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It’s possible to explain this in terms of ‘mental’ or ‘psychic’ energy – that is, the energy that is used by our mind, through our mental and psychological functioning. Our strong ego structure needs a great deal of energy in order to function, in the same way that a massive house with dozens of room requires – and uses up – a lot of electricity. In particular, our constant thought-chatter uses up a lot of energy. As the modern-day American mystic Bernadette Roberts puts it, ‘The continual movement [of thoughts] inward and outward, back and forward … consumes an untold amount of energy that is otherwise left free when the mind
is restricted to the now-moment.’40 The actual structure of the ego requires a lot of energy to be maintained too, in the same way that the physical structures of the body, such as our bones and internal organs, need a constant input of energy to maintain themselves. There has to be some input of energy just to keep such a powerful structure intact and in place. (We’ll look at this energy in a lot more detail in Chapter 5.) All of this means that with the ego ‘gobbling up’ so much of our mental energy, there’s very little available for us to use in perceiving the world around us.
In fact, we seem to have developed a psychological mechanism specifically for the purpose of reducing the psychic energy we use up through perception. In our mind there is a ‘desensitizing mechanism’ which turns the is-ness of our surroundings to familiarity, as a way of conserving energy.
This mechanism acts on all our perceptions. It edits out the reality of all our experience. It makes the world dreary to us so that we don’t need to pay attention to it, in order to ensure that the ego always has enough energy to meet its requirements.
Our strong ego creates a sense of duality and separation. It gives us the illusion that we are each an isolated entity, alone inside our body with our own thoughts and feelings, disconnected from the world ‘out there’ and the people and animals and plants that make up that world. The boundaries of our ego are fixed and firm, ‘walling us off’ from the world around us so that we can’t experience the kinship and shared sense of being that indigenous peoples felt towards other beings and their land.
Duality and separation create a basic sense of anxiety within our mind. At the same time, the thought-chatter of our ego creates a constant disturbance inside us, so that our being is never still or peaceful. And since our mind is tinged with anxiety already (as a result of duality and separation), our thought-chatter is often negatively based, creating worries and problems. And finally, as we’ll see later, the energy of our being has a natural quality of happiness. But when the ego develops and monopolizes the energy of our being, we lose touch with this natural well-being.
The desire to take drugs may also come – at least in part – from this instinct to transcend our normal consciousness.
Most of us seem to be satisfied with occasional glimpses of a more intense reality, like city dwellers who need to go out into the countryside every so often to get a ‘fix’ of nature. We are content to be asleep as long as we wake up briefly from time to time. However, a small number of people feel such a strong dissatisfaction with their normal consciousness that the desire for transcendence completely dominates their lives. These people have a powerful sense that something isn’t right about the way they are, that they aren’t existing in the state they should be in and that the world as they see it is not the world as it is. They know that they are asleep and feel a powerful instinct to wake up.
AI Summary
Waking From Sleep by Steve Taylor presents key insights from the Zen tradition. The 8 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 8 are particularly representative.
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