What exactly is an “ego” anyway?

It took me years to understand what people meant when they talked about “ego” (and I suspect many of the people talking didn’t understand it either). Then, I understood the concept intellectually but my understanding was coming from my EGO. Only recently have I begun to truly understand what an “ego-less” state is like.

We are discussing “ego” all this week (and maybe next as well). This is not the “ego” of Sigmund Freud but of the Buddhist tradition. Interestingly, modern psychology and psychiatry have embraced the Buddhist concept of the ego and incorporate Buddhist mindfulness practices (used to achieve an ego-less state) into formal therapy. Even my father’s Southern Baptist physician has recommended mindfulness to him to help with stress-related medical conditions!

The following definition of “ego” is excerpted from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche.

Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in hospital after a road accident to find she is suffering from total amnesia. Outwardly, everything is intact: she has the same face and form, her sense and her mind are there, but she doesn’t have any idea or any trace of a memory of who she really is. In exactly the same way, we cannot remember out true identity, our original nature. Frantically, and in real dread, we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch onto with all the desperation of someone falling continuously into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is “ego.”

So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, and inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keep changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. In Tibetan ego is call dak dzin, which means “grasping to a self.” Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of “I” and “mine,” self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction. Such a grasping is futile from the start and condemned to frustration, for there is no basis or truth in it, and what we are grasping at is by its very nature ungraspable. The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fear.

So long as we haven’t unmasked the ego, it continues to hoodwink us, like a sleazy politician endlessly parading bogus promises, or a lawyer constantly inventing ingenious lies and defenses, or a talk show host going on and on talking, keeping up a stream of suave and emptily convincing chatter, which actually says nothing at all. [Like inspirational quote after inspirational quote on facebook and Twitter that masquerades as enlightenment but often prevents what it pretends to provide. – Jennifer]

Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable.

Ego plays brilliantly on our fundamental fear of losing control, and of the unknown. We might say to ourselves: “I should really let go of ego, I’m in such pain, but if I do, what’s going to happen to me?”

Ego will chime in, sweetly: “I know I’m sometimes a nuisance, and believe me, I quite understand if you want me to leave. But is that really what you want? Think: If I do go, what’s going to happen to you? Who will look after you? Who will protect and care for you like I’ve done all these years?”

And even if we were to see through ego’s lies, we are just too scared to abandon it; for without any true knowledge of the nature of our mind, or true identity, we simply have no other alternative. Again and again we cave in to its demands with the same sad self-hatred as the alcoholic feels reaching for the drink that he knows is destroying him, or the drug addict groping for the drug that she knows after a brief high will only leave her flat and desperate.

From Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn: The next time you feel a sense of dissatisfaction, something being missing or not quite right, turn inward just as an experiment. See if you can capture the energy of that very moment. Instead of picking up a magazine or going to the movies, calling a friend or looking for something to eat of acting up in one way or another, make a place for yourself. Sit down and enter into your breathing, if only for a few minutes. Don’t look for anything – neither flowers nor light nor a beautiful view. Don’t extol the virtues of anything or condemn the inadequacy of anything. Don’t even think to yourself, “I am going inward now.” Just sit. Reside at the center of the world. Let things be as they are.

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