Ego

[Nalaar]

Following on from an exchange with DeppityDawg in another thread, I am going to try and expand more on the topic of Ego. Starting with  the following exchange

Ok then, I'll bite. I wish I could do away with this divisive polarised "I am superior to you" attitude that infects our political discourse. Where people are vilified and dismissed simply because they don't share the views of others. All sides do it. We all do it on here. No one is wholly innocent. Even Tootsie baby is not innocent.

I don't know how to do it, but that's what I'd like. No political party could ever be that I guess is the answer.

May be more of a conversation for another topic, but I think we can get there with three realisations -
1 - You are not your Ego.
2 - You are the result of circumstances beyond your control.
3 - Everyone else is also subject to 1 and 2.

This is a very broad topic and is rooted in the sense of I, and Free Will. I discussed Free Will in another thread of the same name, so here I will focus on the sense of I.

It is easy to observe how much the idea of "I" and "me" shapes our view of the world - 'He was rude to me' and 'I am getting a promotion' is such a non-remarkable way to think that it can be difficult to even notice that there is a distorting process in operation - Consider by analogy the optical blind spot. I'm sure most people have seen the trick by holding their fingers apart, or staring at dots on a page etc. That blind spot is always there, but it can be difficult to see, and even after you learn about it, it seems not to exist unless you're testing for it, and so it fades into invisible background noise. Imagine trying to describe seeing the optical blind spot to someone who had never seen it, and without the aid of a simple physical experiment, that is the difficulty presented in exposing the Ego.

I'll open with one of the first stories I heard that helped me to see the Ego Blind spot. It was told by Alan Wallace, what follows is my memory of the story i've since heard many times.

"I want you to look at my watch. My watch. My wife gave it to me, it is a cheap watch, but it is a good one. My watch. Right? So if you take it, then you took something of mine. So imagine someone take my watch and runs off to another country, at what point does it not become my watch anymore? I lost my watch...he has my watch...but he says 'no, this is my watch'
When did it become my watch? When did it stop being my watch? People give away kidneys while they are still alive, and blood, when do they stop becoming theirs?
We have a notion of possession. This is my country, my race, my possession, my memories - people lose their memories. The notion of I, and mine, and therefore not I, and not mine - All projection.
And what results? Suffering."