Egolessness by Ken Wilber cont'd

P. 34 from  The Essential Ken Wilber:

"But we do not want our sages to have big egos; we do not even want them to display a manifest dimension at all.  Anytime a sage displays humanness -- in regard to money, food, sex, relationships -- we are shocked, shocked, because we are planning to escape life altogether, not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us.  We want out, we want to ascend, we want to escape, and the sage who engages life with gusto, lives it to the hilt, grabs each wave of life and surfs it to the end -- this deeply, profoundly disturbs us, frightens us, because it means that we, too, might have to engage life, with gusto, on all levels, and not merely escape it in a cloud of luminous ether.  We  do not want our sages to have bodies, egos, drives, vitality, sex, money, relationships, or life, because those are what habitually torture us, and we want out.  We do not want to surf the waves of life, we want the waves to go away.  We want vaporware spirituality.

The integral sage, the nondual sage, is here to show us otherwise.  Known generally as "Tantric," these sages insist on transcending life by living it.  They insist on finding  release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of samsara, finding total liberation by complete immersion.  They enter with awareness the nine rings of hell, for nowhere else are the nine heavens found.  Nothing is alien to them, for there is nothing that is not One Taste.

Indeed the whole point is to be fully at home in the body and its desires, the mind and its ideas, the spirit and its light.  To embrace them fully, evenly, simultaneously, since all are equally gestures of the One and Only Taste.  To inhabit lust and watch it play; to enter ideas and follow their brilliance; to be swallowed by Spirit and awaken to a glory that time forgot to name.  Body and mind and spirit, all contained, equally contained, in the ever-present awareness that grounds the entire display.

In the stillness of the night, the Goddess whispers.  In the brightness of the day, dear God roars.  Life pulses, mind imagines, emotions wave, thoughts wander.  What are all these but the endless movements of One Taste, forever at play with its own gestures, whispering quietly to all who would listen:  is this not you yourself?

When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self?  When the lightning cracks, do you not see your Self?  When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your very own limitless Being, waving back at you?"

- "One Taste: November 17"