The Eastern Ego: The Problem is YOU!!!

With each passing decade, Eastern philosophy and spirituality are becoming more accepted and widely adopted in Western culture. But still, in mainstream Western philosophy, we have a very simplified understanding of the Eastern Ego. The Western Ego is a psychological profile of the human brain, while the Eastern Ego is a part of spiritual understanding.

The Western system of Ego is centered around understanding the mind mechanism that is ego, while the Eastern system is based around the release of Ego and the attainment of enlightenment. These two thought systems are actually quite similar when you dig down to their root. The Eastern Ego is often thought of as something bad or evil but it’s actually a really important part of a person’s development and it is something that should be transcended rather than abolished.

For many years I thought I understood the Eastern Ego. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it or explain it but I felt I understood it at a fundamental level. I viewed my own Ego as the part of me that wanted to be right, that wanted to be heard, and that wanted to be successful. So I often thought the way to be truly free of Ego was to stop trying to be right all the time and to accept failures and let go of attachment to material things. I guess I was partly there with my thoughts but then one day the true meaning of my ego dawned on me. My ego was me!!

Ego is everything I think of as me!! That phrase might seem simple but it is so hard for our brains to understand. You might read it and think you understand it but very few people truly understand that statement. Actually it’s not something you really understand, it is instead something that you experience. Intellectual understanding of Ego can often trap you further in Ego, because Ego is a mechanism of the human mind. The human brain is a labeling and problem-solving device. The mind is the expression of the brain, and the mind is where the Ego is created.

The Ego is an important survival mechanism that develops early in life. When a child is born they are not self-aware. They have no language and they do not consider themselves to have a name. They do not see themselves as separate from a room, they just react naturally to whatever is around them. The brain has inbuilt survival mechanisms that will insure they are kept warm, that they are fed, and that they are loved. When the body feels a lack of something (such as food or warmth) it sends a signal through the nervous system to the brain, the brain then sends the signal to call for help. The child cries which beckons an adult who hopefully solves the problem.

When a child begins to develop language it starts to label what it sees. So for example, it names/labels a cup for the first time. Rays of light hit the cup, the rays reflect back into the child’s eyes where they get converted into electrical pulses and sent to the brain. At the same time, an adult says “cup” and the sound waves pass into the child’s ear where they are converted into an electrical pulse and sent to the brain. The child then links the word cup and the object that it sees before it, and now its brain labels this item and similar ones as cups. Now the child begins to build up knowledge of the cup, it touches it when it’s hot or cold, and it adds labels that indicate a cup can be hot or cold. It drops the cup and it breaks, so the child labels the cup as something that can break. It drinks from the cup and labels it as something that holds fluids.

An interesting thing has happened here. The child used to just perceive the cup exactly as it is in the moment with no preconceived notions. But now a separation has happened between the cup exactly as it is and the child’s labels of the cup. The child also begins to label itself and other objects around the room. Now it sees itself and other objects in the room as separate items. This is the birth of the Eastern Ego. It’s very important because without it the child would never learn about anything, it would constantly break the cup, or touch it when it’s hot.

It’s important to note that labeling and naming things isn’t real, it’s just a thought system. Water existed long before humans, but it wasn’t called water until we named it water. Humans didn’t have names until we decided to start naming ourselves. A baby in the womb usually hasn’t been named, we just assign it a name. You did not have a name when you were conceived, but you have linked every action in your life to that name.

When a child begins to speak often they will say their name instead of I. They might say: “Mary wants the cup”, instead of “I want the cup”. At this point, they have separated themselves from what they are right now and into a concept that they are calling Mary. So now in the room, there are two things happening, the first is everything exactly as it is, and the second is the labeled story that happens in the child’s head. This labeled story includes a character called Mary that is asking for a conceptual object that has been named “cup”.

From this point on, any time anything happens to the child it adds it to the story of Mary. As the child gets older, it becomes more self-aware so it starts referring to itself in the first person rather than in the third. It no longer says Mary, it now says “I”. But “I” is still a character in the child’s mind, it is still separate from the child as it is now. Every experience is added to “I”’s story which is a separate entity to everyone and everything it meets, and this is the mind mechanism known as the Ego.

The Ego is an essential and brilliant thing, it’s how we build up a map of the world, it’s how we predict the future, and it’s how we know so much about so many things. We know so much about nature because we are able to build up a comprehensive story of how it operates. We know about our family and friends because we have labeled their personalities and traits. We have a personality because we are able to build up a story of how we act.

The negative effect of the Ego’s development is that the more we experience reality the more we label it and lose all sense of wonder about it. We start to see only our memories of things and we deaden reality. We deaden other people and we deaden ourselves. When a person walks into the room, if you don’t feel alive and view them as an incredible luminous mystical entity that space and time has motioned into a transcendent meeting with you for a reason that could never be understood, then you have deadened yourself to reality.

Children are so full of excitement and wonder about the world around them because they have so few labels and past experiences attached to things. The older they get, the more they label their experiences, until eventually, they deaden everything to a list of labels. They only ever see the past in life, they start making predictions about the future based on the past. They are always preoccupied with the past and the future, never again able to experience the world just as it is. This is known in Eastern spirituality as Samara, the mind trap of suffering.

In Eastern spirituality, the Ego is recognized for the useful instrument that it is. It is recognized as an important mechanism of the mind and it is not seen as something to be destroyed, it is seen as something to be transcended. The Ego becomes something that is turned on and off, you use it as an interface for the world and to understand the world. So when you need to perform a task, you turn on the Ego so that you can prepare and begin properly. Then you turn off the Ego as you perform the task, you just experience the moment as it is. When you meet a person, you turn on your Ego to say hello and to remember your labeling of them. You turn off your Ego while you talk and just experience the conversation as it is.

This is extremely difficult to do because most of us are completely identified with our Ego, in fact, we actually think that we are our Ego, everything that we do or have ever done has come from the base of the Ego. We believe that we are characters in a film, we don’t realize that we are actually the film itself. Eastern spiritualists release the Egos hold on them through Ego dissolving practices like intense suffering, meditation, and recognizing their own Ego and the Ego of others. The complete dissolution of the Ego means that they no longer feel like a character in a movie. So the script of the movie can no longer affect them. They don’t see themselves as a separate entity from the film, they instead see themselves as a perspective point watching the movie. Very few people go to a film and get overly upset at a death, or a war, or an explosion, but they still enjoy the film a lot.

This is what it’s like to be free of the Ego, you no longer worry about the past or the future, you just experience things exactly as they are. The famous Buddhist saying is “No Ego, No Problems”. Reaching this point is a state that is known as Enlightenment and it is the movement from the suffering of Samsara to the bliss of Nirvana. Many claim to have entered this state over the millenniums of recorded history and quite a few of these apparently enlightened beings live right now.

The state of Nirvana is apparently achievable by everyone and is our natural state, children and animals live in this state, the only thing that keeps us separate from this state is the Ego, and the Ego is what most of us, including myself, think we are. The world around us isn’t what makes us unhappy, the problem isn’t all the things that happen to us every day, the real problem is our identification with our Ego.

The real problem is YOU!