Quite the 'Buddhist' post
7/20/05
This realization is a hard one to put into words, but I must try, even expecting what follows to fail at truly communicating what I am trying to say. Here goes.
There is no reason to be proud, there is nothing to be proud of. This is not to say you should feel bad to feel pride -- you should never be ashamed of what you truly feel (You just feel what you feel. We do not control our emotions. They just are what they are, it's not "right" or "wrong" to feel any particular thing.) -- just that pride is illusory, without a solid reason for it. There is no solid basis or foundation for an ego. Anything you have accomplished, no matter how great... anyone could have done it, in a way. This does not diminish the greatness of the accomplishment, not at all. However if someone else, not you, had been born to your parents and lived your life in exactly the same way you have in every detail, with every influence and all the same causes and conditions you had up to the accomplishment, they would have accomplished exactly the same thing. In other words, accomplishment does not come from you, from your ego, but rather it comes simply as a result of all the causes and conditions, the karma, of your life. Having accomplished something great, the ego thinks, "I did this, it is great, therefore I am great." And it simply is not the case. If someone else was you, they would have accomplished exactly the same thing, inevitably. As an aside here, I am speaking in terms of my thinking that karma, with its causes and conditions (think of everything in terms of cause and effect), is really the conceptual opposite of the idea of free will.
It is the ego that feels pride, and the ego is the inflated part of the self. Its all illusory. Accomplishments may be great, but it is not the ego that brought them forth. Thus there is no reason for pride.
Wow! I think I said what I meant to! I feel some pride in the accomplishment! ;-)
I mean, the phrase "I am proud of myself" says it all. We create the self, the I, see the accomplishment made, credit the self, and pride arises.
So, it is not my greatness (ego) that brought forth this explanation of the realization. The explanation, and the realization, were brought about by all the causes and conditions: this person (me) reading about Buddhism, the way this person has learned to think since he was a lad watching Cosmos, the affinity this person has for thinking deep thoughts, whatever it is about Buddhism that has captured and holds this person's interest, and keeps him reading and thinking...
Changing the subject slightly but staying in the same vein; cogito ergo sum. Descartes' well known truth, "I think, therefore I am." From a Buddhist perspective there may be a problem with this, and that is that the "I" is assumed. There is an I that is presumed to be doing the thinking, presumed to exist because of the thinking. A Buddhist teacher might say "there is thinking" and leave it at that. Now yes, both would agree that there is a body and brain that are doing the thinking, and they must exist to create the thinking (part of the chain of dependent causes and conditions), but does "cogito ergo sum" assume the source of the thinking is instead the ego? Or am I reading that into Descartes? Do we not usually interpret cogito ergo sum to prove our existence in terms of a self and an ego? Presuming that because there is thinking, the ego exists, and that that is what we are?
We create our "selves" because we like to imagine a being that does the things that we cause to happen, and we like to imagine that we are that being. But the self is nothing more than a mental construct. Thinking of the self as the essence of what makes the things we do happen is about as silly as believing in a tiny homunculus inside our heads pulling the strings.
