The Ego and the World

This idea may be harder to grasp if you're not familiar with the concept of "emptiness."

But I think about it more and more. I found it in Robert Burbea's book Seeing that frees.

Here it is: what we call the ego isn't a fixed property of a person.

Over a lifetime, a week, a day, the ego moves along a spectrum: it shows up more strongly or almost disappears depending on the situation.

What governs these variations?

As always: attachment.

When I want or refuse something, when I feel desire or aversion toward an object, the object and my ego appear at the same time. Buddhists call this "dependent arising."

A moment earlier, I can be in the flow of the present, moving freely and lightly from sensation to sensation: no center, no subject, no ego. I'm floating.

Then I latch onto a thought. Suddenly I want, I refuse, I ruminate. The ego is nothing more than the relationship that has just formed between this idea of me (which couldn't be found a second earlier) and the idea of this object (which doesn't really exist).

Far from being a flaw, the ego is above all a relationship.

A relationship between two objects that we choose to create ourselves.