A Quote by Tsoknyi Rinpoche

Whenever ego suffers from fear of death & your practice turns to seeing impermanence, ego settles down. — © Tsoknyi Rinpoche
Whenever ego suffers from fear of death & your practice turns to seeing impermanence, ego settles down.
Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.
I have been continuously surprised by people who come to me and say they are afraid of love. What is the fear of love? It is because when you really love somebody your ego starts slipping and melting. You cannot love with the ego; the ego becomes a barrier. and when you want to drop the barrier the ego says, 'This is going to be a death. Beware!'
The ego is your enemy, not your friend. It is the ego that gives you wounds and hurts you. It is the ego that makes you violent, angry, jealous, competitive. It is the ego that is continuously comparing and feeling miserable.
That is again the same story played on a more subtle level. That's what the religious people have been doing down the ages - pious egoists they have been. They have made their ego even more decorated; it has taken the color of religion and holiness. Your ego is better than the ego of a saint; your ego is better, far better - because your ego is very gross, and the gross ego can be understood and dropped more easily than the subtle. The subtle ego goes on playing such games that it is very difficult. One will need absolute awareness to watch it.
People are not afraid of death, they are afraid of losing their separation, they are afraid of losing their ego. Once you start feeling separate from existence the fear of death arises because then death seems to be dangerous. You will no longer be separate; what will happen to your ego, your personality? And you have cultivated the personality with such care, with such great effort; you have polished it your whole life, and death will come and destroy it
If your ego is hurt you may become angry. Understand that ego itself is a disease. Dissolve your ego as far as possible. If you have inferiority complex, or have a very deficient ego you will loose your temper very easily.
The reason that ego and love are not compatible comes down to this: you cannot take your ego into the unknown, where love wants to lead. If you follow love, your life will become uncertain, and the ego craves certainty.
The ego isn't wrong; it's just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don't take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.
Ego is the greatest hurdle for your ascent. You see that ego is at a place where you have to just cross to go to Sahasrara, and to break Sahasrara is very easy otherwise. But if there is ego, you are already lost in that ego.
Part of ego is displaying the ego. I've got ego, and I think I'm really good. But maybe I fall down in trying to sell it to people.
Whenever there is negativity in you, if you can be aware in that moment that there is something in you that takes pleasure in it or believes it has a useful purpose, you are becoming aware of the ego directly. The moment this happens your identity has shifted from ego to awareness. This means the ego is shrinking and awareness is growing.
"When you accept your life - when you take your breakfast, and when you sleep and when you walk and when you take your bath - how can you create an ego out of these things? Sleeping when feeling sleepy, eating when feeling hungry, how can you create your ego? No, if you fast, you can create ego. If you are on a vigilance for the whole night, and you say, "I am not going to sleep," you can create the ego. By the morning, the person who has slept well will have no ego, you will have a great ego."
It’s okay. Let your ego push you to be the initiator. But tell your ego that the best way to get something shipped is to let other people take the credit. The real win for you (and your ego) is seeing something get shipped, not in getting the credit when it does.
You need your ego to survive in the three-dimensional world, but you need only that part of the ego which processes information. The rest - pride, arrogance, defensiveness, fear - is worse than useless. The rest of the ego separates you from wisdom, joy, and God.
The ego, as our familiar sense of self, seems predicated on fear. The fear that we might not make it, that we might not get where we want to go. But deep down there is also a grain of fear that we have nothing to give or nothing to offer. I think that's the ego's justifiable anxiety about its substantiality and existence.
Ego is neither positive nor negative. Those are simply concepts that create more boundaries. Ego is just ego, and the disaster of it all is that you, as a spiritual seeker, have been conditioned to think of the ego as bad, as an enemy, as something to be destroyed. This simply strengthens the ego. In fact, such conclusions arise from the ego itself. Pay no attention to them. Don't go to war with yourself; simply inquire into who you are.
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