The Topology of Reality is a Klein Bottle
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The Klein bottle represents more accurately, than any other object I know, the dynamic functioning of the ego. Every ego is a Klein bottle.
So I’ll leave this at the lodge for a while on display so people can ogle it without breaking it, hopefully. But what a Klein bottle is, I won’t obviously get into the four-dimensional mathematics of it, which you can look up if you’re interested, but basically, it’s analogous at a volume level to the Mobius strip at a two-dimensional level. And what it is, in a nutshell, is an object in which the inside is the outside and the outside is the inside. OK?
This is what is true of the ego, that the ego denies. You see, in this denial that the outside is actually the inside, is the cause of many of the symptoms of disease. So, for example, there are many egos who are addicted to projecting judgments on other people, finding flaws in them, focusing on the flaws, how bad these people are acting, how bad they’re treating each other, how narcissistic they are, how vulgar, how capitalistic, how greedy, how hateful, whatever—finding faults with everything and everyone in the community, and they can’t stop, and they can’t realize that all the faults that they’re seeing outside are the faults they feel inside about themselves. And it’s unbearably painful, and the reason why someone will do that, will become a flaw-finder, is that they have to get the pain out—they have to project the badness onto the other, so they can feel OK about themselves, or else they couldn’t go on living. So it’s a psychological need. It’s not something done maliciously. It’s not something malignant. It’s something that one who has an internal set of superegos that are constantly attacking one, and horrible traumatic memories in which one has felt inadequate, and not good enough, and not lovable, and not whatever, that “not enough-ness”, creates a constant kind of anguish, and so they have to throw that out and see how, “No, it’s everyone else who’s not good enough and not enough. I’m OK”.
And they can’t see that the self-righteous anger and superiority complex is actually holding them anchored to those projections that will, in the middle of the night, come back and haunt them, and prevent them from being able to live in a state of love, and in a state of freedom from the obsessive focus on the unreal world as if it were real. And the only thing it does then is to keep the ego feeling real when that’s the exact opposite of what we want to do in the spiritual path. You want to realize you don’t really exist. Your ego is a delusion, a fiction that was created to deal with certain kinds of circumstances and family systems, and social systems, etc., but that once you have grown to adulthood those algorithms of self-protection and of buffering of the traumatic residues of childhood should be released through ego-death, not through projection.
But no one goes through ego death. They prefer to stay in the ego and feel that self-righteous anger. And the anger gives—you know, anger therapy has its place. It will give you temporary feeling of, “I can breathe. It’s them that are trying to stifle me! I’m OK.” Right?
But it doesn’t last, and then it creates karmic backlash, of course, which proves, “See I was right. They do treat me the way I projected.” But it’s because it was provoked. And so these kinds of behaviors are a Klein bottle, and once you recognize that whatever you are projecting or perceiving—because you won’t even think it’s a projection—you’ll think, “I’m just perceiving it like it is. These people are horrible, and I want to get out of here.” No, that perception is a delusion, because the truth is there’s one Self, and that Self is God, who is infinite goodness, and beauty, and joy.
And so it’s important when we understand the Klein bottle principle of the ego not to fall into judgment of someone who is in judgment, not to think it’s a flaw to find flaws, you see, because then you’re playing the same game. No, it has to be responded to with compassion. OK? With karuna.
Karuna is the central concept in spiritual development. It’s the most important concept, I would say, because karuna is not just ordinary compassion, it’s not an ego’s kind of “Oh, poor thing”—it’s not that. It’s not sympathy, and it’s even beyond empathy. I would have to call it “gnostic compassion”, because it comes with the wisdom of nonduality, and the ability to see through the pattern of negativity that may be covering someone’s aura, and see the light underneath, and help to draw that light out so that the person can feel love for the world, and for the other, despite their flaws. The world has to have flaws in the end of Kali Yuga. The moment that enough people stop seeing the flaws in the world, the world becomes Sat Yuga. The only reason it’s Kali Yuga is that people started seeing flaws, and they had to see them because they felt them internally.
And so that’s part of the Klein bottle-ness of reality itself. The phenomenal plane and the noumenal plane are in a Klein bottle relationship of inner and outer. And so it has to be dealt with that power of karuna, that is able to both forgive, to understand, and to recognize the perfection in the imperfection that is being found, and that is being created as a kind of undermining vibrational frequency that goes through the community morphogenic field. And it has to be recognized as a necessity at that moment, in order to create an awareness of an issue that will pertain to anyone who notices it to some extent, and give one a responsibility to put out the fire of suffering through what the yogis refer to as samarasa. Samarasa. Does everyone know what samarasa is? Gee, I haven’t taught you very well, have I?
Samarasa. Right? Sama from samadhi, sameness; rasa is taste. It means that when you’re in a state of nonduality, everything has the same taste, and it’s the taste of bliss, the taste of perfection, and it’s there even in that situation because the person who is creating a disturbance is actually the teacher for the community—is teaching everyone what they are probably also doing, so that that can be let go of, and one can save face by not having to act it out and make a display of it, if it’s dealt with through a kind of karuna that is also a self-karurona which will give you the corona—not the virus kind, but the crown of light.
And so it’s very important that we treat this with love, not with condemnation or anger, or some kind of judgment, or punishment that comes out of the same sort of flawed enjoyment, jouissance, of finding flaws and feeling self-righteous. That sanskara has to be released if one wants liberation.
So all that to say that it’s almost universal in every ego that it prefers to complain than to grow into its level of perfection, and to see the perfection in everything and everyone, rather than to have to hold on to a kind of specialness that’s better than the other or else it’s worse than the other—but there’s always that duality, and a constant manic depressive, one up/one down relationality. So you don’t want to be caught in that, and deliverance from that trap is, I would say, of the most urgent necessity at the very initiation of coming onto this path.
This Post Has 4 Comments
Kate
4 Jan 2023Thank you 🙏
Dorothy Kilonzo
7 Jan 2023The analogy of using the Klein bottle is profound. Thank you Shunyamurti and SatYoga community.
renee bales
7 Jan 2023The analogy says it all. Thanks.
Peter
7 Jan 2023That was an amazing description. It was well served in spiritual meaning.
Thank you so much!