Shed Your Identity to See Reality Our egos are constructed in our formative years — our first two decades. They get constructed by our environment, our parents, society. Then, we spend the rest of our life trying to make our ego happy. We interpret anything new through our ego: “How do I change the external world to make it more how I would like it to be?” [8] “Tension is who you think you should be.
Relaxation is who you are.” — Buddhist saying You absolutely need habits to function. You cannot solve every problem in life as if it is the first time it’s thrown at you. We accumulate all these habits. We put them in the bundle of identity, ego, ourselves, and then we get attached to them. “I’m Naval. This is the way I am.

Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

The feeling that we call “I” is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.

Our ego always wants to feel significant and adored. It seeks instant gratification. It wants to feel more powerful than other people. It’s the reason people buy things they don’t need – to impress people they don’t even care about. It’s the reason we become bitter about other people’s successes. It’s the reason greed exists and why we’re constantly striving to outdo others. It prevents us from acting with love and understanding.

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word water is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

[T]he ego is the social image or role with which the mind is shamed into identifying itself, since we are taught to act the part which society wants us to play - the part of a reliable and predictable centre of action which resists spontaneous change. But in extreme suffering and death this part cannot be played, and as a result they become associated with all the shame and fear with which, as children, we were forced into becoming acceptable egos. Death and agony are therefore dreaded as loss of status, and their struggles are desperate attempts to maintain the assumed patterns of action and feeling.

The ego is nothing more than a false belief about our identity. It is the belief that we are separate, alone, and on our own.

3 El ego es un intento de la mente errada para que te percibas a ti mismo tal como deseas ser, en vez de como realmente eres. 4 Sin embargo, sólo te puedes conocer a ti mismo como realmente eres, ya que de eso es de lo único que puedes estar seguro. 5 Todo lo demás es cuestionable.

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 just 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 fear 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 just try to get it your way, the less you feel at home.

Where id is, there shall ego be

If we can see that the ego is purely fictitious — that it is merely an image of ourselves coupled with a sensation of muscular strain occasioned by trying to make this image an effective agent to control emotion and direct the nervous operations of our organism — then it becomes clear that what we have called ourselves isn’t able to do anything at all.

The ego wants resolution, wants to control impermanence, wants something secure and certain to hold on to. It freezes what is actually fluid, it grasps at what is in motion, it tries to escape the beautiful truth of the fully alive nature of everything. As a result, we feel dissatisfied, haunted, threatened. We spend much of our time in a cage created by our own fear of discomfort.

People talk about egos as if it were objects.