Beyond the Ego: New Values for a Global Neighbourhood

Sitakant MahapatraT

HE paper seeks to delineate the ego-centred narcissistic personalityof our time, examines the factors that have slowly led to it and its
utter incompatibility with the “global village” or global neighbourhood,which is so much a reality today.
It then goes on to examine what could be the new route out of thisself-destroying personality—the imperative journey in today’s world. It
concludes with a plea for a new set of values that alone can redeem theindividual and integrate him into the web of communitarian life as inearlier centuries.
Search for New Values for Our Global Neighourhood

Call it Marshal McLuhan’s global village or the new imagery of global
neighbourhood the world today is indeed, to a large extent, in our drawing room. Aldous Huxley had arraigned flew with a hearty laugh. But
today, in the new millenium, the internet makes the citizen or netizen(or a net-slave, if you like and our world really too wired, too connected. The Oklahoma bombing, the Gujarat or Kobe earthquakes reverberate in our drawing-rooms. Ecology, economics and culture have now to
be integrated. The Rio Conference, and the WTO have been followedby the discovery and recognition of our “creative diversity” and thegreat imperative of mainstreaming culture in the development process.
The latter was the theme of the World Commission on Culture andDevelopment of which this author had the privilege of being a part. The
realization has dawned that God may be dead but as Vaclav Havel
would say, man is very sick. And the roots of our sickness none hadseen more clearly than Lord Buddha. The Prince did not ask his father
the King to distribute his wealth among the poor or to preserve ecology.
For he had seen at greater depth the existential human condition. He
was not an escapist to go away from home. He left home for he loved
man too much to be satisfied with palliatives.
And Buddhism in its various manifestations, particularly the shape it
took in the hands of Rev. Nichiren and the Soka Gakkai movement has
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striven hard to achieve human happiness and peace in more concreteand socially-oriented ways.
Mr. Daisaku Ikeda, as president of the Soka Gakkai International andhis wonderful meeting of minds and dialogues with greats like Arnold
Toynbee, Linus Pauling, Johan Galtung, Bryan Wilson and others has,over the years, gone ahead with this relentless search for new values forour global neighourhood peace and human happiness. His book The
Living Buddha is a tribute to the new role that Buddhism and SGI playin the new millennium. This author has immense regard for what he hasdone in this direction.
The Narcissistic Personality of Our TimeLet us have a look at what ails today’s man, the selfcentred narcissisticman.
Narcissism is basically a strong and ideal metaphor of the humancondition in our times. A host of social and cultural factors have gone
into the making of this state of mind which emerges out of a void within and an inability to connect meaningfully with others. It is not just an
acquisitive or authoritarian personality. The former was the hallmark of
the early stages of bourgeois capitalism that characterized the 19th century political economy in most of Europe. Today the acquisitive spirit
does not want any acquisition as insurance against the future for thesimple reason that the existence of the future itself is doubted. Insteadwhat is passionately desired is the immediate or instantaneous gratification of wishes and demands. Life is sought to be lived as a never-ceasing, restless and ever-unsatisfied flood of desires from which there is no
respite. And modern information technology and massive advertisement
industry do precisely that. Descartes is turned upside down. It is nolonger cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore, I am. It is now we think
therefore you are. In fact you don’t even have to think. Researchers in
multi-million dollar business have done all the thinking for you in terms
of profit-loss calculus! They have struggled hard to determine not only
what soap of shampoo you should use or what food you should take but
also how you should adjust your relationship to others and manage yourlife.
Secondly this personality is not an authoritarian personality which isanchored to a highly egotistic self that arrogates to itself all knowledge
or all decision making capacity. Such an authoritarian personality that
imposes its will on others at least occasionally develops a guilt-complex. The present narcissist is not a dictatorial political-economic man.
He is a troubled, anxiety-ridden psychological man. This is perhaps theBEYOND THE EGO

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end product of bourgeois individualism. Such a personality cannot eventhink of imposing his own certainties on others. In fact he hardly possesses any certainties. He is himself unsure of any meaning in his own
life and therefore regards everyone as a rival. He has forfeited his grip
on reality and his own life.
The narcissistic personality not only does not crave for meaning; hedenies the possibility of any meaning beyond the moment, beyond possessions, beyond himself. This is the dreadful impoverishment of thepsyche from where there is no return. Tom Wolfe calls this narcissism
as the “third awakening.” It is an awakening into the terrible silence ofthe ego-centric self which lives for the moment and for himself. To sum
up narcissism has become the most telling metaphor of the human condition in our time. Its twin faces are total ego-centrism with all its anxiety and helplessness and the denial of all connectivity, all linkages toother.
The Long Story of the Broken Gestalt
Once upon a time they were intimately, almost organically, linked toeach other. Man, the individual; other man in various groups, family
and community constituting the social web; the world of nature, earth
with all its ineluctable beauty, its sun-laden promises, the vast sky, theoceans, rivers, forests, birds and animals; thirdly the ancestors who left
the world of humans but yet were interested in its welfare while the survivors remembered them gratefully; and finally the unseen gods behindthe clouds. Man was a part of this huge circle of belongingness. The
vision was holistic. In such an integral view of the cosmos the individual never felt alone. True he could seek the blessing of the gods andancestors through appropriate ritual offerings and worships. Some of
the gods were also malevolent just as others, the majority, were benevolent. One was also supposed to invoke the blessings of the ancestors but
the equilibrium of life was maintained by an integrated approach to aworld-view where man, other men, nature, gods and society each had arightful place.
The birth of technological civilization has resulted in the demolitionof this holistic vision of earlier centuries so common to all primitive
cultures where an isolated selfish lonely individual was the exception
rather than the rule. Modern science explored, after all, only one dimension of reality—the physical, the biological and the psychological. The
other dimensions such as the socio-cultural, the ethical and the psychic
were no doubt explored but only with limited success. We still do notknow enough of the new frontiers of the mind where para-psychology is184

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only at the door-steps of a vast unexplored realm. The pride in knowledge of the earlier periods is giving place to an awareness of inadequacy. The greatest of scientists in our generation have come to visualize
the inadequacies of the scientific view of the self and the reality aroundus. May be we know substantially more than our ancestors about the
Universe but it appears in this knowledge there is dearth of some thingwhich, along with the lack of humility, holistic outlook and altruism,
affects our perceptions. It is not merely the Universe as a whole but of
nature, of our own psyche and of gods, sprits and ancestors. In short,modern civilization fully backed by the gains of science had failed toprovide a valid alternative which could restore the earlier balance ofholistic vision. No doubt science has started talking of the gaps in our
knowledge, of the principle of uncertainty, the black holes and theedges of being but restoration of the integral vision that takes man outof his ego-centric self to a higher level of integration with reality had
not yet become possible. Meanwhile Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose,
Stephen Jay Gould and a host of other eminent scientists are looking at
the borderlines of knowledge and mystery, of technology and myth.
We are aware of the slow, inexorable process by which man got
alienated from nature. Intimacy gave place to a feeling of ownershipand exploitative approach. Even the question of inter-generational equity tended to be forgotten. The earth’s bounties, many of which are notrenewable, is after all meant for all posterity and not merely for one
generation. The result: ecological imbalance, acid rain, green-houseeffect, the talk of silent spring and all that led to the Rio-Summit. All ofus have heard of the Gaia hypothesis, according to which we are part ofa greater whole and our destiny inevitably and integrally linked to theliving planet Gaia, named after an ancient Greek goddess, the archetypeof the Earth Mother in all cultures, all religions. In fact, this uncaring
and ceaseless exploitation of earth’s resources with the help of scienceand technology has come to threaten the survival of life itself. We cannot any longer leave it to Jesus, Mohammed of any other god to redeem
the world. The eminent scientist Collin A. Russel in the collection of
his Templeton Lectures, The Earth Humanity and God, rightly emphasizes that man is the millennial measure and he cannot refuse to bear his
own cross. Technology—at all the stages of it, the steam engine, theprinting press, the computer and the information revolution—only hightens the incoming future shock. And as the millennium comes to an end
man must come to terms with nature.
Yet another leading scientist has warned us of the likely consequenceof our endless pride in the conquest of nature. Our hebris may invite theBEYOND THE EGO

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nemesis of human civilization as we know it. Carl Sagan in his autobiography Billions and Billions tells us how man, without being fully
aware of it, is becoming a danger to himself. The technological revolution has changed the world so much that many people no longer feel athome in it. And then he cautions: “the dinosaurs were exterminated to
the last one after having inhabited the earth for 180 million years.
Human beings have been around only for a million years.”
Unattainable Earth And Human Values
Today life seems to be without joy, without love and therefore without
passion. There is no passion for one’s own life, for other men in society
or for the intimacy of togetherness. There is no passion for gods, for thenatural world, for dead ancestors, for rivers, trees, birds, clouds, animals, for death or another life. In short there is no passion left in loving,
living and dying. No wonder life has become dull, colorless, routinised,a burden, a boredom instead of a celebration, a release, an ecstasy. Lovehas become clinical, too physical, mechanical and no longer reveals thecolors of rainbow, the nuances of feeling that involves the whole beingof man—his heart, his body, his soul, his instinct, his reason—thewhole of his Being. Today Gods either do not exist or are irrelevant.
The life of man is again becoming as Hobbes thought it was; nasty,
brutish and short. There is no meaning, no significance because there isno passion. Meaning and significance are matters of discovery by theindividual mind and not “given” by some sacred text or guru. And thediscovery of significance is impossible of there is no passionate love oflife; if it is looked upon either as an organic functional graph, a robotic
performance or only a whisper in the dark.
So too the passion for the world, for what Czeslaw Milos the Polishpoet calls the unattainable earth:
They are incomprehensible, the things of this earth.
The lure of waters. The lure of fruits.
And ungraspable multitudes swarm, come together.
In the crinkles of tree bark, in the telescope’s eye.
For an endless wedding.
For the kindling of the eyes, for a sweet dance
In the elements of the air, sea, earth and subterranean caves
So that for a short moment there is no death
And time does not unreel like a skein of yarn
Thrown into an abyss.

And Pablo Neruda celebrates the earth by asking:

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Oh Earth wait for me
give me back your pure gifts
it does not matter to be one stone more
the dark stone, the pure stone which
the river bears away.

There is always an ineluctable magic in the life here on this planet.
Behind its quotidian routine there is a magic, an ever-recurring miracle
which make it a myth of eternal Being. We have perhaps been dehumanized to an extent when even death has lost both its grandeur and its
moving image. Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet once felt that the question is not whether there is life after death. The real question is whether
there is life before death. It has been asserted that one’s passion for theworld is at its most intense at the moment of death and that the whole ofone’s life, the series of images that constitute one’s existence fleets
through the screen of the mind in those last moments. Death was also
often sacral, the soul being supposed to begin a new life and therefore
whatever the person valued or loved were also to accompany him on
the journey that was going to begin. For others, who were in the presence of death, it was an enactment of one of the most moving events
one could be faced with. One may recall the classic dialogue between
the protagonist Dr. Bernard Rieux and the church father in Camus’s The
Plague. The father who initially thought of “the plague” as a punishment from the heavens for the unbelievers, the heathens of the city ofOran was now face to face with the death of an innocent child. Thosemoments of the child’s suffering, his writhing intolerable pain were an
eternity. And he could realize why it is said that in every death we are
reduced.
Today death is only a matter of statistics, of numbers whether it is a
car bomb or showering of terrorist bullets on innocent by standers, or aplaneload of unsuspecting human beings falling from the sky into thesea or millions being hacked to death as in Kigali or killed in sniper firein Sarajevo. We have got used to the number-game. Never before in
human history has “life” meant so little and “death” so devoid of significance. We are being reduced either to worms or to inanimate objects.
Where is the passion that would create revulsion, would make every
individual’s blood boil against inhumanity and provide the ultimate
defense for the sacredness of life. Life is sacred, it is magical, it is amiracle because it is evanescent, because it evaporates like the moment.
It is only passion, a degree of pagan love of life and awareness of deaththat can redeem us from the ever-growing dehumanization of the Age.

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187For even today miracles happen. A mango tree bursts into blossom,
clouds lean over the earth and come down in life-giving rain, the sunand moon shine, children are born even on pavements and battlefields
their joyful cry announcing that god is still not tired of this world.
Several international forums repeat the need for a new world order
based on a universal respect for human rights. Such respect can besummed up in what Albert Schweitzer the humanist doctor working in
Africa once said: “I am a Being wishing to live in the midst of other
Beings who also wish to live.” But the imperative for such-universal
respect for human rights has to come only by a new revival of values, areawakening of the forgotten awareness that no individual is here alone
or only for himself but each is anchored to the earth and the universe.
We are an integral part of not only an intimate social web but a larger,
higher any mysterious cosmos whose laws have to respected.
What is needed, therefore is a renewal of lost integrity which was
based upon an awareness of our deeper connection to the entire universe. In fact science today has started talking more about uncertainties
in the shape of the edge of infinity and holes in space. It no longer
exudes is reaching out to the outer limits of human powers and a return
to man, to his integrity and his integral linkage to the cosmos. Many ofus have heard about the “Gaia-hypothesis.” This theory envisions thatorganic and inorganic portions of the earth’s surface are part of a single
system and that the earth is only a mega-organism, a living planet. Gaia,
the name of the ancient goddess is the archetypal Earth Mother.
The awareness we have just talked about is the basic voice of all religions. The recognition that man must understand himself in relation to
the world and the cosmos in the right spirit. This recognition will giveback to us the much-needed capacity for self transcendence.
The real value for a new world can emerge out of our own respect forthe miracle that is life, the miracle that is the universe, the miracle thatis nature and the miracle which is our togetherness on this planet. Only
when we think of such a world and our place in it that we can respect auniversal order, participate in that order and then respect not only our
fellow men but all that lives and their rights. To believe in miracles is
not a superstition. Miracles did not only in some mythic past, they happen even-today before our eyes if only we keep our eyes and ears open.
A story from the 15th century Europe narrates the life of a skeptic
young man who came to a monastery inhabited by monks dedicated to alife of prayer, meditation and scripture-reading. To the head of themonastery he has a simple question: “Are not you people bored bybeing rooted to this place all your lives?” The head asked him “Dear188

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son, do you see the tiny bird of golden plumage sitting atop that tree?”
The young man looked at the bird and felt fascinated. The bird kept flying from one branch to another, from tree to tree as the young man kept
pursuing it and looking at it. After a longtime he came back to themonastery. The erstwhile head of the monastery was no longer there.
Somebody else who had taken his place told him: “Dear son, you took
40 long years just looking at the plumage of a bird.” He could not comprehend its meaning until somebody produces a mirror and he discovered to his utter dismay that his hair was all gray and he had lost a few
teeth. Then the head of the monastery added: “Dear son, if you took 40
years just to look at a bird and you could not even be aware of it, tellme how much can one see or know that one will be bored with theworld or with oneself?”
We can take another instance from our own mythology. Vishnu once
wanted to test the devotion of the sage Narada. He requested Narada to
get him a pale of water as he was thirsty. Narada went looking forwater. He saw a beautiful river. A beautiful damsel was filling her pitcher in that river. Narada fell in love with her, married her, set up a homeand had children. Once there was a heavy flood and in its swirlingwaters his wife and children were washed away. Narada started weeping and then he heard the voice of Vishnu trembling from a peepal tree:“Narada, I am still waiting for you to bring me a pale of water.....”The two instances cited above go only to prove that it is a question ofseeing a miracle. Even today is it not a miracle that same children still
smile like gods? Is it not a miracle that the flower have such colours
which no one can imitate or excel, that the sun rises and sets and rises
again?
A better world can only be founded on a set of values that recognizes
that we must work as if everything depended on man but we should also
pray as if everything depended on God.
We need competence and more than that humility.
Today the world is getting divided into two groups. One group would
like it to be a more efficient machine of progress, for producing moregoods and services, stimulating higher demands and meeting them.
Another group would like it to be a happier, a better place to live in. We
must make our choice where we belong.
Forgiveness: Journey to Other Selves
One of the most important requirements in the long journey to cosmic
consciousness—a state when you are one with the universe—is thecapacity to forgive. Since all of us sin, we will be incapable of redemp-

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tion unless we learn to forgive. We cannot remove the black stain of sin
which only God can. Therefore it is rightly said that to err is human, toforgive divine. As Milan Kundera puts it, “Divesting a sin of its validity, undoing it, erasing it out of time, in other words, making it into nothing is a mysterious and supernatural feat. Only God, because he canwork miracles, may wash away sin, transform it into nothing, forgive it.
Man can forgive man only in so far as he founds himself on God’s forgiveness.”
The capacity for forgiving has been beautifully brought out in theGospel according to St. John, and I cannot resist the temptation of quoting it at length: “And the Scribes and Pharisees brought unto him awoman taken in adultery and when they had set her in the midst, they
say unto him, ‘Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very
act. Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned,
but what sayest thou?’”
But Jesus did not reply, and when they continued bothering him withthe same question he said unto them, “He that is without sin among
you, let him first cast a stone at her.” And they who heard it, being convicted by their own conscience went out one by one even unto the lastand Jesus was felt alone and the woman standing in the midst. Jesus
said unto her: “Woman, where are those accusers? Hath no man condemned then?” She said, “No man, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more.”
Besides the capacity to forgive, one needs to develop the capacity oflove, compassion and empathy. The journey away from ego-centrism tothe cosmic self, which is the essence of all religions, demands that we
feel the sorrow of the entire world within our bones. Sometimes thismay even result in an apparent withdrawal from man and society. When
Prince Gautama left the comforts and luxury of the palace and his beautiful loving wife, he was not running away from the world. In fact hewas leaving the world we all prize because he was too deeply in lovewith man and his happiness and had seen too deeply into the cause ofsorrow which was desire. It was thus the highest love that made him
renounce the known illusions of life and prosperity. True love makes
one a true rebel and Buddha was and still remains the greatest lover ofmankind as also the greatest rebel who said “no” to the prevailing social
values.
The imperative of the journey from one’s limited, self-centred, windowless monad of a self, to a gradually ascending higher consciousness
becomes clear when we look at some of the most profound statementson this matter. Teilhard de Chardin out it most beautifully and cryptical-

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ly when he said, “To be more, one must unite more fully.” Your
strength, in other words, lies in extending the borders of your awareness, of your concerns and not restricting or choking your awareness toa narcissistic impulse. When once asked to express in one word theguiding principle of happy life, Confucius replied, “It is altruism.” And
what is altruism in its essence? It is a total orientation away from selfishness and towards the good of others, to the sharing of joys and sorrows of the whole world. The other becomes the justification for mybeing on this earth. Albert Schweitzer working for the sick and infirm in
African jungles put it this way: “I am life wishing to live in the midst of
the lives which also wish to live.” Such an authentic and altruistic self
becomes possible only when one is deeply aware of one’s failings,
one’s inadequacies. St. Augustine put it in a telling manner: si fallorsum (I err, therefore I exist).
Inside every man there are various levels of awareness corresponding
to the levels of his existence. Vidya or knowledge is not information
gathered from books or manuals. Our culture defines it as Sa vidya Ya
vimuktave: that is knowledge or wisdom which sets you free. Free fromthe narrow confines of ego, from one’s own lower or baser nature, fromdarkness, from the prison-house of selfish desires.
At the root of this realization is the desire for a renewal, of a new
dawn of awareness, of the infinite possibilities of the self only when it
is altruistic and by that very act takes in the entire Universe, the cosmos. The cosmic self is not merely aware of the cosmos; it invokes theuniverse and installs it within. Before his final madness and suicide Van
Gogh painted that wonderful piece wherein a group of human beings
going round and round within a circle inside an enclosed closed space.
But there is agate which they could open if only they wanted to walkout into the bright moon-lit night outside. This is an image of the egocentric self. The tragedy is , it is a refusal to open the door, a forgotten
opportunity, a choked possibility. The journey to a higher self calls on
us to open the door of consciousness to that wider realm, the Cosmos.
Sartre once said, hell is other people. He also said, hell is the self.
That is the end product of western existentialism. A character in Sartre
watches the snarled roots of a tree and feels as if it is going to expandand swallow him up. This happens when the ego-centric self is surrounded only by objects and the latter become the only true reality. It is
not extending of the borders but of constriction and choking.
Out scriptures have spoken of that knowledge knowing which you
know all. Cosmic awareness emerges from that kind of knowledge as abright dawn the dark night of the soul. Knowledge is of thing which areBEYOND THE EGO

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illumined by light for in darkness you see nothing. The meaning of life
and one’s intimate and universal connectivity to all that exist comes outof the cosmic awareness. This universal presence which is the generatorof cosmic awareness is beautifully described by the Svetasvatara
Upanisad:
Tadeva Agnih tat Óditya˙, tat Våyuh tat tu Candramåh
Tedeva Íukra◊, tat Brahma, tat Ópa˙, tat Prajåpati˙Tva◊ Str¥, tva◊ Pumånasi, tva◊ Kumåra uta vå Kumar¥
Tva◊ j¥rnou dandena vazñcasi tva◊ jåto bhavasi Vißvato-mukha˙That, indeed, is fire. That is the sun. That is air. That is the moon.
That indeed is pure. That is Brahman. That is water. That is Prajapati.
You are the woman. You are the man. You are the boy and you are thegirl too. You are old man tottering with a stick. Taking birth, you haveyour faces everywhere.
The journey to the Cosmic Self is the progressive internalization of
the Universe, the world of man, nature, gods, everyone, everything. It isa journey of tirelessly pursuing the bird of golden feathers, the ultimate
dream. That is the way out of the prison house of the deluded ego-centric self towards personal happiness, wisdom, social harmony and universal peace.