How We Have Been Fooled – Alan Watts On The Ego

the child is told in some that we your parents elders and betters command you to do what will please us only if you do it spontaneously and no wonder everybody's completely confused we go through life with that burden on us we therefore develop this curious thing we we develop a thesis 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 uh 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 there's 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 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 got the gifted gears 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 this is an awful red herring a lot of the current quest for identity among younger people is a search for an acceptable 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 [Music] only an image i feel there's something more real than that because i feel i mean i have a sense of there 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 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 [Music] 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 put 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 but there's the floor on you as firmness can be holding you up nevertheless you will detect that the person is making all sorts of tensions 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 her futilities even though the idea of an eye with a name without 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 uh 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 you