January 4, 2011

The crux of the problem is our complete misidentification of ourselves with our body-mind apparatuses.  That's it in a nutshell--and not our fault.  We've had our parents naming and conditioning us since the day our eyes opened at birth, and their parents before them.  In Patanjali's "How To Know God," Christopher Isherwood describes this in an analogy: "It is as if a little electric light bulb would declare 'I am the electric current' and then proceed to describe electricity as a pear-shaped glass object containing filaments of wire.  Such identification is absurd--as absurd as the ego's claim to be the real self.  Nevertheless, the electric current is present in the light bulb, and the real self is in all things, everywhere."  It is the wave believing itself the ocean, the leaf believing itself the tree.  The wave rises and falls, the leaf buds and withers, but the ocean and the tree roll on ceaselessly and unchanging.