What I've Been Reading

There are many things in life we can do nothing about - the circumstances of our childhoods; natural events in the outer world; the chaos and catastrophe of illness, accident, loss, and abuse - but there is one thing we can change. How we interact with our ego is up to us. We get very little help with this in life.

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The bottom line is this: The go needs all the help it can get. We can all benefit from getting over ourselves. 

Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself by Mark Epstein, M.D.

Much needed book in this me, me, me world - a beautiful amalgamation of Buddhism and psychology to eradicate ego to help ourselves and in the process make the world a better place. A must-read.

Awakening does not make the ego disappear: it changes one's relationship to it. The balance of power shifts, but there is still work to do. Rather than being driven by selfish concerns, one finds it necessary to take personal responsibility for them. In Buddhism, this engagement with the go is described as both the path to enlightenment and the path out of it. It is traditionally explained as an Eightfold Path:

• Right View - Right View asks us to focus on incontrovertible truth of impermanence rather than trying to shore up a flawed and insecure self.
• Right Motivation - Right Motivation encourages us to come out from our hiding place, to use our powers of observation for our good, and to be real with ourselves.
• Right Speech - Right Speech asks us to take seriously the stories we tell ourselves, but not to take them for granted. Seeing them clearly gives us back some power over them. "Just because you think it," I often say to my patients, "doesn't make it true."
• Right Action - Postponing the ego's need for immediate gratification is the core principle for this aspect of the Eightfold Path. There is a famous phrase in Japanese Buddism that tries to explain this. "Learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate your self," it suggests. Then "body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will manifest."
• Right Livelihood - Classically, it means avoiding some of the worst qualities of human beings are capable of: those involving deceit or exploitation. Examples from the Buddha's time include trading in weapons, buying and selling human beings, killing animals, selling drugs or other intoxicants, and manufacturing or distributing poison. As these ancient examples suggest, things have not changed very much. Buddha made the Right Livelihood the centerpiece of the Eightfold Path. Right Livelihood encourages us to be ethically aware of how we interact and how we relate - not just to our level of achievement.
• Right Effort - Right Effort suggests that it is possible, and often desirable, to gain control over one' ego's impulses. The precondition for this is the ability we all have, however underutilized, to observe our own minds.
• Right Mindfulness - The trick of Right Mindfulness is not to turn into another method for self-improvement. Mindfulness, once established, continues on its own stream. It hacks into the mind to see what is there, and, out of this self-observation, interesting, unexcepted, and sometimes uncomfortable things can emerge. The original word in the language of the Buddha's time was sati. Sati means remembering. Right Mindfulness - or Right Sati - means remembering to keep an eye on oneself. 
• Right Concentration - Concentration is "Right" when it connects with the other branches of the whole. It is "Right" when it demonstrates the feasibility of training the mind, when it supports the investigation of impermanence, when it erodes selfish preoccupation, and when it reveals the benefits of surrender. It is not "Right" when it is seen as an end in itself and when it is used to avoid painful truths. One can hide out in the peaceful states that meditative concentration makes possible, but in the context of Eightfold Path, this is considered a mistake. 

To counter the persistent and insidious influence of ego has on us - called 'self-grasping' in Buddhist thought - one has to be willing to work with it on all eight levels before awakening and after.

We are human as a result of suffering, not in spite of it.