The Bureaucracy of the Defilements
December 30, 2014
Years back there was a teacher in another Buddhist tradition who liked to talk a lot about the bureaucracy of the ego and how we had to throw off the shackles and tyranny of that bureaucracy. By that, he meant your ideas of right and wrong, of what you should and shouldn’t do. His way of overcoming the tyranny of that bureaucracy was to deliberately do a lot of the things your mind said you shouldn’t do. As you can imagine, he ended up doing a lot of harm to himself and to many other people, breaking the precepts and getting them to break the precepts as well.