Some years ago a Marwari merchant of Bombay (now Mumbai) suffered six months of sleepless nights due to the persecution of a bug that one night entered his brain through his ears! Every fifteen minutes, and sometimes oftener, the bug would creep around inside the skull seeking for a more edible portion of the brain. The merchant went round the globe, meeting all the possible specialists, and yet had to return to India with his pet disease uncured. However, the merchant heard of a great doctor in Lucknow and reached that city with newly lit-up hope. The doctor examined him elaborately and reserving his opinion to himself, declared that he would try his best. Weeks passed. The merchant was almost raving and hysterical as repeated sleepless nights of agony and pain broke down his nervous system bit by bit. One day the doctor approached the patient to inform him that in case the merchant could afford to send a man to the western front, the doctor could exert his influence with the Red Cross and procure for him, a special medicine prepared by the Germans.

Any expense, if it could only relieve him of the agonising pain, was cheap for the merchant. Again months passed. Despair and hopelessness were choking the merchant, when one day the doctor in all cheer and smiles approached the patient and showed him a parcel and said, “Here is the medicine! Now the miracle will be done. There are three tubes here; with one we can make the bug swoon down for at least two, three days; the second, injected after a week, would kill the bug; and third would make the dead bug come out of the ears.” The merchant was naturally much relieved and felt extremely hopeful. Was not the rare German specific for all bugs in the brain procured at such a heavy cost? The next day the doctor with half a dozen of other specialists attended the patient in a well-equipped operation theatre and administered the first of the three injections. As told by the doctor the bug in his brain did swoon, and the patient had a restful night probably, the first night he had slept so soundly after many a month. However, after three days, the bug had started as usual creeping and crawling around, eating the brains and burrowing holes in it! The merciless bug! A week passed. Again the operation theatre scene was repeated and the patient then onwards felt that the bug was really dead. During the week the patient was not even once disturbed by the enemy in his brain.

On the day when the last of the injections was to be administered all the medical college students were called to be in the operation theatre. All the elaborate precautions required for this serious and strange injection of the costliest and the most rare German medicine was enacted faithfully and last of the injections was successfully carried out. After half an hour the patient’s ear was carefully washed, and lo! in the ear basin was seen floating a dead bug! The doctor lifted it with pair of forceps to the gaze of the satisfied and contended patient. The patient was wheeled out of the operation theatre. The doctor went up the door and after closing it carefully wheeled round to face the silent audience of wondering students who were surprised that they should be invited to witness but a mere injection!! ‘Friends’, addressed the practical scientist, ‘you have been watching so far the cure of a very painful disease for which the patient could not get a cure all over the globe. And strangely enough, the German injection bottles were nothing but tubes of distilled water which I had procured from the local chemist round the corner in the street. ‘The most difficult part of the operation was’, confessed the doctor, ‘the hunt that I had to make yesterday night for a live bug. When at last I got one I pressed it carefully between my fingers in one end of my kerchief and preserved the dead carcass, which was dropped into the ear before washing it, and it was that dead bug, which I had hunted out last night, that you saw in the ear! May be the means are unfair but, for an unreasonable patient’s imagined disease, the only cure can be the false medicine of mere attributed powers.’ Viewed spiritually, we all are living the delusions of the merchant. We are suffering the pangs of an imaginary ‘bug’ in us, identifying ourselves with the ego we come to entertain the wrong notions of ‘I’-ness and ‘my’-ness and the consequent sufferings, sorrows, limitations, finiteness and so on. Now we need a Lucknow doctor who will kill for us the bug in our brain, the ego sense, with the rare medicine, the Ᾱtma-jñāna, which, when its purpose has been served, shall be recognised as nothing new or rare but as our own real nature!


Chinmayananda, Swami. KENOPANISHAD:: Self: Different From Known and Beyond Unknown . Central Chinmaya Mission Trust. Kindle Edition.

Very cool. With an m. night shamalan twist in the end!

Hahahahha yes!

Wise are those who understand, but wiser still those who achieve enlightment.

He understands It who comprehends It not; and he understands It not, who feels he has comprehended It. It is the unknown to the Master of true Knowledge but to the ignorant It is the known.

Cool story yet I could see the end coming, not because I'm smart but it's a classic story of the imagined disease.

Also a classic to address the ego as an enemy to kill or call it bad etc.
I carry another classic: to address the ego as a mere tool, just as many things in life. And tools can be wielded for purpose and good ends, it can also be wielded unfortunately and harm. E.G a simple hammer. Show me one person without ego, if you find one then his/her egoless IS the ego remaining shape, a transient form of it, imho.

Enlightenment could be defined as one who has mastered his tools to benefit and able to cause as less of suffering possible. A tool wielding expert sort of, not one without tools, not one who has been able to shed them off. But one who can wield potential wisely.

This kind of view takes a lot of pressure off 'fighting' or defeating internal enemies, one can re-invest all that energy otherwise, for example to learn to wield your tools, like ego, fear, doubts, uncertainties, contradictions, stress, trauma, ...

I realize it's all just words interpretation, yet some nuances can be helpful.

What I try to project is a bit the story of Alchemy (or internal-alchemy for that matter, there are workshops about this so I'm not the inverter), the transforming from lead to gold. Lead being the things that weight on us, and transforming them into things that help us. The ego can be lead-ish and cause heaviness and harm, but it can be wielded differently so it helps us and the world, then it becomes gold, where it's noble weight makes life a nice place. (The affiliation of metals with benefit or harm is strictly an allegory of course.)

Condensed: I would replace kill the ego with tame the ego.

PS: Eaglepath I like the way the story was written

Indeed Jees, it is attachment which is the cause of suffering.

Im happy you liked it

Its pretty simple.. You need to blow yourself (ego) into pieces and realize the unbroken being behind it all which is without defination. That is what you are! Not the pieces... Then when the pieces are coming back (because they will, I agree no person will function without an ego) you can be less identified with them and thus make them work for you as a tool that you describe. An enlightened being could be identified as someone who has taken control over the joystick and is now playing the game instead of being played by the game.. And another level of enlightenment is when you realize that you dont need to play at all

Ps. It can be good to fight hard with the ego, because its only through fighting the possiblility to give up arises.. And thats usually when the magic is happening

Passions is often the reason we get entangled with attachment from the first start.. If you can find the root of this and "uproot" it you would not act at all.. And thus stay free. All in the end comes down to live in clarity, but sometimes it can be nice to get dirty to use that contrast to enjot getting clean

Its not amazing to be God.. Its amazing to forget that you are God and ending up being a confused monkey that have the possiblility of cooking up a plant and find his way back home again. Thats beauty because you have a contrast..

Its not nice being clean.. Its nice getting clean after being really dirty

Yes, I think attachment is exactly the core business of the ego, yet a protection mechanism when it gets stripped down from an emotional interpretation of it.

An often used definition of ego has a negative connotation to it, but as a bare protection mechanism it is directionless, rather just functional. That said it CAN be put in favour too like how I see that happening in great people like Martin Luther King or Ghandi, their ego-attachment to a good cause is undertowing good results, it keeps them exactly upright for the better, their attachment is like a super power.

Then there lies the booby trap too, when the ego runs off good rails and it becomes destructive like in the OP story, there the ego has gotten a bad rep and people want to kill it, unnecessary in my view to throw out the child with the bathwater.

A good ego can help support a family or help entrepreneurs in their goals when things go hairy. In my definition of ego it has no intrinsic direction, but just being a protection mechanism, and from there things can go good or bad. A potential. And as already mentioned one simply cant choose for being without ego. That is why I favour managing it rather than attempts to kill it.

To rectify a south going ego, that is a hard job to do and I agree with Eaglepath that obliteration of it might be in order, and indeed putting the pieces together again in a better way hopefully. People come to great lengths like meditation, isolation in caves, dark retreats, vision quests, entheogenic plant use, vipassana...
I agree that notification of 'whats beyond ego' can be an effective way to learn to put the ego in perspective.

The parable is an interesting one, and it can be read at least two ways. For is not the "spiritual seeker", ever insistent on putting the "ego" to sleep, then killing it and ridding oneself of it not like the merchant in the story? Is this "ego" thing not an imagined bug, that we try to get rid of with the help of rare drugs, and false gurus?

What is "ego" anyway? The seeker feels that something is wrong, and goes on a long search, denying themselves and idolating people and ideas not worthy of idolation. All good it does is buy some false guru another Rolls Royce or two.

The true path starts when one realizes there is no bug, there is no "ego" to kill or get rid of. There's just you. And you are a wonderful being, you only need to start listening - not to false gurus, but to your own Spirit, your own Will. There is no bug, no "ego" keeping you from it, only your own decision not to listen.

Indeed.

This is an excerpt of wikipedia:
The ego is the organized part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. Conscious awareness resides in the ego, although not all of the operations of the ego are conscious. Originally, Freud used the word ego to mean a sense of self, but later revised it to mean a set of psychic functions such as judgment, tolerance, reality testing, control, planning, defense, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory.

The above is also free of a pejorative connotation per se, as I put it before: it's something functional.

Looking closely one notices ego differences in animals too and therefore I consider it BIOS stuff, not something you simply don't-want-in-your-system for whatever good reasons one might have in mind. I think it's a prime portal, a filter, a lens trough which we put things into the world. Something inevitably actually for better or worse.

The ego is attachment.

Its not true to say that people imagine the ego, and are like hypocondriacs...I have some friends and if you would see their minds, if you would see all their desires, how lost they are in their desires, how banal and superficial their desires are, how little time was actually put into educating themselves, and how much they have submitted to the authority and expectactions of others (country, culture, family, friends, etc), you would see the ego in all its blinding glory; people stuck in this have no connection to the sacred and infinite and dont know love.

Yes, this is them, this is actually who they are--but can you not see the conditioning set in place? This is not how they would have been had they rid themselves of the conditioning set in place--and it is so much conditioning, empirically proven by many branches of psychology and sociology. Almost all words directed at us as children are a form of conditioning, and this is how fear begins, which is the root of attachment.

I'm against the use of new age terminology. It's a hodgepodge of misinterpreted Freudian lingo and misrepresented Buddhist and Hindu philosophy. In psychology, the ego is an integral part of the human mind, and is not synonymous with attachment, desire, selfishness or conditioning. In new age lingo, the "ego" kinda means everything and nothing at all. It's an imagined bug. Just because the patient suffers from an imagined illness, of course doesn't mean that they aren't also suffering from a real one:

Attachment and desire needs to be tempered to reach higher states of thinking and being. Depictions of Ganesh show his rat in a position of subservience. The rat symbolizes his desires and attachments, which, in the spiritually perfect being, are at the beck and call of the higher mind, and wait obediently until summoned and directed. At the same time, Ganesh is often shown to ride the rat, as the higher mind rides the body and the world of imperfection. There's a Hindu story of the moon having been cursed for laughing at how ridiculous it thought the mighty Ganesh looked riding that tiny, filthy rat... And yet, that's how things work in this world, there's nothing to laugh at here.

As far as I know, in psychology ego is synonymous with conditioning.

It is generally not outright said most of the times and you have to read between the lines and realize that if the ego if formed in childhood (by parental commands like; this is acceptable, the isnt, you should do this, shouldnt do that) that then the ego is born out of conditioning and is in fact that very conditioning.




By new age you mean the ancient scriptures?

From the viewpoint of Buddhist practice 'atta' (self ) refers to an ignorance created by 'thought formation'--Saṅkhāra, which refers to "conditioned things" or "dispositions and mental imprints" that ignorantly assume self-identity and ownership in relation to any of the five aggregates.

The five aggregates are synonymous with clinging (clinging is snynonymous with the word attachment)

This is the actual vocabulary used. So its clear to see that the ancients knew about Operant Conditioning and all the rest of it more than 2000 years before empirical science even existed.



One gets over conditioning by, for example, if one is harsh or passive agressive to people, by training oneself to stop doing that and cultivating compassion and good will instead. No drug or guru will help with that.

One has to develop oneself so that one loves people as one loves oneself, to give the people one interacts with the gift of our smile, and then the gift of our shining eyes, and then our openess of spirit.

Yet these acts of kindness, beauty, and selflesness dont come naturally to us, we have to develop it.

We grow by letting go of our beliefs, habits, and conditioning (being in a hurry, being judgmental, being moody, being self centered, being too much of an 'individual', not being in the present, self loathing, and just in general wrong views, acts, intentions, speech, etc.) most of which is defensiveness because we think if we show people who we truly are we will become too vulnerable and that they can then take advantage of us.

Some people might have autism or aspergers, and me talking about all this smiling and stuff is weird, but even then they must understand what I mean by growing as a person and becoming nicer.




Why a long search? Why a guru? All people aren't in this 'wu wu' scene. In fact the nexus has very little members, and big cults like Osho's were only like 7000 people big. Thats nothing!

I rather talk about how us real people who just go to work and try to do the right thing become better versions of ourselves (growth)

Most people get over their conditioning through a will and a determination to do what is right. Thus normal people quit smoking (a harmful physical and psychological addiction) without the help of a guru or a long search. They also become better fathers and husbands, bosses and friends, through correcting bad habits, and developing patience, compassion, and in general; knowledge, wisdom.

To me people dont just 'feel' that something is wrong (as in they are imagining stuff.) Something can actually be wrong with the way one, for example, talks to people and treats them. Or the way one reacts to things or gets angry and looses patience.

How can it be imaginary when one for example can directly see in one's life the direct corelation between one's conditioning and the results one reaps?

If this imaginary person is addicted to pleassure, in the forms of masturbatation or food or drugs, they are imaginarily addicted to them?




But we are not animals. Monkeys eat baby monkeys and share a piece of the body with the whole group.

This violence is a part of our human nature, but it is pejorative. And we must go beyond it for our own good; if not we will blow ourselves to smithereens.


It isn't imaginary. People actually argue and use harsh words with eachother. And cheat on their wives even though they have kids. And take hard drugs even though they shouldn't. And hold on to toxic ideas and beliefs even though they do them no good. And lie and steal.

This is because of our conditioning.

No, that's the super-ego... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego

As for the rest, my viewpoint is that you're seeing a pattern where there is none, but that is probably beyond the topic of this discussion. I don't see that we disagree in any practical question, it's more like word choice and placement of emphasis where our viewpoints differ.

The one thing that I find in your approach problematic, is placing the blame outside. But well, whatever. I'm not here to convince you. I made a point that you seem to have misread. Whatever.

Everyone has a different definition of ego it seems. Given we're trying to define a subjective term I think the type of person who should be referred to for a definition is a person who has actually achieved realisation. To define it one must go beyond it for a point of comparison. I can think of no better candidate than Ramana Maharshi;

"The Ego is the I-Thought. The true I is the Self".

"All bad qualities centre round the ego. When the ego is gone, Realisation results by itself. There are neither good nor bad qualities in the Self. The Self is free from all qualities. Qualities pertain to the mind only."

"Seek the mind. On being sought, it will disappear. The mind is only a bundle of thoughts. The thoughts arise because there is a thinker. The thinker is the ego. The ego, if sought, will vanish automatically. The ego and the mind are the same. The ego is the root-thought from which all other thoughts arise. Dive within. You are now aware that the mind rises from within. So sink within and seek. You need not eliminate the wrong "I." How can the "I" eliminate itself? All that you need do is to find its origin and abide there. That is as far as your efforts can extend. Then the Beyond will take care of itself. You are helpless there; no effort can reveal it."

--

The Ego is the root, the I-Thought, around which all other qualities, thought-patterns, gestalts, conditioning, are centred. The approach of trying to blast the Ego to smithereens with substances for example is a doomed approach. You can't destroy it in the classical sense. It has to be taken from you, and that is not something you have any control over.. it is like a lightning strike.

I tend to think we can only shed the ego temporarily.

In the rest of the time it is often worthwhile to live AS IF there is no such thing as the ego, but that is destined to be an ongoing struggle.

It basically comes down to always trying to do what IS right instead of what FEELS right, trying to be truthfull instead of comfortable, etc.

I fail this standard about 10 to 20 times a day myself, and i have met only a handfull of people who actually seem to succeed in living like this all the time.
And that is only because they just try very hard all the time. Not because they just happen to be born special or something.

Ok, but Freudian psychology isnt the whole of psychology. I really like Parent, Adult, and Child ego states, invented by Eric Berne who presented transactional analysis to the world as a phenomenological approach supplementing Freud's philosophical construct with observable data.

Would it help you to know I really like Heidegger's books?



Thank you for reading my response from earlier this morning. I know it was a long and scattered read, and that some is crude. I'm sorry if I totally missed your point.

I'm curious what you mean about placing the blame outside. If you can teach me something about that, itd be cool. I think you are refering to not making a division between the egos, for example, between desire and the soul? Do you understand what I mean?

Smart and complex conversation is smart and complex!!

Xss27 I liked those thoughts. Its like that.

Maharishi is controversial...but he knew things. You hear him talk and...there is a method to his madness. Very unique person. What do you think?

Dragonrider, cool thoughts.

I know these people are super rare...these amazing humans who think ahead instead of give into immediate pleassure, but we have to be that person. We must do it. We must be heros. Masters over ourselves. I just dont ever want to give up fighting for my freedom. Im actually a prisoner.

I wonder if this isnt what dmt taught me by showing me these super aliens who's eyes transmit infinite wisdom and bliss. It showed me how bliss looked. And it looked like it was free of all desire, all bad habits, all ruminous thoughts. I dont beat myself up at all, but I believe in a higher state of consciousness and I have a plan. I'm gonna become that hero we all want to be but fall short of because of desire, lazyness, etc, etc.

It seems like a full proof plan, like if you really apply yourself you could achieve things that are like miraculous, like the buddah!! Like for real. If hyperspace exists...why cant being a being of pure bliss and awareness be possible?

Thanks for reading

I think out of all the characters in recent history he ranks #1 for authenticity in terms of whether realisation was achieved, thus what he says regarding the ego is definitely worth examining. Of course his concepts shine through the lens of Hindu inspired concept structures and terminology, but there is a real simplicity to his method and explanations. When I read his words and heard his story something about it just rang true straight away. There is no guff, his words are not verbose, and his actions are congruent with what he states.

In regards to what he states about the Ego, thought/mind.. I think he's correct in the overall concepts. Maybe some finer details are absent perhaps, but the notion that there is this root 'I-Thought' (Ego) around which all other tendencies (mini-ego's) centre seems valid.

I should say from my own experiences it appears valid too. I recall him talking about the rising of the 'I-Thought' upon waking for instance, and how it is possible to be aware prior to this and see it rise. That is something I've experienced and not seen written or spoken by anyone else.