They say that all desires and fears arise precisely in the ego, that it is the ego that wants everything and that it is afraid of death, and that it is precisely from it that one needs to be freed in order to come to self-awareness. This is not so. The ego itself does not want anything, it is not afraid of anything, and it cannot feel anything. After all, what is the ego? The ego is not a real entity. This is imagination, a figment of the imagination that arose in consciousness and endowed with the same consciousness with all the qualities of a real existing being. Precisely because the consciousness that imagines it endows and fills the ego with all the qualities of a real living being, it is perceived as living and real existing. And therefore it seems that it really wants something, it can feel something, it is afraid of something, it is striving for something, it is leaving it, it is achieving something and it is receiving something. But this is only an illusion, a game of imagination that arose in consciousness like a dream. And there is nothing real about it.
The ego has no real basis. This is not some living, really existing creature, which has its own will, capable of performing some independent actions. This is an entity that has arisen in the consciousness in the form of a certain image, a character of a dream that has a dream called universal life, and therefore the ego itself cannot do anything. Actions attributed to ego-personalities are only embodied in images of this pseudo essence, desires arising in consciousness.
Initially in the mind there is a hunt, a desire for a change of state, a desire for impressions perceived in the form of sensations. Indeed, nothing but sensations arising in consciousness and experienced by consciousness does not exist. The whole world visible and perceived by us, through all our senses, exists only in our perception and only in the form of various visions and sensations. There is no other world except the world of visions and sensations arising in us.
The hunting that has arisen in consciousness is the basis for the emergence of all subsequent desires. We can say that this initial hunt sheds itself in all subsequent desires. And desires are a continuation and at the same time a manifestation of this initial hunt, the desire to change states, change impressions, change sensations.
Desires, in turn, are formed into images that can be called images of desires and described as: “What do I want?” Then there are images of actions that need to be performed to satisfy these desires. They can be expressed like this: “How do I get what I want? What do I need to do for this? ”This is where the images of the characters arise through which all these modes of action will be embodied. These characters are ego-personalities.
So in consciousness a multilevel game of imagination arises and then occurs, which we, the acting characters of this game, perceive as the life of the universe and as our own life. But there is no "our" life, just as there is no life in the universe. All this universal life, of which our personal life is a part, is only a set of images that have arisen in the consciousness perceived by the very same consciousness in the form of various visions and sensations. And there is nothing else.
Therefore, there is no liberation from the ego. Indeed, the ego itself is nothing, an image in consciousness that is part of the game of imagination. And therefore, all existing methods of liberation from the ego are nothing more than a continuation of the game of imagination. The only really existing liberation that can happen is the liberation from the obsession with the imagination wound up by the game, into which the consciousness has been drawn.
This is an exemption from flirting. Consciousness involved in its own game of imagination, identifying itself with all the acting characters of this game, was so carried away by this game that it ceased to understand what is what, what is an ego-personality, and what is consciousness itself, which created and fills it with all the qualities necessary for it. This is the same as a person during sleep ceases to perceive himself as sleeping and dreaming, and perceives himself in the form of a character withdrawn to him. That is why such a liberation is often called awakening, that its nature is the same as the nature of awakening from sleep.
This release is also called understanding or awareness, because as a result of it, in the consciousness that previously identified itself with one of the characters in the game, there is an understanding and awareness of what is in reality, that there is a game of imagination and that there is THAT that this game observes and receives from her all the impressions and sensations that arise.
It can also be called self-awareness, since the consciousness involved in its own game of imagination, being extracted from it, is again aware of itself by what it is. And what is usually called self-knowledge is the search for ways to free oneself from the obsession of the imagination wrought by the game. This is a search for ways to return self-awareness, a search for ways leading to an understanding of what the Self is in reality.
The ego (small "I", the false "I", the second "I", it, ego) is all that we are NOT in reality, it is our false essence, which is constantly looking for something, wants, is afraid or complexes .
The ego consists of our fears, complexes, beliefs, beliefs, eternal desires. The language of the Ego is our uncontrolled mind, which is constantly chatting, the mind, which constantly condemns, criticizes, which makes the assessment “like / dislike”, “good / bad”.
It is from our Ego that constant desires emanate: to have a lot of money, material wealth, to have love, to want “this” and not “what really is”, to want to look good and not get old, to want the best (car, house, partner , friend), etc. All this gives rise to inevitable suffering, because there is no limit to the needs of our Ego! As long as we identify with our Ego, we remain blind and cannot see the reality as it really is. The present moment is death for the Ego, therefore this false entity does everything possible to only escape from what is "here and now." In those moments when our mind is silent, when we are in the present moment, our Ego dissolves, at that moment we are who we really are - the higher “I”, “soul”, “higher mind”, “God "," Truth ", etc.
Traditional Indian yoga is aimed precisely at getting rid of the shackles of our ego and ultimately becoming what we really are - the higher "I", the Higher Mind, Spirit, God, Enlightened - everyone calls it differently, but meaning and finite is true one.
Egoism - is a narrower concept, different from the ego. Egoism is just a small fraction of the human ego. A selfish person cares only about himself, pursues selfish goals. Such a person can do anything for his own benefit, despite the fact that someone from his actions may suffer. For example, a person opens a window in a vehicle without asking about the passengers around him.
Therefore, do not connect the concepts of ego and egoism.
There is also such a thing as “Alter Ego”:
What is Alter Ego?
Alter Ego (Alter Ego) - the second essence of man, the second person or person inside the person. The phenomenon when a person changes completely in a particular environment. For example, a quiet excellent student enters the basketball court, and begins to tear and throw everything around, forgetting about the rules. An enclosed guy enters the stage, and amazes the audience with his play and depth of feeling. Exhausted modest professor with glasses, goes to a disco and gives heat to the young.
On our spiritual path, for us only the concept of “Ego” matters.
Ego: The Modern State of Humanity (Ego)
Words — whether they are spoken aloud or remain in the form of unspoken thoughts — can produce an almost hypnotic effect on you. They fascinate you, you easily get lost in them and begin to unconditionally believe that if you attached a word to something, then you know why. The fact is, you don’t know what you attached it to. You just covered the secret with a label. Everything - a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and especially a man - is absolutely unknowable. Because in them there is an immeasurable, incomprehensible, bottomless depth. All that we are able to perceive, feel and what we can think of is the surface layer of reality, which is smaller than the tip of the iceberg.
Under the outward appearance, not only is everything connected with everything - everything is connected with the Source of all life from which it came. Even a stone, and even better - a flower or a bird can show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at them, or hold them in your hands and allow them to be, without covering them with mental labels, a feeling of awe and surprise rises in you. Their very essence speaks silently to you and reflects your own essence. This is what great artists feel and bring to their art. Van Gogh did not say: "This is just an old chair." He looked, looked and looked. In this chair, he felt Existence. Then he went over to the canvas and took a brush. The price of that chair was a few dollars. The same chair, just written by him, today costs more than $ 25 million.
If you do not cover the world with words and labels, in your life, lost a long time ago, when humanity, instead of using thinking, was captured by it, a magical feeling returns. Depth returns to your life. Everything regains its novelty and freshness. And the biggest miracle is the feeling of one’s true self, which is more important than any words, thoughts, mental labels and images. For this to happen, you need to clear your sense of "I", the sense of Existence from that with which it was mixed and confused, in other words, identified. This book is about how to clean it.
The faster you find verbal and mental labels and attach them to things, people or situations, the less your reality is filled with life, and the weaker you feel this reality, the miracle of life, which constantly unfolds inside and around you. This way you can develop the ability, but at the same time lose your wisdom, which means joy, love, creativity, and vitality. They lurk in the gap of silence between perception and interpretation. Of course, we have to use words and thinking, they have their own beauty - but do we really need to be held captive?
Words reduce the scale of reality to such an extent that the human mind can grasp something. The language consists of five main sounds produced by the vocal cords. These are the vowels a, e, and, o, y. Other sounds are consonants, they are made using compressed air: s, f, f, etc. Do you really think that any combination of these basic sounds can explain who you are, or explain the ultimate goal of the Universe, or at least what is a tree or stone in its depths?
The ego is a false "I"
The word “I,” depending on the context, personifies either the greatest mistake or the deepest truth. In its usual sense, it is not only one of the most common (along with its derivatives “me”, “me”, “mine”), but also one of those that are very misleading. The word "I" in the framework of ordinary everyday use embodies the original error, the wrong perception of who you are, an imaginary sense of personality. This is the ego. Albert Einstein, who possessed the gift to feel the essence of not only the reality of space and time, but also of human nature, called this imaginary perception of himself an “optical illusion of consciousness”.
Then this imaginary "I" is taken as a reference point for further erroneous interpretations of reality, as well as the basis from which all thought processes, variants of interaction and relationships are repelled. Your reality turns into a reflection of the original illusion.
The good news is: if you see an illusion as an illusion, then it dissolves. Recognition of deception is its end. A necessary condition for the survival of an illusion is that you take it for reality. Therefore, when you see who you are not, the reality of who you are arises by itself. This is exactly what will happen when reading this and the next chapter, which describes the mechanics of the imaginary "I", which we call the ego. So, what is the nature of this imaginary "I" (egoism)?
When pronouncing the word “I”, you mean not at all what you really are. The infinite depth of you true as a result of the monstrous contraction is replaced by the sound produced by the vocal cords, the thought of the "I" in your mind, or something else with which this "I" can be identified. So, what does “I” and its derivatives - “me”, “me”, “mine” usually refer to?
When the child learns that the sequence of sounds pronounced by the parents is his name, he begins to equate the word, which becomes a thought in his mind, with who he is. At this stage, some children speak of themselves in the third person: "Johnny is hungry." Soon they learn the magic word “I” and equate it with their name, which before that has been equated to who they are. Then other thoughts come and merge with the original self. The next step is to identify and label those things that will make up “me”, will become part of “me”.
This is an identification with objects, that is, the endowment of things, and, ultimately, thoughts designating them, their sense of self. So the child identifies with them. When “his” toy breaks or someone takes it away, he experiences great suffering. Not because the toy has any special value - the child will soon lose interest in it, and it will be replaced by other toys, other objects - but because of the thought that it is “his”. The toy has become part of the child’s self-development, the sense of “I”.
As the child grows, the original “I” thought draws together other thoughts: it is identified with his gender, his things, the perceiving and feeling body, nationality, race, religion, profession. Other things that “I” is identified with are roles (mother, father, husband, wife, etc.), accumulated experience or opinions, likes and dislikes, as well as what happened to “me” in the past, the memory of which is a combination of thoughts that define my further self-perception as “I and my experience”.
In the end, they are nothing more than thoughts randomly gathered together as a result of the fact that they were all endowed with my self-perception. It is this mental construct that you mean when you pronounce the word “I”. More precisely, most of the time, speaking or thinking like “I”, you really do not say or think, but some aspect of the mental construction, an element of the egotypic “I”. When you wake up, you will continue to use the word “I,” but then it will come from a much deeper place within you.
Most people are still completely identified with a continuous stream of thoughts in their heads, obsessive thinking, most of which is characterized by repeatability and lack of meaning. For them, no “I” exists outside the thought process and the emotions that come with it. This is called being spiritually unconscious. When you tell them that they have a never-ending voice in their head, they either wonder: “What voice?” Or vehemently deny it, and yet this is the very voice, thinker, unobserved mind. It can be considered a certain entity that has taken possession of them.
For some, the moment of the first identification with thoughts became unforgettable, a shift from the state when they were a reflection of the contents of one’s own mind to awareness that arose somewhere in the background. For others, this happened so subtly that they either did not even notice, or felt a certain influx of joy or inner peace, not understanding the reason for this.
Ego: Voice in the Head
The first glimpse of awareness occurred to me when I was a freshman at the University of London. I had to take the subway to the university library twice a week. It happened at nine in the morning near the end of rush hour. Once I was sitting opposite a woman of about thirty. I had seen her on the train more than once, so I couldn't help but find out. Despite the fact that there were a lot of people in the car, the seats on either side of it remained empty. The reason, no doubt, was her strange appearance. The woman's gaze was extremely intense, and she constantly spoke to herself in a loud and irritated voice.
She went so deep into her thoughts that she was completely unconscious. She seemed not even to notice others. Her head was lowered and slightly tilted to the left, as if a woman was addressing the one sitting next to her. Although I don’t remember exactly what she was talking about, her monologue was something like this: “And then she tells me ... so I tell her: no, you're lying, how dare you blame me ... because you have always been one of those I deceived me, I believed you, and you betrayed me ... ”In her voice, angry intonations were heard, addressed to the one whom she considered wrong, and who, in theory, should defend themselves so as not to be destroyed. When the train arrived at Tottenham Court Road station, she got up and, without interrupting the flow of words, headed for the door.
I also had to go out, so I stood behind her. On the street, she headed towards Bedford Square, still immersed in an imaginary dialogue, angrily accusing and proving something. I was curious, and I decided to follow her, because I still had to go in the same direction. Despite being completely immersed in an imaginary conversation, the woman seemed to know where she needed to go. Soon, the impressive Senate House, a high-rise building of the 1930s, the main administrative building of the university and the library appeared.
I was amazed. Did we go to the same place with her? Yes, she was heading there. Is she a teacher, student, office worker or librarian? Maybe she conducted some kind of psychological experiment? I had no answer. I was about twenty steps behind her, and by the time I entered the building (ironically the former headquarters of the Police of Thoughts in the George Orwell novel “1984”), one of the elevators had already consumed it.
What I witnessed somewhat discouraged me. As an adult twenty-five year student of the first year, I considered myself an intellectual, and I was convinced that all the answers can be found and all the problems of human life can be solved with the help of intelligence, that is, thinking. Then I still did not understand that unconscious thinking is the main problem of human existence. The professors seemed to me to be sages who knew all the answers, and the university seemed to be a temple of knowledge. How could she be part of all this?
Before entering the library, continuing to think about a strange woman, I went into the men's room. I washed my hands and thought: “I hope I don’t finish like her.” A person standing nearby cast a glance in my direction, and I suddenly realized with shock that I not only thought, but also muttered it out loud. “My God, I’m already the same as her,” flashed through my head. Didn't my mind work as continuously as hers? There was an insignificant difference between us. It seemed that anger was the dominant emotion of her thinking. In my case, anxiety prevailed. She thought out loud.
I thought mainly to myself. If she’s crazy, then everyone’s crazy, including me. The difference is only in degree. For a moment, I managed to step back from my mind and see it as if from a deeper point. There has been a brief shift from thinking to awareness. I was still in the men's room, only now alone, and looked at the reflection of my face in the mirror. At the moment of separation from the mind, I laughed out loud. It might seem crazy, but my laughter came from a sound mind. It was a big bellied Buddha laugh. "Life is not as serious as the mind draws." It seems that laughter told me exactly that.
But it was only a glimpse, and very soon he was forgotten. For the next three years, I lived in a state of anxiety and depression, completely identified with the mind. And before awareness returned to me, I had a chance to come very close to the idea of suicide, but then it was already much more than a glimpse. I freed myself from obsessive thinking and imaginary thought created by the “I” mind. That incident not only gave me the first glimpse of awareness, it also shed the first grain of doubt about the absolute value of human intelligence. A few months later, something tragic happened, further exacerbating this doubt.
On Monday morning we came to a lecture by a professor whose mind delighted me. As it turned out, we came only to hear: on the weekend he committed suicide - shot himself. I was shocked. The professor was an extremely respected teacher, and, as it seemed to me, knew all the answers. However, then I had not yet seen an alternative to cultivating the mind. I still did not understand that thinking is just a thin layer of consciousness that we are, and also did not know anything about the ego, not to mention the possibility of discovering it in ourselves.
Content and Structure of the Ego (Ego)
The egotypic mind is entirely conditioned by the past. Its conditioning consists of two parts: content and structure. In the case of a child crying from deep suffering due to a selected toy, the toy is the contents. It can be replaced with any other toy or item. The content with which you are identified is determined by your environment, your upbringing and the surrounding culture. As for the suffering of the child, there is no difference whether it is caused by the loss of a simple wooden toy in the form of an animal or an expensive and complex electronic trinket. The reason for such acute suffering lies in the word “mine” and is structural in nature. An unconscious need to strengthen one's identification through fusion with an object is embedded in the very structure of the egotypic mind.
One of the most basic mental structures through which the ego exists is identification. The word "identification" (or identification) comes from the Latin word idem, meaning "the same," and the word facere, meaning "to do." That is, if I identify with something, then "I" "do it the same." Same as what? I endow it with a perception of myself, becoming a part of my "identification". One of the main levels of identification is identification with things: over time, my toy is replaced by my car, my house, my clothes, and so on. I try to find myself in things, but it never succeeds, and I end up losing myself in them. This is the destiny of ego.
Identification of the Ego with Things
Those working in the advertising business know very well: in order to sell a person a thing that is not particularly needed, he must be convinced that it will add something to the way he sees himself, or how others perceive him, in other words, to add something to him self-perception. For example, they can tell you that using these things, you can stand out from the crowd, and therefore you will be even more yourself. Or they can form in your mind an association between the advertised product and some famous person or a young, attractive and happy person. For this purpose, even photographs of some aged or deceased celebrity taken at the time of its heyday are quite suitable.
There is an unspoken assumption in this that, by purchasing this product, you, through some kind of magical merger with this celebrity, become the same, or at least outwardly look like her. Therefore, in most cases, you are not buying a product, but an “identification enhancer”. Company stickers are what you “peck” at first. They are expensive, which means “exclusive”. If anyone could buy them, they would lose their psychological price, and only their physical price would remain, which would hardly make up at least a small fraction of what you pay.
What things a person identifies with depends on himself - on his age, gender, income level, membership in a particular social class, fashion, cultural environment, etc. What you identify with is relevant only to the content ; whereas the unconscious compelled need to identify is structural. This is one of the main modes of functioning of the egotypic mind.
Paradoxically, the existence of the so-called consumer society is based on the fact that it is impossible to find oneself through things: the sense of satisfaction of the ego does not last long, and therefore you are always looking for something more, keep buying, keep consuming.
Of course, in that physical dimension where our surface “selves” dwell, things are necessary and are an indispensable part of life. We need housing, clothes, furniture, tools, vehicles. At the same time, in our life there can be things valued for beauty or inherent qualities. It is necessary to show respect for the world of things, and not to despise it. Every thing has a Being. A thing is a transient form, originating in a single, lifeless form, emanating from the source of all things, all bodies, all forms. In the most ancient cultures, people believed that the spirit lives in everything, even in the so-called inanimate objects, and in this respect were much closer to the truth than we are today. Living in a world devoid of vital energy and struck by mental abstraction, you stop feeling the life force of the universe. Most people do not exist in living, but in conceptual reality.
However, it cannot be said that we show respect for things if we use them as a means of self-reinforcement, in other words, if we try to find ourselves with their help. And the ego does just that. The egotypic identification with things creates attachment to things, an obsession with things, which, in turn, forms our consumer society and its economic structures, where the only measure of progress is invariably more. An uncontrollable insatiable desire to have more is both a functional disorder and a disease.
This is the same functional disorder that manifests itself in cancer cells when their goal is to multiply themselves. Sick cells do not realize that the destruction of the body of which they are a part will lead to their own death. Some economists are so attached to the concept of growth that they cannot do without this word, calling the recession "negative growth."
Many people spend a significant part of their life becoming owners of things. That is why one of the diseases of our time is called proliferation - a rapid increase in the number of things. When you stop feeling life, which you yourself are, you try to fill it with things. As a spiritual practice, I advise you, through self-observation, to explore your relationship with the world of things, especially with those created by the world of “mine”.
You need to be vigilant and honest to understand whether, for example, your self-esteem is connected with things that you own. Do any things stimulate the appearance in you of a subtle sense of self-importance or superiority? Does the absence of any things make you feel lower than those who have more than you? Do you mention some things unintentionally or, perhaps, deliberately exhibit them in order to raise your price in someone's eyes, and through this in your own? Do you feel resentment or anger, some inferiority of self-perception, if someone else has more than you, or when you yourself lose something very valuable?
History of the Lost Ring
At one time I visited people as an adviser and spiritual teacher. Then I visited a woman twice a week whose body was affected by cancer. She was a little over forty, and she was a school teacher. Doctors did not give her more than a few months. Sometimes during my visits we hardly talked, but mostly sat in silence. It was during such hours that she experienced the first glimpses of inner peace, the existence of which she had not even suspected for many years of her work at school.
However, one day I found her in a state of great suffering and irritation.
- What happened? I asked.
Her diamond ring, which cost a lot of money and expensive as a memory, was gone, and she told me that she was sure that a woman had stolen him, who came for several hours a day to look after her. She was amazed how a person can be so callous and heartless to do this, and asked me if she should hold a confrontation with this woman or if it was better to call the police right away. I replied that I did not know, but asked to think about whether this ring or anything else at this point in her life is so important.
“You don't understand,” she said. - This is my grandmother's ring. I wore it every day until I got sick and until my hands were swollen. For me, this is not just a ring. How can I not get upset?
The quick response, anger and the desire to defend themselves, sounded in her voice, showed that there was still not enough presence in her to look inside herself and to separate the reaction to the event from the event itself and to observe both. Her anger and desire to defend testified that the ego continues to speak through her.
I said:
“I would like to ask you a few questions, just don’t answer them immediately, but see if you can find the answers within yourself.” After each question I will take a short pause. When the answer comes to you, it does not necessarily come in the form of words.
She said she was ready to listen.
I asked:
“Do you realize that at some point, perhaps quite soon, you will have to part with this ring?” How much more time do you need for you to be ready to let him go? Will you become smaller if you let it go? How can who you are be made smaller by this loss? - The last question was voiced, and silence reigned for several minutes.
When the woman spoke again, a smile appeared on her face, and she herself looked calm:
- The last question made me understand something important. At first I turned to the mind, and he replied: "Yes, of course, you will become smaller." Then I asked this question to myself: “Has the one who I am become less?” This time I tried to feel rather than come up with an answer. I suddenly felt the nature of my “I Am”. I've never felt this before. If I feel so strongly the nature of my “I Am,” then who I am cannot in any way become smaller. I still feel it, something calm, but very lively.
“It is the joy of Jehovah,” I said. “You can only feel it when you get out of your head.” One must feel it. It must not be thought. The ego knows nothing about him, because it consists of thoughts. In fact, the ring was in your head in the form of the thought that you took for your "I Am." You thought that “I Am” or at least part of it is in the ring.
Everything that the ego distorts and becomes attached to, replaces the Being, but the ego cannot feel it. You can value things and look after them, but if you become attached to them, then you know that this is the work of the ego. In fact, you are not so much attached to a thing as to a thought containing "I" or "mine." Accepting this loss as a whole, you go beyond the limits of ego, and then who you are - “I Am” - arises awareness itself.
My ward said:
“Now I understand something from what Jesus said,“ If someone takes your shirt, give him your outer clothing, too, ”but before that it wasn’t filled with that meaning for me.
“That's right,” I said. “But this does not mean that you no longer need to lock the door.” This means that letting go of things is an act of much greater power than protecting and holding them.
In the last two weeks of her life, as the body died out, it became more and more luminous, as if light streamed through it. She let go of much of what she owned. She let go of the woman who, as she thought, stole her ring, and with every thing released, her joy only deepened. When her mother called me to report the death of her daughter, she mentioned that after death a ring was found. It was in the bathroom of the medical office. Maybe that woman returned the ring, or maybe she was lying there all the time? No one will ever know. We know only one thing for sure: life gives you only the experience that best contributes to the evolution of your consciousness. How to understand what kind of experience do you need? Very simple - the one you live at the moment.
Is there anything wrong with being proud of your possessions, or feeling lower than those who have more than you? Not at all. In a sense of pride, the need to stand out, strengthening your “I” through “more than” (and weakening through “less than”) there is nothing that is right or wrong - this is ego. The ego is not something wrong - it is unconsciousness. By observing the ego in yourself, you go beyond it. Do not take it too seriously. Noticing the egotypic behavior in yourself, smile. It can even make you laugh at times. How could humanity be captured by this for so long? First of all, know that ego (egoism) is not something personal. The ego is not you. The fact that you consider ego to be your personal problem is even more ego.
Ego and Illusion of Possession
What does it really mean to own something? What does it mean to make something "your"? If you stop on the street of New York, you show on a skyscraper and say: “He is mine. I own it, ”- then you are either fabulously rich, or you are mistaken, or lie. In any case, you are telling a certain story in which the thought forms “I” and “skyscraper” merge into one. This is how the mental principle of ownership works. If everyone agrees with your words, then signed sheets of paper will appear that certify that people agree with this. You are rich. If no one agrees with this story, you will be sent to a psychiatrist. Either you have a hallucination or you are an inveterate liar.
It is important to understand here that neither the history, nor the thought form from which it follows, regardless of whether people agree with you or not, has absolutely nothing to do with who you are. Even if people agree, it's still a fiction. Many, until they find themselves on their deathbed and until all the outer is gone, do not understand that nothing, no thing, has nothing to do with who they are. When death is near, the whole concept of possession loses any meaning. In the last moments of life, people also realize that while they spent their lives searching for their fuller sense of self, their Essence - what they really were looking for - was always with them, but it was densely covered by identification with things, which ultimately turned out to be identification wisely.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus said, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” What does “poor in spirit” mean? No baggage, no identification. Neither with things, nor with mental concepts that would form this sense of self in them. And what is the “kingdom of heaven”? This is a simple but deep feeling of the joy of Existence, remaining after you release the identification and become a "poor spirit."
That is why the renunciation of all property since ancient times was a spiritual practice both in the East and in the West. However, renouncing property does not automatically make you free from ego. The ego will try to guarantee its survival by finding something that can be identified with, for example, a mental image of oneself that has gone beyond the limits of interest in material possession, and therefore has become higher than others, more spiritual. There are people who have denied everything - whose ego is greater than that of millionaires. When you eliminate one kind of identification, the ego quickly finds another.
Ultimately, he does not care what to identify with, the main thing is that there is something. Anti-consumerism, or the rejection of personal property, is a different thought form, a different mental position, which can be a substitute for identification with property. With it, you can make yourself right, and others wrong. As we will see later, making oneself right and others wrong is one of the fundamental stereotypes of the egotypic mind, one of the main forms of unconsciousness. In other words, the content of the ego can change, but the structure of the mind that supports it cannot.
One of the unconscious prerequisites is that, having identified with a material object through the illusion of possessing it, you will endow yourself with its undoubted strength and constancy, which will enter into your sense of self and give it even greater strength and constancy. This applies to a large extent to the building, and to an even greater extent to the land, since you consider it the only thing that belongs to you that is not in danger of destruction. In the case of land, the absurdity of the concept of ownership is even more obvious. During the time of white colonization, the indigenous population of North America could not understand what it was - land ownership. Therefore, when the Europeans forced them to sign pieces of paper, as a result of which they lost this land, the Indians were not able to comprehend this. According to their ideas, they belong to the earth, and not the land to them.
The ego seeks to equate possession with Existence: I own - it means I exist. And the more I have, the more I exist. The ego lives through comparison. The way others perceive you turns into how you perceive yourself. If everyone lived in large mansions and were rich, then the mansion and wealth would not serve to enhance your sense of self. Then you could leave wealth, move into a simple house and regain true identity.
Then you could consider yourself more spiritual than the rest, and others would also perceive you. The way others see you becomes a mirror for you saying who you look like and who you are. In most cases, a sense of self-esteem ego associated with the wealth that you own in the eyes of others. You need them because they give such a sense of self.
And if you live in a cultural environment that largely equates self-esteem with what and how much you own - unless, of course, you yourself are able to look through this collective delusion - then for the rest of your life you are doomed to chase things in the vain hope of finding in them their own value and completeness of self-perception.
How can you let go of attachment to things?
Do not even try. It's impossible. Attachment to things goes away when you stop looking for yourself in them. Just be aware of this attachment. Sometimes you may not even know that you are attached to something, in other words, you have identified yourself until you lose it or feel the threat of loss. If you are upset, alarmed, etc., it will mean that you are attached. At the moment of awareness that you are identified with a thing, this identification ceases to be complete. "I am awareness, aware that there is attachment." This is the beginning of the transformation of consciousness.
Ego and Greed: the need to have more
The ego is identified with a sense of possession, but satisfaction from possession is a relatively petty feeling and does not live long. Hidden inside, it remains in the form of deep dissatisfaction, a sense of incompleteness and failure. Saying, "I have not enough yet," the ego actually means: "I am not enough."
As we have already seen, possession - the concept of owning something - is a fiction created by the ego to give itself the qualities of visible strength and permanence, as well as to stand out and become special. If you are unable to find yourself through a sense of possession, then it means one more powerful and characteristic ego tendency: the need to have more, which we can otherwise call “greed”. No ego can live long without needing more.
Therefore, greed, even more than the feeling of possession, supports the life of the ego. The ego wants more to want than to have. Therefore, a weak feeling of satisfaction from what I have is always replaced by another feeling - I want to have more. It is a psychological need to have more, in other words, a need to have more things to be identified with. This addictive need is not real.
Sometimes the psychological need so much characteristic of the ego, to have more, or the feeling of insufficiency, is transferred to the level of the physical body and feels like an insatiable hunger. Bulimia sufferers often cause vomiting in order to continue eating. Hungry is their mind, not the body. This digestive upset can be cured if those suffering from bulimia cease to identify with the mind and come into contact with the body, and thereby feel its true needs, and not the pseudo-needs of the egotypic mind.
Some egoes know what they want, and relentlessly, with ruthless and inexorable cruelty, pursue their goal. Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler - these are just a few large examples. However, the energy behind greed creates energy of the same intensity, but of opposite polarity, which ultimately leads to their fall. Nevertheless, they make unhappy themselves and many others, on a scale of life, create hell on earth. The desires of most ego are in conflict. They simultaneously want different things, or even have no idea what they want, except for one thing - they never want what they have: the present moment.
The companions of unquenchable greed are anxiety, impatience, boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction. Greed is a structural element, therefore, as long as the structure is preserved, no amount of its contents can give a lasting sense of satisfaction. The acute form of greed in the form of the desire for something indefinite is easily found in the developing ego of adolescents, many of whom are constantly in a state of negativity and dissatisfaction.
The physical needs of the entire population of the planet - in food, water, shelter, clothing and basic amenities - could be easily met if the distribution of resources were balanced. The lack of balance is a consequence of the ego's greed and the result of its insane, predatory and irrepressible need to have more. Its collective expression, embodiment and personification are global economic structures, huge corporations, which are essentially egotypic entities competing among themselves in order to have more. Their only and all-embarrassing goal is profit. They pursue her with absolute cruelty.
In the original “wanting,” letters. "Desire". Translated as “greed”, because this old polysemous word better expresses the idea of insatiable, predatory hunger. In Buddhist mythology, it is represented in an impressive way of "pret," "hungry spirits." (Note transl.)
Addictive behavior is one of the forms of destructive behavior, expressed in the desire to escape from reality by changing your mental state by taking certain substances or constantly fixing attention on certain objects or activities, which is accompanied by the development of intense emotions. This process captures a person so much that it begins to control his life. A person becomes helpless in front of his addiction. Willful efforts are weakened and do not give the opportunity to resist addiction. (Note transl.)
Nature, animals, people, even their own personnel are nothing more than figures in the balance sheet, lifeless consumables for subsequent disposal.
The thought forms “I”, “mine”, “more than”, “I want”, “I need”, “I must have” and “not enough” characterize not the content, but the structure of the ego. Content is mutable and interchangeable. Until you learn to recognize these thought forms in yourself, while you remain unconscious, you will believe what they say; you are doomed to act on the basis of these unconscious thoughts, you are doomed to seek and not find - because while these thought forms are in effect, no property, no place, no person or condition will satisfy you. As long as the egotypic structure remains in the same place, no content will suit you. Whatever you have and what you receive, you will not be happy. You will continue to look for something that will give hope of a fuller fulfillment and to feel full in return for inferiority, and you will continue to nourish the feeling of insufficiency that lives within.
The identification of the ego with the body
Beyond things, another basic form of identification is “my” body. The body is male or female, and therefore the feeling of being a man or woman for most people becomes the first and very significant part of self-perception. Gender becomes an identification that is encouraged from an early age and encourages you to play a certain role, to follow conditioned behaviors that affect all aspects of your life, and not just those related to the sexual aspect. Many people are completely trapped in this role.
Moreover, in part of traditional Western cultural communities, identification with a known gender affords a certain underestimation of self-esteem. The worst that can happen to a woman living within the framework of some cultural traditions is to remain unmarried or childless, and with a man to lose their sexual potency and be unable to produce children. The life realization of a person is perceived as something depending on his gender.
The self-awareness of most people in the West is to a great extent determined precisely by the appearance and condition of the body - its strength or weakness, external beauty or ugliness - compared to others. For many, self-esteem is intrinsically linked to physical strength, fit and good looks. No less than those who have it underestimated, because they perceive their body as ugly or imperfect.
In some cases, the mental image or concept of “my body” completely distorts reality. The young woman thinks she is overweight, and for this reason exhausts herself with hunger, although she actually looks pretty elegant. She lost the ability to see her body. All that she “sees” is a mental idea of him, and it says: “I am fat,” or: “I will get fat.” The basis of this state is identification with the mind. Along with the increasing identification of a person with the mind, which is why egotypic functional disorder only intensifies, in recent decades there has been a serious increase in the number of cases of anorexia - loss of appetite. If the patient could see her body without interference from the mind and judgment, or at least see these judgments as they are, and not accept them on faith, or, even better, if she could, being at rest, feel her the body from the inside - this would initiate healing.
Those who are identified with their bright appearance, physical strength, experience and suffer when these attributes begin to fade and disappear, but it cannot be otherwise. Now their very personality, which is built on this, is threatened with extinction. In any case, a significant part of their personality, negative or positive, is the body, no matter whether it is beautiful or ugly. More precisely, they build the concept of their personality on the foundation of "I" -thinking, which is mistakenly fixed on a mental image, the idea of their body, which in reality is nothing more than a physical form that shares the fate of all other forms - impermanence, variability and, ultimately complete decay.
Equating the self with a physical body endowed with the ability of sensory perception, which is predetermined to grow old, fade and die, inevitably sooner or later leads to suffering. Avoiding identification with the body does not mean neglecting it, despising it, and not caring about it. If the body is strong, beautiful, strong, you can highly value these qualities - as long as they exist. You can also improve his condition with healthy nutrition and exercise. If you do not consider yourself a body, then at the time of withering of its beauty, reduction of strength and capabilities, it will not affect your self-esteem or personality. In fact, when the body begins to weaken, it is easier for the light of consciousness, the dimension of the formless, to break through its fading form.
Not only people with a good or almost perfect body equate it with who they are. One can very easily identify with a “problem” body, turning its imperfection, illness or impotence into its identification. Then you can consider yourself “suffering” from one or another chronic disease or impotence, and talk about yourself as a body. In this case, you will be surrounded by the attention of doctors and relatives who will constantly support your speculative self-identification with the role of the sufferer or patient. As a result, you will unconsciously cling to the disease, because having become a thought form of a different kind, with which the ego can already be identified, it will become an important part of your self-perception. Having found the identification, the ego does not want to part with it. It is amazing, but sometimes, in search of a means for its strengthening and enhancing self-identification, the ego is even able to “invent” diseases for itself.
How to feel the inner body
Despite the fact that identification with the body is one of the main forms of ego existence, there is good news here - you can easily go beyond it. This is done not by trying to convince yourself that you are not a body, but by transferring attention from its external form and thinking of it as beautiful, ugly, strong, weak, too fat, too thin, to the feeling of vitality that lives in it. It doesn’t matter how your body looks outside - behind the external form it represents an extremely saturated and vibrant energy field.
If you still do not know how to be aware of the “inner body”, then right now close your eyes briefly and try to feel life in your hands. Do not ask your mind about it. He will say: "I do not feel anything." Perhaps he will also say: "Give me something more interesting that I could think of." Therefore, do not ask for the mind, but direct your attention directly into the hands. By this I mean - recognize in them a subtle sense of vitality. It is there. To even notice it, you need to go there only with your attention.
At first you can feel a slight tingling sensation, then a feeling of energy or vitality will appear. If you briefly leave attention in your hands, this feeling will intensify. Some do not even have to close their eyes. They will be able to feel their “inner hands” by reading these lines. Now go to the feet, hold your attention there for about a minute, and then begin to feel your hands and feet at the same time. Include in this process the rest of the body — legs, arms, stomach, chest, and so on — until you become aware of the inner body as a single sensation of vitality.
What I call the inner body is actually not the body anymore - but the vital energy, the bridge between form and formless. Develop a habit of feeling your inner body whenever possible. After some time, you no longer need to close your eyes for this. For example, try to find out if you can feel the inner body and at the same time listen to someone. It seems almost a paradox, but in contact with the inner body you are no longer identified with either the body or the mind. In other words, you are moving away from identification with form to formless - and we could call it Jehovah. This is your true identity. Body awareness becomes for you not only an anchor in the present moment, but also a door from prison, from ego. In addition, body awareness strengthens the immune system and the body's ability to heal itself.
Oblivion of Absolute
The ego is always the identification of oneself with the form, it is a search for oneself in some form, and therefore, the loss of oneself in it. Forms are not just material objects and physical bodies. Of much greater importance are thought forms that continuously arise in the field of your consciousness. Thought forms are energy formations, more subtle and less dense than physical matter, but, nevertheless, forms. What you realize as a never-ending voice in your head is a stream of continuous and intrusive thinking.
If each thought completely absorbs your attention, if you are so strongly identified with the voice in the head and with the emotions that accompany it that you lose yourself in every thought and emotion, then you are completely identified with the form, which means that the ego (egoism) holds you in a stranglehold . The ego is a conglomerate of repeating and repeatedly returning thought forms and conditioned mental-emotional patterns of behavior, stable stereotypes of behavior endowed with a sense of “I”, self-perception. The ego appears when your sense of Existence, the feeling of "I Am," merges with form. This is the meaning of identification. This is the oblivion of Jehovah, the original and initial error, the illusion of absolute separation, which turns reality into a nightmare.
From Descartes' mistake to Sartre's intuitive grasp
Descartes, a 17th-century philosopher, recognized as the founder of modern philosophy, expressed this initial mistake (mistaking it for the original truth) with an aphorism: "I think, then I exist." This was his answer to the question: "Is there anything that I can consider absolutely certain?" The fact that he himself constantly thinks, Descartes considered unquestionable, and therefore equated thinking with Existence, in other words, equated personality - I am - to thinking. Instead of the original truth, he found the root of the ego, but did not understand this.
It took almost three hundred years for another famous philosopher to see what Descartes, like everyone else, overlooked. His name is Jean-Paul Sartre. He looked very deeply into Descartes’s statement “I think, then I exist”, and suddenly realized that, in his words, “Consciousness, saying“ I am, ”is not thinking.” What did he mean? When you realize that you are thinking, this awareness is not part of thinking. This is another dimension of consciousness. This is the same awareness that says, "I Am."
If you had nothing but thoughts in you, you would not even know what you think. You would be like someone who is dreaming, but does not know that it is a dream. You would be identified with every thought as a dreaming person with every dreaming image. Many people live just like lunatics, trapped in old dysfunctional mental attitudes, continuously reproducing the same nightmare reality. If you know that you are dreaming, then inside this dream you are awakened. This is another dimension of consciousness.
The meaning of Sartre's intuitive comprehension is very deep, but he himself was still too identified with thinking to fully realize the importance of his discovery - the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness.
Peace Above All Ego
There are many reports of people who survived the tragic loss of the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness. Some lost all their property, others lost their children or spouse, others lost their social status, reputation or physical abilities. In some cases, in a war or as a result of a disaster, people lost everything at once and found that they were left “with nothing.” We can call this an extreme situation. All that was identified with them was lost, which provided them with a sense of self and supported it.
The acute longing or intense fear experienced by them at the very beginning suddenly and inexplicably parted and gave way to the holy feeling of the Presence, deep peace, serenity and complete freedom from fear. This was probably familiar to St. Paul, who said: “And the peace of God, which is beyond all mind ...” (Phil. 4: 7). And this is really a peace in which, it seems, there is no sense, and the people who survived it asked themselves the question: “How can it be that when I see all this, I feel such peace?”
The answer is simple, if you understand what the ego is and how it works. If the forms that give you identification and determine your sense of self disappear, or when they are taken from you, then such a loss can lead to the collapse of the ego, because the ego is identification with the form. If you no longer have anything to identify with, then who are you? When the surrounding forms die or death approaches them, your sense of Jehovah, your “I Am” is freed from the bonds of forms: the spirit is freed from imprisonment in matter.
You are aware of the essence of your identity, you are aware of it as identity with the world of the absence of forms, the all-pervading Presence, Existing, preceding the appearance of any form, any identification. You are aware of your true identity with consciousness as such, and not with what it is identified with. This is the rest of God. The first and final truth is that you are not this and not this, but I Am.
Not all survivors of this great loss experienced such an awakening, such an identification with form. Some immediately created a strong mental image or thought-form “I am a victim”, or considered that what happened was the result of some circumstances, or happened due to the fault of some people, the injustice of fate, or the will of God. This thought-form and the emotion it induced - anger, indignation, self-pity, etc., with which they were firmly identified, immediately replaced all other forms of identification that disappeared due to loss. In other words, the ego (egoism) quickly finds itself a new form. A person does not very much connect with the ego the fact that his new form is deeply unhappy, and will remain so as long as the ego has an identification, it does not matter, good or bad. In reality, the new ego will be even more condensed, more rigid and impenetrable than the former.
When such a loss happens, you either resist or surrender. Someone is bitterly and deeply indignant, while someone becomes sympathetic, wise and loving. Recession means the inner acceptance of what is. You are open to life. Resistance is internal contraction, tension, hardening of the shell of the ego. You are closed. Whatever action you take in a state of internal resistance (which we can also call negativity), it will create even more resistance, and the Universe will not be on your side; life will not help you. Sunlight cannot penetrate closed shutters. When you surrender internally, when you give in, then a new dimension of consciousness opens.
If an action is possible or necessary, then it will be carried out in alignment with the whole and will be supported by creative rationality and an unconditioned consciousness with which you become one when you are in a state of inner openness. Then circumstances and people begin to help and cooperate with you. Happy coincidences occur. If no action is possible, you continue to remain in a state of inner peace that comes to you through yielding. You rest in God.
Eckhart Tolle: New Earth
The ego has no real basis. This is not some living, really existing creature, which has its own will, capable of performing some independent actions. This is an entity that has arisen in the consciousness in the form of a certain image, a character of a dream that has a dream called universal life, and therefore the ego itself cannot do anything. Actions attributed to ego-personalities are only embodied in images of this pseudo essence, desires arising in consciousness.
Initially in the mind there is a hunt, a desire for a change of state, a desire for impressions perceived in the form of sensations. Indeed, nothing but sensations arising in consciousness and experienced by consciousness does not exist. The whole world visible and perceived by us, through all our senses, exists only in our perception and only in the form of various visions and sensations. There is no other world except the world of visions and sensations arising in us.
The hunting that has arisen in consciousness is the basis for the emergence of all subsequent desires. We can say that this initial hunt sheds itself in all subsequent desires. And desires are a continuation and at the same time a manifestation of this initial hunt, the desire to change states, change impressions, change sensations.
Desires, in turn, are formed into images that can be called images of desires and described as: “What do I want?” Then there are images of actions that need to be performed to satisfy these desires. They can be expressed like this: “How do I get what I want? What do I need to do for this? ”This is where the images of the characters arise through which all these modes of action will be embodied. These characters are ego-personalities.
So in consciousness a multilevel game of imagination arises and then occurs, which we, the acting characters of this game, perceive as the life of the universe and as our own life. But there is no "our" life, just as there is no life in the universe. All this universal life, of which our personal life is a part, is only a set of images that have arisen in the consciousness perceived by the very same consciousness in the form of various visions and sensations. And there is nothing else.
Therefore, there is no liberation from the ego. Indeed, the ego itself is nothing, an image in consciousness that is part of the game of imagination. And therefore, all existing methods of liberation from the ego are nothing more than a continuation of the game of imagination. The only really existing liberation that can happen is the liberation from the obsession with the imagination wound up by the game, into which the consciousness has been drawn.
This is an exemption from flirting. Consciousness involved in its own game of imagination, identifying itself with all the acting characters of this game, was so carried away by this game that it ceased to understand what is what, what is an ego-personality, and what is consciousness itself, which created and fills it with all the qualities necessary for it. This is the same as a person during sleep ceases to perceive himself as sleeping and dreaming, and perceives himself in the form of a character withdrawn to him. That is why such a liberation is often called awakening, that its nature is the same as the nature of awakening from sleep.
This release is also called understanding or awareness, because as a result of it, in the consciousness that previously identified itself with one of the characters in the game, there is an understanding and awareness of what is in reality, that there is a game of imagination and that there is THAT that this game observes and receives from her all the impressions and sensations that arise.
It can also be called self-awareness, since the consciousness involved in its own game of imagination, being extracted from it, is again aware of itself by what it is. And what is usually called self-knowledge is the search for ways to free oneself from the obsession of the imagination wrought by the game. This is a search for ways to return self-awareness, a search for ways leading to an understanding of what the Self is in reality.
The ego (small "I", the false "I", the second "I", it, ego) is all that we are NOT in reality, it is our false essence, which is constantly looking for something, wants, is afraid or complexes .
The ego consists of our fears, complexes, beliefs, beliefs, eternal desires. The language of the Ego is our uncontrolled mind, which is constantly chatting, the mind, which constantly condemns, criticizes, which makes the assessment “like / dislike”, “good / bad”.
It is from our Ego that constant desires emanate: to have a lot of money, material wealth, to have love, to want “this” and not “what really is”, to want to look good and not get old, to want the best (car, house, partner , friend), etc. All this gives rise to inevitable suffering, because there is no limit to the needs of our Ego! As long as we identify with our Ego, we remain blind and cannot see the reality as it really is. The present moment is death for the Ego, therefore this false entity does everything possible to only escape from what is "here and now." In those moments when our mind is silent, when we are in the present moment, our Ego dissolves, at that moment we are who we really are - the higher “I”, “soul”, “higher mind”, “God "," Truth ", etc.
Traditional Indian yoga is aimed precisely at getting rid of the shackles of our ego and ultimately becoming what we really are - the higher "I", the Higher Mind, Spirit, God, Enlightened - everyone calls it differently, but meaning and finite is true one.
Egoism - is a narrower concept, different from the ego. Egoism is just a small fraction of the human ego. A selfish person cares only about himself, pursues selfish goals. Such a person can do anything for his own benefit, despite the fact that someone from his actions may suffer. For example, a person opens a window in a vehicle without asking about the passengers around him.
Therefore, do not connect the concepts of ego and egoism.
There is also such a thing as “Alter Ego”:
What is Alter Ego?
Alter Ego (Alter Ego) - the second essence of man, the second person or person inside the person. The phenomenon when a person changes completely in a particular environment. For example, a quiet excellent student enters the basketball court, and begins to tear and throw everything around, forgetting about the rules. An enclosed guy enters the stage, and amazes the audience with his play and depth of feeling. Exhausted modest professor with glasses, goes to a disco and gives heat to the young.
On our spiritual path, for us only the concept of “Ego” matters.
Ego: The Modern State of Humanity (Ego)
Words — whether they are spoken aloud or remain in the form of unspoken thoughts — can produce an almost hypnotic effect on you. They fascinate you, you easily get lost in them and begin to unconditionally believe that if you attached a word to something, then you know why. The fact is, you don’t know what you attached it to. You just covered the secret with a label. Everything - a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and especially a man - is absolutely unknowable. Because in them there is an immeasurable, incomprehensible, bottomless depth. All that we are able to perceive, feel and what we can think of is the surface layer of reality, which is smaller than the tip of the iceberg.
Under the outward appearance, not only is everything connected with everything - everything is connected with the Source of all life from which it came. Even a stone, and even better - a flower or a bird can show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at them, or hold them in your hands and allow them to be, without covering them with mental labels, a feeling of awe and surprise rises in you. Their very essence speaks silently to you and reflects your own essence. This is what great artists feel and bring to their art. Van Gogh did not say: "This is just an old chair." He looked, looked and looked. In this chair, he felt Existence. Then he went over to the canvas and took a brush. The price of that chair was a few dollars. The same chair, just written by him, today costs more than $ 25 million.
If you do not cover the world with words and labels, in your life, lost a long time ago, when humanity, instead of using thinking, was captured by it, a magical feeling returns. Depth returns to your life. Everything regains its novelty and freshness. And the biggest miracle is the feeling of one’s true self, which is more important than any words, thoughts, mental labels and images. For this to happen, you need to clear your sense of "I", the sense of Existence from that with which it was mixed and confused, in other words, identified. This book is about how to clean it.
The faster you find verbal and mental labels and attach them to things, people or situations, the less your reality is filled with life, and the weaker you feel this reality, the miracle of life, which constantly unfolds inside and around you. This way you can develop the ability, but at the same time lose your wisdom, which means joy, love, creativity, and vitality. They lurk in the gap of silence between perception and interpretation. Of course, we have to use words and thinking, they have their own beauty - but do we really need to be held captive?
Words reduce the scale of reality to such an extent that the human mind can grasp something. The language consists of five main sounds produced by the vocal cords. These are the vowels a, e, and, o, y. Other sounds are consonants, they are made using compressed air: s, f, f, etc. Do you really think that any combination of these basic sounds can explain who you are, or explain the ultimate goal of the Universe, or at least what is a tree or stone in its depths?
The ego is a false "I"
The word “I,” depending on the context, personifies either the greatest mistake or the deepest truth. In its usual sense, it is not only one of the most common (along with its derivatives “me”, “me”, “mine”), but also one of those that are very misleading. The word "I" in the framework of ordinary everyday use embodies the original error, the wrong perception of who you are, an imaginary sense of personality. This is the ego. Albert Einstein, who possessed the gift to feel the essence of not only the reality of space and time, but also of human nature, called this imaginary perception of himself an “optical illusion of consciousness”.
Then this imaginary "I" is taken as a reference point for further erroneous interpretations of reality, as well as the basis from which all thought processes, variants of interaction and relationships are repelled. Your reality turns into a reflection of the original illusion.
The good news is: if you see an illusion as an illusion, then it dissolves. Recognition of deception is its end. A necessary condition for the survival of an illusion is that you take it for reality. Therefore, when you see who you are not, the reality of who you are arises by itself. This is exactly what will happen when reading this and the next chapter, which describes the mechanics of the imaginary "I", which we call the ego. So, what is the nature of this imaginary "I" (egoism)?
When pronouncing the word “I”, you mean not at all what you really are. The infinite depth of you true as a result of the monstrous contraction is replaced by the sound produced by the vocal cords, the thought of the "I" in your mind, or something else with which this "I" can be identified. So, what does “I” and its derivatives - “me”, “me”, “mine” usually refer to?
When the child learns that the sequence of sounds pronounced by the parents is his name, he begins to equate the word, which becomes a thought in his mind, with who he is. At this stage, some children speak of themselves in the third person: "Johnny is hungry." Soon they learn the magic word “I” and equate it with their name, which before that has been equated to who they are. Then other thoughts come and merge with the original self. The next step is to identify and label those things that will make up “me”, will become part of “me”.
This is an identification with objects, that is, the endowment of things, and, ultimately, thoughts designating them, their sense of self. So the child identifies with them. When “his” toy breaks or someone takes it away, he experiences great suffering. Not because the toy has any special value - the child will soon lose interest in it, and it will be replaced by other toys, other objects - but because of the thought that it is “his”. The toy has become part of the child’s self-development, the sense of “I”.
As the child grows, the original “I” thought draws together other thoughts: it is identified with his gender, his things, the perceiving and feeling body, nationality, race, religion, profession. Other things that “I” is identified with are roles (mother, father, husband, wife, etc.), accumulated experience or opinions, likes and dislikes, as well as what happened to “me” in the past, the memory of which is a combination of thoughts that define my further self-perception as “I and my experience”.
In the end, they are nothing more than thoughts randomly gathered together as a result of the fact that they were all endowed with my self-perception. It is this mental construct that you mean when you pronounce the word “I”. More precisely, most of the time, speaking or thinking like “I”, you really do not say or think, but some aspect of the mental construction, an element of the egotypic “I”. When you wake up, you will continue to use the word “I,” but then it will come from a much deeper place within you.
Most people are still completely identified with a continuous stream of thoughts in their heads, obsessive thinking, most of which is characterized by repeatability and lack of meaning. For them, no “I” exists outside the thought process and the emotions that come with it. This is called being spiritually unconscious. When you tell them that they have a never-ending voice in their head, they either wonder: “What voice?” Or vehemently deny it, and yet this is the very voice, thinker, unobserved mind. It can be considered a certain entity that has taken possession of them.
For some, the moment of the first identification with thoughts became unforgettable, a shift from the state when they were a reflection of the contents of one’s own mind to awareness that arose somewhere in the background. For others, this happened so subtly that they either did not even notice, or felt a certain influx of joy or inner peace, not understanding the reason for this.
Ego: Voice in the Head
The first glimpse of awareness occurred to me when I was a freshman at the University of London. I had to take the subway to the university library twice a week. It happened at nine in the morning near the end of rush hour. Once I was sitting opposite a woman of about thirty. I had seen her on the train more than once, so I couldn't help but find out. Despite the fact that there were a lot of people in the car, the seats on either side of it remained empty. The reason, no doubt, was her strange appearance. The woman's gaze was extremely intense, and she constantly spoke to herself in a loud and irritated voice.
She went so deep into her thoughts that she was completely unconscious. She seemed not even to notice others. Her head was lowered and slightly tilted to the left, as if a woman was addressing the one sitting next to her. Although I don’t remember exactly what she was talking about, her monologue was something like this: “And then she tells me ... so I tell her: no, you're lying, how dare you blame me ... because you have always been one of those I deceived me, I believed you, and you betrayed me ... ”In her voice, angry intonations were heard, addressed to the one whom she considered wrong, and who, in theory, should defend themselves so as not to be destroyed. When the train arrived at Tottenham Court Road station, she got up and, without interrupting the flow of words, headed for the door.
I also had to go out, so I stood behind her. On the street, she headed towards Bedford Square, still immersed in an imaginary dialogue, angrily accusing and proving something. I was curious, and I decided to follow her, because I still had to go in the same direction. Despite being completely immersed in an imaginary conversation, the woman seemed to know where she needed to go. Soon, the impressive Senate House, a high-rise building of the 1930s, the main administrative building of the university and the library appeared.
I was amazed. Did we go to the same place with her? Yes, she was heading there. Is she a teacher, student, office worker or librarian? Maybe she conducted some kind of psychological experiment? I had no answer. I was about twenty steps behind her, and by the time I entered the building (ironically the former headquarters of the Police of Thoughts in the George Orwell novel “1984”), one of the elevators had already consumed it.
What I witnessed somewhat discouraged me. As an adult twenty-five year student of the first year, I considered myself an intellectual, and I was convinced that all the answers can be found and all the problems of human life can be solved with the help of intelligence, that is, thinking. Then I still did not understand that unconscious thinking is the main problem of human existence. The professors seemed to me to be sages who knew all the answers, and the university seemed to be a temple of knowledge. How could she be part of all this?
Before entering the library, continuing to think about a strange woman, I went into the men's room. I washed my hands and thought: “I hope I don’t finish like her.” A person standing nearby cast a glance in my direction, and I suddenly realized with shock that I not only thought, but also muttered it out loud. “My God, I’m already the same as her,” flashed through my head. Didn't my mind work as continuously as hers? There was an insignificant difference between us. It seemed that anger was the dominant emotion of her thinking. In my case, anxiety prevailed. She thought out loud.
I thought mainly to myself. If she’s crazy, then everyone’s crazy, including me. The difference is only in degree. For a moment, I managed to step back from my mind and see it as if from a deeper point. There has been a brief shift from thinking to awareness. I was still in the men's room, only now alone, and looked at the reflection of my face in the mirror. At the moment of separation from the mind, I laughed out loud. It might seem crazy, but my laughter came from a sound mind. It was a big bellied Buddha laugh. "Life is not as serious as the mind draws." It seems that laughter told me exactly that.
But it was only a glimpse, and very soon he was forgotten. For the next three years, I lived in a state of anxiety and depression, completely identified with the mind. And before awareness returned to me, I had a chance to come very close to the idea of suicide, but then it was already much more than a glimpse. I freed myself from obsessive thinking and imaginary thought created by the “I” mind. That incident not only gave me the first glimpse of awareness, it also shed the first grain of doubt about the absolute value of human intelligence. A few months later, something tragic happened, further exacerbating this doubt.
On Monday morning we came to a lecture by a professor whose mind delighted me. As it turned out, we came only to hear: on the weekend he committed suicide - shot himself. I was shocked. The professor was an extremely respected teacher, and, as it seemed to me, knew all the answers. However, then I had not yet seen an alternative to cultivating the mind. I still did not understand that thinking is just a thin layer of consciousness that we are, and also did not know anything about the ego, not to mention the possibility of discovering it in ourselves.
Content and Structure of the Ego (Ego)
The egotypic mind is entirely conditioned by the past. Its conditioning consists of two parts: content and structure. In the case of a child crying from deep suffering due to a selected toy, the toy is the contents. It can be replaced with any other toy or item. The content with which you are identified is determined by your environment, your upbringing and the surrounding culture. As for the suffering of the child, there is no difference whether it is caused by the loss of a simple wooden toy in the form of an animal or an expensive and complex electronic trinket. The reason for such acute suffering lies in the word “mine” and is structural in nature. An unconscious need to strengthen one's identification through fusion with an object is embedded in the very structure of the egotypic mind.
One of the most basic mental structures through which the ego exists is identification. The word "identification" (or identification) comes from the Latin word idem, meaning "the same," and the word facere, meaning "to do." That is, if I identify with something, then "I" "do it the same." Same as what? I endow it with a perception of myself, becoming a part of my "identification". One of the main levels of identification is identification with things: over time, my toy is replaced by my car, my house, my clothes, and so on. I try to find myself in things, but it never succeeds, and I end up losing myself in them. This is the destiny of ego.
Identification of the Ego with Things
Those working in the advertising business know very well: in order to sell a person a thing that is not particularly needed, he must be convinced that it will add something to the way he sees himself, or how others perceive him, in other words, to add something to him self-perception. For example, they can tell you that using these things, you can stand out from the crowd, and therefore you will be even more yourself. Or they can form in your mind an association between the advertised product and some famous person or a young, attractive and happy person. For this purpose, even photographs of some aged or deceased celebrity taken at the time of its heyday are quite suitable.
There is an unspoken assumption in this that, by purchasing this product, you, through some kind of magical merger with this celebrity, become the same, or at least outwardly look like her. Therefore, in most cases, you are not buying a product, but an “identification enhancer”. Company stickers are what you “peck” at first. They are expensive, which means “exclusive”. If anyone could buy them, they would lose their psychological price, and only their physical price would remain, which would hardly make up at least a small fraction of what you pay.
What things a person identifies with depends on himself - on his age, gender, income level, membership in a particular social class, fashion, cultural environment, etc. What you identify with is relevant only to the content ; whereas the unconscious compelled need to identify is structural. This is one of the main modes of functioning of the egotypic mind.
Paradoxically, the existence of the so-called consumer society is based on the fact that it is impossible to find oneself through things: the sense of satisfaction of the ego does not last long, and therefore you are always looking for something more, keep buying, keep consuming.
Of course, in that physical dimension where our surface “selves” dwell, things are necessary and are an indispensable part of life. We need housing, clothes, furniture, tools, vehicles. At the same time, in our life there can be things valued for beauty or inherent qualities. It is necessary to show respect for the world of things, and not to despise it. Every thing has a Being. A thing is a transient form, originating in a single, lifeless form, emanating from the source of all things, all bodies, all forms. In the most ancient cultures, people believed that the spirit lives in everything, even in the so-called inanimate objects, and in this respect were much closer to the truth than we are today. Living in a world devoid of vital energy and struck by mental abstraction, you stop feeling the life force of the universe. Most people do not exist in living, but in conceptual reality.
However, it cannot be said that we show respect for things if we use them as a means of self-reinforcement, in other words, if we try to find ourselves with their help. And the ego does just that. The egotypic identification with things creates attachment to things, an obsession with things, which, in turn, forms our consumer society and its economic structures, where the only measure of progress is invariably more. An uncontrollable insatiable desire to have more is both a functional disorder and a disease.
This is the same functional disorder that manifests itself in cancer cells when their goal is to multiply themselves. Sick cells do not realize that the destruction of the body of which they are a part will lead to their own death. Some economists are so attached to the concept of growth that they cannot do without this word, calling the recession "negative growth."
Many people spend a significant part of their life becoming owners of things. That is why one of the diseases of our time is called proliferation - a rapid increase in the number of things. When you stop feeling life, which you yourself are, you try to fill it with things. As a spiritual practice, I advise you, through self-observation, to explore your relationship with the world of things, especially with those created by the world of “mine”.
You need to be vigilant and honest to understand whether, for example, your self-esteem is connected with things that you own. Do any things stimulate the appearance in you of a subtle sense of self-importance or superiority? Does the absence of any things make you feel lower than those who have more than you? Do you mention some things unintentionally or, perhaps, deliberately exhibit them in order to raise your price in someone's eyes, and through this in your own? Do you feel resentment or anger, some inferiority of self-perception, if someone else has more than you, or when you yourself lose something very valuable?
History of the Lost Ring
At one time I visited people as an adviser and spiritual teacher. Then I visited a woman twice a week whose body was affected by cancer. She was a little over forty, and she was a school teacher. Doctors did not give her more than a few months. Sometimes during my visits we hardly talked, but mostly sat in silence. It was during such hours that she experienced the first glimpses of inner peace, the existence of which she had not even suspected for many years of her work at school.
However, one day I found her in a state of great suffering and irritation.
- What happened? I asked.
Her diamond ring, which cost a lot of money and expensive as a memory, was gone, and she told me that she was sure that a woman had stolen him, who came for several hours a day to look after her. She was amazed how a person can be so callous and heartless to do this, and asked me if she should hold a confrontation with this woman or if it was better to call the police right away. I replied that I did not know, but asked to think about whether this ring or anything else at this point in her life is so important.
“You don't understand,” she said. - This is my grandmother's ring. I wore it every day until I got sick and until my hands were swollen. For me, this is not just a ring. How can I not get upset?
The quick response, anger and the desire to defend themselves, sounded in her voice, showed that there was still not enough presence in her to look inside herself and to separate the reaction to the event from the event itself and to observe both. Her anger and desire to defend testified that the ego continues to speak through her.
I said:
“I would like to ask you a few questions, just don’t answer them immediately, but see if you can find the answers within yourself.” After each question I will take a short pause. When the answer comes to you, it does not necessarily come in the form of words.
She said she was ready to listen.
I asked:
“Do you realize that at some point, perhaps quite soon, you will have to part with this ring?” How much more time do you need for you to be ready to let him go? Will you become smaller if you let it go? How can who you are be made smaller by this loss? - The last question was voiced, and silence reigned for several minutes.
When the woman spoke again, a smile appeared on her face, and she herself looked calm:
- The last question made me understand something important. At first I turned to the mind, and he replied: "Yes, of course, you will become smaller." Then I asked this question to myself: “Has the one who I am become less?” This time I tried to feel rather than come up with an answer. I suddenly felt the nature of my “I Am”. I've never felt this before. If I feel so strongly the nature of my “I Am,” then who I am cannot in any way become smaller. I still feel it, something calm, but very lively.
“It is the joy of Jehovah,” I said. “You can only feel it when you get out of your head.” One must feel it. It must not be thought. The ego knows nothing about him, because it consists of thoughts. In fact, the ring was in your head in the form of the thought that you took for your "I Am." You thought that “I Am” or at least part of it is in the ring.
Everything that the ego distorts and becomes attached to, replaces the Being, but the ego cannot feel it. You can value things and look after them, but if you become attached to them, then you know that this is the work of the ego. In fact, you are not so much attached to a thing as to a thought containing "I" or "mine." Accepting this loss as a whole, you go beyond the limits of ego, and then who you are - “I Am” - arises awareness itself.
My ward said:
“Now I understand something from what Jesus said,“ If someone takes your shirt, give him your outer clothing, too, ”but before that it wasn’t filled with that meaning for me.
“That's right,” I said. “But this does not mean that you no longer need to lock the door.” This means that letting go of things is an act of much greater power than protecting and holding them.
In the last two weeks of her life, as the body died out, it became more and more luminous, as if light streamed through it. She let go of much of what she owned. She let go of the woman who, as she thought, stole her ring, and with every thing released, her joy only deepened. When her mother called me to report the death of her daughter, she mentioned that after death a ring was found. It was in the bathroom of the medical office. Maybe that woman returned the ring, or maybe she was lying there all the time? No one will ever know. We know only one thing for sure: life gives you only the experience that best contributes to the evolution of your consciousness. How to understand what kind of experience do you need? Very simple - the one you live at the moment.
Is there anything wrong with being proud of your possessions, or feeling lower than those who have more than you? Not at all. In a sense of pride, the need to stand out, strengthening your “I” through “more than” (and weakening through “less than”) there is nothing that is right or wrong - this is ego. The ego is not something wrong - it is unconsciousness. By observing the ego in yourself, you go beyond it. Do not take it too seriously. Noticing the egotypic behavior in yourself, smile. It can even make you laugh at times. How could humanity be captured by this for so long? First of all, know that ego (egoism) is not something personal. The ego is not you. The fact that you consider ego to be your personal problem is even more ego.
Ego and Illusion of Possession
What does it really mean to own something? What does it mean to make something "your"? If you stop on the street of New York, you show on a skyscraper and say: “He is mine. I own it, ”- then you are either fabulously rich, or you are mistaken, or lie. In any case, you are telling a certain story in which the thought forms “I” and “skyscraper” merge into one. This is how the mental principle of ownership works. If everyone agrees with your words, then signed sheets of paper will appear that certify that people agree with this. You are rich. If no one agrees with this story, you will be sent to a psychiatrist. Either you have a hallucination or you are an inveterate liar.
It is important to understand here that neither the history, nor the thought form from which it follows, regardless of whether people agree with you or not, has absolutely nothing to do with who you are. Even if people agree, it's still a fiction. Many, until they find themselves on their deathbed and until all the outer is gone, do not understand that nothing, no thing, has nothing to do with who they are. When death is near, the whole concept of possession loses any meaning. In the last moments of life, people also realize that while they spent their lives searching for their fuller sense of self, their Essence - what they really were looking for - was always with them, but it was densely covered by identification with things, which ultimately turned out to be identification wisely.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus said, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” What does “poor in spirit” mean? No baggage, no identification. Neither with things, nor with mental concepts that would form this sense of self in them. And what is the “kingdom of heaven”? This is a simple but deep feeling of the joy of Existence, remaining after you release the identification and become a "poor spirit."
That is why the renunciation of all property since ancient times was a spiritual practice both in the East and in the West. However, renouncing property does not automatically make you free from ego. The ego will try to guarantee its survival by finding something that can be identified with, for example, a mental image of oneself that has gone beyond the limits of interest in material possession, and therefore has become higher than others, more spiritual. There are people who have denied everything - whose ego is greater than that of millionaires. When you eliminate one kind of identification, the ego quickly finds another.
Ultimately, he does not care what to identify with, the main thing is that there is something. Anti-consumerism, or the rejection of personal property, is a different thought form, a different mental position, which can be a substitute for identification with property. With it, you can make yourself right, and others wrong. As we will see later, making oneself right and others wrong is one of the fundamental stereotypes of the egotypic mind, one of the main forms of unconsciousness. In other words, the content of the ego can change, but the structure of the mind that supports it cannot.
One of the unconscious prerequisites is that, having identified with a material object through the illusion of possessing it, you will endow yourself with its undoubted strength and constancy, which will enter into your sense of self and give it even greater strength and constancy. This applies to a large extent to the building, and to an even greater extent to the land, since you consider it the only thing that belongs to you that is not in danger of destruction. In the case of land, the absurdity of the concept of ownership is even more obvious. During the time of white colonization, the indigenous population of North America could not understand what it was - land ownership. Therefore, when the Europeans forced them to sign pieces of paper, as a result of which they lost this land, the Indians were not able to comprehend this. According to their ideas, they belong to the earth, and not the land to them.
The ego seeks to equate possession with Existence: I own - it means I exist. And the more I have, the more I exist. The ego lives through comparison. The way others perceive you turns into how you perceive yourself. If everyone lived in large mansions and were rich, then the mansion and wealth would not serve to enhance your sense of self. Then you could leave wealth, move into a simple house and regain true identity.
Then you could consider yourself more spiritual than the rest, and others would also perceive you. The way others see you becomes a mirror for you saying who you look like and who you are. In most cases, a sense of self-esteem ego associated with the wealth that you own in the eyes of others. You need them because they give such a sense of self.
And if you live in a cultural environment that largely equates self-esteem with what and how much you own - unless, of course, you yourself are able to look through this collective delusion - then for the rest of your life you are doomed to chase things in the vain hope of finding in them their own value and completeness of self-perception.
How can you let go of attachment to things?
Do not even try. It's impossible. Attachment to things goes away when you stop looking for yourself in them. Just be aware of this attachment. Sometimes you may not even know that you are attached to something, in other words, you have identified yourself until you lose it or feel the threat of loss. If you are upset, alarmed, etc., it will mean that you are attached. At the moment of awareness that you are identified with a thing, this identification ceases to be complete. "I am awareness, aware that there is attachment." This is the beginning of the transformation of consciousness.
Ego and Greed: the need to have more
The ego is identified with a sense of possession, but satisfaction from possession is a relatively petty feeling and does not live long. Hidden inside, it remains in the form of deep dissatisfaction, a sense of incompleteness and failure. Saying, "I have not enough yet," the ego actually means: "I am not enough."
As we have already seen, possession - the concept of owning something - is a fiction created by the ego to give itself the qualities of visible strength and permanence, as well as to stand out and become special. If you are unable to find yourself through a sense of possession, then it means one more powerful and characteristic ego tendency: the need to have more, which we can otherwise call “greed”. No ego can live long without needing more.
Therefore, greed, even more than the feeling of possession, supports the life of the ego. The ego wants more to want than to have. Therefore, a weak feeling of satisfaction from what I have is always replaced by another feeling - I want to have more. It is a psychological need to have more, in other words, a need to have more things to be identified with. This addictive need is not real.
Sometimes the psychological need so much characteristic of the ego, to have more, or the feeling of insufficiency, is transferred to the level of the physical body and feels like an insatiable hunger. Bulimia sufferers often cause vomiting in order to continue eating. Hungry is their mind, not the body. This digestive upset can be cured if those suffering from bulimia cease to identify with the mind and come into contact with the body, and thereby feel its true needs, and not the pseudo-needs of the egotypic mind.
Some egoes know what they want, and relentlessly, with ruthless and inexorable cruelty, pursue their goal. Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler - these are just a few large examples. However, the energy behind greed creates energy of the same intensity, but of opposite polarity, which ultimately leads to their fall. Nevertheless, they make unhappy themselves and many others, on a scale of life, create hell on earth. The desires of most ego are in conflict. They simultaneously want different things, or even have no idea what they want, except for one thing - they never want what they have: the present moment.
The companions of unquenchable greed are anxiety, impatience, boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction. Greed is a structural element, therefore, as long as the structure is preserved, no amount of its contents can give a lasting sense of satisfaction. The acute form of greed in the form of the desire for something indefinite is easily found in the developing ego of adolescents, many of whom are constantly in a state of negativity and dissatisfaction.
The physical needs of the entire population of the planet - in food, water, shelter, clothing and basic amenities - could be easily met if the distribution of resources were balanced. The lack of balance is a consequence of the ego's greed and the result of its insane, predatory and irrepressible need to have more. Its collective expression, embodiment and personification are global economic structures, huge corporations, which are essentially egotypic entities competing among themselves in order to have more. Their only and all-embarrassing goal is profit. They pursue her with absolute cruelty.
In the original “wanting,” letters. "Desire". Translated as “greed”, because this old polysemous word better expresses the idea of insatiable, predatory hunger. In Buddhist mythology, it is represented in an impressive way of "pret," "hungry spirits." (Note transl.)
Addictive behavior is one of the forms of destructive behavior, expressed in the desire to escape from reality by changing your mental state by taking certain substances or constantly fixing attention on certain objects or activities, which is accompanied by the development of intense emotions. This process captures a person so much that it begins to control his life. A person becomes helpless in front of his addiction. Willful efforts are weakened and do not give the opportunity to resist addiction. (Note transl.)
Nature, animals, people, even their own personnel are nothing more than figures in the balance sheet, lifeless consumables for subsequent disposal.
The thought forms “I”, “mine”, “more than”, “I want”, “I need”, “I must have” and “not enough” characterize not the content, but the structure of the ego. Content is mutable and interchangeable. Until you learn to recognize these thought forms in yourself, while you remain unconscious, you will believe what they say; you are doomed to act on the basis of these unconscious thoughts, you are doomed to seek and not find - because while these thought forms are in effect, no property, no place, no person or condition will satisfy you. As long as the egotypic structure remains in the same place, no content will suit you. Whatever you have and what you receive, you will not be happy. You will continue to look for something that will give hope of a fuller fulfillment and to feel full in return for inferiority, and you will continue to nourish the feeling of insufficiency that lives within.
The identification of the ego with the body
Beyond things, another basic form of identification is “my” body. The body is male or female, and therefore the feeling of being a man or woman for most people becomes the first and very significant part of self-perception. Gender becomes an identification that is encouraged from an early age and encourages you to play a certain role, to follow conditioned behaviors that affect all aspects of your life, and not just those related to the sexual aspect. Many people are completely trapped in this role.
Moreover, in part of traditional Western cultural communities, identification with a known gender affords a certain underestimation of self-esteem. The worst that can happen to a woman living within the framework of some cultural traditions is to remain unmarried or childless, and with a man to lose their sexual potency and be unable to produce children. The life realization of a person is perceived as something depending on his gender.
The self-awareness of most people in the West is to a great extent determined precisely by the appearance and condition of the body - its strength or weakness, external beauty or ugliness - compared to others. For many, self-esteem is intrinsically linked to physical strength, fit and good looks. No less than those who have it underestimated, because they perceive their body as ugly or imperfect.
In some cases, the mental image or concept of “my body” completely distorts reality. The young woman thinks she is overweight, and for this reason exhausts herself with hunger, although she actually looks pretty elegant. She lost the ability to see her body. All that she “sees” is a mental idea of him, and it says: “I am fat,” or: “I will get fat.” The basis of this state is identification with the mind. Along with the increasing identification of a person with the mind, which is why egotypic functional disorder only intensifies, in recent decades there has been a serious increase in the number of cases of anorexia - loss of appetite. If the patient could see her body without interference from the mind and judgment, or at least see these judgments as they are, and not accept them on faith, or, even better, if she could, being at rest, feel her the body from the inside - this would initiate healing.
Those who are identified with their bright appearance, physical strength, experience and suffer when these attributes begin to fade and disappear, but it cannot be otherwise. Now their very personality, which is built on this, is threatened with extinction. In any case, a significant part of their personality, negative or positive, is the body, no matter whether it is beautiful or ugly. More precisely, they build the concept of their personality on the foundation of "I" -thinking, which is mistakenly fixed on a mental image, the idea of their body, which in reality is nothing more than a physical form that shares the fate of all other forms - impermanence, variability and, ultimately complete decay.
Equating the self with a physical body endowed with the ability of sensory perception, which is predetermined to grow old, fade and die, inevitably sooner or later leads to suffering. Avoiding identification with the body does not mean neglecting it, despising it, and not caring about it. If the body is strong, beautiful, strong, you can highly value these qualities - as long as they exist. You can also improve his condition with healthy nutrition and exercise. If you do not consider yourself a body, then at the time of withering of its beauty, reduction of strength and capabilities, it will not affect your self-esteem or personality. In fact, when the body begins to weaken, it is easier for the light of consciousness, the dimension of the formless, to break through its fading form.
Not only people with a good or almost perfect body equate it with who they are. One can very easily identify with a “problem” body, turning its imperfection, illness or impotence into its identification. Then you can consider yourself “suffering” from one or another chronic disease or impotence, and talk about yourself as a body. In this case, you will be surrounded by the attention of doctors and relatives who will constantly support your speculative self-identification with the role of the sufferer or patient. As a result, you will unconsciously cling to the disease, because having become a thought form of a different kind, with which the ego can already be identified, it will become an important part of your self-perception. Having found the identification, the ego does not want to part with it. It is amazing, but sometimes, in search of a means for its strengthening and enhancing self-identification, the ego is even able to “invent” diseases for itself.
How to feel the inner body
Despite the fact that identification with the body is one of the main forms of ego existence, there is good news here - you can easily go beyond it. This is done not by trying to convince yourself that you are not a body, but by transferring attention from its external form and thinking of it as beautiful, ugly, strong, weak, too fat, too thin, to the feeling of vitality that lives in it. It doesn’t matter how your body looks outside - behind the external form it represents an extremely saturated and vibrant energy field.
If you still do not know how to be aware of the “inner body”, then right now close your eyes briefly and try to feel life in your hands. Do not ask your mind about it. He will say: "I do not feel anything." Perhaps he will also say: "Give me something more interesting that I could think of." Therefore, do not ask for the mind, but direct your attention directly into the hands. By this I mean - recognize in them a subtle sense of vitality. It is there. To even notice it, you need to go there only with your attention.
At first you can feel a slight tingling sensation, then a feeling of energy or vitality will appear. If you briefly leave attention in your hands, this feeling will intensify. Some do not even have to close their eyes. They will be able to feel their “inner hands” by reading these lines. Now go to the feet, hold your attention there for about a minute, and then begin to feel your hands and feet at the same time. Include in this process the rest of the body — legs, arms, stomach, chest, and so on — until you become aware of the inner body as a single sensation of vitality.
What I call the inner body is actually not the body anymore - but the vital energy, the bridge between form and formless. Develop a habit of feeling your inner body whenever possible. After some time, you no longer need to close your eyes for this. For example, try to find out if you can feel the inner body and at the same time listen to someone. It seems almost a paradox, but in contact with the inner body you are no longer identified with either the body or the mind. In other words, you are moving away from identification with form to formless - and we could call it Jehovah. This is your true identity. Body awareness becomes for you not only an anchor in the present moment, but also a door from prison, from ego. In addition, body awareness strengthens the immune system and the body's ability to heal itself.
Oblivion of Absolute
The ego is always the identification of oneself with the form, it is a search for oneself in some form, and therefore, the loss of oneself in it. Forms are not just material objects and physical bodies. Of much greater importance are thought forms that continuously arise in the field of your consciousness. Thought forms are energy formations, more subtle and less dense than physical matter, but, nevertheless, forms. What you realize as a never-ending voice in your head is a stream of continuous and intrusive thinking.
If each thought completely absorbs your attention, if you are so strongly identified with the voice in the head and with the emotions that accompany it that you lose yourself in every thought and emotion, then you are completely identified with the form, which means that the ego (egoism) holds you in a stranglehold . The ego is a conglomerate of repeating and repeatedly returning thought forms and conditioned mental-emotional patterns of behavior, stable stereotypes of behavior endowed with a sense of “I”, self-perception. The ego appears when your sense of Existence, the feeling of "I Am," merges with form. This is the meaning of identification. This is the oblivion of Jehovah, the original and initial error, the illusion of absolute separation, which turns reality into a nightmare.
From Descartes' mistake to Sartre's intuitive grasp
Descartes, a 17th-century philosopher, recognized as the founder of modern philosophy, expressed this initial mistake (mistaking it for the original truth) with an aphorism: "I think, then I exist." This was his answer to the question: "Is there anything that I can consider absolutely certain?" The fact that he himself constantly thinks, Descartes considered unquestionable, and therefore equated thinking with Existence, in other words, equated personality - I am - to thinking. Instead of the original truth, he found the root of the ego, but did not understand this.
It took almost three hundred years for another famous philosopher to see what Descartes, like everyone else, overlooked. His name is Jean-Paul Sartre. He looked very deeply into Descartes’s statement “I think, then I exist”, and suddenly realized that, in his words, “Consciousness, saying“ I am, ”is not thinking.” What did he mean? When you realize that you are thinking, this awareness is not part of thinking. This is another dimension of consciousness. This is the same awareness that says, "I Am."
If you had nothing but thoughts in you, you would not even know what you think. You would be like someone who is dreaming, but does not know that it is a dream. You would be identified with every thought as a dreaming person with every dreaming image. Many people live just like lunatics, trapped in old dysfunctional mental attitudes, continuously reproducing the same nightmare reality. If you know that you are dreaming, then inside this dream you are awakened. This is another dimension of consciousness.
The meaning of Sartre's intuitive comprehension is very deep, but he himself was still too identified with thinking to fully realize the importance of his discovery - the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness.
Peace Above All Ego
There are many reports of people who survived the tragic loss of the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness. Some lost all their property, others lost their children or spouse, others lost their social status, reputation or physical abilities. In some cases, in a war or as a result of a disaster, people lost everything at once and found that they were left “with nothing.” We can call this an extreme situation. All that was identified with them was lost, which provided them with a sense of self and supported it.
The acute longing or intense fear experienced by them at the very beginning suddenly and inexplicably parted and gave way to the holy feeling of the Presence, deep peace, serenity and complete freedom from fear. This was probably familiar to St. Paul, who said: “And the peace of God, which is beyond all mind ...” (Phil. 4: 7). And this is really a peace in which, it seems, there is no sense, and the people who survived it asked themselves the question: “How can it be that when I see all this, I feel such peace?”
The answer is simple, if you understand what the ego is and how it works. If the forms that give you identification and determine your sense of self disappear, or when they are taken from you, then such a loss can lead to the collapse of the ego, because the ego is identification with the form. If you no longer have anything to identify with, then who are you? When the surrounding forms die or death approaches them, your sense of Jehovah, your “I Am” is freed from the bonds of forms: the spirit is freed from imprisonment in matter.
You are aware of the essence of your identity, you are aware of it as identity with the world of the absence of forms, the all-pervading Presence, Existing, preceding the appearance of any form, any identification. You are aware of your true identity with consciousness as such, and not with what it is identified with. This is the rest of God. The first and final truth is that you are not this and not this, but I Am.
Not all survivors of this great loss experienced such an awakening, such an identification with form. Some immediately created a strong mental image or thought-form “I am a victim”, or considered that what happened was the result of some circumstances, or happened due to the fault of some people, the injustice of fate, or the will of God. This thought-form and the emotion it induced - anger, indignation, self-pity, etc., with which they were firmly identified, immediately replaced all other forms of identification that disappeared due to loss. In other words, the ego (egoism) quickly finds itself a new form. A person does not very much connect with the ego the fact that his new form is deeply unhappy, and will remain so as long as the ego has an identification, it does not matter, good or bad. In reality, the new ego will be even more condensed, more rigid and impenetrable than the former.
When such a loss happens, you either resist or surrender. Someone is bitterly and deeply indignant, while someone becomes sympathetic, wise and loving. Recession means the inner acceptance of what is. You are open to life. Resistance is internal contraction, tension, hardening of the shell of the ego. You are closed. Whatever action you take in a state of internal resistance (which we can also call negativity), it will create even more resistance, and the Universe will not be on your side; life will not help you. Sunlight cannot penetrate closed shutters. When you surrender internally, when you give in, then a new dimension of consciousness opens.
If an action is possible or necessary, then it will be carried out in alignment with the whole and will be supported by creative rationality and an unconditioned consciousness with which you become one when you are in a state of inner openness. Then circumstances and people begin to help and cooperate with you. Happy coincidences occur. If no action is possible, you continue to remain in a state of inner peace that comes to you through yielding. You rest in God.
Eckhart Tolle: New Earth
