The Authentic Self: Changing the Script

Each of us shares in this drama called Life, living by the script we each learn from birth until the day we die.

"The script" is a metaphor for behavioral and psychological negativities including cognitive distortions which lead to neuroses and sometimes, psychoses.

Indeed, the script can be summed up by this definition of insanity: when I keep doing the same thing all the time, expecting different results.

Yet it doesn't have to be like that.

Indeed, whenever I act differently from the day before, the script is being rewritten by me with the help of others.

This is why we share our lives with friends and family: to help rewrite that script, based on our shared experiences, to regain our sanity, one day at a time.

While we cannot change our life experience, we can still gain wisdom from it.

For the script is what we can change, just for today.

We can change the things we can by the grace of God as we know him, be it the 12-Step group, a prayer group, or simply two or more people sharing their lives with each other; within Japanese New Religion, Oyasama — which means "Greatly Honoured Parent" — also refers to the Higher Power, be it the Buddha or another spiritual entity.

This change is vital to, and a result of, spiritual growth which brings us closer to the authentic self.

Thus, living authentically is to live in the present moment, letting what each day offer each of us the chance to act to the best of our ability.

Provided that we play our part in Life, and be willing to change the script, it is possible to regains ties to the authentic self.

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For more notes on the authentic self, click on the link at the head of this article: http://gandhara.blogspot.com/2010/12/notes-on-being-mentally-captive-and.html

My Spiritual Hierarchy of Jesus, God and the Buddha

Introduction

In this article I begin with the declaration that the ego is a social fabrication, introduce the patriarchal sexist myth of the male ego, and contrast the ego to its Christian counterpart, self-will.

Then the Buddhist view of the ego will be discussed, followed by a short discussion of the healthy ego with respect to individual needs and continuing on with the view of personal spirituality as self-actualization.

Next, I will illustrate how my spiritual hierarchy of God, Jesus and the Buddha cuts through the fallacy of false dilemma.

Following that thought is the discussion of how beliefs outside the spiritual life affect myself and others.

Finally in the conclusion, I will try to show how the spiritual life has a common ground in all faiths.

Ego as a Social Fabrication

Ego is a social fabrication; the proof of this is in the media. The term "ego" is used to describe the whole psychic apparatus defined in Freud's structural model of the psyche, which he divided into three parts as id, ego and super-ego.

Examples of the ego in action in popular culture occur regularly in the media regarding not just politicians, religious icons, scientists, and sports idols, but also local celebrities and famous pop icons.

Although it isn't commonly talked about, the Western social consensus is that the ego exists.

Because ego is a social fabrication, it requires daily exercise through self-expression. The ideal of a wholesome life implies that the healthy ego needs expression in the community in socially acceptable ways.

In contrast, the unwholesome life leads to social isolation and its impact on the ego. Without self-expression in socially acceptable ways, the individual is susceptible to depression and anxiety. As a result, the ego may become the focus of one's life. Thus he becomes ego-centered, and much of his misery in life is due to his egocentricity.

The Patriarchal Sexist Myth of the Male Ego

In the minds of many people, a patriarchal sexist myth about the ego may be commonplace. In this myth, the male ego is the only thing that exists.

This does not mean that the female ego is non-existent; it just is not talked about.

This is not the true picture of the ego at all but a false view of it, which is defined by how the male ego is vilified whilst pretending women do not have one.

Yet this myth about the ego arises in the male-dominated patriarchal society for many reasons which are political and social.

While the male ego is sometimes associated with God, the female ego kept hidden, to be discussed behind closed doors between women.

However, this sexist myth about the ego is counterproductive to inner change.

Ego and Its Christian Counterpart, Self-Will

In reality, the ego exists from birth to death for everyone, young and old, male and female.

It is also known in Western religious circles as self-will, which consists of resolute adherence to your own ideas or desires and the trait of resolutely controlling your own behavior.

Self-will has the negative qualities of stubbornness, bullheadedness, obstinacy, obstinance, and pigheadedness, and the positive qualities of self-control, self-possession, possession, willpower, will power, and self-command.

Buddhist View of Ego

According to Buddhism, all people have an ego which arises from the moment of birth. The Buddhist concept of dependent arising explains in detail how the ego arises from birth until death. Indeed, the ego arises after ignorance as one of the many fabrications of the mind.

In the Four Noble Truths,

1. human suffering is first identified in fine detail as misery, pain and unhappiness.
   
2. The origin of suffering is revealed to be unwholesome desire or craving.
   
3. Relief from suffering consists of ending suffering by allowing craving to fade away and stop, by giving up and letting go of the unwholesome desire, being free of sensual pleasures, and not relying on such existence. In this way is the ego appeased.
   
4. Finally, the means to appease the ego by promoting equanimity is given as the Noble Eightfold Path:
   
   1. right view,
      
   2. right intention,
      
   3. right speech,
      
   4. right action,
      
   5. right livelihood,
      
   6. right effort,
      
   7. right mindfulness, and
      
   8. right concentration

Divided into three parts, the Eightfold Path consists of:

• wisdom (right view, right intention),
  
• ethical conduct (right speech, right action, right livelihood), and
  
• mental discipline, concentration and meditation (right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration).

As a result of following the Eightfold Path, specifically breath and insight meditation, the Buddhist practitioner acquires right knowledge (seeing things as they really are) which results in right liberation.

Ego with Respect to the Individual Needs

For the average person, the healthy ego requires the basic needs consisting of Maslow's hierarchy of needs:

• the physiological needs (breathing, food, sex, water, sleep, metabolic equilibrium, and excretion),
  
• safety needs (personal security, financial security, health and well-being, and a safety net against accidents and illness, and their adverse impacts),
  
• love and belonging(social needs which involve feelings of belongingness, and especially emotionally based relationships such as friendship, intimacy and family),
  
• esteem need (which consist of two parts:
  
  • 1) respect for others, the need for status, recognition, fame, prestige, and attention, and
    
  • 2) self-respect, the need for strength, competence, mastery, self-confidence, independence and freedom),
  and
• self-actualization (self-mastery).

Personal Spirituality as Self-Actualization

Once these needs are satisfied, self-actualization also consists of meeting my spiritual needs, which is satisfied by maintaining a spiritual life. Within the context of spirituality, the ego refers to a "sense of doership" or sense of individual existence. The ego-centered life is the life where the illusion of such existence prevails. As a result of that illusion, I may believe myself to be a human being and that I must fight for my rights to make it in this world. Yet, throughout it all, I remain unaware and unconscious of my true nature until a series of spiritual experiences show me that the God-centered life is essential to my spiritual well-being Within context of a God-centered life, it is a fallacy to believe that the social conventions of pronouns (I, me, my, mine) reflect the ego-centered life. Rather, by focusing on God from the start of every day to its very end, the use of pronouns just make the God-centered life more personal.

My Spiritual Hierarchy Cuts Through Fallacy of False Dilemma

To a person who sees the world through the fallacy of either as God-centered or Buddha-centered, the following statements would seem complicated and unwieldy. Such a false dilemma overlooks the fact that both God and Buddha are manifestations of the Higher Power, which is God as each of us knows Him to be. Does the God-centered life conflict with my belief in Buddhism? No, since both God and the Buddha are different aspect of the Higher Power, and since God, being Creator, made the historical Buddha to realize His mysterious works, I do not see any conflict between my faith in God and my belief in the Buddha. For God is at the core of my hierarchy of the spiritual life, with my belief that Jesus died on the cross for us as coming second, and then the Buddhist principles defined by the Eightfold Path. Outside of these three core beliefs are the multitude of beliefs we hold about life and ourselves.

Beliefs and Its Relationship to Self and Other

These other beliefs which lie outside the spiritual life are still a vital part of it, because they subtly influence how I view my hierarchy of core beliefs about God, Jesus and the Buddha. Yet how I view God, Jesus and the Buddha reflect my spiritual views, which influence how I see life and its effect in my daily existence, and how other people see me. With my heart focused on God as the center of my spiritual life, my faith in Him is validated by my belief that Jesus died for our sins, and is tempered by the underlying Buddhist principles of dependent arising, the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. By making God the core of my spiritual beliefs, the ego becomes healthy because my growing reliance on God depends on fellowship with like-minded people. By relying on God, I develop a need for Him which deflates my ego, leading me to practice humility. With prayer and meditation, it is possible for me to moderate my life, encouraged by the fact that salvation is the free gift of God, the belief that Jesus died for our sins, and a growing faith in God inculcated by reading the Bible.

Conclusion: The Spiritual Life as Common Ground Between All Faiths

Thus I see the common ground between Buddhism and Christianity since each faith help to enrich a person's spiritual life. Indeed, both faiths continue to enrich my life through my willingness to practice a form of spiritual plurality. Rather than water down Buddhism and Christianity, spiritual plurality helps me to maintain a balanced view of both faiths. Using what I know of Buddhist meditation to moderate my behavior (thought, speech and action), I am able to apply its use to seek God through careful prayer and meditation. As well, the spiritual insights gained by reading the Bible can also help me see Buddhism in a refreshing new light. As an example of such insight, both Christianity and Buddhism emphasize loving-kindness but use it differently. In Christianity, a loving God sacrificed His Son, Jesus Christ, so that all Christians are saved by faith in Him, with salvation freely given by God's grace. Salvation in Buddhism starts with a mytho-poetic Buddha named Amida of a Buddhist "heaven" (the Pure Land of Bliss) who is reborn from an angelic Bodhisattva (Dharmakāra) who was once the king of a mythical land. Inspired by a Buddha of a previous age, this former king made a series of vows of which the most important vow allows all Buddhists who revere that Buddha to be reborn in that Pure Land as "angels" so that they may listen to the Buddha preach before being reborn in the earthly realm to help other people come to know the Buddha. In this way Buddhism enriches my spiritual life as much as Christianity does, and my faith in God is complemented by my belief that Jesus died for my sins and my belief in what the Buddha taught! For the spiritual life is the common ground that all faiths share.

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Reference:

Id, ego and super-ego: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego,_and_super-ego
Ego as doer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_%28spirituality%29
Higher Power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Power
Maslow's hierarchy of needs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
Buddhism and Christianity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Christianity

The Social Fabrication of the Ego

In Buddhism, human suffering is explained by the Buddhist concept of dependent arising, which consists of twelve parts which work together in an orderly manner. First and foremost, ignorance is the first of those twelve parts. Next comes fabrications.

Indeed, Buddhist thought confirms that the ego is a social fabrication. Likewise does social psychology.

According to Greenwald, Ego, or self-will, is an organization of knowledge, characterized by cognitive biases strikingly analogous to totalitarian information-control strategies.

These totalitarian-ego biases function to preserve organization in cognitive structures.

Ego's cognitive biases are egocentricity (self as the focus of knowledge), "benevolence" (perception of responsibility for desired, but not undesired, outcomes), and cognitive conservatism (resistance to cognitive change).

In addition to being pervasively evident in recent studies of normal human cognition, these three biases are found in actively functioning, higher level organizations of knowledge, perhaps best exemplified by theoretical paradigms in science.

The thesis that egocentricity, benevolence, and conservatism act to preserve knowledge organizations leads to the proposal of an intra-psychic analog of genetic evolution, which in turn provides an alternative to prevalent motivational and informational interpretations of cognitive biases.
See Anthony G. Greenwald's article "The Totalitarian Ego Fabrication and Revision of Personal History" (1980).

Commentary:
"Benevolence" is my interpretation of Greenwald's term "beneffectance" (beneficence and effectance), which is a term he coined to describe the perception of oneself as responsible for desired outcomes but not responsible for undesired ones. This involves forgetting failures more easily than successes, and remembering one's contribution to a group effort to have been better than average due to superiority bias.

Beneficence is defined as doing good and feeling beneficent, and specifically describes the quality of being kind, helpful or generous.

"Effectance" itself is not defined in any dictionary, but is probably related to effectiveness and its synonyms, power and especially powerfulness, which means possession of controlling influence.

Cognitive conservatism, being defined as resistance to cognitive change — changing what one knows based on current experience — suggests an unwillingness to adapt to present circumstances.

Adaptability is a useful psycho-social trait in which the individual adapts readily to the current environment, especially during times of political change and upheaval. It is also useful within the context of social rehabilitation related to addiction, mental health and associated issues.

Thus cognitive conservatism as defined by Greenwald does not imply adaptability at all.

Overall, egocentricity, beneffectance, and cognitive conservatism are not effective means of dealing with human suffering. The reason that they are not is that the ego tends to blame others for human suffering, so as to reduce its ultimate role in one's own suffering.

Indeed, the ego will come up with seemingly good excuses to avoid or deny responsibility. Yet a healthy view of personal responsibility allows for each of us to share responsibility for relief of the suffering of others.

Therefore, Greenwald's article suggests that totalitarianism might be the externalization of egocentricity taken to political extremes.

Egocentricity taken to extreme on the individual might also explain addiction and other dysfunctional behavior, especially within the context of beneffectance and cognitive conservatism.

Indeed, beneffectance in itself could be used to deny and excuse responsibility for undesirable outcome, while cognitive conservatism, the inability to change.

Overall, Greenwald's analogy that the cognitive biases of the ego are similar to totalitarian information-control strategies confirms the ego only exists as a social fabrication.

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References:

Social psychology notes on Greenwald's article: http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/soc_psych/greenwald_tot_ego.html

Totalitarian ego: http://biasandbelief.pbworks.com/w/page/6537228/Totalitarian-Ego

Greenwald's references on beneffectance: http://biasandbelief.pbworks.com/Beneffectance

Mistakes were made but not by me: http://biasandbelief.pbworks.com/w/page/6537204/Mistakes-Were-Made-but-not-by-me

Suspension of Disbelief (poem)

A suspension of disbelief
allows the once-born Buddhist
to expand his faith in
a Higher Power and be
reborn as a Christian.
For he finds inspiration
both from the Buddha
and from Jesus Christ with love
the guiding power
yet serves one master alone:
God as he knows him...

The Healthy Ego Revolves Around a Higher Power

Ideally, a truly healthy ego revolves around a Higher Power. For some of us, this is God as we know Him; others rely on the Buddha or Allah or even their most trusted friends.

Egocentricity however operates under the delusion that the world revolves around me. It tries ot get us to believe that we don't need help to recover from addiction.

Yet, where is this "me" when the chips are down? When self-will (ego) tells us we can do fine on our own, relapse might occur.

Out of ignorance, we create fabrications rather than simply face the simple truth that the biggest social fabrication is the ego.

For the ego does not exist, except in the mind.

Of the mind, let us be mindful of the folly of egocentricity. For what is "I", "me", and "mine" but social conventions?

Let go and let God...

Letting Go (of Ego) and Letting God

To ask the question "Would a God-centred life actually resolve my spiritual challenges?", brings up the false dilemma that either resolves those challenges or does not resolve it.

A God-centred life will always be challenged by a human being whose life revolves around his egocentricity. Thus, I would still need the Buddhist meditative practice and meditation to cut through the delusion of ego that I alone can decide when to rely on a Higher Power.

In order to reconcile Buddhist practice with a God-centred life, without compromising the middle way of Buddhism, I consider such a life as the ideal by which God guides me.

For the ideal is this too: God is the Creator of His Creation; He is in all Creation yet is a part of Creation.

Given that God is in all creation yet a part of creation, the very thought that I decide when to rely on Him is utterly foolish! For I am not God, only a human being with a soul worth saving.

When I let go of ego, and let God be the centre of all life, it makes sense to rely on Him all the time.

How simple it is to just rely on Him!

Higher Power (Poem)

All faiths of people are
reflections of a power
higher than ourselves alone.

In each of us dwells
the soul, the Self, the inner child
whose spiritual essence has many flavors,
be it human love, the group, family,
the universe, Nature, a force for good,
Christ, God or a deity.

This is your Higher Power.

Lewis's Trilemma

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%27s_Trilemma

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God." -- CS Lewis, Mere Christianity
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Given the brevity of Jesus' life, much of his teachings didn't reach their ultimate conclusion as it did for his ancestor Moses.

Rather, it plays out daily in our everyday lives without most of us being aware of it.

For it begins with humility and a reliance on a higher power...

Many Buddhas Point the Way

Over 2500 years ago, on his deathbed, Gautama Buddha said, to his followers: "Work out your own salvation with diligence."

Afterwards, ancient followers of the Buddhadharma path worked out their salvation, each in their own way.

Influenced by Hindu scholars, the early Buddhist community graciously begged to differ many times, and evolved into three paths of today: the monastic path of Theravada; the bodhisattva path of Mahayana, salvation through one's own power and the other power of Buddhas, bodhisattvas and deities; and, Vajrayana, salvation through Mahayana Buddhist tantric ritual.

Salvation for a Buddhist means spiritual awakening, be it gradual or sudden. Since the Theravada path is not for everyone, the Mahayana path has as many Buddhas as there are schools of Buddhism. Though the Mahayana way has many Buddhas, bodhisattvas and dieties, all of them are symbolic of the Buddhadharma.

For, just as the moon reflects the light of the sun, so too do Buddhas point the way.

Reference:

Death of a Buddha: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parinirvana
Vajrayana: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajrayana_Buddhism
Mahayana: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahayana
Hinayana: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinayana
Theravada: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theravada

We Aspire to Infinity...

We aspire to infinity, to God, and yet we are living in a finite time and space with the many constraints that brings. Our hearts are actually made for union with everybody, and to relate to everything, yet we cannot, on earth, experience more than a taste of what awaits us in the fullness of time. It is not surprising, therefore, that we experience an insatiable appetite for love, that we experience loneliness, that in our restlessness we may turn to alcohol or drugs. Our longing and yearning for a universal love is infinite and with the grace of God our capacity is infinite. -- from an unknown Catholic source

I don't think any Buddhist sutra could sum it so well, this yearning for spirituality that causes the foolish to turn to drugs and alcohol instead.

Yet it takes a bit of humbling to come to this realization, which most people try to avoid at all costs, only to die miserably and alone.

That a person should at the first opportunity awaken to their spiritual purpose is an obligation only a few people dare to make.

Thus it is that many people are called by a Higher Power, but few of us dare to heed that Call.