In all its various forms suffering, as distinct from pain, contains the frustrated desire to abolish itself. It grows analytic so that it seems always to have arisen as a result of some kind of error, which means a kind of choice, even if you are forced to admit that the choices made were inevitable. Eventually this boils itself down to a single cause, such as craving, ignorance, or pride as the source or universal form of all the other modes of faulty will. And sometimes a term like 'ego' is applied to the locus of this explanation, as if it is both agent and agency responsible for it. The ego is a blunderer stubbornly acting out the consequences of a primal mistake. It inveterately takes things personally, you say, when in fact things just happen, and its biggest mistake is believing in its own existence. But just as there is a positive ego from whom you derive great delight as well as this negative ego whom you mercilessly patronise, so there is an anti-ego, a summation of all the good advice you've ever been given as to unmaking this absurd figure. Every variety of response and attitude is included in the resulting dance but no insight is offered into what exactly the personal is, and how it arises out of the purely impersonal, unless it is suffering itself that is the key.