Your ego causes you so much stress, you need to let go of thinking and discover your true soul. This is the path to freedom and peace.
The above statement is true but that isn’t a good thing. It is very true that meditation and discovering what people call your true center can have a certain peaceful affect on your psychology. However, this could slow our progression down as a race and have some other unforeseen consequences.
Every human action is powered by the ego. Every action derives from want. Your desire and need to find peace, and think about peace, is also driven by your ego. The mental gymnastics people are playing with themselves to “view the viewer” is a method of giving you peace through release. When you surrender, you give up the need to become more accomplished. This is why the most spiritual of people will either be those at the very top who can’t really accomplish much more or those at the bottom who can’t seem to accomplish anything.
To surrender the need to accomplish is no different then taking a drug to override your senses. While people might think they are casting off their ego what they are actually doing is reprogramming it. The very method of meditation is a mechanism for psychological programming. Whenever you have a thought you discard it and you stay focused on the present. When things bubble up to your consciousness and you discard them you are telling your unconscious that these things don’t matter as much because the whole purpose of the consciousness is to prioritize importance.
Don’t get me wrong, meditation is very important to do. In fact I endorse meditating some what frequently. It is like cleaning out a closet. What I don’t endorse is to stop caring or to delude yourself in to thinking you can actually stop caring. No one seems to find it odd that these people who have discovered how to truly stop caring, care so little that they need to tell everyone about it?
“A trait that we call empathy, a trait that completely vanishes if everyone simply accepts everything.”
We have incorrectly demonized selfishness. Every philanthropic action in the world is a way of forming a better world for ourselves. When we vilify selfishness incorrectly it is not good for society. Are you evil when you feel hunger and selfishly want to eat? Of course not. We create a hyperbole where on one side of the spectrum we have people who give away everything and live in poverty (saints) and on the other you have these evil business men who take money for services. The ego is a core to our selfishness and it makes us want to accomplish things. That isn’t to say it is perfect but it actually has done a some what decent job so far in progressing us as a human race.
I want to change the world, or at least try. If I stopped caring and simply accepted life for what it was there would be little motivation for me to do so. In a Brave New World a drug called soma was discussed that had zero biological side effects. This drug allowed the “beta” working class to do horrible jobs but get through it. I can’t help but believe that spirituality revolving around the attempted casting off of the ego is the soma of this society. It’s a way of allowing people to deal with, sometimes incorrectly, the dissatisfaction with their lives.
The main problem is that right now we can’t support everyone being satisfied. Someone has to clean the sewers. However, we’re trying to fix that. We can get workers out of the sewers with technology but that technology might not be developed by someone who is satisfied either, it might be developed by someone who just needs to pay their bills. At a certain point there will be so many improvements that we will enter what I call the second phase. In this phase we will be able to live in ways that right now we can’t even think or dream about.
The difference between say Eckhart Tolle and I is that I believe that dissatisfaction is necessary to improve the lives of all humans where as he thinks that everyone can just learn to deal with their terrible situations. He is a glorified drug dealer. People who work in sewers should not be happy about what they’re doing because then who would be interested in getting them out of that situation? Our need to help others stems from a trait that we call empathy and this is a trait that completely vanishes if everyone simply accepts everything.
