When the word ego is used it brings to mind some “thing”, a self that’s different from some other self. Over time this has grown into the idea that the “ego” is almost an entity of its own. There’s talk about killing it, dissolving it, overcoming it, but in reality it’s nothing… only a collection of thoughts, memories, a story that make up an assumed identity. I use the word, but often choose an alternative because of the baggage it carries. There’s nothing wrong with the term as a concept, it just gets distorted when you hear something like the ego doing something, because what’s actually happening is simple… thoughts are arising, declaring an identity, claiming ownership of whatever appears. The word is just a placeholder for all that.
Take for instance the common phrase that the ego feels threatened. This is just a convenient way of saying that thoughts surrounding the idea of a person are being challenged, a feeling of defense arises in a body, thoughts follow, words follow, all giving the illusion that there’s a someone at the wheel responding to all of this… but it’s just happening. That’s all the ego ever is… nothing mysterious and nothing to kill or eliminate. It’s just part of the functioning that mistakenly came to be identified as an independent agent, a person with a will, a history, a life. All of this content is in the appearance, it just doesn’t belong to that, because that is only an idea, a story, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, as Charlie Hayes used to put it.
The word is only a convenience, just like saying I, me, and mine. They’re useful bits of language so we don’t have to lumber through a conversation. Ego is whatever is happening that’s being erroneously attributed to an identity, nothing more… qed.
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