Meditation is to see past the ego to understand the unity of all things

The Separate Self 1.

Ego is like a room of your own, a room with a view with the temperature and the smells and the music that you like. You want it your own way. You’d jus like to have a little peace, you’d like to have a little happiness, you know, just gimme a break.

But the more you think that way, the more you try to get life to come out so that it will always suit you, the more your dear of other people and what’s outside your room grows. Rather than becoming more relaxed, you start pulling down the shades and locking the door.

When you do go out, you find the experience more and more unsettling and disagreeable. You become touchier, more fearful, more irritable than ever. The more you try to get it your way, the less you feel at home.

Pema Chodron, Start Where You Are

The Separate Self 2.

Go to a party. Listen to the laughter, that brittle-tongues voice that says fun on the surface and fear underneath. Feel the tension, feel the pressure. Nobody really relaxes. They are faking it. Go to a ball game. Watch the fans in the stands. Watch the irrational fit of anger. Watch the uncontrolled frustration bubbling forth that masquerades under the guise of enthusiasm or team spirit.

Booing, catcalls and unbridled egotism in the name of team loyalty. Drunkenness, fights in the stands. These are people trying desperately to release tension from within. These are not people who are at peace with themselves. Watch the news on TV. Listen to the lyrics in popular songs. You find the same theme repeated over and over in variations.

Jealousy, suffering, discontent, and stress. Life seems to be a perpetual struggle, some enormous effort against staggering odds. And what is our solution to all this dissatisfaction? We get stuck in the if only syndrome.

Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English

The Separate Self 3.

It is possible to take our existence as a "sacred world," to take this place as open space rather than claustrophobic dark void. It is possible to take a friendly relationship to our ego natures, it is possible to appreciate the aesthetic play of forms in emptiness, and to exist in this place like majestic kings of our own consciousness. But to do that, we would have to give up grasping to make everything come out the way we daydream it should.

So, suffering is caused by ignorance or ignorant grasping, or suffering exaggerated by ignorance or ignorant grasping and clinging to our notion of what we thing should be, is what causes the "suffering of suffering." The suffering itself is not so bad, it's the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.

Allen Ginsberg, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Vol. II, #1

The Separate Self 4.

Pride is a mental factor causing us to feel higher or superior to others. Even our study of dharma can be the occasion for the delusion of pride to arise if we think our understanding is superior to that of everyone else.

Pride is harmful because it prevents us from accepting fresh knowledge from a qualified teacher. Just as a pool of water cannot collect on the tip of a mountain, so too a reservoir of understanding cannot be established in a mind falsely elevated by pride.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Meaningful to Behold

The Separate Self 5.

One sure clue as to whether we're being motivated by aspiration or expectation is that aspiration is always satisfying; it may not be pleasant but it is always satisfying. Expectation, on the other hand, is always unsatisfying, because it comes from our little minds, our egos.

Starting way back in childhood, we live our lives looking for satisfaction outside ourselves. We look for some way to conceal the basic fear that something is missing from our lives. We go from one thing to another trying to fill up the hole we think is there.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

The Separate Self 6.

Just being at the piano--egoless--is to reach the place where the only thing that exists is the sound and the moving toward the sound. The music on the page that was outside of you is now within you, and moves through you; you are a channel for the music, and play from the center of your being.

Everything that you have consciously learned, all of your knowledge emanates from within you. There is a sense of oneness in which the heart of the musician and the heart of the composer meet, in which there is no room for self-conscious thought. You are one with yourself and the act, and feel as if playing has already happened and you are effortlessly releasing it.

The music is in your hands, in the air, in the room, the music is everywhere, and the whole universe is contained in the experience of playing.

Mildred Chase, from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran

The Separate Self 7.

If we had to make a choice between outer pleasure, comfort, and peace, and inner freedom and ultimate happiness, we should choose inner peace. If we could find that within, then the outer would take care of itself. Even when we have a comfortable and pleasant life externally, if our inner peace is shattered, or disturbed, we are not able to enjoy all that we have in our outer life.

To make that transformation we find--when we think only of ourselves, and hold on to things, consider ourselves and our happiness as the most important thing--that it is the ego and its clinging that disturbs both the outer and the inner happiness.

Even if we have a well-organized outer life, it can be very difficult for us to find inner happiness because we can never be satisfied so long as we have not cut the attachments due to ego. There is no end to it--it wants more and more--without any limit. The ego is insatiable.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Spring 1993

The Separate Self 8.

Central to the Buddha's teaching is the doctrine of anatman: "not-self." This does not deny that the notion of an "I" works in the everyday world. In fact, we need a solid, stable ego to function in society. However, "I" is not real in an ultimate sense. It is a "name": a fictional construct that bears no correspondence to what is really the case. Because of this disjunction all kinds of problems ensue.

Once our minds have constructed the notion of "I," it becomes our central reference point. We attach to it and identify with it totally. We attempt to advance what appears to be its interests, to defend it against real or apparent threats and menaces. And we look for ego-affirmation at every turn: confirmation that we exist and are valued.

The Gordian Knot of preoccupations arising from all this absorbs us exclusively, at times to the point of obsession. This is, however, a narrow and constricted way of being. Though we cannot see it when caught in the convolutions of ego, there is something in us that is larger and deeper: a wholly other way of being.

John Snelling, Elements of Buddhism