Excerpt from a book

[alexey]

This is from a book called “The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation” by Chogyam Trungpa. I think this part, especially the last paragraph, does a very good job describing the nature of human neurosis.

Cosmic Joke

In order to cut through the ambition of ego, we must understand how we set up me and my territory, how we use our projections as credentials to prove our existence. The source of the effort is to confirm our solidity is an uncertainty as to whether or not we exist. Driven by this uncertainty, we seek ot prove our own existence by finding a reference point outside ourselves, something with which to have a relationship, something solid to feel separate from. But the whole enterprise is questionable if we really look back and back and back. Perhaps we have perpetuated a gigantic hoax?

The hoax is the sense of the solidity of I and other. This dualistic fixation comes from nothingness. In the beginning there is open space, zero, self-contained, without relationship. But in order to confirm zeroness, we must create one to prove that zero exist. But even that is not enough; we might get stuck with just one and zero. So we begin to advance, venture out and out. We create two to confirm one’s existence, three by four and so on. We set up a background, a foundation from which we can go on and on to infinity. This is what is called samsara, the continuous vicious cycle of confirmation of existence. One confirmation needs another confirmation needs another…

The attempt to confirm our solidity is very painful. Constantly we find ourselves suddenly slipping off the edge of a floor which had appeared to extend endlessly. Then we must attempt to save ourselves from death by immediately building an extension to the floor in order to make it appear endless again. We think we are safe on our seemingly solid floor, but then we slip off again and have to build another extension. We do not realize that the whole process is unnecessary, that we do not need a floor to stand on, that we have been building all these floors on the ground level. There was never any danger of falling or need for support. In fact, our occupation of extending the floor to secure our ground is a big joke, the biggest joke of all, a cosmic joke. But we may not find it funny: it may sound like a serious double cross.