PERSONA (literally 'mask': the artificial 'me'): You say that I don't exist, that I have no reality; you liken me to a puff of smoke, vapour, a passing cloud, even a mirage. But here I am.
RELATIVE EGO: Look, there is passing cloud!
PERSONA: Then what am I?
RELATIVE EGO: You are the resultant of all my contacts with the 'not-me'. Your substance is memory, also called 'habit energy', your vitality is psychic tension, and you live on affirmations and negations.
PERSONA: Is my substance not real?
RELATIVE EGO: Memory is not real; it is like a reflection or echo of that which has been perceived and is no longer perceived - though it has not ceased to be; it is a distorted image of a perception.
PERSONA: Even if I am not real, how can you maintain that I do not exist?
RELATIVE EGO: Because you are not a thing-in-itself. You only exist in the colloquial sense that everything we recognise may be said therefore to have an appearance of existence. You are an evaluation, not a reality.
PERSONA: Yet you and your friends spend a lot of time talking about me as though I existed. You say that the ego of so-and-so sticks out like the bristles on a hedgehog, that such another has an ego like a boil on his nose, that a third is an 'insufferable egoist'. You have just been saying that pride and humility are merely functions of the ego, that when I am powerful they manifest as pride, and that when I am weak they manifest as humility. How can they be a function of something that does not exist?
RELATIVE EGO: They do not exist as things-in-themselves just as you do not, and for precisely the same reason; just as they are merely estimations of a function depending on you, so you are also just a functional manifestation.
PERSONA: So they are a function of a function? What is a function?
RELATIVE EGO: It is defined as 'a quantity that is dependent for its value on another quantity'. No function exists as a thing-in-itself.
PERSONA: Of what am I a function?
RELATIVE EGO: Of me.
PERSONA: And what, pray, are you?
RELATIVE EGO: As Bodhidharma stated long ago to the Emperor of China in reply to the same question - I do not know.
PERSONA: Is that a qualification for accusing others of not existing?
RELATIVE EGO: I am a function of maya. When Reality refracts Itself through the prism of Time, and appears in Mind as manifestation in three dimensions - which is maya - I appear as the nucleus of this so-called individual.
PERSONA: Why so-called?
RELATIVE EGO: Because the word 'individual' means that which is undivided, and the manifestation in question is just the opposite of that. He is a 'dividual', but he has the superficial appearance of singularity.
PERSONA: Multiple or single, are you real at least?
RELATIVE EGO: Good Heavens, no: I am relative.
PERSONA: That is a comfort.
RELATIVE EGO: Thinking of yourself as usual!
PERSONA: That is my job. How do you know that you are not real?
RELATIVE EGO: The Lord Buddha, in the Diamond Sutra, many times used a phrase which was admirably inclusive. That which must not be conceived as really existing he termed 'an ego-entity, a personality, a being or a separated individuality'. We are all in that.
PERSONA: Well, what is the difference between us?
RELATIVE EGO: I fulfil a useful function; without me this so-called individual would disintegrate, could not remain in manifestation.
PERSONA: And me?
RELATIVE EGO: You are just a nuisance, a by-product, a malady, a bad smell. I have only to cut off the psychic tensions which are your life-force, or deprive you of the affirmations and negations on which you feed, and you dissolve like a puff of smoke, vapour, or a cloud in the sky.
PERSONA: You try! I am strong; I know how to fight and protect myself.
RELATIVE EGO: Nonsense, you are a clown, an illusionist. When one grows up and sees through the tawdry mechanism of your tricks, and watches you performing them, you wilt and crumple up like a balloon that is burst. Your strength is that of a bully, but you are only a poor fish. You have nothing substantial anywhere in you to hold you together. You are just hot air.
PERSONA: You think you are somebody just because you have Reality behind you, attached to your name by a hyphen.
RELATIVE EGO: Potentially I am Reality, but as long as I am encumbered with you I am tied down to perception in three dimensions and can only know that intellectually. When I am rid of you I shall be free to turn round - paravritti it is called in Sanscrit, the 'turning over of the mind' - and live in accordance with cosmic necessity, free from conflict, free from all the miseries that come upon me through your antics. I shall be able to cast off relativity.
PERSONA: Can't I come in on that?
RELATIVE EGO: In that state there remains no sense of a 'me', there is no longer differentiation between one and other. How then could you participate therein?
PERSONA: That's all ballyhoo; I'm off to see if I can't find a means of having a good time. I 'exist' all right in my own way.
RELATIVE EGO: Incorrigible! What a lout! You could not understand it, but to 'exist' connotes 'dualistically'; all idea of existence is dualistic. That is why it is unreal, why nothing exists in reality - as Hui Neng told us. But 'being' is always in unicity. And nothing dualist (relative) IS.
