Ever since learning about narcissism, the whole thing has felt abhorrent. Various Christian thinkers pointed to this not as something that only a few would deal with in terms of a diagnosis. Rather, they assessed it as the fundamental human problem.

The idea felt abhorrent because it felt as though this assessment was true. If it was true, then who wants to be the person stuck looking at their own thoughts, reflections, eventually drowning in them, while in the meantime life as it is actually happening is flying past. And moreso: the life that is missed out on, is actually turning into an echo of what could have been. That is to say: it is done injustice to. This is because is the freedoms between the individual and the larger meshworks of society and nature dependently co-arise.

It seemed vital to find anything to overcome such a condition. Which turns out to be surprisingly possible. Over the years, what started happening was a change in perspective. In an interview with my meditation teacher, Leigh Brasington, I ask him about what I by then found out are these heavenly mental states, known as jhana’s. And I ask him what he feels, looking around and what people do to each other, knowing the availability of these states, and he basically shrugs his shoulders saying he does the best he can.

Put differently, if one practices to cease narcissus, one develops a different set of issues from the perspective of echo. Echo has on offer all sorts of heavenly stuff that it can’t share by itself. On the part of narcissus, it just takes wisdom, ethics, right effort, attentiveness, and seclusion from the hindrances in the thinking. Then the madness ceases.

For reference, it reminds of the Cave Octet sutta. It is reminiscent because there is an enchantment and infatuation with what is thought of as self that only leads to despair and loss of what is actually happening.

Translation by Laurence Khantipalo Mills, the monk who supported Ayya Khema through most of her bhikkuni life. 🌼

4:2  The Cave Octet

The person who’s to their body-cave
Clouded by many moods, and in delusion sunk,
Hard it is for that one, far from detachment,
To abandon sensual pleasures in the world.

Bound the worldly pleasures of the past,
And hard to liberate are they in future time,
From others they’re not free, not liberated—
They’re attached to past and the future too.

Those who are niggardly, who hank after pleasures,
infatuated they are, all their things—losses all!
But subjected to pain they lament their losses—
For how can all this be taken away, they wail?

Therefore should a person train,
Seeing the roughness of the world,
To take not to a wicked way,
For the wise say, life is short!

I see here trembling, fearful in the world,
These people gone under the sway of craving for births—
Base people floundering in the jaws of death,
Not free from craving for repeated birth.

Look at them trembling with their egotistic selfishness,
Like fish in a stream fast drying-up,
Seeing it so, fare unselfish in this life,
And cease worrying on different states of being.

No longer longing towards either extreme
Having understood touch, together with letting go,
One should do what others will praise and not blame,
A wise one is not stained by what is seen and heard.

The sage has known perception and crossed the flood,
So with nothing tainted, nothing wrapped around,
They fare on in diligence with the arrow drawn,
Neither longing for this world nor for another.