A
DEEP DIVE POINTS — RAMESH BALSEKAR
“Without the ego, interhuman relationships wouldn't happen. Friendship and enmity, love and hate. And without interhuman relationships, life as we know it cannot happen.”
The statement attributed to Ramesh S. Balsekar points towards a subtle paradox: the ego is necessary for the drama of human life to unfold, yet the belief that we are separate, independent authors of that drama is the source of our psychological suffering.
To understand this deeply, we need to distinguish the functional ego from the psychological identification with the ego.
1. The ego is the organising principle of human interaction
In ordinary life, the ego gives us a sense of being a particular person, with a name, a history, preferences, responsibilities and relationships.
I am a parent, partner, friend or colleague.
I prefer certain people and feel uncomfortable around others.
I remember how somebody treated me.
I make decisions, pursue goals and respond to circumstances.
Without this sense of individual identity, the practical structure of human relationships would be radically different.
Balsekar is not necessarily saying that the ego is an independent entity that creates life. Rather, within the functioning of everyday life, the sense of individuality is part of how human interaction takes place.
Deep point: The ego can be necessary as a practical instrument without being the ultimate truth of who we are.
We can use the identity of a person without assuming that this identity represents our deepest nature.
2. Friendship and enmity arise through the sense of separation
Friendship and enmity seem to be opposites, but both depend upon the formation of a relationship between apparently separate individuals.
Friendship says:
You are someone with whom I feel connected.
Enmity says:
You are someone whose interests oppose mine.
Both involve recognition of a self and another.
The ego creates distinctions: my interests, your interests; my people, your people; my success, your success.
From these distinctions emerge affection, loyalty, rivalry, jealousy, protection and hostility.
Yet the distinction between self and other does not have to produce conflict. It can also make compassion and cooperation possible.
The deeper issue is not that distinctions appear, but that we become psychologically imprisoned by them.
A relationship can function through individuality without requiring the belief that the two individuals are fundamentally isolated from one another.
3. Love and hate are both movements within relationship
Consider how closely love and hate can be connected.
We may love someone because they fulfil our expectations, affirm our identity, provide security or make us feel valued. When those expectations are disappointed, the same relationship can become a source of anger, resentment or rejection.
The person we once idealised may become the person we blame.
From this perspective, some forms of love contain an unspoken bargain:
I love you because of what you mean to me.
This does not mean that all human love is merely selfish or that genuine affection is impossible. It means that attachment, possession and expectation can become entangled with love.
The Advaitic enquiry asks: Can there be affection without the constant demand that the other person reinforce my sense of self?
Can I care without possessing? Can I disagree without turning the other person into an enemy? Can I allow another person to change without experiencing it as a threat to my identity?
When psychological ownership diminishes, love may become less about securing the ego and more about responding to another human being with openness.
4. The ego is not only the source of conflict; it is also part of the conditions for intimacy
It is tempting to conclude that if the ego causes suffering, the ideal would be to eliminate it completely.
But Balsekar's statement points towards a more nuanced understanding.
A world of human relationships involves differences, preferences, memories, needs and individual perspectives. These differences create the conditions for friendship, romance, family life, disagreement and reconciliation.
Without the experience of being distinct individuals, our familiar understanding of interpersonal life would not exist in the same form.
The implication is not that we should deliberately cultivate hatred, jealousy or possessiveness. Rather, we can recognise that the whole spectrum of human experience belongs to the functioning of life as we know it.
There is a crucial distinction between:
Functional individuality: knowing who you are in a practical situation, setting boundaries and meeting responsibilities.
Psychological egoism: treating your personal identity, opinions and desires as something that must constantly be defended, validated or made superior.
The first is compatible with wisdom. The second often generates unnecessary suffering.
5. The paradox: the ego participates in life, but need not define our deepest identity
This is perhaps the most important point in Balsekar's teaching.
The ego is involved in the experience of being an individual. Through that individuality, life unfolds as relationships, choices, conflicts, affection and countless other human experiences.
But Advaita Vedanta questions whether the individual ego is truly an independent, self-existing controller of this process.
Thoughts arise. Emotions arise. Preferences develop. Circumstances influence decisions. The body and mind respond to the world.
We ordinarily interpret this activity through the assumption: I, as a separate individual, am the independent author of everything I think, feel and do.
Balsekar's nondual perspective challenges that assumption.
The individual person continues to function, but the claim of absolute personal authorship is questioned.
This does not require denying ordinary responsibility or pretending that actions have no consequences. It changes the way we understand the person who acts.
The person continues to participate in life; what is questioned is the imagined independence of the person from the totality of life.
6. If the ego is necessary, why seek freedom from it?
Here lies the apparent contradiction.
If the ego makes relationships possible, why would spiritual understanding involve seeing through the ego?
Because the aim is not necessarily to abolish the practical person. It is to loosen identification with that person as an isolated, independently controlling entity.
Imagine that somebody criticises you.
The functional response might be to listen, consider whether the criticism is justified, explain your position or establish a boundary.
The ego-driven psychological response might add an entire story:
How dare they speak to me like that? They have humiliated me. I must prove them wrong. I cannot let them win.
The original event may be brief. The psychological continuation can last for days.
Awareness allows the practical response to remain while the additional struggle is seen more clearly.
The insult may still hurt. Anger may still arise. But there is potentially less compulsion to turn the experience into a lasting story about me.
Freedom, in this sense, does not mean becoming a blank, emotionless or indifferent person.
It means that emotions and relationships need not be accompanied by the same degree of rigid self-identification.
7. The world of opposites belongs to the play of manifestation
Friendship and enmity, love and hate are pairs of opposites. Human life is experienced through distinctions and changing circumstances.
A person can be a friend today and an adversary tomorrow. Someone we dislike may later become someone we deeply appreciate. Love can mature, fade or change its form.
Nothing in ordinary relational experience remains entirely fixed.
From a nondual perspective, these changing opposites belong to the manifested world: the world in which multiplicity, differentiation and relationships appear.
The mistake is not necessarily that opposites exist. The mistake is assuming that one side must provide permanent psychological security.
We want friendship without the possibility of disappointment, love without vulnerability, success without failure, and approval without criticism.
But a changing world cannot provide permanent security to an identity that depends upon its circumstances remaining favourable.
Seeing this can make us less rigid in our demands upon life.
We can appreciate friendship without assuming it must last forever. We can experience disagreement without making it the definition of a person. We can love while recognising that all relationships exist within changing conditions.
8. Does this mean that everything is predetermined and nobody is responsible?
This is an important question in Balsekar's teaching.
Balsekar is well known for emphasising that events unfold through the totality of causes and conditions, rather than through an entirely independent individual will.
On this account, what we call a personal decision arises from a particular body-mind, its conditioning, circumstances and the wider situation.
But this philosophical view should not be confused with the practical claim that nothing matters.
Actions still affect people. Consequences still occur. Society still requires boundaries, accountability and protection from harmful behaviour.
Understanding that another person acts from conditioning may reduce hatred without requiring us to tolerate abuse.
You can recognise the conditions that contribute to somebody's behaviour and still decide not to remain in a destructive relationship.
Compassion and boundaries are not opposites.
The deeper shift is from condemning a person as an independently evil self towards understanding behaviour while responding appropriately to its consequences.
9. Can we have relationships without ego?
The answer depends upon what we mean by ego.
If ego means the practical sense of being an individual, then human relationships as we know them depend upon distinctions between people.
If ego means the psychological insistence that I am a separate entity whose worth, security and identity must be continually defended, then a relationship can become less dominated by egoic reactions.
Consider two people having a disagreement.
In the first case, each person is primarily concerned with winning, protecting pride and proving the other wrong.
In the second, both can express their views firmly while remaining open to the possibility that they have misunderstood something.
The difference is not the absence of personality or individuality. Both people still have opinions and preferences.
The difference is that the relationship no longer has to serve as a battleground for the preservation of each person's self-image.
Perhaps this is the practical significance of the teaching: we do not need to destroy individuality to become less imprisoned by it.
10. The deepest paradox: life needs the relationship, but awareness sees beyond separation
At the everyday level, there are two people: you and me.
There are promises to honour, conversations to have, responsibilities to fulfil and relationships that require care.
At the level of nondual enquiry, however, we ask whether the apparent separation between individuals tells the whole story of existence.
Advaita points towards a reality in which multiplicity does not represent the ultimate truth of what is.
This does not mean that the other person ceases to matter, or that suffering is unreal in the practical sense. Rather, the sense of being fundamentally isolated may be less absolute than it appears.
The paradox is that we can continue to participate fully in the world of relationships without assuming that our separate identities are the ultimate foundation of reality.
We can love without needing to possess. We can disagree without needing to hate. We can act without imagining ourselves to be entirely independent of the conditions that make action possible.
And we can recognise the importance of the human world without assuming that it exhausts the meaning of existence.
11. Bringing the teaching into everyday life
When you feel jealousy
Notice the fear of losing something that reinforces your identity or gives you security. You do not have to condemn the feeling, but you need not allow it to dictate your behaviour.
When somebody criticises you
Distinguish the useful information from the threat to your self-image. You can respond to the information without automatically fighting to restore your pride.
When a relationship becomes difficult
Ask whether you are responding to what is happening now or to the story you have built around what the other person supposedly says about you.
When you notice the sense of “I”
Instead of trying to suppress it, observe how it appears in thought: my opinion, my hurt, my success, my relationship. The enquiry is whether these thoughts must define your entire sense of being.
12. The ultimate question: who is it that loves, hates, befriends or becomes an enemy?
This is where the quotation can become a genuine enquiry rather than merely an intellectual idea.
Ordinarily, we assume that there is a separate individual standing apart from life, deciding how to relate to other separate individuals.
But can we find this independent controller apart from the thoughts, emotions, memories, desires and circumstances that constitute the experience of being that person?
When anger arises, the anger is experienced. When love arises, love is experienced. When a decision is made, the decision occurs within a complex web of conditions.
The mind then claims ownership: I created this. I am in control. This is happening to me.
Balsekar's teaching invites us to examine that claim.
This is not proof that no individual exists in any sense. Nor is it a reason to dismiss our experience. It is an invitation to question whether the familiar sense of a separate, autonomous self is as solid and independent as we assume.
Perhaps the point is not to stop being a person, but to see that being a person does not necessarily mean being an entirely separate entity.
And perhaps the possibility of freedom lies not in escaping human relationships, but in participating in them with less attachment to the story of a separate self.
The essence of Balsekar's statement
Three levels can help bring the whole teaching together.
LEVEL 1 — ORDINARY LIFE
The ego makes personal relationships possible.
Individuality gives everyday life its familiar structure of friendship, love, conflict and social interaction.
LEVEL 2 — PSYCHOLOGICAL FREEDOM
We need not turn every relationship into a defence of the self.
Hurt, anger and attachment may arise, but we can become less governed by the demand to protect our image and control other people.
LEVEL 3 — NONDUAL UNDERSTANDING
The separate individual may not be the ultimate truth of existence.
Life unfolds through relationships and distinctions, while Advaita invites us to investigate the deeper unity underlying apparent multiplicity.
The essential insight is this:
The ego is part of the mechanism through which human life is experienced, but it need not be mistaken for the ultimate truth of what we are.
The aim is not necessarily to remove the person from life. It is to see through the assumption that the person is an entirely separate, independent centre of existence.
And when that assumption relaxes, relationships may continue, but the compulsion to defend, possess, control and perpetually validate the self can begin to lose its grip.
One final question captures the heart of the enquiry:
Can I participate fully in the world of love, friendship and human relationship while remaining open to the possibility that I am more than the separate “I” I ordinarily take myself to be?
No comments:
Post a Comment