Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
WIZARD: One of the beautiful things about the silence is the
capacity for empathic listening.
TRIP: I don't know whether or not we want to spend our time
going through some of the symptoms of the phantom self that you
described to me in your email, but I just think it's really useful
because whenever I'm living out of my ego, which is still a
significant portion of time, these things that you point out are the
things that are happening. And so I think it might be helpful to
spend 10 minutes going through these symptoms of the phantom
self one by one if you don't mind.
Okay, the first one you say, "Always seeking".
NORIO KUSHI: Yes.
TRIP: You say, "Once this phantom self attains what it's seeking,
it'll always make it wrong or judge it as something missing and
continues seeking".
NORIO KUSHI: Yes.
TRIP: Now here's another thing, an important note, you said,
"The phantom self can only seek what is known, therefore in its
unconscious it always knows what it's seeking". Can you get into
that a little more?
NORIO KUSHI: Yes. It turns out that the phantom self judges
something missing in the moment, or something wrong with the
circumstances, or with somebody, or with whatever, you know, fill
in the blank. In the judging, which I mention as well, it's part and
parcel of maintaining the illusion of phantom self, the illusion that
this self is real. And so it automatically judges every circumstance,
every situation, and so in order for it to determine that something
is missing it has to know what that missing thing is. Or if it's an
experience or feeling, or something, it has to know what that
feeling is. Otherwise if it did not exist in the psyche of the
phantom self, it wouldn’t be seeking it.
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