Some years back I saw a nature program on PBS in which a wonderful little crab stuck bits and pieces of whatever it could find to its body to disguise itself in defense of its life.
This is a great analogy for the way the ego works. The ego is always adding whatever it can find to give itself a sense of belonging, identifying with relationships, possessions, beliefs, religion, concepts, or anything else that makes it feel secure. However, the ego can never be secure. The very nature of what the ego is will never allow security, nor should it. The ego is a by-product of the evolution of the human brain and consciousness. It is a feedback system of identification. What I mean by this is that the mind looking at the images, conclusions, concepts, beliefs, and history in its memory, creates a feedback of ideas about itself. When the mind feeds on its own history, etc., one idea of identification feeds back to others and a separate sense of being a self comes into being. It is just a mind game. When one awakens, it will be clearly seen for what it is, a dream in the conditioned mind.
As the human brain developed the ability to abstract information from the environment, it began to see everything in terms of things, objects and images. At first this was not a problem, but when the brain started to identify itself as a separate individual and believed the images were real, it lost touch with its direct intuitive connection with the rest of life and the ego was born.
This new use of the brain would not have been such a problem had it not been for insecurity. Long before the development of the ego there was the natural need for security of the body. When the image of the isolated self-developed, that need for security was carried over to the ego. This process has been going on, for the most part unnoticed, ever since.
If you remove the debris one piece at a time, you will eventually come to the crab itself. On the other hand, if you remove all of the ego's concepts, beliefs and images used to build a sense of security and identity you find a phantom creation in the brain. This trying to protect that which can never be protected is the root cause of all human misery. Subconsciously, we know this ego process is unreal. Therefore, we do everything we can to keep up the image of something solid, which lasts and does not change. When we are confronted with something that might bring into question the reality of our dream self we want to escape, go get an ice cream, buy a new car, anything but look at the truth.
The ego has a much broader and more complex covering than the crab. Although it’s covering is completely insubstantial, it is far denser than that of the crab. We have ideas upon ideas, our history, our spirituality and our insecurity-based desires. The crab knows it is covered with debris but most humans do not have a clue about its image process that is covering a lie.
Spirituality and religion allow us to project the ego dream into the future when we will be Enlightened and find Nirvana or go to Heaven. We can identify with the people who went before us in this search for immortality. This can all be comforting to the ego but it can keep us blind to what it really means to be Enlightened.
When one truly awakens from the dream of ego, it is realized that the mind has built a universe of ideas, beliefs, relationships, things, and concepts about everything, never realizing the falseness of this process. To the Enlightened mind, it is clear that this process is void and empty. There is only this nameless Creative Mind, which is Life, flowing from instant to instant in constant change. There is nothing to hold on to. It is seen that all things are mental projections from the fog of the ego. Emptiness is seen as just that: empty of all objectification. This insight is not a mental projection but a direct seeing into our true nature. This is a profound and transformative insight. Life is seen as continual transformation.
Emptiness, however, as used in some spiritual traditions, can be another piece of debris we use to cover our ego insecurity. When someone who has seen this directly talks to others about it, if the others are still functioning as ego, they will project that Emptiness into a future or look at it as the past, as the "ground of Being"- for example. Emptiness is still a projection. Without the ego's image-making process working, however, there is no emptiness. It is only the somethingness of ego that brings about the sense of emptiness. Without that contrasting image where would emptiness come from? There is a sense of emptiness from an awakened perspective but it is not the opposite of thingness. It is seeing that all things are projections of thoughts and the seeming emptiness is just what is without the filter of ego in the way.
One reason emptiness gets misunderstood is that in the last few decades, we have often taken insights from the field of physics, such as those into the nature of space/time, and matter and tried to apply them to the spiritual. But enlightenment is not a problem for physics to solve. We are dealing with a psychological problem, a problem of misperception.
We will continue to add more bits and pieces to this dream until we start to see clearly what the problem is. It can be a scary and difficult process at times to face the games we play. In time, it will mean the death of who we think we are. This is not to be feared. The ego, for all the suffering it has caused, is just a misunderstanding and is not our total life. You will still be who you are, beyond the ego, just as the crab is still a crab. And for the first time, you will be an authentic individual, undivided. You will see that you are an expression of the Whole Mind, which is Life and will never end.
There are those who say we have no choice, that all of our actions are preordained, the will of God. "God's will" is just another ego concept. It is like saying, "The devil made me do it"- or "We aren't responsible." The ego functions automatically according to its conditioning. However, the free mind knows that although it is not separate from the rest of life, wisdom can express itself through us, as us. Real values come from this state of wisdom and we are all in touch with it if we are truly open. This is where real compassion and love are realized. Nothing is in control except intelligence. We are intelligent beings and when the ego is out of the way we can function with real intelligence and help the evolution of the human mind. We need to take responsibility for our own madness and get well.
Those who talk about life being preordained seem to have come to that view by way of the intellect: it is a conclusion. I refer to these teachers as Conclusionists. Ego logic is not Enlightenment and real Awakening is never a conclusion.
Mind has always been awake with no need for transformation. It is just we, the dreamers, who need to awaken. We need to get beyond the ego and see for ourselves. This is a profound transformation, yet it only happens to the dreamer who will then find out what it means to be truly awake.
What started out as a process of trying to find security may well end by destroying life on this wonderful planet. We have a chance to change this.
