The Reality of Being
#73. Ferocious egotism
We are not what we believe ourselves to be. Blinded by our imagination, we overestimate ourselves and lie to ourselves. We always lie to ourselves, at every moment, all day, all our lives. If we could stop inwardly and observe without preconception, accepting for a time this idea of lying, then perhaps we would see that we are not what we think we are.
I can have moments of real tranquillity, of silence, in which I open to another dimension, another world. What I do not see is that apart from these moments I am prey to conflict and contradiction, that is, to the violence of my egotistical action, which never ceases to isolate and divide me. Everything I do arises from this action. As I discover new possibilities, I need to know what is at the root of this other part of my nature. I have to see that it is not something foreign that I can put aside when and as I wish. It is what I am, and I cannot be otherwise. This ferocious egotism is me, and I have to become conscious of its action. To see this violence, I have to enter into an intimate and real contact with myself, to observe myself without any image.
Why do we have a compelling need to prove ourselves, to actualize ourselves? A profound impulse is at play: the deep fear of being nothing, the fear of total isolation, of emptiness, of solitude. We have created this solitude with our minds, with self-protecting and egocentric thoughts like “me” and “mine,” my name, my family, my position, my qualities. Deep down, we feel empty and alone, living lives that are narrow and superficial, emotionally starved and intellectually repetitious. Because our petty “I” is a source of suffering, we wish—consciously or unconsciously—to lose ourselves in individual or collective stimulation or in some form of sensation. Everything in our lives—entertainment, games, books, food, drink, sex—encourages stimulation on different levels. We revel in this and seek to find a state of “happiness,” to maintain a pleasure in which we can forget the “I.” All the time our minds are busy in evasion, constantly seeking, in one way or another, to be entirely absorbed in something outside ourselves, to be captivated by some belief, love or work. The evasion has become more important than the truth we cannot face.
Revolving around self-interest, our narrow mind diminishes the challenges of life by interpreting them with its limited understanding. As a result, our lives suffer from a lack of intense, strong feeling, a lack of passion. It is an essential problem. When we have real passion in the depths of ourselves, we feel strongly and are extremely sensitive to life—to suffering, to beauty, to nature … to everything. We care about life, its possibilities in work together and in relation. But without passion, life is empty, meaningless. If we do not feel deeply the beauty of life and its challenge, then life has no sense at all. We function mechanically. Yet this passion is not devotion or sentimentality. As soon as passion has a motive or preference, it becomes pleasure or pain. The passion we need is the passion to be.
Centered in our ordinary “I,” most of us do not love and are not loved. We have very little love in our hearts, which is why we beg for it and seek it in substitutes. Our usual emotional state is negative, all our feelings are reactions. In fact, we do not know what it would be to have a positive feeling, what it would be to love. My ordinary “I,” my ego, is always preoccupied with what pleases or displeases me, what “I like” or “I dislike.” It always wants to receive, to be loved, and impels me to seek love. I give in order to receive. Perhaps this is generosity of the mind, my “I,” but it is not generosity of the heart. I love with my “I,” my ego, but not with my heart. Deep down, this “I” is always in conflict with the other person and refuses to share. To live without love is to live in perpetual contradiction, a refusal of the real, of what is. Without love, one can never find what is true, and all human relations are painful.
If I do not know myself totally, my mind and my heart, my pain and my avidity, I cannot live in the present. What I must explore is not beyond the self, but the very basis from which I think and feel. My thought craves continuity, permanence, and its wish gives rise to my ordinary “I.” This thinking is the source of fear, fear of loss, of suffering. If I do not know my total consciousness—unconscious as well as conscious—I will not understand fear and my entire search will go astray and be deformed. There will be no love, and my only interest will be in ensuring the continuity of this “I,” even after death.
Beelzebub’s Tales
Chapter 27
“In my opinion, …the assigning of each other to different classes or castes, that had become, as you will surely understand for yourself later, the basis for the gradual crystallization in the common presence of your favorites of a particular psychic property that in the whole of the Universe is inherent exclusively in the presence of those three-brained beings.
“This unique property…, gradually developing and becoming stronger in them, passed from generation to generation by heredity, until it reached contemporary beings as a lawful and inseparable part of their general psyche, and this particular property they call ‘egoism.’
“…(T)hanks to the abnormal conditions of external being-existence established there, your favorites first began assigning each other to various castes and how subsequently, thanks again to similar abnormalities, this maleficent form of mutual relationship has persisted until today. But meanwhile you should know that the cause of the arising in their common presence of this unique property of ‘egoism’ was that, owing as always to those abnormally established conditions, soon after the second transapalnian perturbation their general psyche became dual.”
…“That is why, my boy, the crystallization in their common presence of the divine manifestation issuing from Above, forming the data for the arising of this sacred being-impulse (Conscience), takes place only in their ‘subconscious,’ which has ceased to participate in the process of their ordinary daily existence, so that these data have escaped the degeneration undergone by all the other sacred being-impulses that they also ought to have in their presence, namely, the impulses of Faith, Hope, and Love.”
Furthermore, …the action of the divine data crystallized in their presence for this being-impulse begins to manifest itself in certain of them from their ‘subconscious,’ and strives to participate in the functioning of their abnormally formed ‘ordinary consciousness.’ (T)hen no sooner are they aware of this than they at once take all sorts of measures to avoid it, because in the conditions now prevailing there it has become impossible for anyone to exist with the functioning in his presence of this divine impulse of genuine Objective Conscience.
“Ever since ‘egoism’ became firmly implanted in the presence of your favorites, this unique being-property became, in its turn, the main contributing factor for the gradual crystallization in their general psyche of the data for the arising of several other exceptionally peculiar being-impulses, now existing there under the names of ‘cunning,’ ‘envy,’ ‘hate,’ ‘hypocrisy,’ ‘contempt,’ ‘haughtiness,’ ‘servility,’ ‘slyness,’ ‘ambition,’ ‘duplicity,’ and so on and so forth.”