A Short Book about Ego…and the Remedy of Meditation

Drawing on 30 years of experience as both a meditator and political activist, the author identifies three key strategies deployed to make ourselves feel special – the successful ego, the suffering ego, and the righteous ego, all of which represent our drive to feel superior to others, and which he explains can be dissolved in the alchemy of meditation. We can all recognise these patterns and the way in which they separate us from others and the human condition. Such trends are amplified on social media as an immediate feedback mechanism. Our inner attitude to our circumstances is critical, and there is a powerful example of a woman working in a factory who was caught up in a drugs bust and spent three years in appalling conditions in prison. She kept dropping into inner space, opening and letting go of her pain to discover the inner smile.

In a chapter on misdirection, the author considers the failure of external success, and head-trapped intellectuals unable to engage their feelings – as happened to Darwin and John Stuart Mill, both disconnected from love and bliss. Erich Fromm engaged with this in the 1970s, commenting that the experience of love is the most human and humanising act, while the Dutch writer Rutger Bregman highlights the Enlightenment prioritisation of reason over empathy, while activists disconnect inner spiritual practice from outer action. The author underlines the importance of balancing thinking with feeling and the role of thought in driving emotional pain; again, this is an opportunity to drop thoughts and realise that ‘our internal source of love and bliss’ is normally obscured by mental activity. Only then can we become inwardly free.