Tashi Chodron:

སྟོང་ཕྲག་སྟོང་གི་མི་རྣམས་ནི། གང་གིས་གཡུལ་དུ་ཕམ་པ་བས། བདག་ཉིད་གཅིག་པུ་ཕམ་ བྱས་པ། དེ་ནི་གཡུལྐ་ལས་རྒྱལ་བའི་མཆོག

Isabella Rossellini:
Although one may conquer in battle a thousand thousand men, yet the greatest victor is the one who conquers himself.

Eve Ekman:
This idea of ego is very misunderstood. It has that kind of quality of holding lightly. Like we don’t need to not have a sense of self or identity. Of course we do! I’m Eve Ekman, I’m a daughter, I’m a contemplative social scientist, I’m a friend, I’m a cat mom, right? I’m all these different aspects of who I am and I can’t just all the sudden have amnesia and have no memory recollection, no sense of who that is and those ties and those relationships which are so important. Where we get stuck is this term you hear so much in Buddhism, like “fixation”.

Annabella Pitkin:
Buddhist and other Tibetan literatures describe how the monstrous enemy of the ego and the addicted ego attachment harms us all the time, cuts us off from relationships, makes us suffer, but also makes us do things that we regret afterwards, makes us hurt others. And when others hurt us, it’s because they’re under the control of that monstrous psychological state.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
There’s no way to not have identity. It always comes down to how open identity is, how flexible identity is, how dynamic this identity is.

Isabella Rossellini:
Welcome to season 4 of AWAKEN, a podcast from the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art about the dynamic path to enlightenment and what it means to “wake up.” I am Isabella Rossellini, an actress and activist and your host for this season of AWAKEN, where we are exploring a fundamental concept in Buddhist thinking and philosophy: attachment.

Himalayan art has long been a pathway to insights and awakening, and in this season, we will look at objects from the Rubin’s collection as a way to better understand attachment and its counterpoint, non-attachment, which translates to openness, or seeing things as they truly are. With stories and wisdom from artists, writers, poets, Buddhist teachers, psychologists, scholars, and others we will explore the meaning of attachment and how it shows up in different parts of our lives.

In this episode: Ego. So many of the challenges that arise with attachment are related to our ego: Who we think we are, how we think others should feel about us, think about us, treat us. And really how we see ourselves as separate from others, holding on so tightly to ourselves that we miss out on the fundamental truth of what Buddhist Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh called our interbeing. We are all connected and yet our attachment to our ego, and the identity we’ve constructed from it, often keep us separated. Contemplative social scientist, Eve Ekman.

Eve Ekman:
I’d say it’s kind of this compulsive way we think about ourselves. And it’s not that—again, we are great, we deserve a lot of love and attention and care but when we are so centralized it actually is the root of suffering. So it’s not, like, do this dissolution of your ego or somehow loosen the ties of your ego because that’s the right thing to do.

It’s “Look. Look really closely. Really notice where is your suffering coming from.” And it’s these ideas and identities. I myself have been really working with, for years now—I hope there’s an end in sight but we’ll see [both lightly giggle]—this sense of deficiency, not enough. I know this is common from all my students. And being able to offer for them what I’ve learned and hear their reflections—this identification with someone who isn’t good enough.

My God. Such suffering.

Dr. Richie Davidson:
If you ask a person, “What is happening in your mind?” what they typically report, not surprisingly, is that they’re thinking about themselves. Self-referential thought.

Isabella Rossellini:
Psychologist Dr. Richie Davidson, Founder & Director of the Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Founder & Chief Visionary for Healthy Minds Innovations, Inc.

Dr. Richie Davidson:
It may be that they’re going through their to-do list, “I need to do this, I need to do that,” or reflecting on some activity in the past that they did. But it’s very self-referential.

Eve Ekman:
I love the part of identification with someone who’s great, right? When I do something I feel proud of, when I’m recognized. But it’s temporary. And so if I’m living my whole life there, it’s this what’s called a hungry ghost phenomena. There’s never enough.

I have one feeling of success, achievement, or being loved and it’s almost like a bucket with a hole in it. I just need to keep filling it up and keep filling it up. So it’s so wonderful to be reflected beautifully in the world, it’s so important to be self-reflective and think of what do I need to do and change, but to also have a sense of basic goodness, basic okayness. “There is something in me that is already okay. I don’t actually need to earn being good.”

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
If your identity is very dynamic, that means appearances will not affect you, because it will always turn out to be supportive. There are people, no matter what happens in their life, they grow. Yeah, they advance their sense of self and growth.

Isabella Rossellini:
Teacher and meditation master in the Bon Buddhist tradition Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
Other identities, no matter what happens in their life, they always go downward. So that identity being dynamic or not—dynamic basically means you are open enough and aware enough—these two things—open enough, aware enough—will make more dynamic or less dynamic.

So that means that whatever they are facing, they are looking from the perspective of open. Possibility. Infinite possibility. So they look like your friend who says, “Wow! I did not know that.” So they are not threatened. Their sense of self is not threatened. They take it—everything is like world is there to help them, support them, guide them.

Eve Ekman:
Of course the past matters, of course the past influences how we see the world, how we act in the world.

Isabella Rossellini:
Again, Eve Ekman.

Eve Ekman:
And we have this opportunity to see—again, a fancy word—but the emptiness of those past sense of self. An emptiness not as in vacant or void, but as in everchanging. Who I am this morning is a bit different than who I was yesterday morning. I had all these different experiences yesterday that opened me or changed me or moved me and if I’m not too busy to notice them, I’ll really see that constant subtle change of my consciousness, who I am in the world, how I relate to the world, how I feel about myself.

That fluidity, it’s so natural to have that more fluid sense of who we are. But this rigidity and this tightness—sometimes we make that, sometimes it’s imposed upon us—that’s where we get that kind of ego clinging. That sense of really being confined.

The teacher Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche calls this “identification with our pain body,” and that when we are over-identified with who we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to do, it actually hurts. It’s an identity of pain. And there is a choice we can make through practice to instead release and open to the deep inner refuge of our body, speech, and mind and these qualities of stillness and silence and openness.

Isabella Rossellini:
To get to that open state, the one that is free from the attachments to ego, it’s almost as if the ego has to be trampled, destroyed. And that’s exactly what we see in a 16th or 17th century clay sculpture from the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art depicting the wrathful deity Panjaranatha Mahakala. Take a moment to look at the work at rubinmuseum.org/awaken.

Scholar of ​Tibetan Buddhism Annabella Pitkin, explains.

Annabella Pitkin:
In this image, this golden image, we see the wrathful aspect of Mahakala standing full frontal, facing the viewer, holding in his hands a skull cup with what looks to me like the kind of frames of awareness, and standing on the body of a human figure. So the body that Mahakala is standing on represents the ego of the viewer, and the kind of ferocious cutting or trampling of that ego.

And then the base of this is a lotus, right? There’s always a lotus supporting Buddhas in this kind of artistic style. And then all around, there’s a halo, and it’s a kind of fierce halo that

matches the wrathful aspect of Mahakala. There’s a kind of tendril of flaming clouds around this halo. And so it’s a very compact image. It’s gilded. It’s beautiful. And it has a kind of satisfying rounded shape because of the halo and because of the way that the shape of the Mahakala body fits perfectly within the oval of the halo. And then there’s a kind of gloss on the human figure that symbolizes the ego. So there’s a kind of juxtaposition of the wrathfulness of Mahakala with the satisfying aesthetic quality of how perfectly contained in the architectural form of the piece the whole image is.

So the freedom from attachment and from the violence and greed that can come from this kind of self-grasping fundamentally come from a misunderstanding of the self. And when Mahakala tramples the ego here, he’s trampling both the ignorant miscognition of how I am in the world, and all the violence and greed and addiction that flow from that, not to punish or to harm, but to set free, to say, there never really was any problem. Where would you have been that you wouldn’t have been connected with everything else?

Sonya Renee Taylor:
In 2020? My life blew up is the best way I can describe it. Everything fell apart in a very short period of time. Everything I thought made sense and grounded me and affirmed my sense of me just was gone over the course of a week 

Isabella Rossellini:
Author and transformation thought leader Sonya Renee Taylor.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
I wanna say that was sort of the beginning of the separation of the construction and—you know, the construction which I call Ego, and my soul self, perhaps is the way I’ll talk about that. It was clear that it was a death, an Ego death. Like, “This version of you is gone, pumpkin, and there’s nothing you get to do about it.” It was back in last June. I had been for the last—since 2018 working on a memoir project that was about myself and my mother and our story, and the sort of unfolding of our lives together, and what I’d felt I’d learned from that. And I’d been getting Inclinations that maybe I wasn’t gonna be able to write this book that I was very, very committed to.

All I know is that I got a very clear message that I was not to write this book. Very clear. And, the utter rage, and anger, and despair.

Just such an intense feeling of me versus whatever this force is that’s taking away this thing from me! And I was so angry! I remember I was in North Carolina and I was just yelling, like “You take everything! I can’t even have my own story!” [laughs] And I was enraged! I was enraged.

Annabella Pitkin:
One of the things that viewers of Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist art that has a—portrays an enlightened being or a deity in a wrathful form, one of the first responses that people often have, if it’s the first time they’ve seen something like that, is a kind of fear, right? The wrathful quality of the deity, the wrathful quality of the Buddha’s wide open eyes, or their teeth, or the protruding tongue, the kind of, you know, almost like a snarl or a

roar, and the fames and the kind of intensity of the gaze, not to mention the fact that the shape of a human is being trampled here, that can really intimidate a viewer.

It can be scary.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
I also had been in this process long enough to know that there wasn’t anything to do but surrender. By this point I was like, you can try to hold on if you want to; that does not turn out well for you, so I guess it’s “good-bye, story.” And for the next ten days I just sat in this house laying on the couch, trying to figure out, why life.

Like, why be alive? Right? I can’t have anything that’s mine. Not even my story.

There is no “my”. And there was ‘Sonya the Ego’ in this experience narrating it that way, and then there was this observer self, this—this—energy that is source knowing—that understood that my ego self was having some feelings about this experience, but that it was not those feelings. And it was not that experience. And it was not that story. And that there was, you know, this construction of my beingness, made by the world and made by my experiences. 

And then there was this other thing that was watching it all happen and knew that all the questions I was asking and all the stories I was telling about it and all the anger I was having was just an expression of this construction trying to hold onto itself. 

Annabella Pitkin:
People often ask me, students often ask me, whether the Buddha or the deity is angry, or whether they’re dangerous. And a really important aspect of understanding the language of wrathful iconography is to have some sense of that wrath as a kind of pure expression of compassion and wisdom, that this wrathful quality is directed not at vulnerable humans who long to be cherished but actually at the sources of personal suffering, at the fierce enemies that are the kind of real bad guys, we could say. And so in Buddhist terms, in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist ways of talking about it, we could say, what are the real enemies?

What are the real bad guys, the real kind of scary monsters? Well, they are attachment, which we could talk about as addiction or craving, addictive craving, addictive thirst, grasping attachment.

And that terrifying psychological state has two companions.

The other two are the state of anger or rage or the impulse to violence, hatred, another monster; and then the kind of root monster of them all is the monstrous, ferocious problem of ignorance, the kind of misperception of how things exist.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
This observer energy kept informing me that there was nothing to do except just sit in it. And at the end of those 10 days, I was so clear that some part of me that was highly identified with everything that had ever happened to me and every thing I’d ever created and all of that, some version of that had died and was very much gone and whatever was left had a lot less investment in those constructions and those narratives and those things that had been made. 

Annabella Pitkin:
We really have to understand the close, almost inextricable relationship between ignorance and attachment to really get what Mahakala is doing in this moment, the miscognition of ourselves and reality, the experience that we have, that everybody has, that maybe even animals have, of being separate from everything else, so that if you want something, you might have to punch somebody to get it. You might have to grab it. You might have to hug it to yourself, and not share it.

All of those impulses toward grasping attachment, violence, envy, jealousy, hatred, cruelty, that fundamentally is all powered by this sense of being alone in the universe, and separate. And that, according to Buddhists, is a complete misunderstanding. It is a false cognition. In fact, we never are alone and we never were.

Jenny Odell:
I was talking about the phrase “alone in nature” and that this is an impossible thing for me, not only because, yeah, there’s the co-presence of me and these other animals, but also it’s just a funny thing that, yeah, these other beings are also here.

Isabella Rossellini:
Jenny Odell, avid bird watcher, artist, and author of How to Do Nothing, a New York Times bestseller, considers how when we let go of our ego, that focus on the self, we begin to really recognize and see those around us.

Jenny Odell:
I was at the Rose Garden—and I write a lot about crows in How to Do Nothing, and getting to know my neighborhood crows, and how they recognize human faces, and all this. So, I was in the Rose Garden, and I was talking to one of the gardeners who I’ve known for many years at this point, because I go there so much. And this crow just walked up to us. And it walked up to us exactly like how a person would walk up if you were at the Rose Garden and you overheard your friends talking in the distance and you walked up. That’s exactly how this crow—[laughs] and it walked right up. It just looked like it was part of the conversation. And the gardener introduced me to the crow [laughs] and said, “Oh, this is Peanut.” And I was like, “Oh, nice to meet you.” And then he gave the crow a peanut, of course. And he was like, “Yeah, sometimes he just follows me around the garden.” And I was thinking about that later, and the Rose Garden had been pretty empty that day because it was pretty hot.

And in my mind, when we started having that conversation, yeah, we were alone, or it was just us talking; and it’s like, “Oh, right. There are literally other animals listening.” And in this case, this one recognizes his voice and walks over. 

Annabella Pitkin:
We always are and always have been and always will be completely interconnected and interdependent with everything and everyone else. And once that wisdom, insight has dawned, then attachment and rage and violence look very different.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
There was something massive that died that June and it very much felt like what I call ego.

I, me—these words don’t mean the same thing today that they used to mean, and there is a different expression of my energy today that doesn’t feel less—it doesn’t feel less vibrant, just way more at ease with life.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
Whatever their sense of identity they have, it’s much more open.

Isabella Rossellini:
This ease with life comes when we become less attached to ourselves. And it’s not about losing one’s self, it’s about flexibility and openness.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
And they are very aware and connected to their sense of self. There is some sense of confidence. There is some sense of stability. There is some sense of groundedness. There is some sense of they’re happy. There’s some sense of they’re excited of their sense of self. They have some sense of optimistic of their sense of self.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
In my experience, a part of our assignment as humans is to come back and realize there is no separation, to recognize that there is no distinction between us, right? There is no you and them, or me and them, or the other. That it is all life in its multiplicities of expressions. 

Isabella Rossellini:
There’s a beautiful poem by the 13th-century poet, Rumi, called Out Beyond Ideas. It speaks directly to what can happen when we let go of our ego. Part of it goes:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a feld. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’

doesn’t make any sense.

May we lie in fields and remember we are not alone.

You just heard the voices of Dr. Richie Davidson, Eve Ekman, Jenny Odell, Annabella Pitkin, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. 

I am Isabella Rossellini, your host.

To see the artwork discussed in this episode, go to rubinmuseum.org/awaken.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts, and tell your friends. For more stories and news from the Rubin, follow us on Instagram @rubinmuseum and sign up for our newsletter at rubinmuseum.org.

AWAKEN Season 4 is an eight-part series from the Rubin.

AWAKEN is produced by the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art with Tenzin Gelek, Jamie Lawyer, Kimon Keramidas, Gracie Marotta, Christina Watson, and Sarah Zabrodski in collaboration with SOUND MADE PUBLIC including Tania Ketenjian, Philip Wood, Alessandro Santoro, and Jeremiah Moore.

Original music has been produced by Hannis Brown with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

AWAKEN Season 4 and Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now are supported by Bob and Lois Baylis, Barbara Bowman, Daphne Hoch Cunningham and John Cunningham, Noah P. Dorsky, Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), Mimi Gardner Gates, Fred Eychaner, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Jack Lampl, Dan Gimbel of NEPC, LLC, Agnes Gund, New York Life, Matt and Ann Nimetz, Namita and Arun Saraf, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Eileen Caulfeld Schwab, Taipei Cultural Center in New York, and UOVO.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

The Rubin Museum’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts

Thanks for listening.