THE DEATH OF THE EGO!
The essence of spiritual ascension is killing the ego. Once you embark upon this journey, with every path you take and each set back bestowed upon you, this becomes more and more apparent. The stronger we hold onto our ego the more frustrating the journey and life itself becomes. As a down to earth, proudly introverted and compassionate human, I thought this part of the journey will be an easy A for me but as time passed on and I confronted my demons — insecurities, it became impossible to disregard the fact that I too, had an ego that needed to be taken care of.
Ego doesn’t always manifest itself as an act of grandiosity. Not all people have a sense of grandeur existence or a sense of being above and beyond compared to others. Sometimes egos represent themselves as fragility, hypersensitivity, quick discouragement and extreme introversion. When it comes to myself, I can easily say that the latter applies to me more than the abovementioned. I have always had issues with self-worth and spent an unacceptable timeframe of my life self-deprecating and easily giving up. You see, when we don’t consider ourselves worthy of accomplishments, love, success and all the beautiful things life has to offer, we subconsciously sabotage ourselves. Sometimes the fear of facing loss and failure is so crippling that our ego goes into resistance mode to avoid such outcomes. At some point on our spiritual journey we understand that failure, rejection or loss doesn’t take away anything from our value, it just helps us work harder towards our goals and become more motivated or navigate our paths towards a better suited direction. Though, reaching this conclusion may take many years and troublesome encounters on the way down.
Killing the ego will not only set you free from all nonsensical expectations and consequent sabotage but also build self-esteem and encourage contentment. Once we dial down the voices coming from our ego, we can see that we are more valuable than all the expectations that we may or may not fulfil. We do not need to meet societal or parental standards to have value. We are valuable regardless of what we have or what we lack. Society has evolved in a manner driven by materialism. We are constantly bombarded with the idea that we’re insufficient and need something to feel whole and complete. Whether that’s education, cars, houses, relationships, expensive stuff, social recognition etc. Being present and content is never advertised or hardly ever advised. Be that as it may, it is exactly where true happiness stems from. Contentment, being present in the now and accepting life the way it is, all the while working towards goals and dreams is the formula for a calmer mind and an exasperated appetite for life.
When we listen to our ego we feel less than and worthless because the ego is never satiated. When we feed it, we become slaves to it and when we fear it, we are filled with dread due to resistance. There is no winner in this vicious cycle. When we however, learn to kill our egos and die before we die, we are blessed with an enlightening secret, we are enough and nothing that is marketed to us as the key to happiness actually has any intrinsic value. One thing certain in this chaotic life is death. We are mortal beings and will eventually succumb to our inevitable demise. Thinking about death, contemplating it and visualising the experience has helped me immensely with my struggle to kill my ego.
As Eckhart Tolle beautifully puts in the ‘The Power of Now’ “….So anyone who has identified with their mind and, therefore, disconnected from their true power, their deeper self-rooted in Being, will have fear as their constant companion. The number of people who have gone beyond mind is as yet extremely small, so you can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear. Only the intensity of it varies. It fluctuates between anxiety and dread at one end of the scale and a vague unease and distant sense of threat at the other. Most people become conscious of it only when it takes on one of its more acute forms.
Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people this is conscious, in others unconscious. If it is conscious, it manifests as an unsettling feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing. In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this whole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about them-selves, feel more complete. But even when they attain all of these things, they soon find that the whole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble because they cannot elude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult.
As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot truly be at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled. Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious and other collective identifications. None of these is you. Do you find this frightening? Or is it a relief to know this? All of these things you will have to relinquish sooner or later. Perhaps you find it as yet hard to believe, and I am certainly not asking you to believe that your identity cannot be found in any of those things. You will know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel death approaching. Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to die before you die and — find that there is no death.”
This beautifully elucidated quote is a wonderful summary to what I’m about to try and explain as far as my humble abilities allow. Our idea of self deeply involves external factors. We associate our self-worth with things we have and titles we hold. For instance, many people identify themselves with their jobs or worse, their possessions. People seek validation from things that hold tangible yet no intrinsic value. We accentuate the value of our belongings to fulfil a false perception in our minds enforced by society — that being, material will bring happiness. Once we start going down this dangerous path our ego becomes less and less satisfied with what we feed it. Happiness is always at the end of another purchase, relationship, promotion or some useless crap. We will only be fulfilled when we achieve whatever’s next on the menu and only for a brief moment because as we all know, the excitement from feeding our egos easily fades away and starvation for the next hit takes over. This is exactly why killing ones ego is essential in practising spirituality and stillness. There is no room for the ego when it comes to spiritual ascension or mindfulness in general.
My interpretation of “death is a stripping away of all that is not you” is that whatever is left behind after we take our last breath is what we truly are. Everything else, whether that’s family, significant others, friends, jobs, titles, possessions are an extension of our ego. That being said, having a family, a job or a car isn’t a bad thing — obviously. It just isn’t what your primitive and limited mind and the thoughts that limited mind generates tells you it is. Regardless of how much happiness and fulfilment they bring, anything beyond our fragile bodily existence is just an addition to our material world, they do not define us and they’re not us. Once this realisation kicks in, the ego starts to lose its ability to convince you otherwise.
During my personal dark night of the soul journey and consequent purge, I came to this realisation. Everything I hoped for and dreamt of in life didn’t bring me happiness or content. It just made me more frustrated and hungry for more. I felt so lost and empty despite being surrounded by stuff, that I had an inherent impulse to go after anything that was going to bring me gratification, even for a short while. It takes a lot of courage and pain to break loose from this cycle but at one point I got so tired I just couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to be happy, I wanted to have a still mind, I was desperate to feel gratitude for everything I had rather than chase after the next fix. I was tired of chasing — so tired. Just mindlessly wasting away my precious life on things that really didn’t matter or hold genuine value. Finally, I started shedding my old skin. This process is one of most difficult you can ever encounter. The realization that I wasn’t special — that I was just another mortal being in this world kicked in. It was majestic, truly and deeply majestic. I no longer had the urge to prove myself. I didn’t care about what others thought about me or how I looked from the outside world. I no longer cared about worldly possessions. I no longer cared about what I had or didn’t. I was now ready to be present and just live. Live the life that was meant for me, regardless of what it had to offer. I started appreciating the pain that my past gifted me. It was, at the end of the day, really a gift. If it wasn’t for my journey and all the ups and downs, I wouldn’t have arrived at this awakening. Ultimately, “pain is the fuel that lights the flame of our enlightenment”.
