On our first trip to Thailand, we went to a Dhamma talk led by two young Western Monks. This was in Bangkok, where The World Fellowship of Buddhists runs a monthly Western class. So these two young Western Monks were leading it. Rosemary and I were sitting there, and about ten or fifteen other people were also there. The room had poles in the middle of the room, it was quite a big room. All of a sudden one of the Monks started saying, "that pole does not exist." Immediately the other Monk started arguing with him and they went on for five or ten minutes arguing whether the pole did or did not exist. To me it was futile intellectual discussion. Scientists can readily say that there are no such thing as poles because they can break it down into atoms and all this and that. We can say that about our physical body as well, that actually most of it is air, right? It's made of atoms, most of us is air. Every seven years this entire physical being changes. Every seven years every cell in the body dies, with new cells replacing the old ones, so obviously there is no permanent physical body. As to the mind though, can we say it exists or doesn't exist? For me, this is pretty much an intellectual discussion which often seems like useless entertainment for intellectual scholars. It doesn't help us end our Dukkha.
As to working with the word Anatta, for those of you that don't know, Anatta is one of the Three Characteristics. Buddhism teaches about three characteristics which are Dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), impermanence (the Pali word is Anicca), and Anatta. Now Anatta gets translated in lots of different way: non-self, no-self, not-self, voidness, emptiness, all sorts of other words filter in there. By definition, only if you are partly or fully Enlightened will you be able to understand what that means. It's impossible to figure it out with your intellect, it stays a philosophical, scholarly work but a person who is partly or fully Enlightened will actually know what it means.
In order to use it in the practice, we tend to emphasize the term "non-ownership". We don't actually own anything. This makes sense according to what we see around us. We say, "I own this recording device." Yet if it was mine, totally under my control, that means it would never break down, it would never get old. It would be good forever and ever and ever. So obviously no, it is not "mine". It has its own life span, therefore I do not control the device fully. I can't control my own body fully. It'll get sick when it wants to, not when I tell it to. I can't control it. When we try to control our thoughts, we see how difficult it is to control our own thoughts. We simply can't, they go their own way. So as far as non-ownership of things, we can see that. We don't own things.
Now, in here it says "I'm sure my anger feeds my ego and vice versa." Ok the term ego, that ties in with this phrase Anatta, non-self and so on. We have a type of ego about who we are. I am this. I am right here, I am a man, I am a teacher, I am American, etc.
We have all these statistics about who we are, I am a nice man, compassionate man, a wise man this or that, they are all statistics about who I am. Some people believe that Anatta, especially when translated as non-self, means we shouldn't have an ego, yet as far as we understand the practice, we don't have to get rid of the ego just because there's this term non-self. We are going to use the ego on the path of Enlightenment. We are going to build a nice ego but out of compassion for ourselves and others, to have more peace and happiness and be free of Dukkha. If we are more compassionate, we'll have less anger. The more we develop our sympathetic joy, the less envy and jealousy we have. So we are actually going to work with the ego as we purify. Many people feel the ego is actually the problem, but it's more what we are feeding the ego with. If we are feeding it with anger, then that's the problem. If we are feeding it with compassion, then that's not a problem. Now as to what happens to the ego when we get enlightened, well hopefully all of us will find out one day.