Scholar

I was in the same position. The problem and suffering you are facing now is the key to your liberation, it is a great gift you have received if you can recognize it for what it is. A challenge which, if you face, will lead to your freedom. I am not exaggerating. Firstly, you are uncreative because you are disconnected from your true self. You wanting to be an artist, you wanting to create great art, you wanting what IS to be anything other than what IS, is literally the reason for why you are uncreative. True creativity occurs spontaneously when your experience lacks resistance. As a left-brained, rationally minded person, the way your mind operates by default is by attempting to control the world through thinking. Every moment you are in this state, you are resisting the moment as it is and striving towards a "future moment". You are using the moment as a means to an end to actualize some sort of outcome. But the future literally does not exist. All that you will ever experience is this moment. Wanting something in the future means that you fundamentally want this moment to be something other than it is. This is resistance. Notice this right now. You never in your life ever experience "the future" or "the past". What you consider "the future" is literally just a thought. A thought that is occuring right here, in this moment. The same applies to the past. Here is the crux of the problem and why you suffer: You are trying to find your Self in the future, which is just a thought. So, you are trying to construct an identity out of a narrative of what you are. "I am a talented artist!" If your experience does not match that narrative, you suffer. The essential realization to take from this is the following: Your identity determines your suffering. If you didn't want to be an artist, if you wanted to be a computer scientist, you would be happy. You believe that your existence has to have a purpose. What exactly does that mean? It means that this moment right now, your experience as it is, has no value in and of itself, and has only value in relation to accomplishing some future goal. A future which is an illusion and does not exist. So your mind is completely conditioned to trivialize this moment, the moment in which every experience you will ever have will occur, and to value something that is completely ficticious. The process of art literally IS connecting to this moment, to not want it to be a certain thing, but to be immersed in it fully. The more you try to control this moment, the less free it can be. The left brained person struggles with this because they live in the realm of thinking. Thinking is fundamentally linear, it views the past as necessary for the present and the present as necessary for the future. It is constantly looking forward or backward. Looking at what is now has no "purpose" to the intellectual mind. But now is ALL you will ever get. Not only is it all you will ever get, it is your true nature. You are not an artist, you are not any narrative you will tell yourself. You are not a "low iq uncreative person". You are this moment, eternal, unbound. This unboundedness has given rise to all things. Your creativity is infinite. You just cannot recognize this because your ego has hijacked your nature. An artist literally is someone who escapes the bounds of identity. To make being an artist an identity is an oxymoron. The moment you would define yourself as an artist, it would mean you are defining yourself as a particular thing. The whole point of creativity is to be free. Which is precisely why your true nature is infinitely creative, because it is no particular thing at all. Life purpose is an egoic attachment. Egoic attachment is the opposite of true artistry, creativity. The moment you say your life purpose is to be a good artist, you have disconnected from your true nature, this very moment, your own being and essence, and instead attached your identity onto the constant narrative of the egoic mind. The part of your mind that wants to control, manipulate, resist. "Why am I living?" Why is anyone creating art? The whole point is that there is no purpose to it. It is a celebration, an immersion into what is. Into this moment, into your own nature. The purpose of dancing is to dance, the purpose of beauty is to be beautiful. And your purpose is to exist. Only once you realize the beauty of this, and are capable of celebrating this moment, your own nature, as it is, as it always will be, as it always has been, will you be a true artist. The notion that you could be a good or bad artist will be laughable to you once you realize. Only an ego could create such lies. Not only are you not an artist, what you consider your self is itself art. Art that is displayed on the screen of your true nature, which is this moment. Another, more meaningful way to frame this is this: You are not living right now. You are trapped in thinking, disconnected from the essence of life. Thinking is supposed to be a tool which you employ to solve problems in a targetted way, yet you reside every waking moment in them. You are immerse in them, which is why programming is so easy to you. All it is, is just conceptual thinking. This is not life. Life is when you are immersed in anything other than your thinking. If you want to connect to the process of art, you have to learn to live. Here is the practical solution: Listen to Eckhart Tolle and do exactly what he tells you to do. Do it every waking moment. Meditation is not something you do 20 minutes every day. Those 20 minutes of sitting down exist so you connect to your own nature, to this moment. You want to spent every waking our in that state. There is literally no other point in life. That is what life is, complete immersion in sense perception, and in the underlying invisible ground that is your true nature. When you are fully immersed in it, you will notice that you don't need an identity. When you accept thm moment for what it is (which is what immersion is) you don't need to be an artist, or do anything, to be completely at peace. Life itself is the purpose, everything else is just extra. You want to disidentify with your thoughts and emotions. What this means is that when a thought arises, notice it without getting caught up by it. When an emotion arises, like you feeling your life is purposeless, you allow that emotion to exist. If you resist it, you disconnect from the moment and therefore from your true nature. You allow the emotion to exist in you, fully immersing yourself in it without it rising into your head and taking control over your action and behavior. You do this always, every waking moment. When a thought comes and you notice you are taking it seriously, you think it is "important", you do the same. You take a step back, and you just let it fade away. And while doing all this you need to return your focus and attention to "the moment", to the container of your consciousness. You want to reside in that as much time as you can. It shouldn't be forceful, but simply relaxing into it. If you have no sense of "this moment" yet, you can simply focus on sense perceptions instead. Like the sounds you hear, the sights you see, the presence feeling in your body. You can arrive and connect to "the moment", to the "container" by putting your attention to that in which all of these experiences are occuring. The way it feels is like eternity. You sort of grasp what the moment is, that literally your entire life happened here, right now. It will feel like your birth happen right now, in this moment. "It was actually here that it happened!" No matter where you were, it was here, right now. A very visceral sense of this. "Here" and "Now" are there same thing. Time and location become illusiory. That's what eternity is. That's your true nature, you reside in that as much time as you can. From that position, you can act effortlessly, without resistance. Learning to not resist anything is fundamental. Every challenging emotion and thought ought to be considered a gift that allows you to transcend part of your egoic mind. The feeling of "I cannot live with myself" is essential to all of this. If you could live with yourself, your ego would have no reason to take the actions I described above. It wouldnt be motivated, the chance of liberation would basically be zero. The gift is that your ego cannot live with itself anymore, so the solution is to subdue it. The more this sense of "I cannot take this anymore, I CANT LIVE WITH MYSELF!" is, the more chances of liberation you actually have. If you do what I say, you will probably find yourself no longer suffering, in which case you will let your guard down again, because the motivating force to maintain high awareness will be gone. Then you go unconscious again, suffer, and the cycle continues. Ideally you will improve in each cycle. But you should garner a sense that life is about that moment. Being immersed in what is. That's the whole point, there will never be anything beyond it. When you are not in that moment, you are not actually living.

I am not sure if this is sarcastic but I would be careful with such assumptions. I have not achieved what would be considered traditional enlightenment, and I did not have an experience of God consciousness.

I want you to consider a few things before we continue this engagement: Consider the relevancy of bias in relation to animal exploitation. We live in a culture that normalizes speciesism and violence towards animals, and there is a sophisticated machinery around the rationalizations for why that exploitation is justified. Remember how before you identified as a vegan, you might have thoughtlessly accepted those rationalizations. You would have argued that eating meat is moral and necessary, and you would have defended the current cultural norm. Now it is blatantly obvious to you how biased those arguments is. I want you to keep an open mind to this being possibly the case with discrimination against consanguinamorous individuals, too. When we consider our own biases, we can ask questions like: "Could I be subject to certain biases that are culturally or even biologically reinforced? And could those biases distort my ethical thinking in a way that cause serious suffering or injustice to others?" How exactly do we know if we are biased or not? I think there are a few good measures of that: 1. Do we live in a culture which reinforces certain biases? 2. Do we make arguments that under scrutiny are inconsistent with our own moral values? Let us examine question the first question. Does society reinforce biases against incest? Almost every depiction in media surrounding consensual incest is profoundly negative. Usually individuals who participate in it are villains, morally depraved, highly dysfunctional or evil. Especially abrahamic religion has a long track record of demonizing incest. Not only that, but we seem to have an inherent negative predisposition towards incest resulting from evolutionary pressures. Positive depictions of incest are demonized and prohibited, and individuals who participate in such relationships in a healthy manner are never exposed to the public because of both the criminalization and the severe stigma. Given this is true, you should already be careful around how your mind might distort this issue. Let us move to question to and examine the arguments you have provided: Yes, but many things are normal. Xenophobia, misogyny, queerphobia, speciesism. Many of those are perfectly normal, which of course doesn't mean they are good. Be careful with conclusions like "Incest is taboo everywhere, that means there must be a good reason for it!". The reason might be that evolution simply reinforced a strong aversion against incest because of the effects of multigenerational inbreeding. The presence of the taboo itself might be driven more by that aversion than any functional reason. We don't need a taboo if we already have an aversion towards it, because the aversion itself is what fulfills the function on the population level. This is simply not true. Consensual incest is criminalized in most US states. Criminal prosecutions of consensual incest are rare, but still happen. Homosexuality was also not prosecuted often when it was criminalized. Proving private consensual acts is notoriously difficult. The harm of such laws however extend beyond prosecution, as individuals who live in such circumstances do live in fear of being caught. Usually individuals who are already marginalized in some manner have to worry that exposing their relationship will lead to criminal consequences. Additionally, anyone who does have children (even if they are not the result of incest), will be deprived of their parental rights if their relationship is exposed. This has the effect that individuals who find themselves in domestic abuse circumstances might fear reporting it to their family or authorities because exposing the abuse threatens to expose the relationship. Incest is a strict liability crime for both participants, if coercion cannot be proven. There was a case just a few years ago where a woman was arrested for incest after she gave birth and her doctor found the child was a result of close inbreeding during genetic testing. There is a few problems with this argument. Incest and Inbreeding are not the same act You can be in an incestuous relationship without ever having children or even risking to have children. Same-sex couples, couples who underwent sterilization, couples who are too old to procreate or couples who simply don't want children. You don't have to make incest taboo to make inbreeding taboo. And you certainly don't need to make all incestuous acts taboo, when children can only result from vaginal intercourse. A couple can be in a loving relationship without ever engaging in vaginal intercourse, or more specifically, unprotected vaginal intercourse. Inbreeding risks are not absolute risks This is important to note. Inbreeding risks are not absolute. Not all siblings have a substantially elevated risk of birth defects, it completely depends on their particular genetic make up. People can get tested to ascertain whether or not significantly harmful recessive gene alleles are present in both individuals. It is more likely that two siblings will have such matching recessive alleles, but not at all guaranteed. From the calculations I saw, around half of siblings will not even have a significantly elevated risk for this reason. There is no fundamental reason to treat consanguinamorous couples any different from other high risk groups. Inconsistency with how we treat other high risk groups This is where bias becomes pretty obvious. We simply do not treat any other high risk couples the way we treat consanguinamorous couples. People with conditions like Huntington's Disease and various other conditions are not prohibited from having children. Many people don't know this but the most common form of dwarfism is achondroplasia. If two individuals with achondroplasia have a child together, there is a 25% chance that child will suffer early fatality. Inbreeding does risk disabilities and even fatal afflictions, but even the risk of sibling inbreeding doesn't come close to matching that sort of risk. We are talking about a child who will live a life not worth living. Do we condemn people with dwarfism for being in relationships with each other? No, we don't even condemn them for having children. We even support them in their endeavors to have children via community education and things like reproductive counselling. We have deep respect even for people's reproductive choices, no matter how high the risk to the offspring is. Yet, a brother and sister who are in a relationship and don't even want to have children are treated as disgusting and extremely selfish? We don't even apply remotely the same amount of stigma to women who smoke and drink during pregnancy. Obviously irresponsible reproductive behavior is something that should be discouraged. But the idea that a high risk couple cannot engage in responsible reproduction, or simply choose not to reproduce, and must be shamed for the greater good of society, would be a fundamental violation of people's autonomy in any other case. In one case we have sympathy for and actively support the individuals, in the other we condemn them. Taboo is trivially unnecessary In the case of other high risk parents, we recognize that we don't need to enforce any form of stigma against such relationships because it is obvious to everyone that any parent already has every incentive to reduce the risk of disability or suffering to their future child. For this exact reason we also don't universally criminalize late term abortions. We employ education and medical guidance because we know that parents don't want their children to be disabled and suffer. That is sufficient to discourage individuals from engaging in irresponsible reproductive behavior. When people engage in inbreeding, in virtually all cases it is because the individuals involved were uneducated about the risks involved. We have an inbuilt aversion towards close-family inbreeding, which trivializes the need for a social taboo as well. The invisible harms of the taboo The taboo, on a societal level, discourages education around healthy consanguinamory. You don't need to teach people the risks of something nobody is supposed to engage in in the first place. On the other hand, the stigma (and laws) around incest makes it unlikely that couples do seek counselling from family, friends and medical experts. When there is a pregnancy, they might not inform the doctor of the nature of the pregnancy, which could be essential to preventing further harm. Taboos such as these lead to social isolation which becomes it's own vector for harmful behavior. We recognize this for drug users, teen pregnancies and so forth. Identity Problem The idea that it is actually immoral to give birth to a disabled child itself is hard to defend philosophically. It's not as straightforward as you would think to say that a couple who has a high risk of giving birth to a disabled child is actually harming that child. The alternative to that child being born is for it to not be born at all. Even individuals with significant disabilities tend to live lifes that they consider worth living. A woman who drinks alcohol is different because the child born with a disability in that case would otherwise have been born healthy. But even then we don't even apply an ounce of the stigma we apply to non-reproductive siblings who are in a romantic relationship. This does not translate to modernity. Royals engaged in forced arranged marriages to maintain positions of power and wealth. This lead to multigeneration inbreeding, which compounds risks significantly. Even in countries like Pakistan, the issue arises as a result of cultural norms and lack of education. Arranged/forced marriages, a culture that encourages marriages within extended families and no education around the risks of inbreeding. None of these are applicable to modern, western societies. This is simply demonstrably not the case. People had no awareness of the risks of inbreeding until fairly recently historically speaking. The bias against incest was driven by an instinctual aversion towards incest, which is driven by our evolutionary legacy. This instinctual aversion caused profound harm to individuals. In scandinavia even in early modernity the punishment for participating in incest was execution for everyone involved. A woman, or little girl, who was raped by her father in law would be executed with him because incest was considered such a profound violation of the natural order that all traces must be eradicated. It extended far beyond just closely blood related individuals. There is a deeply primitive aversion residing in us that erases our empathy towards those who violate the "sacred" order of family and replaces it with pure disgust and horror. Apparently, this aversion was necessary to keep our prehistoric ancestors from engaging in inbreeding, but that doesn't mean that the hallucinations that result from this feeling are justified or necessary. The aversion assert and reinforces itself culturally. Animals don't kill their fellow animals because they engage in incest. Inbreeding happens sometimes, must mostly is avoided. Humans however turn this aversion into a sacred order that must be maintained and protected, to avoid the corruption of the entire community. That is precisely the mythology you find across cultures. It's not a result of necessity, it's a result of primitive emotions guiding our actions and belief systems. I hope I demonstrated to you why this taboo does not make as perfect sense as it at first seems to make. But I also want you to consider how you trivialize the actual nature of this taboo. It isn't just people finding incest icky, or people disapproving and being judgemental. If a twin brother and sister engage in sex, or even identical twins, independent if they can have children or not, the degree of shame and stigma they face is basically equivalent to a child rapist. A woman could be guzzling down alcohol every day while pregnant and she would not face an ounce of the same stigma. And this is the truly perverse thing. Siblings who do end up in relationships tend to come from backgrounds of childhood adversity and marginalization. People who had neglectful or abusive parents, people who felt like outcasts in society. The guilt and shame they experience, the lack of mercy society has for them. And these individuals are then forced to live a life of complete social isolation because somehow we cannot come up with a more reasonable and targetted approach than blanket stigma against the relationship itself? Remember than these individuals had no choice in how they grew up, the feelings they developed for each other over the span of two decades being raised together. We have issues of enmeshment, codependency, trauma-shared bonding, coforming identities. I want you to notice that you probably never even considered any of what I just said. You don't care to mitigate their suffering, you already are steadfast in the idea that this taboo is necessary as it is. And actually, it isn't that bad. It's just a little bit of social disapproval, we don't even imprison people for it anymore in civilized countries like the US. Actually, the animals don't suffer that much when I buy free ranger meat. You know, we need meat to survive, every society in history consumed animal products. Society would collapse if we considered animals equal to ourselves. It would lead to people recognizing that animals death and suffering is unavoidable, and that would normalize the death and suffering of humans as well. Because we can't avoid killing animals and inflicting severe suffering on them completely. Society needs to consider animals inferior because we are not ready yet to adopt responsibility for all animals and give them actual rights. We need to consider non-human animals as inferior to us for practical reasons, otherwise people would have an existential crisis whenever they accidentally killed an animal. Having restricted identities is actually a very important thing. If you agree that the arguments you provided here are weak and not at all sufficient to justify the taboo in the way you claimed it was, before you move on to new arguments (preserving family roles, power dynamics, coercion risks etc), I want you to note that you did find this argument compelling. If to me the flaws of the arguments are so transparent, I suggest that it is not because I am more intelligent or even more informed, but because I don't share the same set of biases as you do.

That's not really the argument. Those who have an identity tied to being logical and ethically consistent, which to some degree most people do. However, see next point. Rational thinking is a tool deployed by identity. In this case, I pointed out how identity engaged in rationalization of it's own behavior. We don't really start with a set or ethical premises and then work out from that all conclusions that follow from that, and then abide by those rulesets. We constantly adjust our own moral rationalizations to fit moral intuitions (which are tied to identity). Of course, logic can be a great tool. I used logic to elucidate the process that has taken place here.

It seems to me like there is rationalization going on here. The obvious answer is that humans are selfish. The idea that we actually don't help starving people in another country with our money because otherwise the world wouldn't be worth living, or some other deeper philosophical reality about the nature of ethics, is I think kind of hilarious if you truly look at how absurd that actually sounds. No, you just don't want to be bothered to spent the money. It takes time, effort, sacrifice. Humans are driven by emotion, not reason, or philosophy, or the consequences of moral systems and principles. They don't see the suffering, they don't act on it. If you were sufficiently horrified by what is going on another country, you would be motivated to do something about it. Not because you realized the true nature of morality, but because for whatever reason your identity was tied to that thing and you were driven to act on it. There is no "ought" here. What seems to be happening actually is this: You have engaged in some moral thinking, and that lead you to the idea that there are people in deep suffering that you could help substantially with a fairly trivial sacrifice to your life. We live in a society where nobody will peer pressure you into actually donating that money, and you really don't feel like donating that money. But you also have enough ethical sensibility that you realize the choice that you are making: You are choosing to go to the cinema instead of saving another human beings life. And in your mind, a person who prioritizes their own, trivial pleasure (you could easily do something that doesn't cost money and have just as much fun as whatever you spent money on) over another human beings life and suffering, clearly cannot be a good person. Not only are they not a good person, they are a horrible person. But you are a good person, not a horrible person. So now here we go, we have to explain why it actually is not horrible to make this choice. In the end, no matter what you come up with, the reality will be: If it was your brother or sister who needed 100€ not to starve to death, or die by some horrible disease, you would immediately give them that money. There would be no question about it. You would never say "Well, who is to say I need to give my sister this money? Why ought I use 100€ to save her life? What would life be if nobody could enjoy art, music?". Everyone would know this is bullshit. You can enjoy life and music and everything else while still giving your sister 100€. You would help your sister because your identity is tied to your sister. Even if she lived on the other side of the planet you would still give her that 100€. You would be highly emotionally driven to do so. When we talk people in africa, they are an abstraction to you. You could sit down, watch videos, maybe even contact a person and befriend them from that region via the internet. And maybe your identity would get tied to them, or that issue in general. And then, you would be motivated to act, because your emotions drive you to do so. You are sensing an issue with the problem of identity in general. Expanding identity is burdensome. Even just loving your own family can be burdensome. When they suffer, you suffer. You feel obligated to help them if they are in need of it. "Feeling obligated", just means there is a strong emotion driving you towards that. Now, the more people you include into your identity, truly, the more burden you would have to carry. Everyone's suffering who is included into your identity becomes your suffering. Identity means self. So that is the reason why your psychology resists this idea. This is why identity is highly selective. Notice there is no morality here. Morality has a profoundly small role in actual human behavior.

But couldn't we say the same about incest? (I am drawing from a conversation we had some time ago) As long as society is capable of condemning and imprisoning two siblings who were abused by their parents, or rejected by society, and therefore developed a romantic relationship, that this kind of mentality will open the door to do the same to other sexual minorities? The reason why we do it is almost exclusively motivated by our emotional predispositions towards incest. By continuing to do so, and allowing bias to shape our evaluation of such acts, we also enable a paradigm that encourages moral thinking that is shaped by primitive emotions and allows for the stigmatization and persecution of innocent individuals. Valuing our preconceptions or feelings of disgust over the actual lives and suffering of other individuals. The response I remember was that "society is not yet ready to abandon incestophobia". But why is society ready to abandon speciesism? Why is it the case that in this instance, the lack of moral development is a hinderance to social development, but in the case of incest, the lack of moral development is actually something that is either independent, or even conducive, to social development?

He is repeating Leo. Leo has been on the "liberals are too soft to see the harsh realities of the world" train for a while now, including talking about how the death penalty is actually good. You guys need to watch out for your reactivity. Outrage and moral condemnation means your ego has been hijacked by the level of consciousness of society. You are getting pulled down, you aren't pulling anyone up. What you should do is learn what is happening. And while doing so, study how your own mind is reacting to the things you are exposing yourself to. Otherwise this discussions is just an extention of the internet brainrot. The whole point of the forum is elevation of consciousness, the conversation taking place here are on par with discussions taking place on social media. That's not good.

If God made the world impermanent so nothing could be seperated from God forever, then doesn't that mean that God denies some things from existing? In the "Understanding Impermanence", I haven't heard any metaphysical reasons for why reality must be permanent, rather it seems more like God intentionally created an impermanent world. If reality is impermanent necessarily for some logical reason, does that mean God is governed by logic? But what could possibly be that which limits God, if God is the ultimate? If God does limit Infinity, then how is Infinity to be understood? Does that mean God has preferences and biases? If not, what else would those things be? Does God only limit true permanence? For example, Infinity could be impermanent but still allow the emergence of forms of suffering and separation from God that could go on for trillion and trillions of years. Let's say humanity evolves technologically and we can create artificial consciousness that can sustain itself until the heat death of the universe, you can conceive that someone, either an individual or a government, might create a being that will experience ultimate pain for this long of a duration. If Infinity is Infinity, such experiences must exist infinitely. Even if they are not permanent, the existence of such experiences would make it hard to justify the existence of anything at all. Would God also prevent such forms of existence? But if that was true, where would he set the limit? Would he allow a form to be separated from God/in ultimate suffering for centillion years? Maybe sextillion years? Or a million years? It seems arbitary to set a limit. And if he does not set a limit, then it must be the case that there are forms which experience incomprehensible amounts of suffering for what from a human perspective would be indistinguishable from infinity. Or would you say it is biased of someone to consider that such experiences ought not exist? That they must exist because God's love must include all things?

Most humans aren't developed enough to grow a conscience knowing that hundreds of millions of individuals are tortured for their convenience in their own countries. This applies to you as much as it does to Netenyahu. Expecting the Israelies, under the given survival pressures, whether self caused or not, to behave any other way than they do, is simply ignorance and lack of acceptance of the reality of the human condition. It has nothing to do with moral failing. Morality doesn't exist, humans are predictable animals that will act according to the conditions they were raised in. All of you are like vegans screeching at meateaters for causing unnecessary suffering. But then you turn around and flop your meaty fingers at the judgemental activists who by your account only harm the their own cause with their immature behavior. This is in essence what Dave is. It's pure unconsciousness. You and Dave can't even stop a habit that would mildly inconvenience you to prevent someone from being put through literal torture. In fact, Dave would mock any vegan who would point this fact out to him. At least Destiny is an actual sociopath. He has an excuse to behave the way he does.

It depends on what you mean by real. I am speaking of a sense of realness any given person has, which is in essence completely removed from causative narratives within your experience, although of course correlated. But yes that is a psychosis, on both a psychological level and an existential level, because causation itself is an illusion.

Incest rape victims*

Not in the clinical sense, I was being a bit cheeky. He basically still hasn't properly distinguished thoughts from reality, or rather dissolved the illusiory sense of reality. I say this because it is transparent to how attached he gets to various thoughts he has about reality, or things like believing he was an alien and learned an alien language. Psychedelics tend to reinforce the confusion between thoughts and reality because the experiences are so intense the egoic sense of reality gets hijacked by it.

This is the opposite of true. Realness is a sensation that exists completely outside of the Isness of things. It's not a profound realization at all, it is psychosis. There is no you to give anything meaning and realness in the first place.

I don't know how the narrative emerged, but people tend to confuse awareness with egolessness. Both concepts are connected, but a being can be without ego can lack self-awareness, and a self-aware being can still have ego. An enlightened teacher can still act ignorantly even if he has attained a cessation of ego. Sure it's basically the survival apparatus of the mind, although when I talk about ego I refer specifically to the identity-forming parts of the mind. Really, it's just models to communicate the ideas, when I look in my own direct experience it becomes too complex to accurately describe.

This is the confusion that plagues these sorts of communities. You don't have to be without ego to realize what is happening within your own experience. I am aware of what my ego is doing, to the degree necessary to assert the claims I did. Being egoless will not fundamentally shift the awareness of what I speak of, it would just change the quality of this experience.