I spent some time recently at Osel Ling, Mingyur Rinpoche’s monastery in the hills above Kathmandu, sitting in on teachings on Buddhist wisdom. These are a different animal from the compassion practices I had grown used to. The meditation turns analytical here, closer to Vipassana (not the Goenka kind, before anyone gets excited). You take a question and you take your own sense of self apart, piece by piece, to see what is actually holding it together.
Rinpoche gave an example of ego-clinging that landed a little too well. He pointed out, with the data to back him up, that we all quietly believe we are better drivers than everyone else. (Ola Svenson found as much back in 1981; the overwhelming majority of us rate ourselves in the top half, a feat about as statistically likely as everyone being taller than average.) A car swerves near us, we have a narrow miss, and our very first thought is some version of, well, I would never have done that. I am the careful one. The competent one. The one who can be trusted behind the wheel.
I nodded along like everyone else in the room. Then I remembered that the drive up to the monastery had terrified me.
Osel Ling sits on a steep hill, and the road to it is the kind that makes you reconsider your life choices. Every time the taxi climbed it, I gripped the seat and held my breath. So I sat there feeling rather pleased with myself, because surely this proved I was not the ego-clinging better-driver type at all. My fear had nothing to do with the driver. I am scared of mountain roads. Full stop. It would not matter who was at the wheel. I would not even have the confidence to drive that terrain myself.
Or so the story goes.
On first glance the fear looks innocent enough. It is not superiority, not comparison, not control, not even a sneaky bit of self-enhancement. It reads as a clean vulnerability assessment. My body tightens on a cliff road and the organism is simply saying, risk detected. There is nothing philosophically suspect about that. It is biology doing its job.
Sit with it a little longer, though, and the story shifts. A subtler layer surfaces, and it has to do with identity. Underneath the fear were thoughts I had never bothered to examine. I’m not good at this kind of thing. I can’t handle mountain driving. I’m not brave like other people. I have read enough by now to recognise that voice as self-referencing, only without any of the swagger. It is a deficient self-structure rather than an inflated one. Ego-clinging does not always arrive as I’m better. It is just as happy showing up as I’m not capable, I can’t do this, this is too much for me.
Psychologists have charted the other direction too. Justin Kruger, in a 1999 paper with the marvellous title ‘Lake Wobegon Be Gone!’, described the below-average effect. When a skill feels rare or difficult, we flip the usual conceit on its head and rate ourselves worse than everyone else. People judge themselves hopeless at juggling, or at riding a unicycle, quietly certain the competence belongs to other people. The swagger of the better driver and my conviction that I cannot do mountains turn out to be the same machinery, simply running in opposite directions. Both manufacture a fixed self and then stand guard over it.
Where exactly does the “I” live in any of this?
There is a reason we are taught compassion long before we are handed wisdom. Loosening the grip on a fixed identity is uncomfortable work, and you want a soft place to land before you start pulling at the threads.
Mountain roads are good teachers precisely because they take the ground away and widen the drop. The mind has no appetite for groundlessness. The ego wants to say I am safe, I am stable, I am in control, and a cliff road quietly undermines all three. So the fear may be doing something more interesting than warning me about gravity. It may be exposing how fragile that sense of control was to begin with. Ego-clinging tends to hide in exactly these places.
The practice, then, is to tease apart the genuine fear from the storytelling. There is the raw experience: the quickened heartbeat, the tightening body, the shallow breath. Real, honest, no argument there. Then there is the layer stacked on top, the hating of it, the I can’t handle this, the I am not the sort of person who does mountains. Wisdom asks a blunt question. Where exactly does the I live in any of this? Are there fear sensations? Yes, plenty. Is there a solid entity that owns them? Or are there only sensations, thoughts, images and contractions arising and passing, with nobody actually sitting at the centre holding the reins?
Analytical meditation keeps poking. Is the fear mostly in the body, or is there mental resistance layered over it? Is there a moment when the mind announces that this should not be happening? That should is usually the ego clearing its throat. From the perspective of insight practice, the fear itself is natural. The ego-clinging is the tightening around identity that comes afterwards. Wisdom is the capacity to see them both clearly without hardening either one into a fact.
So here is the invitation, and I offer it as someone still very much in the back of the taxi with white knuckles. The next time fear arises, go looking for the me who is afraid. Is it in the chest? In a thought? In an image? In a prediction about a bend that hasn’t even arrived yet? Look carefully, and look directly, not philosophically.
I have not located that me yet. I am starting to suspect that is the whole point.