Even Buddha eventually had to abandon his disciples for a while when they become pride-filled and started arguing and fighting about power and the right path. The ego is a powerful thing, it conditions us to cling to it for our lives, and terrifies us when we lose it.

I don't believe you can walk away from it whenever you want though PureEvil (with all due respect). It takes time, patience, work, devotion. To lose ego one must lose desire, one my lose craving, one must lose even aversion. You must be able to confront every aspect of the mind, reject nothing, but grasp on to nothing. One who focuses on compassion will build a character of such, until all else goes extinct and you become a force of pure good in the world, bringing a death to all detrimental karma.

To destroy the ego, you must also see it for what it really is; an illusion. It's like looking at a busy street full of traffic, and believing the trafic is a single entity. It's like looking at waves in an ocean and thinking the wave is somehow distinctly separate from the rest of the waters. The ego, the conscious mind, all of it, are a massively complex system of infinite processes that work in a symbiotic state. When they work together in perfect syncrony, you stop seeing the parts and start experiencing the whole. The whole of the actions, the group, forms into consciousness that can only see itself by believing it is one and separate.

Yes suffering is an illusion, ego is an illusion, self is the ultimate illusion. But then reality itself is the illusion, the illusion that somethingness and nothingness are distinct and separate, that you and others are distinctly separate. Yes these are all illusions, but to wake up we must also understand that illusion is as relevant as reality, it is reality, and the effect of the illusions are as real as anything. Really, nothing exists and nothing is relavent, only effects are relevant (take a gander of quantum theory the buddhism, you'll get my drift and see how the two relate). Don't dismiss illusions because they are illusions, but realise effects are everything and the most important thing, and those effects are the product of illusion.


- My viewpoint as is.