Ego-A-Go-Go

“Self-liberate even the antidote, or, Do not hang on to anything – even the realization that there’s nothing to hold on to.”

Avalokiteshvara, The Bodhisattva of Compassion

Learn to let go. This is one of the most concise instructions for living and dying in Buddhist teachings. I’ll explain why by way of a story about a pig.

I recently saw a performance by The Dance Brigade in San Francisco. The show, The Great Liberation Upon Hearing, is a dramatization of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The show began with one simple, but somewhat alarming, question: “Did you kill the pig, and why?” (The question itself wasn’t so alarming, but the pig carcass a few feet away from my seat sure was.)

The performance explored how killing the pig, with varying motives and intentions, could lead to the accumulation of merit or the lack thereof, also known as good and bad karma. In the instances in which killing the pig was done as a selfless act – say to feed a starving village – one accumulated good merit. Yet, when one killed the pig to satisfy one’s own self-serving ends, one did not accumulate merit. It is conceivable that killing the pig for a starving village could still be a deeply self-serving act if the intention behind feeding the village was to gain recognition, rather than purely helping others. While some good comes of it, it doesn’t generate good merit. This leads me to my next point.

"Pig head businessman counts US dollar" by Kutay Tanir

The desire to gain recognition (among others) is an ego driven desire. It is a desire to amplify ego, to make one’s sense of self bigger, more robust and more potent. Ego-amplification depends upon a conception of oneself as independent and separate from others (indeed, separate from everything in the universe), such that one’s primary concern is to indulge one’s self-interests, and appease one’s desires without much regard for how self-satiation impacts the larger environment in which one lives, and from which one gains life. We can call this ego-clinging.

Ego-clinging is the fertile ground from which identities sprout. Identities are rigid little boogers that have the force of substantialist grammar behind them. Substantialist grammar is grounded in, well, fantasies of substance. It is way of speaking about the phenomenal world that yields an illusion of fully present and finite objects with impermeable boundaries between them. One thing cannot be another thing, right? A bird cannot also be a cat. Water cannot also be a tree. And most of all, I cannot be you, right?

Well, maybe we’re wrong. Maybe our perception is a bit off, restricted as it is by the physical limits of the human eye. Maybe one thing can be in two places at the same time. (Or, so says quantum physics about matter at the subatomic level.) Perhaps there is nothing existing(?!) That is, no-thing, or no individual thing in existence, but everything existing in everything else to varying degrees?

If so, then, might s/he who kills the pig with the intention of ego-gratification also be the pig who dies?

I’m not sure. But I do know that the idea of no-thing existing is the basic proposition of Buddhist theories of interdependence. It proposes re-imagining the phenomenal world in “both/and” terms, rather than in binaries. The idea of interdependence encourages us to see, for example, the interconnectedness of water, sunlight and plantlife, such that we can say, the water is the tree, for without precipitation and the process of photosynthesis, seeds cannot grow into trees. And, without food, which contains other elements in it, we cannot exist, so we inter-are with cabbage, apples, chickens, pigs, quinoa, wheat, and so on. Being is seen as interrelated. Being ceases to be singular and we speak in terms of inter-being, in terms of humans being part of an ecosystem not of our own making.

If we take the proposition of interdependence seriously, then ego-clinging turns out to be a disavowal of the vast network of relationships between “things”: between people, sentient beings, various forms of inanimate matter, and ultimately the universe that holds us. In this repudiation of connection, one clings to oneself despite the ongoing fact of connectivity. According to the Dharma, clinging, or attachment, is the source of suffering. For instance, one clings to good feelings and pushes away painful ones. Yet, no feeling lasts forever. So, as the phenomenon of impermanence swaps out one feeling for another, we experience suffering because we yearn for something that can no longer be, at least not in the present moment.

"Hand of person grips chain" by Michael Hitoshi

Or, consider how much suffering we are currently experiencing because we insist on clinging to an economic system that is failing precisely because it is grounded in the ego-based fiction of self-interests that are seen as separate from the interests of others. This is a double-whammy, where attachment is at work on two levels.

First, we are clinging to the individual subject at the heart of (neo)liberal economic and social theory. If we think in terms of interdependence, or ecosystems, then the individual cannot be the primary unit of society because society is comprised of various networks. Thus, the networks are primary, not the nodes.

Second, we are clinging to the economic system built around this individual subject and “his” hoarding activities. “Financial Bailout” is a tactic that reveals an attachment to a system that is deteriorating under the force of its own effects. Rather than figure out how to craft a better system that reflects the shared and collective process of wealth generation, our elected officials move in the opposite direction.

But this is not unusual. We tend to turn away from pain rather than sit with it. Allowing the economy to fully collapse so another system can emerge from its ashes would be absolute pandemonium. Lots of people would suffer terribly from various forms of deprivation. And that kind of potential chaos, insecurity and contingency triggers attachment to things that are not in themselves solid, like this notion of “our way of life.”

What does all of this have to do with self-liberating the antidote? The antidote is the realization that there is nothing solid to hold on to, not one’s ego, nor the teachings themselves. I’ve learned that letting go of my attachment to the various identities I crafted for myself over the years opened me up to changes that were coming into my life whether I wanted them or not. Practicing non-attachment helped me meet change with less resistance. In short, I suffer less. For such an insight to be useful in the context above, we’d have to experience a broad-based transformation in social consciousness whereby we’d be less attached to ego, the idea of individuality, and all that comes with living in an ego-centric world. But that’s a big let go, especially for those of us who aren’t even aware of our egocentrism. Maybe we better start by thinking about why we killed the pig.

Hot Coals

Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

-Buddha

My mother’s ex-husband has a daughter who is four years older than me. When we were younger, and our parents were married, she spent weekends at our place and would let me hang out with her and her friends. I looked up to them, developed a tiny crush on one of her friends, and generally played the role of the annoying, younger sister.

Meanwhile, her dad was a raging alcoholic who wreaked havoc on my life for seven years. His “episodes” conveniently happened when she was away (she lived with her mother) so she didn’t have the displeasure of seeing her father’s alter-ego, or my mother’s bloodied face.

The trauma was mine to bear alone.

I didn’t realize how much I resented her for missing out on all of this madness until many years later. I remember seeing her in my mid-twenties and wondering why she was talking to me as if nothing happened. I scowled, was short with her, and vowed to never speak to her again. In fact, everyone on her dad’s side of the family with whom I had a connection was summarily eliminated from my life. They were all guilty by association in my mind. They were just as bad as he because they did not intervene to save us, nor did they reprimand him for his bad behavior (as far as I knew). Their silence was complicity; tacit consent to domestic violence and the familial dysfunction that followed in the quietude of our daily lives.

Every now and then I’d receive emails from his daughter. She’d ask me out to dinner, ask about my family, and generally make a good faith effort to reconnect. In each instance I’d read the email then delete it as if it were spam; even the emails with pictures of her son who’s about six or seven years old now.

While reading through a client contract today she IM-ed me via Gmail to ask for a favor. My first response was, “you’ve got to be kidding me.” Then I leaned back in my chair, thought about all the favors, kindness and generosity that recently saved me from serious trouble.

I wondered what would happen if I ignored her request. I wondered what the cost would be to her if I pretended to not see her need. Clearly she needed help, and I was sure she’d ask someone else if she could. But here I was, available, and on the verge of withholding assistance because she failed to save me from trauma she couldn’t have prevented anyway.

Something in me changed when I decided to respond and call her mom to relay a message.

I think I let go.

I let go of the idea that she was responsible for her father’s behavior, and for my safety.

I let go of my habit of punishing her for something she did not do.

I let go of my need to be avenged by others, and my need for resolution in the wrong-doer’s sense of guilt.

I think I let go of the anger that was burning my hand as I waited to hurl it her way.

I recently read a passage in Thich Nhat Hahn’s essay, “The Six Paramitas” that probably planted the seed for the release I realized today. It reads thus:

To suppress our pain is not the teaching of inclusiveness. We have to receive it, embrace it, and transform it. The only way to do this is to make our heart big. We look deeply in order to understand and forgive. Otherwise we will be caught in anger and hatred, and think that we will feel better only after we punish the other person. Revenge is an unwholesome nutriment. The intention to help others is a wholesome nutriment.

And so it is. I feel better in the absence of revenge. I feel better because I’m no longer burning myself as I wait to throw a flame at anyone related to my mother’s ex-husband. As I look deeper into his behavior, it is clear to me that his actions were borne from his suffering. While this is not an excuse for hurting others, it is certainly a source of action that I understand.

My anger did not change the past and it didn’t enrich my present. All anger seems to do is truncate the potential of the future.