Deflating an Enlightened Ego

How challenges are the Path

Without therapy, it is impossible for the grandiose person to cut the tragic link between admiration and love. He seeks insatiably for admiration, of which he never gets enough because admiration is not the same thing as love. It is only a substitute gratification of the primary needs for respect, understanding, and being taken seriously—needs that have remained unconscious since early childhood. Often a whole life is devoted to this substitute.

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Continuous performance of outstanding achievements may sometimes enable a person to maintain the illusion of the constant attention and availability of his parents (whose absence from his early childhood he now denies just as thoroughly as his own emotional reactions). Such a person is usually able to ward off threatening depression with increased displays of brilliance, thereby deceiving both himself and those around him.

Alice Miller. The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (p. 40-42).

I think there are many high achievers who suffer from grandiosity due to developmental trauma. As described by Drama of the Gifted Child, it can stem from an underlying (unconscious) belief that doing big things is required to be worthy of love. As a result, afflicted people can work extremely hard to maintain a sense of their own importance. Spiritual practice can unwind this workism, only for a new identity around a spiritual ego to coalesce in its place. In this identity one must remain perfect, thinking that the mark of a fully awakened being is maintaining a certain mind state in all times and all situations. This awakened person has clear vision into the true nature of reality, and is therefore obligated to proselytize and proclaim their vision as the final truth of reality. For such a person, any sign of deviation from the ideal concept of that spiritual person is dangerous and potentially destabilizing. What such people may not realize is that those deviations are crucial for seeing the true groundlessness of the ground.

As many surface level things clear up following some kind of spiritual realization, the ego can be subtly bolstered by the novel smoothness of day to day experience. One might even forget what's it's like to endure any significant suffering. You think the eight worldly concerns - praise/blame gain/loss pleasure/pain fame/ill repute — cease to apply. A temporary suspension of impermanence. Ha! This sets the stage for some massive problems to arise. They can take many forms; one common way this can manifest is relationally - friction in close relationships. Everyone could get enlightened if they just follow the realized being’s instructions! But those silly humans have ideas of their own!

Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun who studied with Chogyam Trungpa, wrote When Things Fall Apart in the wake of her divorce. It's one of the most powerful and inspiring accounts of what pain in relationship can be like and specifically how to work with relational challenges on the path. Her descriptions resonate far beyond the particulars of her situation and speak to any deep pain caused by intimacy, not just romantic relationships. She calls that pain “the squeeze”, and movingly describes how crucial such experiences are for our spiritual development:

This place of the squeeze is the very point in our meditation and in our lives where we can really learn something. The point where we are not able to take it or leave it, where we are caught between a rock and a hard place, caught with both the upliftedness of our ideas and the rawness of what’s happening in front of our eyes—that is indeed a very fruitful place. When we feel squeezed, there’s a tendency for mind to become small. We feel miserable, like a victim, like a pathetic, hopeless case. So believe it or not, at that moment of hassle or bewilderment or embarrassment, our minds could become bigger. Instead of taking what’s occurred as a statement of personal weakness or someone else’s power, instead of feeling we are stupid or someone else is unkind, we could drop all the complaints about ourselves and others. We could be there, feeling off guard, not knowing what to do, just hanging out there with the raw and tender energy of the moment. This is the place where we begin to learn the meaning behind the concepts and the words.

Pema Chodron. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Shambhala Classics) (pp. 150-151).

The initial experience of the squeeze can be surprising when experienced from spaciousness. With no preference over experience it's completely unrestrained. Thoughts wash over in waves. Somatic sensation starts in the dantien and rise up until they flow through the eyes, again and again. It can feel like being perpetually on the brink of tears. Normal life activities, like sleeping or eating, can be disturbed. It might seem like a regression in one’s practice when a big chunk of conditioning like this comes up. But actually it’s not. One might work with it in all the typical ways that Buddhist practice advises working with emotional pain (e.g. metta practices, tonglen etc.), but from the view of primordial perfection, these energetic occurrences are the Path. Therefore there’s no reason to do anything, simply to allow it to be. Where you end up is a bit like this midwit meme:

Of course there is a big difference between the person on the left-hand side and the right-hand side. The difference is capacity - the person on the left can’t help but let it rip because their emotions are unworkable. In fact, for such a person, the experience can be so overwhelming that there is natural avoidance and aversion. From the perspective of the person on the right, there is no avoidance or aversion, no need to try and change anything or make anything go away. There is just the clarity and luminosity of the emotional expression as it wends its way through the body and mind. There is no softening of the disturbance even as it appears as empty. As one rests in the display, the idea of perfection, or that enlightened ego, begins to melt away. Dogma and certainty give way to groundlessness, a more complete expression beyond perfection / imperfection. The way Chodron puts it:

We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that’s death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn’t have any fresh air. There’s no room for something to come in and interrupt all that.

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To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that’s life.

Pema Chodron. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Shambhala Classics) (p. 94-95).

There is no ultimate resolution, no matter how the specifics of the situation evolve. That’s just the way things are. And that goes beyond relationships. There is deep wisdom in recognizing that ambiguity, non-resolution and groundlessness. It cuts to the heart of our confidence in the path. The Enlightened Ego is not sustainable precisely because the fundamental truth of awakeness is fundamental uncertainty. The continued arising of challenging circumstances undercuts the simple notion that we are someone separate or better than anyone else. Paradoxically (or not), perfection is exactly this “imperfection”. It’s our nirmanakaya. They don’t teach you this in jhana school. This is sacredness too. The core mystery of who we are imbues us with a basic humility. It forecloses the possibility of certainty that we know best, or that our path is best. At the bottom of pain and grief is love for oneself and compassion for others. We are connected not only to one another via that struggle, but to the great masters of the past. As Chodron points out, Milarepa was still being abused by his aunt long after he was recognized as a great spiritual master. When we consider their stories, we can feel inspired, just like this:

One can be grateful that a long lineage of teachers has worked with holding their seats with the big squeeze. They were tested and failed and still kept exploring how to just stay there, not seeking solid ground. They trained again and again throughout their lives not to give up on themselves and not to run away when the bottom fell out of their concepts and their noble ideals. From their own experience they have passed along to us the encouragement not to jump over the big squeeze, but to look at it just as it is, not just out of the corner of an eye. They showed us how to experience it fully, not as good or bad, but simply as unconditioned and ordinary.

Pema Chodron. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Shambhala Classics) (pp. 153-154).

We will continue to be tested, and we will continue to fail. The mark of wisdom is not how much we stumble, but in our willingness to get up and try again.