Kyle Dixon/Krodha wrote: ELI5 : What exactly is ego according to Buddhism and why is it considered an illusion? : r/Buddhism

It is far more fundamental than that. The ego or self-entity is literally your visceral sense of self that seems to be in the body, looking out through the eyes and so on.

Judging and so on, these are all secondary conditions. Biases, viewpoints, these can all be stilled in dhyāna and samādhi due to the cessation of imputation, but, even then that underlying sense of self remains. That is why śamatha is incapable of being a cause for liberation when divorced from the vipaśyanā which experientially realizes the nature of mind and phenomena.

Cutting through the ego, or the self is not about merely arresting our imputed ideas and views. It is about actually severing the delusion which causes the internal, subjective feeling or notion of being a knower of the known, feeler of feelings, thinker of thoughts, hearer or sounds and so on.

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