What is the source of bad action, the root of our doing wrong or being worse than we should? I’m currently reading Iris Murdoch’s dense and rich Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, in which she most frequently identifies this source with ego. Attachment to ourselves is what makes us do wrong. The view has fairly obvious Buddhist affinities. Suffering, we are told in the Pali Buddhist texts, comes from craving and ignorance; this craving is often specifically identified with craving for selfish things, ignorance with belief in a really existing self or ego. Śāntideva states the view most explicitly: if we knew what the self really was, we wouldn’t act in selfish ways, and then we’d be the bodhisattvas we should be.
There is something I find worrisome about this position – something I think Ken Wilber has managed to catch. It relates to a point I made in a previous entry: that it can be wrong to avoid insisting on what is rightfully yours. Sometimes, it seems to me, we act wrongly because we are not egoistic enough. Again, sociological evidence seems to indicate women typically have this problem more than men; but men are far from immune to it.
Wilber catches this point through the generally developmentalist thrust of his philosophy: awakening proceeds in stages. First we must build a healthy ego for ourselves; only then can we transcend it. Wilber refers in this light to the “pre-trans fallacy”: someone who has not developed proper ego boundaries seems a lot like someone who has transcended them, because neither have strong egos; but that does not mean the two are the same. Something like Śāntideva’s meditation on the exchange of self and other – designed to break down a sense of ego and identify ourselves with other people – seems very much like a “snake wrongly grasped” if it falls into the hands of the meek and servile.
The pre-trans business comes up in early China too, specifically in the context of honing skills. (Or behavioral patterns conceived on a skill model.) Competence in an activity permits effortless, even inattentive success, so the accomplished agent “returns to simplicity” in one sense. (Slingerland, for one, has written a great deal about this.)
Of course, it is also possible to directly value the pre-, and not bother with talk of trans-. Much Daoist talk of reversion to simpler states (explicitly childlike or animalistic on occasion) or simpler social orders does not invoke the three-stage progress model familiar in pre-trans discourse, rather invoking a perfection-decline gradient with “perfection” set squarely in the beginning. I would be interested to know what Indic precedents there are for a perfection-decline gradient, since Neo-Confucians became famous (at least to those of us who focus on much earlier material) for mobilizing allegedly Buddhist notions of this kind in their quest for a prenatal or neonatal “human nature” that could ground norms.
A lot of my own feelings about pre-trans matters arise from playing qin music, which has a strong “simplicity/genuineness” ethos. Some of the most stirring and inspiring moments I find in qin music are those where the emotionality is extremely direct, extremely positive, but grounded and dare I say self-aware in a way that suggests a trans- state rather than a pre-state. In a sense it turns into baby-music, great-staring-innocence music, but no baby or truly innocent person could ever make it.
There may be some Indian precedents for the perfection-decline approach – though not in any early Buddhist texts, anything the historical Siddhattha Gotama could reasonably be believed to have taught. One probably sees this most clearly in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta – an explicitly anti-Buddhist (“Hindu”) philosophical system – in which everything is truly one, and the goal is to realize our identity with this oneness, jettison the ignorance that makes us see multiplicity. Still, ultimately it’s not really a matter of returning to a prior state per se, as the perception of time is itself part of our ignorance.
There are some relatively late Buddhist schools in India as well that see a concept of buddhat? or buddhabh?va (a “buddha-ness” or “buddha-being” inherent in everyone). I’m not sure whether even these have a conception of returning to the original state, though; my impression is it’s more a matter of developing a potential that has not yet been realized. And certainly in earlier Buddhism there’s nothing about returning to an original state; we are born into suffering and that’s where we’ll die, unless we either make an extraordinary and almost superhuman effort to get out of it on our own (rare and almost impossible) or take the Buddha and his teaching and community as a refuge (much easier and more straightforward).
I agree with what you’ve written here, and with what I know of Wilber’s comments as well.
There are some teachers (e.g., Adyashanti) for whom discussions of enlightenment is not merely theoretical; they have achieved it and have taught students to achieve it.
Adyashanti mentions somewhere that he’s seen people of all stripes, including those who are a complete basket case, achieve enlightenment. So apparently the ability to let go of ego is not quite as linear as Wilber or anyone else would have us believe.
Here is the interesting question to me: What is the nature of your new self, after you have let go of ego? Not in a metaphorical sense (oneness, etc) but rather in the literal sense.
If we’re hard-headed scientists about our words, what is the nature of this new understanding of self that emerges once we have let go of duality?
Our answer to this question has big implications for whether you could or should stand up for what is rightfully yours (to use your words), even if you are fully enlightened.
I tend to be a little skeptical of accounts like Adyashanti’s. What happened to these people who supposedly achieved enlightenment – not just at that time, but afterwards? What was their life like, how did they act? I don’t think I’ve yet met anyone about whom I’d feel confident saying they’ve become enlightened; the proof is in the pudding, so to speak.
Anyway, I agree that your question is an extremely interesting one. It probably can’t be answered in the general case, though. I put together a number of quite different views, sharing in common the view that the ego should be transcended, for the purpose of this post’s caution on that advice. But each view is probably going to look quite different. One big trick (which I think Stephen’s comments point to in some respect as well) is to distinguish whether there’s actually a new self created when we get over the ego, or whether we just realize an absence that was already there in the first place.