To the ego, love is poison.
Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life__ secrets. It__ the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. __e are too ego-centered,_ Suzuki tells Cage. __he ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away.__dolescent love gives us the first chance to break the shell. Sexual love makes the ego lose itself in the object it loves. __hen the ego-shell is broken and the __ther_ is taken into its own body, we can say that the ego has denied itself or that the ego has taken its first steps towards the infinite._The religious consciousness is now fully awakened, and all the possible ways of escaping from the struggle or bringing it to an end are most earnestly sought in every direction. Books are read, lectures are attended, sermons are greedily taken in, and various religious exercises or disciplines are tried.__uzuki says that sexual love is a vehicle of liberation? A crack in the ego shell? A path to the infinite?At this point, if I were Cage, I would buy the book and take it home.
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Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life__ secrets. It__ the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. __e are too ego-centered,_ Suzuki tells Cage. __he ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away.__dolescent love gives us the first chance to break the shell. Sexual love makes the ego lose itself in the object it loves. __hen the ego-shell is broken and the __ther_ is taken into its own body, we can say that the ego has denied itself or that the ego has taken its first steps towards the infinite._The religious consciousness is now fully awakened, and all the possible ways of escaping from the struggle or bringing it to an end are most earnestly sought in every direction. Books are read, lectures are attended, sermons are greedily taken in, and various religious exercises or disciplines are tried.__uzuki says that sexual love is a vehicle of liberation? A crack in the ego shell? A path to the infinite?At this point, if I were Cage, I would buy the book and take it home.
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Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life__ meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style.
On our Journey, we should not dwell on the guilt emerging because of dropping back to Ego-dominated state; instead, we should celebrate that we are in the state of the Presence!!
Ego is the central figure of our personal history, based upon the past and looking into the future. Ego is the deepest dream of the Consciousness.
We grow up to believe that we are supposed to somehow "become" who we are meant to be through the trial-by-fire that is life here on planet Earth.Reality is...there's no "becoming".It's actually all an "un-becoming", only to reunite with who you were born to be in the first place before society told you otherwise.
To speak conventionally - and I think it is easier for the general reader to see Zen thus presented - there are unknown recesses in our minds which lie beyond the threshold of the relatively constructed consciousness. To designate them as __ub-conciousness_ or __upra-consciousness_ is not correct. The word __eyond_ is used simply because it is a most convenient term to indicate their whereabouts. But as a matter of fact there is no __eyond_, no __nderneath_, no __pon_ in our consciousness. The mind is one indivisible whole and cannot be torn in pieces. The so-called terra incognita is the concession of Zen to our ordinary way of talking, because whatever field of consciousness that is known to us is generally filled with conceptual riffraff, and to get rid of them, which is absolutely necessary for maturing Zen experience, the Zen psychologist sometimes points to the presence of some inaccessible region in our minds. Though in actuality there is no such region apart from our everyday consciousness, we talk of it as generally more easily comprehensible by us.