by Buddhism Now
I would like to consider the words of Buddhadhassa Bhikkhu when he said that many people suffer mental disorders, but a much more common disease is a spiritual disease which goes by the name of ‘me’ or ‘mine’. Most of us, it seems, need to work to be healed from this illness.
What is it, then, that we usually refer to in this way? What is it that we call ‘ego’, ‘me’, or ‘mine’? Ego is the totality of what is classically called ‘afflictions’, the afflictions being attachment, aversion, and ignorance; ego is our deep habit for attachment, aversion and ignorance. In other words, ego is being attached to attachment, being attached to aversion, being attached to ignorance. Unless we taste real peace, we tend to be attached to desire. We see desire as having a value in itself, something energetic, as something which can for a while take us from our boredom and depression, etc.
Unless we taste some inner stability which gives us a little more clarity and perspective, we are easily attached to our several forms of aversion. We think we don’t care about the many resentments we have against other people, or against ourselves, and then we go into retreat and start seeing a mass of aversion. The most important thing we begin to see, however, is not the aversion itself, but that we are holding onto it as though it were a treasure and we are afraid of letting this treasure go; we are afraid that if we lose this important thing, if we start letting go of this resentment or aversion, then we shall lose our identity.
Sometimes when we hear the words ‘let go’ we think that means letting go of something fascinating. That is true to a certain extent, but much of what is meant by ‘letting go’ is related to what is painful. Out of a deep habit, we are attached to many forms of aversion, which is to say, we are attached to many forms of suffering, and we hold onto them. We are also attached to ignorance. We may know, for example, that being recollected, being mindful, is a good thing; we know we have never regretted being mindful, and yet we choose to drift along with a total lack of mindfulness. Isn’t that attachment to ignorance? Isn’t that yielding to the momentum of unawareness and to its power and strength?
We tend to conceive of ego, not as a necessary convention, but as a solid entity which is separate, which has an intrinsic existence independent of anything else. We also impute this same solidity and separateness onto everything else, onto people and events. Ego, then, is conceived as something solid, but ego is also the activity of incessantly solidifying events, people, and everything. We could say that ego is a radical denial of our belonging to a vast, flowing interconnectedness. We may be able to accept the idea, but as long as ego is strong and rampant, we are stopped, we are prevented from drinking into this flowing interconnection, because we experience ourselves as being separate, solid and basically alone in this vast world. We experience ourselves as anything but interconnectedness, anything but flowing processes.
If we consider envy, we can easily see how ego (the me/mine) comes into being. On the other hand, if we had real participation in this flowing, universal interconnection, the fact that our friend John has had some success or good fortune would obviously, naturally, be something positive for us as well. There would not be any other option, any other possibility. Mudita (sympathetic joy) would be present; it would not be the object of an arduous practice, but would already be there as our nature, as the most logical and natural thing. We know how things go, however. There is usually me on this side, this one thing here, and another thing on the other side, our friend John—and also a third piece, the good fortune, which adds up to John’s dimension—so he is big and we are small; he is rich and we are poor. So we have aversion for him, aversion for ourselves, and attachment to that thing called ‘good fortune’. This is envy; this is suffering; this is the state of separation; this is ego; it is the deeply unnatural situation of our life, our suffering.
When Zen master Bankei died, an old blind man who used to sit outside the zendo said how sad he was. ‘You see,’ said the blind man, ‘since I am blind I cannot watch people’s faces, so I judge their character by the sound of their voices. And it is this way...
Full story at Buddhism Now
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