The Emergence of the Ego/Self Complementarity and Its Beyond

Abstract

This study traces the emergence of the ego/selfideain Buddhist experience-based and processoriented thinking (rDzogs-chen). This is thinking that is primarily concerned with understanding and less so with establishing and being satisfied with a theoretical system, one that inevitably remains reductionist and, for this reason, fails to explain or make sense of what matters most to any living system-such as a human being. Because of its dynamic character, rDzogs-chen thinking avoids the pitfall of concretizing the cognitive aspect of the living, variously called a mind, consciousness, ego or self, into some homuncular entity, and of assuming this entity to reside in one's head as a kind of passive spectator. Not only did Buddhist thinking in general, and rDzogs-chen thinking in particular, conceive of"mind" or "consciousness" as a complexity of functions reacting and responding to each other and forming together the idea of an ego/self, but also, in this respect, it anticipated and antedated the findings of modern phenomenology with its differentiation into an ego/self (in small letters) as a limitation of the Self(with a capital letter) that is neither egocentric nor egological nor logocentric. In rDzogs-chen thought even the Self is a barrier that has to be overcome in order to become ek-statically open.

The Essence of Transpersonal Psychology Contemporary Views

“…For an example of the potential intricacy of more precisely characterizing a concept like ego in a single tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, see Guenther (2001).…”