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Whether you study Buddhism or various forms of Hinduism, including the various yoga schools or mystical traditions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sufi traditions, or other less well known paths, almost everybody figures out that ordinary arrogance, vanity, and pride is something you have to cleanse yourself of—you have to get past that. I think it is a very common human experience, amongst serious people, that in those moments in which we are not so arrogant and not so vain, where we are almost humble, that our consciousness expands precisely because there is less ego clogging up our head. There is actually more room for the world to come in. There is actually some space in your hard drive for reality.

Therefore there is this practically universal quest or attempt to free yourself from this arrogance and vanity, and become, in a sense, selfless. Yet, you’ve got to go somewhere.  There have been historically different ways of understanding where you go when you leave vanity.  If you are going to leave that place of arrogance, vanity, and pride, you’ve got to go somewhere, in all humility.  And we have to know not only what we aren’t but what we are.  So what is the cognitive contour, what is the shape, the nature of pure consciousness? Is it simply a neutral awareness, without a sense of personal identity, volition or will? Is it just like this sensing organism, this cognizing thing, and I take it all in? Or, when you reach this point of pure cognition or become free of these impurities in consciousness—are you a person? What is your relation to other people? Do you merge into other’s consciousness—in other words, do people with pure consciousness just kind of coagulate? How do they interact?

So when you get past this initial universal realization that if you want to be in higher consciousness, in a more sublime consciousness, that we can’t just be arrogant, vain, and selfish, there are different approaches to that.

There is one approach in certain historical forms of Buddhism, which attempts to simply isolate pure consciousness, without any sense of self, so that you get rid of the ego, or the false ego, and you don’t go to a position of self, you simply go to a position of awareness. If you know about the history of Buddhism, it is extremely diverse. (cont’d @ Buddhism)

(Spring Tour Lecture, “Distinguishing Ego from the Self”, March 20, 2008, USA, Location unknown)

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