Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche talked about working with the negativity that arises in your mindstream as making friends with your ego. This is the area that we judge, that’s embarrassing, that we want to do away with. We try to stop it based on thinking it’s real. Just observe the the circularity of passion, aggression and ignorance. What’s being suggested here is that befriending ego is not likely to occur without a strong practice of sitting meditation, realigning our attitude t

Through the sitting practice of meditation, you can retrain your mind to observe what’s arising rather than what you think is there. The idea is to see clearly and deeply what is arising so you know fundamentally what it is. You don’t have to stop covering up, just be aware of it. If you don’t cover it up, ego finds its own space in the form of dependent origination. If you see what this is, all the warfare stops.

What is the observer that can’t be seen as content?That aspect of consciousness which is just receiving and processing does not have a spacial dimension or a time reference. It doesn’t have an identity, particularly. You could call it tathagatagarbha, jnana, prajna or wisdom. Even calling it an aspect is going too far. This and other questions from sangha are addressed in depth in this talk.