So this is why desire is always self-sabotaging. At the ego level, desire is always for an imaginary object on which you’ve projected the manna from heaven or the rescuing knight or the goddess or whatever. But at the higher level, the desire for bliss, the desire for liberation, all of those sabotage the state of liberation that’s already here—they obscure it.
So desire is a defense against what you desire, because every soul desires liberation. Not the ego, though, you see—the ego doesn’t even believe in it. The ego just wants its imaginary object until it gets it; and then it says, “No, it was that one,” and it goes for another one and that’s not it, and then another and another. So it’s a serial failure, but a failure that allows desire to remain alive, you see? The ego likes its desire; it doesn’t want to be desireless. Desire is energy.
See, there are two drives, not only in the ego but at every level; and the Greeks called these two drives Eros and Thanatos. Now Eros, from the ego’s perspective, is desire; but from the soul’s perspective it’s love, which is very different than desire; and from the perspective of the Atman it’s shakti, it’s bliss, it’s ananda. And Thanatos is death, right, the Death Drive. Yes, there’s a Lower Death Drive that the ego has, but the soul has an Upper Death Drive. It wants to die into God. It wants to die in the same way that the male praying mantis wants to have sex with a female, knowing that she’ll chop off its head and eat it during intercourse. At the very moment of orgasm, he’s decapitated and his head is swallowed. Alright? And yet you don’t see any male insects of this sort refusing, being celibate—no, they go for it. Why? And who’s having the better time, the male or the female?
But at the ego level, the ego doesn’t want to die. It may want to swallow the other, it may want to possess the other. It may even internalize the other and make the other into a superego figure in its own mind that then becomes a problem for the rest of its life. But the interesting thing is, for the Greeks (if we go back to what we now call the ancient world, that’s actually just early Kali Yuga—it’s not ancient at all—it’s in the last yugas), for the Greeks, Eros and Thanatos were gods. They were not psychological drives or forces within the psyche that could not be controlled. That changed with the coming of Christianity and taking over the Roman Empire. Then that Greek frame of reference changed. And the law, the commandment that came from the Judaic model of reality, was superimposed on and replaced the externalization of the archetypes. So you have someone like Paul (St. Paul, he’s called by Christians, but you can decide that for yourself), who writes in the Epistle to the Romans (I probably should have brought it and read it, but the gist of it is), “I don’t do what I should do and even what I want to do. I do what I hate, and I can’t stop. Why?”
The Greeks never had that problem; you never see any problem of divided will in the Greeks. If you see a tragedy in the Greeks that has to do with a division, it’s always an external one, like in Antigone. Antigone has two laws that she wants to somehow mediate or try to reconcile. There’s a law that says you have to bury a family member who dies (and her brother dies); but her brother was a traitor to the city state, and another law says that traitors can’t be buried. So here Antigone is between these two external laws, and she decides that the law that supports the family order of unconditional love demands that she bury the brother, even though the other law means she will die for it. But this is not the same kind of a tragedy, you see. It’s a heroic choice, we could say, but there’s no internal agony. She doesn’t have a tragic flaw in the way that the tragic heroes of Shakespearean or other later models have, who have an internal conflict of drives. And that’s the issue for the ego.
Not everybody has that issue, however, while those who do, have it to different degrees and with different sorts of conflicts and with different emphases between Eros and Thanatos. Some people have an over-balance of Thanatos—they’re very depressive; they hate life; they’re in a very negative, angry, complaining state; and they cannot help but put their bad humor into the world, as if to give the message, “I’m not happy; I wasn’t treated very well.” Why would somebody do that? It’s because they have internalized a bad object from their childhood. An object that originally was perhaps their mother or some other person who was a mothering figure (if it was early in infancy), or a father figure, or a father playing a mothering figure, or a fight between the mother and father, or some even far more traumatic abuse by one who was supposedly their protector and loving parent. So if there is a bad object that was projecting negative energy on you in childhood and you internalize that object, you’re still dependent on it and there’s an internal war between the child and the parent. (You could say between ego and superego, but it’s easier if we use these terms that the transactional analysts used to use of parent, child, and adult.) The problem for the postmodern ego is that it doesn’t develop an adult self-image. There’s a parent and a child who are at war in a hostile dependency that gets expressed in the world, requiring regular enactments of anger and hatred of the other and self-righteous superiority and flaw-finding and all of that. And that has to be there in order to get the poison out from within that’s constantly being produced by superego attacks and a sense of being unlovable that’s produced by this internalized figure.
For the ego that’s in that illusion there’s a desperate need for deliverance, because that ego structure is designed to hide from your consciousness the truth of your Real Self. If you’re in that kind of a consciousness, you cannot perceive the Real Self. Why? Because you have defended your ego from being hurt by the superego by closing your heart, by refusing to love, by refusing to be vulnerable by loving. And you’ve closed your mind to knowing that, because you need to blame the other (“That’s the one who doesn’t love and who isn’t nice to me and who isn’t whatever”), all the ways that the ego rehearses its perception of the flaws of other people who don’t treat it properly (and communities and systems and all of that). Those egos then also create dharma—not as the truth, which dharma really is, but as a set of rules (“If you don’t follow these rules, you’re bad”). They become the rulekeepers who make everybody miserable because nobody wants to follow those rules. So there’s an externalization of an internal conflict. Everyone wants everyone else to follow the rules, but they want the freedom not to follow the rules.
Maybe your Eros is out of alignment and way too strong in the form of desire and then you cannot remain committed to a discipline or to a goal because Eros is basically the desire to be distracted. The paradox of the ego is that once you’re committed to the ego identity, you refuse to be distracted from your distraction. That’s the basic structure of the ego. And because of that you cannot remain in the uninterrupted realization of the Self because that would distract you from both your desire and your agony.
In the world of the medieval wisdom schools in India—but also in Japan and China, and even in the Kabbalistic schools and the Christian mystical schools and the alchemical schools—you have pretty much of a congruent approach. The Shaivite schools of Kashmir are probably the paradigm that is most clear. For them the teacher would have to diagnose a new student and determine whether they were in one of three categories which they referred to as shambhavopaya, shaktopaya, and anavopaya.
As time went on, there were fewer and fewer people who came who were in shambhavopaya. What does that mean? That is the level of a soul of a very high caliber of intelligence, of readiness, of ripeness to realize the Self. And all the guru would have to do would be to say, “But there is only one Self, the Self is all there is, you are the Self now. There’s no need to do anything; no effort at all can be made because any effort will take you away from what you are. So why not just be in bliss now?” And a student in shambhavopaya would say, “Yes,” and they’d be liberated. Is there anyone here in shambhavopaya? Why not? This is the truth. If you recognize that the signifiers are true, then why not claim the signified and the referent? What’s the problem?
Well, the teachers, sadly, had to recognize that this didn’t happen with most of their students. And then they would check to see, “Are you in the second category or the third?” In the shaktopaya category they could work with your mind; they could work with the obstacles to the recognition that this truth pertains to you (not just to Ramana or any of the sages or any other being), what is it that keeps you from realizing the Self at this moment? There was always some error in logic that was involved, or some attachment to an identification with the body or with a particular command from the family system or the religious system—like Christianity, as I said, which internalized a law that was impossible for the ego to keep. So the ego, even if it was that of a saint like Paul, would find itself not living up to its own preaching. It would say, “Yes, we’re all saved. Christ came. He died for our sins. We’re free. But I can’t stop sinning and I can’t stop feeling anxious and depressed and like a failure as a prophet and a saint. I know it’s true, yet I can’t feel it. I can’t make it real for myself.”
Why? Because the shaktopaya soul is committed to the symbolic plane. It’s committed to thinking. It wants to think it all out, have it all figured out on a map that it can then use to impress people and feel superior and have a whole understanding of reality at its fingertips, but never bring it in. If it does that, then all of that symbolic development that it’s so proud of (that has produced a narcissistic scholar or an ego that feels like it’s superior intellectually) will die—will be gone—because the Self is non-conceptual consciousness, no thinking. You see, the attachment to thinking supersedes the desire for the Real.
But the shaktopaya soul can work through that error and logic if there’s enough of an energy field of coherent presence from the teacher and from the sangha to give it a sense of safety in dropping its main weapon—its main tool, its main instrument for coping with the phenomenal plane—and trusting that there is a higher Intelligence that will spontaneously move it through life that’s far more effective than the use of the thinking mind that’s stuck in duality and internal ambiguity. You will never know what the symbol really symbolizes until you’ve gone beyond the symbol. So the symbol feels hollow (and is hollow) even though you have to use symbols (as is being done now) to try to communicate and refer to that which is beyond the symbolic. It is the tool you have to use until you grok the fact that that tool must be left behind in order to reach the Real. Once that happens, then the tool will continue to be used, but it will be used now only by the vehicle, not by the Self. It will become part of the dream field. It will not be part of your action in the world, because the Self does not act and there is no world for the Self even though the functioning of the illusion will continue.
So this is what is referred to as the nonduality of duality and nonduality. Duality itself is recognized as simply what the Muslims call Ayat Allah, the “Signs of Allah.” There is no world, but Allah reveals the nuances of wisdom through the creation of an apparent multiplicity with every possible permutation of spiritual intelligence and lack thereof and of karmic consequence and of the content of Reality that, in its perfection, expresses the entire spectrum of light and dark. If that is recognized as an expression of perfection rather than a problem of a war between two polarities—a war between God and Satan, the light side and the dark side, all of these kinds of dualizations of a single spectrum that is the whole—if you are free of conceptualizing dualistically the unfoldment of the implicate order as the explicate, then every moment is a teaching that you are receiving from the Supreme Source. Every moment. You are receiving it, you are transmitting it, and you are sharing in the collective knowledge of the field that is a unified field.
