2013
To Arrive at What You Are Not
After sitting the weekend retreat with Phillip Moffitt, I came back home and picked up his book, Dancing with Life, which the KM group has been discussing for almost 2 years. The next-to-last chapter is titled: “Now That You Know, What Is It That You Know?”
Here’s the part that really stood out for me:
Based on my years of experience of working with students, you most likely have some psychological/emotional issues that create an inner sense of scarcity or need in your ego identity that must be worked with before you can finish walking the Eightfold Path…..[This] is what must be released so that something new beyond your ego’s imagination and capacity can enter and flourish.
…It is difficult and confusing to work with your ego’s limitation, no matter what it is. This is because you need the ego’s cooperation in order to act in a manner that at times seems contrary to its own interest. As T.S. Eliot says in “Four Quartets”:
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
The journey feels as strange as Eliot’s words because by definition you are “not being yourself,” yet you are being very genuine in not being yourself!
This is the paradox of the inner journey….You aren’t supposed to build your practice around “destroying your ego limitation,” rather you consciously go through your ego limitation in order to be freed from it.
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(image: Green Vacancy by Wassily Kandinsky)