Mine, mine, mine, you fool! Credit: Business2community.com

Judgment, the ego, and desire seem to go hand in hand.

Judging another elevates me in my own sight. It calls the ego into action to do the elevating.

Desire is also a call to action. The ego arises to fulfill the desire.

If another stands in the way of us satisfying our desire, we use our judgments as weapons, to diminish and dominate them.

When the mind is silent, the ego does not arise.

When no desire or judgment arises, the ego does not arise.

If we want the ego to fall silent, in my view, none of this can be forced. Otherwise, we’re still making the mind active and the ego will still arise to do the forcing. Instead we have to experience the thoughts and feelings that obstruct us through to completion.

Just be alert and observe, S.N. Goenka would advise. (1)

***

But, oh, how hard it is not to yield to the temptation to be self-serving. No one will see. I’ll just slip that praiseful comment in here.

And yet others have a myriad ways of sussing out our intentions and we are seen.

The very first sentence in the very first book I ever wrote reads: “We’re invisible only to ourselves.” (2) And I still think that’s more accurate than I like.

How hard it is to tell about the day’s events without being self-serving. How hard it is to come from a point of view other than considering ourselves the center of the universe.

How many are beyond that? Let’s have a show of hands. One over here. One over there.

OK, OK, I’m kidding. But I watch my own self-servingness and it permeates everything.

That smug look on my face? It means I have all my ducks in a row, have my story where I want it, and consider myself to have come out looking good and smelling like a rose.

It doesn’t matter what I did or did not do. It only matters what my story is and how I look.

I won’t ask for a show of hands on that one.

***

So I’m your basic self-serving creature.

I’m so much organized and programmed in that way that I don’t notice it. It exists in what Werner Erhard called “the background of obviousness.” “What are you talking about? That’s obvious, isn’t it?” (So therefore be quiet.)

At times, we’re probably all routinely self-serving creatures. And, because everybody’s doing it, it’s OK. Our shared agreement seems to be not to call each other on it.

I wouldn’t call self-servingness a vasana (or core issue), but rather what Linda Dillon calls “a false grid” or an unhelpful belief/belief system, a paradigm that inhibits our growth.

Simple awareness, I believe, is enough to handle it even though the belief system itself runs deep.

Awareness is dissolutive. By that I don’t mean that it dissolves. But, rather, when we rest in passive awareness of something, on the one hand, it, meeting no resistance, tends to stay for a while and then move on. Nothing is holding it here.

What we resist, on the other hand, persists. But we’re not resisting. We’re just passively observing and the feeling or thought should pass. In this sense, awareness is dissolutive.

So I’m still tied to judging but my desires get fewer and fewer as time passes.

But I do notice that the more I love, the less I judge…… Hmmm….. Hmmmmm……

Footnotes

(1) S.N. Goenka, master of Vipassana meditation.

(2) Steve Beckow. Quiet Nights at O’Doul’s. Vancouver, 1976.