ego

Patience is a strength, not a weakness; and if by practicing patience we stop retaliating to harm and criticism, people will gradually come to understand that our real nature is very special

I grew up in a world that regarded authenticity as something deep within one's soul-- governed by one's conscience and measured against one's true nature. A question of being true to oneself. Of avoiding artifice. Kuranko do not fetishize the ego as we do, but emphasize a person's social nous. As such, authenticity is consummated in the way one realizes one's given destiny or plays one's social role. The name of the game is not self-knowledge, but knowing one's place and making the most of it. Fot this reason implies theatricality implies something very different from acting out. rather than spontaneously giving vent to one's feelings, one learns to perform the gestures and emotions appropriate to one's role.

When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When the lightening cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your very own limitless Being, waving back at you?

"Transcending the ego" thus actually means to transcend but include the ego in a deeper and higher embrace, first in the soul or deeper psychic, then with the Witness or primordial Self, then with each previous stage taken up, enfolded, included, and embraced in the radiance of One Taste. And that means we do not "get rid" of the small ego, but rahter, we inhabit it fully, live it with verve, use it as the necessary vehicle through which higher truths are communicated. Soul and Spirit include body, emotions, and mind; they do not erase them.

Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant manifestation of Spirit. All Forms are not other than Emptiness, including the form of the ego. It is not necessary to get rid of the ego, but simply to live with it a certain exuberance.

According to Buddhism, the deepest, most pernicious erroneous view held by sentient beings is the view that a permanent, eternal, immutable, independent self exists.  There is not such self, and deep down we know that.  This makes us anxious, since it entails that no self or identity endures forever.  In order to assuage that anxiety, we attempt to construct a self, to fill the anxious void, to do something enduring.  The projection of cognitive objects for appropriation is consciousness's main tool for this construction.  If I own things (ideas, theories, identities, material objects), then "I am."  If there are permanent objects that I can possess, then I too must be permanent.  If I can be identified with something permanent, the I too must have a permanent identity.  To undermine this desperate and erroneous appropriative grasping, Yogacara texts say: Negate the object , and the self is also negated.

If there is any point at all to life, surely it is to live out our dreams, to serve, to follow our bliss, to release the music within us, play it with joy and to share it with others? Surely we have a responsibility to finally listen to - and honor - the siren calls of our souls, which have been silenced by our egos throughout our lives? How else can we connect with our essence, the source of our calling?

"Personal importance or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about "me". "

The ego is not a thing but a subtle effort, and you cannot use effort to get rid of effort - you end up with two efforts instead of one.  The ego itself is a perfect manifestation of the Divine, and it is best handled by resting in Freedom, not by trying to get rid of it, which simply increases the effort of the ego itself

But egoless does not mean "less than personal"; it means "more than personal." Not personal minus, but personal plus--all the normal qualities, plus some transpersonal ones. Think of the great yogis, saints, and sages--from Moses to Christ to Padmasambhaya. They were not feeble-mannered milquetoasts, but fierce movers and shakers--from bullwhips in the Temple to subduing entire countries. They rattled the world on its own terms, not some pie-in-the-sky piety; many of them instigated massive social revolutions that have continued for thousands of years. And they did so, not because they avoided the physical, emotional, and mental dimensions of humanness, and the ego that is their vehicle, but because they engaged them with a drive and intensity that shook the world to its very foundations.