The Ego

The face of desire.

There is a part of you that wants things.

It wants to be right. It wants to be loved. It wants the performance of being loved. It wants to be seen, validated, coddled, admired, and protected. It wants the next thing, and when it gets the next thing, it wants the thing after that. 

It is desire, personified. It is the mechanism through which you experience this life as a “separate” self, moving through a world of other “separate” selves.

This is the ego.

It isn't evil. It isn't malevolent. It isn't the enemy. In fact, in the context of a human life, it can be useful. A navigation system for a physical reality that requires you to know where you end and everything else begins. It has given you a reason to stay alive, kept you entertained, kept you here.

But there is something it cannot do.

It cannot take you home.

Desire Personified

The ego is not a thing you have. It is a thing you are. Or more precisely, it is the thing you believe yourself to be when you are not looking deeply enough at your existence.

It is the accumulated weight of every experience you have ever had, every conclusion you drew from those experiences, every emotion that calcified into a belief about what the world is and who you are within it.

It is your story. And it will defend that story with everything it has.

Watch it sometime. Watch how quickly it moves when someone questions your opinion. Watch how it floods the body with sensation when its version of events is challenged. Watch how it manufactures entire internal narratives in the space of a breath. Justifying, defending, explaining.

This is the ego doing exactly what the ego does. This is not a malfunction. It is desire, seeking its own continuation. Survival.

What It Cannot Feel

The ego cannot love.

This might feel wrong to you. You love your children, your partner, your closest friends. You have felt what love is. But what the ego experiences is not love. It is the manufactured version of something we call love. 

It is love filtered through opinion, through preference, through the accumulated story of who you are and what you believe you need. It is love with conditions attached, even subtle ones. It is love that rises and falls with circumstance, that can be withdrawn, that is shaped by every experience you've had that taught you what you believe love means.

Real love, the love that exists as the foundation of everything, has none of those qualities. It doesn't rise and fall. It doesn't have a perspective. It doesn't need anything from you in return. It simply is, in the same way that the space in the room you are reading this simply is. Regardless of what moves through it.

The ego cannot access love. Not because it is broken, but because it is, by its very nature, a mechanism of separation. It requires a "me" and a "not me."

Love, real love, requires no such distinction. The ego measures, defines, weighs. If it feels anything at all, it feels calculation.

And this is why the ego cannot bring you to enlightenment.

In the posts on The Path and Free Will, I've touched on how the constructed self builds systems to seek awakening, spiritual paths, practices, frameworks, and how even the seeking can become another expression of the ego's desire to arrive somewhere.

The ego can become the most devoted meditator, the most disciplined practitioner, the most knowledgeable student of nonduality. And before, during, and after, it will still be the ego. This is the spiritual trap that catches nearly everyone: the ego does not need to be transformed. It needs to be transcended. You cannot renovate your way out of the container. You have to step beyond it entirely.

A quote passed to me, written by Ramana Maharshi: "When a man's mind is dead, he will not die again."

The death being spoken of is not the death of the body. It is the death of the constructed self, the one who believes it is separate, the one who wants, the one who is afraid of not being enough.

When that dies, there is nothing left to die. What remains is what was always there, before the story began. The fully realized being. The infinite you.

This is ego death. And it is, in every meaningful sense, a death.

The Gift of Contrast

Before you move toward transcendence, the ego offers you something genuinely useful: Contrast.

Every time it reacts, every defensiveness, every craving, every fear, is showing you exactly where you are in your journey. The ego along with its desire is a perfect mirror. They reflect with remarkable precision the places where you are still identified with the story, still believing that what happens to you, and your feeling of lack, defines what you are.

Recognizing the ego's movements is not the same as being trapped by them. In fact, the moment you can observe the ego with some degree of distance - there it goes again, defending itself, wanting something, afraid of something - you have already created a crack in your identification with it.

The observer is not the ego. The one who can witness the wanting is not the same as the wanting itself.

This is the beginning of freedom. But it is only the beginning.

The willingness to step back from the ego's noise, even briefly, creates the conditions for something deeper to come through.

Why Some of You Can Feel the Truth

There is a reason that when some of you hear the words I speak or read these blog posts that you recognize something in what is being shared, and others do not.

It comes down to whether you are receiving through the ego or through the heart.

The ego hears language. It evaluates claims, compares them to its existing framework, and decides whether they are credible. It hears a man saying things. It places those things within a hierarchy of ideas and assigns them a position. 

It may agree. It may disagree. But in either case, it is running everything through its biased filter of experience and opinion.

However, the heart does not operate this way. The heart recognizes. Not intellectually, but in the way that something deep within you knows when it is in the presence of something true. A recognition that precedes thought, that doesn't require argument or proof.

You've felt it. You know it. You know this feeling. That sudden stillness. That resonance that doesn't ask to be explained. The connection. The remembering.

When I share, those of you who are open enough to detect truth in what comes through are feeling it from that place. Not because of the words, but despite them. The words are just the carrier.

These Words Carry No Agenda

A lot of people hear what is shared here and conclude that it is one man's interpretation of one experience. A translation inevitably shaped by whoever is doing the translating.

I understand why they think that. They are seeing through their ego, and the ego sees everything as filtered, everything as perspective, everything as positioned. 

From that place, you could say every spiritual teacher has an agenda. Every teaching is someone's opinion.

But those who have felt, or remember, recognize something about me that did not return: there is no "I" in this vessel.

In death, what dissolved was the part of me that would need to be present to have an opinion of what I received or a translation. The part that needed to be right, to be validated, to benefit in some way from being listened to.

One of the warnings I received in that space beyond material existence was: "You will be persecuted for the words." Not my words. “The words.” 

They, The All, God, Source, Universe, knew what I was returning with, and knew that there was no personal bias left that would shape or filter it.

This is not a claim of perfection or that you even follow what I say. It is a description of a specific condition: the absence of a self with something to gain.

I have nothing to gain. Only to give. Which raises the question some of you are already asking: then who is sharing this, and why?

The answer is the identity question is not important. What exists is love, embodied. Something that can only exist when there is no 'I' seeking an outcome, no calculation of what you can offer in return.

Sharing, simply because you are here. Love for all.

Looking It in the Eye

So what do you do with all of this? You become the witness.

You don't fight the ego. Fighting it is still the ego just turned against itself, creating a new identity as the person who is “transcending their ego.” That is just the ego in a spiritual costume.

Think of it this way. The ego and its intellect never truly mature beyond the reach of a small child. It is always stretching toward the cookie jar. Always reaching outside of itself for comfort, for validation, for some fabricated version of truth. And when it doesn't get what it wants, like any child who is frightened or uncomfortable, it throws a tantrum. The defensiveness, the reactivity, the internal storms, that is a child acting out, not a monster to be defeated. Nothing to fight here.

You witness it. You watch it with the same patient, compassionate attention you would give that child. You see its desires without becoming them. You observe its fears without feeding them. And when it rises up against your growing movement toward formlessness, because it will, because you are choosing something it cannot follow you into, you look it squarely in its desire, and you tell it that you love it.

As a conscious practice.

The ego is the part of you that formed in response to a world that sometimes felt unsafe, that required you to be something, to want something, to become something more. It did its job. It got you here. You can honor it for that even as you cease to be defined by it.

The other side of ego death is not loss. It is the fullness that the ego has been standing in front of your entire life. The direct experience of the divine, the recognition of what you actually are beneath the story.

What I felt in death, without the ego, is freedom. It is bliss. It is fullness and unconditional love and connection and a contentment that has no opposite. And it is the complete absence of the thousand pound lead weight you have been carrying without knowing it. Desire, preference for outcome, the exhausting management of a self that needs things. When that weight is gone, what remains isn't empty. It is filled with everything.

Every wisdom tradition that has ever pointed toward truth has known this. The thread of truth that runs through all of them, through every genuine teaching, every real mystic, every authentic moment of awakening across every culture and every century is this:

The mind must die for you to be fully alive.

The constructed, story-telling, desire-generating, separation-maintaining mechanism that you have been calling "Yourself."

When that dies, what remains is what was never born.

And that, you will never lose again.