Ego

Ego development

The newborn human infant reacts to but cannot control, anticipate, or alter sources of stimulation, be they external or internal. At this stage perception is primitive and diffuse, motor activity is gross and uncoordinated, and self-locomotion is impossible. Learning is limited to the simplest type of stimulus-response conditioning.

The infantile ego develops in relation to the external world and reflects (as psychoanalysis has emphasized) the helpless and dependent infant's efforts to alter or alleviate painfully intense stimuli. Mechanisms evolve for controlling tension while seeking means by which gratifications can be obtained, and these mechanisms develop into increasingly complex forms of mastery.

At the outset, perception and motor activity are closely tied, with stimulation immediately provoking motor action. The delay of action, while tolerating the consequent tension, is the basis for all more-advanced ego functions. This delay is prototypic of the ego's role in later personality functioning. The learned separation of stimulation and response allows the interposition of more complex intellectual activities such as thinking, imagining, and planning. By not reacting directly, the ego develops the capacity to test reality vicariously, to imagine the consequences of one or another course of action, and to decide upon future directions to achieve probable ends. The accumulation and retention of memories of past events is necessary for internal processes of thought and judgment. The acquisition of language, started during the second and third years, provides a powerful tool for the development of logical thought processes as well as allowing communication and control of the environment.

As the individual continues to develop, the ego is further differentiated and the superego develops. The superego represents the inhibitions of instinct and the control of impulses through the incorporation of parental and societal standards. Thus, moral standards as perceived by the ego become part of the personality. Conflict, a necessary ingredient for the growth and maturity of the personality, is introduced. The ego comes to mediate between the superego and the id by building up what have been called defense mechanisms.

Since the concept and structure of the ego were defined by Freud and explored by Carl Jung, other theorists have developed somewhat different conceptualizations of the ego.

Ego strength

A strong ego is exhibited in the following characteristics: objectivity in one's apprehension of the external world and in self-knowledge (insight); capacity to organize activities over longer time spans (allowing for the maintenance of schedules and plans); and the ability to follow resolves while choosing decisively among alternatives. The person of strong ego can also resist immediate environmental and social pressure while contemplating and choosing an appropriate course, and strong ego is further characterized in the person who is not overwhelmed by his or her drives (but instead can direct them into useful channels). On the other hand, weakness of ego is characterized by such traits as impulsive or immediate behaviour, a sense of inferiority or an inferiority complex, a fragile sense of identity, unstable emotionality, and excessive vulnerability. Perception of reality and self can be distorted. In such cases the individual may be less capable of productive work, because energy is drained into the protection of unrealistic self-concepts, or the individual may be burdened by neurotic symptoms. Ego weakness also underlies the inflated sense of self, which can be associated with grandiosity and a superiority complex.

Superego*

Exorcising Ego

The true enemy is inside. The maker of trouble, the source of all our suffering, the destroyer of our joy, and the destroyer of our virtue is inside. It is Ego. I call it >I, the most precious one.

I, the most precious one does not serve any purpose. It only makes tremendous, unreasonable, impossible demands. Ego wants to be the best and has no consideration for anyone else. Things work fine as long as I, the most precious one's wishes are being fulfilled. But when they're not, and Ego turns on the self, it becomes self-hatred. That self-hatred will eventually burn the house down.

Gehlek Rimpoche

Ego is a source of self-deception. It minimizes, overlooks, or makes excuses for our transgressions and faults, while magnifying or demonizing the faults of others. Whenever we break something or make some other mistake, the ego leaps to the rescue by finding someone else to blame. It also performs another function: shielding us from the difficult realities of life, such as the inevitability of aging, sickness, and death. Somehow the ego accomplishes all this while maintaining the fiction that it—the self—exists as something more than a mirage. What a talented fellow!

The ego's perspective is a fundamental distortion, reinforced by religious, philosophical, and cultural beliefs. We take it for granted that this perspective is valid, that it's based on something that really exists. We assume that there is a self, that >I refers to something real. You may never have questioned this assumption, but clinging to this belief is the source of misery without end.

An excellent way to begin looking into this illusion is to ask yourself some simple questions: Can you decide not to think? Do you control what you think? Do the thoughts control you? Do you control your emotions? Do they control you?

If there really is a thinker (the self) that produces thoughts, it should be able to control the process. It should be able to decide whether to think or not. It should be able to choose what to think about and what not to think about. Likewise, for feelings and emotions. If an autonomous self produces feelings and emotions, it should be able to choose which feelings and emotions to feel. So why do you sometimes feel crappy?

Ego is a superimposition. We don't just project our conceptions onto the world outside. We also project them onto our inner experience. Unlike such concepts as box or yellow, which get superimposed on a limited range of phenomena, I and me are applied quite liberally to all sorts of experiences.

When thoughts arise, I is projected to be the thinker of those thoughts.

When we are doing something, I is conceived to be the actor or doer.

When we feel bodily sensations, I is assumed to be the possessor of that body.

When emotions arise, I is thought to be the emotional one.

When we see, hear, smell, or taste something, I is understood to be the experiencer.

In each case, we perceive one thing and conceive of another. We perceive thoughts, activities, emotions, and sensations. We conceive of the self.

India in the seventh century C.E. was a time of great flourishing of the buddhadharma. Two enduring Mahayana masterpieces survive from that period. Both texts focus on the two central concerns of the Mahayana: methods for developing wisdom and methods for developing compassion. Each of these texts calls out the problem of ego.

Shantideva's The Way of the Bodhisattva is a lyrical instruction for training in compassion based on the wisdom of no self. The harm caused by ego is highlighted in this seminal verse:

All the joy the world contains
Has come through wishing happiness for others.
All the misery the world contains
Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself

Chandrakirti's Entrance to the Middle Way is a profound instruction for training in wisdom. It begins with an homage to compassion as the seed, water, and ripening of the victorious ones' abundant harvest. Chandrakirti singles out the problem of ego in this verse:

Seeing with their intelligence that all mental afflictions and problems
Arise from the view of the transitory collection,
And realizing that the self is the object of that view,
Yogis and yoginis refute the self.

In this verse, the transitory collection translates the Sanskrit term skandha (heap). The view of the transitory collection is the belief that the fleeting, kaleidoscopic display of forms, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousnesses—the five skandhas—constitutes a self. This view is both instinctive and conditioned. The basic sense of self comes from the innate dualistic feeling of a me inside and objects that are out there. Even beings without developed linguistic concepts, such as human babies and nonhuman animals, seem to exhibit this instinctive self-conception.

The concepts of the conditioned self are learned as we grow up. We absorb them from the culture we are immersed in. Some come from religious training. Some come from psychology or philosophy. These conditioned views reinforce the instinctive feeling of me-ness.

To disprove the self means to decisively recognize selflessness—that I and me are illusory. The way to realize this is by thoroughly investigating the illusion to see if there really is somebody home.

Death of the Ego: A Buddhist View

When I was a young boy I used to visit my grandmother at her house almost every chance I got. Her home was one of those older clapboard single level houses that had heavy to-the-floor curtains on both side edges of the windows. Covering the window as well was an inner curtain made from a gauze-like material that allowed a sort of diffused sunlight to enter the various rooms in a muted haze. The windows also had opaque yet translucent yellow-brown pull-down spring operated roller shades that worked by pulling a piece of cord hooked to a circular ring that you stuck your finger through. In either pulling the shade up or the shade down it would snap back and flap around and around, over and over unmercifully until it stopped if the ring slipped from your finger. That shade is the same vision that always comes to mind when I conjure of thoughts of what it was like that day so many years ago in the military when I made the conscious decision to let go of my life force...it flapped around and around unmercifully over and over until it ran out of power and just stopped

the Wanderling, from Death Had A Face

In my case, except for the flatline of the EEG (Electroencephalogram) signals which was duly noted by a number of outside observers and medical attendants and pronounced clinically dead, for me, IF the less than gossamer-thin membrane between the still alive and the that which becomes the now-not-alive was actually crossed or breached, it is not known because no difference was remembered if detected. In what would appear to be an almost diametric opposition to such a scenario, any previous or residual "fear of death" after being brought back or coming back as the case may be, seemingly dissipated along with the ego --- loss of both ego and fear stemming, it is guessed, from the experience --- in which "I" was in a totally unflawed flatlined state (or non-state) for close to thirty full minutes, and, except for maybe not being totally zipped up, put into a body bag even longer and stacked in a row along with other corpses.

the Wanderling, from ALFRED PULYAN: Richard Rose, My Mentor and Me

The Fear of Death is not an instinct: it is a reaction of the animal who is conscious enough to become aware of himself and his inevitable fate; so it is something we have learned. But exactly what is it we have learned? Is the dilemma of life-confronting-death an objective fact we just see, or is this, too, something constructed and projected, more like an unconscious game that each of us is playing with himself? According to Buddhism, life-against-death is a delusive way of thinking it is dualistic: the denial of being dead is how the Ego affirms itself as being alive; so it is the act by which the Ego constitutes itself. To be self-conscious is to be conscious of oneself, to grasp oneself, as being alive. (Despite all their struggles to keep from dying, other animals do not dread death, because they are not aware of themselves as alive.) Then death terror is not something the Ego has, it is what the Ego is. This fits well with the Buddhist claim that the Ego-self is not a thing, not what I really am, but a mental construction. Anxiety is generated by identifying with this fiction for the simple reason that I do not know and cannot know what this thing that I supposedly am is. This is why the "shadow" of the sense-of-self will inevitable be a sense-of-lack.

Now we see what the Ego is composed of: death terror. The irony here is that the death terror which is the Ego defends only itself. Everything outside is what the ego is terrified of, but what is inside? Fear is the inside, and that makes everything else the outside. The tragicomedy is that the self-protection this generates is self-defeating, for the barriers we erect to defend the Ego also reinforce our suspicion that there is indeed something lacking in our innermost sanctum which needs protection. And if it turns out that what is innermost is so weak because it is...nothing, then no amount of protection will ever be felt to be enough and we shall end up trying to extend our control to the very bounds of the universe.

What makes this more than idle speculation is that there is ample testimony to the possibility of such Ego death:

No one gets so much of God as the man who is completely dead.

St. Gregory

The Kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly dead.

Eckhart

We are in a world of generation and death, and this world we must cast off.

William Blake

Your glory lies where you cease to exist.

Ramana Maharshi

All of a sudden, he was seized by a chill of Fear. He felt he was almost dying by an all encompassing Fear of Death. Trying to prevent this feeling from weakening him, he began to think of what he should do. He said to himself:

Now death is approaching. I am dying. What is death? This body gets lost.

Then he held his breath completely, closed his lips and eyes, lay down as one dead, and began to ponder:

Now my body is dead. They will carry this body, motionless, to the cremation ground and burn it. But do I really die with this body? Am I merely this body? My body is now motionless. But still I know my name. I remember my parents, uncles, brothers, friends and all others. It means that I have a knowledge of my individuality. If so, the "I" in me is not merely my body; it is a deathless spirit.

Thus, as in a flash, a new realization came to Venkataramana. His thoughts may seem boyish fancy. But one thing must be remembered. Usually a man wins God realization by performing tapas for years and years, without food and sleep; he subjects the body to great suffering. But Venkataramana won the highest knowledge without all these. The fear of death left him. Venkataramana became the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi.

A moving example of death and resurrection is of course one of the sources of Western culture; but examples are found in many religious traditions. The problem is demythologizing these myths, extracting the core of psychological and spiritual truth from the accretions of dogma and superstition that all too often obscure their meaning, in order for that truth to spring to life again within our myth--the technical, objectifying language of modern science (in this instance, psychology). Blake's quotation (from The Vision of the Last Judgment) points the way because it implies that we are not seeing clearly but projecting when we perceive the world in terms of the dualistic categories of birth and death.

Precisely that claim is central to the Buddhist tradition. Why was I born if it wasn't forever? bemoaned Ionesco; the answer is in the anaatman "no self" doctrine, according to which we cannot die because we were never born. Anaatma is the "middle way" between the extremes of eternalism (the self survives death) and annihilationism (the self is destroyed at death). Buddhism resolves the problem of life-and-death by deconstructing it. The evaporation of this dualistic way of thinking reveals what is prior to it. There are many names for this "prior," but it is surely significant that one of the most common is "the unborn."

In the Pali Canon, what are perhaps the two most famous descriptions of Nirvna both refer to "the unborn," where neither this world nor the other, nor coming, going, or standing, neither death nor birth, nor sense objects are to be found.

There is, O monks, an unborn, an unbecome, an unmade, an unconditioned; if, O monks, there were not here this unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, there would not here be an escape from the born, the become, the made, the conditioned. But because there is an unborn,...therefore there is an escape from the born....

UDANA viii, 3

Similar claims are common in Mahayana scriptures and commentaries. The most important term in Mahayana is Sunyata, "Emptiness," and the adjectives most used to explain Sunyata are "unborn, " "uncreated, " and "unproduced." The best-known Mahayana scripture, The Heart Sutra, explains that all things are Sunya because they are not created, not annihilated, not impure, and not pure, not increasing and not decreasing. This is echoed by Nagarjuna in the preface to his MMK, Muula Madhyamaka Kaarikaas, which uses Eight Negations to describe the true nature of things: they do not die and are not born they do not cease to be and are not eternal, they are not the same and are not different, they do not come and do not go.

Moving from India to China, we read in the Song of Enlightenment of Yung-chia, a disciple of Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, : Since I abruptly realized the unborn, I have had no reason for joy or sorrow at any honor or disgrace. That all things are perfectly resolved in the Unborn was the great realization and later the central teaching of the seventeenth-century Japanese Zen master Bankei: When you dwell in the Unborn itself, you're dwelling at the very wellhead of Buddhas and patriarchs. The Unborn is the Buddha-mind, and this Buddha-mind is beyond living and dying.

These passages (many more could be added) are important because, although it may not be clear what "the unborn" refers to, in each case it is an immediate experience that is being described (or at least claimed) , rather than a philosophical conjecture about the nature of reality. For a case which combines personal experience with philosophical acumen, we shall turn to Japan's foremost Zen master and philosopher, Dogen:

For Buddhism, the dualism between life and death is only one instance of a more general problem, dualistic thinking. Why is dualistic thinking a problem? We differentiate between good and evil, success and failure, life and death, and so forth because we want to keep the one and reject the other. But we cannot have one without the other because they are interdependent: affirming one half also maintains the other. Living a "pure" life thus requires a preoccupation with impurity, and our hope for success will be proportional to our fear of failure. We discriminate between life and death in order to affirm one and deny the other, and, as we have seen, our tragedy lies in the paradox that these two opposites are so interdependent: there is no life without death and--what we are more likely to overlook--there is no death without life. This means our problem is not death but life-and-death.

At issue are the boundaries of the Self as a symbolized entity. There is a clear sense of the relationship between awareness of death and a delineated Self. The second is impossible without the first. Even prior to the disturbing syllogism, If death exists, then I will die, there is an earlier one: Since 'I' was born and will die, 'I' must exist.

If we can realize that there is no delineated Ego-self which is alive now, the problem of life-and-death is solved. And such is the Buddhist goal: to experience that which cannot die because it was never born.

This is not a devious intellectual trick which claims to solve the problem logically, while leaving our anguish as deep as before. The examples above make it clear that we are referring to an experience, not some conceptual understanding. It can be no coincidence that the praj~naapaaramitaa scriptures of Mahayana also repeatedly emphasize that there are no sentient beings.

No Determinism, No Indeterminism, No Self

The question is, where does Buddhism stand on the question of free will? And the short answer is, it doesn't, exactly. But neither does it propose that we have nothing to say about the course of our lives.

In an article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (18, No. 3–4, 2011), Author and Buddhist practitioner B. Alan Wallace said that the Buddha rejected both the indeterministic and deterministic theories of his day. Our lives are deeply conditioned by cause and effect, or karma, refuting indeterminism. And we are personally responsible for our lives and actions, refuting determinism.

But the Buddha also rejected the idea that there is an independent, autonomous self either apart from or within the skandhas. Wallace wrote:

Thus, the sense that each of us is an autonomous, non-physical subject who exercises ultimate control over the body and mind without being influenced by prior physical or psychological conditions is an illusion.

That pretty much refutes the western notion of free will.

The western free will perspective is that we humans have free, rational minds with which to make decisions. The Buddha taught that most of us are not free at all but are being perpetually jerked around -- by attractions and aversions; by our conditioned, conceptual thinking; and most of all by karma. But through the practice of the Eightfold Path, we may be freed of our backward thinking and be liberated from karmic effects.

But this doesn't settle the basic question -- if there is no self, who is it that wills? Who is it that is personally responsible? This is not easily answered and may be the sort of doubt that requires enlightenment itself to clarify. Wallace's answer is that although we may be empty of an autonomous self, we function in the phenomenal world as autonomous beings. And as long as that is so, we are responsible for what we do.

What About Me

A Song Co-authored by the Sakyong

What about me?
That's my first thought every morning.
What happened to me?
It's the last thought every night.
Has this gotten me anywhere?
Any more friends? Any more love?
It should. It should have, by now.
In fact, by now I should be a bundle of joy.
Because I say this mantra every day.

What about me? What about me? What about..

In fact, it's embarassing
I say this mantra all day long.
Like the beating of my heart: What about me?

What about me? What about me? What about..

When I take a shower, I think: what about me?
I hope this shower makes me feel happy.
I hope this kiss makes me feel happy.
I hope this lunch makes me happy.
I hope these clothes make me feel happy.
I hope this donut, this cup of coffee,
This new affair, this new job….

What about me? What about me?
What about me? What about me?
What about me?

This new spiritual practice,
This new movie, this new CD
Oh, this new CD will make me happy…

What about me? That's my first thought every morning.
What about me?
What happens to me? It's my last thought every night.
Has this gotten me any more love? Any more joy?

This new city. This new country.
This new planet. This new universe makes me happy.

You know what? None of it will make you happy
Unless you do one simple thing:
Change me for you.
Change me for you.

Just wake up in the morning, and try something wild.
Just wake up, and not me.
Instead, say you, be happy.
May you be happy.
May you be happy.

What about you?
That's my first thought every morning.
What happens to you? It's my last thought every night.
It has given me so much more love. So much more joy.

When I give you a big fat kiss, take a shower,
Make my bed, when I dance,
May make you happy.
When I give you the remote control
May make you happy.
When I sit on a park bench by myself,
When I feel the sun, the breeze,
May make you happy.
When I just look at you, and stare at your eyes.
May make you happy.

And you know what?
When you're happy, I'm happy.
That's the formula:
First you, then me.
That's all happiness is.
It's just the heart being free.