egolessness

The enlightened state is one of egolessness. To reside in the enlightened consciousness, is to live without an ego. By an ego, we mean any idea of oneself. Of course, the physical human being is still present. To others, on the outside, this being may still seem to have a personality, an identity, and therefore an ego. But inwardly, one is not feeling oneself in that way. It is said that one no longer identifies with the idea of oneself, with the persona. In fact, it goes deeper than that, for there is no longer anything to identify with the persona or the idea of the self. The little self was nothing but an idea, an idea of itself. But ordinarily, much energy gets bound up with that idea, the ego.

Of course, anything that threatens the ego results in much anguish, one way or another. The ego’s primary characteristic is to keep itself alive, energised. So one way to approach enlightenment is to starve the ego, so that it becomes smaller and smaller until it withers away. This is the approach of classic meditation methods. Another way is to burn up the ego. This is the way of tantra. But regardless of the route – the path that is followed – coming home to your essence is reaching a space where the ego no longer has any existence for you. All the energy has been removed from it. It has disappeared.

By an ego, we do not only mean a feeling of being great or wonderful, as is implied in common use of the word. Equally the ego can manifest as a feeling of being somehow inferior, inadequate, not good enough. In fact underneath the more boastful aspects of ego, these feelings of inadequacy invariable exist. They are also an expression of the ego; of the sense of being a separate self, with an identity.

Going beyond these aspects of the ego, one reaches to that space where there is no sense of self at all. It sounds like there is nothing left but that is not the case. On the contrary, in that space, everything is. The whole of existence is felt, undivided. It is a beautiful space; a space of wholeness; a space without ego.