Well, so in the same way, he said, “Look, you heard a bomb coming at you-you could hear it whistle, and you knew it was right above you and headed straight at you, and that you were finished-and you accepted it. And he said, “Well, I tell you what, a lot of my work has to do with people who went through spiritual crises during the war.” And he said, “You know, we all know when a person’s in an absolutely extreme situation, and they accept it, there is a possibility of a natural satori.” And that’s what I mean when I was explaining that, when one gets to an extreme-that is to say, to the point where you realize there is nothing you can do about life, nothing you can not do about life-then you’re the mosquito biting the iron bull. He was a former German diplomat who had studied Zen in Japan, and when he came back after the war, he opened a meditation school and retreat in the Black Forest. And I’m not going to put you down on that account, you see?īack in 1958 I was in Zürich, and there met a most extraordinary man by the name of Karlfried von Dürckheim. But if, on the other hand, you haven’t, you haven’t. If you got that yearn, then you’ve got that yearn. If that’s the only thing that’ll satisfy you, and you feel that deep down inside you.
That may not be very good, but on the other hand, those tricks are only necessary in the sense that I would say to someone, “It’s necessary for you to go see a psychiatrist if you think you must.” And if you’re not going to be satisfied without going to Japan and studying Zen Buddhism from a Rōshi-okay, you better go. Now, perhaps I shouldn’t tell you that-but you see, I’m not a guru in that I don’t give individual spiritual direction to people. It’s convincing you in more than a theoretical way. Only, it’s convincing you very thoroughly. So all these trials that gurus put their students through have, as their ultimate object, convincing you that you can’t do anything. Now, that sounds very discouraging, doesn’t it?
Because we ask the question-if we hear about people who have transcended the ego-well, we ask, “How do you do that?” Well, I say, “What do you mean, ‘you?’ How do ‘you’ do that?” Because the you you’re talking about doesn’t exist! So you can’t do anything about it anymore than you can cut a cheese with a line of longitude. But we are so hung up on this concept that it confuses us, even in the proposition that it might be possible for us to feel otherwise. Even though the idea of an “I” with a name, with a being, is naturally useful for social communication, provided we know what we are doing and take it for what it is. So that we get the ego as the marriage of an illusion to a futility. So that, in other words, this feeling of tightness is the physical referent for the psychological image of ourselves. So that chronic tension-which in Sanskrit is called saṅkoca, which means contraction-is the root of what we call the feeling of the ego.
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