Through seeing and contact, you have sensation, from sensation thinking, and from thinking you have ideas. Thus you are creating craving through your perception, through your contact and sensation. There are many layers of craving, and these layers put together, if I may so express it, make up self-consciousness, individuality, the ego, "I-ness", personality. I am using those words synonymously to imply that wherever there is craving of any kind, there is self-consciousness and disharmony; whereas, with the cessation of craving, there is intelligence and perfect harmony. You will see that what you call the ego, personality, individuality, self-consciousness, is nothing but a series of hindrances created through craving. Therefore the "I" is nothing but a frustration, a recognition through impact, through reaction, of a hindrance. That is, you are conscious of yourself as a personality, as an ego, only when you are frustrated, when there is resistance.