Spanking your Ego – Finding a Sense of Humor and Finding your Path

A student told me my talks made her feel “never good enough”, and she also asked, “When am I going to get this right?”

Maybe it is true that we will never be good enough, however, we try our best. And we may wonder, “When will I get it right?” but the goal is not to get it “right”, or perfect anything.

What we are trying to do is to bring things more into reflection in our mind, and also to have some humor when we actually see how many times we are not able to be perfect and get it all right.

When you discipline a child, you have to have a clear view and a lot of love and care for the child.  There is a danger that strong irritation and aggression may come up, clouding you completely, and you could actually lose the view, and lose the love and care for the child.

As a practitioner we need to learn how to discipline our ego, but we really have to do it with a sense of humor and love and care for our well-being.

Of course we need to self-reflect and work with ego’s tricks and wrongdoings, and see how the ego’s grasping and emotional states lead us to do things that are not really for the benefit of ourselves or others.  But we really have to watch out for self-aggression.

A lot of people do not know how to get away from their own self-aggression, and this can actually make you feel far worse than anyone from outside can make you feel.

Even if it is in the name of the dharma, or in the name of the practice, even if it is in the name of really trying to do the right thing, you have to have a very clear view that self-aggression is not going to be good. The attachment to self here generates even more self-aggression and the whole process is self-defeating.

You feel the difference when you are doing things with the correct view, with love and care for your well-being, and when you aren’t.  We have to learn how to differentiate between the two: discipline without the self-aggression and discipline with the self-aggression.

Without self-aggression we can have tremendous success to get beyond our habitual tendencies and habits and increase our sense of strength and power to overcome them.

We can also have increased humor when the habits and tendencies do arise. Humor here is related to intelligence.  Humor is related to the view. Humor is related to the love and care, It’s not like you have to be a comedian to have humor. You could actually have a lot of humor without being an outward comedian. That’s one very good aspect of the practitioner; it’s almost like it’s a solo performance in the theater of our mind.

But when you have a lot of strong self-aggression and strong sense of judgment rooted in self-aggression, then you don’t see any humor inside of you. You don’t feel any humor inside of you.

It’s all good or bad, black or white, right and wrong. It’s all in some sense, “me, me, me!” It is helpful to get out of “me, me, me” all the time. But again, if you are not able to get out of it, please try to have some humor about it. Humor about how there is so much “me me me.”

So the point is not to get it “right” or be perfect, the point is to have humor as a way to relate with our ego. And when we make some progress, and we actually begin to see the ego differently, we must bring that up into the light.

In the beginning people may fail to do this on their own because they are so caught in the ordinary mind of being good and being bad. The emotional judgments are so overwhelmingly strong they confuse the mind, so it is helpful if a teacher brings it up for you.

But then slowly you have to learn how to do that for yourself. And when you do, over time, there is tremendous relief in finding a sense of path in oneself.

It is as if you’re trying to cross a river, trying to find a path over, and you can’t find a path, and it seems hopeless. And then all of the sudden you see a path, a stone in the middle of the river that you could jump to and then make another jump and then get over the river. And as you see a path, you become tremendously encouraged and joyful.

So like that I think when you see the path inside of you, you feel incredibly encouraged, and you don’t need to be encouraged from the outside so much.

From your own mind, you find the path to go beyond the ordinary mode of self and all the confusions and conflicting emotions that you have about yourself, the world, and your experience of the world. That is the spirit of the practitioner.