"Ego" (New Latin - circa 1789 A.D.) is from the Latin word meaning "I". By returning to the meaning of the good English word "I", most of the b.s. disappears - such as using the English word-article "the" in front of the word "ego".
Maharishi's idea of the expansion of the "I" to cosmic dimensions is not founded upon Shankara's Kevala Advaita but rather upon the teaching of Kashmiri Shaivism. It is this teaching about Shiva's "Aham" (I) contracting through Anava mala to become the illusioned and powerless individual (anu) and then expanding to realize it's real status as Shiva that is the source of this idea. He received this view from Swami Lakshman Joo and not from SBS. That is why SCI has little to do with Shankara's Advaita. This is likewise true of MMY's Rig Veda bhasya which reads like Kashmiri Shaivism couched in psycho-quantum mechanics. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, doctordumbass@... wrote: > Here's a question:Â if the ego has expanded to cosmic level, which is what Maharishi explained, then what does it mean to be egocentric?! > > I was using 'egocentric' as a shorthand for the identification with the small self. A sense of self, or ego, must exist. Nothing wrong with Cosmic Ego. The difference comes with which ego we are identifying with, the small, egocentric one, or the Cosmic Ego, unbounded and universal. > > Remember MMY's talk on "Identification", that when we gaze into a flower, we get lost in the flower, losing our identity in the flower? It is like that. There is no way to get *lost* in the identification of the small self, and still retain the awareness of Cosmic Ego. The two cannot co-exist. > **On the one hand, this statement that we are all enlightened, is true, in terms of everyone's potential. However, the way in which it is commonly used, is as a fiction. It is as if I handed you an avocado, and charged you $100,000 - $2 for the avocado, and $99,998 for the full-sized tree, residing latent in its seed. > > So as a Rah, Rah, feel-good statement, yeah, we are all enlightened. As a practicality, the tree is still within the avocado, so it only costs two bucks.
