March 3, 2009

Tonight was the Jewel Heart class on the Four Noble Truths. Susie Kirchner is the dharma teacher. She does a great job; mostly I think, because she loves doing it.

Baby Dee was there; I'm not sure how long she has been coming. Quite awhile I think. She's been a pretty steady customer lately. Usually her tour schedule keeps her away from Cleveland for long stretches. So it was good to see her. David was there also. His cat ran away on Monday, but the cat is back. So that's good.

We were talking about karma tonight, good and bad. It is just the action you take, good or bad.

I must say, that I am not a very good student of Buddhism. I don't take notes, I just try to absorb. Most of the other people take notes. I always say and think that it is because I abhore dogma but it's really because I'm lazy. Still, to give myself credit, I do absorb quite a bit.

Take ego for instance. The western view of ego is that it is very much at center ring. The whole goal of healthy personality development in the west is to develop a mature ego with a good executive command in charge of it all. From the Buddhist point of view, ego is not only not at the center of things, but in an enlightened being, it is gone. Literally. Actually. Well, not really gone, but never acutally there in the first place. Which from the healthy ego at the center of things point of view sounds like jibberish. It's not; it just means that although our existence is eternal, traveling from body to body and life to life, our ego is impermanent. It is simply a method of organizing our thought process, while in a physical body. So ego does have a practical aspect. But it is not reality. It is not the core of consciousness. We leave it at the door on the way out. But, because we rely on it so much while we are alive, we mistake it for the real deal.

As you might surmise, this is Roger Miller, singing do-wacka-do, one of my favorites. Ignore the printed content; I just posted it for the lyric. The point that sent me in quest of it is the lyric, "well I see you going down the street in your big Cadillac, you got girls in the front, you got girls in the back, back, way in the back you got money in the sack, both hands on the wheel and your shoulders right back ...."

It's a perfect methaphor for the ego. More real than real. Life and death itself; so much a part of you that you'll fight to the death to protect it. The irony is that you are protecting an illusion; an illusion in the sense that it is temporary, based on the concerns of the present existence and only a small component of present existence at that. It does seem to have a primary function of some importance however. It serves as the mechanism that connects consciousness to the world of physical existence. The purpose of existence, it is often said, is learning. While we draw breath, we have an opportunity to learn, and what we learn, we take with us when we go. We use it to build future lives, to connect with the full potential of our consciousness and to use the human opportunity to achieve, or at least work toward achieving, the level of perfection of which we are capable.

So ego can be useful, as long as we don't mistake it for the real thing.


It is a lot like owning a car. Americans are crazy about their cars, and actually think of them as an extension of the self. In America, "you are what you drive" is a common attitude. When you drive the new car off the lot, it looks like a million bucks, and you look like a million bucks driving it. But after you've put a few hundred thousand miles on it and aquired a few dents and a thick coat of dirt, your million bucks is down to spare change. And your proud ego goes with it. In the fifties, when I grew up, yearly trade-ins were a common status symbol. The new car ethic of the fifties, was "trade it in as soon as the ash tray is full." Protect that ego! Polish it, wash the tires, give it a wax job to keep the rain off. Buy a set of fuzzy dice to hang from the rear view mirror.
I just thought of a good YouTube that would fit here. I'll be right back...

This line of thinking may have been of great help to me tonight. It has to do with writing, and my ambition to write. I have known since a young child, that I have a talent for writing and my undergraduate degree from Ohio University is in Communications. My first career was in journalism; I wrote for a magazine, and have done writing for radio and tv. But I have not realized my true ambition, which is to write creatively. I have the worst case of writer's block I know of. Obviously I've thought a lot about why that is, and I think I have it figured out. It is a three-fold problem, as follows:

• I'm lazy. To succeed at writing, you have to write every day. That's why I started this blog; to begin to discipline myself to work at it. After I retire in December, I hope to begin a project. This has been my game plan for some time.
• Writing takes honesty. True honesty. Which I find very difficult. One the one hand, I have a lot of dark corners, and I'm not sure how honest I want to be. On the other hand, I realize that only honesty is interesting and to be otherwise, is to risk creating trivia instead of something worth reading. Or worth writing for that matter.
• Protection of the ego. See point 2.

See my point? I am so invested in protecting my ego from whatever, that I let it get in the way of my creative energy. So here, I may have a practical application for the whole impermanence of ego thing. Ya think?

DHL