It may seem rather radical to say that we need to let the ego dissolve, or perish, or die. It can be an uncomfortable concept, or a concept that the ego will try to prove that is not even possible. If psychologists claims that the ego is a critical component of the soul, then of course, it must be true. It is always fascinating how the unawakened consciousness can accept the creation of conceptual systems because of their logical truth. It never attempts the test against reality. And you will find why: the ego has no access to reality. It is barred from it completely. The Self, the true Self, is here on earth to wake up, and find its way out of the deceptions of the self-imposter called ego. Ego, id, the super-ego, the collective consciousness: all of these are concepts of Mind,and are often used by ego to try to explain itself, to cement itself in conceptual reality in order to posit its existence and reality. All of these complex philosophical and psychological theories are only theories but are treated as fact. Most people think “I have ego”. No, you don’t “have” an ego. The ego runs you, and you are in it like a fish in water. Does the fish “know” the water? Does he “have” the water. Conceptual systems are an illusion and veil of the truth. The ego is the fish tank that the consciousness swims in. It doesn’t know any of it, and what it does profess to know, is old stories, or completely outside the water, on the projection screen of Mind.
Ego, again, is a world derived from the Latin and Greek, ego. If you read Greek, you’ll notice that ego is very rarely the center of the action. The word is rarely used, except for emphasis. The idea of a “self” or a ”me” is always expressed in the verb itself, which contains a suffix indicating 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, singular or plural. “Me” or action that is derived from “me” is expressed in the action itself. The “me” is not a subject, but a temporary source. Even more, most verbs in Greek use the middle-passive tense, which indicates that the “me” is only a participatory force that is also passive in the action expressed by the verb. For example, dynamai, from which we get the word dynamite, mean something like “I’m experiencing the ability to”. It is very hard to translate this into English, as English doesn’t have middle-passive.
But today, ego has become the center of the universe. Self-realization has come to mean the ego finding its truth and purpose, its unveiling; self-reliance and trust has come to mean trusting in whatever the ego thinks or feels; triggering is something the ego recognizes and avoids and tries to avoid it another. The duty of ego is to maintain its alliance with other egos by making sure that they all agree to not press the red button on each other. The collective ego is very powerful indeed. I believe Jung called this the super-ego but correct me if I am wrong about this.
But ego’s knowledge and awareness is extremely limited and superficial. Ego is restricted by its own ability to understand, the specific knowledge it has acquired on Google and YouTube, and the language it uses. Ego assumes that its language directly reflects all possibilities of reality. That English doesn’t contain middle-passive, means that English-speaking egos easily believe that it doesn’t exist. In English we say “I do this or that”. In Greek, it would be like “I am being done to do this or that”. The Greek wouldn’t even separate the I into a separate word. It is a minor force in the scheme of the universe.
In the modern world, Me is everything. The Greeks had their illusions. We have ours. They had myths about gods and goddesses. We have myths about ourselves and those we project upon our mental screen. Modern gods and goddesses are ego-picked and adaptable to the inclinations of that ego. Our own stories feel more like “me” and less like a one-size fits all egos. This is why the modern ego is so much more powerful than the Greek ego. It is convinced it is real and that delusion has made people extremely fragile, volatile, unable to cope with challenges and difficulties, lazy and self-entitled, easily triggered and disturbed, avoidant, and co-dependent, and often cruel and filled with gossip. This is not because we “are” this way. This is all coming from ego. And yet, ego will defend itself as if we don’t need it and that it should never die.
And that gets us to the first thing about ego. It likes to spend time figuring itself out, in order to present a good argument for its own existence. It does this because it is really not very secure in its own knowledge of itself. The huge popularity of psychology today is only possible because of ego’s own obsessive need to understand itself. Ego believes that once it understands itself, it will find peace and happiness. This never works out that way in the end, but does give temporary pleasure. Ego thrives only on temporary pleasures, periods of time when it thinks “I finally feel free and got away from X”.
When you give a child a toy, they can take a lot of joy in it for a while. It will make them feel happy. Like a young child, the ego is very limited, and it feels that limitation and it knows that pleasure and happiness are fleeting and something that has to keep up with in order to keep up with the Joneses. Facebook would never have become popular if it were not for egos incessant desire to try to prove its own happiness, as if its entire existence depends on it. This precarious and ungrounded situation is the source of so much instability and fear. However, the ego finds a way to “get” what it thinks it wants in order regain happiness. The ego runs toward its desires and runs from its fears. Most people will think this is elementary: “Of course I run from fears and towards desires. Who wouldn’t? I am chasing my dreams, and I don’t like those things I fear”. Egos are constantly trying to balance their triggering fears and their deep desires that are derived from that fear. Egoic fear is always a fear of lack of something: lack of life (fear of death), lack of love (fear of abandonment or rejection), lack of success (fear of failures), lack of reality (fear of illusion). All of these things, the things that it fears and the things that desires make up the bulk of the ego-world. It is like a seesaw: an ego can for days, weeks, and even years with a focus on getting what it believes it lacks, while also ignoring or pretending that the lack doesn’t exist. For example, most egos who seek knowledge have created a story that they love history, or philosophy, or whatever it is they are seeking knowledge about. They see themselves as curious, or profound thinkers and observers who want to get to the truth. It feels virtuous and gives the ego pride. This is what ego does, it is constantly looking to tell the tales about its pride, whether that is pride for its achievements, its children, or what have you. In the meantime, the ego conceals from itself what is really motivating this desire to feel prideful and forgets that it is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason. Pride is what the Greeks called hybris. Hybris is what every hero suffers in the tragedy and is the source of his eventual death. That is the fate of the ego. It will not last long, because its foundation is not in strength of Self, but is in the lack of things it is trying to compensate for. The instability, therefore, not only remains becomes stronger and powerful the more the ego creates overly complex scenarios and difficulties. That is why many people collapse from their success. They have no foundation in Self to hold up their achievements.
So the ego busies itself with a few things. One thing it does it tells stories about itself and repeats them endlessly and in different form and variation. They can be as creative and as simple as the imagination of the individual permits. The ego goes for “as real as possible” which means convincing enough so that the consciousness accepts it without question. When a child believes in the story of Santa Claus, there are no problems for the ego. When they start to doubt the story, the ego may either have to improve the story to take care of what isn’t convincing any longer or give up the story altogether and replace it with something completely mundane, like “we made it up, sorry” and the child learns that adults lie to him for no reason but for the sake of fun. Lies are now a fun tool with which to create a reality that doesn’t exist for someone else in order to deceive and manipulate them. This is about as honest as ego can get about itself.
In any case, the stories of ego are the ego’s most prized positions, and it uses all means to achieve these stories, including the talents and proclivities of the body it is inhabiting and the higher natural abilities of the soul. By “achieve stories”, I mean, get them into the collective ego consciousness, which is the society. The ego knows that if it can contribute to the collective ego, it can survive much longer than it would otherwise. For example, most people are endowed with some sort of genius, a special gift or talent. These gifts are very much active from the Self and are God-given. However, ego will use these for its own ends, as it wishes. So, it will use musical talent in order to get famous or make tons of money and acquire as many sexual experiences as possible, simply because it is motivated by a fear of lacking in these things and afraid to even look at that lack at the same time. The ego is actually run by anxiety and panic and it is very greedy, like a child who has been starved for centuries. It is so hungry for whatever form of power it thinks it doesn’t have, that it will stop at nothing to get it, including committing severe cruelty and callousness towards those who stand in its way. This can be devastating for the higher awareness of the individual, and triggers other egoic forms within the individual who personify and identify consciousness with shame, guilt, and suffering. The ego doesn’t care: it has made a lot of money, gotten famous. For a while, the ego is satiated, but not for long. This is why, again, gossip magazines exists: people love to watch the stars fall to the ground. And that is a dirty secret of the collective ego – it detests those it adulates, because it thinks they are self-absorbed fools. They enjoy watching them suffer. Ego always eats its own.
And we are also uncovering another secret about ego: the ego is not really one but is often an amalgam of many. We suffer a whole a host of them, although, in most “normal” (under-control individuals) there is always one who seems to manage all the rest. The one that manages them all is very tapped into the collective ego, a.k.a. society. This keeps all the egos in some kind of check or checkmate, as you will. It makes sure that the ego doesn’t talk to the other egos in public (although with the invention of Bluetooth, we can do this and no one cares). Still, the more dissociated and chaotic and splintered the individual is, the more the egos do not get along. Some people are just a walking talking nation of anarchy and are clinically identified as insane people, or people who are dealing with a personality disorder. The ego loves to find names for these diseases, because the only way ego feels strong, whole, or normal, is by proving the deficiencies and diseases of others. For example, the “narcissist” is now the popular scapegoat of many, as being the cause of all evil and pain the perceived ego victim. I speak about this in my article Meditation on Ego Playing God. And that gets me to the second most favorite activity of the ego: to create enemies.
The ego loves to find contrast and enemies, people to argue with. This is because ego is born as a duality and is a contradiction that cannot really exist. It is both victim and perpetrator, good and bad, lover and beloved. It thinks it needs to create war in order to achieve peace. It believes it separated and that is why it wants togetherness. It take sides in this or that, forgetting that “that” cannot exist without “this” and vice versa. This inner duality is not entirely projected onto the consciousness that is watching its own ego-movie. That is the dishonesty of the ego. Instead, the consciousness sees the ego as its hero, or the good guy. All the others are the bad guys. Even those who claim to be spiritually awake find enemies in those whom they believe are not, or those who seem to dislike them. Ego cannot find any harmony in the opposites, and it doesn’t want to, because the ego-drama is spun out of conflict. And this is the dirty secret of ego – it creates a wasteland and calls it peace; it hides its enjoyment and delight of watching its perceived enemies get their deserts, even while it still claims to be devoid of judgment of others and a lover of diversity. As an aside, I find it interesting how American comic books indulge the egoic good guy vs bad guy, but Japanese anime, which is decidedly becoming more popular in this younger generation, leans more towards honesty about the duality, and so reveals a lot of things that were once hidden. This revelation contributes to awakening, regardless of the purposes of the Japanese anime creators.
But because the ego conceals and lies to the consciousness that is the observer, It is not possible to experience Being or Self when possessed by the ego. However, Self, like the light it is, can shine through the plot holes in ego’s stories. In the beginning of a person’s awakening, which is the beginning of the death toll of ego, there will be moments of sunshine in between the endless cloudy days. The individual will feel a pull towards Being and will begin to sense the many lies of ego but be unable to dismantle them. Still, the beautiful serenity and peace is unforgettable and will continue to be the guide that will eventually lead the Self into mastery, which is the end of the ego’s reign. The ego, which is what Descartes might have referred to as the evil genius, will pick up on the fact that the individual has begun to awake, and so will alter some of its stories in a way to deal with the sense of illusion. It may request that the individual “prove” the illusion before it accepts it. People may come into your life that will challenge you and try to make you fall back to sleep. You will encounter them in life, in dreams, and maybe visions. The ego may get you excited to read more books, seek out gurus, go back to school. Many beginning truth seekers join spiritual groups or philosophical organizations. These are collective ego organizations and are designed to keep the still sleepy where they are, or even get them to become dissatisfied, leave the group, and return to sleep. Many stories, both dramatic, philosophical, and psychological, can be spun and accepted in the collective ego, and even taught at universities. But all universities should be called Ego Universities. There is no truth in them, only perhaps at best, something like the truth, or as Plato called them, “right opinion” (for Plato, “opinion” is constructed of what seems to be, and not what truly is). When right opinions are created in order to help people release ego and seek truth, they are called “Noble lies”.
Ego death must be complete in order to leave the game of the egos, which creates the karma here on earth. When the ego dies, you get the reward of peace, of bliss, of Self- love: everything you were looking for. You feel whole and complete, no longer driven by the mad masters of fear and desire. You reflect on what your ego thought you were, you, who are in truth a quiet, and deep silent expanse of space. The ego is the one that made all the commotion: the waves of light and sound are the thoughts of Mind that the ego employs and encourages the consciousness to identify with. The ego tried to tell your sleepy Self that you are the tip of one of those little waves and that you will have to be clever and group with other waves in order last longer, be bigger and be better, louder, brighter. Those tips do not last long at all, no matter how big they get. The expanse of space is who you really are. It is very absurd when you see this.
The deep expanse of space needs no saving. It lacks nothing. It is the serene bliss of Nirvana, the Good of Plato, the God, the true Self, the only Guru, the I AM PRESENCE. The ego will insist that it needs to understand ego and that it needs to do so in order to help others, to help itself. All it is really doing is creating confusion, more layers upon layers of what is actually useless nonsense for those who are seeking the Truth, Peace, and Unity of God/Self. Each one of us will arrive in God, back into Home, into nondualistic reality, in our own time, and when we are ready. No ego can help another ego in this except as driven by the divine karmic order. All egos are not conscious actors at all in their play, they are at best middle-passive, and usually passive. Ego death is an energetic release, a complete release of ego that can only be described as a combination of faith, grace, and surrender.
Many will argue that ego can never be released completely and that it ought not to. This is just another story of ego. Such arguments claim that we need ego in order to be in this world and to function normally, whatever that means. I have said time and time again that the ego is never dealing with reality and actually works on the premises of limitation (of others and self). It constantly sees war or conflict or blockages. It sees problems everywhere, and that is why it is always seeking knowledge. It thinks it needs improvement and betterment. It knows it isn’t enough. And yet, it is that same ego that claims that it won’t function well if it isn’t allowed to live forever? The world needs more Being and less doing and activity of ego. More and more people will come to this realization, and we will see a real transformation on earth at that time.
When the ego finds its death, while you still inhabit this body, you will see another reality that you never noticed before. Limits dissolve, communication become clear, others are actually (not conceptually) see as aspects of Self, so amicable, not inimical. The entire world starts to feel as support, because you are experiencing yourself as the flow of vast energetic space that exists because it exists. It doesn’t have to prove anything in order to exist, and it doesn’t have to get or lose anything. Everything is experienced as it is and in its perfection. When God made the world in seven days, He said it was Good. So did Plato call I the Good, this Self, this infinite consciousness.
Some might object: but I am an artist! I want to be in this duality so I can create. And create you will. This experience on earth is designed to teach you to become Self and embody Self so that you can create from your own autonomous source. How do you think this world came to be in the first place. Ego creativity cannot match the creativity of God. You do know you are God, don’t you? If you don’t, you have not experienced Self or the Elohim that We are, the I AM PRESENCE.
And so in that context, without ego, life feels and is experienced in a vastly different way. Your ability to create will be easy and flowing. You won’t have to work hard. The music and the words will flow from you as rivers flow. Your joy will be able to create all forms, shapes and sizes. God created all of this world, even the suffering, and even the devil, lies, and falsehoods, all in order to come back to Self. This way is called the Tao, but the Tao cannot be understood by ego in the sense of understanding via scientific inquiry or philosophy or psychology. The Self awakens despite the ego’s resistance, and is the awakening happens, the ego’s stories and resistance grows less and less powerful. The world of duality begins to dissolve. The ego and the collective ego, and the egos who are not even embodied will do everything they can to prevent your eventual goal that is freedom and bliss. No ego is interested in your freedom from it. The ego is the definition of co-dependent attachment on every level and in every form it takes. The ego, at top, feeds on God energy. And at the bottom, feeds on physical blood. It is entirely a product, motivated by and rabid for what is not.
When you experience nonduality, you experience Self as a steward of this body, just like a steward of the land. This body contains the memories of ancestors, the patterns and DNA of bloodlines. You don’t own any of this as this little ego you call “self”. This DNA and this blood belongs to the timelines and forms of earth and will return to the earth when the ego leaves it behind. The ego is a shadow of its experience of reality, and only retains memories of it through the veil of its stories. When the ego dies, there are no more stories, and only reality is left. You have finally come home.
Why the ego must die and other stories
Soul in the machine 