the ego will never leave you

This is one of those crucial linchpin topics. It’s got to be approached skillfully, otherwise it makes no sense, and just makes you want to take up something else.

I have never found that thinking of the ego as a problem to be overcome to be of much use. I am speaking from what I call “valley spirituality” — spirituality for the rest of us. Kids, rent, jobs, not retreats, renunciation and narcissism (oops).

There is a saying from the I Ching (hexagam 43, breakthrough): “The best way to fight evil is to make energetic progress in the good.”

This seems like an excellent way to approach the so-called ego. Not that it’s evil, and certainly not that it should be opposed, but rather, to focus on the positive and build up wondrous mana. As we do this, the ego will get weaker. As we work on opening our hearts in the loving-kindness meditation, self-centered tendencies begin to be re-examined and gently released.

Paul Brunton, in his six volume Notebooks, writes: “It is not a matter of destroying the ego as of balancing it with the Self. Such an act will put it in its proper place, as a child’s individuality needs to be balanced with it’s parents’.”

In another passage, he writes: “The ego is part of the divine order of existence. It must emerge, grow, enslave, and finally be enslaved.”

The ego will never leave you, but you can slowly outgrow it. You can leave it.

I see this leaving as a gradual process of individuation of the higher Self. You meditate a little and begin to feel happy for no reason. You begin to expand your sense of empathy. You dip a toe in the Absolute and discover it is very healing and refreshing to splash around in the waters of the unconditioned.

This is a poem from Swami Nirbhayananda, who lived in North India in the nineteenth century, which describes this process of transpersonal individuation, or the gradual shedding of the tyranny of ego (he is addressing his ego in the poem):

“Your thoughts are restless, mine are forever peaceful.
You are attached to name and form.
I go beyond them.
O dear one, I listen to you, but am not quick to respond.
O mind, we part company and are friends.
I salute you a thousand times.
You are all pain and tears.
I am peace and perfection.”