My current understanding of mind and ego

 Hi all,

Second blog. Recently I read  "Understanding Our Mind" .This book explored how our mind works from a traditionally eastern/ buddhist perspective as written by Thích Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese buddhist monk. I found myself drawn to these teaching after understanding to a degree that ego is pervasive voice in our heads that does much harm. Throughout my life I have heard comments about certain people having "big egos" often associated with perceptions of arrogance with a very much negative connotation. I have also heard to a degree that ego is rooted in insecurity, a take that was once hard to understand with people who are overt about how successful they are. Without fully understanding what ego is and isn't I knew for certain that it existed and I probably was referring to it wrong.

From watching various videos teaching on eastern psychology schools of thought I learned that ego can manifest itself in more than one way and that even more concealed (covert) ways of boosting your ego are possible. From here I dedicated myself to reading  "Understanding Our Mind" cover to cover with full annotations written on sticky-notes, journals or even just pads of paper. Though I learned many things from author Thích Nhất Hạnh, my focus was definitely on the nature of ego which was discussed a lovely amount of times.  Let me first say that I am no scholar and will likely not do the late Thích Nhất Hạnh justice, and that's okay.

Our mind exists as a collection of many consciousness. To start, at the base, there is our store conscious which is often compared to a garden storing all the seeds that have been passed down to us. These are seeds given to us by our parents, their parents before them and so on. In addition you also gain seeds from your early upbringing and early experiences. We never notice these seeds until they are given the proper nourishment from not only ourselves (compared to the gardener to the garden) but our environment. Only under the right conditions will they manifest as thoughts, ideas and behaviors that we are consciously aware of.  I like the example of the seed of love: in all of us there is a seed of love that was given to us by our parents and nurtured (or not) throughout our lives by the way of kind words, soft touch, and so on. From here when we are in the company of someone we deeply cherish we to are aware of the warm and uplifting feelings and thoughts of love that we are able to share with others, further nurturing the seeds of love in the loved-one but also yourself. When these manifestations of love come up they arise in our mind consciousness which serves as sense organ just as your eyes sense light, ears sense sound and so on. 

This was a very brief summary of how I understand some parts from the teaching from the book. So where does ego come in? Ego latches on to a sense of self and not self. If we remember "our self" is really the store conscious that we inherited and collected in many ways and the manifestations (mental formations) that come about and our observations of those formations. There really isn't a truly individual "self" there. Are you the seeds and the garden?  No, they are as much apart of you as the people who gave them to you. Are you the mental formations that come about?  No, they came about by seeds passed down to you nurtured and taken care of by everything around you. There is an individual nature to it all, but this only comes about by the collective that formed it. What ego does is "make a self". It discriminates what is you and not you. It's completely comparative in nature. It labels and categories things. It grasps and latches on to all that comes about and decides what it identifies with and what it doesn't. But is any of what comes about truly separable from the collective, from all that went into an idea, thought or belief, judgment? Absently not. 

From here I hope you can see that ego is quite ignorant and delusional in nature. It pushes aside all the collective nature of things which is how everything came about. Again this is not to say that there is not an individual aspect to things but rather an intricate balance between individual and collective that shape one another that would not be anything without the other. Ego serves to put oneself up and others down. Let's look at come examples. 

After getting an A on a test you tell everyone how smart you are and how dumb they all are. But how did you get an A, your own individual self? That's not possible, what about the house you grew up in, the teachers that taught you. And everyone else, by what logic does one doing well negate the worth and value of others? None. 

What was heavily emphasized in the books and that which I try to practice myself is simply to observe and recognize one's actions as they are. This is without putting yourself above
others or others below you as that is not reality as it is but merely an aspect of your mind picking-and-choosing what it wishes to see and believe. It's rooted in ignorance and delusion and takes away all the collective that went in to the you that exists today. 

The mind, and ego, is very nuanced and I only understand a fraction of what we know. I hope to write more posts on it in the near future to expand on my thoughts today as I learn more of these beautiful teachings to better my life and the lives of my community.