“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The Bureaucracy of Ego

It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego. This means stepping out of ego’s constant desire for a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of knowledge, religion, virtue, judgment, comfort or whatever it is that the particular ego is seeking. Whenever we have a dualistic notion such as, “I am doing this because I want to achieve a particular state of consciousness, a particular state of being,” then automatically we separate ourselves from the reality of what we are. One must step out of such spiritual materialism.
--Chogyam Trungpa



2 comments:

forestmongrel said...

thanks for that.
today I feel this exactly describes the challenges of occupy san francisco.
fantasy of building popular transformative political movement
vs.(enmeshed with)
the real(ishness) of colliding
bureaucracies of ego
trying to build a village in a park

Kaposvári Márk said...

objects occurring
http://youtu.be/GsRLeeqSVYg