This blaming and defensive character of narcissistic rage gives it an isolating quality. It makes her insensitive to and unaware of the condition of the other; she does not care about the other’s feelings and is not interested in knowing about them. This defensive schizoid feature of narcissistic rage isolates her from any true or meaningful contact or communication with the other.

Each of the boundless dimensions in our work reveals to us and teaches us something about reality and about experience. We learn that reality has true nature. We’ve been using the concept of true nature in our teaching for a long time, and now I’m introducing Total Being, which is an overlapping, though not completely identical, concept. I am leaving it ambiguous on purpose. True nature is total purity and freedom all the time. If we only say, “Everything is always true nature,” that doesn’t account for the fact that most people don’t experience things that way. We could explain this by saying, “Well, that is because they are not aware of it.” But when we understand reality or true nature, we realize that people don’t really exist the way we think they do. So when we say, “They don’t understand true nature,” we believe that they are responsible for not understanding it. But when we blame somebody for not understanding it that way, we ascribe to them an independent existence apart from Total Being. They don’t have that; nobody does. So actually, it is Total Being that is ignorant—not the individual. An individual does nothing on his own because he is a manifestation of Total Being. So none of us is to be blamed for our shortcomings. 

Ultimately, all self-blame comes down to blaming oneself for not being enlightened. Universally, there is a core place within all ego structures where one feels guilty for not being a realized Being. The guilt, as we have seen, has to do with the fact that (in Christian terms) you have been thrown out of paradise—yet you don’t blame God for this; you blame yourself. The deeper you go into understanding the sense of guilt, the more you realize that you feel guilty for not being real. This is particularly relevant when you have realized the essential aspect of the Point, the Essential Identity (see The Point of Existence, Almaas 1996). Here you see that you have carried within you a profound sense of guilt for losing contact with your true nature. A sense of great betrayal arises, not just because your parents didn’t see your real nature, but that you stopped seeing it. You abandoned what is real in you; you abandoned yourself. Each ennea-type will experience this guilt in a slightly different way, as it is filtered through the lens of each one’s specific delusion, but this guilt and self-blame for the loss of contact with Being is universal to all egoic experience. 

So here we see the causes of suffering that have to do with the inadequacies of our upbringing. But we come to see that the childhood events that caused our suffering continue to do so now because we haven’t completely understood them. When we do understand them, the suffering seems to lessen and some of the patterns die out. When you understand the causes of suffering, the causes are often eliminated. The profound understanding that arises here is that the cause of suffering is lack of understanding. You suffer because you don’t know what is moving you, what is making you react in one way or another. The more you know what triggers your reactions and your behavior, the better chance you have of resolving those issues. Our work exposes the extent to which we blame our parents for our suffering. When we delve deeply into the matter, we realize that the lack of understanding is more basic than what happened with our parents. What happened in childhood caused the suffering in some sense, but not knowing those causes, forgetting about them, not understanding them, is what perpetuates our suffering. Our work is based on the insight that understanding the causes of suffering is the best way to relieve it.