Egoless-ness

Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering.
    Yet, ego is so terribly convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be introduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable.

Glimpse After Glimpse

Sogyal Rinpoche

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   I spent some time, after my discharge from the Navy in 1969, tending goats on the mesa at Morningstar Commune above Arroyo Honda New Mexico. A celebration of some guru’s death or birth  was being held across the other side of town on the mesa above the Rio Grande Gorge at New Buffalo. I can’t remember which guru, or what we were celebrating. It didn’t matter to me back then… the whole idea was that we were celebrating something. We participated in a group meditation in the guru’s honor, the beginning of which, each of us was handed little stick. The middle of the guided meditation paused as the guide told us the stick represented our egos and, when we were ready, we were to burn the stick. I looked at the stick and the more I thought about it the more the idea became repulsive to me because my whole philosophy of life at that time was based on protecting and asserting my ego. Everyone else dutifully went to the fire with their sticks while I stayed seated feeling quite righteous.
    I mention this experience because that incident reminds me of how tricky the ego is. Now the words of the Saint Francis Prayer come to me: “It is by self-forgetting that one finds…” It is so easy to see in that context what it was that burning that stick meant and how easily I was tricked into feeling righteous by hanging on to it. Ohhh… how clever is the monkey mind!

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