I have a lot of fear inside me.
I feel inferior and superior to others at the same time, and I cannot make friends easily because I feel everyone criticizes me.
I cannot feel intimacy with others.
Does meditating help to diminish my ego?
Yes, meditation does help to diminish your ego.
You don't have fear.
You don't feel inferior and superior.
It's not that you can't make friends easily and you don't feel that everybody criticizes you.
It's not that you cannot feel intimacy with others.
What's happening is fear arises.
Fear arises, you identify with it, you think, I am afraid, and therefore, oh my gosh, I've got a problem.
Now, if you just saw it as fear, you'd be able to watch it arise and cease, and you'd see, oh, it came by itself, and it disappeared by itself.
It wasn't really mine at all.
And you feel quite free, because it's like looking at a blazing, raging fire from afar.
It's hot, and that's bad, but I'm not standing in it.
You can't feel inferior and superior to someone at the same time.
That's impossible.
But at certain times, feelings of superiority arise.
At certain times, feelings of inferiority arise.
These are a product of a sense of attachment to self.
It's called conceit and it's unwholesome.
But it's not something that you should get upset about.
It's something that you should see clearly and see the uselessness of.
that it's to your detriment to think such things.
Wanting to feel intimacy is also a problem, so the desire to feel intimacy, you should watch when that arises.
And
Really, I think it's misleading to think that we can ever be intimate with anyone.
We're always an island.
You never share other people's thoughts, really.
You never share their space.
You just get really, really close.
That's the best you can hope.
But you're never in someone else's experience.
We're not halves of a whole.
We're complete beings.
All we can do is knock.
Don't worry about intimacy.
Meditation will help to diminish.
It's kind of, you know, the whole question is wrong.
And it's right, I'm not really picking on you, but I want to help you to see that it's wrong.
Because this is the kind of question anyone would ask, and other people have asked.
But it's not my ego, you see.
You've already made a mistake there.
You can't ask someone, how do I diminish my ego?
Does this help to diminish my ego?
It's not, you know, the fact that you say my ego is egotistical, right?
It's a funny way of phrasing.
And semantically it's not a problem, but it hints to me that you do have ego problems, like most people do, in the sense, not that you're egotistical, but in the sense that you identify with things.
You think of things as me, as mine.
And it's not your ego.
In fact, there is no ego whatsoever.
Ego is just a concept.
that we use to talk about the set of experiences that arise that are associated with identification and comparison and view of self.