Egolessness, Evolution, Revolution

It's just a thought that occurred to me, while I was practicing meditation, as tends to happen, so I noted it down to come back to later. What I wrote was: "Interesting parallel between idea of egolessness in Buddhism and that of Natural Selection."

It is not so much about a similarity between those two things, but about the dynamics around the ideas. At the moment there is a heightened interest in Darwin and his theories, particularly his Theory of Natural Selection and species formation. His ideas were revolutionary at the time, and are still highly controversial in certain areas.I think that the Buddha's theory of Egolessness is another revolutionary idea, perhaps a contentious one, perhaps not, whose time has come.

The idea of egolessness is not a new one in certain cultures. The ideas of the Buddha spread two and a half thousand years ago in Asia. Here in the West, there have been proponents of some Buddhist ideas for around two hundred years, but in the early days the ideas were often elucidated by scholars with little feeling for or personal experience of the teachings. Only in the last fifty years or so have experienced teachers from Buddhist cultures been to the West to teach.

And what is the essence of that message? The initial and perhaps most vital teachings of the Buddha were 1) Beings suffer; 2) They suffer because they believe in ego, some ongoing, eternal part of themselves which needs constant reinforcement and protection; 3) That there is an end to that process of creating ones personal world of pain and 4) There is a particular path (the Buddhist path) that leads you to that cessation.

You could, cynically, look on it as purely a sales pitch for Buddhism. In fact it seems fairly traditional to start trying to convert someone to your religion by drawing attention to their pain and hardship and promising some relief from that if they do what you say. The key point here is that the Buddha actually gives you the answer, he doesn't say pay me some money and then you can have the answer, he gives it straight away, then says, you don't have to believe me, see for yourself.

Number 2) above is the answer. It's not entirely complete without 1, 3 and 4, but it's the essential message. Which is that however much one looks, one can never find a part of oneself that is eternal, unchanging. Existence is rather slippery, it seems, neither there nor not there.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is not philosophical musings, however important, nor to convert anyone, particularly. But more to point out that like the ideas that Darwin proposed, it's revolutionary. Likewise it is also hard to prove, except by looking and looking. There is no formula that will capture it.

So to be a little bolder here, what are the parallels between the two theories? (Let's call egolessness a theory.) Well, in one way they both deny the necessity of God's involvement in creating and maintaining this world we live in. Natural selection suggests a mechanism for the diversity of life on this planet, and as I've said in a previous post, there is plenty of evidence for it, and no evidence against. I realise that's a contentious point, but it seems clear to me.

Egolessness means there is no need to explain beings with some idea of 'soul' or 'ghost in the machine'. That humans are a product of many causes and conditions, ever changing in response to surroundings and their responses, rather than having some nugget of identity at the base. There's a similar mechanistic idea here to that of natural selection.

I would go so far as to say that the idea of human consciousness being an emergent property of the complexity of the brain, a current contender in rational scientific circles, does not contradict the Buddhist view. However neither does the more thoughtful idea that everything is consciousness, neither really do some kinds of creationist logics, funnily enough. The main point, that fundamentally there is no one single thing that makes me Me, is fairly robust.

My personal view? I did what the Buddha suggested and spent a lot of time looking at my own mind. By the way, I have read in books about consciousness that introspection doesn't work. I disagree, but one needs to retain an open mind, in the sense of no fixed preconceptions, and no particular goal. In any case, my experience over the last 15 years has not disagreed with the theory of egolessness. I see patterns, some deeply ingrained habitual patterns that make my life difficult at times. But I have in no way been able to pin down the Me-ness of me. It's pretty liberating.