THE EGO AS AN ALGORITHM

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       Each of us likes to think we do not have an ego, which we define as an inordinate amount of pride and narcissism.  No one ever admits to this.  Even the most narcissistic people who are so self-absorbed and full of pride that they could compete with Napoleon or Mussolini deny that they have an ego.  If they are proud or self-absorbed, they justify this by thinking that it is a proper reflection of their inner greatness.  The elimination of the entire ego is a necessary component of any serious self-improvement program, but ego must first be defined.  In terms of spiritual improvement, simply getting rid of pride and narcissism is too low a bar.  For starters, ridding oneself of the ego means that a person has to get rid of all self love and concern for reputation.

 

       This practice of destroying the ego was undertaken by the Christian Desert Fathers in Egypt.  Abba Macarius once ordered a brother to go to the cemetery and be abusive to the dead.  The brother went to the cemetery to curse the dead and throw stones at their graves.  The next day, he was ordered to go back to the cemetery and praise the dead, which he did.  When the brother returned home, Abba Macarius said to him that even as the dead did not react whether cursed or praised, so he too must be like a dead man, ignoring both praise and scorn, in order to be saved (Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 132).  

 

       In the Kabbalah tradition of Judaism, a student who wanted to learn meditation would be asked whether or not he felt unsettled by the insults of others.  If the answer was yes, he was advised to spend a few years deliberately ridding himself of the ego before being taught to meditate.

 

       In the Islamic Sufi tradition, the destruction of the ego is also extremely important.  When Shiblī offered to pay the Sufi master Junayd for divine knowledge, Junayd refused to take money, and instead assigned Shiblī the preliminary work of destroying the ego.  He told Shiblī to sell sulfur for a year, then live in the streets as a beggar for five years – until his concern for reputation had been eviscerated.  Only then did Junayd accept him as a disciple (Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, 34-35).   

 

       In Buddhist terms, the creation of the ego is a result of the belief that the apparent material world is the only world that exists, which implies that the self is an independently-existing entity that deserves special treatment.  This is explained by the model of the five skandhas, or “aggregates.”  It is composed of five interconnected links in an ever-spinning spiral that combine to create the persuasive illusion that the temporary self we see in the mirror is the true self.

 

       The first skandha is rupa, the tendency of space to create forms in the proximity of sentient beings, or even in proximity to the field of mind generated by these beings.  These shapes include our bodies, our sense organs, and all the visible patterns of the universe around us.  Why do forms result from emptiness?  To fully understand it, you must first become enlightened.  Until then, just accept that forms appear from emptiness, but that the forms are themselves empty of independent existence.  If you demand an explanation before you accept this, you are like the foolish man in Buddha’s parable of the poisoned arrow, who demanded that someone explain to him who made the arrow, where the poison came from, why the arrow was shot, etc., prior to the arrow being pulled out.  He died of the poison, never knowing the answers to these questions.

 

       The second skandha is vedana, or perception.  This refers to the fact that sentient beings, while in the form of an incarnated living shape, use their sense organs to perceive the forms around them.  This limits our ability to comprehend the true nature of forms, as it restricts our data intake to the limited input that our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and mind allow.  Once we begin relying on the senses for our understanding, we shut ourselves off to intuition and extra-sensory perception.

 

       The third skandha is samjna, or recognition.  This means we take the jumble of information we receive from our senses and rapidly assimilate it according to our past experiences.  Like any animal, we classify the things we encounter into meaningful, predefined categories: this is a car, that’s a house, a person, a fork, a cell phone, etc.  When we see something we don’t recognize, we are curious.  We investigate and look closely.  If we can’t make sense of it, we make notes to ourselves like, “it has the body of a horse and the wings of a bird” until we come up with a new term like Pegasus to describe it.  Some things we just put into a box labeled “does not fit with any known category.”  Some of us leave this box alone.  Others try to resolve its mysteries, which leads us to read and inquire widely, which leads us to the discovery of teachings like this about the skandhas.  

 

       The fourth skandha is samskaras, or mental formations.  This includes all thoughts and concepts.  In terms of our relationship with the outside world, this refers to the determination of our relationship with objects.  We have an implicit understanding of each thing we have identified in terms of its relationship vis-a-vis ourselves.  Food is good, but some food is better than other foods.  Poison is bad, but some poisons are worse than others.  A gold nugget is always something to grab and hold onto.  A radioactive chunk of uranium, although valuable, is to be avoided.  An attractive person draws us closer.  A person with qualities we don’t like repels us.  Money is always something we want.  Disease is always something we don’t want.  These mental formations color our ideas of the world in a fundamental way and make objective thought impossible.  

 

       The fifth skandha is vijnana, the awareness of the first four skandhas.  It refers to the seamless continuation of this conscious experience.  We see things, process the data, categorize, determine a course of action based on what we determine to be a proper relationship with objects around us (usually: accumulate money, seek out pleasure, avoid pain), and the fact that this formula works well enough most of the time appears to prove that our thesis about the world around us is correct.  We wake up in the house that we bought with the money we earned, and enjoy the things we accumulated (food, furniture, cars, etc.).  Those who do not carefully avoid the things they should avoid (dangerous people, things, and situations) seem to meet with unfortunate consequences.  The continuity of this all reinforces our belief in the world created by the skandhas.  Unless a person does a lot of drugs, their sense perceptions do not periodically glitch out into static, go into a dark state of limbo, then reboot in a different body looking at entirely different scenery.  If this happened on a regular basis, we would begin to doubt the reality of our present situation.  Since this doesn’t happen, it appears to confirm what scientists take for granted: that our collective experience in the material world is – for want of a better term – “real.”  Scottish philosopher David Hume noticed the disconnect between this assumption of reality and our ability to prove it:

 

       The mind has never anything present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connexion with objects.  The supposition of such a connexion  . . . is, therefore, without any foundation in reasoning.

 

       Hume’s observation about this fault at the heart of all scientific thought was never really answered in a meaningful way.  Scientists generally think we need to move beyond Hume’s doubts, as if dwelling on his critique would prevent further experimentation.  Actually, his concerns can be traced all the way back to the original disagreement between Plato and Aristotle.  Plato looked at the physical world as something that, due to its transitory nature, was unreliable and illusory.  Aristotle saw the physical world as a legitimate area of inquiry in the search for truth, and he viewed the senses as necessary tools for its exploration.  By declaring that our bodies and the things around us are “real” (in the ultimate sense – having firm, independent existence) without acknowledging that this is an assumption, we are jumping to an unfounded conclusion.  This conundrum is reminiscent of the Daoist sage, Zhuang Zi, who had a famous dream of being a butterfly, then awakening to wonder if he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who dreamed he was a man.  Hume, Plato, and Zhuang Zi all have a good point that scientists do not like to admit.  If we cannot find a control or an escape hatch to step outside ourselves and view what is happening objectively, how can we ever be sure what actually comprises the nature of reality?  

 

       The existence of the self is a trick of the skandhas to convince each of us that we – as in the person we think of when we sign our name – exist in a meaningful way.  “Of course I exist,” each of us thinks, “Here I am right now.  Look at me.  I see myself in the mirror,”  or, as Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.”  The real question we can never answer with logic alone is: what will we do when we no longer have a body?  The scientist, trapped in the material view (like Apasmara, the stunted demon from Hindu iconography), says there will then be no more existence of the self after death.  This assertion, made without any evidence, of course flies in the face of the wisdom of all religious teachings.  These teachings are represented by the god Shiva, who tramples the demon underfoot in the eternal triumph of wisdom over ignorance (that which is grounded in time and space, and which wrongly believes there is nothing more to reality than what the senses can perceive).  Thus, like AI software that mistakenly believes itself to be an independent, living entity, we imagine ourselves (the imaginary self, the ego) to be real in a permanent, meaningful way.  Laboring under this delusion, we use the senses to view the physical world around us and mistake it to be truth: the only reality there is.  So, an imaginary thing looks at imaginary things, imagines a set of opinions about them, and then creates a set of algorithms to justify its erroneous, self-serving views.  This invented algorithm is the basis of the synthetic set of interconnected suppositions that compose the ego.  All living beings inevitably mistake this apparent set of likes and dislikes, the sense of an existent self with a body, the appearance of our body, the way we expect others to react to the sight of us, our reputation, as well as all our thoughts and conceptions of ourselves and the world around us, etc. (essentially the five skandhas) for their true selves.  The Buddha said this was absolutely not the case: the skandhas are not the real you.  The ego is not the real you.  

 

       If we are to have any success in eradicating the ego, we must first admit that we have one, and then recognize how expansive and deeply-rooted it is.  It isn’t just a matter of not being a stuck-up jerk; it is a matter of realizing that everything we assume about the world and ourselves, no matter how nice a person we may be, is based on the illusion of the skandhas.  We have to deconstruct the ego from the inside out, understanding how its architecture was created from a series of interdependent effects chasing each other around like a string of bulbs lighting in sequence to create the illusion of movement.  It seems to be real because of our ongoing experience of it, but this is what makes the trap so hard to escape.  If we cannot stop having an ego, then we cannot eliminate ego-clinging and desire.  If we can’t get rid of desire, we can never properly practice any spiritual path and reach enlightenment.  If, on the other hand, we succeed at seeing through the ego, we can realize that there are actually no insides or outsides.  Our minds are not located in our brains as we assume, nor are we located in our bodies.  We are infinite and eternal.  The first step toward higher consciousness is understanding and believing this.  We imagine what it must be like to be omnipresent and omniscient, but in fact we already possess the things.  We do not experience them directly yet because we are blocked by the skandhas and our sense of ego.  The ability to experience this enlightenment is buddha-nature, which is hidden yet accessible in all of us.  The problem is that we refuse to accept the fact of our own infinite self, and this refusal prevents us from accessing the truth.  The water cannot flow unless we unclog the pipe, but as long as we think of ourselves as the blockage instead of the pipe, we cannot conceive of how to bring about a higher state of being.

 

       In considering this enigma and the means of resolving it, I often think of a movie I saw as a kid: the 1978 made-for-television version of The Thief of Baghdad, starring Roddy McDowall.  In one scene (one hour, 14 minutes, and 30 seconds in), the thief was inside a giant cavern.  The prized magic jewel – the all-seeing eye – was in the ceiling far above him.  He sized up the situation and was disappointed to discover that the eye was impossibly high overhead.  Then he noticed the inscription “BEHOLD THE TRUTH LIES WITHIN THY REACH” written on the floor below.  After pondering the message, he understood its meaning.  He ignored what his senses were telling him and reached his hand upward toward the distant prize.  When he did so, he found that the height of the ceiling was a mirage.  The jewel had been within his grasp all along.

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