A Short Book about Ego...: And the Remedy of Meditation

A Sufi tale has it that God plays a joke on us when we’re born. He whispers in our ear: ’You are the special one!’ The joke is that He says it to everyone. Referring to the works of Eckhart Tolle, Osho, Michael Singer, Steve Taylor, Erich Fromm, Noam Chomsky, and others, A Short Book About Ego describes the three key strategies we use to be ’special’ the Successful Ego, the Suffering Ego, and the Righteous Ego arguing that the drive to be ’above’ others is the ultimate root of all misery and prejudice.

Based on 30 years of meditation and 30 years of political activism, David Edwards provides a simple, direct guide to transforming the emotional pain of ego of anger, resentment, dissatisfaction, boredom, jealousy, craving, and fear into love and bliss through witnessing, watching, and presence. Nothing humanises us like the pain we’re willing to accept and embrace. Nothing dehumanises us like the pain we’re willing to reject and project onto others. Drawn from indepth personal experience, A Short Book About Ego argues that the best way to escape from a maneating tiger in hot pursuit is to stop, turn, and jump into the tiger’s mouth!

David Edwards is the coeditor of the website Media Lens (www.medialens.org 72k followers on X), which has been campaigning for compassionate reporting on human and animal rights, and environmental politics, for two decades. His work has appeared in Tricycle, The Ecologist, Resurgence and New Internationalist magazines. In 2007, he was awarded the Gandhi Foundation’s International Peace Prize.