The Ego

So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.

Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of 'I' and 'mine,' self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction. The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist.

The ego's greatest triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us.

by Sogyal Rinpoche