The ego feeling we are aware of now is . . . only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.
—SIGMUND FREUD
THE DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSITE NOTIONS of ego strength and egolessness epitomize the seminal difference between the psychologies of West and East. Western psychotherapy emphasizes the need for a strong ego, defined in terms of impulse control, self-esteem, and competence in worldly functioning. Eastern contemplative psychologies, by contrast, regard the ego—the separate, bounded, defensive self that appears to be in charge of the psyche—as ultimately unreal and unnecessary. Eastern psychology looks beyond the notion of a strong ego toward a larger quality of being that is egoless, or free of the constraints of the bounded self-sense. Just as spiritual seekers with only a superficial knowledge of Western psychology often misunderstand the therapeutic goal of ego strength, so most Western psychologists would regard the notion of egolessness as an invitation to psychosis.
Are these two notions of ego strength and egolessness irrevocably opposed? Or is it possible to strip away the superficial differences between Eastern and Western psychology and forge a common ground of understanding? This is a matter of vital importance, for it raises essential questions about the direction and aim of human life. What then is ego, and how exactly is it a problem? Is it possible for a Westerner to function in the modern world without being under the driving influence of an ego? And what would that mean?
The Nature and Function of Ego
When it comes to clear or consistent definitions of the terms ego and self, Western psychology is a jumble of imprecise notions and conflicting ideas, in which theoretical constructs are mixed up with experientially based notions in confusing ways. Even psychoanalysts who share similar theoretical orientations use the terms ego and self in a wide range of different ways. To add to the confusion, ego is often used as a translation of terms from Eastern psychology that differ in meaning and connotation from the psychoanalytic ego.
Psychoanalysts often speak of two domains of the ego: the functional—its capacity to organize and manage both internal functioning of the psyche as well as external functioning in the world—and the self-representational—its capacity to synthesize a consistent self-concept out of various images of itself. Ego defined as an organizing or synthesizing activity is not something we directly experience. It is purely a theoretical construct that serves a useful explanatory function.
Nonetheless, it is possible to have some experience of ego as a kind of energetic constellation in the body-mind. Mystics and seers, for instance, can often perceive ego activity directly, as a core of tension or contraction in the body that is thick, tight, and opaque. In everyday life, we are also familiar with a part of us that is geared toward worldly functioning. And we have a consistent sense of I-ness.
Yet if we look more closely, we find that the familiar I consists mostly of thoughts or images. Mostly what we mean when we refer to I is what the great Indian sage Ramana Maharshi called the I-thought. Our experience of ourselves is not fresh, immediate, or direct, but is filtered instead through concepts or images of who we are.
Buddhist psychology considers the fixation on this I-thought, as a center around which human life revolves, to be extremely problematic. When the conceptualized I, based on identifications and conditioned beliefs, becomes the command center of the psyche—the knower, the observer, the controller, the doer—this cuts us off from the more authentic knowing and acting that arises from our true nature. Meditation experience reveals a vast expanse of being and awareness that is egoless, that is, not owned or controlled by this bounded, controlling sense of self. The core of the Buddha’s teaching is that meditation provides a way to uncover the jewel of our authentic nature by cutting through the habitual concepts of self that obscure it like a film of dust.
The Functional, Managerial Ego
A psychology of awakening, which recognizes the larger realm of egoless awareness, could recognize the functional ego as a transitional mental structure that serves a useful purpose in human development. It is an interim caretaker, a managerial function created by the mind for the purpose of navigating in the world. Initially, this allows children to survive, function, and develop during their early years when they cannot yet fully recognize or draw on the power of their larger being. Ego, then, is a control structure we develop for purposes of survival and protection. The I thinks it is in control, and this belief provides a necessary sense of stability and security for the developing child.
Ego therefore serves a useful developmental purpose as a kind of business manager or agent that learns and masters the ways of the world. The tragedy of the ego, however, is that we start to believe that this manager—this frontal self that interfaces with the world—is who we are. This is like the manager of a business pretending to be the owner. This pretense creates confusion about who we really are.
There is a certain poignancy to this. As an imitation of our true nature, ego is a way of trying to be. If we lack the true strength to deal with difficult circumstances, we try to be strong—by tensing and tightening. Lacking true confidence, we try to get ahead or be on top—by forcing and pushing. Lacking direct knowledge of our value, we try to be lovable—by compromising ourselves, trying to save our parents, or pleasing people. All of these can be useful adaptations in childhood, for they provide some semblance of real inner resources we are not yet fully in touch with.
According to Buddhism, ignorance is the root of suffering. Yet as the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo taught, ignorance is merely incomplete knowledge. In this sense, ego is a form of incomplete knowledge—an attempt to know ourselves as real and capable, rather than deficient. It is incomplete because it operates only on the surface of our nature, as an outer facade, and is not grounded in the true reality of our being. This is a poignant situation because the ego, the managerial self, is trying hard to do the right thing, without ever really succeeding.
Therefore criticizing the ego is like condemning a child for not being an adult. Our personality is simply a stage on the path. Instead of indulging in ego-bashing, a more helpful approach is to appreciate how ego tries its best and have some compassion for its ultimate failure.
Indeed, if we define ego strength as the capacity to function effectively in the world, without being debilitated by inner conflict, certainly no Eastern teacher would have any argument with that. The Buddhist notion of egolessness is not meant to counteract ego strength in that sense. Practically speaking, most spiritual teachers would agree that a grounded sense of confidence is an important basis for spiritual practice, which aims at letting go of self-fixation altogether.
Yet at some point in adult development, we may start to recognize that ego’s effortful striving does not really work. We discover the painful truth: the Wizard of Oz who’s pretending to control things behind the scenes has no real power to deliver the goods—the mastery or satisfaction it claims to be capable of achieving. As the Russian teacher Gurdjieff used to say, I cannot do anything. Just as digestion and the blood’s circulation happen on their own, so genuine action, decision, understanding, and feeling arise, in truth, from a larger grace and intelligence that lies outside the ego’s grasp. At some point in our development, it is time to let go of the fabricated control structure that once served us so well.
So from a larger spiritual perspective, the central ego-self around which most people’s lives revolve is at best an early stage of development, rather than an ultimate, indispensable organizing principle of consciousness. To reify the ego as a necessary, enduring structure of the psyche—as Western psychology does—only solidifies its central position in our lives and impedes our capacity to move beyond it. If the small managerial self runs our life, this is not because ego is indispensable but because we have not found a larger principle to guide us. Ego is a pretender to the throne; it sits in the seat of the real sovereign, which is our true nature, our larger being.
Once we no longer believe in ego as a permanent structure necessary for the balanced functioning of the psyche or for efficient action in the world, we can start to recognize how capacities for balance, harmony, integration, power, and skillful action are resources inherent in our larger nature. As these larger capacities of being are uncovered, they can take over functions that the controlling ego-self formerly managed. Then it becomes possible to function in the world in a way that will not cut us off from our being.
The Self-Representational Ego
The second domain of ego—the continuity of a known, familiar sense of self, the belief that “I am consistently me”—raises a more subtle and difficult question: If ego is not ultimately real, how is it that I continue to feel that I am the same me? Buddhist psychology explains the relative consistency of the sense of self in terms of karma, the transmission of tendencies from one mind-moment to the next. Each grasping mind-moment carries forward a previous moment of grasping and passes it on to a successive moment. The father of American psychology, William James, echoes this notion of karma in his analysis of how thoughts inherit and transmit a chain of seeming ownership:
Each pulse of cognitive consciousness, each thought, dies away and is replaced by another. . . . Each later thought, knowing and including thus the thoughts which went before, is the final receptacle . . . of all that they contain and own. Each thought is thus born an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its self to its own later proprietor . . . like the log carried first by William and Henry, then by William, Henry and John, then by John and Peter, and so on. All real units of experience overlap. Each thought dies away and is replaced by another, saying, “Thou art mine and part of the same self with me.”a
Thus, who I think I am now is always determined by who I thought I was a moment ago. Ramana Maharshi described this illusory continuity of ego in a strikingly similar way as James:
This ghostly ego . . . comes into existence by grasping a form; grasping a form it endures; leaving one form it grasps another form. . . . Ego is like that caterpillar which leaves its hold only after catching another.b
In this way, the thought process is what continually recreates the sense of a continuous, consistent self. Most of our thinking, indeed, revolves around and confirms the central I-thought.
Western and Eastern psychology do share an important area of agreement regarding the nature of the ego identity: they both see it as a construction, fabricated through the power of conditioning. According to Western developmental psychology, newborn infants lack a sense of self and develop it only gradually through interactions with their caretakers. Children construct their sense of self through internalizing and identifying with aspects of their parents and how their parents relate to them. This ego identity is formed out of self-representations—images of oneself that in turn belong to larger, transactional self/other imprints called object relations.
Although Eastern psychology does not take account of child development, it too sees the egoic identity as a construction of the mind, formed through conditioning, or karma. Thus defining ego as the fabricated or constructed self is something that Eastern and Western psychology could agree on. Both sides would concur with Ernest Becker’s statement that the child’s defensive ego allows “him to feel that he controls his life and his death . . . that he has a unique and self-fashioned identity, that he is somebody.”c The key difference is that Eastern thought sees this somebody as ultimately unreal and dispensable, while Western psychologists tend to grant it permanent status, regarding it as substantive, enduring, and indispensable.
Yet how can a constructed sense of self, built out of self-concepts, be real or have any genuine, lasting power? This is a question that Western psychology has never confronted. The psychologist J. F. Masterson displays this confusion when he defines the real self as “all our self-images plus the ability to relate them to each other and recognize them as forming a single, unique individual.”d A Buddhist might say to Masterson: “How could a real self consist of images? What is real about a collection of self-representations, since these are only mental concepts? This sounds like a house of cards to me.” Precisely because the egoic self is a mental fabrication, contemplative psychologies regard it as having no inherent reality.
If there is a true self beyond ego, it would have to be a reality that can be directly known and recognized, without recourse to images—an I beyond I, as it were. Ramana Maharshi called this “the pure ‘I’ . . . the pure being . . . free from thought-illusion.”e The limitation of Western psychology is that it fails to look beyond the conventional ego or self toward this larger dimension of being.
Although C. G. Jung spoke of a transcendent Self behind the ego, Jung’s Self could never be directly realized, but only revealed through images—archetypal images, in this case. And while Jung recognized a spiritual principle in the psyche, like most Western psychologists he could not allow for egoless awareness as a developmental step beyond ego. He could only see it as a step backward, leading toward a more primitive state of mind dominated by the unconscious, at the expense of mature, differentiated consciousness. In his words: “Consciousness is inconceivable without an ego. If there is no ego, there is nobody to be conscious of anything. The ego is therefore indispensable to the conscious process. The Eastern mind, however, has no difficulty conceiving a consciousness without an ego. . . . [A]n egoless mental condition can only be unconscious to us, for the simple reason that there would be nobody to witness it.”f
Ego as Grasping
To understand the meaning and importance of egolessness in Buddhist psychology, we need to consider its view of ego more closely. If Western psychology defines ego primarily as a structure, built on self-representations and self/other imprints (object relations), Buddhist psychology focuses instead on ego as an activity—a recurring tendency to make oneself into something solid and defined, and to grasp onto anything that maintains this identity, while rejecting anything that threatens it. One Tibetan term that is often translated as ego literally means “grasping at self” (dak-dzin), or “holding on to the ‘I’ I think myself to be.” It is this activity of grasping that turns any experience—from chasing worldly status to subtler forms of holding on to ideas, feelings, or even spiritual experiences—into ego activity.
Ego in the Buddhist sense, then, is the ongoing activity of holding oneself separate, making oneself into something solid and definite, and identifying with this split-off fragment of the experiential field. Continually maintaining this identity project perpetuates a division between self and other that prevents us from recognizing ourselves as seamlessly woven into the larger field of reality. And the more we hold ourselves separate from the world, from our own experience, and from the naked power of life itself, regarding these as other, the more we fall prey to inner struggle, dissatisfaction, anxiety, and alienation.
A Buddhist View of Ego Development
Western psychology studies the development of ego (as a structure) horizontally, in terms of a sequence of stages spanning a number of years in childhood. By contrast, Buddhist psychology looks at the egoic self in a more vertical, immediate way—as the activity of recreating and reinforcing our concept of self over and over again at every moment. If we made a cross-sectional diagram of ego activity, we would see five layered tendencies at work, known as the skandhas, operating within and shaping our experience of reality.1
The sense of a separate self initially arises out of contracting against the boundless openness of being in order to establish some measure of security and control. This contraction establishes me as something bounded, definite, substantial, and separate, and sets up a split between self and not-self. This is the first skandha, known as form or the “birth of ignorance.” From the perspective of developmental psychology, the first skandha would correspond to the stage when the child’s consciousness cathects, or identifies with, the body. Out of this, the belief that “I am this body” arises, along with its attendant sense of boundedness and separation.
Once the I has separated out from the larger expanse of reality, it checks to see whether the not-self standing over against it is friendly, threatening, or neutral. This is the skandha of feeling—feeling out situations to see if they are for us or against us. In this way, our relation to reality becomes shaped by the categories of pleasure and pain, hope and fear, like and dislike. We like people, situations, and experiences that confirm our identity or make us feel more solid and secure, and we dislike anything that threatens our bounded identity. The split between self and not-self that emerges in the first skandha now also takes place within the self. We like the good (adequate, lovable, competent) self we hope we are, and we dislike the bad (inadequate, unlovable, deficient, unworthy) self we fear that we may be.
The third skandha, termed perception or impulse, involves adopting a stance—of passion, aggression, or ignorance—toward situations, based on whether we perceive them as friendly, threatening, or neutral. Passion here means the activity of chasing, grasping, seducing, possessing, incorporating, or clinging to situations that confirm our identity. Some people try to confirm themselves through chasing after pleasure, others through holding on to pain (“I suffer, therefore I am”). Aggression involves attacking or rejecting whatever threatens our identity project—our attempt to establish ourselves as solid, real, and valid. We must continually ward off anything that might invalidate us or imply that we are bad or inadequate. And ignorance involves apathy and indifference toward situations that are not interesting because they neither confirm nor threaten us.2
The fourth skandha, known as conceptualization, represents a further step toward solidifying our identity. We generate elaborate beliefs and interpretations about reality based on our patterns of hope and fear. These stories and beliefs about self and world further reinforce and crystallize our strategies of grasping, aversion, and indifference. They keep us imprisoned and isolated in a narrow, self-perpetuating conceptual world.
These four tendencies are like cascading rivulets that all come to fruition in the fifth skandha, the ongoing stream of consciousness. If you look at what propels the endless torrent of your thoughts and feelings, you will inevitably find the first four skandhas—contraction and solidification, hope and fear, grasping and rejecting, and the continual reconstellating of familiar self-concepts—in operation. Most of our mental activity is an attempt to prove that we exist, that we are something solid, and that we are okay. Ego maintains itself through the endless self-talk of the busy mind, which covers up any gaps or open spaces in the mindstream.
If we were to sketch this cross-section of ego, the five skandhas might appear like layers of a cake. This layered texture can actually be discovered through careful attention to the play of the mind. When we start to meditate, what we usually notice first is the top layer—the relentless chatter of the busy mind, with its chaotic flux of thoughts and impressions. With continued practice, we start to uncover the underlying layers of the ego mind driving our thoughts: concepts of self and other, the continual tendency to grasp and reject, the continual churning of hope and fear underlying that, and on the bottom layer, the tension and contraction involved in trying to maintain and preserve a separate self-identity.
William James described the flux of thought underlying what he called the “central self” in a similar way:
Now can we tell more precisely in what the feeling of the central active self consists? . . . First of all, I am aware of a constant play of furtherances and hindrances in my thinking. . . . Among the matters I think of, some range themselves on the side of the thought’s interests [passion], whilst others play an unfriendly part thereto [aggression]. The mutual inconsistencies and agreements, reinforcement and obstructions . . . produce . . . incessant reactions of my spontaneity upon them, welcoming or opposing, appropriating or disowning, striving with or against, saying yes or no. This palpitating inward life is, in me, that central nucleus [of the self].g
James takes a further step in the Buddhist direction by recognizing that beneath these mental dynamics, no substantial self can be found:
But when I . . . grapple with particulars, coming to the closest possible quarters with the facts, it is difficult for me to detect in the activity any purely spiritual element at all [i.e., any central self]. Whenever my introspective glance succeeds in turning around quickly enough to catch one of these manifestations . . . in the act, all it can ever feel distinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking place within the head.
Ego and Egolessness
Although the egoic activity of contracting, grasping, and identifying is relentless, it is not solid or continuous like a barnacle on a rock. Rather, grasping and contraction come and go, like a fist alternately clenching and relaxing. If a fist remained clenched all the time, it would cease to be a hand and would become a different sort of limb. Just as a fist is the activity of clenching an open hand, so the ego is the solidifying of open, nongrasping awareness, which is inherently egoless. Ego continually arises out of and subsides back into egolessness, like a fist tensing and relaxing again.
If ego is awareness in a contracted state and egolessness is awareness in a relaxed state, it is clear that ego cannot exist without egolessness, which is its ground. Therefore, theologian Harvey Cox was mistaken in asserting, “There is no basis whatever in our Western experience for understanding what the Buddhists mean by egolessness.”h Everyone has little glimpses of egolessness in the gaps and spaces between thoughts, which usually go unnoticed. Ego is dying and being reborn at every moment. We continually have to let go of what we have already thought, accomplished, known, experienced, become. A sense of panic underlies these births and deaths, which stimulates further grasping and clenching. Existential anxiety arises as a sense of impending death, a dawning realization that the I is nothing solid, that it has no true support and is continually threatened by the possibility of dissolving back into the egoless ground of being from which it arose. Ego contains at its very core a panic about egolessness, an anxious reaction to the unconditional openness that underlies each moment of consciousness.
Identifying with a self-concept is an attempt to give ourselves some shape, some hold on things, some security. Experience may change, but at least, so we hope, the experiencer endures. But in fending off its continual impending dissolution into openness, the experiencer gets in the way of its own experience, becoming an obscuration that prevents direct contact with our true nature, with others, and with the larger sweep of life.
Understanding egolessness as the open hand out of which the clenched fist of ego forms helps us see that it poses no real threat to our existence or effective functioning in the world. A fist may be useful for some purposes, but in the long run we can do a lot more with an open hand. And in the end, it is only egoless awareness that allows us to face and accept death in all its forms. Recognizing ego death as an integral, recurring aspect of life makes it possible to overcome our fear of letting go. When we are not so driven to prove, justify, defend, or immortalize our bounded self, we can breathe more deeply, appreciate death as a renewing element within the larger circle of life, and embrace reality in all the forms in which it presents itself.
Thus the fear of many psychoanalysts—that egolessness sounds like a forerunner of psychosis, paralysis, or decompensation—is unfounded.3 For egoless awareness does not mean losing sight of the conventional boundaries of where this mind/body leaves off and other mind/bodies begin. Rather, these conventional self-boundaries are seen as just that—conventional constructions—rather than as absolute demarcations that fence off a solidly existing, separate territory.
The continual activity of grasping onto an ego identity is essentially narcissistic, for it keeps us occupied with propping up an image of ourselves. Even Freud recognized the narcissism inherent in the ego when he wrote, “The development of the ego consists in a departure from primal narcissism and results in a vigorous attempt to recover it.”i So if we truly want to move beyond narcissistic self-involvement, we must work on overcoming our identification with whatever we imagine ourselves to be—any image of ourselves as something solid, separate, or defined. The less involved we are with images of who we are, the more we will be able to recognize our deep bond with all sentient beings, as different expressions of the mystery that also pervades our inmost nature.