What you are looking for, you already have.
My comic book wisdom is limited to a few hundred I read as a kid and my knowledge of the Marvel universe is narrow. I’m just writing this as an observer of the Marvel universe, not a curator. If you haven’t seen GotG2 then there are spoilers a-plenty. If you are not that big on superhero movies, then reading this might make you want to watch it, which isn’t a bad thing — right Marvel?
Before we start, I must clarify another thing. Ego can mean many things, but when I talk about Ego, I mean the individual, the mind and not arrogance or hubris. In this context, arrogance is just a facet of the ego. Ego is the mind, it is the feeling we get when we say ‘I’.
I have a fascination with things that looks different from what they are. I love things that seem simple, but is layered with complexity. These are the ways in which GotG2 is d..e..e..p
You create yourself
Our mind creates our sense of existing — our sense that ‘here I am in this space; this is my name; this is who I am; this is me’. This abstract idea boils down to the simplest feeling of ‘I’. There is a sense that you are alive; you are here, and that you are an individual. If you touch the table in front of you, then you will get a sense that ‘you’ are touching the table. Without that feeling of ‘I’, then ‘you’ are not touching anything, there would not be a separation between you and that object with which you are interacting. Jill Todd in her book ‘Stroke of Insight’ describes experiencing this after brain injury caused by a stroke. She describes how she no longer saw separation from herself and everything else, she just saw atoms.
EGO in GotG2 first started off as a ‘brain’ and what better analogy for consciousness than a brain right? The first thing EGO did was to learn how to manipulate mass to create substance, with which he creates his body and that eventually becomes ‘him’. Without a body, without a form, he felt purposeless. Because how do you have a purpose if ‘you’ don’t exist. This is why his first purpose was to learn how to manipulate substance so he could create form.
He created his form, he created himself. The ego created the ego.
Ego has been created by the Ego. The individual has been created by the individual. The world has been created by the mind. Okay, the whole floating brain is a bit naff but I guess it’s there as a representation. The brain represents the mind, and the planet represents the reality that it has created. Because everything that happens in our ‘reality’ happens in our planet.
I have built it layer by layer
Have we built out reality layer by layer? The substance with which we create our reality is the same substance with which our dream are created. The substance with which our dreams are created is the same substance from which our hallucinations are created. So could we then conclude that our reality is a hallucination? To put it even simpler, we can only perceive the external reality once a representation of it has been replicated in our minds. Once something is created in our mind, it then becomes a dream, a hallucination.
When we dream, we create that entire dream world. We create it, we live it, we believe it, then we wake up and we carry on doing the same thing?
What we think is our reality will always just be an interpretation of it.
When we meditate, when we are aware, when the mind becomes the observer of itself it creates something like an awareness. In that awareness you no longer hallucinate and you begin to see what is actually there. You no longer see what you have created, but you see ‘you’ who creates it. The ego can only exist when it lives what it has created, not when it sees itself.
Your body is just an extension of you, not the other way round.
Instinctually, the sense of our individuality is the physical space it occupies. We can glare at our own hands, and get a sense, that this is me. Our experience has taught us not to question this sense of self, even though everyday something happens that fundamentally fucks with the very nature of reality. We dream.
When we dream we imagine our physical body, we imagine our sense of self and it feels just as real. It feels just as painful and we never question the nature of the reality of our dreams, when we are dreaming. Lucid dreaming, is the next stage, where you feel the falseness of it, but you still get fearful even in lucid dreaming, you still play out the illusion, even though you know it’s an illusion.
Like a movie theatre, you know the contents of the screen isn’t real, but you still get a little emotional when John Coffey gets executed.
This is a basic mechanism which is used to create stories of ourselves. Anything can be put on that screen and as long as it suspends your disbelief, you’ll plug yourself into these projections. You know you’ll believe it and you know it’s not real in that once the film stops, you can again go back to being yourself. But what makes us believe the most? What grips us the most? Purpose. What bores us the most? Purposelessness.
For EGO, the only purpose of the being a ‘body’ was to, well, reproduce. How wonderful that EGO’s whole purpose was to travel the universe and make love to millions of aliens. If there was no need to reproduce then there would be no need for a body, if there is no need for the body, then there is no need to survive. If there is no need to survive, then there i no purpose.
I’m all for inter-species love 100%.
Our brain only had one soul(chuckle) purpose. To move. Ie.
Our brain is complex just because there is complexity in movement. I don’t know how much of that I truly believe, but it’s an interesting thought nonetheless. I wonder why we are made to move? so we can reproduce? So we can run, so we don’t die, so we can reproduce? I’m starting to think that the desire to reproduce, is more profound that the desire to live.
Without meaning, the ego cannot exist. We search for meaning in everything, and this is a reflection of that. To desire for meaning. Everything with purpose has meaning, everything without purpose is meaningless. To get a first round knockout is purpose, because there is meaning in that result. To see a sunset and feel its beauty, there is no purpose, it just is, it’s meaningless and in that emptiness of meaning, there seems to be beauty.
Unconditional Love and purpose is not compatible
There are two type of love, one is evolutionary and tied into survival and the other is beyond survival, it’s beyond just ‘us’. The first kind of love is limited, “I can only love my own son the way I love him” but this is necessary so you protect him. The other kind of love is of the unlimited variety, which is love that is unconditional. The thing about this kind of love, is that it needs to be completely purposeless and purposeless can only come with awareness.
Love and the present moment, aren’t that different. When you reach the depths of love, you are in the present moment and you can only truly love when you are in the present moment. Love doesn’t need purpose, but this purposelessness is seen as a void by the Ego. When the ego sees the present moment as emptiness, it senses it’s own death, because for our Ego, silence is a form of death, because in silence our minds don’t exist and paradoxically only when our mind no longer exists do we truly see silence. Without thought, you don’t exist, without thought there is the present moment; without thought there is silence. This is why the ego can only survive with purpose and it will actively seek out purpose. Purpose is the future, and it’s built from the past. If your purpose is to be in the present moment, then you are still driven by your past. If your purpose is love, then that love is from the past. It is your idea of love and your idea is limited by your beliefs, it is limited by you. For compassion that is not bounded or limited, it needs to be in the present moment, where you don’t exist, where your judgements and beliefs don’t exist.
This is why in GotG 2, Ego ultimately killed his love. With Ego the deeper he went into that love to Meredith, the more he felt his purpose dissipate. In unconditional compassion, purpose is no longer there.
Compassion is not something you do. Compassion does you.
You can only be compassionate once compassion enters you. As Ego went deeper and deeper into his love for Meredith, the more he started to feel his purpose die, the more he felt himself dying. An ego without purpose is an ego that is dead.
Ego meeting Meredith was his purpose, but meredith took him beyond his purpose and the only way for Ego to get his purpose back, was by killing that which gave him purpose in the first place. Maybe it’s no accident that the word orgasm translate to ‘little death’ in French.
Yondu — You can go beyond the ego with love
Yondu, throughout the film, is a mirror, a reflection to the other characters. He suggests to others a part of themselves that they can’t see. He allows the characters to step away from themselves and see themself in the third person and one of the biggest catalysts for change is the observation of oneself. That observation of the self is itself the process.
Yondu represents the mirror and the mirror is our heart. Our heart is where our ego lives. Our heart is from where our ego comes from, but its not the ego. The ego is thought, the ego is the search for meaning, the heart is what the thought is made of, the heart is what meaning is made out of. The heart is the source of everything.
Ego lives on action, the present moment lives.
Yondu, is the deeper self. When we are yondu, we are fearless. Fear is not the lack of courage, fear is the lack of love. If you love, you accept, you bring it to be a part of yourself and nothing separate. If you felt as if you are no different from everything else, then everything you do to others, you would be doing to yourself. You can’t lose, because you are just losing to yourself. The ego ultimately feels separate, but when the mind is silent, when it’s in meditation, it’s no longer separate. To meditate, is to be in love and to be in love is the end of the ego.
What you are looking for, you already have.
Sometimes that thing you’re searching for your whole life — is right there by your side all along — you don’t even know it.
Is Quill talking about Gamora? If Gamora can make quill fulfilled, then on a deeper level, Quill is searching for fulfilment.
What is it that we are looking for our whole lives, but has been with us from the very beginning? Fulfilment.
Desire itself is inversely proportional to fear — the more you desire, the more you are afraid. The more you want something, the more you are afraid of not having it. The more you want to keep something, the more you are afraid of losing it.
If you didn’t have duality, then you couldn’t exist, because existence boils down to one simple desire; to survive. Our desire to live is proportional to our fear of death. The more you want to live, the more you are afraid of death. The more you want to hold onto everything you have, the more you are afraid of losing everything you have. We can go our entire life thinking we are not afraid of death, until it really comes knocking on our door and it’s then that we desire to live the most. In our awareness of death, we become the most alive.
So fulfilment is to be free of fear, fulfilment is the lack of desire. Unfulfillment is the desire to be free of fear, the desire to be free of desire.
So is being joyful void of desire? That itself is a paradox, how can you desire to not desire? You can be happy when your desire is fulfilled, you can be happy when you get that job, when you reach that level, but happiness always just passes by. Joy is something that stays.
Happiness always passes by, joy tends to stick by
Joy isn’t dependent on anything, you can feel joy for no reason. With joy, you can be in suffering and still be joyful but you can’t suffer and be happy. Joy is something far beyond happiness.
The strange thing about being human, is that when we feel human, we never feel completely fulfilled. We can be happy momentarily when our desire is realised, but even that is fleeting because the last thing we want is to be without purpose. So it’s a formula that is set to fail. When you get what you desire, you will feel without purpose, so you’ll fill that hole with another desire, rinse and repeat. We just think we are filling this hole, but all purpose does it helps us to look away from it. We can never fill this hole, because this hole is us. If we actually fill this hole, then we would not be there. That hole is there in us, so we can be in it. Without us, there is no hole. Without the hole there is no us.
The word ‘searching’ would be fitting to describe our state of existing. Without search there is no purpose, without purpose, there is nothing. And nothing makes us more anxious than nothing. In the end, death is the purest form of nothingness and the anxiety about death is compounded by the fact that everything is taken away from you.
When you dilute the search to it’s basic material, it’s the search for purpose. It can be as mundane as a search for that perfect job, house, friend, lover, pet or life. Or it can be as abstract as the search for meaning, god, happiness, joy, bliss, enlightenment.
It doesn’t matter what you eat, it can be as varied as you like, but in the end, all that comes out is shit.
We might be searching for different things, but at the end, it gets us to the same place, unfulfillment. Don’t get me wrong, you do feel fulfillment, but it’s fleeting. The needle always falls back to the start and the search begins again. When we know that we will be searching forever, then we become ready to ask the question, why do I search? ‘I’ have now realised that ‘I’ will always search for an answer. Then I ask myself, am I the one that searches?
So to answer Quinn’s question; what has been with us from the very beginning? What has been with us, that we have turned away from and have felt unfulfilled. What is this thing that has no need to change, has no desire because there is nothing it needs, has no pain, because there is nothing that it depends on. It has no structure, it has no mass, it has nothing, it is nothing. But everything is born out of it. Isn’t everything born out of nothing?
The mind has created the idea of nothing, but this is not that idea. The closest thing we can probably define it by, is that word nothing, but it’s not that neither. Because it seems to be everything and that’s the paradox. The moment we string it together with words, it changes into something else.The truth lies in the unknown. We are trying to tap right into something absolutely immense, using a hammer made of sponge.
The very tools that are given to us, are stopping us from seeing it. Which is why when you start to observe the tool that is you — then you get a sense of something far beyond. This is probably what meditation is.
