Years ago, near Santa Cruz, California, a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang started a fight with a tourist that turned into a melee. Asked what had happened to trigger his wrath, the biker declared, "He touched my bike. Man, you touch my bike, you touch me." This may seem like an extreme example of what the yogic texts call identifying the self with its limiting adjuncts, but it's not so different from what we so-called rational people do.
What do you identify yourself with?
Buddhist and Vedantic teachers are fond of saying that the ego is like the blue of the sky, or the apparent puddle in the middle of a desert-dry highway. It's an optical illusion, a simple mistake in the way we identify ourselves. That's why fighting your ego is like boxing with your reflection in the mirror, or trying to rid yourself of something you don't have. Now that neurobiologists seem to have reduced the sense of I-ness to a couple of brain chemicals, the ego looks more than ever to be a kind of involuntary mechanism, something beyond our personal control, just like the reflex that makes us go on breathing when we sleep.
So what are we fighting for?
Or is the problem that our egos isn´t big enough to stand above it all?
Ahamkara-love. 4 real!
Read the whole text "Sophisticated Ego" by Sally Kempton
http://www.yogajournal.com/wisdom/2502
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