4 posts tagged with "ego"
An old idea, told slightly unhinged: you are not a lonely meat-sack stranded in a hostile cosmos — you are the cosmos itself, briefly pretending to be a person who forgot to mute himself on the morning call.
We keep deferring our lives to a future that never quite arrives — the next promotion, the next blender, the someday we'll finally feel alive. On the hoax of the future, why your to-do-list version of yesterday is a ghost of the real thing, and why the anxious self you're straining to fix was never actually there.
There's a parable about a beggar who spent thirty years asking strangers for change while sitting on a box full of gold. On why discomfort is unavoidable but suffering is optional, why you are not the voice in your head, and why one small question — am I being present? — reliably ends the misery.
Suppose a dial were wired in beside your eyes, and turning it changed what a person actually is — body, then personality, then soul, then a single shared awareness, then nothing at all. On the many channels of identity, why you are not the car you happen to be driving around in, and why being nobody in particular turns out to be an enormous relief.