know thyself=bogus shit

[Rune]

Then understanding oneself leads to a contradictory state (ie. if you understand yourself then you are doing it from a point of view that is not encompassed within your understanding.)

understanding yourself is not looking at yourself from without. understanding yourself is to be completely within. so the only point of view you see yourself is your own, not from out side of you as if you were looking at a mirror.

[M S Smith]

Young Tripper said:

Thanks for putting this into your reply Michael, i felt maybe i had the wrong perception. Would reaching the state beyond the ego into the "self" be somewhat like "enlightenment" or is this a totally different again. Also would the info and things learnt about the laws and universe be hard to assimilate into everyday living throught ones other part of themself the ego?

I understand how easy it is to interpret things from the common modern understanding rather than the one intended 2500 years ago. Certainly if we wish to know what someone meant 2500 years ago it is best to understand the concepts held at the time rather than to interpret the saying 2500 years later with our own, particularly when our views have been perverted by Christianity to a degree most might be willing to accept, but of which few actually understand the depth of (see A.B.Kuhn: The Lost Light, Who is this King of Glory, & Shadow of the 3rd Century, a triad of lengthy works by a very insightful comparative religious scholar that clearly explain the errors of interpretation and provide needed insight into the true symbolic and allegorical meaning that underlies mythology, including the “myth” of Jesus).

Enlightenment, Illumination, Born Again, the Second Birth, Rebirth, Cosmic Consciousness, Christ or Krishna Consciousness, etc., and even Nirvana in my estimate, are all reflective of the same thing, but often are lessened in their meaning by the less reflective and unlearned to the point of being applied to those who haven’t really attained it. This is commonly because the historic traditions in most cases have been broken and profaned, both unintentionally and intentionally, causing this state of false enlightenment to be misinterpreted as something it is really not, that being true enlightenment. The best example recognizable to most is the individual who accepts “Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior,” part of this necessarily being the acceptance of the belief that he was a historical being whose miraculous birth and acts, crucifixion and resurrection, were real occurrences in time (something the evidence is piled against). But it is clear for all to see that such a simple recitation of belief is not enlightenment and freedom from the misfortunes of animal tendencies, this while true illumination and enlightenment are.

I must say, I dislike the word “ego” as being adequately indicative of who or what we are at any stage, and therefore I think the idea of overcoming ego makes little sense. When ego is taken out of the equation and is no longer considered as being some sort of “real” aspect of the self we are left with two things, the lower desires of the animal, and the higher callings of the rational mind which exists outside intellectual sophistry and in obedience to a universal law that is beyond mere belief, but which is also beyond rational explanation (therefore the basis for parables and myths which tell of the untellable in words that can be comprehended by the initiate, but not nullified by the ignorant).

And so if enlightenment is escape from the animal self and the intermediate self, both of which can be taken as the “ego,” and is the union of the self with the divine, then the difficulty isn’t the assimilation of enlightenment into daily living, but is rather the quest to achieve enlightenment itself from the intermediate stage. Once one achieves illumination the struggle isn’t more difficult as this isn’t the plane on which internal struggle occurs, but is rather the plane on which rest occurs and were life’s choices are no longer a hardship; it is eternal peace even in the face of physical struggle from continued existence in the material plane. But this enlightenment isn’t a place of forgetting what we now are and the setting aside of it in neglectful mendicancy; it is a place of remembrance of what we truly were before we became flesh and incorporating the newfound into our present forms. In doing so we are then illumined and draw the universe down into us for its expression in the world.

~Michael~

ps: I'll look to get to the more recent comments soon.

[Rune]

'ego', in the sense I have been working on, is not who I am, but who I am not. ego is a real aspect of the self only in as much as it is a bunch of lies we have adopted at some time during our spirit's existence.

this is my belief at this stage:

there are hitchikers trying to suffocate our spirits, lying to us, making the path forwards unclear. to believe in "the child" within is to function more on simple instincts rather than be tricked by the lies of spirits telling us how we could be "better than" - that is, different to who we are.

I believe 'listening' and not 'doing' is the way further from the trail. innocence is lost if temptation is given in to. and stopping to listen could see the loss of that innocence. instinct knows the way home.

that's not to say life can't be the most amazing experience anyone could imagine. the limits of man's endurance are understood by the unquestionable knowledge of the essence. working for peace is a job that is always paid in full.

how do you get more than just a feeling of trust in those words? I think there needs to be an awareness of self. so that all the 'demons' if you will have no 'handle' on your soul - no temptations to offer you that you can't easily, flatly refuse.

there is a spiritual path for those ready to start going down it, but the first step is to show some kind of serious attempt at working out what is "right" and "wrong", and where "right" and "wrong" fits into your life.

it takes sacrifice. constant sacrifice that gets easier as time goes on. as you become more of the 'real' person within.

[M S Smith]

Horatio, so your claim is that you can’t know yourself unless you extricate yourself from that which you are looking to know, and since you can not extricate yourself from yourself to perform the examination you can not know thyself. And certainly should you be able to extricate yourself from yourself, you can not overlook looking at the looking self, and so you must have a thirds self observing the second that is observing the first, and so on ad infinitum. Is that about right?

Honestly though, you’ve provided certain suppositions which you haven’t defended yet. One question raised is why must the so-called “meta-subject” self be divided from the “former total self” to be able to know thyself? Now I know that you are saying that even with such a division knowing thyself isn’t possible (as it throws it in the “circular ourouborotic,” something I agree with under your analysis and made reference to in my previous paragraph), but if knowing thyself is not possible from the stance you claim of necessity must exists if it were to be possible at all, then why not look at such a stance as being incorrect to start with? Maybe the necessity of extricating yourself from yourself to know thyself is wrong because it is completely illogical should one remain the self through the whole process and not someone else in observation.

Now, what are we left with? Ah, right, trying to find a way to defend the ability to know thyself without having to extricate and divide the self to do the observation since that view is unworkable. Now, what I gather from you Horatio is that the extrication is a necessity in the process of knowing thyself due simply to the fact that it is only through such extrication that one could objectively know something at all, and that you believe the subjective view (the view arising through our “subjecthood”) of the self is intrinsically one of error, and therefore those who would claim to know themselves do not really know themselves because they are the subject of their own observation, and therefore can not objectively know themselves. Which I might add lead us to the subject of subjectivity.

So there is the real crux of the problem, that subjectivity in knowing thyself is valueless as true knowing at all, and therefore objectivity must be had to know thyself, and since we can’t separate ourselves from ourselves to learn of ourselves in an objective manner we can not know ourselves at all.

Now I don’t agree with this at all, but I am simply trying to flush out what it is I am making an argument against.

So now we must broach the issue of whether we can know ourselves without having to step outside of ourselves to do so, a stepping out which we both agree is impossible to do. The difference in our opinions though being that you hold that since we can we can’t know ourselves, while I think we can even by not stepping outside of ourselves. How so you might ask?

Well the fact is that we are not static beings at a level of completeness, and therefore we can know ourselves, but only at the level we are now. This doesn’t negate our knowing ourselves unless we hold that when we observe ourselves we are something that we are not. And so this gets back to the whole “ego” thing in the sense that many hold that the so-called ego is not really us, but I see no grounds for claiming that it is not unless of course we wish to excuse ourselves from that which is generated from us, this of course meaning the harmful. But why is it that we are so ready to admit that the harmful we commit is some sort of un-self, while the helpful is from the self? Is it so hard to accept the fact that the harmful is a produce of the self as much as the helpful which we grant as a product of ourselves?

But that is getting a bit off topic.

Anyhow, knowing thyself is, regardless of the difficulty of getting there, something that seems to have a place in human efforts regardless of the degree it is attained as it is a worthy goal, a goal whose good is negated should we all commit to the belief that we can not know thyself. Many great minds have seemingly attained this alleged unattainable, and they have then attempted to share this worthy goal with the rest of us. And I can not say it is a useless goal even if my own reasoning tells me that it is a worthless goal, something I am convinced it is not even though I might not hold the belief that I have attained it yet myself.

Thanks for the interesting discussion, and I do hope I have said something of value to someone.

And Rune, let me know if you would like my serious thoughts on your words.

~Michael~

[Rune]

thanks michael, that would be good. just looking at what I wrote in my last post, I think what I really believe when it comes to this subject was best summed up in the first two sentences:

"'ego', in the sense I have been working on, is not who I am, but who I am not. ego is a real aspect of the self only in as much as it is a bunch of lies we have adopted at some time during our spirit's existence."

I guess I am interested in hearing more about what you call the 'narcissistic self' of ego. I would not regard the ego as deserving in any way of the title 'self'. I see it as nothing but a lie to my true self:

"By going "into" the self you can learn of the universe, and this I find true. It has nothing to do with the narcissistic self of "ego."

to me, ego is something people learn to rely on as a kind of security. throughout the spiritual process, there becomes an awareness that ego is a hinderance. it's somewhere along this point that the ego becomes not narcissistic in the sense that it shows its true colours as nothing but a deceiver.

now the challenge seems to be to shake the ego with hopes to be left only with the pure self.

so two questions I have are: do you believe that ego deserves recognition as 'belonging' to the self? and: do you believe ego is something to always be taking holidays from (going "into" the self), or can it be left behind altogether so that all that remains is true self?

my answers would be no to the first question and yes to the second.

sam

[M S Smith]

Hi Rune, unfortunately the way that you use the word ego is a little confusing as it seems you are defining the word from your own perspective rather than defining from accepted terminology. Not that you can’t do this, but if you do then you are out of the realm of normal forms of argument which depend heavily on common usage of terminology, this usually being a terminology that is accepted culturally. I’ll just proceed with the use of the accepted definitions just to move forward our engagement.

Webster’s has it as:

1) The self; the individual as aware of himself.

2) Egotism; conceit.

3) In philosophy, the self, variously conceived as an absolute spiritual substance on which experience is superimposed, the series of acts and mental states introspectively recognized, etc.

4) In psychoanalysis, that part of the psyche which, developing from the id, experiences the external world through the senses, and consciously controls the impulse of the id; distinguished from superego, id.

As you can see Webster’s regards the definition as the self in all. I have never seen any reason why to consider it anything else other than the self, and in your opinion you are clearly a minority.

Here is were I think you have made a small mistake, and that is in regarding the ego as something similar to id when in fact it is the id which would better fit your own personal definition of ego.

The recognition of numerous aspects of the self and the degree of control we maintain over them doesn’t at all mean that we should say that something (i.e. id, ego) are not who we are even though we also maintain a superego that presides over them. Now this is of course addressing the matter from the psychoanalytical definition applied above, and not from the philosophical, a definition that doesn’t make such distinctions of a tripartite self at all.

This last definition is more to my liking, as it provided for the “spirit’s existence,” but makes the ego something that arises from the incarnation of that spirit into the substance that provides it experience, that being matter itself. So in my view the ego isn’t not-me or sub-me, or any other similar designation, but is rather what I am when I am placed into the arena of experience (as does pure spirit really experience? I would have to say no). This view provides me the ability to maintain the highest conception of spirit, with me as it in partiality, with the understanding that due to spirits placement within matter, its alleged antithesis, the ego (the self) and its struggles are the product. And so in this state the error that I commit, as I can not lay off so easily my own mistaken choices, is not due to something I am not, but is rather due to the struggle between the material and the spiritual, something I am a little bit of both of and should accept responsibility for.

So ego is not “a bunch of lies,” but rather a necessary correlate of the placement of spirit in matter. This combination of spirit in matter creates the ego, a being (us) who can choose to live within either to varying degrees, or according to either one of them; we can live in matter as the animal, or we can attempt to transcend the animal by living in our conceptualization of the spirit, this even though being stuck in a body that continues to reside in the neutral creation of matter. Therefore we forever continue as ego in this life.

In this view the narcissistic ego is that which lives more closely at the animal level. So when I say you can go into the self it is to be taken as going into the internal spiritual self rather than living through the self in the external material realms. It is this narcissistic self, stuck in the external world, which is the one that offers the feeling of security, and it is this one which we are most familiar with from our birth. It is the process of entering the spiritual realm which is the one that is not so comforting and this is the “narrow path,” and so we often stay in the material rather than struggle to attain the spiritual.

From my view we are all potentially spiritual beings, but we are not automatically so, we must accept the challenge to become one when the flame is still small, and seek to make it larger and brighter. But I don’t believe that we are not the animal ourselves when we live in an animal manner. What I see is your insistence that we are spiritual beings and that the animal being is not real. But the animal being is real when there is no spiritual being able to participate in the spiritual world. What I think you have done is that you have recognized the fact of your spiritual nature, but have for some reason decided that it alone is the real you and that that which you once were is not just not you, but wasn’t real at all.

And so it is that we are a combination of the spirit and the animal, and that combination creates the self (the ego) and this ego can live in the world of its choosing as it does appear that it is a natural progression of the self to come to the realization that there does exist a spiritual world which can be strived for, initially through ethics and afterwards by contemplation. In contemplation we can shake of the old skin of the animals and become the pure self, being the spirit that came to reside within the animal at our birth. But even with this as the case the ego is not “left behind altogether,” but is in fact still us, even when converted to our pure spiritual form.

There doesn’t appear to be any basis to support the ego as being something aligned to a deceiver, unless you take a definition of ego that isn’t necessarily in line with any of the accurate definitions of such a term, philosophical or psychoanalytical, and think it something other than ourselves and of which we have no power over. The ego remains the self all along, as it is the product of two worlds; it just exists in many phases of existence according to the manner in which we come to express it in the sea of matter. The id is what you seem to be defining as ego, while it is the superego that you seem to be saying is the true self. It is the ego that experiences both, and that is us; we never forget that which we were, the instinctual animal, and should be make good use of the ego we can go into that which is our potential, pure spirit upon the demise of the form.

I have a little more to say, but I think I have said enough so far.

~Michael~

[narayan]

know thyself = bogus shit

You are what you are.

I've struggled sometimes when i've seen myself through a "clearer" point of view but once i've realised my limitations I know how I can work around them.

Sometimes for me its more about accepting thyself instead knowing thyself