(#188.365) Offerings

[thoreau]

"Meditators with this misunderstanding [of the self] often feel under pressure to disavow critical aspects of their being that are identified with the "unwholesome ego." Most commonly, sexuality, aggression, critical thinking, or even the active use of the first person pronoun are relinquished, the general idea being that to give these things up or let these things go is to achieve egolessness.

Aspects of the self are set up as the enemy and then attempts are made by the meditator to distance oneself from them. But the qualities that are identified as unwholesome are actually empowered by the attempts to repudiate them! It is not unusual to find meditators in therapy insisting that they do not need sex or have no need for an orgasm, or denying feelings of anger.

Rather than adopting an attitude of nonjudgmental awareness, these meditators are so concerned with letting it go that they never experience the actual insubstantiality of their own feelings. In a similar way, those with this misunderstanding of egolessness tend to overvalue the idea of the empty mind free of thoughts."

In this case, thought itself is identified with ego, and such persons seem to be cultivating a kind of intellectual vacuity in which the absence of critical thought is seen as an ultimate achievement. As Robert A. F. Thurman describes this misconception:"One just refutes all views, dismisses the meaningfulness of language, and presumes that as long as one remains devoid of any conviction, holding no views, knowing nothing, and achieving the forgetting of all learning, then one is solidly in the central way, in the silence of the sages."

- Buddhist Author Mark Epstein
from Freud and Dr. Buddha: The Search for Selflessness