Sometimes I wonder if the ego really disappears when we talk about samadhi. The mind says it’s gone, but the hands still wash dishes, the eyes still see the sunrise. If there is no doer, who is the one that feels the water on the skin? I keep asking myself, is the feeling a ripple in a larger wave? Maybe the wave doesn’t need a surfer, but the wave still moves. That thought makes me smile, lol, because it sounds like a paradox dressed in a yoga class slogan.
We like to label the ego as the thief of peace, yet the same ego picks a partner, plans a career, even chooses a coffee brand. Those choices feel personal, like a fingerprint on a glass. If we drop the word “I”, do we also drop the sense of ownership? Can a spoon stir soup without a stirrer? The soup changes, but the change is recorded somewhere, in a pattern, in a memory. Memory itself is a story we tell ourselves, a story that needs a narrator.
So when teachers say “no self”, I hear “no story”. But stories are how we make sense of the world. Without a storyteller, does the world become mute? Or does it keep humming, indifferent to our labels? I think the ego is less a villain and more a lens. It focuses attention, it filters desire, it gives us a point of view. Even in emptiness, there is a point where emptiness is noticed. That noticing is an act, a tiny claim of “I observed”. Maybe the claim is the only thing we can truly own, and everything else is just the background.
