If there's one thing that will humble you it's trying to fathom the scale of the universe. You think a celebrity matters at these scales? But don't let it make you feel impotent - rejoice at the fact that you're alive, you exist and the world is fucking interesting. Even if you just stare out the window all day, you're a consciousness residing in a stardust body observing the thing that made you.
There is a paved road to clinical depression which starts with thoughts like these. I know it because I've taken it.
Life stops having meaning if you take this too seriously - I mean, why do anything or achieve anything if we're just specs in time and space destined to die and be forgotten ?
Besides, this doesn't necessarily imply humility. If it doesn't matter then it doesn't matter - if you've got a small/quiet ego or you're a larger-than-universe egomaniac... because... we're just a minute...
"Why do anything?". Presented with these options, which would you prefer:
A. Live a normal life and be promised that after your death people will fabricate a story of your adventure, heroism and glory?
B. Live a life of adventure, heroism and glory with the promise that when you die nobody will remember you?
The point being, why derive meaning from the notion of being remembered by people you will never know, when the meaning may be found in the experiences our actions produce now?
The heights of human happiness (yeah, misery too) are ours for the taking. Derive meaning from trying to squeeze as much of the former from life as we possibly can.
But to a small number of people you can be everything.
The best antidote to avoid swinging the other way, into nihilism, is to simply live in the present as much as possible and enjoy what's there. Things don't need to be permanent and important to be enjoyable. Think about games. We know the outcome doesn't matter in any larger frame of reference, but we still like playing and get wrapped up in them for their own sake. Life is just another game--not ultimately significant, but fun to get wrapped up in if you don't take the outcome overly seriously.
And the funny thing is, those who hone that strongest sense of subjective meaning and well being in how they see the world, are the ones who make an outsized butterfly-effect impact on the world, coming closest to overcoming that objective meaninglessnes.
So basically, imo the answer to why do anything? Is because you believe something is worth doing subjectively/on faith/on instinct. Only then does it have a chance to build toward a more objective answer to why do it, in its impact on people & history.
“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Minuteness is a problem when you feel like an outsider 'brought into' the world to 'confront' it, but is less problematic if you feel like part of a greater whole.
When I contemplate the vast cosmic scale and look up in the stores, my jaws drop open like a kid, and I go "whoa..." That's the sense of awe and profoundness. It doesn't have to be about humility or about insignificance.
Because being aware that your actions in the greater scale of things mean less, make it easier for you to appreciate the moment and what you can do for those who will be around when you are.
There's a quality in these one-liners from the Zen tradition that I haven't experienced since I was obsessed with physics in high-school.
The gold bar isn't in a large empty room. It's in a room filled with piles of gold, each more massive than the planet Mercury, for every person on Earth. Amongst those piles, would that single bar still hold value to you?
Edit: Formatting engine didn't like using * for multiplication
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Is a nice recap of just how vast the universe really is and how utterly insignificant we are within it, in spite of all we're figured out and have achieved collectively. It certainly humbles me.
The idea that if there are millions of planets like ours, containing billions and billions of beings like us, on average your "problems" could be a lot worse. I find it humbling imagining the epicness of some of the struggles going on elsewhere in the universe.
For something more from a particular tradition, "Mindfulness in Plain English" is a reasonably good start.
One confusing thing is the use of the word "ego," by the way. A good working definition is "a belief that the self is more than a mental construct," and so "loud ego" refers to putting this belief at the forefront of one's life. Note that this has nothing to do with believing in a self, the construct of self most certainly exists[2] and is useful (though likely not in the way you think it does or is). This is in contrast to Freudian 'ego' which is, as I understand it, the mediator between superego and subconscious. Like, as an analogy, your stomach is an important organ, but it has its rightful place. There's no need for structuring your life around, elevating, and identifying with the stomach as the seat of conscious experience. (Though we do structure our lives around eating. The stomach, digestive system, and body still need food to exist after all...)
[1] A related feeling which I'm sure people in the knowledge business would recognize is that unpleasant sensation of coming into contact with something confusing. If the goal is understanding a subject, then this is a good indicator for the things which could use more work, but it is surprising how resistant we can be to realizing it: it's as if confusing things sometimes become invisible!
[2] I'm ontologically uncomfortable to be categorically claiming this, but it seems true enough to me.
It's possible to strip out the reaction of shame from confusion. At which point, it will feel like a mental block where things just don't have much clarity and things are not connecting, but you're no longer treating it as something to hide from others.
http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/stoicismtoday/2015/09/12/announcin...
You can do that bit by bit. Everyday, do one thing that you really don't want to do. Everyday, refrain from doing something that you want to do and can do.
If you want to go hardcore, expand this circle of do's and don'ts over the course of a month. By the end of the month, you'll be living as an ascetic, and that is when you'll know you have mastery over yourself.
Then every year repeat this asceticism for about 1-2 weeks. Withdraw from the world, read and write, eat one meal a day. That way your control over yourself keeps strong.
I think Wittgenstein hit the nail on the head when he said that the most profound philosophical truths can only be told in the form of jokes. This is the origin of humor in happy people.
EDIT: [1] A lot of what I find so amusing in the Zen tradition is that it is so good at articulating these jokes/truths in a minimum amount of words & its rejection of philosophical musing, etc.
load average: 5.38, 5.30, 4.11
This is, by the way, the basis of Buddhism, which nowadays is ruined by piles upon piles of narcissistic commentaries of so-called teachers.
The reasons we have a lot of "scripts" running in our mind is because they have historically helped us survive and pass on our genetics. Turning them off doesn't manifest joy but a genetic dead-end, in aggregate.
We're also talking about 'ego' as if there is one universal definition we all agree to. It can mean self-centredness and haughtiness, or it can mean the continuous self that one person goes through from birth to death - essentially our memory. It can be many things to many people, and different thing to the same person, at different times.
But within the context of Upanishads that you've quoted, ego is all that is negative about ourselves. But then - letting go of all that is bad is very logical, although not original.
The most important realisation with Buddhism I had was the idea that you can't know the truth but you can be it. That changed everything for me.
Again why do we want to demonize or characterize not having a quiet ego as less superior to having a quiet ego. I do think that if the non-quiet ego is bombastic and misleads people by stating not true statements, that can be a problem.
You can indeed interpret these statistics in many ways, but you first need to know the statistics.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254336923_The_cultu...
He's also not making statements about the superiority of anyone. I think he's trying to encourage less focus on superiority in the first place.
What's really bothering you about this article? You seem really frustrated.
I haven't gone through the referenced paper but I think it should answer your question to an extent. Also, I feel that the author has been quite diligent has linked to multiple papers to back up his points.
Social change has occured as well of course, hugely, the availability of information about other countries and other ways of living have contributed to that.
Susan Cains book "Quiet" is an exceptional exploration of the field, and well worth reading to breakdown some of the misconceptions about introverts.
People often take ego as an indicator for status or intelligence. If you're not asserting yourself, you don't know as well, or you're not as smart as others. Humbleness doesn't mix well with assertiveness. Assertive people need to be humble around humble people, and the other way around. With just two persons it might work, add more and you get interesting group dynamics.
Humility doesn't mean letting people walk all over you, it means not thinking you're the most important person in the room.
Mr Myagee (sp?) from Karate Kid was both humble and assertive.
Once me and colleagues were discussing some technical issue with our customer. At one point I suggested a solution which I wasn't really confident in, but I liked to hear his opinion anyway. The guy listened to me and then, in split second, resumed the previous thread of conversation as if exactly nothing had happened.
I didn't even feel offended, just spent the next minute silently amazed by this weird glitch in human psychology. His reaction looked so automatic that I felt he wouldn't even be able to consciously recall this event afterwards.
But a lot of the times when ego is triggered today have nothing to do with survival advantages or success. Identifying this fact in itself is a first step to quieting down the ego. Identifying a feeling as not valid (just because a feeling is 'natural' doesn't automatically make it valid) can take away a lot of the justification to perpetuate it.
For example "Facet #1: Detached awareness", I don't really see what "detached" adds to the category of awareness if it only involves those 3 questions mentioned in the article. I can easily imagine people that also score low on those questions but who practice "involved awareness" feeling really attached to what they are doing in a very aware state of mind.
Same with the rest of facets, the idea that "Facet #3: Perspective taking" involves quieting your ego is a point of view that is not obvious and you will have to prove somehow. I think for a lot of people empathy intuitively involves feeling the pain of others as your own, which is not a detached feeling at all, and involves a strong involvement of the ego.
And I really can not see how the last point of personal growth is supposed to fit with the rest of them. It seems like the typical Western Buddhist marketing, they start speaking about how alienated we are in our consumerist way of life, some love and compassion follow, but the real selling point is that with their help and a little bit of detachment you can even be MORE successful on the consumerist game.
All in all I don't buy it unless there's more to it.
In our lab, we recognize is as deactivation in the PCC, some of our collaborators recognize it as deactivation in the DMN, measurable with both EEG/fMRI.
>All in all I don't buy it unless there's more to it.
I'd say it's preferable if more people don't feel like they have to "buy" into it… but as you know, there's a burgeoning industry surrounding such, but I'm mostly grateful that I get to be apart of working on the technology which I'd say will be way more useful outside of just meditation and contemplative practices…
All this has been talked about by various western authors and scholars before(Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Carl G. Jung etc.) and as far as I understand them, they all agree on one thing: western people are good at being individuals, having an ego, and it would be mistake to start removing this part of ourselves and think about it as something bad. Of course we should be integrating mindfullness and controlling our narcissistic behaviour, but without antagonizing our ego.
I'm reading Marcus Aurelius (AD121-180) right now. It's one of the themes he covers over & over again.
Of course, I'm probably going to die pretty soon (relatively speaking), and I've come to terms with that, but you should question the inevitability of death.
This is change happening at the microscopic scale all the way to the macroscopic scale: the death of a thought, the death of an emotion, the death of an idea, the death of an ideal, the death of a pet, the death of a person, the death of a group, the death of a startup, the death of a community, the death of a nation, the death of a civilization, the death of a star, the death of a galaxy, the death of the universe.
Real change does not happen without the death of the old.
Change is inherent. Changes happen with or without you. Resisting change makes from some incredible drama, but it doesn't have to be a struggle.
You could find longevity treatments so that your body does not die, but I think people will ultimately find the whole thing fruitless even if it works.
See also: http://tabcloseddidntread.com/
For some people, on some issues, there is a need to assert themselves. I've met people for whom, some issue, left them feeling victimized, helpless, and hopeless. There's a shift that happens when, such a person drops that sense of victimization, and develops the sense of the initiative, of agency, of being able to make choices. For a lot of people, this idea that you can make choices (as opposed to merely taking options presented in front of you) is life-altering.
Likewise, when you are used to making choices and having an effect on the world, all sorts of things now come up. This includes the asshole (someone acting from entitled superiority), the jerk, (someone acting as if surrounded by idiots), and so forth.
As one of my friends put it, the "ego" -- and by that, I speak of "the acquired self", or "the conditioned self" -- likes to take credit for everything even if it is not the source of everything. That means that even humility, modesty, charity, mercy can get hijacked by the ego. I've met people, even meditators, for whom, the ego hijacks the spiritual development that comes out of their practices.
One of the things the ego can hijack is that very capability of making choices (real choice, not just taking one of the options). We have long associated the acquired self with this idea of making choices, but making real Choice ... the ego actually shies away from it.
It's similar to how most people don't actually want real Change. Real change has much more to do with death. People tend to seek out novelty, instead -- apparent change that doesn't really change anything deep down.
One of the things I've been working on in the past week or so in my meditation is the relationship between posturing and posture. Posturing happens as a result of clashing egos. In some cases, maybe it is just one person thinking they need to posture, while no one else is participating. The noun "posture", though, is neutral, associated with "martial arts stance", or "yoga asana". I've found through martial arts, there is a particular feeling that comes from wanting to win and overcome the other person, which leads to becoming physically unbalanced, and then the other person exploits that. My desire to win and submit the the other person is the seed of defeat. A lot of work went into being sensitive to balance and imbalance ... to seek out balance within myself, to upset the balance in my opponent, to correct postures and structure of the body, to learn how to break all of that. It's only in the last week that it dawned on me that posturing is accompanied with the same kind of imbalance in the emotional and social dimension, and that by simply by dropping things to the ground, the desire to win an argument disappears.