I’ve been thinking a lot about the ideas I mentioned in the last Men’s Monday: specifically, that it’s possible to develop a balanced approach to ego and enlightenment… that a synthesis of the two would make a more complete path to spiritual development. I was sure that this was not a new idea, but I knew I was approaching it from my own weird perspective. Anyway, it’s kind of pushed a lot of other things out of my mind, but I’m feeling closer to a clearer understanding of it.

I found an interview with Dennis “Genpo Roshi” Merzel that Bill Harris did as a part of his series on Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Pop-cultural enlightenment gurus like Tolle and Deepak Chopra always trigger my gag reflex.. especially when, as in this case, they’re heavily promoted by both Harris and, Buddha help us, Oprah. At the same time, these people are often learned and experienced: it’s just that they’ve chosen to make a grab at the incredibly lucrative self-help market. Hard to blame them, with all that money lying around.

Merzel himself is in Maezumi Roshi’s dharma lineage (as is one of my favorite teachers, Charlotte Beck) and has been studying and teaching for many years. He’s put a fair amount of energy of late into promoting his Big Mind practice, which purportedly allows you to achieve enlightenment in a day. Which, I should note, reeks heavily of bullshit, and the $150 fee doesn’t help with its credibility as an authentic spiritual practice. But, I take what wisdom I can find wherever I can get it. You can make up your own mind.

What I found useful in Merzel’s talk was his approach to balancing out ego and non-dualistic awareness. Ego, in a lot of spiritual traditions, is something to be eliminated, cut out like a tumor. While I think that egoic thought is at the root of most or not all of our problems - as people and as a species - I don’t see a solution in forcing people to somehow eliminate their ego.

First off, getting rid of the ego is an enormously difficult task that even enlightened masters struggle with. But secondly - and more significantly in my opinion - ego is a part of who we are as human beings. And I can’t see the value in denying part of our humanness in pursuit of an abstract goal. The task, it seems to me, is to put the ego and the Buddhamind in harmony. Merzel has a way of presenting this which I found valuable.

He presents a triangle, with egoic thought or “everyday mind” on the left and non-dual awareness or (retching a little) “the power of now” on the right. Ego mind he calls, with some validity, “human.” We need our egos to move through the day, to make decisions about what’s better or worse, and to provide that striving for excellence that’s needed to develop on a spiritual path. Nondual awareness is referred to as “being,” and it’s the consciousness of the Eternal that guides the ego mind in making its choices.

He brings the two together at the apex of the triangle and calls it (retching again) “Human Being” - placing ego as a tool of non-dual awareness, rather than excluding it altogether:

the triangle described by Merzel

There’s a very interesting story I’ve thought a lot about lately. It was written by a neuroanatomist who suffered a stroke and observed the effect it had on her consciousness, from the point of view of someone who understands how the different parts of the brain work. She had a golf-ball-sized blood clot that put pressure on her brain’s left hemisphere, rendering her unable to walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. She describes this experience in terms that resemble those used by people who have had glimpses of true enlightenment: a sense of oneness with the Universe, freed from any sense of being a separate self. When the blood clot was removed, she resumed being able to use language, study… and communicate her experience to others.

It seems to me that we, as humans, have the incredible gift of being able to experience ourselves as both individuals (left hemisphere) and as part of Oneness (right hemisphere). I have a suspicion that we are Evolution’s way of becoming aware of itself, and that it is this element of our nature that makes so many people drawn to religion and spirituality. However you choose to view it, though, I think it is hard to make the case that either ego or non-dual, Universal consciousness should be allowed to completely eclipse the other half of our natures.

We are all of a piece. We diminish ourselves by denying any part of ourselves. And I believe that the path to reaching our true potential is in accepting the totality of what we are. The story of driving Lucifer out of Heaven is re-enacted constantly in our culture: from faith-healers driving out demons to New Agers doggedly sitting on their meditation cushions trying to eliminate their egos.

Lucifer isn’t bad. Just misunderstood.