The Self-Referential Ego Paradox: Drama or Dharma? – 09.23.10

Meditation is paradoxical. All meditations is, is an attempt to stop trying to do anything. “How can you create a technique for not trying to do anything?” asks Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “If you do, then the very technique defeats the effort of not making any effort.” This is akin to the problem of self-reference which “has become a very big business, actually, since Bertrand Russell and Kurt Gödel. . . . Basically it comes down to the ‘liar’s paradox,’ you know, the guy from Crete who says ‘I’m lying.’ Is he telling the truth when he’s saying he’s lying? Well, if he’s telling the truth, he isn’t lying.” And, at the same time, if he’s lying then he’s telling the truth. “Anyway, you can go around and round forever in this, and this is basically all the ego is: it’s basically a voice in your head attacking you, and then you defend yourself against that voice. It’s two voices of self-reference, but they’re both delusional.”

“And the problem is that the ego doesn’t exist, except as the self-reference of one voice referring to another—both of which are in the same mind. And without the two voices attacking one another, of course, there is no mind, because the existence of the mind, as an illusion, is created by the fact that there are voices. And so if there were a modern-day Descartes, he would probably start out with: ‘I attack myself, therefore I am.’ . . . And, you’re either caught up in the drama, or you escape into the dharma. Those are the two options: dharma and drama. If your dharma is mellow, you won’t be in a melodrama. But to have a mellow dharma means you have to accept the fact that there’s nothing to gain. Not from anything: not from meditation, not from any other thing you would do to improve yourself. You can’t be improved on. Which in a way is a good thing isn’t it? You're already the Buddha-nature. You're already enlightened. You already have God inside of you. You are already That. This is what all the traditions teach. But ‘no no no. I’ve got to create a cloud in front of this realization and then try to blow away the cloud.’”

“But, the extraordinary thing is that when you have finally let go of this game of chasing your own tail, that’s when the bliss actually emerges from within. And that’s why this simple act of not doing anything, which drops all of these veils of illusion away, allows you to enter into the Source of your being, the Sat, which is already magical and miraculous and astonishing, without having to do anything, without having to become anything, without having to be anybody—by letting go of that desire to try to be somebody and do something and achieve something—that’s when you discover the reality, the Supreme Reality, of what you are.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 23, 2010.