{"id":986,"date":"2010-01-11T10:46:55","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T10:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2010\/01\/buddhist-quote-of-the-day-misunderstanding-the-ego-by-mark-epstein.html"},"modified":"2010-01-11T10:46:55","modified_gmt":"2010-01-11T10:46:55","slug":"buddhist-quote-of-the-day-misunderstanding-the-ego-by-mark-epstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2010\/01\/buddhist-quote-of-the-day-misunderstanding-the-ego-by-mark-epstein.html","title":{"rendered":"Buddhist Quote of the Day: Misunderstanding the Ego by Mark Epstein"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"meditation_therapy.jpg\"<\/a><\/span>posted by Ethan Nichtern<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

I am pretty darn psyched<\/b> (no pun intended) to be co-teaching a four week series on Buddhism and Psychology<\/a> at the Interdependence Project<\/a> with my friend Dr. Miles Neale<\/a>. If you are in the New York Area, drop in tonight, or listen along to the series at home, wherever you are. Below is a great quote of the day<\/a> by Buddhist psychologist<\/a> Mark Epstein<\/a> that serves as a great hors d’oeuvre for what we will be discussing and practicing tonight:<\/p>\n


\n“Meditators<\/a> with this misunderstanding [of the self] often feel under pressure to
\ndisavow critical aspects of their being that are identified with the
\n“unwholesome ego<\/a>.” Most commonly, sexuality, aggression, critical
\nthinking, or even the active use of the first person pronoun are
\nrelinquished, the general idea being that to give these things up or
\nlet these things go is to achieve egolessness<\/a>. Aspects of the self are
\nset up as the enemy and then attempts are made by the meditator to
\ndistance oneself from them. But the qualities that are identified as
\nunwholesome are actually empowered by the attempts to repudiate them!
\nIt is not unusual to find meditators in therapy insisting that they do
\nnot need sex or have no need for an orgasm, or denying feelings of
\nanger. Rather than adopting an attitude of nonjudgmental awareness,
\nthese meditators are so concerned with letting it go that they never
\nexperience the actual insubstantiality of their own feelings. In a
\nsimilar way, those with this misunderstanding of egolessness tend to
\novervalue the idea of the empty mind free of thoughts.” In this case,
\nthought itself is identified with ego, and such persons seem to be
\ncultivating a kind of intellectual vacuity in which the absence of
\ncritical thought is seen as an ultimate achievement. As Robert A. F.
\nThurman describes this misconception:”One just refutes all views,
\ndismisses the meaningfulness of language, and presumes that as long as
\none remains devoid of any conviction, holding no views, knowing
\nnothing, and achieving the forgetting of all learning, then one is
\nsolidly in the central way, in the silence of the sages.”<\/p>\n

-Mark Epstein
\nfrom Freud and Dr. Buddha: The Search for Selflessness<\/a>
\nin Tricycle: The Buddhist Review<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

posted by Ethan Nichtern I am pretty darn psyched (no pun intended) to be co-teaching a four week series on Buddhism and Psychology at the Interdependence Project with my friend Dr. Miles Neale. If you are in the New York Area, drop in tonight, or listen along to the series at home, wherever you are.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buddhism","category-meditation"],"yoast_head":"\nBuddhist Quote of the Day: Misunderstanding the Ego by Mark Epstein - One City<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2010\/01\/buddhist-quote-of-the-day-misunderstanding-the-ego-by-mark-epstein.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Buddhist Quote of the Day: Misunderstanding the Ego by Mark Epstein - One City\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"posted by Ethan Nichtern I am pretty darn psyched (no pun intended) to be co-teaching a four week series on Buddhism and Psychology at the Interdependence Project with my friend Dr. Miles Neale. If you are in the New York Area, drop in tonight, or listen along to the series at home, wherever you are.…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2010\/01\/buddhist-quote-of-the-day-misunderstanding-the-ego-by-mark-epstein.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"One City\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-01-11T10:46:55+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/files\/import\/assets_c\/2009\/05\/budd_psych-thumb-225x201-5095.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Ethan Nichtern\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Buddhist Quote of the Day: Misunderstanding the Ego by Mark Epstein - One City","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2010\/01\/buddhist-quote-of-the-day-misunderstanding-the-ego-by-mark-epstein.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Buddhist Quote of the Day: Misunderstanding the Ego by Mark Epstein - One City","og_description":"posted by Ethan Nichtern I am pretty darn psyched (no pun intended) to be co-teaching a four week series on Buddhism and Psychology at the Interdependence Project with my friend Dr. Miles Neale. 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His writing has been featured in numerous print and online publications. He is the founding director of the Interdependence Project and the host of the I.D. Project\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s popular weekly podcast (available on iTunes). He is currently on the part-time faculty of Eugene Lang College at New School University in NYC, where he teaches Buddhism. Ethan lectures regularly at universities and venues around the country on Buddhism, meditation, contemporary culture, and activism.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/author\/enichtern"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}