Friday Reflection: The Ravages of Ego

The star Gliese, the "sun" around which an Earth-like and possibly habitable planet was recently found revolving (click graphic to learn more)

It was great to see Moyers back on the air Wednesday night, wasn't it? (if you missed it, you can watch it here). Yes, it was very painful to watch, but that's because it was so thoroughly and masterfully done. I thought the scenes with Beinart were particularly compelling: the old teacher, the Socrates of modern journalism, gently but firmly exposing and correcting the peach-faced stripling, one that the I Ching would refer to as "The Young Fool" (Hexagram 4):

Youthful Folly has success.
It is not I who seek the young fool;
The young fool seeks me.
At the first oracle I inform him.
If he asks two or three times, it is importunity.
If he importunes, I give him no information.
Perseverance furthers.

But let's turn off the TV, put down the newspaper and leave the knotted ball of conflict that the neocon tyrants have visited upon our world behind for a little. Congress will (one hopes) go on fighting the President; Condi will go on fighting her subpoena; Cheney will go on fighting himself; and McCain will continue to tell jokes and sing songs about the carnage that he helped to bring into the dawn of the 21st century. Let them go on; they are old men (most of them) being dissolved by time and dying further within, every day.

Or is it really time that kills us? Here's an alternative, from my supply of cheap, dime-store New Age fizzdom:

Time does not ravage us. Time is just a cosmic dimension, doing its job. Time does not degrade or destroy life; only ego does that. So if you would like to remain young and beautiful until the day comes for your transformation beyond time, then turn within regularly and kill ego. Kill it, and then discard its corpse, with the help of the cosmic presences (time included). Once you have focused upon your true enemy, then time becomes your friend, your ally in the life of form and the life to come, beyond form.


Everyday elimination:
Your body does it—
Why not your mind?

If you can feel falsehood and expel it,
Your thoughts will ring true.
If you can clear the code of hatred
That was written on your heart
Amid childhood ambivalence,
Then the quantum breath of love
Will fill you, extending outward.

Diderot told us that we will never be truly free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. I would suggest now, that for each of us who turns within and rips the bowel of belief from the dead body of ego, and with it, chokes the voice of authority into stillness, and finally expels it—for each of us who does that within himself, we will more nearly approach the day of true freedom for all.