Neglect is not looking at my webpage for six months. A lot has changed. I am not reading as much lately as I used to. This is because reading has become an egoic thing for me, rather than just something to enjoy.
Robert Persig:
To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, he’s unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be “here”. What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
This is nice, because it fits in well with what I have been learning from Ekhart Tolle about Ego. My model of what inner processes cause what behaviour is so far from complete though! I most definitely feel like a novice these days, but maybe if I begin writing down some of my thoughts I can erase this feeling. I would not want to accidentaly egoise it away though.
Let us start with this thought: There are multiple relationships between language and egoising. These relationships include: * We measure ego through language. * We often express ego through language. * Hypothesis: Ego is expressed when an identification would cause suffering if it were not expressed?
Maybe if Persig had focused on trying to define identity rather than quality, he would not have gone mad.