Loss of Ego       

I read a Zen story a long time ago about a monk who was walking along a cliff, lost his footing, and fell over the side.  He grasped a root just as he fell and hung on terrified.  Eventually his grip weakened and he fell three inches to the ground.  

Recently, in re-reading Chogyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (2002), I encountered a summation of the point of this story.  Trungpa was asked during a talk, “Why is it so hard to let go of one’s ego.”  He replied, “The idea of it can be extremely frightening, though not the real experience.”  Trungpa continued that the fear is “that we will not be able to anchor ourselves to any solid ground, that we will lose our identity as a fixed and solid and definite thing” (p. 22). 

I remember that when I began to practice zazen, I did feel some fear, and it may well have been fear of dropping ego.  Eventually it went away.  If a zazen practitioner experiences this fear, he or she can reflect that it is quite imaginary.  If, by chance or grace, he does experience at some point the absence of the idea of himself in his mind, the experience will simply be matter-of-fact.  Afterwards it will be full of marvelous insights.