1 00:00:00,773 --> 00:00:02,356 I have a lot of fear inside me. 2 00:00:03,178 --> 00:00:10,213 I feel inferior and superior to others at the same time, and I cannot make friends easily because I feel everyone criticizes me. 3 00:00:11,135 --> 00:00:12,678 I cannot feel intimacy with others. 4 00:00:13,059 --> 00:00:15,103 Does meditating help to diminish my ego? 5 00:00:17,311 --> 00:00:19,856 Yes, meditation does help to diminish your ego. 6 00:00:20,597 --> 00:00:21,499 You don't have fear. 7 00:00:22,161 --> 00:00:24,024 You don't feel inferior and superior. 8 00:00:24,084 --> 00:00:29,976 It's not that you can't make friends easily and you don't feel that everybody criticizes you. 9 00:00:30,517 --> 00:00:32,822 It's not that you cannot feel intimacy with others. 10 00:00:33,543 --> 00:00:35,607 What's happening is fear arises. 11 00:00:36,582 --> 00:00:42,211 Fear arises, you identify with it, you think, I am afraid, and therefore, oh my gosh, I've got a problem. 12 00:00:42,251 --> 00:00:49,462 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. 13 00:00:49,843 --> 00:00:52,166 It wasn't really mine at all. 14 00:00:52,487 --> 00:01:00,479 And you feel quite free, because it's like looking at a blazing, raging fire from afar. 15 00:01:01,721 --> 00:01:04,986 It's hot, and that's bad, but I'm not standing in it. 16 00:01:07,632 --> 00:01:12,097 You can't feel inferior and superior to someone at the same time. 17 00:01:12,137 --> 00:01:12,978 That's impossible. 18 00:01:13,158 --> 00:01:16,061 But at certain times, feelings of superiority arise. 19 00:01:16,161 --> 00:01:18,704 At certain times, feelings of inferiority arise. 20 00:01:18,884 --> 00:01:25,711 These are a product of a sense of attachment to self. 21 00:01:25,871 --> 00:01:29,935 It's called conceit and it's unwholesome. 22 00:01:30,816 --> 00:01:33,038 But it's not something that you should get upset about. 23 00:01:33,058 --> 00:01:37,403 It's something that you should see clearly and see the uselessness of. 24 00:01:37,383 --> 00:01:40,953 that it's to your detriment to think such things. 25 00:01:43,861 --> 00:01:48,955 Wanting to feel intimacy is also a problem, so the desire to feel intimacy, you should watch when that arises. 26 00:01:50,419 --> 00:01:50,920 And 27 00:01:52,385 --> 00:01:56,790 Really, I think it's misleading to think that we can ever be intimate with anyone. 28 00:01:57,250 --> 00:01:59,252 We're always an island. 29 00:02:00,554 --> 00:02:02,716 You never share other people's thoughts, really. 30 00:02:02,756 --> 00:02:04,058 You never share their space. 31 00:02:05,159 --> 00:02:06,460 You just get really, really close. 32 00:02:06,520 --> 00:02:07,822 That's the best you can hope. 33 00:02:08,342 --> 00:02:11,666 But you're never in someone else's experience. 34 00:02:12,106 --> 00:02:13,528 We're not halves of a whole. 35 00:02:14,208 --> 00:02:15,169 We're complete beings. 36 00:02:16,711 --> 00:02:20,916 All we can do is knock. 37 00:02:20,936 --> 00:02:22,257 Don't worry about intimacy. 38 00:02:23,570 --> 00:02:25,874 Meditation will help to diminish. 39 00:02:25,894 --> 00:02:27,957 It's kind of, you know, the whole question is wrong. 40 00:02:28,097 --> 00:02:32,123 And it's right, I'm not really picking on you, but I want to help you to see that it's wrong. 41 00:02:32,744 --> 00:02:35,989 Because this is the kind of question anyone would ask, and other people have asked. 42 00:02:37,111 --> 00:02:38,473 But it's not my ego, you see. 43 00:02:38,593 --> 00:02:40,396 You've already made a mistake there. 44 00:02:40,416 --> 00:02:43,241 You can't ask someone, how do I diminish my ego? 45 00:02:44,202 --> 00:02:45,484 Does this help to diminish my ego? 46 00:02:47,567 --> 00:02:51,113 It's not, you know, the fact that you say my ego is egotistical, right? 47 00:02:52,392 --> 00:02:53,874 It's a funny way of phrasing. 48 00:02:56,758 --> 00:03:08,133 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. 49 00:03:08,153 --> 00:03:09,755 You think of things as me, as mine. 50 00:03:11,077 --> 00:03:13,460 And it's not your ego. 51 00:03:13,500 --> 00:03:15,082 In fact, there is no ego whatsoever. 52 00:03:15,122 --> 00:03:17,185 Ego is just a concept. 53 00:03:18,397 --> 00:03:31,832 that we use to talk about the set of experiences that arise that are associated with identification and comparison and view of self.