Originally Posted by
shadowofwind
I read a dialogue between Krishnamurti and David Bohm when I was flying Friday. My opinion is neither of them fully understand the origin and nature of the ego. Krishnamurti knows that there is a way to think which produces an 'egoless' experience, and which he believes is the solution to conflict and suffering for humanity. But his whole gig is being able to do that kind of thinking, and trying to communicate it to other people. He doesn't look very deep into why people don't think that way to start with, which requires a different type of thinking, not the one that he advocates. I have the same criticism of Ramana Maharshi and the rest of the jnana yogis, and a similar criticism for raja yoga and other Vedic and Buddhist teachings. (Yeah I know that Ramana Maharshi and Krishnamurti are dead now, but their thinking lives, it is transcendent in that sense.)
Clearly the jnana yogis are onto something, because their thought produces powerful experiences that go far beyond any mere intellectual philosophy. But it doesn't appear to me to do what they claim it does in the long run. People who take their ego-eliminating doctrine seriously, in my experience, are the most egotistical people around. And despite the blissful aura that they cultivate, they fail remarkably in other aspects of life also, as measured by their own ostensible values. Franklin Jones, later known as Adi Da and by other names, is to me a classic illustration of this kind of thing.
I think that what all of these guys are doing is thinking in a way that is more like how our 'higher selves' think. So doing that gives us some of that kind of transcendence. But as I see it, our "higher selves", despite being marvelously powerful and wise in some regards, don't entirely have the answers to our condition either. They're subject to another side of the same semi-disfunctional dynamic, as evidenced by the persistence of that dynamic in us. Theirs is an egoless mind in the sense that there's no personal self-image in the usual sense. But there is still ignorance, and a kind of arrogant dishonesty expressed through individuals where that ignorance is denied. So it seems to me that these teachings about the ego are good in that they teach us something about a subject that is clearly important. But they're traps if we take them seriously as paths towards some kind of final freedom or perfection. Yeah I know that thinking in terms of a "path" or a goal to be reached is according to them an egotistical kind of thinking, yada yada yada, and isn't the kind of thinking that produces the transcendent glimpse. But these contradictions are built into their doctrines also.
Though I don't fully understand the subject either, as a working hypothesis I think the existence of the ego is natural and necessary. And some degree of identification of 'self' with the body is natural: that kind of extension is an aspect of how spirit interacts with matter, so to speak. But when its done in a way that precludes awareness of the capacity not to identify with the body, that puts a mind in a sense-bound trance of sort. So it seems to me that what we need to do is understand this other way of thinking that people like Krishnamurti teach, and modify our egotistical way of thinking to accommodate it better.
