The Ego’s Default
Recently I was reading about the art of Gung Fu, an art practice with its basic structure in the essence of Tai-Chi – Yin-Yang. It is an art form Bruce Lee engaged in tenaciously as well as I’ve read. His one assertion “be like water” – fight not against the flow of the world, but go with it – rings continuously when I think of the art form.
I have spent many of my experiences fascinated with such an artistic aspect of life as well as relishing in the satisfaction of the results. Nonetheless, when faced with the reality of the world that compels a recognition of the difficulty to ‘be like water’, I believe there arrives one of two decisions to make: to succumb to the faults of the ego or to overcome those faults.
Such a fault, among others, is the act of revenge. Thus, the saying “hurt people hurt people.” And recently I have been thinking about it extensively:
“The revengeful soul will always fail to realize the value of compassion and forgiveness. For it is never able enough to abandon such a fault; to retaliate out of pain simply because all of its focus is to make the cause of its pain, a subject or an object, feel the same pain as it is feeling.”
I have continually found myself playing with the meaning of those words and go as far as to rationalize the truths within them. How can ‘Person A’ understand ‘Person B’ if ‘Person A’ focuses only on his/her own self – the ego’s instinctual desires? And while it is important to focus on ourselves, it still remains true that we must be able to show compassion to others to solidify our humanity and connections with them even when it is not in our best interests. Reason being, those connection with others gives rise to a developing understanding that fosters even more compassion. Furthermore, to show compassion or empathy to another soul awakens a sense of recognition felt by the person receiving the empathy; a recognition of their own being as important and valuable to another person. A recognition that shows, to the deepest degree, that we are just one individual among the many within the world. And those we call our enemies deserve no less even if they are ‘bad’ in the simplest meaning of the word, even when they have caused us pain.
However, that word – ‘bad’ – must be considered with the Gung-Fu art form and Bruce Lee’s muse of ‘being like water.’ The idea of Yin-Yang reflects the balance in the world and notion of values in the good and the bad. It is a hard pill to swallow, but it made me think about this one character I read about in Octavia E. Butler’s The Patternmaster series – Doro.
Doro, a spirit, which I will refer to here as “It” due to the context of gender in the novel, simply wants to live and reproduce to ensure “It’s” survival for generations to come in the form of superhumans. The problem is, Doro has to inhabit a human body and after that body can no longer sustain Doro, or serves the purposes Doro has for the body, Doro departs with a spiritual transfer to another body thus killing the previous host indirectly. One may say Doro is ‘bad’ in the sense of evil, but it is also debatable. Doro’s actions is a requirement for “It’s” survival after all.
On the one hand, it sounds sickeningly immoral as it reflects the taking of life with the rationale on the other hand that better lives will come about through reproduction and superior development. Nevertheless, in such a moment, Doro isn’t thinking about compassion or empathy among other things. All Doro is thinking about is the potential pain to be felt if Doro, It-self, does not create new beings for betterment in the future. Compassion and/or empathy is the least of Doro’s worries and succumbing to the fault of the ego, instinctual desires, could be regarded as what led Doro to surviving through the taking of life unintentionally. For Doro, it appears to be a “looking ahead” ordeal wherein ‘It’ prevents ‘It’s’ own pain by causing the pain of others first.
For us humans, our faults and instinctual desires are what makes part of who we are. Our egos, in the sense of a revengeful soul and our challenging that aspect of our soul is our Yin-Yang. In the end, the default is a lack of consideration that causes us to jump in a situation without rational thought. Yet, the moments of our deep reflective thinking before we jump revengefully is our consideration of our own pains and the potential pains of others. Those pains are there to give us a sense of understanding of what gives us peace. It is in those moments that we are able to realize the value of empathy, the act of being like water, and the act of fighting not against the world – not against the subject or object of our pains – but flowing with the world in a balanced way. Thus, ‘the act of flowing with’ illustrates that ‘you’ and ‘I’ are not the only ones in the world. And so, consequently, the ego’s default loses.
