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Some interesting ideas here.
Been reading some Ken Wilber lately, and he has an interesting line on the expectation we have that shamen/sages/mages/delete as preferables should be 'egoless'. To whit:
'[The] great movers and shakers were not small egos; they were, in the very best sense of the term, big egos, precisely because the ego...can and does exist alongside the soul...and the Self...To the extent these great teachers moved the gross realm, they did so with their egos, because the ego is the functional vehicle of that realm. They were not, however, identified merely with their egos (that's a narcissist); they simply found their egos plugged into a radiant Kosmic source. The great yogis, saints, and sages accomplished so much precisely because they were not timid little toadies but great big egos, plugged into the dynamic Ground and Goal of the Kosmos itself, plugged into their own higher self, alive to the pure Atman...that is one with Brahman; they opened their mouths and the world trembled, fell to its knees, and confronted its radiant God.' ('One Taste', November 17, reprinted in The Essential Ken Wilber, Shambhala Publications Inc, 1998. Italics Wilber's).
As a magician this rings more true for me than the endless bleatings I've heard from passive-aggressive little hippies about how they've 'transcended their ego' and so opted out of any confrontation with life, while punky little ol' me is still trapped in the ego and hence, of course, inferior to them...Claiming to not have an ego is the biggest, most dishonest ego trip of all.
When I started as a magician I expected to wind up like the idiot's idea of Buddha: in full lotus position all the time, blissfully relaxed, and endlessly contemplating my own arsehole in the face of all the world's problems. Seven years later I only resemble Buddha when I haven't been to the gym as much as I ought to. I drink, I smoke, I swear like a goddam sailor, I eat the flesh of dead animals, I regard women (and some men, on occassion) as little more than sex objects, and I've used magic to my own selfish little ends (though I've also used it for acts of genuine altruism and personal discovery as well). I'm generally calm and cheerful, but my depressions are harrowing purgatories of nightmare, my rages are ten-megaton emotional holocausts, and my spite is a poisoned diamond shuriken - but my joys are like Beethoven's ninth symphony with guitar accompaniment by Hendrix.
My point? In my experience magic (or whatever we want to call it) isn't about simply transcending and rejecting the ego. It's about going beyond the simple ego, the ordinary 'I' of much human experience, connecting to the godhead, and bringing that back into the domain of the ego, but with more forcefulness (and yet more grace, as well) than ever before. Transcend but include, as Wilber has it.
And, erm, that's my 2ps worth for now. More on the 'd'you think of yourself as a magician' stuff when I've thought about it. |
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