Dhamma from Buddha by Karen Armstrong

The ego is voracious and continually wants to gobble up other things and people. We almost never see things as they are in themselves, but our vision is colored by whether we want them or not, how we can get them, or how they can bring us profit. Our view of the world is, therefore, distorted by our greed, and this often leads to ill will and enmity, when our desires clash with the cravings of others. When we say 'I want,' we often find ourselves filled with envy, jealousy and rage if other people block our desires or succeed where we have failed. Such states of mind are 'unskillful' because they make us more selfish than ever. Desire and hatred, its concomitant, are thus the joint cause of much of the misery and evil in the world. On the one hand, desire makes us 'grab' or 'cling' to things that can never give lasting satisfaction. On the other, it makes us constantly discontented with our present circumstances. The way one craving after another took possession of his mind and heart, human beings were ceaselessly yearning to become something else, go somewhere else, and acquire something they do not have. It is as though they were continually seeking a form of rebirth, a new kind of existence. Craving manifests itself even in the desire to change our physical position, go into another room, have a snack or suddenly leave work and go find somebody to talk to. These petty cravings assail us hour by hour, minute by minute, so that we know no rest. We are consumed and distracted by the compulsion to become something different. 'The world, whose very nature is to change, is constantly determined to become something else,' Buddha says. 'It is at the mercy of change, it is only happy when it is caught up in the process of change, but this love of change contains a measure of fear, and this fear itself is dukkha.'




When people lived as though the ego did not exist, they found that they were happier. They experienced the same kind of enlargement of being as came from a practice of the 'immeasurables,' which were designed to dethrone the self from the center of our private universe and put other beings in its place. Egotism is constricting; when we see things only from a selfish point of view, our vision is limited. To live beyond the reach of greed, hatred, and the fears that come with an acute anxiety about our status and survival is liberating. Anatta may sound bleak when proposed as an abstract idea, but when it was lived out it transformed people's lives. By living as though they had no self, people found that they had conquered their egotism and felt a great deal better. By understanding anatta with the 'direct knowledge' of a yogin, they found that they had crossed over into a richer, fuller existence. Anatta must, therefore, tell us something true about the human condition.
The Buddha believed that a selfless life would introduce men and women to Nibbana. Monotheists would say that it would bring them into the presence of God.