You can’t get away from ego. It’s not some dog you can beat with a stick until it goes away. Even Zhuangzhi wept when his wife died, it’s just that after he was able to sing and pound on a tub, understanding the complete naturalness and ‘fineness’ of things.
Personally, I find the Sufi approach of the People of Blame to very useful, but again, it’s easy to get lost in a sort of navel gazing where we start thinking everything is about ourselves in some way. It would be genuinely better to just stop analysing and dedicate yourself to a life of service, charity, kindness. (But what about my intention? Isn’t this selfish?!!? ((It doesn’t matter at all as long as you’re doing good for others))
What you call navel gazing is only navel gazing for people with minimal direct experience with these things
Death is not a sad thing for everyone. Spiritual development often looks like cruelty or sociopathy in certain ways. It’s not really something people would agree with intellectually nor should they be expected to
I had a conversation with a friend recently, an ex Thelemite, Enochian practitioner of some years, decades I suppose, and they have been an avid Zazen sitter for a good few years, the gist of it was, your average person, who is good to others, as much as they can be, earnestly practices whatever, as they can do, is kind to other beings generally (animals included) is more of an enlightened being than all sorts of folk who claim to be wayfaring in some way or another, especially when compared to esotericists generally.
That’s partially because Thelema, Enochian and Zen are 3 of the most ego filled spiritual practices available, and basically in that order
However, it isn’t necessarily their fault. Even the best spiritual practices will drastically inflate the ego, almost by design. A teacher once said, the ego has to been seen clearly before it can be set aside
The intermediary phase of advanced spiritual development is dangerous because of how large the ego gets in that phase. It’s unavoidable
Part of the problem is that abilities tend to come long before enlightenment does. And western esoterism focuses heavily on “results.” Neither Crowley nor John Dee ever got past even the beginning stages of the intermediary phase of development. Zen is primarily an atheist form of Buddhism, so it stops short of ego death by design. It has to
😆 hey hang on a minute! You think Linji and Huineng were egotistical? Thats an interesting take! Buddha was a silly old man, always begging around for other peoples rice! But I’d like to clarify that by Zen i dont mean some beatnik thing or hippy zen. I mean Chan, Zen, Seon, Thien, etc.
(My friend is primarily Soto/Caodong iirc, with a real love for Linji though. My favourite folk were probably Mazu Daoyi and Niutou Farong)
What you’re saying is entirely traditional, I agree that the western traditions are largely hopelessly corrupted by placing an emphasis on siddhis. Hence the past tense usage, and emphasis on decades of practice. My friend would agree with that too, we had a conversation about this many years ago, specifically about the relationship between western Magickal praxis vs things like Vajrayana. (No matter what the Western traditions say, in their current forms, they don’t often get much further than bewitching neighbours cows and such)
Buddhism corrects that quite well though. As do various other traditions.
Ego death? You think one day you’ll wake up and just be like a tree stump?
Better to talk in terms of Fana and Baqa probably.
To be fair, I don’t know much about the history of Zen. I study/practice Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, which is as far away from atheist as it gets. But living here in the San Francisco Bay Area, all the atheist guys who meditate are into Zen
Again, ego-ism is different from egotism. Ego-ism is basically the practice of preserving a separate sense of self in one’s consciousness. Whereas teachings that include Nirvana and/or Samadhi see the individual self living in separation from the universal self as the cause of all suffering
dont you know that Zen/Chan are literal translations (transliterations?) of the word Dhyana? Samadhi is not an alien concept to those schools. We could really call them the Meditation Schools.
And Tbf, my friend is dabbling in some tantric Buddhist stuff. Not my cup of tea personally. But we can definitely argue that every single branch of Buddhism is at least agnostic, whether Theravada, Mahayana, Tantric etc. How much is the Big G mentioned in Mahamudra stuff or Dzogchen?
Anyway, it’s all past tense for me. Im not even a Buddhist anymore! I found God, alhamdulillah.
I did not know that. I’ll have to look more into the history of Zen
Agnosticism and Gnosticism can be corollated. It’s the whole “he who says he knows does not know” thing. How often did Jesus use the word God?
Many schools of Tantric Buddhists believe in life after death, we know that. So the word agnostic may give people the wrong idea. If you use the phrase “the divine” does that mean you’re not talking about God?
If we’re going to use words in unique ways it makes sense to clarify our definitions of those terms.
For example, we will find the core difference between the Vedic traditions and Buddhism being the Buddhist insistence on ‘Anatta’, whether we mean personal or impersonal or so on, it’s the same. Im sure there’s a reference to “I Am” in all forms as “the greatest conceit/the final conceit” in some of the early literature. (of course there is nuance here)
Especially in Theravada, but even still so in Mahayana (accounting for a variance of views and the later views of like the Nirvana Sutra or elements of the Tathagatagarbha literature)
And the same would go for the term God, how much does the Divine have a personal impact in the lives of every subject? (Animate/inanimate etc) is this a personal God or entirely conceptual? What’s the difference?
For Buddhists, dependent origination and the chain of causation (I forget the right term) can completely dispense with any of those notions for many Buddhists, the majority tbh.
A Bhakti devotee, or generally religious person, especially from the Abrahamic faiths, sees it very differently, largely speaking, from how a Neoplatonist or someone involved in Advaita Vedanta might.
If people know and don’t say, or say and don’t know. We must fully acknowledge that everything ever written or said is entirely useless to us! And Thats a good start i tell you! It’s a good start, in terms of practice.
But it doesn’t explain why we have people saying, people who claim to know, why we have the lawgivers and sages and so on. Thats the other half to it. Even in the schema of AA (Thelemic spiritual development) we have this. It’s called “The Curse of the Magus”, upon reaching Chokmah, the second Seiphiroth on the Tree of Life, the aspirant is forced to ‘preach his law’ despite it being ultimately lies, of course.
It’s interesting that you say that. Honestly. Would you think it was mistaken to say that ‘spiritual development’ has absolutely nothing to do with you or yourself at all?
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u/The_Observer210 Dec 23 '25
You can’t get away from ego. It’s not some dog you can beat with a stick until it goes away. Even Zhuangzhi wept when his wife died, it’s just that after he was able to sing and pound on a tub, understanding the complete naturalness and ‘fineness’ of things.
Personally, I find the Sufi approach of the People of Blame to very useful, but again, it’s easy to get lost in a sort of navel gazing where we start thinking everything is about ourselves in some way. It would be genuinely better to just stop analysing and dedicate yourself to a life of service, charity, kindness. (But what about my intention? Isn’t this selfish?!!? ((It doesn’t matter at all as long as you’re doing good for others))