First, cool story about the samurai, eh?
To the extent he was impersonally fulfilling his vow, he’s all good. The moment it became personal, time to sheath the sword.
Powerful.
And then this gets a Big Wow: “… the problem is to balance yourself against that [cosmic power which is operating through you] and have a personality at the same time.”
I think this is definitely one of the (if not THE) biggest challenges we face in our spiritual evolution: How do we align with the Divine AND allow our personal essence to shine through?
There’s all this talk about annihilating the ego. It always make me wince.
Why’d we want to do THAT? Part of a whole ‘nother conversation, but even the WORD “ego” rubs me the wrong way. 99% of the people who throw it around can’t even tell you what it is and then even the ones who DO know what they mean when they say it use it in totally different ways depending on whether their orientation is from the West or the East.
In the West, your ego is an important aspect of who you are—the part of you that balances your desires (Id) and your conditioning from the world (Superego). In this world-view, we want to develop a healthy ego. In fact, it’s *essential* to proper functioning. Then we head East and all the sudden we’ve got a totally different take.
As Campbell says: “We hear so much talk now, particularly from the Orient, about egolessness. You are trying to smash this thing which is the only thing that keeps you in play. There’s got to be somebody up there; otherwise you’re not oriented to anything. The self, that’s the great circle, the ship, the ego is the little captain on the bridge.”
He continues: “Of course, to reach the transpersonal, you have to go through the personal: you have to have both qualities there.”
And Ken Wilber (see Notes) did the job most wonderfully for me on this one. He says:
“But ‘egoless’ does not mean ‘less than personal’; it means ‘more than personal.’ Not personal minus, but personal plus—all the normal qualities, plus some transpersonal ones. Think of the great yogis, saints, and sages—from Moses to Christ to Padmasambhava. They were not feeble-mannered milquetoasts, but fierce movers and shakers—from bullwhips in the Temple to subduing entire countries. They rattled the world on its own terms, not in some pie-in-the-sky piety; many of them instigated massive social revolutions that have continued for thousands of years. And they did so, not because they avoided the physical, emotional, and mental dimensions of humanness, and the ego that is their vehicle, but because they engaged them with a drive and intensity that shook the world to its very foundations.
The great yogis, saints, and sages accomplished so much precisely because they were not timid little toadies but great big egos, plugged into the dynamic Ground and Goal of the Kosmos itself, plugged into their own higher Self, alive to the pure Atman (the pure I-I), that is one with Brahman; they opened their mouths and the world trembled, fell to its knees, and confronted its radiant God… There is certainly a type of truth to the notion of transcending ego: it doesn’t mean destroy the ego, it means plug it into something bigger… Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant manifestation of Spirit.
The integral sage, the nondual sage, is here to show us otherwise. Known generally as ‘Tantric,’ these sages insist on transcending life by living it. They insist on finding release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of samsara, finding total liberation by complete immersion.” [from One Taste: November 17]
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* queue Hallelujah music *
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Back to Campbell: “You are acting not in terms of your individual, personal life but with the sense of yourself as the priest, so to say, of a cosmic power which is operating through you, which we all are in circumstances, and the problem is to balance yourself against that and have a personality at the same time.”
And back to you: How are YOU showing up?!?
How’s the balancing of your personality and your role as priest of the cosmic power working out?!?
Too much of your personality (without the plug into Source) or too *LITTLE* of your personality (in which case, it DOESN’T MATTER how plugged in you think you are because you’ve lost your power)?
As per Wilber, I say we plug into Source and let our radiant manifestation of Spirit shine! Yah? :)