Ego
is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result:
a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image
of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing, and
has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.
In
Tibetan, ego is called
dakdzin
,
which means “grasping to a self.” Ego is then defined as incessant
movements of grasping at a delusory notion of “I” and
“mine,” self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and
activities that will sustain that false construction.
Such
grasping is futile from the start and condemned to frustration, for there is no
basis or truth in it, and what we are grasping at is by its very nature
ungraspable. The fact that we need to grasp at all and to go on grasping shows
that in the depths of our being we know that the self doesn’t inherently
exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental
insecurities and fears.
Excerpt by Sogyal Rinpoche
Tibetan Book of the Living and Dying
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