Aldous Huxley: On the Perennial Philosophy and the Ground of Being

" . . . (T)here is a hierarchy of the real. The manifold world of our everyday existence is real with a relative reality that is, on its own level, unquestionable; but this relative reality has its being within and because of the absolute Reality, which, on account of the incommensurable otherness of its eternal nature, we can never hope to describe, even though it is possible for us directly to apprehend it."

-- Aldous Huxley --

("The Perennial Philosophy," page 33.)

Just to the extent that we mistake our "relative reality" with "absolute Reality" do we suffer. That is the nature of samsara, the unawakened life. Our identification with the unawakened "self" of our normal, workaday consciousness obscures the consciousness of the true "Self" which is co-extant with the Ground of Being. The object of the Buddha's 'Eight-Fold Path to the End of Suffering' - the fourth of the Four Noble Truths - is, like all true spiritual teachings, to bring us to a unitive knowledge of this Ground of Being.

In his Introduction to "The Song of God," a translation of the Bhagavad Gita by his frineds Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda, the polymath author and philosopher, Aldous Huxley, outlines "the Perennial Philosophy" underlying the world's great spiritual traditions, a philosophy which points to our ability to realize the ineffable Ground of Being.

"At the core of the Perennial Philosophy," Huxley observes, "we find four fundamental doctrines."

"First: the phenomenal world of matter and individualized consciousness - the world of things and animals and men and even gods - is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their beginning, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground."

 "Direct knowledge of the Ground (of Being) cannot be had except by union," Huxley notes, "and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the "thou" from the "That.""  The ego, or smaller "self" is, thus, the face and identity of the "relative reality" which obscures our higher consciousness, while "the Self" of the divine "Ground of Being" is the higher consciousness which enables us to experience (although not describe) true "Reality."

"Thou art that," we read over and over again in the Upanishads, and in other Scriptures. "Tat tvat asi."

The End of Suffering

"When you can't stand the endless cycle of suffering anymore, you begin to awaken."

-- Eckhart Tolle --

("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose")

"To the unawakened mind, life is suffering," the Buddha taught. This First Noble Truth was the prime basis of all the Buddha's teachings. Turning his back on his own practice of self-induced suffering (he was born a wealthy prince) the Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi Tree determined not to move from that spot until he had achieved enlightenment. 

It is said that during the four watches of the night he consecutively realized (a) that ordinary life is suffering, (b) that there are specific causes of suffering, (c) that there is an end to suffering by eliminating these causes, and (d) that there is a path to eliminating these causes. Thus, the Buddha's own enlightenment is evidence, as Tolle notes, that the beginning of awakening is unendurable suffering.

Moreover, it is taught in some schools that this realization, some 2,500 years ago, was the first turning of the dharma wheel, the first realization of the true nature of being, and the first realization of nirvana. If this is so, then Tolle's observation is all the more pertinent. The Buddha's awakening was then, indeed, the beginning of the end of "the endless cycle of suffering" - the beginning of the end of both individual and collective suffering.

"Suffering is a wonderful teacher," Tolle observes in the video (below) on "The End of Suffering. And for some people it is their only spiritual teacher he points out. "Suffering deepens you. It gradually erodes the mind-made human sense of self, the ego. And for some people the point arises where they realize, "I have suffered enough."" This, he points out, "is the end of living in the state of suffering."

Dying to Self

He who knows men is clever;
He who knows himself has insight.
He who conquers men has force;
He who conquers himself is truly strong.

He who knows when he has got enough is rich,
And he who adheres assiduously to the path of Tao is a
      man of steady purpose.
He who stays where he has found his true home
      endures long,And he who dies but perishes not enjoys real longevity.

-- Lao Tzu --
("Tao Te Ching")

Verse 33 from the Tao Te Ching, above, like teachings from all the world's great wisdom traditions, identifies the great metaphysical challenge for all men and women: to know, and then overcome, their own narrow "selves." For in every one of us a separate ego-self arises, but in only a very select few is it overcome.

"It is by self-forgetting," St. Francis of Assisi affirmed, "that one finds. . . . It is by dying (to self) that one awakens to Eternal Life." Or, as Lao Tzu put it, "(H)e who dies but perishes not enjoys real longevity." Thus, not only is being born a second time a great spiritual goal, but perhaps more so is dying to one's self while remaining in the world.  It is the loftiest of goals, only to be achieved by disciplining the mind that has created the second self of the ego.

Don't Drink the Ego's Kool-Aid

The spiritual quest can become an ego trap. Instead of diminishing and letting go of the separated sense of 'self' the ego can quite easily flip and appear to cooperate in its own diminishment. "You want to be spiritual," the ego says, "then watch just how spiritual I can be!" Perhaps it is this reverse egoic thinking that leads to the demise of many of the so-called 'gurus' and self-proclaimed messiahs who rise, crash and burn. The trouble is not only that all too many drink their kool-aid, but even more critically, that we are all too prone to mix and take our own.

Having learned that there is such a thing as enlightenment, and finding out that literally thousands of books have been written on how enlightenment might be achieved, the ever-voracious ego sets out to gain more and more knowledge. However, once one has read even a few of these books one knows that it is only practice and experience, rather than intellectual knowledge and beliefs, that will do the trick. But, oh, how attached the ego can become to more spiritual knowledge!

"In one way or another," writes Ram Dass, " all of the practices of jnana yoga work with our intellectual faculties and with different levels fo the mind to get to something that is finally beyond the mind's grasp. It's called higher wisdom, and higher wisdom is a different thing altogether from knowledge. . . . Knowledge is a function of the intellect; higher wisdom goes beyond mind and intellect."

"The intellect," Dass notes, "is like a siddhi, a yogic power, and like all such powers, it's very seductive. It's easy for us to seduced  by all the fascinating things we can know about. But our knowing isn't wisdom - it's knowledge; and all of that fascination with knowing things can end up drawing us outward rather than inward."

"We get trapped in the world of knowing," Dass points out. "We busy ourselves collecting more and more worldly knowledge, and focus on the matrix of the rational mind instead of openining into our deeper wisdom. And then the very tool we're trying to use to escape becomes our trap, because with knowing there's always still a "knower" and a "that which is known.""

"Only when the knower and known become one," writes Dass, "does that One get through the door. Nobody who knows anything gets through the door - which means that the ultimate sacrifice for the gynani, the intellectual, is giving up everything."

[Ram Dass, "Paths to God," pp. 74-75.]

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument."

"Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment," Rumi advises us.

[Coleman Barks, "The Essential Rumi, p. 36.]

Suffering and the End of Suffering

The central teaching of Buddhism is that to the unenlightened being life is suffering, that there are specific causes of suffering, that there is an end to suffering if these causes are overcome, and that there is a specific path to the working out of these root causes and thus to the ending of suffering. Called the Four Noble Truths, this teaching of the Buddha is perhaps the earliest and most explicit teaching of how suffering works as the soil and water that nourishes spiritual growth. As one famous spiritual writer put it: 'When we are suffering we are really being blessed, but we do not recognize it at the time.'

"You won't be able to surrender," notes preeminent spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle (in the video, below), "unless you are completely fed up with suffering, (unless) you have had enough suffering, and at some level you recognize that most of your suffering is self created."

"Suffering is a wonderful teacher; (it) is most people's only teacher," he points out. "Suffering deepens you. It gradually erodes the mind-made sense of self, the ego. And for some people the point arises where they realize, "I have suffered enough.""

Not only is the message of suffering and the end of suffering the central tenet of Buddhism, Tolle notes, it is also a central teaching of Christianity. "Finding the Pearl of Great Price, finding the Kingdom of Heaven that is within you, here and now, as Jesus says, is of course the ending of suffering. So one could say that you need suffering for you to realize, to come to point of realization, that you do not need to suffer anymore."

That one needs to suffer in order to come to the realization that one no longer needs to suffer, is as Tolle puts it, the "great paradox" that drives spiritual growth. One finds in time, however, that one can sincerely strive to live a life of the spirit without the necessity of constantly being bludgeoned into that position by painful struggle. That, Tolle would probably agree, is the beginning of the end of the small, ego-self.

Lower Self, Higher Self, No Self

Thirty spokes join at the hub;
their use for the cart
is where they are not.


When the potter's wheel makes a pot,
the use of the pot
is precisely where there is nothing.


When you open doors and windows for a room,
it is where there is nothing
that they are useful to the room..


Therefore being is for benefit,
Nonbeing is for usefulness.

-- Lao Tzu --
("The Essential Tao")

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"The image of the wheel that is not too tight on its axle and not too loose," says Allan Watts, "that is really with the axle, is the Zen principle of not being attached, not being sticky. It is very difficult for us to function in that way," he points out, "because we have been brought up to believe that there are two sides to ourselves. - one the animal side, and the other the human and civilized side."

"These are expressed," he observes, "in what Freud calls 'the pleasure principle' which he classifies with the animal side, the Id, and the other the 'reality principle' which he puts on the side of society and the Super-Ego. And man is so split, that he is in a constant fight between these two."

"Theosophists," Watts notes, "sometimes speak of our having two selves: the Higher Self which is spiritual, and the lower self which is merely psychic - the ego. And therefore the problem of life is to make one self, the higher one, take hold of the other like a rider takes charge of a horse."

"(However) in Zen," he points out,  "a duality between higher self and lower self is not made. Because if you believe in the higher self, this is a simple trick of the lower self. If you believe that there really is no lower self, that there is only the higher self but that somehow or other the higher self has to shine through, the very fact that you think it has to try to shine through still gives validity to the lower self."

On the other hand, he notes: "If you think you have a lower self or an ego to get rid of and then you fight against it, nothing strengthens the delusion that it exists more than that. So this tremendous schizophrenia amongst human beings of thinking that they are rider and horse, soul in command of body, or will in control of passions wrestling with them, all that kind of split thing simply aggravates the problem and we get more and more split."

"And so," he points out, "we have all sorts of people engaged in an interior conflict which they will never ever resolve. Because the true self, either you know it or you don't. If you do know it, than you  know that it is the only one, and the other so-called lower self just ceases to be a problem. It becomes something like a mirage, and you don't go around hitting them with a stick or putting reins on them, you just know that they are mirages and walk straight through them."

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

The "Fictitious Self" or Ego

The greatest insight in human history, according to spiritual teacher and best-selling author, Eckhart Tolle, may have been when the Buddha recognized that the "self" is an illusion. Calling this egoic sense of 'me' and 'mine' the "fictitious self," Tolle illustrates how this seeming separation of one from another is a form of "collective insanity" and the source, as the Buddha recognized, of all suffering.

"But there is a level within yourself," Tolle notes, "where you are already a full expression of the one life. You are already complete on the level of the timeless, the essence of your own being."

"It is quite a relief," he observes, "to realize that the world cannot make me happy. To demand that situations, people, places or attainments should complete me or make me happy is bound to be frustrating, whether I attain or I do not attain."

"(Life) loses its frustration," he notes, "when you do not look to the world anymore for your satisfaction or for your 'self.' When you give up demanding that people, places, (and) situations should make you happy and fulfill you - when you don't demand it anymore - then suddenly the ability arises to allow the forms of this moment to be as they are."

  "Because life at this moment," Tolle points out, "already always is as it is."

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

The Ego, Identification and Attachment

Psychologically, the lower consciousness of the ego may perhaps be viewed as a learned attitude, an habitual way of thinking that the individual grows into as he or she grows towards adolescence. By adolescence, the vast, vast majority of individuals have taken the stream of thought generated by the ego as their identity.

Wholly identified with this "voice in the head" we are attached to the personas it creates for us, and then seek, in turn, further attachments to objects, conceptual structures, experiences and other people to reinforce this attachment to our egoic "self." This attachment process, robs us of the reality of the higher levels of consciousness which are nascent within us, but which are obscured by the wiles and wants of the ego.

"Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel," writes Eckhart Tolle in "A New Earth," his best-selling treatise on higher consciousness. "You can value and care for things," he observes, "but whenever you get attached to them you will know it's the ego. And you are never really attached to a thing but to the thought that has 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine' in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego and who your are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emerges."

"In the end," it has been said," what matters most is how well did you live, how well did you love, and how well did you learn to let go."

Letting go, however, necessitates our letting go of the egoic state, not only of our identification with he ego, but with the never-ending attachments and desires that the ego produces, the subject of the reading by Tolle, below.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Alan Watts: A Modern Vedantist Examination of the "I"

In "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are," philosopher Alan Watts examines the delusionary way in which each of us looks as him or herself as a separate "ego" or "self" and the implications this has for society's development and its future. Critically examining the way that all of us are conditioned in this belief, Watts presents an Advaita Vedantist view on the question of our consciousness with a decidedly modern twist.

"The sensation of "I" as a lonely and isolated sense of being is so powerful and commonsensical, " Watts notes, "and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe."

"I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time," he observes, "a rare, complicated and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy."

 "As the ocean 'waves,'" notes Watts, "so the universe 'peoples.'"

For more on this topic: See "Einstein to Alan Watts and Beyond: Who Are We?"

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

A Oneness beyond Ego

"When I go within myself, I feel that I have discovered something over which had no power. Life and death are constant changes, but I have something that is one and unchanging." So says renowned contemplative monk Br. David Steindl-Rast.

Is this the deathless soul that survives the ego's death? Is this what we are all here to look for?

Lama Surya Das: On the Dharma

The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character;
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings. . . .

As the shadow follows the body,
as we think, so we become.

-- from the Dhammapadda --

"Dharma teachers," writes Lama Surya Das, "sometimes refer to the stream of consciousness of a person with an untrained mind (most of us, much of the time); as a continuous stream of delusion. This continuous stream is built up through years (or lifetimes) of deeply confused habitual and distorted thinking. We think so much, yet we truly know and understand so very little."

"A Tibetan saying," notes Das, "is that thoughts and concepts are delusions; awareness is wisdom. Self absorption acts as a veil of delusion that distorts everything."

[Lama Surya Das, "Awakening the Buddha Within," pp. 131-132.]

Like so many other spiritual teachers, in varied traditions, Das, notes the post-modern man and woman seem to be "narcissistic and self-absorbed," identified and ruled by the continuous stream of deceptive self-consciousness which is the human ego. Thus, he notes, "(t)o embody the Dharma, we have to learn to let go of self-deception and be honest with ourselves as well as the rest of the world. This level of honesty requires conscientious attention, discernment, emotional intellignece, self-knowledge, and sincere internal scrutiny."

"Everything," Das observes, "depends on motivation and intention. What you tell yourself about any situation reflects where you are coming from. It starts in your head, with what you tell yourself."

* * * * * * * * * * * *

"Right intentions . . . suggests to the spiritual seeker that it is in our own highest interest to be less selfish," Das notes.

"When our energies are taken up with thoughts of "me" or "mine," we are honoring neither our human dignity nor our innate Buddha-nature," he points out. "The Dharma urges seekers to develop an unselfish view of the world because the reality is that we are all interconnected; our fates are intertwined."

"It takes an entire community to raise a Buddha," he observes.

[Lama Surya Das, supra., p .135.]

Three Causes of 'Suffering'

To the unenlightened mind, the Buddha explained, life is duhkha, a Pali term customarily translated as 'suffering." From this First Noble Truth - the truth of suffering - flow the rest of the Buddha's teachings. But what does duhkha really signify?

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Buddhism:

"There is no word in English covering the same ground as duhkha in the sense it is used in Buddhism. The usual translation of 'suffering' is too strong, and gives the impression that life according to Buddhism is nothing but pain. As a consequence, some regard Buddhism as pessimistic."

"While duhkha certainly embraces the ordinary meaning of 'suffering,' it also includes deeper concepts such as impermanence (anitya) and unsatisfactoriness, and may be better left untranslated. The Buddha does not deny happiness in life, although this too is seen as part of duhkha because of its impermanence."

"The concept of duhkha is explained as having three aspects. Ordinary duhkha (duhkha-duhkha) refers to all kinds of suffering in life, such as illness, death, separation from loved ones, or not getting what one desires. The second aspect of duhkha, or duhkha produced by change (viparinama-duhkha) is the duhkha resulting from the impermanent nature of all things. The third aspect of duhkha, or duhkha as conditioned states (samskara-duhkha), is the most important philosophical aspect of the First Noble Truth. This teaches that what we call an 'individual' is, according to Buddhism, a combination of ever-changing physical and mental forces known as the 'five aggregates, (panca skandha). This is known as the doctrine of anatman, or no-self."

"(L)ike everything else," it is noted, "the individual ego is dependently originated and conditioned. Holding to the illusion of an independently originated self (atman), according to the Buddha, makes one crave for the satisfaction of this self. However, since everything is duhkha, and impermanent, there cannot be enduring satisfaction. Instead, craving (trsna) only leads to a vicious circle of unfulfilled, desires, and therefore more suffering (duhkha)."

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

The first aspect of 'suffering' - duhkha-duhkha - is the most readily apparent aspect: hit your thumb with a hammer, develop arthritis, grow sick and die, and the inevitable result is suffering, both mental and physical. This might be called 'ordinary suffering.'

The second aspect of suffering - duhkha produced by change (viparinama-duhkha) - is somewhat more subtle, yet still very easy to grasp. Picture yourself on a paradaisical beach. Everything is beautiful and perfect. Then the thought arises that your vacation will end on Saturday and you will have to return to work and your 'normal' life. Suffering ensues. It ensues irrespective of whether we realize that we may not get something that we crave, or whether we realize that we may (or will) inevitably lose something that we cling to. Under these conditions, even that which is pleasurable causes the experience of suffering, albeit suffering produced by change - or viparinama-duhkha. This might be called "the suffering of impermanence."

The third aspect of suffering (samskara-duhkha) - suffering caused by the illusion that the ego-self is not conditioned or learned, but rather is actually 'who' and 'what' we are - is yet more subtle. Because of this mistaken illusion, we try to satisfy the ego's desires and allay its fears, but are ultimately unable to do so, as the ego itself is illusory. It is the ego-self that we mistake with our ultimate being - the Atman - a reality that is obscured by the conditioned states and thought patterns of the ego. This might be called "existential suffering."

To understand samskara-duhkha, it is perhaps helpful to examine what is meant by the 'samskaras' - a term that evolved, as did Buddhism, from the Vedic teachings of India.

In his masterpiece commentary on Patanjali's yoga aphorisms ("How to Know God"), Swami Prabhavananda asks us to picture the mind as a lake. The surface of the lake is our conscious thinking, while the water column is the 'thought-stuff' of the mind, and the lake bottom is the Atman, the Godhead within each of us. In its perfect state the waters of this mind-lake are purified and clear and one can easily percieve the Atman, which is the Ground of Being. However, as the 'thought-stuff' of the mind is distrubed, the water gets murky and turgid and the Atman is no longer discernible.

Over time, our habitual thought patterns flow and eddy in particular forms, building up sand banks and pebble beds which both obscure the lake bottom and channel the water to run in certain directions. Prabhavananda identifies these obscurations as the samskaras. In our consciousness we identify with our samskaras (or thought-patterns) and lose all contact with our Ground of Being, the Atman. Thus, a person who is habitually involved with thoughts of those who have 'wronged' him, plotting revenge, becomes a resentful man. A person who habitually thinks anger thoughts becomes an angry man etc.

Even as we learn to still the thought waves in the mind through the practice of meditation and contemplation, the samskaras remain as obstacles to realizing 'who' and 'what' we are and achieving union with our Ground of Being. But, as time passes, and with disciplined practice, even the sandbanks and pebble beds of the samskaras will begin to dissipate.

No longer sustained and built up by our habitual, egoic thinking the samskaras fade in time, and once again we can see from our consciousness through the water-column of the mind to the Atman at the base. But, in the meantime, if we habitually identify with our samskaras as being 'who' and 'what' we are, we suffer. Like all other 'things,' our false ego-self is a product of dependent origination. If we can realize its impermanence and cease to identify with it we begin to overcome our samskara-duhkha.

Gerald Heard: Conscious Evolution as Life's Focus

"(I)t seems clear now that a higher level of consciousness will not emerge unless we plan our living so as to permit that emergence. It is not difficult to understand why this should be so. The higher consciousness transcends the ego; the ego is a transitional stage, a husk. The present level of consciousness, of interest and attention, is almost wholly directed to preserve the ego. "We only live once" is a common motto and to make a life which may be worth while and have satisfied the self when it is over (almost a contradiction in terms) is the aim of "every sensible man." Dealing as we are, and cannot escape dealing, with a creature of body, mind and spirit, we must modify in every favourable way spirit, mind, and body if the new type of consciousness, tentative and vague as it must be in the first stirrings, is to become fully formed."

"It would seem, then, that the forwarding of the evolution of consciousness, the aiding of that further emergence of the psyche, requires, immediately, the constant practice of a certain method of mental focusing and this constant practice, in its turn requires, if it is to be successful and without thwarting strain, to be set in a complete way of life, a way which is centered on the exercise of this focusing, a way in which every activity is subordinate and ancillary to the focusing."

-- Gerald Heard --
("Pain, Sex and Time," pp. 177-178)

First published in 1939 (and republished in 2004), Heard's "Pain, Sex and Time" is an encyclopedic review of the history of the evolution of transcendental consciousness beyond the ego. Tracing the history of esoteric teachings, mystery schools and mysticism from ancient to modern times, it lays a firm foundation for the premise - attested to in all the world's great religious and wisdom traditions - that a higher state of evolution that is psychical rather than physiological is our destiny. However, as Heard points out, above, for this next evolutionary step in our development, a conscious and strenuous effort is needed, a conclusion that is at once more pertinent, imperative and challenging in our hyper-connected, hyperactive world today then it was when first written.

"When such extensive requirements and radical modifications of customary living are said to be necessary," Heard accedes, "many may withdraw, using as an excuse that such a change of life for the sake of attaining a state of mind is merely escapist. The man who really cares for his fellows lives in the world, we shall be told."

To such inevitable criticism, Heard notes that "(i)t is necessary . . . to remind ourselves that this contemplation which is to be made the ordering purpose of our lives, is not an individual, withdrawn, ingrowing, hypnotic pleasure. It is the deliberate attempt to constitute evolution which is otherwise balked and arrested. It is a purposed plan to lead us out of our present impasse, to which unconscious growth and uncoordinated discovery have brought us, into the next stage of evolution, which is a higher degree of consciousness apprehending a larger and more relevant reality."

In prescient words that are evermore powerfully relevant today, as we face the challenges of global warming, energy depletion, desertification and massive species extinction, Heard notes that, "(w)hat is clear, even to those who have not reached this next step and sighted the way out, is that we certainly cannot stay where we are and as we are. Our individual selves, our culture, our society and our race - all are profoundly unstable and rapidly becoming more unstable."

"However we try to escape it," he observes, "we come back to the same point: we must go on or collapse."

"It is, then," Heard points out, "those who will not so recast their lives who are escapist, fleeing into social activity to escape thought, to escape the question, "Does my activity really solve the problem(s) Life has set me or is my business precisely in order to escape from answering the problem(s) which confront me?"

It is, Heard concludes, "(t)his extension of consciousness (that) can alone solve our present problem(s)."

[Heard, "Pain, Sex and Time," pp. 178-179.]

Thomas Merton, Zen and the Nature of the Ego

The ego (or small "self") is wholly narcissistic and driven by fear, or its counterpart, desire. When one first becomes aware of the spiritual nature of one's being there arises a real risk that the ego will say: "Spiritual? You want to be spiritual and become enlightened? Just watch how spiritual I can become!"

Thomas Merton
(1915-1968)

The renowned Trappist monk and prolific author, Thomas Merton, addresses this process of spiritual self-sabotage in his book, "Mystics and Zen Masters." In recounting the story of how Hui Neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Zen (Ch'an) Buddhism was chosen, Merton illustrates how the self-seeking ego can embrace spirituality and the concept of enlightenment itself and, thus, fool even the most ardent spiritual seeker.

The Fifth Patriarch, when choosing his successor, asked each of the monastery's monks to write a verse illustrating their Zen insight. The much accomplished monk who was presumed to be the heir-apparent wrote:

"The body is the Bodhi tree,
The mind is like a clear mirror standing.
Take care to wipe it all the time,
Allow no grain of dust to cling to it."

Profoundly dissatisfied with this explanation, Hui Neng, the monastery's unordained cook, wrote:

"The Bodhi is not like a tree,
The clear mirror is nowhere standing.
Fundamentally not one thing exists:
Where then is a grain of dust to cling?"

The "clear mirror" is - or, so it seems -  really the ego which the heir-apparent was constantly trying to wipe clean. The problem, however, seems to be that it was the "ego"or "self" that was trying to wipe itself clean. Illustrating the principle that "self" cannot rid itself of "self" or "ego-nature," Hui Neng -  the unordained cook - was appointed as the Sixth Patriarch.

In rejecting the "mirror wiping" concept of meditation, Merton observed that Hui Neng "was not rejecting meditation itself, but what he believed to be a totally wrong attitude to meditation." Merton explains that a "wrong attitude" or error may occur when the ego, in a last-ditch effort to retain its hold on the spiritual seeker, embraces spirituality itself. He explains:

"1.  This wrong attitude assumes and gives primacy to a central ego-consciousness, an awareness of an empirical self, an "I" which, with all the good intentions in the world, sets out to "achieve liberation" or "enlightenment." This is the familiar empirical ego which is aware of itself, observes itself, remembers itself, and seeks ways to preserve and perpetuate its self-awareness. This "I" seeks to affirm itself not only in its actions, and its thoughts, but also in contemplation. In stripping off the exterior and sensible trappings of superficial experience, the ego seeks to realize its own spiritual nature more perfectly. This implies a rejection of one's sensible and active self in order to attain to an inner "silent" self, which is still, however, our "ego."

2.  The empirical and self-conscious self then views its own thought as a kind of object or possession, and in so doing accounts for this thought by situating it in a separate, isolated, "part of itself," a mind, which it compares to a "mirror." This is also considered a "possession." "I have a mind." Thus the mind is regarded not as something I am, but something I own. It then becomes necessary for me to sit quietly and calmly, recollecting my faculties and reaching down to experience my "mind."

3.  The empirical self then resolves to purify the mirror of the mind by removing thoughts from it. When the mirror of the mind is clear of all thought (so it imagines), the ego will be "liberated." It will affirm itself freely without thoughts. Why does it aim at this bizarre attainment? Because it has read in the sutras that "enlightenment" is a state of "emptiness," of "suchness." It is an awareness of an inner and transcendental mind. Presumably if all thoughts of material and contingent things are kept out of the mirror, then the mirror will be filled with the pure spiritual light of the Buddha mind, which is a kind of "emptiness.""

"So," Merton observes, "the ego-consciousness is able, it believes, to eat its cake and have it. It renounces its empirical autonomy in order to sink into spiritual, pre-biological nature. But since this nature is regarded as one's possession, the "spiritualized" ego thus is able to affirm itself all the more perfectly, and to enjoy its own narcissism under the guise of "emptiness" and "contemplation.""

In this manner, the ego, it turns out, becomes the ultimate ego-trap. The old axiom, "Know thyself!" is thus, still valid, albeit with the corollary: "But beware of thyself, and all its ways!"

(Excerpts from Thomas Merton, "Mystics and Zen Masters," pp. 19-23.)

Fear, Desire and Experience

"Before you learn to swim, water seems to be a dreadful place. "Suppose I drown? What will become of me?" But once you learn to swim, you love the water. You have to learn to swim in this ocean of samsara - to become a master swimmer."

-- Swami Satchidananda --

Mastering our fears by overcoming desires - in this instance, the fear of death and the desire for perfect security - leads to the experience of something far greater than the sum of all fears and desires, i.e., the human ego. The ego cannot experience the divine, its experience is only that of fears that can never be allayed and desires that can never be fulfilled. Yet experience of the divine is just beyond the ego's seemingly firm, but feeble, grip.

"To know itself," the modern sage, Sri Nisagardatta remarked, "the self must be faced with its opposite - the not-self. Desire leads to experience. Experience leads to discrimination, detachment, self-knowledge - liberation. And what is liberation after all? To know that you are beyond birth and death. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal creature, you created so much trouble for yourself that you have to wake up, like from a bad dream."

[Sri Nisagardatta Maharaj, "I Am That," p. 68.]

Over and over, saints and sages have used the metaphor of water - the spring, the lake, the river and the ocean - to express the challenges to, and potential for, transcendental experience of our higher being. Jesus walked on water, the Buddha crossed over to the far shore. The lotus flower is rooted in the muddy bottom of a lake and blooms on its surface. Rumi's flutes are fashioned from the reeds that grow along the river's shores, already singing plaintively for the divine breath that will loose the music they hold within themselves.

Rhetorically, Nisagardatta asks: "What is wrong with (the mind) seeking the pleasant and shirking the unpleasant?"

"Between the banks of pain and pleasure," he notes, "the river of life flows. It is only when the mind refuses to flow with life, and gets stuck at the banks, that it becomes a problem. By flowing with life I mean acceptance - letting come what comes and go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, for you are not what happens, you are to whom it happens. Ultimately even the observer you are not. You are the ultimate potentiality of which the all-embracing consciousness is the manifestation and expression.

Perhaps it was Herman Melville, author of "Moby Dick," the great novel of what happens to man when he seeks to kill the leviathans that lurk beneath the oceans' waters, who said it best when he observed:

"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all of whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began."

"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"

In his metaphor, "Tahiti" is the higher consciousness of enlightenment available to the man who reaches its shore having crossed the ego-ocean of the "half known life," with all of the self-cannibalizing fears and desires that lurk beneath a surface that is often calm, but just as often storm-tossed. "Push not off from that isle," Melville warns, for if you do, "thou canst never return!"

Enlightenment Is Not Complex

There is a higher state of consciousness beyond the mind-chatter of our ordinary egoic human consciousness and the sense of suffering it engenders. It is in attaining to this higher state of consciousness, to a state of consciousness beyond the ordinary perceptive and conceptive mind, that one frees oneself from the anxieties, depressions, petty fears and annoyances that perpetually plague us. But how willing are we, really, to give up our perceptions about what we, life and the world are all about?

"Most of us want to feel better, we don't want to see that we are misperceiving things," says neo-Buddhist teacher, Adyashanti. "But that is the core of spirituality," he notes, "and the only way to really wake up is to realize that the way you perceive yourself may not be true."



"There is no such thing as a true belief," he observes. "Reality itself is simple, clear and unitary. There is nothing mysterious about it. The mystery all has to do with misperception."

"When we really start to wake up from our misperceptions, we realize reality isn't mysterious. Life isn't a big mystery. It's not really an overly complex thing. Freedom isn't complex. Enlightenment isn't complex. It is actually the opposite. It is the most simple thing. It is the most simple perception," Adyashanti notes.

A Stranger to One's Self

 Humankind is unique because we are conscious of our consciousness. So far as we know, no other species is capable of this self-reflection, And while this has allowed all that we know of culture - from philosophy to physics - to flourish, when it comes to the individual most of us are more or less blind to our inner realtities.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

The great 20th-century theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, author of the famous "Serenity Prayer," once observed:

" . . . (M)an, alone among all animals, stands in contradiction to himself. The possibility for this contradiction is given by the self-transcendence of the human spirit, the fact that man is not only soul, as unity of the body, but spirit, as capacity to transcend both the body and soul."

[Niebuhr, "The Nature of Man," vol. 1 page 30.]

For his part, the great Swiss psychologist Car Jung, wrote:

"Most people confuse "self-knowledge" with knowledge of their conscious ego personalities. Anyone who has ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents. People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. In this respect the psyche behaves like the body with its physiological and anatomical structure, of which the average layperson knows very little too. Although he lives in it and with it, most of it is totally unknown to the layman and special scientific knowledge is needed to acquaint consciousness with what is known of the body, not to speak of all that is not known, which also exists."

[Jung, "The Undiscovered Self," pages 14-15.]

Man, thus, stands in contradiction with his or herself, because most people know but little of their psyche, and almost nothing of their essence, an essence which is beyond both psyche and the soul. Few, indeed, even look. And this fact, seems to be a truth of all inner religious teachings.

For example, the great Buddhist master, Tulke Urgyen Rinpoche, observed that, "Buddhas become awakened because of realizing their essence. Sentient beings become confused because of not realizing their essence. Thus there is one basis or ground and two different paths."

[Tule Urgyen Rinpoche, "As It Is," vol. 2, page 43.]

Sufi teachings, the esoteric, inner teachings of Islam, are also based on this rarely realized "essence." "All dervish teachings," writes Idries Shah, "is based not on the concept of God, but on the concept of essence. . . . 'He who knows his essential self, knows his God.' Knowledge of the essential self is the first step, before which there is no real knowledge of religion."

[Idries Shah, "The Sufis," page 309.]

It is also recognized in the Christian scriptures, where the Book of James, notes that, "A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways." (James 1:8) And, in the Katha Upanishad, one of the most ancient of all the Indic scriptures, advises that: "The wise should surrender speech in mind, mind in the knowing self, the self in the Spirit of the universe, and the Spirit of the universe in the Spirit of peace."

But the Katha Upanishad also famously notes that few look past the egoic self in a search for the truth of man's being. "Sages say the path is narrow and difficult to tread," says the ancient teaching, "narrow as the edge of a razor."

["The Upanishads," Penguin Classics, page 61.]

Very few, it seems, truly walk the 'razor's edge' it seems; for, as Jesus advise his disciples: "Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it."(Matt, 7:13-14)

It is, of course, notoriously difficult for an individual to plumb his or her inner depth. Over and over, in all traditions there are warnings, the crux of which are that 'the inner spiritual journey is a lonely path." For most people, who are not bothered by existential questions it is far easier to ignore the subtle yet disturbing questions of 'who' and 'what' we really are, and 'why' we are here.

Even religious institutions,  Jung observed, for the  most part, only address the outer conditions and needs of man.

"The Churches," writes Jung, "stand for traditional and collective convictions which in the case of many of their adherents are no longer based on their own inner experience but on unreflecting belief, which is notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it. The content of belief then comes into collision with knowledge and it often turns out that the irrationality of the former is no match for the latter. Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which comes miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously."

"People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to think that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled nous into us - that is, trust and loyalty. This experience has a definite content that can be interpreted in terms of one or other of the denominational creeds. But the more this is so, the more the possibilities of these conflicts with knowledge mount up, which in themselves are quite pointless. That is to say the standpoint of the creeds is archaic; they are full of impressive mythological symbolism which, if taken literally, comes into insufferable conflict with knowledge."

 Thus, for the rare individual who wishes to 'walk the razor's edge,' settling for the outer teachings of the various creeds and denominations is unlikely to suffice. With the "capacity to transcend both the body and soul," that lonely spiritual traveler will need to take the "inner way" that leads from the lower self-consciousness of the ego, to the higher God-consciousnes of his or her essence. He or she will have to become a Buddha, or at a minimum, a Bhodisatva, foregoing ultimate enlightenemnt until all beings become enlightened themselves.

Jung & Tolle: Finding Meaning in Difficult Times

How do people seek meaning in transitional times such as these, in times where economic, political and cultural "norms" that we have lived with our whole lives, and which have to a greater or lesser extent defined our lives, are increasingly being challenged? Where can meaning now be found?

In an interview in the late 1950s, the great Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, warned that, "Man cannot stand a meaningless life." Because of this, he warned, it is mankind which poses the gravest dangers to itself.

"The only real danger that exists is man himself," says Jung. "He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it.  We know nothing of man. Far too little. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil."

This is a prescient preview of the dangers we face from one of the greatest minds of the early 20th-century, a period rife with great minds like Einstein, Heisinger, and Jung's friend and colleague, Wolfgang Pauli. All of whom, perhaps because they survived two world wars, and the birth of atomic weapons and an era of "mutually assured destruction,' were quick to warn of mankind's inherent danger to itself. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, Einstein once remarked, "but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Eckhart Tolle, spiritual teacher/author of "The Power of Now,"
and "The New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose."

"We are the origin of all coming evil," Jung remarks. And, this, at a time before evidence of global warming, mass extinction of species, desertification, energy crises and toxic industrial pollution of the environment were seriously considered.

In contrast, current best-selling author and enlightened spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, looking at the  difficulties that many people in the West are nofacing due to seemingly ever-changing shifts in economic and cultural norms, notes that these problems may be a catalyst for change.

"For many people, limitation in one form or another is coming into their life situation. And, that is actually not what the media wants us to believe, that these things are dreadful. The challenge that many people are encountering at this time, is actually that which will push them into a new state of consciousness. That is the possibility. that is the promise. Whenever you encounter a crisis situation, whether it is personal or collective, there is the opening into a new way of being. It is a possibility. It doesn't mean that everyone will embrace that possibility.

"Do not believe what we are told in the media," Tolle observes. "That we should be in a state of fear. That the only real response, the only natural response to what is happening is a state of fear. That is an unconscious response. We need to see that change is absolutely necessary in this world, and the dissolution of many of the ego-based structures is absolutely necessary for the planet to survive, and for humanity to survive. So what's happening is not dreadfully 'bad.' What's happening needs to happen. The totality, the intelligence behind phenomena is doing it, So, it is a good thing."

Paradoxically, Tolle says that mankind can actually find the "meaning" which Jung saw as so necessary for our lives in the very challenges that we have been conditioned to see as "threatening" our way of life. As such, the coming changes will be what makes or breaks the human spirit, and so determines our fate.

Falling from Grace, Falling into Grace

"Thinking without awareness is the main dilemna of human existence," Eckhart Tolle observed in his great book, "A New Earth." Similarly, in his newest book, "Falling Into Grace," the neo-Buddhist spiritual teacher, Adyashanti, notes that "one of the greatest reasons that we suffer is because we believe the thoughts in our head."

In short, says Adyashanti, we are taught to believe that the world we create in our head is the real world, a mental error that has prompted ancient and modern teachers alike to warn us that the world we live in is 'maya' - i.e., an illusion, or a dream.

Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

In one of their many dialogues, the late, great spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the theoretical physicist, David Bohm, took up the question of just why men and women came to believe in, and then identify with, their thoughts:

"DB:   Yes. It is important to bring out this point - that rationality is limited, and, as you say, the fundamental fact is that more generally (people) cannot be rational. They may succeed in some area.

K:   That's right. That is a fact.

DB:   That is a fact, though we don't say it is inevitable, or that it can't be changed.

K:   No. It is a fact.

DB:   It is a fact that it has been, it has happened, it is happening.

K:   Yes. I, as a common human being, have been irrational. And my life has been totally contradictory, and so on, which is irrational. Now can I as a human being change that?

DB:   Let's see how we could proceed from the scientific approach. This would raise the question, why is everybody irrational?

K:   Because we have been conditioned that way. Our education, our religion, our everything.

DB:   But that won't get us anywhere, because it leads to more questions: how did we get conditioned and so on.

K:   We can go into all that.

David Bohm (1917-1992)

DB:   But I meant that line is not going to answer.

K:   Quite. Why are we conditioned that way?

DB:   For example, we were saying the other day that perhaps man took a wrong turning, established the wrong conditioning.

K:   The wrong conditioning from the beginning. Or, seeking security - security for myself, for my family, for my group, for my tribe - has brought about this division.

DB:   Even then you have to ask why man sought this security in the wrong way. You see, if there had been any intelligence, it would have been clear that this thing has no meaning.

K:   Of course, you are going back to taking the wrong turn. How will you show we have taken a wrong turning?

. . .

DB:   Also it would have to be made clear why, if thought is so important, it causes all the difficulties. There are the two main questions.

K:   Yes. I think the wrong turn was taken when thought became all important. . . . That is fairly simple. So thought has been made king, supreme. And that may be the wrong turn of human beings.

DB:   You see, I think that thought became the equivalent of truth. People took thought to give truth, to give what is always true. There is the notion that we have knowledge - which may hold in certain cases to be true. There is the notion that we have knowledge - but men generalize, because knowledge is always generalizing. When they go to the notion that it would always be so, this crystallized the thought of what is true. This gave thought supreme importance.

"Why is it that we do this?," asks Adyashanti. "Why do we believe the thoughts in our head?  We don’t believe the thoughts in someone else’s head when they speak them to us. When we read a book—which is nothing but the recording of somebody else’s thoughts—we can take them or leave them. But why is it that we are so prone to grasp at the thoughts that occur within our own mind—to hold onto them and become identified with them? We don’t seem to be able to put them down even when they cause great pain and suffering."

"The capacity to think and utilize language has a shadow side," notes Adyashanti, "that, if left unattended and used in an unwise way, can cause us to suffer and experience unnecessary conflict with one other. Because after all, that’s what thought does: It separates. It classifies. It names. It divides. It explains."

"Again, he notes, "thought and language have a very useful aspect and they are therefore very necessary things to develop. Evolution has worked very hard to make sure that we have the capacity to think coherently and rationally, or, in other words, to think in ways that will ensure our survival. But when we look back upon the world, we see that the very thing that has evolved to help us survive has also become a form of imprisonment for us. we’ve become trapped in a world of dreams, a world in which we live primarily in our minds."

Thus, through identification with our very random thinking we fall out of grace. However, through mindfulness and the sort of radical self-enquiry advocated by Krishnamurti and the long line of spiritual teachers before him, like Sri Nisargadatta and Ramana Maharshi, we have the opportunity, as Adyashanti makes so clear, to fall once more back into grace.

And, at a time when we face global warming, rampant pollution of the environment, widespread deforestation, mass extinctions, soaring population growth, energy shortages and an ever-growing threat of mass hunger, there is an urgent imperative for us to seek the answers within that will lead to answers in the world.

But, to paraphrase the great 12th-century Sufi poet, Rumi: "We may need more grace than we thought."

 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

 In the attached video, Adyashanti explores mindfulness, compulsive thinking and our relationship to thought.

The Ending of Ego-Addiction: "A Pathless Land"

". . .. (T)he annihilation, cessation, and overcoming of bodily form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness, this is the extinction of suffering, the end of disease, the overcoming of old age and death."

"This, truly, is the Peace, this is the Highest, namely the end of all formations, the forsaking of every substratum of rebirth, the fading away of craving, detachment, extinction, Nibbana."

("A Buddhist Bible," Dwight Goddard ed., page 32.)

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Perceptions, mental formations and consciousness." Over 2,500 years ago, the Buddha identified these three mental phenomena - or, perhaps, noumena, to be more precise - as the root cause of suffering. In growing up we are conditioned by the people in our lives and our culture to regard so-called "normal" perceptions, mental formations and consciousness as being our "reality."

Few even think about these concepts, much less question whether our "reality" is so "real" after all. In a very literal sense, it could be said that we are "addicted" to our thinking, and the perceptions, ideas, inner narratives and identities that we take to be who we "are."

But is that so? And what can "we" do about it?

A modern enlightened master, Jiddu Krishhnamurti would ask us to question these propositions for ourselves; yet, his life's work points us to the truth that there is a near universal addiction to the ordinary  human consciousness. We are, he would likely say, overwhelmingly ego-addicted.

"When one makes an abstraction in thought, one moves away from 'what is,'" Krishnamurti writes in his book, "The Wholeness of Life." And that, he observes, has both ethical as well as psychological implications for the individual, suggesting that our propensity to think without an awareness of what we are thinking, is a life-long 'habit.' A 'habit' we should probably quit, as it interferes with our deepest psychological functioning, the ability to love.

"That movement of abstraction," he notes, "becomes a condition according to which one lives, therefore one no longer lives according to facts. This is what one has done all one's life; but one will never know what love is through abstraction, will not know the enormous beauty, depth and significance of love."

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986)
". . . Truth is a pathless land . . . "

"Why does man put up with this suffering," Krishnamurti asks, utilizing his customary method of inquiry:

Why does man put up with this suffering? . . . What is it that suffers? When one says "I suffer," who is it that suffers? What is the center that says "I am in agony of jealousy, of fear of loss"? Is it the movement of thought, as time, which creates the center? How does that I come into being, which, having come into being says, "I suffer, I am anxious, I am frightened, I am jealous, I am lonely". That I is never stationary, it is always moving: "I desire this, I desire that and then I desire something else", it is in constant movement. That movement is time, that movement is thought.

["The Wholeness of Life," p.  152.]

Such 'desire,' along with 'anger' and 'ignorance' is, of course, one of the "Three Poisons" that the Buddha identified as the root of our human suffering, our addiction to self, our ego-addiction. End desire, end anger, end ignorance and one will end suffering is the essence of the Buddha's "Third Noble Truth," the noble truth of the end of suffering.

The Buddha suggests a comprehensive eight point methodology to end this addiction to ego-centric thinking (his "Fourth Noble Truth," the noble truth of the eight-fold path to the end of suffering), all of which is set out to stop the 'thinking without awareness' that is the root of ego-addiction. Krishnamurti, for his part, suggests rigorous self-examination and inquiry to overcome theses thought processes

"Thought identifies itself with the name and with the form and is the I in all the content of consciousness," Krishnamurti observes. "(It) is the essence of fear hurt, despair, anxiety, guilt, the pursuit of pleasure, the sense of loneliness, all the content of consciousness. . . . If one runs away from it, one has not solved it; but if one remains with it, not identifying oneself with it  - because one is that suffering - then all your energy is present to meet this extraordinary thing that happens. . . . (W)hen one observes suffering in oneself, not escaping from it, but remaining with it totally, completely, without any movement of thought, without any alleviation, comfort, but just completely holding to it, then one will see a strange psychological transformation take place."

And that transformation? Is it the end of "self," or ego death? One will, of course, have to find the answer to that on one's own? It was the Buddha who said, in effect, "do not take my word for it, do not worship me, find out for yourself if these truths are not real." Or, as Krishnamurti famously said to a crowd of his "followers" before setting out on his radical course of lonely self-inquiry:

"I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. . . . Because I am free, unconditioned, whole -- not the part, not the relative, but the whole Truth that is eternal -- I desire those, who seek to understand me to be free; not to follow me . . . Rather they should be free from all fears -- from the fear of religion, from the fear of salvation, from the fear of spirituality, from the fear of love, from the fear of death, from the fear of life itself."

["The Wholeness of Life," p.  153. Emphasis added.]

To end this addiction to thought, to end 'ego-addiction,' therefore, one must follow one's own inner path of self-inquiry and self-examination as one travels through this inner, "pathless land."