Travel Day 1058-62 – Kopan Monastery, NEPAL
We talked yesterday in our discussion group about how to identify attachments in our own life and with that, ego, attachment and liberation became the main focus of all the teachings over the next couple of days…
My Ego liking the Views from Kopan
Actually the concept that ego and attachment were the root cause for all our suffering seemed pretty simple and in general terms I had learned about it already during my first stay at Kopan Monastery, two years ago. What we had learned back then was that we always have a choice over our own emotions and we could decide to react to a situation with anger or with happiness. Like Lama Zopa Rinpoche said: “The way you think is what determines if you’ll experience suffering or happiness”…
That concept was already known to me and I found it very useful in many situations to try and step back while observing the arising emotions, rather than reacting to them. Not so clear to me on the other hand was the fact that ego and attachment were the main hindrance to evaluate a situation calmly and achieve a peaceful, liberated mind. In order to do that, we would have to develop equanimity; we would need to be balanced while recognizing a situation, but not reacting to it with an emotion. We should rather ask: What to do now?
Ego and Attachment book by Lama Yeshe
In order to fully understand this, we discussed the differences between feelings and emotions. I had always thought of them as being more or less the same, but a feeling was simply a response to our senses. We could feel a sensation to be pleasant or unpleasant, while an emotion was making a judgment about a feeling and that was where the ego came into play. With the ego interpreting the feeling for us, we were creating an unnecessary, possibly negative emotion…
For example the self could recognize a smell simply as unpleasant, while the ego would interpret the smell: “I hate this smell, this smell is making me angry”. As mentioned earlier, luckily we learned that we always have a choice in life and the correct choice would be to act out of self and not out of ego. The self in this case meant something that has wisdom, while the ego meant something that acts out of attachment and habit…
My Ego liking the Garden in the morning
A politician for example creates a view of himself and how he wants to be seen. This view is based on a false assumption and creates a desire as well as an attachment to this false assumption. The ego now interprets everything according to this desire and attachment, creating much suffering for the politician and a constant struggle because he wants to be seen as desired. In order to avoid this kind of situation, we would need to use the self to make a value judgment and not the ego which only gives us an emotional response…
We further discussed that, in order to achieve true liberation, one would need to realize emptiness, the ultimate truth. But to reach that point, it would be necessary to overcome the ego, which is empty of existence and attached to the “I”, which in turn does also not exist. While I realized that I personally was definitely very far away from that point of realization, I still thought that the class was very inspiring. Although, the teachings left me with the realization that I was still suffering from a lot of attachments in my life and liberation from my ego was really quite a long way to go…
Find all Kopan Monastery 2013 Photos here.
Really good write up Sir, The problem with out society is that real realization to a human does not come from his Childhood. We impart them all sort of knowledge in the form of curricula -Science, Arts what not…….. but do not inculcate them the knowledge that this world is just like a bubble ..We are hear in this world is like puppet …..Every one will have end —whether he is a king or monk…..and therefore what really needed is that we need to keep our wants as minimum as possible. But what happens really is that as a father I would like my son to become a big officer,engineers and what not……..Thus materialism enters in the life . We do not say that once you become a big officer your first duty should be to bring progress humanity using all your knowledge and duty befitting with your cadre……….We simply li8ke to see that he earns more have all comforts and so on………Further one want give rise to other want and all wants cannot be satisfied with the available means…..but then his ego comes ….Oh that fellow is having a Mercedes why should not have and so on ……..By the time he collects all these things he becomes old and ONLY THEN START THINKING OH THERE IS NOTHING IN THIS WORLD ………..So the basic problem is that from the very beginning he should be taught what is the real meaning of life……………Another issue–> There are so many teachers who are called Gurus. The job of Guru is to bring enlightenment but they themselves are not perfect ………….In India you musthave seen in recent times what has happened ……….So the solution lies that fromvery beginning a child should be empowered with so much knowledge about life that while discharging his duties he should not suffer from ego or other bad habits……………………will talk more sir in due course
Dear Dr. Banshi, you are definitely right when you stating that our education and the way we are brought up, has a lot to do with how we perceive the world around us. Unfortunately it seems today that a lot of our learning happens through television or internet, where commercials are specifically targeted to give rise to exactly these desires and wants…
The awareness that all these advertised material things, like you mention the Mercedes, are not really bringing happiness and satisfaction, usually comes much later in life. But if you are able to raise your children in a way that they do not have these wants and not the attached ego, that would be great. To me it seems it needs to be a combination of the right education and right understanding through experience…