(This is Part 15 of a series. Go back to Part 14.)
The essence of self-righteousness is the feeling not just that one is right, but that one is morally right. This feeling of being morally superior is the handmaiden to that which always accompanies self-righteousness—intolerance.
We can see this phenomenon in many ways: In Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, for instance one could easily find the "robot" syndrome, where everyone had a remarkable sameness of thinking—they tended to express the same ideas in the same way, always parroting the party line. In either of those places and times, it was literally lethal to think for oneself. It is true of many places today.
A similar intolerance can be observed in fundamentalists of all stripes, whether Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus or whatever. All share the characteristic that they are in possession of the ultimate truth, and therefore that any variance from that truth is to be vigorously condemned, attacked or eliminated.
We can see a similar phenomenon in the medical field, where numerous pioneers, ranging from Semmelweiss to Jennings to Graham, were attacked and condemned for disagreeing with the medical orthodoxy of their day. And this still goes on today.
But to me, the ultimate in this phenomenon has to be represented by the Holy Inquisition, where people were tortured and burned at the stake for disagreeing with a church representing a man who spent his life preaching love and tolerance. Such is the moral abyss to which the logic of self-righteousness can lead us.
The common thread of all the examples above and many others that could be cited is the pious self-assurance of superiority. This is the ego, and the ego is extremely resourceful in grasping for this state of mind, because it reinforces the ego.
For instance, the ego can use possessions to feel superior to others. Or it can renounce possessions and use that to feel superior. It can use a belief in capitalism or a belief in anticapitalism to feel superior, either one. It can make use of anything. There is nothing that cannot be used to feel superior to others—even our "misery" or "spirituality".
But this seems like a hall of mirrors!—where every path away from it only leads back to it. Indeed it is. Every action to strengthen the ego is the ego acting, and every action to weaken the ego is also the ego acting.
How then do we cut through this dilemma, this Gordian Knot? To explore that question, we must first ask what the ego is. What is the ego?
Imagine an empty sky, spacious, infinite, at peace. And now let that empty sky have various clouds here and there. Has the essential nature of the sky been changed? No; it's always the same no matter what the contents of it are. But if the sky identifies with the clouds, and thinks that it is them—that is the ego.
The empty sky is our consciousness, our Being. And the clouds represent our thoughts, our beliefs, our emotions, desires, habits, etc.—all the contents that can take place within consciousness. If we identify with those contents, if those contents become our identity, then consciousness is "captured" within a narrow vessel—a narrow vessel that always seeks to be and have more, to aggrandize itself. In a nutshell, that is the ego.
The ego is neither "right" nor "wrong"; those terms are irrelevant. The ego is just unconscious. It cannot help being unconscious; that is its nature. And using the ego
to try to remove or eliminate the ego is something of a hopeless venture, like a cat chasing its tail.
But there is something we can "do", although it's not a doing per se. We simply begin observing our mind. In observing our thoughts as thoughts, just thoughts, a subtle dis-identification begins. In effect, one of those clouds becomes more flimsy and we regain some of the already-existing spaciousness of the sky.
No attempt is made to change the thoughts that we notice, for example, thoughts of superiority or self-righteousness. We simply observe them. We become aware of them, we notice them instead of clutching at them and identifying with them. Bit by bit, we cease the hallucination that our thoughts, beliefs and storylines are who we are.
That simple recognition—that our thoughts are just our thoughts, not our consciousness—opens a door. We do not need to do anything to create that consciousness, for it is always there; it is us, it is our Being. Indeed, it is the empty Mystery that is within all things, pregnant with all things, that is giving birth every moment to the timeless and ongoing creation of Itself.
(This is the end of Part 15. Go to Part 16.)
—jim sloman, 12.17.05
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