Can you forget the "I"?

[china]

THERE IS NO "I"- EGO-ME separate from your belief in it. It is an empty shell, a lifeless nothing, an inconsistent phantom. Only by your belief in its reality does it have any power at all. The "I" does nothing in and of itself. Only your decision to believe in it gives it any existence whatsoever. We are not hapless pawns or unwilling victims of something that happened long, long ago. The Fall of Man did not happen in the far distant past; it is happening now, and now, and now. Like a picture on a TV screen, each and every moment this image is refreshed by our belief in its reality. Moment-to-moment we give this spurious idea new life, new reality, new power.

Thomas Merton to the willful nature of our "Fall".
"The story of the Fall tells us in mythical language that 'original sin' is not simply a stigma arbitrarily making good pleasures seem guilty, but a basic inauthenticity, a kind of predisposition to bad faith in our understanding of ourselves and of the world. It implies a determined willfulness in trying to make things be other than they are in order that we may be able to make them subserve, at any moment, to our individual desire for pleasure or for power. But since things do not obey our arbitrary impulsions, and since we cannot make the world correspond to and confirm the image of it dictated by our needs and illusions, our willfulness is inseparable from error and from suffering."

 

[china]

In order to have meaning, perception must have a meaningful perspective from which to perceive, some way of seeing or understanding the whole of it. The "I" is no such place.
The world you see does not exist because the place from which you see it is unreal. I hope you can see that "I" doesn't mean anything either. The "I" is a meaningless place, non-existent -- how could it's seeing be meaningful? Looking from a distorted location through a distorted lens, ignoring and overlooking the essential relationship among all things, what else can one see but a distorted, disjointed and therefore meaningless perception?

 

[hermanntrude]

The "I" is definitely a human construct, and one with no true existance. I can agree with you on that, china, but I still feel the need to point out it's usefulness. The concept of "I" allows us to do so many things. It provides us with our very sentience and hence all of our more complex thinking, and hence our technology, communication skills, abilities, empathy and so on. Without the "I" we cannot conceive of someone elses "I". Without that there can be no compassion, love or sympathy.

What kind of world would it be if we all forgot the "I"?

It may be false but it's also very very useful. Rather like the "i" in mathematics. The square root of -1. It's a nonsense but it allows people to build bridges and design aircraft....

 

[china]

hermanntrude,



What I'm suggesting hermanntrude is that with abstract concepts and, in particular, the terms I ,ego, self, soul, higher self that there is no experiential reality there at all. I have never seen a soul. Have you? We are talking strictly abstract concepts in which I wonder if there is any real agreement at all as to the meaning. The truth is simple that we don't need all those concepts. We are either aware of the truth of our Identity or we are not. We are awake or asleep; there is no grey area. There is truth or illusion, no grey area. Very simple, very cut and dried, but we don't want to accept that because our mind does not like absolutes. It is the mind of relativity, of duality. Either we are functioning from separation, and to talk about self, lower self, higher self, id,I ,ego, super ego ...what is that but separation, fragmentation? I'm either awake or I'm asleep. You're pregnant or you're not. There's no in between .

 

[china]

hermanntrude,

Without the "I" we cannot conceive of someone elses "I".

Please explain....or better not.

Without that there can be no compassion, love or sympathy.

Love Is, when you are not
When you are ,Love Is not.

What kind of world would it be if we all forgot the "I"?

"

"I" don't know hermanntrude what kind of world 'would it be' ,but I,m sure our "needs" would be different .

It may be false but it's also very very useful.

You just defined the illusion and the "I".