I think the average person who knows maybe
a little bit about psychology or a little
bit about Buddhism would think that the Buddhist
emphasis or the Buddhist conversation about
the ego is all about getting rid of the ego
completely.
There’s this notion in Buddhist psychology
of “egolessness” or “no self”, and
most people misinterpret that—as Freud actually
did—most people misinterpret it to think
that Buddhism is saying we don’t need the
ego at all or we don’t need the self at
all, like get rid of it and then we’re one
with everything and that’s it.
And I think that’s wrong.
Obviously we need our egos.
A good friend of mine Robert Thurman who is
a Professor of Buddhism at Columbia, a Professor
of Religion at Columbia, he had a Mongolian
teacher in the 1960s who used to say to him
about this topic of egolessness or selflessness:
"It’s not that you’re not real, of course
you’re “real” you have a self, but people
like you— secular people who don’t really
understand—think that they’re “really
real”" and what Buddhism is teaching is
that that belief in your own “really realness”
is misguided.
We take ourselves more seriously than we need
to; the self is not as fixed as we would like
to think.
The ego is born out of fear and isolation.
It comes into being when self-consciousness
first starts to come, when you’re two or
three years old and you start to realize,
“Oh, there’s a person in here,” and
you're trying to make sense of everything:
who you are, who are those parents there?
The ego is a way of organizing one’s self,
and it comes from the intellect as the mind
starts to click in.
And for many people it stays in a kind of
immature place where our thinking mind, our
intellect, is defining for ourselves who we
are—either taking all the negative feedback
like, “I’m not good enough,” and the
ego fastens onto all the negativity, or the
positive—the affirmation like, “Oh, I’m
really something.”
And the ego likes certainty, it likes security,
it likes repetition, and so it’s always
reinforcing its own vision of itself, and
that starts to restrict us, to confine us,
to make us think that we know ourselves better
than we actually do.
So to bring Buddhism into therapy or to bring
Buddhism into a secular audience, it’s all
about starting to doubt the ego a little bit.
Maybe you don’t know yourself as much as
you think you do.
Maybe some of those fixed ideas that have
been operating inside of you since you were
a little kid and conditioning the way you
interact with other people, with the world,
maybe those are not all so right.
Maybe you’re not as really real as you think
you are, and you could start to let go of
some of that a little bit.
