In This Episode…

“Awakening is the discovery of consciousness without limits, of a self without limits. It’s the discovery that what we are is much vaster than our mind can contain. So if we’re attached to a small little story of self that we’re invested in maintaining, there’s no room and there’s no way for us to really open to and let go into the enormity of the super consciousness that is our true nature.”
—Craig Hamilton

This episode is the first in our “Obstacles to Awakening” series, where we explore the most common challenges to deep meditation and how to overcome them. Craig begins by diving into what many view as the greatest barrier on the spiritual path—the human ego.

We’ve all heard that having a healthy, strong ego is essential for living a productive, fulfilling life. So, why, then, does the ego get such a bad rap when it comes to our spiritual path?

In this episode, Craig offers practical insights into how our attachment to self-image can hinder our growth, awakening, and even our perception of reality. Tune in to learn how to move beyond this internal obstacle and discover new ways to deepen your meditation practice and spiritual journey.

If today’s episode has you curious about what you can do to break free from the grip of the ego, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called: The Key to Evolving Beyond Ego — How to Make the Change that Changes Everything. In this workshop, he’ll share essential tools and practices that have helped thousands make the leap out of ego and into the kind of spiritual life they’ve always sensed is possible.

Register for free at: evolvebeyondego.com.

Discover More about Craig’s Awakened Life Membership Program

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

When we think about obstacles on the spiritual path, most of us have probably heard or read that the primary impediment to awakening is the ego. And since I’m going to talk quite a bit about ego, I want to clarify right up front that ego is a term that is used in different ways, by different people, to mean different things.

When I use the word “ego,” you might have a certain set of reference points for what I’m talking about that might not match what I’m talking about. What’s important here, as always, is not what the word means, because words don’t mean anything. We all know that we assign meanings to them and agree on meanings for them, but they don’t have meaning independent of us. At the end of the day, what’s important in any kind of discourse is defining your term the way you’re going to use it, and why that is, and then using it consistently.

Different Definitions of Ego

So I’ll just say a word about how people have defined the word ego. Broadly speaking, in the contemporary, transformational community of all of us who are practicing or teaching spiritual and psychological practices, there have been two primary uses of the term “ego.”

1. The Freudian Definition of Ego

There’s the one that first came into popularity in contemporary, educated Western culture through Sigmund Freud. It was elaborated on by his daughter Anna Freud and then by many people in the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic communities. I’m going to offer a very simple definition, so for any of you with PhDs in psychology who want to say “Oh, Craig, you’re butchering it,” maybe I am, and you can explain it to me.

Generally speaking, the field of psychoanalysis sees the ego as a functional center in the psyche that enables us to navigate the world, and particularly to navigate between different parts of our psyche.

The Id and the Superego

The basic conception is that, on one hand, we have our raw impulses, our instinctually driven behavior, our animal instincts. In Freudian psychology these unrestrained impulses would be called the “id.”

And on the other side, we have our “superego,” which is the internalized “shoulds” of society and those we grant authority to. It’s like your inner conscience that says, “I should do this, I shouldn’t do that. My parents wouldn’t approve if I did this. Or my teachers wouldn’t approve.” Or so-and-so wouldn’t approve. It’s the part of us trying to navigate the influence of society on our thinking and behavior, and how this functions in our psyche.

The Freudian idea is that you’ve got your instinctual impulses, which might be a powerful lust that would compel you to act out wildly and sexually if these impulses weren’t restrained. Or you might eat everything you can see if you weren’t restrained, or be violent and aggressive when triggered. It’s a very raw impulse. Imagine if impulse was ruling the day, like it is for some animals. We can see how that works.

On the other hand, we’re all trying to be a good citizen and get approval from others. We always want other people to think we’re okay. What do they think I should do? And all those “shoulds” which live in our superego.

The Psychological Ego

In Freud’s conception, the ego is right in between those two. It’s that centered part of us where our values and commitments live. It’s where discipline lives, and it’s your ability to make good, healthy, mature choices, to not just be ruled by your impulses or the influence of others.

Your parents might have really wanted you to become a doctor or a lawyer, to use the cliché, but you knew in your heart you were an artist. You couldn’t do that because you had to follow yourself, your own desires and your own potentials. So you didn’t do what that superego told you to do. But you probably didn’t do this violently or say “Screw all of you, I don’t care,” which might have been how your id would have responded.

With this centered, healthy, mature ego, you can discern and navigate between these two competing sides. You find your way. It’s neither just what everyone else wants me to do, or what my impulses are telling me to do. It’s bigger, it holds it all, and has a center to it.

That’s the extent of my little Freudian education on ego, in Western psychology. It has a lot of other dimensions, but that’s broadly what that idea is.

2. The Spiritual Definition of Ego

In a spiritual context, when we read spiritual books by enlightened masters, new and old, there is often a translation of terms from ancient texts into the word “ego.” Contemporary, spiritually awakened teachers who aren’t relying on ancient texts will use the word “ego” to describe something they’re pointing to in their own experience.

In a spiritual context, the way ego is spoken about is a bit more like the way we often use it in common, plain speech. In plain speech, how do we use ego? We say, “Oh, my boss has such a big ego, I can barely be in the room with them. They’re just so full of themselves. They think they’re the center of the universe.”

We’re using the word ego to refer to a pathological self-focus and self-image – especially self-image. Someone being “full of themselves” means they think the world of themselves. They think they are what it’s all about. They’re the center of things. Their needs are what matters, and others’ don’t. They’re self-centered and arrogant.

Arrogance and self-centeredness may be the two simplest ways of describing the common, colloquial use of ego. You can feel how it’s very different from the Freudian conception.

Ego Is Our Attachment to Self Image

The spiritual way of talking about ego is much more like the commonplace definition. To make it simple, when we hear we have to transcend the ego or the ego is the obstacle to the spiritual path, what we’re talking about is your self-image. It’s your story about yourself. It’s your self-concept.

But it’s not just the concept or the image. It’s your emotional investment in your self-image, your attachment to it, your defense of it. Feel what that is in yourself for a second. We are all different, and each of us has a different kind of self-image or self-concept.

Here are just a few common examples of what that self-image and self-narrative might look like.

Some of us are very identified with being smart and intelligent. Often, people who are smart and intelligent get identified with that because that’s how they’ve been rewarded and found their success. So they think, “I’m really smart, I’m the smartest person in the room, I know everything.” They often make all kinds of mistakes because they think they know things they don’t. We meet people like that and we say, “Oh, he just thinks he knows everything.” Their self-image is very wound up in being smart.

For someone else, it might be that they identify with their physical prowess. Someone who’s strong and athletic has identified themself as “I’m strong, athletic, and super physically capable,” and maybe even “I’m physically beautiful and attractive, look at me.”

We know what it’s like when we meet people who have a big self-image about their physical appearance. You can feel it when you encounter them – they are very aware of it. Another person might be attractive and doesn’t seem that focused on it. But when you meet someone who’s very attractive and they feel very aware of it and want you to be aware of it, that’s what their ego has constructed itself around. Their self-image has coalesced around that quality or capacity.

For some of us, our ego identity might be that we see ourselves as a really ethical, good person. Often, people who are doing spiritual work have a self-image as being very good, very ethical, very kind and very loving.

Our self-image could also be built around the opposite of those. Let’s say we’re not that intelligent or smart, but we’re an ethical, good, kind person. We know that about ourselves. Then our self-image would probably include our ethical nature, and also include the thought, “Oh, I’m not that smart.”

If somebody asks a question in a group of us, we might be somebody who never brings forth our answer because we don’t think we’re the smart one. Instead, we turn to the person we think is the smart one to ask, “What do you think?” What I think doesn’t matter because I’m not that smart.

You can see how the ego now has the story “I’m not very smart.” This story guides all my behavior – not speaking up or sharing my thoughts, reflections and opinions because mine aren’t that valuable. Because I’m not that smart. And so my life choices end up emanating from my self-image, whether it’s negative or positive.

The Ego Creates A Story We’re Invested In

Most of us have a self-image that includes some positive beliefs and some negative beliefs. “I’m great at these things, but I’m not great at these things.” The ego will say, “I’m this, and I’m not that, I’m this, and I’m not that.” It creates a story. The important part is the investment in the story. That’s really the ego part.

The reason I’m saying that is because there’s often confusion. This is an important point. When I’m asking us to go beyond our story and beyond our self-image, people will say “Well, but I do know things about myself. I’ve been alive for 50 years, or 60 years, and I know what I’m good at, what I’m not good at, where I’ve made big mistakes in life, and where I’ve really excelled. Are you telling me to pretend I don’t know that?”

No. This isn’t about denying anything you know about yourself. It’s about not being invested in anything you think you know about yourself. I’m sure this distinction is not clear yet, but it’ll get clearer why in a moment.

When we talk about ego as the obstacle to the path that we need to transcend, what we’re really talking about is not what you know about yourself. It’s your need, on an emotional and psychological level, a level of investment and attachment, to have a story about yourself. It’s your need to have an image of yourself in your mind, which you are sustaining, preserving, and maintaining. It’s the need to see myself.

That’s the ego.

How To Identify Your Own Ego

One of the easiest ways, therefore, to actually experience your own ego is to just think about a time when somebody challenged your self-image. You’ll notice, “Oh, that’s my ego, there it is, now I see what he’s talking about.”

Again, we’ll take a concrete example. Let’s say you have a self-image of being a very good, kind, caring, loving, selfless person. You’re somebody who’s out for the greater good in life, not just out for yourself – because that wouldn’t be spiritual.

The ego of the spiritual practitioner very often believes, “I’m good and kind and nice and loving,” or some variation on that. There might be a lot of truth in that relative to other people on the planet. But what happens when someone accuses you of doing something selfish, something aggressive, or something mean?

Let’s say you were triggered by some event, and you made a comment about someone that was kind of mean because you were emotionally triggered, and everybody felt it. Then one of your friends takes you aside and says, “What you said to so-and-so was kind of mean,” or “What you did seemed kind of self-centered.”

What I want you to draw your attention to is the feeling you get in that moment. It’s a very specific kind of feeling. It’s not shame. That’s different. Shame might be related, but it’s more specifically the feeling of wanting to defend your self-image. It goes like this: “Oh, no, I didn’t mean to be mean. That wasn’t my intent. That slipped out accidentally.”

Or, “I was emotionally triggered, and I know I just said that, but I didn’t really mean it. I’m not that person.” You feel this endless protestation. “But I’m not a bad person, I’m not a mean person, I’m not a selfish person.”

Maintaining Our Self-Image

We make a desperate attempt to maintain the self-image inside the psyche. That’s all that matters right then. We see an incoming threat to the story about ourselves that we’ve constructed and defended. Now there’s a potential that something will break through the defense system and reveal we’re not the perfect, nice, kind, good person we were convinced we were. Sometimes we might do something a bit mean or self-centered, or something else that doesn’t quite align with the ‘perfect’ story we tell ourselves.

All this machination goes on inside the self. Outwardly, it goes out as a story of defense of my good name: I’m misunderstood, that’s not what happened, that’s not what I meant to have happen. But inwardly it’s more the notion, “I can’t see myself that way.” That’s the basic thing. It can’t be me. That can’t be right, because I’m this way.

As another example, let’s look at people who are identified with being smart and intelligent and having all the answers. They may assert something, and it’s quickly revealed to be wrong, in front of everybody, or even just one-to-one. “No, actually….”

These days we have Google, so this happens all the time. Someone asserts something strongly, such as “The population of the U.S. is 290 million,” and then someone googles it, and no, it’s 320. I don’t know what it is exactly, but then the person who identifies with being smart needs a reason why they were wrong. “I accidentally looked at the wrong year when I learned that.”

Again, it’s the defense of the existing self-image. The maintenance system kicks into place to try to preserve it when it’s threatened.

By the way, this doesn’t mean someone else has to reveal a mistake to us. If we do something that contradicts our self-image, that will also impact us. We may have a self-image of being somebody who’s good with money and makes good decisions, then we invest a bunch of our money in something that completely falls apart. A lot of people have had this experience in their life. They made a big investment in something that completely went south, and they lost a lot of money.

Defending Our Self Image

Then a whole inner project starts. “How did I have such bad judgment?” Rather than look closely and see, “I wanted to believe it was true because I was kind of feeling greedy. I thought I could make big money on that opportunity, and I ignored important data. I really took too big of a risk.”

Rather than this honest self-reflection and growth process where we see the things we did wrong, it turns into, “That person swindled me. I believed them, and they lied.” Again, these are just examples of how the self-image operates, what disrupts it, and how we defend it. In this last example, I was touching on some of the pathology that gets involved in having a self-image we’re invested in. We’ll talk more about that now.

Take a second to be with that aspect of the psyche, whether you want to call it ego or not. It’s this function of preservation of self-image. There’s an attachment to knowing who I am and having a story, for good or for bad. Then we’re going to talk about why that’s an obstacle on the path.

How Did the Ego Develop? An Evolutionary Perspective

Before I talk about why it’s an obstacle on the path, I want to add one more thing. This is my pet theory. It’s a possible theory of why and how this pathology came into being. Again, the pathology is the desperate need to see myself as “this, that, and the other thing,” to know my story, and have a self-concept and self-image that I defend.

1. The Survival Instinct

In evolutionary terms, we all know that from the beginning of time, all animals have had a survival instinct. It predates animals. The very earliest organisms probably had some kind of survival instinct. And certainly in the emotional and mental life of emergent animals, the survival instinct in our biology is to rapidly learn what can kill me and what is a threat, and to avoid those threats at all costs. We know this survival instinct is arguably the deepest instinct in our DNA.

2. The Emergence of Self-reflective Consciousness

As life and human consciousness were progressing through the long arc of evolution, we know that somewhere along the way self-reflective consciousness emerged.

This means consciousness could start to reflect on itself. People became self-aware. A person became capable of having a concept of self, instead of being an organism having a pure experience of being alive and going from one thing to the next. Trying to find food and warmth, trying to stay safe, trying to mate. Just living and following the impulses that protect me and keep it all going, from one moment to the next.

3. The Development of the Self-Image

One evolutionary step beyond that, this organism started to go, “Oh, I’m a self. This is me. I have things I want and things I don’t want. I like this. I don’t like that.” I don’t know how it all unfolded, really. I’m not going to go too far in depth. But at some point, the ability emerged to have an image of the self in the mind, to think about one’s own self and say, “Oh, I’m Craig.” It probably wasn’t “Craig” back then – although it might have been because my name originates from people who dwelled in crags. “Craig” means crag dweller.

The point is, we have this ability to have a concept of the self in the mind. The survival instinct had, up until that point, been doing one thing: preserving your body and your life. Survival of your body meant your genes could carry on. You could keep them going. That was the self.

The self was just the body, and the survival instinct was trying to preserve and protect it. Now, another kind of self emerges. It’s the self in the mind. A mental self starts to have a story about it. It starts to have a world it’s building up around the self in the mind.

4. When the Survival Instinct Fused with Self Image

At that point, my best guess is that the survival instinct latched on to that mental self and assumed it needed protecting, too. It needed defending too, just like the physical body. So we ended up with this new entity inside us: the survival instinct trying to preserve the self-concept, the self-story, the self-image.

Over time that entity became what we are calling the ego in a spiritual context. It probably wasn’t pathological initially, or it wouldn’t have been selected in evolution. I’m sure it served a function. That would be a conversation for another day. But you can simply see how this pathology has emerged. Now there’s an undue, unnecessary impulse to defend the self-image, keep it intact, sustain it, maintain it, and preserve it.

The Problem with Ego on the Path of Awakening

Why is this such a big problem when on a path of growth and awakening? For one thing, awakening is about the discovery of consciousness without limits, a self without limits. It’s the discovery that what we are is much vaster than our mind can contain, that who and what we are really exists beyond the mind.

1. We Are Infinitely More than Our Self Image

We don’t live in the mind; the mind arises within us. We are this vast, infinite consciousness, and mind and thought are all stories. The whole world of concepts is arising within this vastness that we are.

If we’re attached to a small story of self – “I’m this and I’m not that” – and we’re invested in maintaining it, there’s no room for us to open and let go into the enormity of the superconsciousness that is our true nature. It is so vast and limitless that we can’t know it with the mind.

This is a basic truth of enlightenment: your mind can’t know it. Your mind won’t go there. But you can, if you go beyond the mind.

From the point of view of awakened consciousness, this self-story or self-concept is incredibly limited. It’s this tiny, little story about this person we thought we were, made up of particular events, stories, choices, ambitions, needs and cravings. It’s our little story, inside this infinite ocean of being and depth.

2. Ego Prevents Us From Seeing Reality As It Is

The second reason ego is a big obstacle to awakening is that it prevents us from seeing things as they really are. We use the term awakening, frankly, because the experience has this quality of waking up. But waking up from what? Waking up from illusion, delusion, distorted perceptions and distorted ideas.

We’ve all heard and we all feel that our spiritual path is a path toward truth. This means alignment with truth – not someone else’s truth, but what actually is reality. Let’s say reality, since truth can be a triggering word. We have a drive toward the real, and we are waking up from the unreal into the real. That can sound esoteric or metaphysical, but I mean it practically. It’s waking up to where we can more accurately see the way things are.

We now have a chance to be in touch with what’s happening right in front of us. We can perceive other people’s motives accurately, and see situations, dangers, threats and opportunities for what they are.

Many human beings can’t perceive opportunities or assess threats accurately. Vast volumes have been written on all of our cognitive biases that distort the truth about things and distort reality. Hundreds of cognitive biases are part of this process. Awakening is waking up out of bias, ideally. Ultimately, we are coming into the ability to be with things as they are and perceive them as they are. This doesn’t mean you have superpowers and can see through everything, but you’re not actively distorting reality.

If you got the picture of what ego was up above, you could feel all the distorting mechanisms in it – which are called ego defenses. These are mechanisms for distorting reality. When we’re invested in and defending any delusion or limited story, it’s nearly impossible for us to face and align with the truth. When we’re in our ego, it’s impossible to come into reality and begin to live in reality, not in our mind’s stories or our false, biased perceptions about reality.

3. The Ego Also Prevents Us From Authentically Facing Ourselves

Here’s the third reason that ego is such a huge obstacle to awakening. Another way of understanding awakening is that we’re awakening to the good, which means a deeper moral center. Spiritual awakening is a moral awakening. It’s awakening to a deeper knowing.

Basically, it’s awakening to an alignment with the actions that would bring about the greatest good, as an expression of love and wisdom coming into the world. We align with what has been called the moral axis of the cosmos, the ability to sense and know right action. This doesn’t mean there’s only one right thing to do in every moment.

It means we ask, “What’s the best thing that could be done in every moment, to the best of my ability to perceive it? How do I do what’s truly good?” It’s not just what feels good, not just what seems good to my distorted, conditioned mind. Someone may be asking you for help, but it might be a very different kind of help they’re truly asking for, if you have the ability to see what would truly be helpful. It may be to “teach a man to fish,” not just give him a fish. Maybe that would be the best thing in another circumstance. “Hey, they need a fish because right now they’re about to starve.”

How do we perceive what’s truly good and right? By not having biased, distorted perceptions about it, and by being aligned with that good. We can’t be aligned with the greater good when our fundamental driver is the ego. It’s out for itself. It’s about preserving itself. It’s very hard to be someone who really cares and can live a life of true care for the greater good when we’re ego-driven. And it’s hard to know in every moment what the greater good is.

I’m not implying that you have super knowledge of the greatest good in every moment and it’s always right. It’s not that. It’s about removing all barriers to an alignment with the good, with the moral axis of the cosmos, in order to live a truly ethical life by the highest possible standard.

The ego makes this so hard, and not just because the ego is selfish. To truly be a good person, an ethical person, a moral person, we have to be willing to face our potential to not be a good person at all. Wise people throughout the ages have always known this. They have always said the path to being good is very much about seeing everything about you that’s not very good, and keeping that in view so that it doesn’t run the show of your life.

If you’ve got a self-image of being good, you’re in real trouble. How are you going to see everything in you that’s not so good – all the impulses toward self-preservation, selfishness, greed, and getting what you want at the expense of another? Here’s the point: All of those more primitive, self-centered instincts exist in every one of us. They’re part of the universal human condition.

Now, any one of us can look at a life and say, “This person really is aligned with the better angels of their nature. They make choices consistently that are putting the greatest good first rather than what’s good for them, their tribe or family, or their future benefit.

You can see another person is just brutally self-centered and doesn’t seem to care about anybody but themselves. There are massive relative differences between us, but the person who can align with the highest in all of us is the person who can face all of the darkest corners of the psyche and all of our darkest impulses.

These impulses are in all of us, but they’re impossible to face if we have a self-image that does not include them. If these impulses are not in your story of what’s possible for you, you’re not going to see them, and then you won’t be able to be really good. You’ll have a self-image of being good. You’ll try to be good, but you’ll still do all these other things. It will all be fairly superficial. Are you convinced that ego might be a problem yet?

4. The Ego Will Not Surrender and Let Go

The fourth reason that ego is an obstacle to awakening is that spiritual awakening is not just waking up to a greater reality. It also requires us to surrender to something beyond the mind.

There’s an emergent flow of living in free, full-hearted, loving, caring, wise response to the moment that is possible when we surrender to that greater consciousness, when we allow ourselves to let go of control.

Up until now we may have controlled our life very well, predicted it, controlled it, gotten somewhere with our life, and been successful.

But as we progress on the spiritual path, we have a realization. We realize that for this awakened consciousness to be center stage in my life and get into the driver’s seat of my life so that I’m living from awakened consciousness, I have to let go of that control. I have to let go of my personal agendas, my personal need to control my story about how everything’s supposed to go, my insistence on having it go a certain way.

But ego manifests as a strong desire to stay in control, to keep feeling safe and okay: “I got this, and I’m in control.” That’s part of why it has that whole self-image.

Again, it’s all woven together. Ego is trying to keep everything under control and okay, and even just keep a belief intact that we’re in control. It doesn’t even have to be in control. It just has to think we’re in control so that we can feel okay about ourselves and where we’re at in life.

Let’s make it really simple. Awakening calls us to surrender to something bigger, to a deeper part of ourselves. Ego can’t. Ego can’t surrender. Ego holds on forever, until we surrender and shift our alignment.

5. Awakening Is All About Evolution. Our Egos Love the Status Quo

The fifth reason ego is a barrier to spiritual awakening is that awakening isn’t just a static state of consciousness. Maybe, in the past, some of us have thought it was. We get on a spiritual path, we’re trying to get to a place of peace and quiet and joy. Peace, quiet and bliss. It’s a static place we get to. We sit there, and life is just peaceful now, and we’re content and happy. But that’s not what awakening is really about. It might be an occasional byproduct, but ultimately, awakening opens us up to our nature as an evolutionary process.

The universe is an evolutionary process. It’s not a bunch of stuff that’s going through an evolutionary process. It’s evolution itself. Evolution is in motion, moving through everything. We human beings are at our optimized best when we’re in a state of constant growth and development. People are happiest when they’re learning and growing, right? We can all see that in ourselves. Often, people forget that.

They keep their life small for a while and don’t change and grow that much, and then suddenly, they take a course and feel the movement forward. I don’t mean only a spiritual course. It can be any kind of growth and learning. They say, “Oh, wow, I’m learning again. I feel so alive. New things are happening. I’m improving.”

So our nature is to grow and evolve and develop freely. Awakening frees us to be a fluid, dynamic participant in the evolutionary process. But the ego wants nothing to do with any of that. The ego’s job, if you can feel it by now, is to preserve the status quo, to keep the self-image intact.

By the way, I’m talking about the self-image, but there are a bunch of other things that cluster around the self-image, which have to do with your beliefs about the world and about other people. There’s a whole worldview, paradigm, and belief system that are all in orbit around the self-image. The attachment to keeping your worldview and your beliefs about everything intact is woven into the ego structure.

This whole phenomenon is ego trying to keep it all intact. It’s why we also get very triggered if somebody says something that challenges our worldview. It’s like, “Whoa, wait a minute, that’s not how I thought things were.” Ego is a barrier to this life of dynamic growth and change and fluidity.

How Ego Stymies Our Progress in Meditation

Let’s take a look at how this shows up in meditation. How does the ego attempt to block our profound meditation? You may have heard people talk about resistance in meditation, or you may have experienced something and felt, “Oh, this is resistance.”

1. Fear, Insecurity, and Agitation

You sit down to meditate, you’re very intentional about it, you’re doing the practice, and then all this stuff starts coming up in your meditation to make it really difficult to meditate. There may be a lot of insecurity or fear that comes up. Some people experience intense agitation. They just want to jump up and run out of the room, almost get out of their clothes, get out of their skin.

2. Overwhelm and Distraction

There can be feelings of being overwhelmed by sitting with what is. Being here with what is, just as I am, feels overwhelming to my system. Or many of us experience the movement toward distraction in meditation. I’m here, I really want to meditate, but I’m going off and planning my weekend, or I’m really trying to solve that problem at work. I’m not really bringing myself to it. No matter how much I intend to, there’s this gravitational pull of distraction.

3. Resistance

Resistance also shows up as a kind of doubt and cynicism about the possibility, about ourselves, and our own ability to do it. How many of you have had that happen? “Oh, I guess maybe I’m not cut out for meditation. I can’t seem to sit still, I can’t seem to not be distracted. Maybe there really isn’t anything here for me. Maybe there’s nothing here at all.” This kind of doubtfulness shows up. These are all forms of ego resistance. The ego churns it all up to try to get you to stop meditating, or to make your meditation miserable so it will not go anywhere.

4. Needing To Know

There are also ego obstacles to meditation that have to do with knowing and grasping, because that’s also the nature of ego. It’s trying to know, trying to have a clear picture and grasp on what’s happening, so it can have control. Having expectations of your meditation, such as, “I know what should be happening, and this isn’t it. I know what should be happening in meditation – I should be feeling calm, peaceful, happy. I’m not, so this isn’t it.”

5. Expectations, Control, and Results

All these expectations that we bring to our meditation are essentially the ego wanting “in” on your meditation. That’s all it is. The ego wants a piece. “Okay, you’re going to meditate? How do I get in on the action?” I’m going to impose a bunch of expectations on it so I’ve got control of this thing now. It’s attachment to having deep states in meditation, or powerful experiences.

In other words, attachment to concrete results that the ego can get. The ego is the one who wants concrete results out of your meditation, sorry to say. It’s the one that wants to have it be a certain way, feel a certain way, and get to a certain place where it now has control. That’s why many of the meditations we do are about trying to let go of all that. We try to unwind it, and not feed that grasping for states and for experiences.

Just to be clear, all of the direct awakening practices are practices that are helping to unwind, get underneath, and bypass the ego mechanism I’ve been speaking about. They are designed to do that, and they do do that. It’s not as if you’ve been doing all this meditation and now you have to do a whole other thing called “ego practice.” Fundamentally, when we’re doing these direct awakening practices, we’re already on the path that goes beyond the ego.

6. Impatience

We can also experience a lot of impatience in our meditation. When is this going to get really cool? When is this going to get really exciting? Again, that’s your ego. “Come on, give me something here. I want something for myself.” Why? To show me that I’m doing it right so I can have a self-image of being someone who’s meditating right. To know how I’m doing.

7. Self-Evaluation

With the ego in meditation, a lot of its activity revolves around wanting to know how I’m doing. I’m trying to see myself in the meditation, and I can’t do that very well, so how am I doing? Am I doing it right? Where is a sign? I need a sign that I’m doing it right, so I can see myself doing it right and know “I got this. I’m a good meditator. I’m doing it right.”

8. Stubbornness

The ego also shows up as frustration, and a kind of stubbornness, when the process doesn’t give me what I want. Stubbornness is a clear face of the ego. Of course, this isn’t true in all areas of life—there are times when it’s good to be stubborn. It’s good to be stubborn about not accepting compromise or giving up on forward progress. We should be very stubborn about that.

But the stubbornness I’m talking about in meditation is the stubborn refusal to actually do the practice in the way it’s been designed. Sound familiar, anyone? It will happen where there’s a very simple meditation instruction, like “just let things be as they are.” Then there’s this stubbornness: “Well, he’s saying let things be as they are, but it must really mean I need to relax. I shouldn’t have these thoughts, so I need to calm my mind down, and I need to relax because then maybe I can let things be as they are.” It’s a stubborn insistence on staying in control instead of just doing the very simple practice that’s laid out, which might have a chance at unwinding this defense.

Spiritual Freedom Is Awakening Beyond Ego

The ego also shows up in many other ways. I’m sure we could all compare notes, and come up with a long list. Because spiritual freedom really is, from one point of view, freedom from ego. It’s awakening beyond ego. It’s the discovery of who and what we are when we don’t know who or what we are.

I would argue we can only really be who we are when we aren’t imposing any idea of who we are. When we aren’t carrying the weight of the ego around, there’s this freedom and lightness.

When we aren’t needing to know who we are, we discover what’s possible.

We’re discovering who we are in each moment, and who we can be, and it’s evolving and changing. It’s not static anymore, like our story was. We’re not trying to make up a new story. We’re now leading a life of discovery about what is possible for this human being that I seem to be.

Who can I be now? What can come forth now? What new capacity, discovery, or response will emerge from my open, liberated consciousness when it’s no longer embedded in a story about me?

Now, when we make a mistake, or problems are revealed that we had some part of, our energy is completely liberated to address it and learn from it. “Whoa, what did I do wrong? What happened? What was the bad judgment here? Let’s see what we could do better next time.”

There’s no need to maintain and manage the self-image. “Oh, no, maybe I’m not as smart as I thought. Oh, no, maybe I’m not as capable as I thought. Oh, what did I not get?” It’s not about you. There’s no need for it to be about you. It’s just about what’s happening, how we’re all doing, and how do we do better. We’re liberated, free, engaged, evolving, unhooked. That’s the beautiful possibility all of this is leading to.