#40 Michael Taft: Deconstructing the Self

 Full text: https://deconstructingyourself.com/deconstructing-the-self.html

(...) meditation can be described as a kind of deconstruction, and the thing we are deconstructing is sensory experience. But there is one sensory experience that is categorically different than all other sensory experiences: the experience of being “me.” The sense of being a person, an ego. 

(...)This sensory experience is centered around self-referential thinking and feeling. The narrative voice in your head, the pictures in your mind’s eye, and the emotions you’re having right now constitute almost all of it. (...)

Understanding the ego as a sensory experience is extremely useful, because it allows us to get a handle on it. We can deconstruct the sensory experience of being an ego just like we can deconstruct any other sensory experience. (...)

Many people understand the goal of meditation to be somehow the destruction, annihilation, or vanquishing of the ego. It is common to hear meditation teachers or spiritual counselors demonizing the ego as the source of all our problems. Basically the Satan of Buddhism. This is a misunderstanding. Human beings evolved to have an ego for very good reasons, and the ego is a powerful and useful thing in life. (...)

Luckily, that is not what we’re trying to do in meditation. Rather, the goal is to be able to see through the illusion that the ego is really who you are, and instead to witness it as just another kind of sensory experience.

If there is anything we are trying to destroy or get rid of it is the sense of identification with the ego. The ego as “me.” It is possible to have a high-functioning ego in perfect working condition and to simultaneously understand on a very deep level that it is not who you are.(...) That is where not only the relief from mental suffering, but also the clarity, openness, and freedom really begin to enter the picture.


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