Sometimes I wonder what a person from a little village in Tibet would feel if you suddenly brought him to a modern city with all its sophisticated technology. He would probably think he had already died and was in the Bardo state. He would gap incredulously at the planes flying in the sky above him or at someone talking on the telephone to other person on the other side of the world. He would assume he was witnessing miracles. And yet all this seems normal to someone living in the modern world with a western education, which explains the scientific background to these things, step by step.
In just the same way, in Tibetan buddhism there is a basic, normal, elementary spiritual education, a complete spiritual training for the natural Bardo of this life, which gives you the essential vocabulary, the ABC of the mind. The basis of this training are what are called the " three wisdom tools" : the wisdom of listening and hearing; the wisdom of contemplation and reflection, and the wisdom of the meditation. Through them we are brought to reawaken to our true nature, through them we uncover and come to embody the joy and freedom of what we truly are, what we call " the wisdom that realises egolessness. "
Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in hospital after a road accident to find she is suffering total amnesia. Outwardly, everything is intact: she has the same face and form, her senses and her mind are there, but she does not have any idea or any trace of memory of who she really is. In exactly the same way we cannot remember our true identity, our original nature. Frantically, and in real dread, we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch on to with all the desperation of someone falling continuously into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assume identity is "Ego"
So Ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs to a cobbled together and make shift image of ourselves, and inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.
