Vipassana meditation is an exercise in mindfulness: egoless awareness. It is a process in which the ego will be eradicated by the penetrating gaze of mindfulness. This is Vipassana, namely, insight meditation. Of course it is based on concentration.
The practitioner begins this process with the ego in full command of mind and body. In reality, body and mind are not controlled by ego. Ego is nothing but a wrong attachment. Body and mind are controlled by karma. Of course, due to ego, many corresponding afflictions will arise. Then, as mindfulness watches the ego function, it penetrates to the roots of the mechanics of ego and extinguishes ego piece by piece. Here it says clearly that mindfulness extinguishes ego. Yesterday we talked about this attitude — objective attitude. For example, when a scientist observes nature, the animal world, or other beings; or when a doctor observes the human body and patients’ physiological phenomena, they tend to be quite objective, because those things have nothing to do with “me.” But if you are a scientist and the observed object is your son or your wife, you are no longer the same. Your attitude is mixed with emotion. If you see your son fall or encounter something dangerous, you immediately throw away your instrument and run to him. At that moment you are no longer objective, because you regard the object as “mine”—my son, my family. If the observed object is yourself, and the footage is something someone else recorded of you, your feeling becomes even more different. Have you ever watched your own video? Watching your own video taken by someone else, what state are you in? Your emotions immediately get stirred up, and various reactions arise. If you are an actor and you watch your own performance: if the performance is good, you feel happy, inflated, proud; if the performance is bad, you feel uncomfortable and awkward. Watching your own scenes, you quickly become entangled and carried away by the situation. This is how ordinary people are. ……………………………….. Actually, it’s not that hard to extinguish ego-grasping. You just need to apply right mindfulness. As you stay mindful, you will gradually enter a state similar to egolessness. Then, as you continue, you move closer and closer to that state, and slowly you will find the feeling of egolessness. One day you might genuinely realize egolessness — and then everything becomes easier. Therefore, from now on you no longer need to wear a sad face, because all the bad things are done by ignorance and karma anyway.