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7.19
The Implications Of The Understandings Of Ego
  
  Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in hospital after a road accident to find they are suffering from total amnesia. Outwardly, everything is intact: they have the same face and form, their senses and their mind are there, but they don' t have any idea or any trace of a memory of who they really are.  
  In exactly the same way, we cannot remember our true identity, our original nature. Frantically and in real dread, we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch onto with all the desperation of someone falling continuously into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is "ego".  
  So ego, then 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 dak dzin, which means " grasping to a self." Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion os "I" and "mine", self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires and activity that will sustain that false construction. Such a grasping is futile from the start and condemned to frustration, for there is no basis of 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 go on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that self does not inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge springs all our fundamental insecurities and fear.  
  So long as we haven;t unmasked ego, it continues to hoodwink us, like a sleazy politician, endlessly parading bogus promises, or a lawyer constantly inventing ingenious lies and deafness, or a talk show host going on and on talking, keeping up a stream of suave and emptily convincing chatter, which actually says nothing at all.  
  Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to believe the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest triumph is to convince us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival as its own.  
  This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable.  
  Ego plays brilliantly on our fundamental fear of losing control, and of the unknown. WE might say to ourselves: "I should really let go of ego, I'm in such pain; but if I do, what's going to happen to me?"  
  Ego will chime in, sweetly: "I know I'm sometimes a nuisance, and believe me, I quite understand if you want me to leave. But is that really what you want? Think: If I do go, what's going to happen to you? Who will look after you? Who will protect and care for you like I've done all these years? I am you!"  
  And even if we were to see through ego's lies, we are just too scared to abandon it, for without any true knowledge of the nature of our mind, or true identity, we simply have no other alternative.  
  Again and again we cave into its demands with the same sad self-hatred as the alcoholic feels reaching for the drink that he knows is destroying him, or the drug addict groping for the drug that she knows after a brief high will only leave her flat and desperate.  
 
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