Egotism and Practice

 Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

When Crowley instituted the syllabus and methods of the A.'.A.'., he stipulated that each aspirant should work alone or with their instructor. The main reason for this is to reduce the risk of the work becoming a social gathering, a 'tea party', as one initiate put it. Another good reason is to reduce the friction of egos within the work. There is no getting away from the fact that, once you set out on the path, at some point the ego is going to trip you up. For me, the ego pops up from time to time in a multitude of ways. One of the biggest in in comparing myself with others. 

Using a graded system, we are of course subject to a hierarchy, we have people above us who we take as superiors, and those below us in the chain, who presumably that makes inferiors. To attempt to mitigate this somewhat, within the lineage I work out of we have substituted these terms for 'supervisor' and 'student'. It's not perfect, but language is important, what you feed into the subconscious is what grows there. 

Other situations for ego to arise are available. I recall that I once joined a Buddhist meditation group for a while. Nice people, vegetarian, knowledgeable about their subject, with a bit of an activist streak that I wasn't entirely comfortable with but I was mainly there for the meditation. One day I was out with some friends, walking the dogs in the woods, having a beer and generally having a good time. I happened to see a couple walking nearby, and one of them was a lady from the meditation group. I hoped that she wouldn't see me drinking beer in the woods, lest she judge me and think me not a 'serious' practitioner. You see, the ego has a negative side too.  

I've never done a vipassana retreat. I'd quite like to give it a go, but one report gave me food for thought. An acquaintance of mine did one, and she said it was full of egotists all trying to outdo each other with how well they could meditate. I'll never know how much of this is true as reported and how much her perception, perhaps based on the same sort of negative egotism I fell prey to in the woods that day. I suspect it may have been a little of both.

In the dojo we are constantly exposing our strengths and weaknesses to one another. One friend described it as the ego being a raw nerve. We perform well, we feel good, but if we perform badly we feel bad, more so that the other person was there to observe our failure. It takes real humility to fail and fail hundreds of times, even after years of practice, and still go back the next day to do it again.

Egotism arises in all walks of life. As an academic I've felt it, as a martial artist, as a musician, it has a multitude of ways to show its face. I feel however that to try to suppress it or pretend that we don't have it is a mistake. Psychologists tell us that suppressed emotions get stuffed into the subconscious, and arise later as neuroses and projections. What we put into the subconscious is what grows there. The subconscious mind provides the materials from which we build the conscious mind, so we need to be careful of every loose thought and feeling that we suppress and stuff into the cellar, hoping that nobody will notice. 

My current practice regarding ego is to treat it as everything else that comes up, observe it, name it, and understand how it arises and passes away. But importantly try not to attach anything to it. Morihei Ueshiba said, "when a guest comes to visit, invite him in, when he's ready to leave, bid him farewell." Meditation is like this. Spiritual practice is like this. We observe what we are and where we are, thoughts, feelings, pain, pleasure, without judgement or expectation. It can be painful to stand naked before ourselves, it pricks the ego to admit our shortcomings and perceived failings. But without this we have no humility, we build up walls between ourselves and others, we start making distinctions and differences, better/worse, wise/stupid, good/evil etc. 

In the end, ego can teach us how to deal with ego, if we are willing to look it in the face.

Love is the law, love under will.