What is the Ego you say? by Kris Vockler

The other day I was trying to explain the ego to a friend of mine, from a Buddhist perspective on what it is. First off, it’s a very complex concept and how I explained it was very good yet there is more to it. Yet, to boil things down to an analogy that seemed to make sense to one who hasn’t studied Buddhism at all, here is my explanation:

The ego is like the spell checker in a word processing program. When you fire it up the first time, it’s blank and has no idea how to spell anything. So, we put a dictionary of words into it so it will know where to start, this is birth to early childhood for the ego. Let’s assume the dictionary we added to the checker is correct and all the spellings are right. Now as you progress through life you will come across a situation or event that shapes how you see the world. Call this event or situation a single word if you will. The spell checker that is your ego won’t recognize it and it puts a red wavy line under it so you know it doesn’t understand it. Once you have lived the event and now see the event through your own lens, you have just defined the word for the checker. If you spell the word wrong, you will forever spell or see the world in that incorrect way. As we go through life we add our own spellings to words and by the time we get older we realize that the way we spelled it is wrong and not true reality. This is where Buddhism comes in, Buddhism shows you where the word is spelled wrong (or where you incorrectly saw the event or world) and allows you to change the spelling.

About as simple as it gets as to how the ego takes an event and defines it, see how one can stray away from the reality of things?

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