The "Radical" Understanding of the Ego
by Carolyn Lee, PhD
Various Eastern traditions have emphasized the "Non-dual" nature of Truth and Reality.
Much has been said about non-dualism — but to actually go beyond dualism in real practice, rather than as mere philosophy, is a great matter.
It means transcending the dual structure of conventional awareness — the sense of "self" and "other", or the "I" over against everything else — in a process that can be called "ego-death".
Oriental culture, on the whole, takes a negative view of the body and of physical (or gross) existence. Thus, there is a tendency to dissociate from conditions and to idealize the ascetical life as a way to minimize or eliminate the ego and "get to" What is Beyond.
But, as Adi Da Samraj has always pointed out, asceticism — in and of itself — does not lead to true "ego-death", because it is, ultimately, an attempt by the ego to eliminate the ego!
To really transcend the ego-"I", which is the most fundamental structure in consciousness, requires a more "radical" approach.
On April 25, 1972, the evening that He began His formal Teaching-Work, Adi Da Samraj expounded His own "radical" understanding of what the ego-"I" is, as opposed to the traditional understanding.
Ramana Maharshi advised seekers to find out who it is that asks the question, thinks the thought, and so on. But that "who" is, in Reality, not an "entity". When Ramana Maharshi spoke, He used the symbolic language of Advaita Vedanta . . . .
The imagery of this traditional description of the process of Realizing Truth deals in statics, "things"-in-space. Therefore, in that traditional description, there is the ego — the objectified, solidified self.
But I speak in terms of process, or movement. I speak in terms of concepts of experience with which the modern mind is more familiar — and which more accurately reflect the actual nature of conditionally manifested reality.
Thus, I do not speak of the ego as an "object" within a conceptual universe of objects. The concept of the "static ego" is no longer very useful — and, indeed, it is false and misleading.
Therefore, what has traditionally been called "the ego" is rightly understood to be an activity. And "radical" self-understanding is that direct seeing of the fundamental (and always present) activity that is suffering, ignorance, distraction, motivation, and dilemma.
When that activity is most perfectly understood, then there is Spontaneous and Non-conditional Realization of That Which had previously been excluded from conscious awareness — That Which Is Always Already the Case.
— My "Bright" Word, p. 82
The ego-activity, as Adi Da Samraj explained that night — and has continued to emphasize ever since — is self-contraction, a recoil in conscious awareness. From this ego-act stem all our notions about reality.
We see an apparent world of separate beings and things from a point of awareness that we call "I".
This is the world we presume to live in, the world we think is real. But it is real only from a limited "point of view". And it is not a "free" world. It is a world fraught with the bondage of frenetic seeking — the never-ending search to overcome the core ego-stress that is our fundamental (and self-created) suffering.
Such is the root not only of the searches of ordinary life, but of the religious and Spiritual quest as well. In the words of Adi Da Samraj, there are, in fact, "three egos", or the same activity of self-contraction operating at each level of the human mechanism — gross, subtle, and causal.
The ego-search at the gross level is the wandering in all the possibilities of the waking body-mind. The same search at the subtle level is the pursuit of mystical experience and "Spiritual" goals. The causal level of the search is the effort to get beyond all experience and all sense of "I" through one or another technique.
During His junior year at Columbia College, Adi Da Samraj had a sudden, profound experience that revealed to Him this depth structure of self-contraction and the Condition that is Prior to it.
The context for this experience was a bold experiment that Adi Da Samraj had been engaging for the previous two years. Out of utter despair at finding Truth in any traditional source, and certainly not in the university ethos in which He was living, He had chosen an extreme course.
On the streets of New York and in every kind of circumstance, He had abandoned Himself to the gamut of experience, unrestrained by social taboos, in the hope that Truth, or God, or Reality would be revealed through the intensity of His search.
He writes in The Knee Of Listening:
On this extraordinary night, I sat at my desk late into the night. I had exhausted my seeking, such that I felt there were no more books to read, no possible kinds of ordinary experience that could exceed what I had already embraced.
There seemed no outstanding sources for any new excursion, no remaining and conclusive possibilities. I was drawn into the interior tension of my mind that held all of that seeking — every impulse and alternative, every motive in the form of my desiring.
I contemplated it as a whole, a dramatic singleness, and it moved me into a profound shape of life-feeling, such that all the vital centers in my body and mind appeared like a long funnel of contracted planes that led on to an infinitely regressed and invisible image.
I observed this deep sensation of conflict and endlessly multiplied contradictions, such that I was surrendered to its very shape, as if to experience it perfectly and to be it.
Then, quite suddenly, in a moment, I experienced a total revolution in my body-mind, and (altogether) in my humanly-born conscious awareness. An absolute sense of understanding opened and arose at the extreme end of all this sudden contemplation.
And all of the motions of me that moved down into that depth appeared to reverse their direction at some unfathomable point.
The rising impulse caused me to stand, and I felt a surge of Force draw up out of my depths and expand, Filling my entire body and every level of my humanly-born conscious awareness with wave on wave of the most Beautiful and Joyous Energy.
I felt absolutely mad, but the madness was not of a desperate kind. There was no seeking and no dilemma within it, no question — no unfulfilled motive, not a single object or presence outside myself.
I could not contain the Energy in my small room. I ran out of the building and through the streets. I thought, if I could only find someone to talk to, to communicate to about this "Thing".
The Energy in my body was overwhelming, and there was an ecstasy in every cell that was almost intolerable in its Pressure, Light, and Force.
It took me many years to understand that revolution in my living being. . .
It marked the rising in me of fundamental and Non-conditional Life, and it, in its moment, removed every shadow of dilemma and ignorance from the mind, on every level, and all its effects in the body. . . .
While the experience itself passed, a knowledge arose from it, which Adi Da Samraj calls "radical" understanding:
I saw that the Truth or Reality was a matter of the absence of all contradictions, of every trace of conflict, opposition, division, or desperate motivation within.
Where there is no seeking, no contradiction, there is only the Non-conditional Knowledge and Power that is Reality. This was the first aspect of that sudden Clarity.
In this State beyond all contradiction, I also saw that Freedom and Joy is not attained, that It is not dependent on any form, object, idea, progress, or experience.
— The Knee Of Listening
The Columbia experience took place in 1960, when Adi Da Samraj was only 20 years old. And so, even before He approached His Gurus, He had understood the ego as self-contraction, and seen the worlds of seeking that it generates.
He had made the "radical" discovery that the very search for Truth is the obstruction to Realizing Truth, because seeking is always based on the presumption and activity of separation from That Which Exists.
Thus, Avatar Adi Da's time with His Gurus was not, as in the usual case, for the purpose of Realizing the Truth but for the purpose of learning what esoteric Masters have believed to be the Truth, and how they have attempted to get there.
All the while, "radical" self-understanding was His steady foundation, until the Realization that was coincident with His Birth emerged again in its fullness.
As Adi Da Samraj has always Taught, human beings in the general case simply want to fulfill their ego-search, at whatever level of reality they are focused — gross, subtle, or causal.
The disposition of "radical" understanding is to transcend the root "clench" in consciousness that is generating the search at every level.
Adi Da Samraj sometimes refers to the first six stages of life as the "psycho-biography" of the ego, because these stages represent all the potential that the apparent persona can experience or achieve, by "playing" its structural mechanism — gross, subtle, and causal.
In the midst of that vast range of possibility, however, the fundamental ego-activity, the motivated search, remains the same. At the causal depth, all that is left is the root-ego, the barest sense of separateness, just the awareness of "I" and "other", and the effort to resolve that last duality.
That is the place where the greatest Sages have, to one or another degree, "leaped off" the edge into the non-dual Knowledge of the Transcendental Self, or the Nirvanic Truth.
That is the place to which the youthful Adi Da Samraj would spontaneously return in His periodic revery of contemplating the great stone. He knew intuitively that the Truth lay in understanding the mysterious coincidence between the Transcendental Reality and the apparent world.
But none of His experiences, none of His Teachers, could explain this.
The Answer came, in the end, through the force of His own "radical" self-understanding — which enabled Him to transcend all the partial messages of Truth delivered through the psycho-physics of the body-mind and Re-Awaken to the "Bright", the Inherently egoless Condition, beyond all seeking and all "difference".
Next: The Perfect Tradition
