Ego was the Helper; Ego is the Bar – February 24 2019

The formation of a mental and vital ego tied to the body-sense was the first great labour of the cosmic Life in its progressive evolution; for this was the means it found for creating out of matter a conscious individual. The dissolution of this limiting ego is the one condition, the necessary means for this very cosmic Life to arrive at its divine fruition: for only so can the conscious individual find either his transcendent self or his true Person. This double movement is usually represented as a fall and a redemption or a creation and a destruction,-the kindling of a light and its extinction or the formation first of a smaller temporary and unreal self and a release from it into our true self’s eternal largeness.

Sri Aurobindo,

The Synthesis of Yoga, Chapter IX, 

The Release from the Ego

 

[T]he ego has to be first accepted as though it is a reality in order to be dealt with before it can be transcended. At the higher levels, the ego is seen to be an illusion, without any innate reality.

Dr. David Hawkins,

I: Reality and Subjectivity

  

Ego was the helper; Ego is the bar.

Sri Aurobindo,

Aphorisms

 

The ego is how we come to know ourselves. The ‘terrible twos’ is about that time in development when I begin to recognize that I am separate from the world, that simply by wanting my mother to do something does not make it happen. Thus begins my movement toward individuation, self-reliance, self-identity. I learn how to distinguish myself from others, from the crowd. How to stand out. How to excel, or if not, then how to not even get involved in these games other humans are playing. I learn where I fit, how I fit. What are my gifts, what are my shortcomings. What is my tribe, who are my people. Who reflects me to myself most fully.

 

And just when I start to think I’m getting this thing figured out, I discover that in order to continue to grow and to evolve I must step beyond each of these differentiating qualities to the place where I am at-one-with everyone and everything. I must go to the place where differences may be ignored and similarities are the rule. I must begin to transcend all these ideas of difference in order to know myself as the Oneness, as Nature, as Life Itself, as Sri Aurobindo calls it. The ‘transcendent self or true Person.

 

Life is made up of these two selves: our small self individuality, and our large Self universality. Our journey in life is first to know the one absolutely in order that we may then transcend it and go to the other. Know ourselves as ‘me,’ individuality, that I may then begin to know myself as ‘I,’ universality.

 

And then? And then to transcend even the duality of that in order to know myself as both, together. Individual and universal. At the same time.

 

Why? Because that’s the way it works. Because this movement, this learning, is the way of Life. Because the movement from knowing nothing, to individuation, to oneness, to All-ness, is the movement toward an ever greater, ever more expanded, ever more enjoyable experience of myself here in the world.

 

Today I will realize that no matter how loud the voice of the ego may be, there is something I am that is more. There is something I am that is beyond it. There is something I am growing toward, and if I simply choose to stop listening to the constant voice of the ego, in the silence there behind that voice I will begin to hear this something, and begin to recognize it as what I am.