Imagine you are a tree

Imagine you are a tree. You have been growing steadily from seed through sapling through mature tree, and all this time you have been under the impression that you are moving. You are moving upwards towards the sky, then outwards with your branches. But at one point you are up and out enough to look down at the base of your trunk and see the roots firmly planted in the earth. You are confused—haven’t I been moving? You mean, I’m stuck here? And then you turn around and look at all the other plants around you, stuck in the ground, immobile. This is a turning point.

Alan Watts: “By the same law of reversed effort, we discover the ‘infinite’ and the ‘absolute,’ not by straining to escape from the finite and relative world, but by the complete acceptance of its limitations.” (Wisdom of Insecurity, p. 27)

At the realization that you are immobile, you have a choice—to accept it or not. You can’t change it. Sorry. You just can’t. So you are either going to identify then with the highest twig on the tree and say “Well, I’ll just keep going higher and higher, and no one’s going to tell me otherwise.” Or you can keep moving up and out, while still accepting that you’re not actually going anywhere. This is a parallel to the development of the human ego, if we are to accept the convention of the ego. The ego wants to uproot itself and walk. It wants to be infinite, unlimited. But it cannot be. It just can’t. It is simply part of a much larger organism, that is firmly planted in the earth. The ego's limitations are intrinsic to its existence. But there is more to the human organism than the ego.

The rest of the tree is like the unconscious—both ontogenetically and phylogenetically (see Ken Wilber's Up From Eden)—and the attitude towards this trunk of the tree can become one of love, because it is me. I am simply an outgrowth of it—my ego is simply the tip of one tiny twig among billions. And to think that I have the degree of control over my/the life that I am used to thinking I have, is to believe that the twig is controlling the tree.

The ego is not infinite and boundless. It is inherently concerned with itself, because it does not want to die (Some would point to the fear of death as an impetus for the ego's creation in the first place--an entity that need not die because it can survive the body, in memory, artistic output, etc.). The ego can only do so much, but it certainly cannot, no matter how hard it tries, lift itself out of the ground.

It is significant that the moment I mentioned above is a turning point. Before this point, it is necessary for the twig to separate from the branch and follow its own path determinedly, believing that it is much more important and self-directed than it actually is.

And the really hard part for me is looking at another person and overriding the usual sensation that they are a separate person (as a twig may interpret looking at another twig a few feet away) with the remembrance ("Do this in remembrance of Me") that the other person and myself are both outgrowths of the same tree.