Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
NORIO KUSHI: There were still thoughts here and there; my fuel
gauge is low, I need to stop for fuel, I'll stop at exit 140 in
Oklahoma, and get fuel there. And then silence, no more thinking.
I pull in. What it turns out is there's this… once one realizes
there's no phantom self, what I'm referring to is this
psychologically made up self, there's still what I call an ego. Like
the translation of no phantom self from the Far East to the
English, they use the term ego as the phantom self. I see an ego as
a necessary, an integral component of being human, being a
typical body.
WIZARD: It's a biological function.
NORIO KUSHI: Yes, exactly. And like all animals they can
respond to its environment, and the way the cat has a cat ego, a
dog has a dog ego, etc. So humans have the human ego. So we
don't really describe or explain what the ego really is, and so
there's a misunderstanding as to what it really is. So what I'm
referring to, let's see… so what occurs is the phantom self
disappears but then there's still the ego, which is fully aware of the
duality, the world of separation, the world of contrast. And it
turns out that without the separate self, without the phantom self,
as I like to call it, we can actually navigate the physical, the
manifest world much more adeptly, we're much more aware of
really what's happening.
WIZARD: Yes.
NORIO KUSHI: And so there's this wonderful Keda videos or
whatever that's called. This woman, Jill Bolte Taylor, had a stroke
and the left brain, she had a stroke in the left side of her brain, and
so therefore the right side of her brain was still fully functioning.
And when the left side of the brain went dead, so to speak, this is
how she would say it, but she experienced this bliss, and this nondifferentiation,
and where she couldn't tell where her hands ended
and the wall started, and things like that. So here she was, because
the left brain completely shut down, the left side, she was like a
ship without a rudder in this sea of bliss. And I think that's
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