It’s The Movement Toward Something Or Away From Something That Stops
Excerpts from Emptiness Dancing by Adyashanti:
Ego [the perception of a self] is a movement. It’s a verb. It is not something static. It’s the after-the fact movement of mind that’s always becoming...
The sense of “me” is always becoming, always moving, always achieving. Or else it is doing the opposite—moving backward, rejecting, denying. So in order for this verb to keep going, there has to be movement. We have to be going forward or backward, toward or away from...
So the verb—let’s call it “egoing”—is not operating if we are not becoming. As soon as a verb stops; it’s not a verb anymore. As soon as you stop running, there is no such thing as running—it’s gone; nothing is happening. This ego sense has to keep moving because, as soon as it stops, it disappears, just like when your feet stop, running disappears...
As long as we try to do what we think is the right spiritual thing by getting rid of ego, we perpetuate it. Seeing that this is more of the same egoing will allow stopping without trying.
You could find a hundred oak trees and each would have a personality but no ego. So the stopping of this verb called ego has nothing to do with the personality stopping. It has nothing to do with anything we could put a finger on: not a thought, not a feeling, and not ego. If we had to stop or the world had to stop in order for us to be free, we would be in big trouble. It is the movement of becoming, the moving toward something or away from something, that stops.
A different dimension of being starts opening up when this verb ego is allowed to run down. Just by watching, we can start to see that nothing that arises has an egoic or “me” nature. A thought arising is just a thought arising. If a feeling arises, it has no “me” nature and no self nature. If confusion arises, there is no “me” nature in the arising. Just by watching, we see that everything arises spontaneously, and nothing has an inherent nature of “me” in it. Egoic nature comes only in the afterthought.
