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Many people on the spiritual path learn that the ego is a sort of enemy to be defeated. There’s some kind of real you, and then there’s the false self, obscuring it. If only you could tear down the false self, and stop identifying with all the things that aren’t really you, you could uncover your true nature.
It’s a decent story, but it has a big plot hole. See if you can spot it.
According to the story, your ego is a durable illusion, and you devote considerable effort to maintaining it. Some of your personality strategies, known as “ego defenses”, function to protect the ego against threats. You feed your ego when you have the chance, building it up and strengthening it, so it can withstand the barrage of life’s many challenges. This ego structure helps you function in the human world, but it stands in the way of your spiritual liberation. To have any chance of discovering the truth of what you are, you need to break down that structure, ruthlessly starve your ego, and overcome its defenses. In a word, you need to destroy it!
Did you catch it? Do you see the glaring contradiction here?
If the ego was a thing with an independent existence, it would persist without needing constant maintenance. All that defending, protecting, strengthening, and feeding doesn’t maintain the ego. Those activities *are* the ego. The ego is not a thing. It is an array of ongoing efforts to make something seem to exist that otherwise doesn’t. If your ego appears to have coherence or continuity, it is only because you continuously work to make it seem that way.
Said more simply, your ego doesn’t *have* a maintenance department. It *is* the maintenance department.
You don’t need to destroy an illusion, even a durable one. You need only stop producing it. But even that doesn’t require any special effort. Your ego-maintaining activities are already interrupted over and over again in the course of a normal day.
Let me see if I can illustrate the tenuous nature of the ego (or at least my particular ego) with three mundane examples from my day today. In each example, my ego-producing activities are disrupted, and in each, an ego-recovery strategy reactively pops up to compensate.
A MOMENT OF SHAME: In the morning, I go running. It’s hot here in Cambodia, and I sweat a lot when I run. At the end of the run, I’m cooling down by walking, and I stop for a fresh pressed sugar cane juice on the roadside. The woman selling me the drink asks, “You’ve been walking?” Now you might see that as a simple, friendly question, but I am, for a moment, mortified. Here I am, absolutely soaked, dripping with sweat, and she thinks I got this sweaty just by walking. I desperately want to explain that I’ve been running, and running hard. I’m not some wimp who sweats buckets merely from taking a walk! A self-image I don’t even realize I have appears - one in which I’m impressive because I’m a runner - tough and capable. And then the image is demolished by her innocent question. To put my self-image back together, I want her to see me how I was seeing myself. I want to defend the honor of my persona! The idea that a stranger, one I’ll probably never see again, might think me less impressive than I wish to be, evokes shame. And a strategy for escaping shame is readily available! If only I could only explain my self, my self-image might be redeemed.
A MOMENT OF FEAR: Some hours later, I’m driving on my motorbike, when a car barges into the road from a driveway, directly in my path, without pause or warning. Fear takes over my system, helping me to brake and swerve. There’s enough room to maneuver, and within a moment, driving returns to business as usual. Everyone is fine. Immediately after the fear passes its peak, however, it transforms into anger. I am sure the driver of the car is wrong, that they should have looked first! In actuality, the car was behaving appropriately for the cultural context, but that doesn’t stop a flurry of angry fantasies from forming in my mind: telling off the driver, or educating them on how to drive more respectfully, or getting revenge by making them feel as scared as I felt. Fear had knocked me out of my normal assumption of safety and control. Something in the world overpowered me, and flashed the possibility of death or injury. My fantasies of overpowering someone else in response are a strategy to stave off the fear and reinstate the illusion that I’m in control.
A MOMENT OF CONFUSION: Returning home, I open my laptop to a piece of writing I’ve been stuck on. A mere glance at the screen is enough to evoke a familiar wash of feelings. I’ve been writing up an exercise on the nature of thoughts. The material is quite abstract, so devising concrete steps that students can follow is a challenge, and thus far, I have been failing the challenge! Looking at the page, a mix of panic, confusion, and general aversion appears. My entire system prepares a strategy to evade these feelings by switching to a less difficult task. Procrastinating by doing something easy and comfortable would certainly be better than a confrontation with my own limitations! The impulse to procrastinate is a strategy for turning away from confusion, returning my self to more familiar and comfortable territory.
These are three everyday kinds of moments. I imagined someone had a judgment of me. I got scared by something that momentarily overpowered me. I was thwarted by my own limitations in my wish to accomplish something.
Each of these moments is a blow to the ego. Think about just how many such blows hit you on any given day. You imagine someone is judging you. You’re dominated by someone or something. You face your own limitations. You get embarrassed by a mistake you made. You find yourself wanting to impress someone. You panic because you perceive a threat. You forget what you were trying to do and get confused. You scramble to fill a perceived absence. You feel at a loss, or trapped, or like you can’t handle something. You get blamed by someone, or misunderstood, or disregarded. You get rejected, or disappointed, or insulted. You feel guilty because you impose on someone, or resentful because someone imposes on you. You feel betrayed by your own body, or bullied by society, or like you don’t belong in the world.
You might think each of these experiences is merely a minor attack. They are, for the most part, minor. The problem is that the ego doesn’t exist as a thing that can withstand an attack. All that exists is a range of ego-maintaining activities. Any disruption to those activities effectively eradicates the ego. The slightest insult is a killing blow. Whatever tentative sense of self was being held in place easily gets knocked down and broken into pieces. It’s like an ego Jenga, being blown over all day long.
In each example I gave, an ego-restoring strategy spontaneously arose in reaction to the ego blow. I wished to explain myself to someone who I imagined was judging me, so that she might see me the way I want to see myself. I fantasized about overpowering someone else, in order to convince myself I am in control. I looked for escape from the frustration of ongoing failure, through more familiar activities.
These kinds of strategies reassemble my destroyed ego. The poor thing has to be put back together over and over.
But what if I didn’t? What if I didn’t put the ego back together?
Every single instance in which your ego-generating activities get disrupted is an opportunity to reduce or slow or cease those activities. Let’s look back at my three examples through this lens. What are the opportunities each moment offers?
REMAINING UNDEFINED: In my running example, a self-image appears of me being impressive and cool. I only notice I’ve been maintaining that self-image because someone hints that her image of me might be less complimentary. Uh oh! If she thinks I’m unimpressive and uncool, is she right, or am I? My shame comes from a suspicion that I’ve been wrong about myself all along, and that suspicion, of course, is correct! I was never actually impressive and cool. But neither was I unimpressive and uncool. The positive attributes define one character. The negative attributes define another. But I am not either character, and I never was. I am embarrassed because I have been confusing myself with a mere character, perhaps for a very long time. The impulse to explain myself is a strategy to reinstate that character, to redefine myself. If I don’t follow the impulse, and allow the shame, I have the opportunity to remain undefined instead.
REMAINING INSECURE: In my motorbike example, I am enveloped in the illusion of safety and control, when the appearance of danger breaks the spell. Such illusions are woven out of several strands. I construct an ongoing narrative in which the character of my self is on its way from a past location to a future destination. I believe this to be true both of my motorbike journey, and of my life journey. I assume I will continue to be the person I was in my recent memory, and the person I imagine in my fantasy of the near future. Other strands of the illusion keep me imagining that both I and the world are continuous, consistent, predictable, orderly, and stable. Any given driver on the road can remind me that none of those things are true - fear is a fantastic disruptor of illusions! This fear isn’t only a reminder that there is no guarantee anything will continue. It is already a kind of death right now. Self is a narrative, and the narrative has been shocked out of existence, leaving me in a space of insecurity. There is no safety. I’m not actually in control. The emergence of anger, and the fantasy of dominating this particular driver, instead of being dominated, is a strategy to reestablish my belief that my character has control and can choose to persist. If I don’t entertain the fantasy, and allow the fear, I have the opportunity to remain insecure instead.
REMAINING DISORIENTED: In my writing example, something weirder is happening. The panic I feel when I open my laptop is due to a clash of identifications! Normally, without realizing it, I identify myself with a familiar collection of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. I think those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are “me”. Looking at the unfinished piece of writing before me, I discover that I am also identified with a goal - to complete the writing. This goal, unfortunately, is impossible for “me” to achieve. The task is beyond the current capacity of that familiar cluster of thoughts and feelings and behaviors. To engage with the writing requires a departure with the familiar. “I” can’t do it, so to accomplish it requires not being me. I know this intuitively, and so looking at the page disorients me. It takes me beyond what I know myself to be, into an experience without landmarks or guideposts. My impulse to procrastinate is a strategy to return to the bounds of the familiar, to the construct that I believe my self to be. If I thwart the impulse, and allow confusion to take over, I have the opportunity to remain disoriented instead.
I have the opportunity to remain undefined, instead of reestablishing a self-image. I have the opportunity to remain insecure, instead of restoring a self-narrative. I have the opportunity to remain disoriented, instead of returning to familiar self-territory. Being undefined, insecure, and disoriented may not seem desirable, but those qualities are all close to the true nature of things, to my true nature.
Whenever something interferes with your ego-producing activities, there are two choices available to you. You can deploy a strategy that restores the sense of an ego. Or you can drop the strategy and remain relatively egoless.
There are many other qualities that can characterize egolessness. You may find yourself undefined, insecure, disoriented, open, boundless, centerless, unmoored, lost, unknowing, empty, preferenceless, purposeless, meaningless, timeless, goalless, or just plain weird. These are all aspects of freedom, but freedom is something the ego does not tolerate. Developing the capacity to tolerate these states gives you the freedom to do things that are much more interesting than maintaining an ego.
So, the question isn’t how to defeat or destroy the ego. You can’t destroy something that doesn’t exist in the first place. You can stop pouring your efforts into producing and reproducing the ego illusion. But there’s nothing there to destroy. Your ego comes pre-destroyed.
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