Posthuman Blues

I read Hermann Hesse's "Siddhartha" today, inspired by Colin Wilson's treatment of Hesse in "The Outsider."

The conflict I encounter with books on Eastern thought is the presumed need to permanently dispense with the Self. Can't one somehow have both? How to reconcile the ego (William Burroughs' "excess baggage") with the need to become as one with the Cosmos, obliterating the illusion of time and plunging into David Bohm's "implicate order"?

Being philosophically omnivorous doesn't help matters. I like Ayn Rand and Timothy Leary; Nietzsche and Gurdjieff. As Hesse's Siddhartha would have said, each route is an equally valid -- if limited -- way of understanding.

I sympathize completely with Burroughs' efforts to "rub out the word." Words, for their pragmatic beauty, are a stumbling block, a transitory phenomenon to be overcome.