$29.95 For the Deal of a Lifetime!
A Deal You Can’t Pass Up!
It’s you’re lucky day! For only $29.95, the Triple-M 3000 can be yours! That’s right! A Misery Manufacturing Machine of your very own!
The Triple-M 3000 backpack slips easily onto your back. It comes complete with Uncomfortably Thin Straps, sure to bite into your shoulders. The Obnoxiously Heavy Weight feature ensures that your back and ankles will always be under excessive strain. And the Sandpaper Finish will wear away at your clothing and flesh. And as a special bonus, the Triple-M 3000 comes with a new Electric Shock feature! At random intervals, a powerful electric shock will be administered to the back of your neck! You never know when it’s coming!
With the Triple-M 3000, you’ll be in total discomfort. And with the new Electric Shock feature, you can live in constant fear of the next burst of voltage! Or get the Mini T-M 3000, perfect for your children!
Get Your Credit Card Ready!
So. Want to buy one? Wear it all the time?
Ha ha. Of course not! Would we actually pay to be uncomfortable all the time? We are quick to say no, but then we turn around and spend a heck of a lot of time, energy, and money doing something just as strange.
You see, this backpack is our Ego. Our Self. It’s what the Zen folks or non-dualists or Advaita people are trying to get rid of. Now, for some strange reason, we think that we simply can’t live without the backpack. We’re spending all of our time and energy making sure that we keep that backpack on. And as soon as we have children, we’re slapping a backpack on them!
As we move through life, we try to solve all the problems that the ego causes us. If the ego were a Triple-M 3000, we’d build custom car seats so that we could sit comfortably. We’d put pads on our shoulders to try to minimize the uncomfortable straps. And we’d wear shoes with 4” rubber soles in an effort to reduce the strength of the electric shocks.
Why don’t we just take the backpack off?
The funny thing is that the backpack doesn’t do us any good. At all. It’s only function is to make us miserable. If someone believed that the backpack was necessary for their day-to-day existence, you’d think they were crazy!
Ego is exactly the same way. It is the huge thing we carry around, and its only function is to make us miserable. It does us no good. At all.
So why don’t we just ‘take the ego off’?
Where Did We Get This Thing, Anyway?
Our ego is the unfortunate consequence of a thought-system that divides the world into objects. This system wouldn’t be so bad if we simply used it to enrich our lives. With this system, we can create amazing things, explore our world with science, and create cultures and societies.
But this process of object-creation is tricky, and since we pretty much forget that we do it, we forget that it was probably never meant to be turned upon ourselves. But that’s the very thing we do. We make ourselves into an object – an Ego – and then we suffer the consequences for the rest of our living days.
Understanding The Ego
Being fully mature humans means moving through three stages. In the first stage, we emerge from the womb, and see the world Just As Is. Nothing has names, and the world isn’t broken into little bits.
In the second stage, we learn a system of communication. It’s called language. This system breaks the world into bits, and using that system, we can do some amazing and wonderful things. But because our divisions are arbitrary, they can also get us into some terrible predicaments — especially when people disagree about the divisions. This disagreement is the root of stress, frustration, arguments, and war. We also get into trouble when we take these imaginary divisions for reality, because when we do, we begin to spend all our life energy trying to uphold our illusions. Another way of looking at it — we spend decades and decades of effort trying to feed our hippopotami.
In the third stage, we are taught that this system of communication is merely arbitrary. It has no ‘reality’ any more than any other fantasy has a reality. In this way, all the objects we’ve created lose any sense of ‘reality’ for us, and they remain a tool – just like they were supposed to be in the first place. They retain the ability to help us do amazing things, but they lose their ability to cause us grief. In effect, we remain the masters of our tools, instead of having our tools become the masters of us.
Unfortunately, almost no one moves on to this third stage. We should probably be taught about this stage when we are about eight years old, but instead, only a few of us ever hear about it, and that’s not until we’re adults and we begin to study Eastern philosophy or meditation or enlightenment. So we all get stuck in the second stage, and end up believing, with all our hearts, in the fantasies we’ve been taught. And the most awful of those fantasies is the one called Self or Ego.
The way it works is pretty simple. If we break the world up into bits, then we have to fit them back together. In other words, we have to try to figure out their relationships. And the nature of things is that sometimes these things will fit together well, and sometimes they won’t. Meaning that sometimes we are happy with the way things are going, and sometimes we are upset with the way things are going.
If we see that the Ego is nothing but a fantasy, then there is no problem. We arise perfectly in each situation we encounter. We simply can’t get upset with things. Believe it or not, you’re as natural as a tree, and just as able to arise, perfectly, in your given environment. We function quite fine without worry, stress, and all the other consequences of imagining that you are a bag of flesh being driven around by a ‘you’ in your head.
We believe that the Ego is a necessary part of who we are. We think it is ‘real’ (whatever that means!) Believing that, we then have to try to ‘get in relation’ to the rest of the world. Sometimes we like how we fit into the situation, and we’re happy. Sometimes we don’t fit with things so well, and we get upset.
Taking Off The Ego
Taking the backpack off is simple. You do it, and you have no more backpack problems. It’s the same with life. If we are spending our time trying to figure out how to solve our financial problems, or our relationship problems, or our self-esteem problems, then all we’re doing is trying to make the backpack more comfortable. The best we can do is to prolong our discomfort.
In this way, we really only have one problem in life. All the other ‘problems’ are necessary symptoms of the only real problem we have.
Take the backpack off. Shed the ego. And then you can stop spending all your time trying to solve your problems, and get down to Living.
How do you do it? That’s the trick, isn’t it? Luckily, the rest of this site is designed to help you out. A good place to start is with the Enlightenment Handbook.
Explore posts in the same categories: Understanding Dualism