What is ego?
Brain science takes it apart.
Yesterday I talked about < Wu Zhuangyuan Su Qier >
One question at the end
Do you remember that?
Su Can finally let go of any identity
But he still has the title of a beggar gang leader after all
The one who dropped everything. "
Let go of "itself"
Did you put a new label on yourself?
One step further - even the "Fa Shang should give up" mentioned in the < Diamond Sutra >
Even the "I'm practicing" thing
It's going to break eventually
Then the question arises: if the "I" is completely broken
I'm gone with that.
Who is practicing?
Who is vowing
Who is preaching
Bodhisattva saves all beings
Bodhisattva without me
Why did he make a wish and for whom?
The Buddha said to destroy all egotism
After the extermination
Who is the person who stood there teaching the Fa for forty-nine years?
Did you notice
Once this question is asked seriously
Will drive the entire practice system into a dead end
"Breaking me" and "Someone's breaking me."
These two things logically fight each other
Yesterday, I told you stories from movies and historical figures
Today I want to change the angle - open my head to show you
From brain science
Take the word "ego" and break it down layer by layer.
After dismantling, you will find
The reason why that dead end existed yesterday
It's because we started from the beginning
I got the two things mixed up.
Hello
Hello.
I am Wang Lijie
To understand ego
We need to address a more fundamental issue first
The "I" thing.
How is it produced in your brain?
If you are a regular viewer of this channel
You're no stranger to default mode networking.
I was in < What the hell are you doing in meditation >
And it's all covered in detail in "The Truth About Retrospective Brain Science"
There's a core system in your brain called the default-mode network.
It's most active when you're not doing anything specific.
What is it doing?
It's making up a story
They make up stories about me all the time.
What have I done in the past?
Who am I now?
What do people think of me?
What will happen to me in the future?
It's that never-ending self-narrative generator that you have in your head.
But here's a crucial detail that many people overlook -- the sense of self.
More than one floor
Portuguese-American neuroscientist Antonio Damasio
He's spent decades studying the neural basis of consciousness.
He found out. "
The self has at least three layers of structure.
The lowest layer
It's called "The Original Self."
It's a neural mapping going on inside of you.
It's tracking your heart rate, your breathing, your internal organs, your muscle tone.
It doesn't need language.
No memory required.
It doesn't even require conscious engagement.
A person in a deep coma
His brain stem is still maintaining this basic physical self-representation.
It's not "I feel like I exist."
It's, "This organism.
It's going on. "
second floor
It's called "Inner Self."
You can try it now.
Press your finger lightly on the table
You don't have to think, "I'm touching the table."
But you know right away -- there's contact going on.
It's happening right here.
It's happening to you.
This knowledge.
Is done before the language
There's no narrative.
It's not about the past or the future.
It is a naked present awareness that something is being experienced
And there's a vague "who" is experiencing it.
Third floor
It's who most people think of as "me."
Damasio called it "the autobiographical self."
This layer relies on higher functions of the cerebral cortex
Especially the synergy between the prefrontal and temporal lobes
It takes your memories, your identity, your social role
Your life narrative is all woven together
It goes on and on in my story.
Your name, your occupation
Your childhood memories, your plans for the future
It's all about the autobiographical self.
And the core hardware that powers this layer
That default mode that we keep talking about, network.
These three floors
Please remember
Because of everything that follows.
It all revolves around them.
Now.
I'm going to do the most crucial step in this video
Put Damasio's three-layer self-model
On the Theory of Egotism in Consciousness Only
Consciousness-only theory
I have two kinds.
The first one is called "I'm the One."
The second is called "parting."
Those two words sound very classical
But put it in Marcio's frame.
It's goosebumps with precision.
Born with me - "born with" means innate
You don't have to learn. You don't have to think.
It is naturally there
A newborn baby
Haven't learned to speak yet
I still don't know my name
But when he is hungry, he will cry, and when he is in pain, he will shrink his hands
He doesn't think, "I'm hungry."
But his entire body system
Doing one thing for him - taking all the experiences
This is how I feel.
This is Damasio's "primordial self."
Add "core self"?
A pre-linguistic, pre-conceptual, biological sense of self-belonging
You don't need to know the word "I."
Your nervous system
The "flag all signals as belonging to this organism" operation is already being performed
Translated into predictive coding
Ego
The prior belief with the highest precision and weight
"There is a continuous, unified subject of experience."
You didn't learn this belief
It's evolution written into your neural architecture.
It goes deep.
You're not even aware of it.
Then there's the dissociation -- dissociation is thinking apart.
The meaning of conceptual construction
This layer is learned
You are growing
Learned "my name is so-and-so", "I am Chinese"
"I am a successful person", "I am a kind person"
You surround yourself with these labels
It's a whole narrative about who I am.
Your self-esteem, your anxiety, your identity.
A feeling of superiority or inferiority when you compare yourself to others
It's all based on separating ego.
It's Damasio's "autobiographical self."
It's the default mode, the "My Story" that the web weaves around day and night
In fashionable terms
It's a set of characters you maintain yourself
Two sets of theories
Fifteen hundred years of time difference
Two completely different research methods - one based on vipassana
One by MRI -- points to the same structure.
I'm going to stop here.
Bring those three characters from yesterday back to the table
Yesterday I talked about Xiang Yu, Su Dongpo, Chu Shijian
What's going on at the neural level?
Xiang Yu on the edge of the Wujiang River
Liu Bang's army is an objective fact
The pavilion-long boat is also an objective fact
The 8,000 children of Jiangdong are also objective facts
But his default mode, the network, is playing a narrative at that moment.
"I am the Overlord of Xichu
The Overlord of Xichu cannot lose, cannot escape, and cannot be ashamed of Jiangdong Fathers
"The precision of this narrative has been weighted to the maximum.
Big enough to overwhelm the "alive" signal from his primordial self
His core self is still there.
He could feel the breath, the hilt, the wind.
But the autobiographical narrative of "I am the Overlord of West Chu"
Drown it all
He didn't kill his own body.
He killed
It's the "I" that doesn't play on the network in default mode.
The day Su Dongpo was thrown from Beijing to Huangzhou
His autobiographical narrative collapsed.
The storyline of "Maester Hanlin" is broken.
But he didn't hold on like Xiang Yu
And he did something really amazing -- he took that story line.
Active shutdown
He changed his name.
It's called "Dongpo Jushi".
You see
A new name.
It's a new narrative starting point
Default mode network is still running
But it began to make up a new story - an old farmer
An idler who makes wine, a scholar who watches the moon
Old transcendental beliefs are corrected
New circuits are slowly trained
Chu Shijian is more ruthless
The years he spent in prison
It's a complete "narrative clearing"
The old man who came out of prison
It's not that "Smoke King" anymore
He squatted on Ailao Mountain to learn grafting from farmers
It's not because he realized some cosmic truth
It's because of his default mode network
That "I am the King of Smoke" high-weight prior
Gone by time and walls
After grinding off
He can really squat down
So you see
Yesterday I was talking about the fates of three people
What I'm going to show you today is
The knife of fate
On which layer of neural tissue was it scratched?
OK
With this picture
Let's go back to the key question -- Buddhism says to "break the self-attachment"
Which floor is broken?
The answer to this question
It directly determines whether the dead end yesterday will pass
Let's talk about the conclusion first: the practice needs to be broken
The first is to separate the ego
In the end, it's ego.
But the word "broken"
Seriously misunderstood
Most people hear this word "ego-crushing."
The gut reaction is - kill "me"
Become an empty shell without a sense of self
This understanding
You're wrong.
You have antivirus software on your phone
It scans for viruses, it gets rid of malware.
If I told you, "Get rid of the virus,"
Would you translate that to "smash your phone"?
Of course not.
Getting rid of the virus is to get the phone back up and running normally.
Not destroy the phone
ego
It's that virus
The basic function of the "I"
It was never a virus.
Damasio's research
Which is right up there with neuroscience.
There is a clinical category of patients
Loss of an autobiographical self due to brain injury
They don't remember who they are.
I don't remember my past
There is no coherent life narrative - but their core self remains
They can still feel the pain and pleasure of the moment
You can still have an immediate emotional connection with the person in front of you.
Can still respond to the environment locally
What they lost was my story.
But I didn't lose the awareness of the moment.
What's even more interesting is that these patients after losing their autobiographical self
Many were surprisingly peaceful.
You think about that feeling: that voice in your head suddenly goes quiet
The voice that is always comparing, worrying, and choreographing tomorrow's script
Stop
It's not because they're enlightened.
It's because of the machine that keeps making up stories and creating anxiety
Forced to shut down
You take this clinical observation
Put it in the framework of Consciousness-Only - the self-attachment has been removed
But the basic function of the innate ego is still there
People didn't disappear
The painful narrative machine stops.
Certainly.
These patients have lost their narrative function passively due to brain damage
Practitioners go beyond narrative through training and initiative
One is a system failure.
One is a system upgrade.
That's two different things.
But it at least proves one thing on the neural level
Remove "my story."
Doesn't mean taking out "I exist."
And the cognitive-only description of this
More accurate than Damasio
Consciousness-only learning does not say, "Destroy Mornah."
It says, "Turn consciousness into wisdom."
Mona
It's that seventh sense that's always grabbing the "me"
It's not been wiped out.
Was transformed
Transformed into what?
Equality Intelligence
Equal intelligence is not "no self."
"No more compulsive division of everything into mine and not mine."
You can still tell the difference between, "This is your hand and somebody else's hand."
You can still make decisions and have preferences
You have different responses to different things.
But that "takes all the experience
Is forced into my narrative. "
Stop
In the words of predictive coding - the precision weight of that imaginary height
Returned to a reasonable level
Not zeroing
Is back to where it should be
Go here.
That cul-de-sac opened yesterday.
After the Bodhisattva broke the ego
Why can you still make a wish?
Because you don't need an ego to make a wish.
Quite the contrary.
Egotism is the greatest obstacle to making a wish
Think about it.
A vow from a man driven by a sense of separateness
What did his wish look like?
"I want to become a Buddha, I want to save sentient beings, I want to practice better than others
"Subject is all" I "
Motivation is all about self-actualization.
This kind of desire is called "some leakage of goodness" in consciousness-only.
It can produce positive results
But it's also feeding the priori belief in me.
Let your knowledge grow bigger and bigger
The better you do. "
I am an advanced practitioner. "
Thicker
And what about a Bodhisattva who broke the separation of ego?
There is a saying in the Diamond Sutra
It can be read almost as a diagnostic report
"If there is an infinite amount of extinction, countless and boundless sentient beings
There is no one who can be extinguished. "
Spent countless sentient beings
But it's clear in my heart - there's no "me" there
Not a single sentient being has been captured.
It happened.
But there's no one around to do the bookkeeping.
This is not false modesty.
It's an accurate description of a cognitive state.
When the mind no longer compulsively labels everything as "I"
Action still happens
Compassion still emerges
But that story machine is no longer running in sync.
I don't have to weave it all into the "How amazing am I" narrative anymore.
Bodhisattva's Wish
Not born out of the self-narrative of the default mode network
It emerges directly from the core self.
A pre-narrative, present, direct response to suffering
Like when you see a child fall
Your hand is already out.
You don't have to think, "Am I a caring person?"
This also explains a question that many people are confused about
Why does Mahayana Buddhism say "no-self" at the same time?
He also acknowledges that there is cause and effect, reincarnation, and a spiritual subject
Because "selflessness" denies
It's not a functional self-process.
It's to deny the existence of a "fixed, unchanging, independent entity."
Call me. "
Your body is metabolizing
Your nerve cells are reforming
Your memory is changing
You every moment
You're not who you were five minutes ago
But there's an ongoing process going on.
The chain of cause and effect, the renewal of seeds, and the continuation of experience
I'm talking about selflessness and reincarnation
I used a metaphor - the river
The river is real
You can swim in it
But you'll never be able to grab a handful of rivers to carry.
"I" is the river.
You can say the river is flowing
But if you have to ask where the river is
Point to any drop of water and say, "This is the river."
It's all wrong.
The river is not a single drop of water
The river is the "process of water flow" itself
"I" is not a thought.
Any memory, any identity tag
"I" is the very process of consciousness flowing.
ego
You planted a flag on this river
It says, "This is my river."
Then desperately hold on to the flagpole
solipsism
Instead of filling up the river
The flag was pulled
The river is still flowing
The water is still moving
But no one stood by and declared, "This river belongs to me."
Yesterday I talked about the scene where Su Can was among the beggars
Wu Mengda said to him, "In the old days when people didn't live
Now is the day "- you should be able to see it clearly by now
What happened in that moment?
I'm broken
The narrative of the "Young Master of the Su Family" in the autobiographical self has been discontinued.
But for the first time, the inner self is released.
He can feel hunger
You can feel the warmth of a bowl of hot porridge
He got poorer.
He was there for the first time.
Before, I had two of you in my mind
One is saying
One of them shared an analogy with me in "Listen"
The physical body is a self-running local AI mockup
It's what Taoists call "knowing God."
The soul is the primordial spirit sitting in the cockpit of the physical body.
Although the physical body speaks of the same awareness
Dissociated into two different "embodied intelligence" bodies
But the spiritual level
All sentient beings are one
It's that "me" that's taking up all your bandwidth
Your connection to the super-consciousness of the universe is almost cut off
And you're like a Tesla driverless.
Rely on local small models to move around the world
In case of an emergency
Yuan Shen can't take over the steering wheel either
Because he is sleeping, dormant
Practice is to try to wake up the primordial spirit
Monitor road condition information at all times
When needed
Take over the steering wheel a little bit
wake up
It's when you go from NPC to super player
Take full control of this little local model body
That's what the Buddhists call "the body."
There is no scientific evidence for this analogy.
It's just a convenient method I knitted for everyone to understand
It's also a machine talk.
No need to delve into the logical details
Otherwise, it will be serious again.
All right.
So much for that.
Let's wrap up today's clues
Damasio takes apart three layers of his self.
Consciousness-Only made almost the same distinction 1,500 years ago.
Everyone at the bottom is born with ego
It's the biological self-attribution function -- deep, implicit, pre-linguistic.
The upper self
It is narrative construction at the conceptual level - shallow, explicit, acquired learning
Meditation is not eliminating the function of the "I"
Is to identify and loosen the "ego" virus
See your name and identity first
Social roles are just a temporary suit
And gradually loosen that deep belief that "there is an independent me"
See that it is just a prior assumption with extremely high precision and weight
It's not an irreversible cosmic truth.
When these two layers of attachment are loosened to a certain extent
The Transformation of Eminence into Equality Intelligence
It's not that the "I" disappeared.
It's the forced boundary between "me" and "you" that melts away
You still have a unique perspective, a unique cause, and a unique mission
But you're no longer being held hostage by a narrative machine.
Putting everything on "my credit" or "my pain"
Bodhisattva's Wish
It is precisely in this state that the power is greatest
Because it doesn't need an "I" to refuel.
Its fuel is the direct awareness of suffering
There's no "mine" or "his."
There's no "I'm saving sentient beings" baggage.
Action is purer, more durable, less prone to being worn down by self-consumption
So back to the question left by Stephen Chow yesterday
Su Can finally became the leader of the Beggar Gang
Isn't that also an identity?
Now you can give yourself an answer using today's framework
If the label of the beggar gang leader
Into his default mode network
It became a new autobiographical narrative of who I was.
Then it's a new piece of clothing.
Will strangle him
But if it's just a functional term - someone else calls him
He promised
When something is done, it falls apart -- it stays in the core self.
That story didn't get into autobiography at all
No story
No lock
Each of you
In fact, I do the same judgment question every day
What was the first thing you said to yourself when you woke up this morning?
It's, "I'm going to be the good me today."
Or, "I'm going to have a drink of water today.
Feel the water enter your body. "
The first is the autobiographical self, the machine is on.
The second is the core self, the online self.
Practice is not about not drinking water or doing anything
It's for you to do things
Turn it on less.
And finally.
I want to leave a bigger question
When we say "break the ego," we don't mean destroy the "me."
It's a loose grip.
But to what extent is it considered "broken"?
If all the flags on this river were pulled up
The water is still flowing
But if even the awareness itself of "the water is flowing"
No longer owned by any subject - that river
Is it still a river?
Or say
It became something that we didn't even have a name for.
Su Can gave up all identities
Left in a beggar
This has been beyond the comprehension of many people
But if you even let go of "let go"
I can't even keep "stay" anymore
The person at that time
Can you still be called "a person"?
What do you think?
Tell me what you think in the comment section.
Also tell me that you listened to yesterday's issue and today's issue
Is there a button in your heart?
Was quietly pressed
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.