Buddhist Insight and Monasticism - The View of the Ego

Your mind has been absorbing influences without choice, and without your knowledge these internalized influences have become your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. They become so much a part of you, shaping your view of yourself and your truth, that you don't even recognize them as the result of external forces, but instead think of yourself as a separate person, completely true to yourself.

If you were completely honest with yourself, you would know that almost none of "your" thoughts and feelings are truly your own, and most of them are the result of influences over which you have no control.

Maybe you should consider how real and valuable life as experienced from the ego's point of view really is. The ego will always feel that its judgments, observations, and experiences are important, and so it trivializes everything, unable to relax and allow things to develop naturally; and it is only when the ego has experienced many difficulties that it stops trivializing.

After careful observation, we realize that most problems are caused by looking at everything from the ego's point of view, and then making a big deal out of things that have no substance at all.

The basic nature of the ego is a solid and persistent sense of itself, coupled with a constant sense of insecurity. The immediate response to insecurity is expectation and fear, and the ego's expectations and fears are inexhaustible, insatiable, confusing, systematic, disorganized, sequential, logical, insane, rational (in a mass of irrationality), cunning, sensual, and sneaky.

The ego is capable of turning almost anything to its own use and justifying itself in every way, and even the teachers and teachings that are supposed to destroy the ego are utilized - the ego is so filled with itself that nothing else can get in. While the ego pretends to be open-minded, true openness is simply not possible; at best it can only disguise, mimic, and represent to make others believe as well as less personal.

The ego is able to talk about "no-self" and use it as an adornment for itself - the ego distorts everything, it develops pride through the expression of humility, it shows compassion in order to feel superior, it teaches the Dharma in order to feel learned, pretending to be generous in order to boast of wealth. The ego may also be a master of disguise, for example, when faced with a serious threat, in order to protect itself, the ego skillfully wears the uniform of the enemy, perhaps by leaving the house or taking a long retreat, and it uses the period of the retreat to lick its wounds, and comes out stronger and more cunning.

From the ego's point of view, success or failure is entirely determined by whether it can explain something in terms of its own point of view. The Buddha's talk of "attaining Buddhahood" can be characterized as a complete failure for the ego. Therefore, the Buddhahood that we claim to seek is not really Buddhahood at all, but rather the "fulfillment of the ego"; from the ego's point of view, it is a much more subtle and grandiose kind of success.

Because of ignorance, you mistakenly believe that the ego is you, and you are the ego. That which you believe to be yourself is not you, it is only an illusion, and because of confusion, initially you mistake it for yourself, and then you waste your whole life trying to satisfy it, to make it happy, and it is such attempts that are the only ones that are hopeless. It is just as there is no escape from the trap of a dream unless you know you are dreaming - to free yourself you must understand your mistake and then wake up from it. Things are that simple and that complicated.