Our form is the ego: it is this mysterious incapacity to be other than oneself, and at the same time the incapacity to be entirely oneself and not ‘other-than-Self’. But our Reality does not leave us the choice and obliges us to ‘become what we are’, or to remain what we are not. The ego is, empirically, a dream in which we ourselves dream ourselves; the contents of this dream, drawn from our surroundings, are at bottom only pretexts, for the ego desires only its own life: whatever we may dream, our dream is always only a symbol for the ego which wishes to affirm itself, a mirror that we hold before the ‘I’ and which reverberates its life in multiple fashions. This dream has become our second nature; it is woven of images and of tendencies, static and dynamic elements in innumerable combinations: the images come from outside and are integrated into our substance; the tendencies are our responses to the world around us; as we exteriorise ourselves, we create a world in the image of our dream, and the dream thus objectivised flows back upon us, and so on and on, until we are enclosed in a tissue, sometimes inextricable, of dreams exteriorised or materialised and of materialisations interiorised. The ego is like a watermill whose wheel, under the drive of a current — the world and life — turns and repeats itself untiringly, in a series of images always different and always similar. The world: it is as if the ‘conscious Substance’ which is the Self had fallen into a state which would split it up in many different ways and would inflict on it endless accidents and infirmities; and in fact, the ego is ignorance floundering in objective modes of ignorance, such as time and space. Extract from Gnosis and Divine Wisdom Photo: Portrait of Tao Yuanming
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 21:54:14 +0000
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