Who do we think we are? A big, fat, solid ME :)
If you've started meditating or finding out more about Mindfulness, one of the first things you might hear or read about is the teaching about Ego. To many people the whole thing about Ego can be so confusing and it might even make you feel like there's a bad part of you that you should be getting rid of!
And no wonder, because Ego gets such a bad rap. It conjures up an image of a vain person with a large sense of self-importance, being 'egotistical'; a swaggering, arrogant megalomaniac, someone who boasts and usually talks more about him or herself than anyone else.
But actually, in meditation the word Ego is used in a different context. Let's use the word Ego with a capital letter, to denote its original context: your consciousness or awareness of your own identity
Ego is the word we use to describe the illusory, false understanding of our own identity we live with. The false sense of 'Me' that we have. Furthermore, we learn in meditation that this false sense of I, this idea we have of our Self, is created by our thoughts. The teaching on Ego suggests that we live with a fundamental error in our perception: We live with the belief that the entity we think of as I or Me is a permanent, solid, lasting, fixed thing.
You may think to yourself: of course I do. I am, I can touch my arm, so I must be here, and its feels quite solid. It's also been around for a while, and it looks pretty permanent to me.
But, despite our sense of a lasting, concrete Self, no such Self really exists in quite the way we imagine.
This is one of the key realisations of meditation:
Our thoughts create the idea we have of Me and there is no fixed Self in the way we have always imagined it. If there are no thoughts, there is no Me, no Ego.
Firstly, I know this is quite a difficult concept for the rational mind to accept. And secondly, you might be asking yourself 'Why is it important and what does this have to do with my life anyway?'
Well, it’s important because this misunderstanding of the way we see our Self, our Ego, is the cause of our main problems in life. Our idea we have of our Self and the way we grasp onto the idea of Self in our ignorance (avidya) is what creates all our suffering, dissatisfaction, troubles and all our pain. And when we hold tightly onto this incorrect view of Me, working hard to provide for the happiness of this Self, we not only place ourselves in an impossible position, but we also harm ourselves and the people around us we love.
This is not philosophy, we can see this clearly through meditation. If you have a few minutes now, I invite you to set aside 10 - 15 minutes and meditate or reflect on this:
"Sit in your meditation posture, in a place where you can be undisturbed for 10 or 15 minutes. Relax the body. Soften the face. Allow your attention to focus on your breath for a few moments. Allow your mind to settle and your breath to become calm.
Think about the idea you have of yourself. Think about the entity you call 'Me". What is it? You will probably find the idea of looking for it slightly confusing initially because we think we know very well who we are.
But let's look inward for the thing you call ‘Me’ and see what you find.
We can imagine our body. Our head, back, front, arms, legs, etc. Is this Me? Or is there something else? Yes, quite a big part of our individuality is the mind, right? Is that what makes Me? Or am I my personality? Or ideas? Or beliefs? What makes you, You?
The irony is that when we look for this very solid and permanent “self” that we’re always cherishing & protecting, when we take even 5 minutes to look for this Self, we will quickly recognise there isn’t a fixed self in the way we usually believe it to be present. We recognise that the self is quite difficult to pinpoint because it is made up of so
many different components, and it is also constantly changing. It feels quite ungraspable.
Now we begin to understand the idea that our Ego or this idea of Self is illusory and the idea that we are unchanging and fixed is created by our thoughts.
When we say “I’m old,” we’re referring to our body. When we say “my body,” the 'Me' we know shifts to become the owner of the body. When we say “I’m tired,” the 'Me' we see is our physical or emotional feelings. The self is our perceptions when we say “I see,” and our thoughts when we say “I think.
So we see that we are not living with a fixed Self but instead we are the result of constant and ever changing processes that make us (and life) what it is. We are a cluster of activities, a collection of functions in the mind — necessary functions, definitely. We are a collection of judgments and opinions.
Take a few moments to reflect on this and see if you recognise or see this truth."
When is our sense of grasping onto our false sense of Me, our Ego the most obvious?
When we experience something that is super involved with "I". Think of situations where your thinking is: I must, I have to, or I'm NOT! It's when we experience something like anger, jealousy or grasping stinginess, and there’s a big fat sense of Me.
Or when our thinking goes along the lines of ‘I am so angry. . . this has been done to me!’ Or when we have thoughts about "Look at them! They are wrong. I am right."
When we cling tightly to our possessions, or our time: “This is mine!”
When we’re trying to defend this Me against the hordes of “other”, with different opinions, wanting to take something from me.
All that is us identifying with our Self, protecting our Self, believing our Ego. That’s Ego.
On the other hand, when we’re not living with the delusion of Ego, when we are feeling really open and generous, that sense of Me is greatly reduced.
As Shantideva (an 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk and scholar) says:
All the happiness there is in the world Arises from wishing others to be happy, And all the suffering there is in this world Arises from wishing ourself to be happy.
Now that we might have an idea of what Ego is, why are we told to let go of it and what does it mean to let go of the Ego?
It’s really not a question of letting go of the Ego. It's probably more correct to say that, once we understand this illusion - or our delusion - our Ego automatically dissolves because we no longer live with the incorrect understanding. It might be more correct to say that we simply need to stop creating our Ego, stop identifying with passing and changing phenomena.
As Wei Wu Wei, a teacher, once said, ‘We’re like a dog barking up a tree that isn’t there.’ When we see there’s no tree, we can finally stop barking.”
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