Self-Denial as Numbness

May 19, 2014 (Revised Oct 18, 2021)

“All dimensions are equations of time and relate to shape in space. Conception is only possible through form, and Ego is our dimensional span.”

Austin Osman Spare

“The space-time structure itself is your ego. […] The very existence, the very creation of space-time, of creating the idea of time and space generates the ego itself because you need that perspective in order to experience space-time.”

Bashar

Ego was a hot topic during my stay in the spiritual consumerist state of Dharamsala in the Himalayas where demonizing the ego was popular. In Joseph Campbell’s “Pathways to Bliss,” he mentions that much of the east has an ascetic ideal. This very ideal results in life-denial (self-denial).

I ask anybody whose relationship with themselves involves flagellation and love-deprivation whether the climax to their behavior is suicide. Would not suicide be the culmination of self-denial?

To India in the past, suicide has not been such a terrible shock in certain circumstances. In the tradition of sati, widowed women were expected to voluntarily kill themselves, else risk ostracization. Value was placed in self-destruction. Everyone is free to choose as they wish, even if the choice is bondage or death.

Longterm ascetic behavior can be another form of slavery and ironically solipsistic, the extreme end of arrogance. To the individual who fervently strives to destroy the ego, the ego appears the most prominent (in its negative form–inflated and autoimmune) to that person. An individual who makes enemies with the ego is already a slave to the ego.

Some have this pre-occupation with not wanting to play the maya game. It’s a no, no, no game. Perhaps Nietzsche’s abyss is secretly yearned for, the void where nothing happens consistently for an eternity (death stagnating in death without resurrection). Some may call this the dark side of the gateless gate, the loops, non-space-time, nonduality.

Perhaps there is a yearning for this grand hell of all hells where a shock treatment involving the epitome of loneliness and concentrated boredom is administered in order to spark feeling and childhood back into the character once the victim is granted life again. We can call the shock treatment maya, samsara, or illusion even, but I call it art. I speak for I have been to the void.

With self-love, self-responsibility, and respect to all regardless of learning stage.

“Be not hasty to condemn others; how knowest thou that in their place, thou couldest have resisted the temptation? And even were it so, why shouldst thou despise one who is weaker than thyself?”

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