Ep 4. - Let go my ego! Just what is it, why should you let it go, and if you should?

Let go of my ego! Just what is it, why should you let it go, and if you should?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome back to the World Treason Eyes podcast. I'm Myung Han Sin-yum. I'm here with Dr. Ruben Lambert, a clinical psychologist specializing in mind, body, interventions, weaving skillfully into it Zen philosophy to help and ameliorate people's sufferings. I do want to advertise you, but it's my understanding that you have a pretty long waiting list at this time, don't you?

SPEAKER_01: 0:53

Yes, right now we have about an eight-month to a year wait list for...

SPEAKER_00: 0:58

Between the two offices. Yes. Yeah, so Dr. Lambert now has an office here also at the Zen Center, so between here and the other one in Union with the two offices, but still nonetheless such a long waiting list. I don't know what that says about what. If it says a good thing about you, or if it says not such a good thing about the state of the world and its affairs. But anyway, welcome

SPEAKER_01: 1:28

back. Thank you. Hello, everyone. It is my pleasure to be back here with you all again. My name is Dr. Ruben Lambert, and I want to introduce to you my co-host, the Venerable Myung An Sunim, Abbot of Sochimsa Zen Center, And again, there are many good things to say about Soshimsa Zen Center. But first, let me start with a little bit about Myungun Sunim. He is humbly known as a spiritual chaos specialist, inner turmoil pacifier, stale water agitator. Be careful with leaving a drink of water around him. Transformational guide, Zen master, and speaker. And I also want to highlight some of the wonderful programs that we have going on here at Soshimsa Zen Center. One of them being also Tea with the Abbot, which I hear is also becoming very popular and

SPEAKER_00: 2:19

in

SPEAKER_01: 2:19

high

SPEAKER_00: 2:19

demand. I'm stacked up on tea, so not running out yet, but it has been, yes.

SPEAKER_01: 2:25

All right, then I'll have to place an order of new tea because even some of my clients are asking about coming here for Tea with the Abbot. And I think a few of them have already been here with you. That's right. That's right. It's nice. And they all have given me positive feedback.

SPEAKER_00: 2:40

Thank you. That's very kind of them. Yeah, we just, you know, have a cup of tea, as I tell them. Some of them are concerned. They sit down and they say, well, I don't know how this works. I say, well, we're just two people having tea. We could talk. We could not talk. We could just enjoy tea, what have you. So really a human-to-human moment of connection. And if I can be of some service and help unbind people from their suffering, then by all means. And if... we just have a nice cup of tea, then that also works. I saw in South Korea, they have a jail for which you pay to enter to kind of self-confinement for peace. So I'm not sure how you pay, what the time limits and windows are, but essentially you pay to be kind of locked away, in a sense, to get... sort of almost enforce upon yourself a reprieve from the going-ons of life. So it's an interesting new... We are really...

SPEAKER_01: 3:52

There's something that's counterintuitive. You actually pay to go to jail. Most people want to run away from there. But I see the concept there, right? But I think in my head, why not just attend the Zen retreat? You can kind of cut yourself off from the day-to-day hustle and bustle of daily life.

UNKNOWN: 4:09

Sure.

SPEAKER_01: 4:10

Isolate yourself from those things and maybe dig a little deeper and pull out some nuggets of wisdom.

SPEAKER_00: 4:16

People are doing. They're doing. The technology is coming out with all these different techniques and trying to find, not necessarily shortcuts, but trying to find ways to eke out some amount of peace in whatever ways that we can.

SPEAKER_01: 4:37

Yeah, and the latest algorithms, I'm sure everyone's coming up with a nice fancy title of a shortcut, right? Someone's always trying to outdo the other person. So seven steps to peace, I got you beat. Six steps to peace, right? That's right. And then so there's always a shortcut to enlightenment, a shortcut to peace, but some steps you cannot remove. It

SPEAKER_00: 4:57

betrays the way that the world works. There are no shortcuts, right? We have on the table today, let go my ego, but just what is it and why should you or should you not let go of your ego, that is? That's our topic for today.

SPEAKER_01: 5:24

That reminds me of that 80s commercial, Lego My Ego. That's right. That kid put an ego in a toaster.

SPEAKER_00: 5:32

That's

SPEAKER_01: 5:32

it. And another one saw it.

SPEAKER_00: 5:34

That's what I wanted to say. I just didn't want to get

SPEAKER_01: 5:36

a lawsuit. No, we can say it right now. Let go of my ego.

SPEAKER_00: 5:39

They're delicious.

SPEAKER_01: 5:40

Let go of my ego. Let go of my ego. Hey, but there's the fundamental problem, right? Hey, that's mine. That's right. And then... Let go of it. And we have so many examples of these things, right? Because you and I both have worked in the schools. And you could see those moments where kids, where their ego is just functioning, are dominating their... mental sphere. For example, you've seen it. You've told me this example. You can have a kid put their shoes somewhere, and then let's say next to Gina, and then another kid puts their shoes next to Gina. And then all of a sudden, the kids don't care. They don't even notice. They're not even paying attention to whose shoes are where. But if that kid now sees another person going there, they say, hey. I wanted to put my shoes next to Gina all of a sudden, right? That

SPEAKER_00: 6:27

was a real event. The kid really had taken it as a sort of betrayal of the newly acquired friend. This was relatively early into the school year. But the best part of the story is that same day... So yes, the argument was shoe parking. I wanted to put my shoes... She comes, waterworks and all... Master Myunggan, I wanted to put my shoes next to so-and-so's shoes, but somebody else put their shoes there, right? And it was a real crisis. And as adults, we tend to kind of dismiss it. It's like, oh, come on, get over it. And we think ourselves lofty and that we have somehow risen above that and that we are much more refined as an adult. And the irony of the story is that same day, I was going to a supermarket and I see two cars angled towards one single parking spot. And out of one car's window hanging out is a man, an adult, quote unquote, throwing out vulgarities and literally just about foaming at his mouth, claiming that parking spot against the other man who was trying to put his car in there. And so... When we think, oh, that's when we so readily dismiss a kind of child's crisis over an ego. Why wanna? We're not immune of that as adults. We think ourselves evolved, but we haven't. We think ourselves grown up, but we haven't. These two grown men were essentially having the same tantrum fit that these children had earlier in the day in the school. And that kind of, you know, shook me at the time because, wow. And I stand firm by this moment and the lesson learned from it, namely that we don't grow up in a sense. We're not somehow grown-ups. Just older... doesn't make you a grown-up, just older, doesn't make you sort of adult in a sense. It doesn't make you wiser.

SPEAKER_01: 8:43

Growing hair and getting wrinkles.

SPEAKER_00: 8:45

And then losing hair. And then losing it.

SPEAKER_01: 8:48

Yes. But it's very interesting because it's almost like the object of focus has changed or the object of disagreement has changed, but the mind behind it that grasps that object is exactly the same. The fundamental underlying thing that's going on there is it's mine. and I don't want to share. Or it's mine and nobody else can access it.

SPEAKER_00: 9:12

Yeah, since we came out of the cave. Maybe you stole my favorite rock and the same tantrum was over that. And until this day, we haven't really evolved much in a sense because now you steal my phone and I have the same. The objects, like you said, differ. But the fundamental mechanism is of the mind hasn't really evolved. I ask in our meditation classes these deeply philosophical questions of my students.

SPEAKER_01: 9:45

Get ready to have your hair blown back.

SPEAKER_00: 9:46

Right, and so just recently I asked, what if, in fact, satsquatch was blurry? If the issue wasn't the pixels on your camera or the resolution on your screen, what if it was actually blurry? And I bring that up to say that this idea of ego thrown out so readily, so easily, it's not like when we dissect a frog or when you take apart your wristwatch, where the edges are clearly defined. Mm-hmm. Those things that belong to the realm of something immaterial, in a sense, as the ego, don't have such clear boundaries. And they are fuzzy, like satsquash. And their function, too, is... kind of dubious and questionable. I mean, we assign a lot of behaviors and a lot of functions and things, but, you know, sort of ego is kind of like an appendix, right? Relatively recently have we discovered some new ideas of what it function may be, but primarily it was, you know, this vestigial organ that, you know, when we were monkeys and you're straightened out and snapped and just dangly thing with single purpose to just catch a seed, get an infection and kill you, right? But it has obviously other functions, right? It's a kind of secret stash for microbiome and all that, but the reason why I bring that up, because when speaking about Ego. I'd like to think of it as, in a sense, an organ of the body. We have it. We're gonna have it. We need it, even though like the appendix. We thought it was like, oh, this is just a useless thing. I don't know why we even have it, but we have it. Oh, you could cut it out and, well, you could take a kidney out too, you'll be fine. You could take a lung out, you'll be fine. You could chop off half your liver, you'll be fine. Doesn't mean that it's useless, right? Right, I think the ego gets a bad rap, right? And that's the thing. So trying to unpack it a little bit, like your monk name was, Mu Sang, the Sang, right, has in it the character, there are two very similar characters, Sang meaning an image, but yours has, or a thing, and yours has the character for Sim, for mind in it, right? So it's the image in the mind, ergo Mu, the absence of those characters like we said, kind of goals and goals of the mind, but really, it's just images of the mind, if you really kind of, right? Reduce it, in a sense. The Korean Zen term for ego is ah-sang. Ah meaning me, self, sang meaning image. So we get the self image, and the self-image is something that we knowingly or unknowingly participate in crafting. And this is this idea of of a attaching to almost as if you were to a symbol of a thing. There's a symbolism of a thing and going back if we want to kind of hanker back again to the map is not the territory, a similar idea. In the West, in the Zen West, or the Western Zen, or it's not even Western Zen, but this idea, this fetish of destroying the ego has been really an occupation of so many practitioners of meditation and many spiritual arts. And it's gotten this Puritan almost approach, where nature, you know, there are certain traditions where nature is seen as vulgar and vile and must be transcended to some holiness. And it does something to life, and there are implications of that. Frequently quoted, you know, the Diamond Sutras, the Kumgangyong, you know, where they all these things, no self, no other, no this, no that, similarly as it's in the the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra is horrid of a quote-unquote translation. I abhor it horribly. It disguises itself and presents itself as a translation. And you read the words, and if you haven't the foundation, if you haven't the ground to build on, the translation of it, I mean, I jokingly frequently say that if you want to read the translation of the Heart Sutra, we need to give it out the translation with an antidepressant right on the onset of it. Because it's so easy, and it's been so frequently done, that this understanding of the ego, and as this monstrous thing, period, that must be destroyed by all means possible. You know, the Western psychology... I mean, maybe you could speak to that better than I, obviously. Well,

SPEAKER_01: 16:33

it's right along those lines, right? The idea of self-concept. What is my concept of who I am? And then you look at, if this is an ocean, then what streams and what rivers flow into that ocean? What are the sources of experiences that develop the self-concept? And so we have to look at that because then what ends up having, whatever your experiences are, and this can be different for any type of person, is oftentimes people lock themselves into this idea of this is who I am, right? And so to shatter that and destroy that would leave the person, this concept of who you are would leave the person sort of like a turtle without its shell or a fish out of the water, right? because their whole life, their whole life. So I think there have been some crude responses to the ego to try to really just carve it out. And I think we have to really completely have an overhaul of the way we have this discussion about ego and understand that maybe there's a ego at its best and ego at its worst. Or what is the function of the, what is a healthy function of the ego? And what is a maladaptive or unhealthy function of the ego? What creates problems in your life? And it all comes down to, I think, this basic concept of rigidity or the lack of flexibility. Because we tell people, you wear many hats, right? Maybe when I'm at work, I'm a psychologist. When I come home, I'm a father. When I'm with my friends, I'm a friend. When I'm with my father, I'm a son, right? And so there's fluidity there. When we have major issues in relationships and communication, I'll just give a stereotypical example as let's say the military father. who, when he's at work, he's at bootcamp, he's talking down upon everyone, right? He's not allowing anyone, right? He's the drill sergeant. He's not allowing anyone to have a say, but then you come home and you haven't taken off- Your boots. And you trample your family members. Then guess what? Your children have not signed up for bootcamp, right? And so you end up doing more harm than good. And so we- I want to create this kind of breakthrough kind of these barriers, right, to free yourself. But to free yourself of the ego doesn't mean to take it and throw it away. Right.

SPEAKER_00: 19:01

Yeah, it's that you hit it on the head. It's the attachment and the rigidness. And with rigidness and with attachment... there's a fixation, and in the fixation, there's a fixed position. And in a fixed position, there isn't movement. And where there isn't movement, there's death. And staleness. And I've seen and heard a number of times, spiritual teachers and religious figures and the likes, speak of the ego only in that one element of its worst permutations. And I gotta say, if there was ever a more dangerous ego than any ego that exists on the planet is that of a spiritual or a religious person. Their ego has got a whole different ballgame because it claims itself rooted in something holy, something lofty, something aloof from the minutia of life. And it disperses and casts these great, great statements from its high, high horse of religious superiority towards the rest of the world that just, you know, schmuckery, just down there in the muck and they know not better, but I am so transcendent of my ego. Isn't it counterintuitive?

SPEAKER_01: 20:46

To declare yourself egolessness is to have an ego so large that you just suck up all the air in the room. It's counterintuitive.

SPEAKER_00: 20:56

And it's evil. I would say it's just evil. The holiness of it really makes it a problematic thing. So this idea of ego as its permutations, how it expresses itself and reorganizes itself in daily life, the easiest way that we see it And that we tend to gravitate to think of it as pride, right? This narcissistic tendencies, conceit, vanity. Which, again, if taken just with these such broad strokes and adding and applying no nuance and no refinement to it, I could see how we could present ego as this evil villain. Now, how does one... That's not what I wanted to say.

SPEAKER_01: 21:55

Wait, can you think of that? I have a story about pride. Just to highlight the example. It's a story you've heard before. It's the naval captain in his large battleship.

SPEAKER_00: 22:08

Ah, yes, yes. And

SPEAKER_01: 22:09

he is traveling on the ocean. That's right. And he sees a light in the distance. And he thinks to himself, this is coming right at me. So the great captain sends a signal and says, please move yourself, go 10 degrees off course. Right, they blink the lights

SPEAKER_00: 22:27

the way that they used to, click, click, click, click, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 22:29

Get out of the way. And the other small object blinks back. You have to move. You move 10 degrees off course. And so this Navy captain gets angry and he flashes back. He says, but I'm a battleship. move off course. And then the other light comes back and says, no, you must move off course. And then now he gets even more mad because he's not getting the response that he wants. And he says, I'm this great general. I command this battleship. I have fleets behind me. You have to get off course. And then the light blinks back. He says, I'm just a mere lighthouse. Old man in the lighthouse. You have to get off course or else you will crash in sync.

SPEAKER_00: 23:21

That's right, yeah. It is pride, it is conceit, it is vanity. Now, how do we reorganize our thinking? Because we need And this is the nuance, perhaps. It's pride versus confidence. We need confidence in our actions. We need confidence in who we are. We need confidence in those things. So this idea of just completely obliterating your ego, it's too one-sided. So the difference between pride is that's the pride. It's that confidence. It's that captain. It's the sort of inflation of this self-image to this astronomical, unreal... And frequently, the underlying thing, there's trauma, there's suffering, there's pain that is being kind of masked and the facade is being built up to be much more grand than what the interior is. Sort of like the... casinos are the great fantastic signage and blinking and come here and you know the facade is great and you go in there and it's hell on wheels right because they all subtly speak to your pride right right so this idea of pride versus confidence and the difference the main difference is confidence speaks from a place of a sort of true understanding If we look at it from a martial arts standpoint, if I'm a red belt, I know the techniques that are required for a red belt. I've practiced sufficiently to get to the red belt. I am a red belt at a red belt level. I know the lower belts, the blue, then green, the yellows, the whites. But I don't know... or haven't trained or haven't accomplished the rank of, let's say, red high, depending on the art, or black belt or what have you. So the problem comes in when we begin to try and present ourselves as a black belt when I'm a red belt. And this is pride. Whereas confidence is, I am a red belt. I've practiced, I've done the things that I needed to do to get here. This is what I know, and stay on that level. Don't make up stuff. Don't try to do more than you know. Every time we overdo, we open just the possibility of mistakes, of injuries, of errors, of what have you. Be confident in who you are. Also

SPEAKER_01: 26:30

looking at the purpose behind why the person is acting in that manner, right? So you have to engage in a little bit of self-reflection. So if you are attacked, or let's say a person says, oh, you can't break this brick, right? And then what is the feeling that you have afterwards? Can you? Can you not? If you determine that you can't, but that feeling gets overridden by the ego that says, I'll show you, right? And then... You hit that brick, and then what happens? Actually, Arun sent him, right? He has a story like this. Our teacher was doing a demonstration at, I don't know if it was Central Park or a park somewhere, and he punches into a watermelon, I believe.

SPEAKER_00: 27:14

Oh,

SPEAKER_01: 27:14

yes. He spears into a watermelon and then eats a handful of it. Which is an amazing thing. I wish we had a video of this to show you all. And then I believe there was a master, a master of another martial art or something on the sidelines, and he goes, oh, I can do that too. And he goes and proceeds and he breaks his fingers. That's right. Here's a man that engaged in this action because, not because he had a true understanding of what he was capable of and was going to show that to the public so that maybe they can improve their lives by understanding that martial arts can build strength in your life. No. All of that Ego trip, he wanted to show off. He just wanted to show off, oh, you can do it, I can do it. Yeah. Right, so those are things that you have to take into account to determine whether the ego has overridden your emotional and mental sphere, and the ego's in the driver's seat, right? So sometimes you gotta put it in check, don't get rid of it. Sometimes we just have to put him in timeout or put him in the backseat. Right. But not kick him out of the car.

UNKNOWN: 28:19

Who's running the show?

SPEAKER_00: 28:20

That's the thing. If your self-knowledge and your self-understanding, because we need ego, right? I mean, it's a necessary part of who we are. For self-preservation.

SPEAKER_02: 28:35

So

SPEAKER_00: 28:37

we organize, and forgive me if I get this wrong, but, you know, Erfroyd and Meister, Jung, and the Western psychologists, the psychotherapists, for the most part, the division of... The psyche is the, we have the conscious mind, the one that we are aware of. And then we have that basement, that in the unaware. Underneath the iceberg is the way that Freud described it. Underneath the iceberg. So the unconscious or the subconscious or whatever the Western psychology term is. The Zen psychology, if you will, divides the psyche so much more finely and it's through experiential understanding of it. So we had mentioned, I think, in the last episode of this podcast, by the way, if you haven't listened to it, as is the microcosm, so is the microcosm. By the way, as a side note, in thinking back on it, someone had asked a question about it. Oh, Milen Sinema, I enjoyed the podcast. Sometimes I think these podcasts could be like three, four... episodes on the same topic. Easily.

SPEAKER_01: 29:53

Afterwards, we're always like, oh, I forgot to say this. It could be this, it could be that. Oh, we didn't talk about this.

SPEAKER_00: 30:00

That's right. Someone just texted me earlier today. They said, oh, I don't think I have to go to the temple anymore. I said, why not? All right, just listen to your podcast. Listen to the conversations,

SPEAKER_01: 30:11

right? We expound the philosophy.

SPEAKER_00: 30:13

And as much as it may seem that it's some dense information at times and around 45 minutes of of an episode, each episode, if, if there is the tiniest possible sampler for your meal or for a concept, these 45 minutes are it. They don't even begin to unpack the, the, the, the real kind of meaning of, of, of whatever the topics that would happen to be upon. And, uh, So this division and the subdivision of consciousnesses, we have the eye consciousness and the ear consciousness and the nose consciousness and the mouth consciousness and the body consciousness. Then we have the conscious mind, the uishik, the sixth one. Seventh is the ego. But then we get hamjangshik and chanje uishik, and they're parts of the aryashik and then muishik and then imuashik, if you really want to get out there into the universe. there are so many subdivisions. And each one of those layers functions in a different way, has a different function, has a different accessibility or inaccessibility. And it really kind of dissects the psyche and the human being and who we are and the world around us in such fine ways. And even though it does so, Still, like a sasquatch, it's fuzzy. Because they're not so clearly defined. We divide them and try and inspect and look at each one under some microscope. And we get this idea that they're such clear divisions. But things happen so quickly, for one. so simultaneously for two, and so undefined by the standards of the end. My fingertips end. And I know they end because the great difference between the temperature of my fingers and the air makes me know, oh, this is where I begin, this is where I end kind of thing. But consciousnesses aren't like that necessarily. So...

SPEAKER_01: 32:41

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: 32:41

And then we have the transcendence of this consciousness and, you know, the most fantastic things are like, you know, when you continue a practice, when you continue training, you do your meditation, you do your spiritual practices, you implement the philosophical... principles in your day-to-day lives. But most and foremost, it's the spiritual practice, the meditation, the prayer. The transformation of the consciousness makes it a different consciousness. The transformation of and changes it to

UNKNOWN: 0:00

.

SPEAKER_00: 33:28

The emperor of no judgment. And this is something to be understood also. The main function of the ego consciousness is the judgment, the preferences of likes and dislikes. And for that very reason, it's a very needed thing. Otherwise, you would eat poisons and you would walk into the middle of the street and... this spiritual and religious psychosis of not participating in the world in the way that we are equipped to do so, because all these things are real. There's a need for these elements of who we are. It's when we lose our bearings. The other way that we must consider ego expression is, of course, pride is a kind of low-hanging fruit and the egotistic tendencies, but shame and self-deprecation and those things are also functions of the ego, right? This is perhaps one that's not so readily understood considered as also the function of the ego. Why am I ashamed? And we'd say, no, I just wanna be good, I just wanna not do shameful things. No, shame and embarrassment come from the fact that ego is present there. I currently have no hair. I mean, I shave, but there are spots that I have no hair. That's the reality of the situation. should I be ashamed of it? In fact, this is the beauty of spending time with Zen masters. When we were running the summer camp, and was walking, and he's balding, right? He's got this male pattern, baldness, kind of traditional look. And he's walking through, and this was Taekwondo summer camp still, back in the day. And he's walking through the camp, and one of the kids is like, huh, you're bold. And I remember all the high-ranking belts, right? All the students just like gasp and freezing because, you know, this was back in the day. The martial arts training was more traditional, so the more martial in its sense. The art was there, but, you know. And so we just... Everyone paused and froze and said, oh my God. What's coming next? You're done. You're done, buddy. He's going to, I don't know what we imagined. What is he going to do? Eat the kid? And I remember inside him looks in a window pane in reflection of it and touches and says, yeah, you're right. I'm bald.

UNKNOWN: 36:39

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 36:40

I have a

SPEAKER_01: 36:41

similar story.

SPEAKER_00: 36:42

It discharges the whole

SPEAKER_01: 36:44

thing.

SPEAKER_00: 36:45

It's true. If it's true, it's true. But shame would be a function of the ego, as would be, what? I'm bald? How dare you? I'm a grandmaster of the arts. What does that have to do with the balding pattern of your follicles?

SPEAKER_01: 37:04

A

SPEAKER_00: 37:04

hundred

SPEAKER_01: 37:04

percent. So years ago, I worked at a behavioral disabilities program at school 14 in Elizabeth. I have to say, I left my blood, sweat, and tears in those hallways. I ran those hallways too much, right? But my heart is there because those were meaningful years of my life that have impacted me to this day. And I remember walking, and there were two kids in the hallway, and one was showing off to the other, trying to be a tough guy. And as I walked by, I hear a mumble under his breath. He's like, baldy. And so then I stop and I turn around and I just kind of muster over him and look down on him and puff myself up. And I see at that moment, he's like, what's coming? I make sort of an angry face. I see his eyes open up and I'm like, it's Dr. Baldy. And I walked away. And I left him there with that. Yeah, so it's understanding like you're saying, understanding... the map and knowing where the pitfalls are, the caverns are, right? Or where the quicksand lies. Where's the par for the course and where are the places that you will get jammed up, right? You have to understand, survey the landscape of your inner world to understand that because when something triggers you and you start to feel shame or when something triggers you and you start to feel pride or this anger comes where you just wanna crush the other person, You have to reflect and see what's going on inside. Who has hijacked my life and taken over my mind and is steering my mind in the direction that will surely lead you to crash? Because oftentimes when the ego's at its worst and it's telling you, oh, you're going to let him talk to you like that? Right? Or, oh, see, you are a piece of this. You are terrible. You are... not worth anything, right? All of those things are going to crush you and destroy your true sense of self-worth, right? And it's funny because I sent you a picture recently of the Himalayan mountains, right? And there was a map of all the people that have died there, right? It was above a certain height. And he said, all those people died of ego death. And I meditated on that. I was like, you know, you're right. Because they all have the sharpers and the guides and they've already... laid out these plans for when it's safe to go and when it's not safe to go. And sometimes, and I've seen in the documentaries, based on your current conditions of your health, you should go back. But when you... You're just almost there. You're almost there. And when the greed to just take it without an understanding of your condition, then you... Yeah, you lost your life

SPEAKER_00: 39:56

for ego. That's in a sense the Buddha's enlightenment, right? Nearly starving to death, engaging in these really extreme aesthetic practices. And the realization is like, okay, if I reach enlightenment now, what's good for it? So you could reach Everest, and then if you die there, what's the point? Is that, you know, it's...

SPEAKER_01: 40:25

Yeah, you trade. What was the cost-benefit of that, right? You traded your life for that moment of what you thought was to be glory, but there's no glory in that.

SPEAKER_00: 40:36

I'm sure, and I'm sure people will argue otherwise. So confidence versus pride. And humility versus humiliation. So no shame needed. Humility will do. no pride needed, confidence will do. Now, having said this, before the purists take to the keyboards, yes, there is transcendence of the ego. Yes, we have it in Zen, a place where there's an absence, in a sense. You just... Those things are the things that are not spoken about. Language falls off. Words won't suffice. Concepts won't suffice. Ideas won't suffice. And so much then of that really otherworldly reality of transcending and doing that thing. But having transcended, it's sort of as you leave... You leave your body, you take a look at it, you come back, and now you know that there's something more than just the small vessel, in a sense, and you come back. And what you return with is you know otherwise. You know that the ego is not what it claims to be.

SPEAKER_01: 42:20

And

SPEAKER_00: 42:21

in having an experience, and this is only experience, Toki Toki doesn't do it. It's only in this experience of it when one returns to oneself and one senses, then one knows how to control the ego. This is where the practice is. Control the ego, not be controlled by it. It's a tool, it's a necessary tool. Don't become a tool yourself on account of it. It will ruin your life because it claims self-preservation. But how many bar fights have started on account of ego under the pretext of self-preservation and some, you know. For nonsense. Honor. And what did it cost you? Honor. You don't know yourself. Don't mention the word honor. Honor meaning I want to protect what? protect my honor, protect my true self. No, you're protecting an image of a self that is in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of the self-defense techniques is don't be there. If you can't handle it, don't be there. So meditation practice and the philosophy associated with it are meant to inform us in our day-to-day lives how to go about it, how to use the tools that we have and not become a tool ourselves.

UNKNOWN: 43:53

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 43:55

I think that's a very good point. There has to be a balance, like in everything that we say, right? So transcending and then returning back. So imagine you were an astronaut and you traveled to the moon and then you were able to jump 15 feet in a single leap, right? Then you come back to Earth, right?

SPEAKER_02: 44:13

Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 44:14

you might have caught a glimpse of that, but you can't apply that principle. Now you want to cross the street by just jumping? Surely you're going to end up in a bad situation. You're going to end up getting hurt. So I think some people really fast have caught a glimpse of the transcendence of self, and then they experience this euphoric feeling. These things, I think, have been highlighted in those moments where you've sacrificed so much, and then you've accomplished something. to help another person. I think mothers that have given childbirth feel this euphoric feeling, right, after they've gone through the pain. They don't feel no pain once they see the sight of the baby. All of that fizzles away. Or people that have worked as EMTs or doctors and have saved another person's life, where they've gone beyond the self and they've helped another person to survive or be happy.

SPEAKER_00: 45:07

There's that famous place, and I think it's in Hawaii, where you pull off a highway and there's this precipitous cliff and people go there to kind of have a view. But it also happens to be a frequent place of suicide jumps. And there was a story where a man was ready to leap. because it's frequently the case, so it's frequented by the police just driving by, making sure nothing of that nature goes on. And the cop in the passenger side had jumped out and grabbed the man as he leapt.

SPEAKER_01: 45:45

And

SPEAKER_00: 45:46

would have been pulled over himself had the second cop not grabbed and rescued the both of them. And in the interview, with the first cop that had grabbed the leaping men, they asked, have you not a family? And he says, I think he said he had a wife and whatever, it was two children, what have you. He says, well, didn't you think about that? Didn't that, he says, that didn't even come into my mind at the time. What I did feel is that if I let this man fall, it is as if I myself would have fallen with him. So this blurring of these divisions between self and other, you know, in the Sambapin, the three marks of impermanence, as in the Buddhist philosophy, there's, you know,

UNKNOWN: 0:00

,

SPEAKER_00: 46:40

namely that all things have no self. And yet, they operate. A beehive And each individual's bees contribute to it in a certain way. Trees contribute to the grand state of the world, etc. There are naturally existing these things. So why does it say then, that all things have no self? It's not a final statement. The question is, And, well, the bigger question is, and I've had that question for many years prior, of, well, why can't they just say the thing that they want to say? And the truth of the matter is that you can't. This is a thing that cannot be talked about. Without experience, all it will do is it will just reinforce more ideas and thinking and headaches. And it's very easy to sit around and philosophize about a thing. We could sit and philosophize about, you know, monocrop farming and the destruction of the soil that it does and how it attracts only the pests that favor the thing and how in such a densely populated monocrop the bugs cannot, the trees or the monocrop cannot send out these chemical signals to, as trees do, to invite, let's say, a parasitic wasp as a sort of self-defense, right? This communication doesn't happen. So we could sit and talk about all this, and we would die of starvation while talking about it. Because you can't eat the idea. You can't eat the concept. And so this was for a long while my complaint about it. Well, why can't they just say what is? And we can't say what is because there ain't words for it. And there ain't concepts of it, and there isn't a picture of it. So no sung, no image of it. Of the thing that is truly who we are. So this idea that there is no ego or there's no self is not entirely accurate. The problem is, as I frequently when kind of try and dredge up some kind of imagery, you've gone shopping and you've come home and you have your keys to your car and you've brought in your groceries, and now you're padding your pockets for where the keys are. And you find that they're not in your pocket, and so what you're going to do, you're going to look first in the usual places. Do you have a little dish by the front door? You're going to look there. Oh, it's not there. You do the pockets thing. It's not there. Maybe it's in my bag. Maybe it's here. And we look everywhere we think. And we look in all the places we've looked. Because of prior experiences, right? Yeah, so we look in all the places we've looked. Likelihood of us looking in the refrigerator is very low. Let me tell you, oftentimes it ends up in the fridge. But that's the point. Just because we can't find it where you think it is, it doesn't mean it does not exist. It's just the attachment, like you mentioned, the attachment and the rigidness and fixation on Not the real thing, the self-inflated image, right? The self-idealization, the self-conceit, all that, that is not it. But it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, period. It just means it's not what we've imagined it to be. It's not where we've imagined it to be. It's not how it's imagined. Then do what we imagine it to, that it does. But from the ultimate standpoint... this ultimate and relative. Yes, there is something. No, we cannot tell because it's not in the places, the usual places that we've looked. And so, but what we have is what we have and what we have to do is learn how to live with it, how to use it properly, how to navigate life without like we said, without the ego running the show.

SPEAKER_01: 51:13

Right. I think I'd like to use the metaphor that we oftentimes give for greed. The ego is like a multivitamin. You take too much of it, it becomes toxic. You don't have any of it, then you get no effect from it. There's this therapeutic range, or this range of function, this range of use, let's say. And you have to figure out where that sweet spot lies in your life. So meditation is a wonderful tool to use in philosophy and prayer to self-reflect and understand the boundaries of who you are. What is truly your limitations so that you know, ah, these are the things I can be confident with. And so even in a case, for example, where a person is giving CPR, you become selfless. You think about the other person, you rush to their aid, and you give of your breath.

SPEAKER_02: 52:02

But

SPEAKER_01: 52:02

remember, to give of your breath, to give the other person life, you also have to inhale too. And this is the balance between both sides. Sort of like everything comes back around, like the inner and the outer, the micro and the macro. And another last point, I am in awe, and I think they're all heroes, those who pierce through the walls and the boundaries of the ego in the sense that This is the extent of knowledge that exists. And they dare to go beyond. This is lost, and many people will go with the flow and just follow the masses. We know that. And say, okay, if it doesn't exist, I haven't seen it. Eight people say they haven't seen it. The majority will agree with that, right? But then there are a few that have a lot of courage, and they have dared to go beyond that. And there have been many wonderful insights and enlightenments that they have brought back to the world to share peace with those around us. And in a more practical sense, also, the Thomas Edisons and the Teslas of back in the day, all of them had to do something like that. Because the latest understanding, or even the quantum physicists, right, the theory of relativity was shattered by them. And so many of them have had to battle the latest understanding of modern day scientists, what the experts say. And they say, no, there's more. And if it wasn't for them, You know, we'd still be using a phone, cranking up a car, or riding a horse, and things like that.

SPEAKER_00: 53:36

Yeah, there's a

SPEAKER_01: 53:37

heroic element in that. You have to have that courage.

SPEAKER_00: 53:39

That flies against the status quo, and it flies against, frankly, our sensory experience of life. This is the difficult element. I mean, now we're getting into more nuanced things, and it's a whole other...

SPEAKER_01: 53:57

Yeah, quantum mechanics can... understand almost the Zen language. I have a patient of mine, she's in Italy right now, and she's getting her doctorate in some, in dark matter, actually. And if you think, and when I hear her speak about these things, it's like, they exist, but they don't exist. So maybe those would be other episodes right there. They exist, but they don't exist. So even modern day science is validating some of the things that we say.

SPEAKER_00: 54:22

Yes. In the interim, and meanwhile, let go my ego. Let go my ego. Um, Don't spend so much time trying to bash it upside its head. Understand it for what it is. When you understand, you know how to use it. When you use it, it's a useful tool when properly used. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other. I'm

SPEAKER_01: 54:49

Myung

SPEAKER_00: 54:50

An Sunim.

SPEAKER_01: 54:51

Thank you for listening. From my heart to yours, I'm Dr. Ruben Lambert. Also, you can check me out at wisdomspring.com or at wisdomspringwellness on Instagram and YouTube. And Myung Eun Sunim, you can find him at soshimsa.org also and at soshimsa on Instagram. Check us out. Find us out there. Like

SPEAKER_00: 55:14

the podcast. Click buttons, bells, hearts, I don't know, thunderbolts, giraffes. And if this

SPEAKER_01: 55:22

touches your heart and you learn something from it. Share.

SPEAKER_00: 55:25

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SPEAKER_01: 55:26

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SPEAKER_00: 55:26

Share it. Share. Thank you so very much. As always. Pleasure. Until next time.