The ego – the false
self – is nothing more than a collection of thoughts. Those thoughts might be
positive (I am smart/attractive/popular) or negative (I am
stupid/ugly/unpopular), but they are still just thoughts.
What are
thoughts? Temporary, volatile wisps of
energy. They have no substance. Thousands of thoughts arrive, grow, shrink,
change, and disappear every day. Their very existence depends on a very
precarious and fickle mental activity.
When we depend
on such an insubstantial thing for our identity, we are keenly aware that our identity
is always in jeopardy. This causes the fear of annihilation, and it’s
why so many people are on edge all
the time: they fear that the false self they imagine themselves to be could die
at any moment.
And they’re
right. The businessman could lose the deal. The athlete could lose the game.
The socialite could fail to impress. This would cause his/her thoughts to
change. Suddenly he/she doesn’t seem so shrewd, talented, strong, or popular. The
fabricated identity as the shrewd, talented, strong, or popular person is gone.
The false self has been annihilated.
What has been
annihilated is not the true self, of course, but a thought. When one mistakenly
believes that one is that thought, the
loss of that thought brings another, painful thought: “You see? You’re worthless after all.”
We live in
fear of just such an occurrence if we define ourselves by our egoic thoughts.
What is fear? Another thought. We are haunted by the thought that at any time
we could be exposed as weak, worthless, unlovable frauds.
This is just a
bunch of erroneous, destructive mental gymnastics. We fabricate an idea that we
are some imagined thing and then keep up a constant, stressful act in order to
uphold it, all the while feeling frightened that we will fail.
We are not a
thought, and we don’t have to uphold a reputation in order to impress ourselves
or others. When we stop generating these foolish thoughts, the fear that they
once caused disappears.
