Ego

I had a very nice massage and dinner last night with my spiritual advisor/masseusse. He had just returned from a 2-week retreat to a place run by the Self-Realization Institute (not sure I got that exactly right, but close enough), where he basically meditated for 3-6 hours a day, sometimes alone, sometimes in a group setting. He performed housekeeping tasks which supplemented the meager $75/week he paid to stay there for room and board.

As my current struggle is with the ego and the trouble it seems to get me in, my friend said at his retreat they spent lots and lots of time talking about ego. Turns out current thought says there is the immature ego and the mature ego. Only the truly enlightened have no ego at all! So our objective in being less than enlightened is to develop and cope with a mature ego.

I believe my ego is mature. It certainly seems to know when it's active, what it wants, what it's doing, and when it is not happy with outcomes. So once again I have learned a new lesson in that my sense of my ego getting in my own way at times is quite normal given my level of self-realization, and further that recognizing that I can improve on ways to remove my ego from things is a wise thing to do. It was truly refreshing to hear someone that I consider much farther along the spectrum of enlightenment myself admit that we are basically at the same place.

I am adamant that my Ironman training and racing quest is not merely about achieving some sort of time goal in a race. One of the thoughts I had about Ironman Brazil is that I feel gypped that I didn't get to have quite the ethereal experience I look forward to because of all the physical items my body was demanding I pay attention to. Yet at the same time, I think I was quite successful at letting those things be as much in the background as possible, enough so that I was able to keep on moving along.

I know that I personally experience many different layers of consciousness. Those of us who choose to live in a society and abide by certain norms (even those of us who think we are nonconformists are playing by a number of societal rules) need to shift our focus of attention many times during a day--sometimes it's work, sometimes it's relationships, sometimes it's maintenance of things (like homes and cars), sometimes it's our physical maintenance (eating, sleeping, stretching, exercising), sometimes our emotional maintenance, sometimes our intellectual maintenance (reading, engaging in spirited discourse), and then there's our spiritual/self-realization maintenance. If we didn't do this focus shifting, then we could all be contented monks living in caves!

When we call a person "balanced," it is based on some inner judgment that we are making about that person's ability to juggle all these things, but it's a foolish judgment, because after all, at the time we are making it, our own focus is on only one of those things, so how can we possibly be seeing the entire picture of another person's "being" and call it balanced or not? So a quest for balance really is, I think, counter to a quest for total enlightenment, as the enlightened one has no struggles with layers of consiousness--they all become one and the same, and there is no wrestling with focus of attention. So I am very happy to say that I am not balanced!

To me an Ironman race is about being able to put everything but the spiritual maintenance into the background. I train hard physically so that I can forget about (or go on autopilot for) my nutrition and pacing. I train mentally so that when physical things are presented in the course of the race that I can quickly evaluate and react appropriately, and then push that item back into the background. I enjoy the act of encouraging others during the race because I hope it helps them stay in their spiritual foreground, even if they are in physical suffering at the time. So the Ironman race to me is a very selfish, unbalanced mental pursuit. I want to be in it doing it all by myself inside my head, save for my altruistic actions to encourage others. I didn't enjoy Ironman Brazil the way I wanted to because other layers of consciousness kept poking through--physical and emotional. I thought I had worked and trained so hard to not let those things surface, and at one level I feel I failed. But at another level, I guess I was able to manage the circumstances and still get things done, but it wasn't "fun" the way I wanted it to be.

Enter Ms. Ego. She got pissed off that the time goals had to be thrown out the window before the starting gun was even fired. She got mildly pissed off each time some new diversion was presented, and SHE got pissed off that she couldn't relax and hang out in the background while Ms. Self-Realization did her thing.

But Ms. Ego is pretty smart. She knows when she's not getting what she wants and why. And then she proceeds to make me feel badly about it! What a wonderful system. Yet that is how I know my ego is mature--if it weren't, I wouldn't question it.

Maybe I am searching for a level of mind/consciousness control that is out of reach. Yet I still think it's worthwhile to pursue it. Better to know and to know my own suffering than to not know.

It is odd that since my infections have cleared up, that I am still left with the usual Ironman fatigue, which doesn't seem right. I was supposed to get better and then just feel great! But I do feel significantly better, just tired. It is forcing me to think every day about how much exercise do I think I can tolerate? I'm flying without a training plan, and plan to keep that up for the next 2 weeks, as there is no pressure on me except for what I put on myself. I will be at about 9 hours for the week at the end of today. I think, gosh, my perception is pretty warped! 9 hours of anything is plenty for most people, but see I've got this bike ride I think I want to do next week, and I'm trying to figure out if I can do it. Each day I am a little less tired. I actually totally enjoyed running this morning, and even managed to pick it up when I saw someone else running the same direction. I'm going to try my second swim of the week shortly. My intention is to be on my bike this weekend as much as I can tolerate.

Am I still a Crackhead? Sure I am. I long for my body to crave and delight in hard, focused training efforts. I long for the annoyed feeling I get because it is difficult for me to match my eating to my calorie expenditure. I long for the complete and utter exhaustion that comes from a 2-hour run or a 4-6 hour ride. I long for the solace I get during those long and hard training sessions because I am so confident in my body's physical abilities that I don't really need to worry about it and I can be on autopilot save for a few glances at the power meter or clock. And yes, in a sick way, I'm looking forward to my next FTP test on the bike, which as always, I will enter with the appropriate degree of fear and respect, and then marvel at what a wondrous machine I have built. But now I can bring something new to the Crackhead table which is that, after all, I do have limitations, and while they may sometimes keep me from satisfying my Ego, they create the environment for greater self-realization and spiritual growth.