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Ego - a worthy battle?

I

infectedmushroom

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I think that for every great desire achieved or completed there is another around the corner waiting to be crushed.

It appears the chase of desire of any type – whether material or immaterial, is an inevitable battle. Desire is spawned in the unquenchable ego, the inner voice who does not cease, the much lamented “human condition.” (Sorry to play the familiar Buddhist angle here.)

It is a construct which, i'm beggining to realize unfortunately cannot be willed or thought away, but needs diligent deconstruction, a steady chipping at the layers stacked upon one another.

Is it our responsibility, in knowing this, in being “civilized” and “intelligent” beings, to pursue this pure egoless state, which has the potential to heal our failing species? Or is it irrelevant?
Is it just another desire to never be fulfilled?
 
Wellll, as far as it goes to being our "responsibility" to reach an egoless state or experience ego death, I'd say no. To say it is someones responsibility to achieve ego death is to place a universal moral prerogative on it, and I simply don't believe in the existence of an objective morality.

I have a little bit of a problem with what you call a "pure egoless state". Its wording to me implies you can transcend physicality into some nonmaterial dimension forever. It implies that there is two types of states, which would separate the world into material and nonmaterial matter. I'm not Buddhist but I believe everything is one in a sense.

For my sake I'm gonna assume you just mean ego death. Even though Eastern Philosophy has often sought to understand the world in holistic terms there are alot of Western philosophers that imply it.

I would check out Maslow's hierarchy of needs. He pretty much tried to map human mental stages and at the top is "self-actualization".

I think if we all collectively raised our conscious, I'm sure our race would be much better off but would that make us evolutionary fit? Our ego does help protect us, is there something with ego that escapes being analyzed with a evolutionary paradigm? I don't know but you certainly brought up a good topic. i'm looking forward to this discussion
 
To me, achievement of an 'egoless' state entails submersion into (and totalized experience of) the conditions of possibility that underlie the emergence of the ego as willful, definite navigation of actuality. Egolessness thus constitutes awareness beyond that conferred by 'egoed' activity, but also inheres prior to the divisions that come with navigation of reality through the lens of the ego, including the very division between potential and actual, material and immaterial, self and other, and so on. It is thus our duty, as manifestations of the universe coming to increasing self awareness, to explore such states, but egoless exploration cannot be sustained indefinitely, as ego plays a central role in our ability as lifeforms navigating a thusly external environment.

ebola
 
desire doesn't need to be a zero-sum game. we could maintain both ego and such balance, if we so desired to.
 
is the desire to be desire-less still a desire?


i think we might need to go to the video ref on that one. today's special guest video ref is Yoda, from them Star Wars films.

yoda.jpg


and his verdict

videorefereelg1.jpg


no try? wtf does that mean, mister leprechaun?
 
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Insofar as animals' neural systems build into experience as proto-subjects, yes. We are the universe coming to self-awareness because we are of the universe, emerging of it's processes, our awareness emerging as the universe loops back, taking itself as an object of awareness. Put otherwise, subjectivity is an emergent level of analysis as more and more complex forms of information emerge.

ebola
 
How about the advaita crowd who points out there is no you or me, and there is no such thing as an ego. That "I" is just a construct of the mind. If this is true there is really no seeing through the ego, or special egoless state because everything is already egoless. So I dont think there is an ego to maintain, or a balanced ego, or a healthy ego as far as Advaita or Buddhism goes... ultimately everything is empty of "I" so any other way of seeing is just projections from your own mind which are no more real than any other "thing". Arising and falling phenomenon dance, dancing just dancing for a little while. The problem is you see yourself to be the dancer but really there is just dancing, when you think yourself the dancer that is arrogance.
 
That's a rather difficult concept: the universe came to developing self awareness without being self aware. It somewhat leads me to believe we are not self aware at all (or perhaps been self aware since the dawn of time), but are acting on numerous different forces which have come together over the last billions of years to in, a sense, turn our bodies into a super colony such that joining a group of correlated forces benefits individual forces greater than if they were independent. Our mind has somehow tapped into the requests of all these different forces in order to satisfy them efficiently. This would assume that the term human is equivalent to the name of a city, or population. If certain forces are not met, would they loose their charge and die off causing other other dependent forces to die and terminate the transfer of needed information between specialized cells? e.g. if we didn't have a system of forces and cells that allowed us to accept Earth's gravity, we would become sick and die.

If this is the case would life simply be defined as the cause and effect of separate forces acting on each other? Life is not just limited to super massive specialized colonies, but nomad forces in the most deserted stretches of space as well? lol

Maybe this is why progress is so important, because the more we progress, the more our forces are satisfied. It would be interesting to be able to trace these adaptations to their roots. This would also explain much of life's confusions, with so many specialized cells working regionally, they are not in a direct relationship with other cells in other regions, kind of like how ants work together, but they have no dominant leader. Things just happen because some ant knows they have to do it.

The human condition could possibly just be another stage with many more to come. We could also be ruining this concept by killing off bacteria we harbor because of the notion that we are separate from this universe and undeserving its 'germs'
 
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