This post was originally published on November 29, 2013.
“With absolute humility, the ego dissolves. It is a collection of arbitrary mental processes that gain force only because of vanity and habit. If one lets go of the vanity of thought, it dissolves. All thought is vanity. All opinions are vanities. The pleasure of vanity is therefore the basis of the ego–unplug it and it collapses.
The ego is neither bad nor an enemy, but merely an illusion to release so that something far better can replace it.” – David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D., Dissolving the Ego, Realizing the Self
When we are identified as the ego, we are at the mercy of things over which we have little or no control. “How I’m doing” is dependent upon my feelings and my thoughts, which in turn are dependent upon whatever system I have in place on this given day. It may be the system of success (or lack of success) in my chosen field; or the amount of money I’ve made this year; whether or not I think I’m attractive romantically to someone else, in particular or in general. It may be what my parents think of me, or what they thought of me 20 years ago.
And this is not even to mention whether or not I worked out today, or meditated, or ate sugar, or drank too much coffee, or not enough.
Or how much traffic there is on my way to work.
All of these things cause me to feel a certain way, which tends my thinking in certain directions, which in turn causes me to feel a certain way.
No matter how we may work at balancing all these things out, perfection is going to be a place that we pass through only occasionally, never a place we find and keep. It’s simply not possible.
This is why we meditate. This is why we seek a spiritual awakening. We seek to awaken to an experience of self that is other than our thoughts and feelings. We seek to know ourselves as this other thing, this deeper thing, this place that is silent and true and never changing.
When I can know myself as this place other than the thoughts and feelings, other than the ego, I am no longer at the mercy of the world. You can have any opinion you want about me and it will not affect the way I feel about myself. The way my parents treated me or disapproved of me will be merely one fact in the story of this life, but no longer the thing that drives me or holds me back.
What I will have is freedom. Freedom to be what I have come here to be. Freedom to do what nature would have me do. Freedom to feel the way that nature would have me feel: happy, joyous and free.
Jeff Kober is an actor and meditation teacher who has spent much of the last 30 years studying metaphysics and meditation, traveling extensively in India. He has written a daily Vedic Meditation thought for over a year and is currently compiling a 365 Meditation Daily Reader. To sign up for his daily email (which is where this post originated), sign up on his site.
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