Walk through any city at any hour and you are among people who are, each in their own way and mostly without knowing it, reaching for the same thing.
The forms the reaching takes could hardly look less alike. Some are exhilarating, some devotional, some ordinary, some desperate. A single movement is taking place in all of them.
The week we present our final instalment, exploring from the section break on page 191 through to the end of the book, and following that movement through the streets of a city and out into what it asks of the way we live together.*
*(The page numbers indicated here each week refer to the original publication of the physical book – they may vary slightly from more recent versions, owing to the publisher’s design modifications.)
The Discomfort Beneath the Activity
As Bernardo Kastrup and I walked through the parts of Amsterdam he had chosen for me, I found myself struck less by the variety of what people were doing than by what seemed to lie underneath all of it. Whatever the outward activity, its deeper purpose appeared to be the same: to relieve a discomfort that lies at the very centre of the ego.
By the ego I mean the sense of self that is mixed with and qualified by the content of experience. It is the self derived from the body, from thoughts and feelings, from memories and narratives, from the roles and relationships we engage in. The ego is the identification of oneself with these contents, and this identification gives us a false view of who we are.
What you are at the deepest level is simply the fact of being, or being aware, and the nature of this being is peace. It is already whole, already fulfilled, and it is shared by every being that exists. But when you take yourself to be this borrowed, assembled self instead, you come to believe you are a temporary and finite individual, cut off from others and from the world. This belief carries within it a primal sense of limitation and separation, and this feeling lives in the hearts of almost everyone, motivating, in one way or another, the greater part of human activity.
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