Going naked

My experience of October 2012 left me with an incredible gift. Since then I’ve had almost continuous awareness of the lack of reality of my ‘self’ or ‘ego’. Even better is that now I can ‘shuck off’ my ego almost at ‘will’ (the wrong words, but I don’t have any better substitutes) leaving me in a blissfully non-dual state entirely in the ‘now’. This is something I had experienced before but only briefly or in situations of extremis (i.e. oxygen deprivation, psychosis or under the influence of psychedelic drugs).

But I don’t walk around in permanent samadhi.

What I’ve learned is that I’m far less mindful than I thought I was. The truth is that in such a state I just can’t function. I can carry out a few simple, familiar tasks but anything that requires planning ahead and anticipating developments is beyond me. Just making up a shopping list is impossible. And social interactions are problematic to say the least.

I’ve sometimes been accused of just saying whatever comes into my head and damn the consequences but when I let go of my ego it’s almost literally true. Stream of consciousness conversations can seem pretty odd to those on the receiving end. I suspect a few people have come to think of me as insane and even though they’d be right it’s not helpful for those kinds of notions to get around too much in this society.

Another thing is that when I’m egoless manifestations of ego can be incredibly funny. Sometimes people think I’m laughing at them and even were I to try to explain that I can’t see their ego at all and am really laughing because they reminded me of my own I don’t know the distinction would be appreciated.

So mostly I put on my ego – or rather one of my egos – before I go out, try to communicate (including when I write this) or carry out extended tasks.

But surely there’s an alternative.

An ironic thing about the situation I find myself in is that I only care about getting rid of my ego for good when I’m ‘inhabiting’ it. Having an ego seems perfectly OK to me when I don’t have one. Everything does. But right now, sitting here in/as an ego, the question of ditching it entirely and permanently seems an important one. Can I ever fully discard my ego and remain truly naked and open to the immediacy of the eternal now? If so, how to do it?

I have some feelings on the matter I’ll try to articulate but I suspect I’m missing some pieces and wonder if I’m on entirely the wrong track.

First there’s the question of mindfulness.

Perhaps if I could be more fully aware of all my ‘internal’ and ‘external’ sensations it wouldn’t be necessary to try to work out what will happen from moment to moment. Every instant implies the next so in a sense there is no difference between ‘now’ and everything that has or will ever happen to me. Would a more complete mindfulness extend the moment so that anticipation and remembering would become redundant? There would be no planning as such, just appropriate reaction to everything as it ‘always’ is and will be. Maybe that would explain why beings such as the Buddha were said to be able to recall their past lives even though cellular memory of them would have been long dead and rotted away – even more so than in dementia patients – and there is no core self or soul that could carry them from one body to another. ‘Memories’ of events are just as much encoded on the universe as a whole as they are in the cells of the brain. But wouldn’t that also imply the Buddha could equally have recalled everyone’s past lives – or at least those of anyone he had come into even the most indirect contact with? In fact couldn’t he even have ‘recalled’ the future lives of those unborn, or did the eventual extinction of his karma break his connection with subsequent events even as his Dharma continued to touch the lives of millions? I’ve never seen any such suggestions in the Buddhist canon. This feels a lot like meaningless metaphysical speculation to me, except that there have been occasions in my life (the earliest before I had even heard of the Buddha) when it felt like it was true. That there was only the thinnest ‘membrane’ separating me from all experience of what had or will happen and that maybe I was on the verge of ‘knowing’ absolutely everything (or at least everything phenomenological) if I could just … push … through. Jungians would probably link that sort of thing to birth trauma. Is there something trying to be ‘born’?

Then there’s the question of spontaneity.

Shortly after my enlightenment/awakening/epiphany/insanity of October 2012 my existence was touched by a Goddess. A dancing Goddess. And while I think it’s almost certainly a projection, it seems to me that She’s been trying to tell me something about maya and dance. Maybe She is saying I need to stop interacting with the universe as ‘other’ – because I know it’s not – and to merge with it in a sort of dynamic, loving worship. To accept that I have reached the limits of my jnana (of thought and knowledge) practice and try to understand things with my heart. To become a bhakti.

I’ve never considered myself a dancer. Us old punks hate disco. But when I’m absorbed into the sort of pounding, raucous music I love I just move. It doesn’t even feel volitional. It’s the music, not me. To an observer it probably seems more like I’m having a seizure than dancing but to me it’s as if my body and the noise have become one. I feel I am completely synchronised with the music and even at its most chaotic my body seems to be able to anticipate every note and beat and just ‘be there’ when it happens. A former colleague of mine – a professional dancer – once told me she was amazed when she first saw my response to a Radio Birdman gig, so perhaps there is more to it than a purely subjective experience. Or maybe she was surprised I would make such an idiot of myself in public.

Is that it? If I could hear the harmony of the universe and love it as completely and unconditionally as I do my favourite live music would I just naturally respond ‘in tune’ without having to think about what I’m doing? Do I need to learn to dance with everything?

Finally there’s the question of desire.

Is that what’s holding me back? Is the craving for a final break from my ego the very thing that keeps me from letting it go? When I’m egoless the question doesn’t even seem to exist, or if I’m aware of it at all it seems some kind of joke. Is even the idea that I should care about shopping, eating and talking to people part of the craving that makes it impossible to do without hiding inside my ego? Maybe I should stop pretending I have any control whatsoever over what happens and just let it be so. It would probably become true after they’d filled my butt with haloperidol and thrown me into a rubber room. Should I care?

What do you think?

Is it possible to be permanently free of ego while living a suburban existence or is that sort of thing just for renunciates and monks?
Is it even desirable? I’m here, I’ve got an ego, everything is as it should be. Why not just settle for that?
Am I missing something important? A vital piece of the puzzle?
Or is everything I have just written merely a manifestation of my psychotic ‘illness’ and of no interest to anyone but a psychiatrist? Even the Buddha made it pretty clear there’s no place in the Sangha for loonies like me.

Does any of it matter at all?