Understanding Ego: The Illusion of the Separate Self

You've been defending this "you" your whole life—getting offended when criticized, proud when praised, anxious about what others think. But what if the self you're protecting doesn't actually exist?

This episode explores ego and the illusion of the separate self. Not as abstract philosophy, but as something you can observe right now. Watch your thoughts arise. Did you decide to think that? Or did the thought just appear? If you didn't choose it, who's the "you" that claims ownership of it?

The paradox: you have to become somebody before you can become nobody. Spiritual development requires building a healthy ego first—integrating your shadow, becoming a functioning adult—then seeing through it. Like climbing a ladder to realize you never needed the ladder. This isn't nihilism (everything is meaningless). This is emptiness (no permanent, separate self—just awareness watching the show).

I share how my depression and burnout dissolved my ego enough to finally see through it, how suffering cracks the shell of the separate self, and why the exhausting work of maintaining your image can finally stop when you realize there's no "you" to defend.

Featuring J. Krishnamurti on "the observer IS the observed" (no separate watcher), Nisargadatta Maharaj's "I am not this body, not this mind—I am the awareness in which all this appears," Ram Dass on "I'm loving awareness," Thich Nhat Hanh on interbeing (you can't exist separately—you inter-are with everything), Paul on "I die daily" and "it's no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me" (ego death in Christian language), Jesus on "I and the Father are one" (dissolving separation), Buddha on anatta (no-self), and the Christian mystics who saw the same truth but called it "union with God."

We discuss: why language creates the illusion of a separate "I" (pronouns make you think there's a doer behind the doing), how thoughts think themselves without a thinker (just like digestion digests itself), the exhausting work of maintaining your self-image, why suffering dissolves ego faster than any practice (when you're in crisis, "you" disappears and only awareness remains), what remains when the separate self relaxes (spoiler: everything, but lighter), and how anxiety is just ego trying to control the uncontrollable.

If you're exhausted from defending yourself, struggling with self-doubt, feeling like spiritual practice hasn't touched your core suffering, or sensing there's something deeper than the "you" you've been told you are—this one's for you.

Transcript

The Experiential Hook

Grammar Creates the Illusion

Who Is Offended?

Becoming Somebody to Become Nobody

What Emptiness Actually Means

Suffering Brings Us Home

The Monkey in the Jungle (Closing)

Jacob 0:01

When your ego dissolves under pressure, what's left? Pure presence. Raw existence. The ground of being a little bit of aone and welcome back to the Standing Nowhere podcast. This is your host, Jacob, and as usual, it's a pleasure to be back with you. I had originally planned a guest for this episode, but they unfortunately had to cancel last minute. So I was kind of left wondering what to do for this episode. And I've been wanting to talk about ego for a long time. Ego is something that we really identify with and that runs our lives without us even realizing it. And if we can take a moment to kind of recognize it, I think it'll create a nice paradigm shift in your life. So if you can follow with me uh through this opening here, I want to do a little experiment. Right now, for example, as you are hearing my voice right now, I want you to just notice the experience of hearing. There are sound waves hitting your eardrums, and there's meaning that is arising from the words that I'm saying to you. Look closely, listen closely. Where in this experience is there an eye? Do you see yourself anywhere in these sound waves? The meaning that arises from them. There's just hearing happening right now, comprehension. But later, after you listen to this episode, you'll say, I listened to a podcast. Notice how the I gets added after the fact, like a signature on a painting that painted itself. This is something that you can observe right now in your own experience. So let's look together at what we call ego, this sense of being a separate self. And a lot of it is created by grammar, believe it or not. Notice when it's raining outside, how we say it is raining. Why do we say it is raining? What is the it that is raining? See, when I say language creates this illusion of ego, I'm not joking. When we say I am thinking, for example, are you really thinking? Or is thinking happening? Just like the rain, there is rain happening, but we say it is raining. I am thinking. Could it be that there's just thinking going on? There's just rain going on, there's no I behind it. I've heard it said that ego is a shadow cast by grammar. Language requires this subject-object structure. And as I mentioned, we retroactively apply this I to our experiences that have occurred without one. You may have some thoughts appearing right now based on what I'm saying. But are you doing those thoughts? Or are the thoughts just doing themselves? And then when you think about it, you say, I'm thinking these things. The thoughts are thinking themselves. I would invite you to directly observe this process. Just watch your mind. You don't have to do it right now, but perhaps after the episode, make it a point to sit and watch your thoughts arise. Just watch your mind with curiosity and notice when a thought arises. Sometimes it'll arise and you won't notice it. And then you'll catch yourself later and say, oh wow, that one snuck up on me. But the important distinction to make here is that when you are watching your mind ready for a thought, you'll notice that the thought comes and it just thinks itself. It appears from nowhere, fully formed. And there's no thinker behind the thought. There is just thinking happening. And then later you associate yourself with that thinking and you say, I thought that thing. J.D. Krishnamurti says, When you realize that the thinker is the thought, you are free. The thought thinks itself. And it starts at birth. You know, there's it's a useful social designation when we say I am Jacob. I was given the name Jacob at birth. But am I Jacob? Is there a Jacob? It is a useful social designation for this body, but it becomes something that is mistaken for something that is real and solid. Nasargadatta Maharaj says, the ego is a phantom made real by thought. So it's fundamentally useful, but it's fundamentally false. I watched my son Leon as he grew up, this first five years of his life. It was around the first year or second when he started talking when I noticed him refer to Leon almost in the third person. You could see there's just open experience when a child is young. There's no association whatsoever of a self, of a separate self named Jacob or Leon or whatever your name is. There's no association with experience and a name or a feeling of a separate self. There's just experience, there's just thoughts. But then we slowly attach ourselves to these experiences. Think of a rainbow. Does a rainbow actually exist? Or is it a coalescence of various things coming together? You need light refracting off of water droplets in the air, and you need air in an atmosphere and gravity. You need the sun to be at the right angle, and you need an observer who can visibly see the light bouncing off the water droplets. All of these things come together to form a rainbow. And you are no different. You are a conglomeration of various things coming together to form what we call you. I'll touch more on this later in the episode. But for now, I want to point out that if there is no separate thinker, no separate self behind these experiences, then who is it that's getting offended, for example? Who is it that is suffering? And this is where there's a weird paradox of somebody and nobody. Like when someone criticizes you, what is it that's actually being threatened? If you look closely when someone criticizes you, look very closely at it. Who is it that's offended? What is it that's offended? Where is this offendedness located and centered on? Look very directly at it. Where is this quote unquote you that could be diminished? The only thing that you're gonna find is that there is awareness. Awareness of sensations, awareness of defensiveness, awareness of stories that are spinning in our head. Am I too skinny? Do I need to lift more? You know, am I a good podcaster? Am I am I you know, all these things that will spin around in your head, but there's no real solid self to defend. These are just experiences, sensations. You'll see there is defensiveness, stories in your head, but there's no solid, tangible self to defend. Muji says the small self is always in fear. The one who sees the small self is not. So the same awareness that was witnessing thoughts in my head to want to record a video and help people is the same awareness that viewed that comment, do you even lift? The same awareness that viewed the new thoughts of self-doubt or feeling that I needed to defend myself. You are behind all that. There's this developmental paradox that we enter into. Ramdas says that you have to become somebody before you can become nobody. So it's not that ego is this bad, terrible thing. We need ego development. Like I mentioned earlier, it's fundamentally useful. It's just not fundamentally true. So it's not about destruction of the ego. It's not about rejecting the ego. That's not what our spiritual journey is about. It's about seeing through it. And like I mentioned in the beginning, you can stop and slow down and not take my word for it, but look right now, very closely, at what you perceive as your ego or yourself. And I'm here to tell you guys the more that you look for it, the more that you'll find it's not there. That's one of the, if not the primary purpose of slowing down and doing sitting meditation practice, is just looking, just simply being aware of what is there, and you will find that there is no you. Chogyam Trunkpa Rimpisha says that ego is a prison where the inmate is both the prisoner and the jailer. And this is not just Eastern wisdom. The Christian mystics saw this as well. For example, Paul, the primary author of the New Testament, in one of his letters that he wrote, I think it was in Corinthians, but don't quote me on that. He says, I die to myself daily, dying to the small self, not literal death. He says, It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. It's not me and Christ. The I dissolves, and what remains is the divine living through this form. Even Jesus, the figure that all Christians acknowledge as God incarnate, points away from his separate self. There's a verse in the Bible, and I forget where it is, but Jesus himself says, The words that I speak are not my own or not from myself, but the fathers who sent me. And of course they use Father as a personification of this whole great mystery. There's no separate speaker. Jesus constantly said, It's not me, Jesus, who is saying these things. He's also said in other parts, he who believes in me does not believe in me, Jesus, but in him who sent me. He's pointing past his ego, past his separate sense of self, past the ego form to the source. And in all traditions, you will always see whether it's Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Sufi, it doesn't matter. It always comes back to the self. When we say somebody is selfish, we know that that's not good. When somebody says they are selfless, you see what I'm saying? So the idea of a separate self, even in our natural language, the natural wisdom pours through, and we understand that selflessness is good. No self is good. No sense of a separate self equals good. And that's just in everyday language. So whether you call it dying to self, emptiness in the Buddhist tradition, or fana in Sufism, Christ consciousness, Buddha nature, mystics across traditions describe the same territory, the dissolution of the separate eye. And I had something similar happen to me where I basically identified myself as somebody who was pretty much always financially stable. I had a decent credit score. I took care of my bills. And then suddenly that was all taken away from me after the pandemic, the cost of living went through the roof. I lost some of my identity markers, if you will. I spoke about this a couple episodes ago, how the increase in demand for my work hours went through the roof, and I was isolated in my car. I had that stripped away from me. So when my social identity was gone, when my financial security was gone, and I was stuck in my car all day, what was it that remained? Something was there that was always there that I hadn't noticed before until certain things were removed. And I started to identify myself with those thoughts. Whereas what was the reality of it? The reality was I was in a car doing deliveries. And I was, yes, I was away from home, and I am away from home more than I would like to be, but that's the only reality right now in the present. All of that other stuff, that sense of I or a failed person is a storyline that I added later. Go back to the beginning of the episode. There are just sound waves coming at you right now. There is just comprehension arising right now. But I mentioned after the episode, you can attach a story to it. I listened to a podcast. There is just the reality of what is happening right now. And that's where I was. I didn't make that connection. I still had this storyline that I was spinning in my head. But again, it's not about eliminating the ego, but relaxing the belief that it's absolutely true. But the absolute truth is, right now, I'm sitting at a computer in front of a microphone recording, and that's the only truth. That's the only reality at this moment. All the rest is added story. We constantly live as if we're separate. Again, necessary and functional, but we need to know that we're not separate. That's what liberation is, that's what salvation is. Pick your word, depending on your tradition. We need to live from these two perspectives at the same time: the functional self and the ultimate reality that there is no self. And this is where people in the West, when they start hearing these ideas that there is no self, or the word emptiness as it's translated from Buddhism, it can make you feel a little uncomfortable, like you don't actually exist, or that when you die, you'll experience annihilation. But I want to tell you that that is not the case. Emptiness is not the same as nothingness. What empty when you hear emptiness as a translation from the Buddhist text, what it actually means is not the emptiness of existence, but the emptiness of a separate, independent existence. Nothing arises on its own. It's all interdependent. Like the example I was mentioning earlier of the rainbow, the rainbow is not a separate individual existing thing. It depends on all those interdependent factors that I was telling you about. The water droplets refracting the light in the air. You need air and an atmosphere, water, gravity. You need the sun to be at the right angle. You need a observer at the right angle to the sun and the axis where it meets to form the rainbow. So the rainbow is not this separate thing independent by itself that arose naturally. It is a constellation of factors that come together to form it. And you are no different. Nothing at all in the entire universe or all of existence is independent. It's all interdependent. So it's empty of a separateness. It's empty of an illusory, divided nature. So when you hear emptiness, this is a positive statement. This is saying you are part of this entire tapestry and you're not separate from it. And people who live life with this mentality, they treat their environment better. When they look at trees, they don't think of it as profit or something that I can use for my own gain or conquer. They look at trees as part of themselves because trees produce oxygen from the CO2 that they receive. They understand that they are part of a big whole. Ticknot Han says we are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness. Think of a TV screen. When I'm watching a movie or show, or you as well, the character on the screen is not separate from the screen itself. You can't extract the character and have it exist independently. So, like whatever image you're seeing on whatever show or movie you're watching, each frame is a complete frame unto itself. It has the individual characters, the background. You know, you can't have the foreground without the background, and vice versa. It's all part of one whole. So you could think of emptiness in terms of when you see a character on a screen, it's empty of a separate nature from the other characters. You are that screen. In reality, you are that screen of awareness that is viewing all the thoughts in your head, all the sensation of the five sense fears, and the sixth, if you count thought forms. You are that eternal awareness behind everything. The I am. Jesus said, Before Abraham was born, I am. Rumi says, you are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop. So this doesn't negate you. You do exist. You're just not separate. You are not independently originated. You are not an independently originated entity. You are a conglomeration of a very large number of factors coming together to form what you call you. It's like the wave metaphor. When you look at the ocean, there are waves. The wave is real or the ripple. It's just not separate from the ocean. So ego is not something that you have, that separate sense of self. It's just something that arises in the ocean. You are awareness witnessing itself. You are in awareness, not as awareness's owner, if you will. You are the the thought forms that arise are finite and they're inside an infinite awareness. You are the aperture through which reality experiences itself. It's a wonderful thing to realize. You don't have to worry about looking at the universe as other than yourself. You are the universe. Alan Watts has a wonderful metaphor where he says apple trees produce apples. It's what they do. And the universe produces people. So you are not this separate thing from the universe. You are the universe itself. All of your attitude, your personality, it's the universe expressing itself in an individual form, a little wave saying, Hello, I'm Jacob. Nice to meet you. I mean, this podcast that you're hearing is an expression of the universe. And you listening to it and your reaction to it is an expression of the universe as well. And eventually, when I get guests on the show, you're going to hear, you know, more personality of this wonderful conglomerate of uh forces coming together. There's a quote from Maharaji where he says, I love suffering because it brings me so close to God. When your ego dissolves under pressure, what's left? Pure presence, raw existence, the ground of being. But when you sit down, slow down, let these sensations pass and really rest in the moment, you will start to realize more and more, especially if you engage in a spiritual practice of your choice, that you are that everlasting, ever loving awareness that sits behind all experience. You'll immediately engage with life more. You won't have to run from it because you'll know that you are that everlasting, ever-loving presence behind everything, that awareness. There's a quote where it says, My mind is like a dark alley. I try not to go down it alone or something like that. It it tells terrible stories, but you don't have to believe them. You just notice them. Wow, that was an interesting one. Where did that come from? These little ego death moments, they come through suffering, meditation, grace. When you watch your thoughts and realize the thoughts are doing themselves, it gives you new perspective on grace. Was I responsible for my faith? Was I responsible for gravitating towards meditation, or did it just naturally occur? The eye temporarily drops away through these moments. And what remains is just this presence, just being. There's no subject-object split. It's just experience, experiencing itself. No extra storyline. The separation was always the illusion. And it's a useful one for societal purposes, but it's fundamentally and ultimately not reality. Suffering forces us to stop walking, to come home. But it's not because God was elsewhere. It's because we believed we were. So we just let those things go. I'm going to close out with a powerful reading on this. Before I do, please take a moment to give the show a rating and review. Really helps us grow. And uh, I'd love to hear your feedback. I want to close out with Hua Hu Ching, if I pronounce that right, verse 10. It says, The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle. Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses. It's its wings from one desire to the next. One self-centered idea to the next. If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life. Let this monkey go. Let the senses go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go. Let ideas go. Let the fiction of life and death go. Just remain in the center, watching. And then forget that you are there. Thank you for listening. Blessings to all.