Ego’s
Fear of Death
and
The Defeat of the Beloved
Adi Da Samraj, November 11, 2005
SUMMARY
Question addressed to Avatar Adi Da Samraj by a devotee about whether Evelyn is reacting to his fear of death, and that is why he is so obnoxious? Ego-fear, comments on the “fear of entombment and desire to escape from water”. Is a description of egoity—and is foolish unless you see the situation of the ego, and then its actions are understandable. Self-understanding has this function—When you hear Me truly, egoity can be released. Trying to argue Raymond out of liberation requiring renunciation. Even after so many years, you still don’t get it about Evelyn. You can’t understand Evelyn if you can’t understand yourself.
***
DEVOTEE: Thank You, Beloved. Beloved, I’m really grateful that you’re here. I love You and it’s so wonderful to sit and listen to your devastatingly brilliant Scapegoat’s Book. I have a question about Evelyn Disk, but I think you answered it in Chapter Twelve tonight, but…
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: And My answer is?
DEVOTEE: Yes.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: What is it? What is the answer you think I gave?
DEVOTEE: That Evelyn Disk is reacting to his fear of death and being obnoxious because of his fear of death.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Certainly fundamentally, yes.
DEVOTEE: Yes. Well, that was my question.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: All kinds of fears.
DEVOTEE: Um hm.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Fear, just as fear in reaction to conditional existence, embodied existence.
DEVOTEE: Right, right.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mentalizing existence. Ego fear. That fear that you all live in day after day, moment to moment in which you know full well which is the basis of your identity as Evelyn Disk. This is why you can listen to Evelyn Disk and feel somehow or other it’s got something to do with you. There are roots in his disposition, his character, his doings, that are simply ego. He is a kind of cartoon, if you will, of the ego. He is three times the size of the ego in its usual form, so it’s just what ego itself is. It’s exaggerated as Evelyn, so that any ego-bound person can feel their own fault in him, see it lived, see its doings, see them clearly and uncompromisingly and without denial, even without the ability to deny it.
So any kind of fear of anything at all is exactly correct about Evelyn. In this chapter twelve in particular, it’s entitled The Great Fool’s Fear of Entombment, not just fear of death, but of entombment—being buried alive, trapped in a coffin, trapped in a tiny space, unable to escape—and his consequent desire, which follows from his fear of entombment in other words, to escape from water. Water has all the meanings, in this case, that are suggested in The Mummery Book, as well. So it is large with meanings.
So because of the fear of entombment, of being contracted or having contraction forced upon self, as if from without, as if one’s self-contraction is actually happening to one from outside rather than being generated from so-called inside, so appearing to be happening from outside. This results in a desire to escape from water, as if entombment were a kind of drowning or as if self-contraction and fear were a kind of drowning, the what happens when a human being is trapped in water, and can’t get to air and so on.
So it’s as if he is contracted to a point by a surrounding and it is as if that is like being internally within a cube or sphere of water and so the entire disposition, reactive disposition of the person becomes absolutely concentrated in that moment. There’s nothing else to think about or want to do except to escape that confinement, that entombment, that drowning, smothering destruction of self that feels to be happening.
That’s a description of egoity, then, described largely, made big. It’s really an internal awareness that is being described, but to put in the form of a metaphor. To enlarge it, to exaggerate it in some sense then, while still being true to what it is, should give it a force of meaning that impresses some fundamental sense of the actual state of egoity from moment to moment.
The great fool is the ego. It’s Evelyn, but it’s the ego. It does only what is foolish or what is apparently foolish if you understand the situation of the ego. Ego’s actions are more understandable, for instance, if somebody actually were trapped in a cube or sphere of water. Their hysterical effort to escape from it would be completely understandable.
But if you don’t see the water, you don’t see the surrounding wall or walls, you don’t really see the situation, then all this flailing is rather incomprehensible. What’s causing it? There doesn’t appear to be any cause of it. It’s just seemingly irrational behavior. If you see the entrapment or the entombment in an enclosure of water, than it’s a kind of rational hysteria or automaticity.
If you don’t see it, then it appears to be irrational, incomprehensible. So the egoic life, the life human beings live, appears on the face of it to be not altogether comprehensible. Why do people do what they do? Why do you all carry on as you do? Why do you bind yourselves up in the drama in which you live?
All kinds of efforts have been made for virtually the entirety of human history to figure this out, figure out self through self-understanding, figure out everyone, the world, and everything altogether, by thinking about it. Why is it happening? Analysis goes on to this day, everybody trying to figure it out, and come up with their best guess.
But you wouldn’t have to guess if you saw the walled enclosure and the solid space of water. Then it would be completely obvious, suddenly, inherently, immediately obvious why that activity is happening. If you could actually see the situation of ego, then, its actions would be comprehensible. They would be understandable, not necessarily relieved, but it would be clear why that’s all going on.
Self-understanding has this function then. When it is most fundamental, when you hear Me truly, there is not only getting the secret, not only decoding the situation of egoity, there is a capability for transcending egoity. The source of it is reached. Its root is found. It is comprehensible and undo-able.
So because this is a possibility, at least in principle, Raymond is still teaching even Evelyn—still trying to get through to him, still works to awaken him in spite of all the circumstances that are there in that first room, because there IS the possibility of awakening. Perhaps it doesn’t seem very likely in any moment that this book progresses, that Evelyn is ever going to wake up, you see—but it’s still in principle possible.
But his mind is rolling. His life is going on in its patterned decisions and it all seems rational to him. He doesn’t get the root of it. He keeps proposing arguments in opposition to Raymond’s instructions or Teaching Revelation. He always has some edge of it that he wants to soften, Evelyn does, some part of it he wants to escape, some implications he does not want to embrace, accept. And therefore he can’t accept the medicine itself. He can’t accept the Revelation itself, because, as Raymond teaches, renunciation and liberation are coincident. They are the same. It’s not about
one or the other. You can’t have liberation and not renunciation because they are the same event.
But Evelyn wants to get out of renunciation. He wants to argue his way out. He wants to even talk Raymond, in this last chapter, into relinquishing the harder edge of His disposition and the disposition of His Teaching, even by suggesting to Him that His Teaching is impractical and unscientific, nobody’s interested in that these days. It has no capability of being responded to. It’s too much. Ego’s mummers won’t choose it. It has no market share out there, Evelyn says.
So part of his argument to Raymond, you see, is get real, life is a mummery. It’s a play. It’s to be played. He keeps trying to argue Raymond into relinquishing his position about Perfect Knowledge being the coincidence of liberation and renunciation, not as two things, but essentially as one Realization.
So all throughout The Scapegoat’s Book, Evelyn is arguing for this one-sided view of Perfect Knowledge in which renunciation is not necessary. You can have a kind of inner renunciation or idea or something or other that is the equivalent of true liberation or true Perfect Knowledge and the freedom associated with it and yet you can be soft on crime, so to speak, you see. You don’t have to renounce or renunciation is left over as something else to quibble over or think about and argue about. He doesn’t get that it is the same and it’s not just about an inner feeling about renunciation and so on, it’s about an actual total life condition of renunciation—not dissociative, not puritanical, moralistic, all those idealistic sources for apparent renunciation, but true renunciation.
So anything that could be said about Evelyn that involves simply an understanding or description of egoity itself is true of Evelyn. That is what he is about. So he’s afraid of death, yes, that’s true. Anything that’s true of the ego or of egoity is true of Evelyn. He is the summation, the epitome, the archetype of egoity.
Something else?
DEVOTEE: I have this question, being involved with your Mummery enactment, and in attending the two silent Avataric Discourses, you helped me understand that this personality is not just, in a sense, a casual thing that arises. It’s actually very intentional on my behalf to deny that I’m going to die and that I’m vulnerable and that my friends are going to die. And so that’s how I felt that Evelyn could be so cruel and blatantly sitting in the institution with Raymond. How could he do that?
But when You gave me this understanding of feeling the force of denying my own death, I could feel how that’s why he’s able to do that, sit there and watch Raymond suffer at his own hand.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Umhm. And keep on sticking it to him …
DEVOTEE: Yes.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: …the whole time.
DEVOTEE: Yes.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Battling with him. It is a disposition to absolutely suppress Raymond, defeat him. Whatever that takes, that’s in Evelyn’s disposition. Whatever it takes to make nothing out of Raymond is the entire purpose of Evelyn’s life.
DEVOTEE: Is that unconscious?
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, it comes from a source that even exceeds and is beyond mere thinking about it. But of course there is much that he does intentionally and deliberately, and might have an argument for why that sounds like it has some virtue even or some intention or rightness or whatever.
But certainly all kinds of aspects of it are very intentionally done. And it is based on the denial of egoity while being the ego and arguing for it, even communicating arguments that sound like they are arguments against it, without he himself getting the point of the arguments, or grasping what it is that he’s really saying about it.
He is absolutely bound to this self-contraction, not the True and Very Self position, even though he claims it. He even claims it’s not a mere idea in his case, it’s just him, you see. He’s absolutely insane, insanely deluded, and all his aberrations are all over his body and his speech, in his state, in all that he does and says and so on in that room and all the situation that’s in that room because of him.
It’s part of the secret of The Mummery Book that part of Evelyn’s entire disposition is focused on defeating Raymond Darling. He has replaced him and never expected him to show up. He invented him in some sense. It seems like he just purely invented him and then he shows up at the window. He was anticipated, but never expected and is not wanted. There’s no room for him there.
The only room for him is the room elsewhere where he will be confined, just for having showed up. Look at all the paraphernalia, the doings, the happenings, the situation and the religion of Saint-and-Ear. It’s all there before Raymond showed up. Quandra there and all the rest – everything’s preplanned, prewritten, presaid.
Look at what Evelyn did in The Mummery Book. It’s an interesting measure of the egoity of people who know The Mummery Book, who read it or see enactments or enact it themselves and whatnot, that even after so many years people still don’t get it about Evelyn. He seems to be entertaining. When I read to you the subtitle for the book describing him as the captor of Raymond Darling, the great foot and false teacher and notoriously eccentric super-criminal, everybody laughed, like it’s just an exaggerated statement. It’s just sort of funny, that he’s not really that bad, so the description to be made that describes him as a super-criminal sounds like a joke.
That shows you the denial involved in all of you, even though you’re familiar with The Mummery Book. You don’t really get what’s going on there at Saint-and-Ear, even though it’s plainly written, plainly stated, plainly performed. I mean look at this outrage, this insane situation in which Raymond becomes incorporated and becomes a scapegoat, a captive and you don’t think Evelyn Disk is a super-criminal?
The only way to think he’s just amusing and innocent, the only reason why you would not quite get it is because your own egoity is a blind to understanding egoity itself, just as it is in Evelyn then. You can’t understand Evelyn altogether, if you can’t understand yourself. You want to identify with virtue, with Raymond and so on. Already you want to identify with Him. Evelyn wants to identify with Him. They are in the first room in this exchange. He is immediately the same as Raymond. He’s a pal. We’re the same somehow. We’re in it together. We love the same truth, you see? Us, we blessed ones. You think that way yourselves.
You forget the Teaching is about egoity and the transcending of it. You think instead it’s about self-imagery and the glorifying of it. So you take on a religious persona and so on, a virtuous idea of self rather than understand and transcend self through the profoundest practice of right relationship to Me.
You are Evelyn. You are not Raymond. You are ego, you are not the True and Very Self. That’s not an absolute, that’s simply the way it is in your state of life. Yes, the True and Very Self is the Truth. It is Consciousness Itself, but your ideas about it are illusions. It’s not true of you. It’s part of an image of self that you acquire by association with My Teaching and with Me here, and indulge in imaginations whereby you let yourselves off the hook of practice all the time—like Evelyn. Evelyn is constantly trying to talk himself out of the position of having to renounce—all the self-surrender and self-discipline stuff which he says has no market share.
He doesn’t want anything to do with that. He is a balloon, an immense balloon, an inflated ego many times his size from his breakfast ritual of absurdities. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand himself, you see. In The Mummery Book, the character you least want to identify with and least understand is the one who is everyone in the theater—Evelyn.
And he’s not just amusing. He’s absurd. He’s amusing in that sense, but not merely happy amusing. He is an immensely dark figure. You haven’t understood or performed him altogether correctly then if you don’t get this. He’s ego. That’s it. Ego is not nice. It’s the root of all ignorance, darkness, madness, the root of all evil, Evelyn—evil in there, in that sphere, that balloon, that disk, that sun, or would-be sun, would-be light, that is darkened by the self-contraction and all that follows from it in body and mind and the doings of life.
So you could say perhaps better that Evelyn suffers from omniphobia—the fear of everything. Why just pick out death and blame it? He fears Raymond. He fears the True and Very Self. He fears the truth of it because of what it implies. So he pretends to have realized it and even be consoled by the message, you see, by the Teaching, but he isn’t. He is threatened to the core, to the root. It puts him in touch with his fear and with his clinging to the self-indulgent consolations of bodily existence and mentalizing existence.
So he’s just like all of you, just a regular guy, male or female, just every man, every woman, everybody. And everybody’s okay, as you say or think—As long as you can get away with it and then it’s not okay.
There’s a phrase stated somewhat differently in The Scapegoat’s Book which I put to you all years ago as a statement of the Laughing Mama, primary word from the laughing mama or the woman on the throne described by Evelyn. “Your objections to anything don’t mean shit”. Don’t you know? So you can’t uncreate the way things happen or are happening by raising objections, complaining, arguing against what is required and so on. You can run around in circles, run around the block for just so long. You do it fast enough, you run into yourself, the wall of not-okay, the who you can’t escape when you’ve run that fast.
Anything else about it?
DEVOTEE: No, thank You, Beloved. Thank You.
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