Acharya Prashant explains the ego using an analogy. He asks one to imagine walking on an empty street in the middle of the night with no one around to disturb, talk to, or point at you. Even in such a situation, one can see how much keeps going on in the mind. This internal activity, this "buzz in the head," is the ego. It is your sense of yourself. Even when all might appear alright around you and in your body, your mind might be very laden, gloomy, burdened, and distraught. That is the ego. The ego has no foundation or reality; it is not grounded in anything objective or metaphysical. It just needlessly exists and serves no real, beneficial, or practical purpose. The ego refuses to be shut down and makes itself feel indispensable, as if things would not work without it. It presents a constant stream of seemingly important matters—the ego of heaven and hell, life and death, urgencies, and emergencies—which take center stage, making the actual task at hand a sideshow. The ego does not allow you to do one thing straight in life because it always presents too many things that are too important to not consider. As you get lost considering these greatly important things, that which is real keeps fading away from your inner radar. The ego's survival is not due to its strength but its great weakness and handicap: its inability to observe itself or self-reflect. The ego cannot know itself; if it had the faculty to know itself, it would have simply collapsed. It is the blindness of the ego that helps it survive. Therefore, the ones who know the least about themselves are the ones whose egos would live the longest. As you grow in self-knowledge, you find that death is near and nearer for the ego. The day the ego comes to learn about itself, it finds nowhere to hide.
