Stop Fighting the Ego and Return to Your True Self

Battling the Ego Won’t Help

In spirituality, one of the first things we come to learn is that if it weren’t for the ego, everything would be wonderful. Our ego, our sense of separate self that is identified with our thoughts and feelings, creates a false sense of individuality—a seeming separation between us and the Absolute. If it wasn’t there, we would be enlightened—no more suffering, no more bad things, just ecstatic bliss all the time.

Instead of blaming everything on outer circumstances, other people, politics, or whatever, we have made a new enemy, which is our ego. Then we read about fighting the ego, killing the ego, and doing all sorts of mental gymnastics to get rid of it.

How the Ego Tricks You into Fighting It

I think almost every meditator has had this experience. We sit down to meditate and try really hard to get rid of the ego.

“If you weren’t there, I would be so happy!”

We do our meditation practice, try to keep the ego in check, and maybe a good feeling will result, for whatever reason. Then we are so proud of ourselves. We’ve done a meditation, we did everything correctly, and now we feel great.

“Finally, my ego is less strong, and as a result, I feel very happy!”

But how long does this happiness last?

We may even start thinking that we’ve figured something out. When we feel bad the next time, we just do our little meditation again, fight our egos again, and afterwards, we’ll feel good again. We may even think that we are progressing on our spiritual paths. But it usually doesn’t last very long before we feel bad again. And when we do, we not only suffer because of our “bad feeling,” but we also suffer because we have failed—because we thought we would be able to control our experience by fighting the ego, and now we feel crushed and defeated.

This is what many spiritual practitioners experience. They are on a real journey trying to get rid of their egos, trying to force themselves into Nirvana, but the only thing that happens is that their egos just put on a new dress called "spiritual ego."

Instead of opening up to the unknown dimension of life and letting go of control, we try to impose our own motivations and will over reality. We really haven’t gone beyond the ego; we haven’t put the ego in check or limited its power—none of that. We have just played the same old game with a new story. And what do we do when we become aware of that?

We blame the ego again. We make all kinds of plans to do it better next time. We meditate more, we read more spiritual books, we do everything to starve our ego.

We are not even attempting to get out of this rollercoaster. We just do the same thing again, and hope that it will eventually work.

And who does all of that?

It’s the ego, of course.

It will feel empowered; it’s on a new mission, whatever it is, and it will take your attention away from real spiritual practice, from finding out who you really are, just to fight another imaginary battle in our minds.

And by the way, if you are a really serious meditator, you may have figured all of this out, and now you’re trying to play the game of pretending not to fight the ego, secretly hoping that you’ll get toward enlightenment that way. 

But you already know that you’re just lying to yourself, and you probably feel very hopeless about it all, or maybe you even settle for some sort of superficial idea of spirituality. You think that the ego is not real, but it stays at that thinking level—you never realize it for yourself.

So how can we get rid of the ego, if trying to get rid of it strengthens the ego?

You Are Not Your Ego

Zen Master Bankei once said that when one tries to stop anger, their mind is split between thoughts of anger and thoughts of stopping them. He compared this situation to someone chasing another person who is running away—except that you are both the runner and the one pursuing them. He said that when you neither try to stop them nor try not to stop them, that is the unborn Buddha Mind, our True Nature.

In the same way, if we try to stop our ego from happening, we make it into a real object—we give it a sense of reality. Then, we have a “real object” to fight—but who is fighting it? It’s like in Bankei’s example, where we are both the person running away and the one chasing them.

We mistakenly think that we are the ego and therefore fight it, but it’s all made up. It’s like a movie being projected onto a white screen. All kinds of movies can be shown on it, but none of them ever touch the screen itself. The screen never actually changes: not before, not during, not after the movie. But if we are attached to the movie on the screen, we might think it’s real and suffer all the consequences that come from that.

The Buddhist doctrine of non-attachment is important because it points you to not getting attached to what you perceive in your mind. Your True Nature is like the white screen. Everything that’s projected onto it is impermanent and relative. It comes and goes, and has no absolute reality to it. Everything that you can witness is just like that. It’s constantly moving, grabbing your attention, and making you forget your True Nature. It doesn’t matter what movie is projected, if you are the hero or the bad guy, from the viewpoint of the screen, the Absolute, you are neither.

No matter what you think yourself to be, you are not that.

So whenever you think of yourself as anything—a good ego, a bad ego, no ego, whatever—know that you are not that.

Oftentimes, letting go of identifications with how we imagine ourselves to be, can be really hard. I mean, we are identified with those images, so we think we are them. And yet, every spiritual practice aims to help us let go of these ideas and images. We really have to be radical with this. Whatever we imagine ourselves to be, we must keep in mind that this is not really us, but only a temporary image that feels kind of sticky. Instead of fighting this image, which will only increase our attachment to it, we need to practice non-attachment.

Return to Your True Self

Remember what Zen Master Bankei said. He said if we neither try to stop nor not stop them, that’s the Buddha Mind. So we just look at these thoughts, feelings, and images as they come up with equanimity. We don’t fight them, we don’t deny them, we just observe them as they really are.

In order to transcend the ideas and images we have about ourselves, we first need to understand and accept them—and we do this by looking at them as they are. We don’t deny the strong pull they have over us, we don’t try to make them into anything else, we just look.

Maybe you think of yourself as a really rotten person.

“I’m such a bad person. I’m not worthy of enlightenment.”

Good.

You just look at that, and not react to it.

Instead of trying to resist this idea by compensating it with another idea that says, “If I do such and such, I can become a better person,” trying to make yourself into something else, trying to overcome feeling like a rotten person, you just look at this idea of yourself and do nothing. If you look at it, just as it is, you will see how it pulls you into identification. You will see the mechanism behind it, and you will finally realize that you are not that, but that this is only a made-up image of yourself. The next time this image comes up, you already know, “Ah, it’s this ego-image again,” and you will already know what’s about to happen, what thoughts are coming up, what feelings are coming up, and you will get less and less interested in all of that.

You will spend less energy dealing with this image. You won’t fight it anymore, because you don’t believe it anymore. If it comes up or doesn’t, you don’t care.

You will have freed yourself from this false image about yourself.

The ego is doing only its job anyway. The ego will do ego-things, so why should we expect it to do anything else?

Just leave it alone, and don’t try to make it into something else. This will only increase your attachment.

No matter what movie is being projected, the movie screen remains unchanged, just as your True Self remains untouched by the ego. If you are getting entangled in thoughts, ideas, or feelings about your ego or about overcoming it, you are not doing spiritual practice.

True spiritual practice begins when you turn your attention around, turn your awareness around, and ask yourself who you really are.

Don’t waste time fighting your ego.

Just look at it, see it as it is, and ask yourself: Who are you that’s looking at the ego, that’s seeing all of this?

And practice it from moment to moment.

Hope this was helpful. 

All the best,

Your friend of the way. Bye.