This evening, I would like to talk about why it is difficult for most egos not to dwell on the thoughts, emotions, images, impulses, and drives that arise in the mind, and why they arise.
The ego suffers from nostalgia. Whether it’s conscious of that nostalgia or not, it is pervaded by a very powerful urge to rediscover and reconnect with a lost perfect object that is usually fantasized as the perfect mother of one’s infancy and the perfect situation of being unconditionally loved. One may or may not have actually felt that in one’s childhood, but one would long for it even more if one had been deprived of it (through neglect or the busyness of parents or the breaking up of the parental couple, or for any of a long number of reasons why that happens nowadays). For most people, the weaning process does not happen in such a way that one is actually able to let go of the drive to retain the “breast-mother” (to put it into psychoanalytic terms).
So there is an urge for the object that will take care of one and make one whole (make one complete) because, in the original state of the ego (as a proto-ego even, in the perinatal period after birth), the feeling that the infant would later be able to signify is that “I and the mother are one” not “I and the Father are one,” but “I and the mother”. If that unity is cut too soon, then it creates a raw feeling of need that will later be converted into lust—which is a very strong passionate desire, not just an ordinary desire. When desire reaches that point, then it’s no longer under the control of the conscious mind; and it is when it reaches that level of energy (of drive) that acting out happens, and then that creates karma.
The nostalgia for the lost object has to become Gnostalgia, which is the longing for the gnosis of the Real Self—the direct, supreme knowledge that is our original Self, that goes back further than this lifetime, and that we also have a yearning for. But the yearning for returning to God is not as strong as the ego’s yearning for a personal relationship that one fantasizes will bring the kind of relief and satisfaction and fulfillment that is always imagined and projected upon an object—but that ends, of course, with disappointment or some other realization that that was not it. So there is resistance to liberation because of the desire to stay attached to an object (or to find an object that one can attach to), and there is at the same time a yearning for God because one knows that no other object, no other being, will actually produce the result that one wants. But the ego is torn between these two logics and two levels of consciousness that are always in conflict until the ego has been transcended and its incoherence eliminated.
We could say that there are three poisons. First of all, nostalgia would mean “no-stale-junk”. You eliminate all the stale interests that are obsolete and that you have become too mature even to have an interest in, and the ones that produced junk in the past that you know are junky even now and would not bring any good karmic results. But the three poisons that we have to deal with (which we have mentioned before) are lust, judgment, and control; and they are all, of course, interwoven in most people’s relationality.
The lust, of course, is generally a lust for sexual desire; but it’s also any passionate desire. Lust can be for any kind of power, for money, for all kinds of objects of desire that one becomes so desperate for that it becomes an addiction or an obsession. This can lead not only to acting out to but to what in psychoanalysis (in Lacanian analysis) is called the passage a l’acte—the passage to the act—which means that when that energy becomes so strong one just simply leaves. OK?
We’ve had yogis just leave the sangha because the energy of the lust and the judgment and the need for control could not be satisfied here. The urgency of the passion (the desire for passion) overcame the person, and their life took a very radical shift. We see that all the time—not just in an ashram, although it’s more obvious here and more brought into the foreground from the very fact that we are here in order to reach liberation. That’s why this kind of a social organization called an ashram exists. It’s not a social club, and it’s not even for therapeutic healing (even though that may or may not be helpful); it’s for the transcendence of the ego. But the ego has a very strong pull, as we know, and a very great power of resisting the truth, resisting love of a divine kind, and resisting its own liberation from suffering.
So everyone is in a battle with themselves. In order to win that battle, the various approaches that we use here are intended to weaken the resistance and strengthen the healthy part of the consciousness to recognize very consciously and very consistently its own interest—its real interest—in not maintaining any attachments, any desires, any judgments, any aversions, any emotional reactions to anything that happens in the world. If there is any emotional reaction, it means there is an ego that’s tied to it; and, if you have experience with having had an emotional reaction, you know that it can last a long time. Your mind will return to it: Why didn’t I say this? or Why did they do this? and the mind will rehearse things, prepare things, plan things, and just go over the feelings that were created by some interaction in which this kind of emotion was triggered. The ego in general doesn’t have the willpower to resist those kinds of obsessive and compulsive thoughts, and it’s overcoming that that is required for sovereignty over one’s mind.
So it’s a very serious enterprise that we are embarking on to become a serious yogi, and it really means you have to be ready to cut all the ties that, in accord with a different frame of reference, are wonderful. Why would you want to cut them? Why would you not want to have emotions about certain things and desires and satisfactions of what we think of as part of human nature? Those are part of the human ego nature in Kali Yuga; but, if you want to reach divine nature (your original nature), your frame of reference has to shift. Unless there is the ripeness of realizing that, it can’t be forced. No matter how many lectures you get on it, it will not matter, you won’t retain it, you won’t be interested. You’ll say, “I’ve heard all that, I know all that”; and it will do no good to change the patterns, because the narcissistic ego defense is simply too strong to overcome. That’s the reality of the state of the ego; and the ego is very good at deluding itself, being in denial, and thinking that it’s gone much higher than it really has. Its capacity for self-deception is so great that—unless you are willing to receive some feedback from outside your own narcissistic bubble—you can go on in denial for a long time, even though you are accumulating a lot of negative karma and not getting anywhere on the spiritual journey.
If you are serious, then you need to really process these resistances. If you don’t, you will discover that your willpower will become weaker and your mind will become less and less coherent, because it will be more scattered by these different conflictive desires. It will become more ignorant of the true situation that it’s in because it has to put its knowledge into the category of forbidden knowledge because the ego doesn’t want to be disturbed in its jouissance. So the technical difficulty of overcoming that propensity to self-sabotage is a very great obstacle that can be overcome only by a very direct assault upon that frame of reference—a paradigm shift in which you are able to let that go without struggling with it directly but through reaching a higher level of intelligence in which it is (to use the Hegelian term) sublated. Or we can say it is subsumed, or sublimated, into a higher kind of desire that will then be able to take all of that energy and push it toward reaching states of wisdom and empowerment. But you have to have that goal in order to have the willpower to sit and meditate long enough to get to the point where you can be in a state of non-dwelling where you will reach the clear light, the shakti, and the presence of the Divine Self that will enable the letting go with grace (literally, gracefully letting go) of those egoic desires and tendencies.
