April 20, 2016
How do you know that what you are doing is from a level of evolving
consciousness and not just an ego trip? Until the final moment before
enlightenment, I can guarantee that everything is an ego trip. Even
spiritual practices are all ego trips. They’re all ego trips because
it’s you being somebody thinking you’re doing something. That’s an ego
trip.
The
work of Zen is to reach the ground of being, to perceive the true
nature of the self, which, as it turns our, is a phantom. This is also
the work of poetry, at least for me: to erode the membrane between self
and the world, so that a newly innocent consciousness can emerge, one
that sees what it sees without commentary, analysis, or judgment.
—Chase Twichell, "Second Innocence: With Basho at Sesshin"
