Happiness - Ego

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Today, we continue a series of talks based on Matthieu Ricard’s book, Happiness:  A Guide to developing Life’s most important skill.    Today, we’ll take a look at this thing called Ego and how we relate it, and how that impacts our happiness. 

He has a great quote from the seventh Dalai Lama he said:

“If there is a way to free ourselves from suffering

We must use every moment to find it.

Only a fool wants to go on suffering.

Isn’t it sad to knowingly imbibe the poison?”

Matthieu puts it even more simply:

“Recognize the suffering

Eliminate the source

End it

By practicing the path.”

How many of us, how many times, we knowingly imbibe the poision of suffering, in the myriad of ways that we think, speak and act unskillfully in our lives?

Three kinds of suffering:

1. Visible suffering:  Easy to see; everywhere pervasive
2. Hidden suffering:  Concealed in pleasure, freedom from care and fun, that turns into suffering (eating a great meal that gives us food poisoning, etc.)
3. Invisible suffering: stems from the blindness of our minds, ego-clinging

Self-centeredness, thinking of ourselves as the center of world, is the source of most of our disruptive thoughts.  We pretty much see things from our own perspective and fit the world and ourselves into neat little boxes of identification.  We might look at a man or a woman and label them handsome or beautiful given our particular likes and dislikes, but to a hermit any person might be seen as a distraction, and to a wolf, any person is simply a good meal.  There is NO instrinsic  value in any object.  It is simply the value we assign to it. 

Just as water turns into ice, we freeze our labels and judgments about ourselves and others, which takes away the fluidity of knowing more clearly moment-to-moment.  Think about how you feel about yourself and the world.  Is there a sense of separation?   Most of us create some kind of separateness feeling from the world, in order to feel safer, more secure.  When we cannot see that our labeling of ourselves and others are what is causing our suffering, we logically pull away from the world, protect ourselves, in hopes of relieving our suffering.  But, this separateness is just an illusion we have created.  The fact that I appear to have a separate body from yours is of little importance in the world of interdependence.  If a nuclear bomb exploded in this room, we would quickly see our interdependence which each other and with our environment. 

We can begin to soften our sense of a separate solid self.  In Buddhism, the quality of self-confidence is turned on its head.  To be truly confident, one strives for egolessness.  Genuine confidence can come for our ability to see the power of our minds to be flexible in any situation, be flexible with any thought or emotion, be flexible with relationships with others.  That is the source of our inner strength, the paradox that letting go of ego-clinging is what relieves suffering and ends up fueling great inner well-being and happiness.

So we start to deconstruct this strangle hold that this concept of ego has on our thinking.  Let’s start with our name.  They say the sound of your own name is the sweetest thing anyone hears.  But are you really your name?  Are you really connected to a thing that is merely the sound of several letters formed together?

And who or what are we?  Are we our head or our heart or our arm?  Matthieu uses the example of if you cut a body up into pieces, which piece is the person?  Just like a river is not one drop of water, but rather the process of the water passing by.  So, just play with the idea that you are no body, no thing.  You are, I am just a process, arising and falling away in each moment.

A little releasing of concern for our own success, failure, hopes, anxieties, anger resentments, frees us up to look for and find a deeper sense of well-being just by being, not by some accomplishment or lack thereof.  And we can more easily become attuned to the suffering of others. 

“Recognize the suffering

Eliminate the source

End it

By practicing the path.”