Humans as Animals
A Contemplation of Ego After One & One Half Year of Study
We’ve confused our brains by thinking we can outthink anything. We tell ourselves deceptions all day every day.
Trungpa Rinpoche teaches us to see reality as it truly is. To be aware. Awareness means seeing the truth of reality. In order to do this, we must shed and shed our ego of projections. These projections are like prescription glasses that are made to only focus on one thing. We wear dozens, maybe thousands of these glasses, distorting our perception of reality and allowing us to see only partial aspects in focus. When we wear these glasses, there are many blurred areas of the images. Things that cannot come into focus for us. We are seeing only part of reality.
Who is this monkey Hanuman? Rama let him loose in the world. He knows Rama and Rama knows him. Hanuman can break in or break out of anywhere. He cannot be stopped. Like the free wind in flight. Hanuman can spot a tyrant, he looks at deeds not words and he’ll go and pull his beard. Disguises and words of talk cannot confuse a mere wild animal…Hanuman will take your sad tune and use it to make a happy dance. Strong is his guard…the Son of the Wind (Buck, 1976, p. 427).
As we sit in meditation and learn to truly let the ego settle, the glasses are consumed by the karmic fires that burn samskaras and our vision becomes clear. We sit in that place where our ego isn’t dying to interpret, project, or protect.
The Buddha described volitional formations (samskaras) as impermanent, conditioned, and subject to cessation, encouraging practitioners to see their impermanence and cultivate dispassion (Bodhi, 2000, SN 36.11).
Clarity is peaceful. There are many more levels after this. Learning to be spontaneous, accurate, and precise with our actions. That can only come when reality is seen as it is.
"When you see things as they are, you do not need to impose a structure or strategy on your life. Actions arise spontaneously and accurately, without needing to be controlled or manipulated" (Trungpa, 2002).
This, in some ways, is animalistic.
We stop deceiving ourselves with the lying ego part of our brains and start to tune into our nervous systems, into our bodies, into the sensations.
The body doesn’t lie. The heart rate and biochemistry of our body are real. We can tell ourselves we are calm even when we are not physically calm.
This level of honesty is required to see reality as it is.
Humans are animals and our animal bodies are communicating with each other in every interaction. It is possible that our animal bodies are resonating energetically throughout time and space and communicating with other beings and humans, as well. There is so much we do not know. We are severely limited by our human sense organs. These organs cannot see the ultimate truth or ultimate reality.
What does it mean to be animal and to start being honest about what your body is experiencing?
It means noticing when you are not calm and not lying to yourself about it.
If you are not calm, it is your responsibility.
One major ego projection is that someone else did that to you.
Or our culture is fucked up and all the things you have to do to survive are causing your agitation.
This is a basic untruth.
You are experiencing what you are experiencing because it is your experience.
Each of those pairs of glasses has a different egoic structure that tells you something different. Each of those egoic structures is projecting something out into the world and the world is mirroring back what you sent out.
So your disdain, disease, discomfort, all of it, is actually being created by you, by this egoic structure in the ultimate attempt for that structure to be destroyed so you can see clearly.
It’s as if the ego itself, which was set up for you as a protection and developed when you were young to create the awareness of separation and differentiation has its own self-destructing desires embedded within it.
You need to become an individual and separate so you can be human. And then you need to destroy that sense so you can become one with God through this human experience.
When you recognize that your experience is being created in each moment by your own creation and your own projections, you can almost go crazy. Right before the death of that ego structure, you begin to see constantly how every single moment, you continue to project this thing into the world.
You can see how you are causing it. And you can’t see what to do about it. Because it feels impossible to stop projecting in that way. You don’t know how. If you knew how, you would stop it immediately, because you see how much suffering it is bringing you.
The things I have found to do (and I don’t know if this works for other people) is to surrender constantly and feel it all.
This means actually having the experience of emoting the sensations and emotions as they come through the body and fully shake themselves out of the nervous system.
Somehow, when enough focus and diligence is given to feeling those emanations, surrendering continually to the experience, and crying/laughing/yawning/shaking/moaning it out, you burn up the glasses.
I call this Somatic Unwinding and I have a course in Skool where I’m teaching this - it’s currently in creation mode. We’re going to have weekly calls to practice Somatic Unwinding together so you can learn to facilitate this for others and yourself. If you join my free Skool community, The Feral Collective, you’ll be the first to hear about it.
It’s a practice I’ve been doing for 25 years.
I’ve been afraid to share it…until now.
Because I realized that the judgment and shame surrounding emotions and the expression of such isn’t going to go away on its own.
From what we know about trauma, these kinds of efforts (crying/laughing/yawning/shaking/moaning) reprogram the amygdala. This is the instinctual part of the brain. It releases the trauma that built the glasses in the first place and there is no longer a need for them.
Great. So one pair of glasses destroyed. The world looks clearer. You are freed up from one aspect of your karma. It is gone. Your life will be different and it won’t look the same from that point forward. All projections associated with it will fall away. You may spend months from that point watching your life rearrange. Watching people treat you differently. Because you are projecting differently. It can be unsettling, because you may be skillless in your ability to know how to respond to the world without this familiar projection. You used to know the path, the conflict, the suffering, and it went through a whole series of events that were patterned, usual, familiar, and comfortable.
They no longer exist.
So what do you do now?
You stay present. You stay surrendered. You bask in the millisecond of time you regained with those glasses burned. Because now your eyes don’t have to take the time to focus and try to see. You are just seeing. Seeing things as they are without those glasses.
And to think you still have likely thousands more pairs of glasses to destroy.
Don’t let this task daunt or overwhelm you.
It gets more and more familiar to burn the glasses in the fire of samadhi.
The reward of seeing the world as it is and finding more inner peace is so worth all the effort you put in.
Resistance is futile. Resistance creates more suffering.
So will you stand in that fire? The fire only burns away everything that isn’t your essence.
They call it ego death because you feel like you might die.
You feel like you might die because that ego structure was built at a time when you had to create an approach to protect you from irrational humans who aren’t present or accessing ultimate reality.
You let that death happen and you learn to accept it and lean into it, because over time, you know that your essence is immune to that fire. The consciousness that fills our cells and breathes our lungs and beats our hearts cannot burn in this fire. Our essence is protected. Our egos believe they are doing the job of protection. But this is the ultimate lie.
We surrender all control. And realize that we have no say in it at all.
So we become the wind and the air and the breath of God.
The fire consumes that which is not us and the hot air rises quickly from that fire, touches the heavens, and we bask in the truth of who we are. Even if for a fleeting moment.
We take that back into our everyday lives and breathe and sit and experience the now.
Some days, we open up to more and more love.
But that is for another day.
Citations:
Buck, W. (1976). Ramayana. University of California Press.
Bodhi, B. (2000). The connected discourses of the Buddha: A translation of the Samyutta Nikaya. Wisdom Publications.
Trungpa, C. (2002). The myth of freedom and the way of meditation. Shambhala Publications.