Chapter 3 The Two Root Obstacles

There are two major difficulties on the path to meditation: the first, and most fundamental, is the ego. Your life has always been arranged by society, family, school, faith, and everyone around you, so you are egocentric. Even modern psychology emphasizes the ego as a foundation. The ego is the greatest problem humanity suffers from.

First, we must understand that the ego is a product of society. Modern psychology and pedagogy generally hold the view that unless a person has a strong ego, they will find it difficult to succeed in a competitive life. If you are a humble person, everyone will push you aside; you will fall behind. In a competitive world, you need a very tenacious and intense drive; only then can you succeed. In any field—business, politics, any career development—you need a very decisive personality, and society as a whole advocates cultivating this decisiveness from childhood. From the beginning, we tell children, "Be number one in the class"; when a child actually becomes number one, everyone praises him. What are we doing? You are cultivating his ego from scratch. You are instilling in him a certain ambition: "You can be president, you can be prime minister." He begins his life journey with these ideas, and with each success, his ego continues to expand and expand.

If you succeed, your ego will inflate—that's dangerous, because then you'll have to remove the huge obstacles in your path. If your ego is small, you won't succeed; you'll be perceived as a failure, and your ego will become sad. It will be hurt, it will develop feelings of inferiority—and then it will cause problems. You'll always be afraid to enter into anything, even meditation, because you know you're going to fail, you know you'll fail—failure has become your mindset. You fail everywhere, and meditation is such a big thing…you can't succeed. If you meditate with this thought—that failure is inevitable, that failure is your fate—then naturally you won't succeed. Therefore, if the ego is large, it will hinder you. And if the ego is small, it will be hurt, and it will also hinder you. In either case, the ego is always a problem.

To understand how this obstacle forms, we need to go back to the beginning of life and see clearly the process of self-formation. In the mother's womb, every child is extremely happy. Of course, he is not aware of this, nor does he understand it. He and his happiness are one; there is no question of knowing or not knowing. Happiness is his life, and there is no difference between knowing and being known. Therefore, the child naturally does not realize his happiness. Only when you lose something do you become aware of it. It is always like this; before something is lost, it is difficult to understand it because when you have not lost it, you are one with it. There is no distance between you: the observer and the observed are one ; the knower and the known are one.