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Iaolus writes:
I have a very active mind myself, highly bound up with my ego. I have figured out that my ego, a very dutiful sentinel, is afraid that if it lets go for any moment, it will die, and will cause me, whom it protects vigilantly, to die.
I tell a strange experience to you, Iaolus, from the deepest year of meditation practice (some time ago) -- a little phenomenon that began rising in the thick of it . . . .
A few times when I was sitting, when it got easier and easier and without effort to silence the internal narrator, which we will call "ego" here -- well, a few times in the greatest depths of this, I began to forget to breathe. In this total silence of being (which is always
pure in itself), with my my-ness apparently dissolved and mingled into the silence, I would simply stop breathing, unconsciously.
At the inhale or the exhale, everything was so still that I would become this stillness, too. I never choked, or suddenly gasped to recover - I would just commence a breath that had been easily left off for, in retrospect, a startling amount of time. It almost seemed as though I could have stopped breathing altogether had I not been recalled to myself. I never talked to any buddhists or meditators about this because I originally thought it so very strange. Perhaps this is the back-door reason for the advice to
concentrate on the breath [/ironic humour]
I do not share the "ego death" aspect of modern buddhism, in fact, I think such a thing intrinsically impossible, as one's sense of self shall always accompany them as long as they live.
I think it is a
kind of ego-perspective that buddhism points to, and that the dramatic "death" descriptions are merely descriptions of shedding and shedding the protective layers of ego that bubble-in a person too closely to themselves, so that they have restricted capacity to see what others see, or even to see the world, or the present itself. Paradoxically, I think it is
expansion of one's sense of self that is called for - the taking in of more and more past oneself, which, of course, does not mean one is past oneself at all. It merely means that one's awareness is more outward-turning, for the sake of awareness within.
Ego can only die when the person dies, so in many ways, I find your comments above pointedly accurate. Your sense of self
does protect you vigilantly, and it will continue this protection as long as you live, but more importantly, giving you reasons to live in itself.
The dramatic ego-death scenario is a favourite here. I share in the sentiment of it only along the lines mentioned above.
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