your concept of yourself

Your concept of yourself is nonessential

Each of us has a concept, an idea of ourself. You could think of it as a model, or a symbolic representation of oneself, in one's own mind. And this is sometimes what is meant by self awareness.

The other day I was watching a small monkey who was sitting on a motorbike, looking at its own reflection in the wing mirror. It was fascinated by it. And this is the sort of behaviour that gets animal psychologists excited. They often think if an animal looks at itself in the mirror, it means it must have some idea of itself, and that this is a sign of intelligence. And one of the strange, curious things about spirituality, is that many of the things that we as human beings often hold up as shining examples of why we are better than other animals, in the field of spirituality, tend to be obstacles, hindrances. In a way this fits with my understanding that wild animals are all living as buddhas. They're living their natural selves. They're living with their buddha nature being expressed the whole time. And for us humans to return to that state is, in my opinion, the highest achievement we can possibly hope for in this human life.

But to live from our Buddha nature in that way, we need to see through some of these human characteristics. And this concept of oneself is one such hindrance to our actual self realisation. It's paradoxical. The language begins to get complicated in a way. For me, self realisation means enlightenment, means seeing for oneself directly the way things actually are. And that's different from living in the world of ideas and concepts.

The idea of oneself, the concept of oneself, one's ego, the way one defines oneself: this is not who we really are. This is all a social construct. It's part of the way we have built up a mental understanding of the world around us. But the mental understanding is not the same as the real thing. And the difficulty is, we as humans spend so much time with our awareness on the mental understanding of things, that we have somehow made the mental understanding more important than the reality. 

Our concepts, our mind objects have been given more importance than the things that they are meant to represent in the real world. And this leads to all sorts of trouble. We start to defend our ideas. We might go and start a war because we want to defend our nation state. The nation state is just a concept. It might be shared between a million people or 100 million people or even a billion people, but it is still just a concept. And to kill a single human being to defend that concept is already showing that we've gone far, far astray from a healthy way of being in the world.

And the same with the individual sense of a self. It's just like a nation state, the I, the ego: I'll start to defend everything about it, all the associations I have. If I identify myself as belonging to a particular race or a particular sex, a particular religion, I might go out and start killing people just to defend those concepts, because they are part of what constitutes my idea of myself.

And it gets worse than that. There are aspects of our personality that we have rejected and pushed into the unconscious parts of the mind. They are still there within us, and they cause all sorts of trouble because we are suppressing that energy. For example, I might have some homosexual feelings and reject them completely, and then I will become homophobic and lash out at other homosexuals. This is all because of ideas in one's own mind that we are trying to defend and justify.

Now all this mental stuff has a certain utility. It allows us to build a society, to interact socially with one another in many ways. The problem comes because we believe too much in these concepts. The concept of oneself, we might actually believe to be who we are. And even if we manage to see through that, we might still make the mistake of thinking it's an accurate representation of who we are. Our mental understandings are never accurate. They are always an approximation. And they're rather rigid, whereas life is flowing and changing: who I was yesterday is not who I am today, and yet does my idea of myself keep up? I don't think so.

So it's really important, even to get along as human beings with one another, that we understand this distinction between ideas about the world and what actually is. And this is no more true than with our concept of ourself. It's important to understand this distinction for normal day to day life, but it's critical if we are to progress spiritually. As we go further down the spiritual path, we see that this concept of ourself, the ego, is what is holding us back from realising our true nature, from getting in touch again with what is essential within ourself, and that's certainly not the idea of ourself.