How is this: Ego is clinging to your own boundaries?
Or: Ego is clinging to arbitrary boundaries?
Ego is one of these words, like love, that have been worked to death, and which I generally try and avoid.
But that popped in my head this morning so I shared it.
And I will add something else: I think much of the beginning of learning to live is learning to do nothing. I think most of us are like automatic cars that are in gear. Unless we hit the breaks, we move involuntarily. So most of us, even at rest, have to exert energy to stay at rest.
Working is good, but working compulsively, out of fear and avoidance–which is the case for most–is not.
In a universe which granted our every wish, which is how I think the next life works, you would be slipping on that ice continually. You would veer first this way then that. Learning to be still, to genuinely be still, to not want anything, not crave anything, not want more than what is right there, is the most important spiritual task, in my view.
And to take a concrete example, wanting to be loving is a form of compulsion. Wanting to “rid yourself of ego”, whatever that means, is a form of compulsion. You start with doing nothing. That is the beginning. Laziness, if I might put it this way, can be work, if you are not being compulsively lazy, which is also common. Laziness can be a fear of work.
The doing nothing I am speaking of involves conscious attention. It involves listening, to use the word common in the book from which some of these ideas, as perhaps slightly adjusted in the filter of my mind, come: “Let the Moon be Free”.
Another way of putting this might be that the first spiritual task is relaxation. This is the same as consciously doing nothing. Nothing to be done. Nowhere to go. Everything full and complete. A death and a continually renewed beginning.