What Happens When You Forget About Ego? – Dialectic Two Step
Estimated reading time: 5 minute(s)
What Happens When You Forget About Ego?
Questions: What happens in Buddhism when you forget about the ego?
The ego is unforgettable. Think of it like a bicycle. You learn what a bicycle is when you are young. If you don’t see one, a picture of one, dream about one, or talk about one for forty years, you forget about bicycles. But if you see one, you know it.
If you somehow manage to do away with ego for some period of time, a situation will arise when it will assert itself. The ego is one of many bags of tricks in our arsenal of evolutionary adaptations. It is useful in many, many ways. But it also has drawbacks. Its negative manifestation it is a misrepresentation of self.
Here’s an example of a trick, similar to ego, that can backfire. We know that if we want to lose weight, we should eat less and burn more calories. This strategy is useful until we are at a healthy weight. At this point we should let go of the rigorous dieting and exercise and adjust to maintain the healthy state.
But what if we fixate on the dieting and weight loss as the most important thing? What if we continue to lose weight to the point where we become ill? Of course, this is the disease anorexia nervosa. We treat it with medical monitoring, nutritional counseling, and therapy. The goal is to replace the fixation on weight loss with healthy habits.
So when we talk about the negative aspects of ego, it is the fixation, not ego itself. Forgetting ego isn’t what we’re after. The Buddha taught that when we can release the fixation, we can reduce our suffering. That can come in myriad forms. You can become more relaxed, have peace of mind, etc. These qualities are summarized in the four Brahma Viharas – Loving Kindness (Metta), Compassion (Karuna), Joy with others (Mudita), and Equanimity (Upekkha).
Dialectic Two-Step is an ongoing series of my thoughts on questions that come my way.
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. - Octavio
Get Each Week's Dialectic Two Step in your email box First Name:
Last Name:
Email address:
In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:
Weekly Series:
One Minute Meditations
Tiny Drops (Photography series)
Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)
Dialectic Two-Step
Modern Koans (interesting questions)
Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)
Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)
Say What?
Quotes
Verse Us (Poems I Write)
Meditations on Gratitude
Tiny Drops (Photography series)
Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)
Dialectic Two-Step
Modern Koans (interesting questions)
Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)
Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)
Say What?
Quotes
Verse Us (Poems I Write)
Meditations on Gratitude
If you enjoyed this post, please like and share.
The post What Happens When You Forget About Ego? – Dialectic Two Step appeared on Andrew Furst.
