The Text - Section 199
199. THE MEANING OF THE EGO AND ITS TRANSCENDENCE
Greetings. Blessed be all of you, my beloved friends. The force of love and truth, elicited by
your seeking, is pouring forth to forge another link in the chain, to give you what you need at this
juncture in your path.
The average state of the human mind is only a fragmented piece of total consciousness. In
this fragmented state you are cut off from reality. You inevitably live in fear and limitation. Yet you
believe that this is all there is to your life and you frantically clutch at this limited fragment. You
resist the natural inner movement of the soul to go beyond, to expand this state, because the split-
off ego-consciousness fears that doing so will annihilate you. You ardently protect this limited
consciousness, yet this very limitation creates fear and suffering.
This is, broadly speaking, humanity's plight. It is your task, in the cycle of incarnations, to
reintegrate this split-off ego-consciousness and to regain forever wider and deeper portions of your
real self, your cosmic existence, with its infinite possibilities for experience, joy, and creation of the
self.
Humanity believes that this split-off ego-consciousness is the real self. You identify with your
brain, your outer intelligence, your will, your mind, all those faculties immediately available, not
realizing that to whatever degree you now possess these, it was you who in the past made them
available for yourself through a deliberate effort. For there was a state in which you possessed much
less awareness, less power to create, less ability to experience joy. Your consciousness was much
more limited and confined. You had to use whatever consciousness you had to enlarge your
faculties and to avail yourself of dormant possibilities. This process must continue until there is no
longer any split-off fragment and humanity has reached cosmic consciousness, which means that
humanity itself has become one with ultimate reality. The process of self-enlargement, of making
apparently foreign territory your own domain, constitutes the Pathwork -- any valid pathwork.
Ego means fragmentation. As I mentioned, it is the task of all beings who are caught in this
fragmentation, and that means anyone in the cycle of being born and dying, to enlarge their field of
operation, their perception, their awareness, and their power to create. The problem is that in the
limited state of the separated ego, enlargement appears, contrary to reality, to be annihilation of your
very existence, of your sense of self. To penetrate this illusion, you need all the force, commitment,
goodwill and help available -- help that you must want and request.
This is truly humanity's search and struggle. Only as you venture forth step by step,
overcoming the inherent resistance to transcend this separated state, do you find out gradually that
there is another life beyond the ego state. You then find out that this other life is reality and that
this reality is not to be feared. It is good; it is to be utterly trusted. It means that there is ongoing
life, self-awareness, and ever-increasing joy. You find out that the limited ego state you have so
ardently protected is an illusion: the illusion of death and aloneness.
Awareness has to be fought for. It does not come easily, nor gratuitously. Remaining in the
isolated ego state may appear safe and easy, but it leads to stagnation and death -- ever recurring
death.
The ego uses any number of tricks in order to maintain its separated, limited state and to
avoid moving beyond it. I would like to show them to you.
In the first place, the ego uses every conceivable negativity known to humanity; any fault; any
violation of integrity, truth, love, and divine law. Since all these negativities can be summed up in
the triad of pride, selfwill, and fear, I shall show how the ego uses these traits to avoid self-
transcendence.
The ego fears losing its present state, meaning its self-awareness, so much that the fear
displaces the instinct of self-preservation. The ego misuses this instinct to preserve its present
awareness. Fear always distorts truth and reality. Thus the ego maintains itself with pride. It
maintains its separateness by creating an artificial conflict between the self and others. It says, "I
must prove to the world that I am admirable and better than others; I must outdo others; I must not
be worse than others; my interests counteract those of others, and vice versa." All these attitudes
are pridefully put in the service of maintaining the ego's separation. It is always "I versus you," and
this inevitably creates a spirit of one-upmanship. Whether or not in your current incarnation your
development happens to be ahead or behind another's, to use this as a wedge between your own ego
and those of others, is completely missing the point. For, in principle, there is no difference. It
does not even take very long on this path to find out that one's interests conflict with those of
others only on the most superficial level. What is really right and good can be seen just beneath the
surface. According to divine law this deeper good is right for all concerned. Therefore all
comparing and competing to best others increases the separation and sharpens the illusion that this
pitiful existence is all there is to life.
People's prevalent tendency to live for the sake of appearances, rather than for the sake of
truth and of real feelings and interests, is also caused by pride. The illusion of separation is so strong
at this point that it seems more important to people to create an impression than even to consider
what a tragic, wasteful sacrifice you make to achieve an entirely imaginary gain.
All masks and defenses, pretenses and false shame of exposure, embarrassment about real
feelings and one's inner reality regarding the spiritual self, belong in the category of pride; they are
tricks of the ego to maintain its limited state.
Selfwill comprises stubbornness, resistance, spite, defiance, rigidity. All these attitudes
connote a stiffening against change, against expanding into new spiritual territory. These traits
express the attitude, "I will stay where and as I am." This ego-trick makes rigidity appear desirable
and makes open, flexible movement appear threatening and/or humiliating. Pride and fear are
necessarily coupled to selfwill, just as selfwill must be present where either of the other two
dominates. Each of these attitudes harbors the other two as well.
The refusal to move may be evaluated on a more superficial level in terms of personal
idiosyncrasies and neuroses, as spite against a specific person or people -- let us say parents or parent
substitutes or general authority figures. Or there might be a spiteful attitude toward life itself. But
on a deeper level the ego's trick is to remain isolated.
Under the category of fear belong all worries, anxieties, and apprehensions. The ego's trick is
to make change appear threatening and life-annihilating. Worrying and anxiety also prevent you
from attaining joyousness, peace, and freedom -- the cosmic reality that opens up when the present
state is expanded.
Negative intentionality is also part of the ego's trickery to preserve your present limited state.
Whatever the specific negative intention may be, it always indicates spite -- hence selfwill, which
always blurs and falsifies reality, denying all desirable life experience.
Other ego tricks that serve to maintain its present "safe" position are: denying pleasure, bliss,
joy, expansion, and creative movement into life. The fear of experiencing all these states is
obviously also a trick of the ego. This is a well-known phenomenon applying to all human beings
and is easy to observe. More such tricks of the ego are: inattentiveness, lack of concentration,
abstractedness, absent-mindedness. These attitudes prevent the focusing necessary for the ego to
transcend itself. To transcend its present limited state, the ego requires a good deal of one-pointed
focusing, of being all there, as it were. Laziness, tiredness, and passivity are, too, tricks of the ego.
They make movement impossible, undesirable, and exhausting. We shall come back to this later.
Fear of exposure and denial of real feelings not only stem from pride but also directly
perpetuate isolation and are therefore used as ego tricks to deny oneness with others. Negative
reactions to the negativity of others is another trick of the ego to maintain its isolation. The
moment negativity appears, the energy system begins to function to deny the ego's expansion, which
would effect self-transcendence. The ego denies the joyousness of true being by making something
more of other people's behavior than necessary. It cuts off the vision of real life that exceeds the
limited present state. Only the isolated ego-bound entity experiences the terror of finiteness.
Distrust and suspiciousness are not only part of the general fear that makes the ego wish to remain
immobile and resort to trickery in order to defy the natural movement toward the being's ultimate
fate. While distrust caused by fear is the motivating force, the ego simultaneously uses the distrust
as a trick to stop the movement toward union.
The ego assumes a preposterous and paradoxical position. It is intrinsically unhappy, precisely
because of its finiteness, or what seems finite in its present limited state. It is self-evident that the
ego can see only what is within its present scope of awareness. And what it sees is, to varying
degrees, limited and falsified. Hence the ego sees and experiences only finiteness: the disconnected,
meaningless universe in which it is senselessly suffering and powerless. This perception of life can
alter only to the degree that the ego overcomes the temptation to stay put. But the paradoxical
position of the ego is that it fights to remain in the very state that often makes your life unbearably
lonely, fearful, and meaningless.
Unfathomable death is terrifying, and although it is possible to deny this terror, it cannot be
dissolved as long as the ego remains within its present narrow confines. Sooner or later everyone is
faced with this terrifying illusory end, both their own and others'. But even if this terror is not acute,
it remains a gnawing force in your soul, a force that must always exist until the ego gives up its
resistance. In spite of the ego's extreme discomfort, it clings to that very condition, the very state
that makes true vision beyond the imaginary line of demarcation between life and death impossible.
This is the sickness of the ego state and the perversion of it -- to cling to the very thing it battles
against.
All my friends can easily recognize themselves in this description, for the pathwork makes this
incongruity very obvious. I believe it will greatly help you all to see your plight in this light and to
know that this is a universal state which you are called upon to transcend. On this path you must be
concerned with, and grope for an understanding of, how to transcend the ego, and what that really
means.
Isolation and separateness are, without a doubt and without exception, tragic and ironic; tragic
because unnecessary, and ironic because the ego clings to what it hates and what hurts it most. It
lacks the discipline and the perseverance, the commitment and the faith to venture beyond its
present scope of awareness. Suffering must exist as long as you cling to this state and indulge in it.
As long as all the tricks of the ego are acted out, rationalized, denied, perpetuated and nurtured -- as
is usually the case -- you cannot help but suffer.
You all know, my friends, and many of you have indeed experienced it, that every step
forward on the path reveals new vistas that are very real, much more real than the previous state that
you thought was the ultimate reality. Every step of the way this newly gained reality opens to a life
wider and fuller for you. The result is more joy, more peace, more consciousness, more
understanding of the beautiful deep meaning of life, more creativity and more intrinsic knowledge of
life's eternality versus the illusion of death, the illusion of finiteness.
But every one of these steps could have been won only by a tremendous amount of
investment on your part. Whoever still wants indulgence and easy, cheap results can never, never
attain this new state. You will look wistfully at the possibilities yet doubt that anything else could
exist that would warrant the effort and the lowering of your pride. This doubt then becomes the
excuse for the artificially maintained status quo. This is the sin against life, defeating life's natural
movement toward evolution and unification.
Discipline, courage, humility, and the ability to commit yourself -- these are not attitudes you
do not possess, my friends. Everyone of you possesses every conceivable attribute in the universe.
The question is, do you wish to avail yourself of these potentials within you, or do you wish to claim
that you do not possess them and that someone has to "give" them to you magically?
You often hold the misplaced and confused idea that self-discipline hampers your freedom,
and, conversely, that a free person does not need self-discipline. Nothing could be further from the
truth. Freedom, in its real sense, is unthinkable without discipline. And, conversely, the people who
indulge themselves and who reject discipline are inevitably dependent, weak, powerless, and
consequently afraid. They lack freedom. Freedom can be gained only to the degree one uses
voluntary self-discipline -- uses it for one's own sake and not to appease and appear good in the eyes
of others. The latter attitude often leads either to actual or imaginary discipline being imposed upon
the person by others. When such imposition happens -- and this is of course undesirable -- it is
always a result of the denial of voluntary self-discipline, which goes together with self-responsibility.
Every expansion must be fought for with self-discipline, by overcoming the embedded
resistance against expansion. The discipline must be used for stringent recognition of the ego tricks
and against giving in to them. This expansion is always a step beyond a known territory. The ego
has evolved to its present state, which varies, of course, from person to person, as a result of what
humanity has already achieved. The "territory" people have gained determines their degree of
functioning, the scope of their experience and awareness.
When I speak of "territory," I mean a state of awareness, creative life force, and influx from
the real world, all of which make experiencing life deeper and more meaningful. The word
"territory" is thus not to be understood in a geographical sense, but in a total sense. The fences
around this territory indicate the degree of the ego's self-transcendence.
Every incarnation, on whatever level, requires increasing the scope of one's "field of
operation." To widen the fences around the fragmented ego, to bring in more reality from the
world beyond the illusory confinement is the task. Indirectly, this applies to all levels. Even the
most mundane, outer, physical and intellectual knowledge and skills to be acquired increase in some
way your present ability to function and experience life, and thus indirectly contribute to the ultimate
task of self-transcendence. The acquisition of new knowledge and skills also demands the
cultivation of the attitudes necessary for self-transcendence. Every bit of new knowledge or a new
skill yields, directly or indirectly, more spiritual power and awareness, more experience of joy and
realization of your own adequacy and your potential.
To acquire new knowledge or skills, on whatever level, always means overcoming laziness. It
means self-discipline: the more desirable a new aspect of life is, the more real and durable it is, the
more you must invest in it. It means trial and error, and the ability to convert failure into success. It
means perseverance, patience, faith. It means overcoming fear until the new thing becomes one's
own natural possession, until it becomes part of the personality, second nature, so to speak.
The ego's task is always first to accept the difficulties, the hardships of the learning process.
Only when the ego has learned the more mechanical aspects of this process can the influx of the
spiritual self make the new acquisitions a spontaneous, living, effortless experience. Ego means
effort; spiritual self means effortlessness. This desirable effortlessness is not given by magic,
however, for this would mean that the ego is not being transcended but avoided. The ego must
change its lazy, resistant attitudes in order to transcend itself to become able to unify with the
cosmic, greater self. The ego must lay the arduous groundwork until the real self can come through.
This can be noted in every activity or skill. First there is always effort. It becomes pleasurable only
when it seems, and actually is, "happening through you."
If you are learning a manual task, the manual rules have to be learned until they become part
of the ego; if a mental task, mental knowledge has first to be painstakingly acquired, often through
quite mechanical processes. Then the new knowledge will become the person's own and the spirit
can use this newly expanded vision, knowledge, skill, energy, and accomplishment to play creatively.
An artist who wants to bypass the effortfulness of learning the ground rules can never unfold any
creative ability, no matter how real it may initially be. These creative abilities will wither because that
person wants to cheat life.
The spiritual path itself demonstrates the identical principles. As mentioned before, the ego
must learn and adopt attitudes compatible with the universal, divine ones. This is, as you know, not
easy. The inspiration of the spiritual self is blocked off to the degree the ego is blindly involved in
its negativity, including laziness, pride, selfwill, fear, wish to cheat life, and escapist tendencies. But
as these tendencies are honestly recognized and gradually given up, the influx of the world of eternal
truth, love, and beauty becomes possible.
The arduous task of making the ego flexible always comes first: teaching it, bending, changing
it; making it receptive and vibrant; letting new life energy and creativity flow through it by
identifying and abandoning the ego's tricks. Whether it takes shape as new knowledge, new skills, or
a new attitude toward life and the universe, this change always means a new territory has become
your own.
People truly wither away when they remain in the narrow confines of their present state
because they feel it is safe and they think they have eliminated the need for effort and investment.
They do not permit life to regenerate them. Regeneration can happen only where inner movement
exists. It always seems frightening at first to go beyond the ego's present confines. The new
territory is foreign, unknown. People want to avoid the unknown, and they would rather cower in
fear of it than have the courage to learn about it and make it their own. To make the unknown
known, outside as well as inside, is the beauty of the spiritual path.
The ego is under the illusion that to stay in the stagnant, narrow confines of the already
known territory -- for regardless of how much wider it may be compared to the territory of others, it
is still narrower as compared to one's potential -- is easy and relaxing. To pull yourself up by your
bootstraps and move beyond seems terribly tiresome. This feeling is illusory because the stagnant
state is really a contraction, and contraction is by no means relaxing and restful, although it may
seem so to the confused mind. True restfulness is always alive and effortlessly moving. This is
impossible in a state of contraction. You can verify this by looking around you. The people who do
the least are always the most tired. And the people who do most are always most energized and
relaxed -- provided their activity does not serve as an escape from the self.
Harmonious movement is not tiring or exhausting, although you may experience such
symptoms at first, because to go from stasis to motion on any level first requires accepting a
temporary effort with self-discipline, faith, courage, and humility until the effort becomes effortless.
Spiritual movement is effortless. By spiritual movement I mean the movement of ultimate reality, of
the totally unified entity. The stagnation is really very effortful, because it requires an enormous and
often unconscious effort in order to sustain the resistance against the soul's natural inclination to
follow its destiny. This unconscious effort then manifests as tiredness, exhaustion, weakness, which
furnish the excuse to remain still longer in the status quo. The ego uses the results of its own errors
as tricks.
All life is movement, and movement is not effortful when the entity is in harmony with life.
But movement seems temporarily effortful until this harmony has been established by reorienting
the ego. You then move within the rhythm of your own life stream. When you can feel the rhythm
of your life stream, you have already acquired a certain amount of self-awareness and you are already
within the expansive movement.
Those who are on paths such as yours will find that some parts of them are already joining the
cosmic movement; other parts still resist and stagnate. Your moving parts are the aware parts.
These parts are capable of recognizing the significance of the resistance. These parts can meditate
on seeking a deeper understanding of your task in life; on the meaning of your life in the light of this
lecture. You will find greater motivation to request guidance so that your stagnating parts will yield
to the moving parts. Little by little you will energize the contracted consciousness that has separated
itself from the whole.
When I speak of ego, I do not wish to imply that it should be totally negated, denied, and
insulted. The ego is part of divine consciousness and holds all aspects of the greater self from which
it has separated itself, even if they are distorted and misused. The basic energy and consciousness of
the ego is made of the same substance with which you ultimately reunite.
The ego must be healthy in order to venture beyond its present confines, to transcend itself,
and learn and own as yet unknown spiritual territory. It needs to expand its knowledge, experience,
and creative potential. In order to do this, the ego must adopt attitudes compatible with its original
nature. All the tricks of the ego, all the negativity and evil that are embedded only in the ego, have
to be recognized with a very incisive, sharp self-honesty for what they are. Denial, rationalization,
and projection must be given up. The searchlight must be ruthlessly turned on the little self. Only
when you use your ego consciousness to put the strong light of truth on other areas of your ego
consciousness can you adopt healthy, truthful attitudes. Only a healthy ego can transcend itself and
unify with the naturally healthy divine consciousness.
The weak, sick, distorted ego very often wants to give itself up simply because it cannot bear
itself any longer. It adopts various forms of escape, such as drugs or other means of false
transcendence. But such ego transcendence is highly dangerous and is just a variation of insanity.
For insanity itself is the attempt of the ego to lose or transcend itself because it can no longer bear
itself. In all these false and dangerous attempts, the entity always seeks to avoid effort, pain,
inconvenience, and those aspects of life with which it does not agree or which it does not
understand. It seeks to cheat, using shortcuts, which can never work and which exact a very high
price. Consequently, the entity may hold on even tighter to the immobile, rigid state, perhaps for
many incarnations, thus making healthy ego transcendence as impossible as the false kind.
You can succeed only by using the healthy part of the ego to shed light on the sick part; to use
the honest part of the ego to shed light on the dishonest part. Then ego transcendence takes place
in the safest possible way. Then you acquire new territory: a territory that was at first frighteningly
foreign, unknown, and apparently dark but will become familiar and light. With this new safety, a
sense of eternality is created in the self. The deepest feelings, knowledge, and experiences of life's
continuum will grow and automatically eliminate an enormous amount of pain and fear. But this
growth cannot come cheaply. It requires full investment and commitment on your part. And
whoever does this genuinely must reap the fruits in a most concrete way.
The greater your efforts become, the more of a spiritual force you lawfully elicit and make
your own. Every step of truth and goodwill activates automatically and inexorably the power and
creative spiritual force within and around you.
Blessings and love for all of you, my dearest ones.