EGO DYNAMICS: Healed Perception

The chief hallmark of healed perception (which some call enlightenment or awakening) is the realization that the world is not to blame for your suffering and deserves NO condemnation.

However, as you begin to retract blame from the world, suffering intensifies as ego resists attempts to alter condemnation as the basis for 'perception.' The ego demands the world be culpable and egoic perception is designed to make judgmental distinctions through contrasts, thereby reinforcing the experience of self divided from world.

The ego’s chief instrument of distinction is ‘perception.’ The ego refuses to accept that perception is a product of belief and instead insists that you must always believe what you perceive. Perception is crucial for the ego to exist and to deny what you perceive is to deny the ego.

However, your ego-self is not to blame and neither is perception

The problem is neither the world nor your ego-self but the conceptual construct of blame, which must lead to condemnation. The ego constructs numerous concepts to reinforce the experience of an external world. This is because the ego is nothing more than a belief in an external world. Yet, essentially, you have NO precise knowledge that an external world even exists, since the body that gives you this information (sensation) is itself external to the ego-self (this ontological issue is as old as time itself).

However, although many “enlightened” minds contend that an external world is maya, or illusion, they cannot argue against your 'experience' of an external world. You do experience a world separate from mind and that experience is solely your own. Many bright minds assert that you are NOT separate from your world, but that you have bifurcated, or split, your ‘self’ off from your experience of a world.

"Spiritual awakening" merely identifies that your experience of a world is indivisible from your experience of a ‘self.’ They are one and the same, because they are both within the domain of ‘experience.’ Condemn the world and, since your experience of a world is indivisible from your ‘self’ you condemn yourself. Blame your ‘self’ and you indict the world. Distinctions are delusional because they construct experiences to allocate blame by maintaining dualistic contrasts.

Miraculous perception, or Christ Consciousness/Buddha Mind, does not dissolve the world, but dissolves blame and condemnation in the realization that there is no division to experience.

Nonetheless, many will assert that the ego constructed the experience of blame and thus, is at fault. But the ego also constructed experiences of joy and beauty to aid in contrasting between what is guilty and what is innocent. The ego constructs conceptual preferences to reinforce your attachment to ‘perception’ as the chief means of knowledge and understanding. Therefore, perception seeks out contrasts by its very nature because the ego needs you to rely on it fully, as opposed to something deeper, that it senses, but can never understand through perception.

Blame the ego for your suffering and you seek to divide your experience into parts and ‘perception’ will continue to divide itself from the world by contrasting between heaven and hell, pain and pleasure, good and bad. This merely reinforces a stronger ego against an external world and it is the fundamental fallacy of many religious and spiritual ideologies.

The ego cannot be dissolved by anything “you” (egoic self-concept) could do, simply because you are an ego and an ego denying itself paradoxically reinforces itself. However, the concepts ego-self constructs as experience can be denied and extinguished. This is because the ego perpetuates itself through denial and it does this simply by denying that its experience of a world is unified and indivisible from itself. Blame separates into parts and denies unity to experience.

Deny blame and condemnation to the world and experience an end to all self-condemnation because there is no division between self and world.

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
If you wish to see the truth
then hold no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind.

(Seng-st'an. Third Patriarch of Ch'an Buddhism)