We therefore develop this curious thing. We develop a thing which is called an ego.
 Now I've got to be very clear to you what I mean by an ego.
 An ego is not the same thing as a particular living organism.
 For my philosophy the particular living organism,
 which is inseparable from a particular environment, that is to say from the universe as centered here and now,
 is something real. It isn't a thing. I call it a feature of the universe.
 But what we call our ego is something abstract.
 Which is to say it has the same order and kind of reality as
 an hour or an inch or a pound or a line of longitude.
 It is for purposes of discussion. It is for convenience.
 In other words it is a social convention that we have what is called an ego.
 But the fallacy that all of us make is that we treat it as if it were a physical organ.
 As if it were real in that sense.
 When in fact it is composed on the one hand of our image of the universe,
 of our image of ourselves.
 That is our idea of ourselves as when we say to somebody you must improve your image.
 Now this image of ourselves is obviously not ourselves.
 Any more than an idea of a tree is a tree.
 Any more than you can get wet in the word water.
 And to go on with our image of ourselves is extremely inaccurate and incomplete.
 Would that some God the gifted gives to see ourselves as others see us. We don't.
 So my image of me is not at all your image of me.
 And my image of me is extremely incomplete in that it does not include
 any information to speak of.
 About the functioning of my nervous system, my circulation, my metabolism.
 My subtle relationships with the entire surrounding human and non-human universe.
 So the image I have of myself as a caricature.
 It is arrived at
 through mainly my interaction with other people who tell me who I am
 in various ways either directly or indirectly and I
 play about with what their picture is of me and
 they play something back to me so that we set up this conception.
 And this started very very early in life.
 And I was told you see and you were told
 that we must have a consistent image.
 You must be you. You have to find your identity in terms of image. And this is an awful red herring.
 A lot of the current quest for identity among younger people is a search for an acceptable image.
 What role can I play?
 Who am I in the sense of what am I going to do in life and so on. Now while that has a certain importance
 if it's not backed up by deeper matters, it's extraordinarily misleading.
 So therefore on the one hand there is this image which is
 intellectual, emotional,
 imaginative and so forth.
 Now we would say I don't feel that I am
 only an image. I feel there's something more real than that because I
 feel I mean I have a sense of their being
 a particular sort of
 how do we say a center of something some sort of sensitive core inside the skin.
 And that corresponds to the word I.
 Let's take a look at this
 because the thing that we feel as being myself is certainly not the whole body.
 Because a lot of the body can be seen as an object.
 In other words if you stand, stretch yourself out, lie on the floor and turn your head and look at yourself.
 You know you can see your feet and your legs and all this up to here and finally it all vanishes
 only there's a sort of a vague nose in front.
 And you assume you have a head because everybody else does and you've looked in a mirror
 and that told you you had a head but you could never see it just like you can't see your back.
 So you tend to put your ego on the side of the unseen part of the body.
 The part you can't get at because that seems to be where it all comes from and you feel it.
 But what is it that we feel because if I see clearly and my eyes are in functioning order
 the eyes certainly are not conscious of themselves.
 There are no spots in front of them, no defects in other words in the lens or in the retina or in the optic nerves that give hallucinations.
 So also therefore if my ego, my consciousness is working properly I ought not to be aware of it.
 As something sort of there being a nuisance in a way in the middle of things because your ego is awfully hard to take care of.
 Well what is it then that we feel? Well I think I've discovered what it is.
 It's a chronic habitual sense of muscular strain.
 Which we were taught in the whole process of doing spontaneous things to order.
 When you're taking off in a jet plane
 and the thing has gone rather further down the runway than you think it should have without getting up in the air
 you start pulling at your seatbelt.
 Get this thing off the ground. Perfectly useless.
 So in the same way when our community tells us
 look carefully
 now listen
 pay attention
 we start using muscular strains around our eyes, ears,
 jaws,
 hands
 to try to use our muscles to make our nerves work
 which is of course futile.
 And in fact it gets in the way of the functioning of the nerves. Try to concentrate.
 And then when we try to control our emotions
 we hold our breath, pull our stomachs in or tighten our rectal muscles
 to hold ourselves together. Now pull yourself together!
 Immediately what are you to do? What does a child understand by that? He does it muscularly. Pulls himself together. It's just useless.
 So everybody chronically pulls themselves together so that it's so funny if you get a person to just lie on the floor and relax
 There's the floor on you as firm as can be holding you up. Nevertheless, he will detect that the person is making all sorts of tensions
 lest he should suddenly
 turn into a nasty jello on the floor.
 So that chronic tension which in Sanskrit is called sankocha, which means contraction,
 is the root of what we call the feeling of the ego. So that in other words this feeling of tightness
 is the physical referent for
 the psychological image of ourselves.
 So that we get the ego as the marriage of an illusion to a futility.
 Even though the idea of an I with a name with a being is naturally useful for social communication
 provided we know what we're doing and take it for what it is.
 But we are so hung up on this concept
 that it confuses us
 even in the proposition that it might be possible for us to feel otherwise.
 Because we ask the question if we hear about people who have
 transcended the ego.
 Well we ask how do you do that?
 Well I say what do you mean?
 You, how do you do that?
 Because the you you're talking about doesn't exist.
 So you can't do anything about it.
 Any more than you can cut a cheese with a line of longitude.
 Now that sounds very discouraging doesn't it?
 It's encouraging, isn't it?
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