Little Tail

Ego

Aware of the trap of spiritual bypassing, many Buddhist teachers don’t encourage students to begin their spiritual path with the eradication of ego. More often, they talk about working on a more skilful concept of self – “reclaiming your true nature” – in the first place.

Instead of abandoning your ego, you’ll be wiser to develop it into more healthy, skilful forms first. But what does it mean in practice? 

And why You Should Make Friends With Your Ego

Neither Buddhism nor psychotherapy seeks to eradicate the ego. To do so would render us either helpless or psychotic. We need our egos to navigate the world, to regulate our instincts, to exercise our executive function, and to mediate the conflicting demands of self and other.

Buddhism views a healthy ego as necessary to interact with the world in skilful ways. This includes enduring a meditative practice.

Jack Kornfield stresses that “a strong and healthy sense of self is needed to withstand the meditative process of dissolution and come to a deep realization of emptiness.”

If your ego is wounded with afflictions such as self-belittlement, you need to reclaim a balanced sense of self in the first place. As Thanissaro Bhikkhu says, a healthy ego is necessary to have an “honest sense of how to learn from your past mistakes for the sake of greater happiness in the future.”

Because here’s the thing: the Buddha advised to use the pursuit of happiness as the most trustworthy compass in life. However, what we need to understand is that Buddhism doesn’t see happiness as a zero-sum game.

The notion of benefiting at the cost of someone else only makes sense if you see happiness as dependent on external pleasures. When you learn to create happiness inside of yourself, the whole paradigm shifts.

Suddenly, your own happiness naturally adds to the happiness of other people. It becomes a team sport instead of a competition.

In the Buddhist paradigm, the pursuit of happiness isn’t just about you. It’s about the collective amount of happiness you can bring into the world.

From this perspective, you need a healthy ego not just for your own sake. You need to “upgrade” your identity so that it’s more helpful to you and the rest of the world.

This way, your natural pursuit to be happy becomes the only compass you need. It motivates you to update your sense of self into more skilful forms. Inevitably, it also leads to letting go of your ego – but that comes as an end result, not the starting point of the process.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu expressed it this way:

“Only on the highest levels of practice, where even the most skillful concepts of self get in the way of the ultimate happiness, did the Buddha advocate totally abandoning them.”