Claude, comment on this saying of mine: “The shadow of Truth falls on everything and everyone I love in my … More
Tag: Ego
The Quarrel with the Present: Human Love, Pleasure, and the Flight from Being Merely Human
Does human love — the love one person feels for another, sometimes unreturned — help or hinder liberation? This dialogue begins there and refuses the usual escape routes: no sublimating the beloved into the Beloved, no dissolving the particular person into metaphysics. It stays with the scandalously particular: this laugh, this handwriting, this way of falling silent mid-sentence. Along the way it separates the two strands entangled in every love — the ego-dismantling that cracks our solipsism, and the pleasure-seeking that certifies our lack — and examines the precise mechanics by which seeking rains on the parade to liberation: the misattributed ananda, the rented ego-death of sex, the anxiety of separateness managed rather than investigated. Krishnamurti’s “understanding is the action” and Ramana’s summa iru frame the inquiry, but the conversation turns its own weapon on itself at the end: isn’t liberation-seeking the final quarrel with the present? Why flee the human that Brahman itself created? Zorba the Greek enters, dancing on the beach after the mine collapses — and the dialogue discovers that the end-state looks embarrassingly like ordinary life fully inhabited, with one difference: no proprietor left behind experience, filing claims against it.
Quit
“Life is not a battle worth fighting. Quit.” The word is a deliberate stumbling block. What is to be given up is not the body or the life, but the fighter — the ego whose founding myth is that life is a war to be won. Camus answered the question of life’s worth with revolt; Advaita takes the path he never considered: neither suicide nor defiance, but the dissolution of the one who asks. Quit the way a fist quits clenching. The battle is optional because the soldier is fictional. What remains is life itself — neither fought nor fled.
Is Everything Predestined?
The So-called Problems
“Do not try to solve your problems. They are NOT your problems. They are the problems of the body-mind. And … More
How Many I’s?
“Are there two I’s? Me and the Truth? Can’t be so, right? What gives?”
Ramana Maharshi on Destiny
“The Ordainer controls the fate of souls in accordance with their past deeds. Whatever is destined not to happen will … More
Happiness
“The only thing standing between us and happiness is our ego.”
Who Is the Doer? Ramana Maharshi Answers
Ramana Maharshi’s teaching on “He who thinks he is the doer is also the sufferer” (Talk 420, Talks with Sri … More