The Truth According to Buddha

The ego is devious because it tells you about the lie called the "self", which is actually alaya conscioousness.

What is alaya consciousness but the place where karmic action is stored with each action done in this life?

He who denies the truth about ego is indeed deluded!

Mistaking alaya for the soul, only a fool would deny the truth, so that his reality alone prevails.

Yet such a reality is nonexistent, but only exists as a hallucination that the courageous would dare escape. Yet few of us try.

If I were lying to you about Truth, I'd call it a lie, for 'self' is empty of all existence, due to ego-delusion.

Delusion itself arises out of ignorance.

Can you see where this is going?

Ego lies to you, and claims the "self" is the immortal soul. What poppycock!

When will all sentient beings awaken to Truth? Only the seeds of karma transmigrate, due to Buddha Nature.

If I were to say anymore, then I'd only be repeating myself and contribute to rebirth in Samsara.

The Truth of Non-self (poem)

The self is empty of existence,
though all sentient beings claim
otherwise, even to the point of
threatening the truth talker
with imprisonment and abuse.

Yet she who talks the truth
bases her words on the Bodhi Mind
and its effect on her mind,
the sixth consciousness,
through the samadhi of truth.

Why would she who sees the truth
keep silent about Emptiness,
when it opens her eyes to
nonexistence of the self?
Only a fool agrees with the world.

This is the truth of non-self,
that the self is nonexistent.
He who denies this to be true,
is but a sentient being, lost
in this world of birth-life-death.

The Solution to Ego Addiction

Dialectic Behavior Therapy requires a trusted facilitator with a psychotherapy background to help the client realize that the root of his problems is ego addiction.

A brief definition of ego addiction is the unhealthy exercise of a person's ego which results in negative feelings of abandonment, grief, guilt, psychic pain, and remorse out of proportion with any given situation.

Furthermore, ego addiction may be harder to recover from, because the afflicted have only a vague concept of ego and how it arises; yet they cling to it strongly.

Easterners have a stronger concept of ego and its originations. This is why they reject psychiatry and the DSM. It also explains their belief in karma.

In the East, it isn't the ego that leads to mental illness.

Rather, it is clinging to the idea that the ego is a permanent entity to the point where one fears nonexistence, and strongly believes the self-as-neutral-observer to be a permanent soul.

For certain Easterners who have carefully studied esoteric Buddhism, the five senses and their organs are the five consciousnesses, the mind is the sixth, and the ego and that "soul" are the seventh and eighth consciousnesses.

For advanced meditators, relief from mental unrest is found by visualizing oneself as the deity (usually Amitabha Buddha) and where one is meditating as the mandala palace (the Pure Land). In Vajrayana Buddhism, it may be White Tara and her Pure Land.

Amida Buddha and his Pure Land of Bliss is actually the symbol for peace of mind.

Thus the solution to the mental unrest caused by ego addiction begins by first stilling the mind through meditation in a social setting conducive to it.

Then, as a result of dialog and practice with a trusted master (therapist), the practitioner behaves in a peaceful and non-violent manner.