Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
TRIP: To me that is an even more pernicious judging, it's kind of
hard to resolve it when you lack self esteem.
NORIO KUSHI: Yes. They're both one and the same, whether
one's judging outwardly or inwardly.
TRIP: Okay, and then…
NORIO KUSHI: And it reinforces that there is a judge. And here
again, being able to judge, being able to discern like walking along,
here's a cliff, you don't want to walk off the cliff, it serves a real life
necessary function. Then the phantom self uses that as a way to
make it… well everything bottom line that the phantom selfing is
about is to constantly reaffirm its own existence. And so that's
what the judging is all about.
TRIP: Okay, then you write, "Another way the phantom self
exhibits is that in inherited thought patterns, we divide "I"
thinking into the thinker and the thought, thus creating the
illusion of the conscious and the unconscious". And then you say,
"The unconscious is just as shallow and trivial as the conscious".
That's contrary to conventional wisdom where the unconscious is
kind of thought of as a royal road of insight, more reliable than the
conscious. Can you talk about that?
NORIO KUSHI: Yes, what it is... is there's actually layers, it's all
layers of like… being human, our body, and awareness, and
consciousness, is multilayers. And so with the realization that
phantom self doesn't exist in silence, what I recognized was that
all these layers exist simultaneously, and one's not better than the
other or anything like that. But one parcel, package. So…
TRIP: Well maybe what you're saying is that when we're taking
the perspective of ourselves as separate individuals, there's this
layered persona that we know, our conscious, our super ego, and
all that, so we think that that's kind of the layers the ocean if you
will, because we're looking at it from a sense of personal. But
when we got the impersonal, we can see that the unconscious, and
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