The death of ego

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Swati Chopra [1]

A New Year’s dawn is imminent at the end of an inky winter’s night. And yet, newness and change are deeply embedded in every moment of our lives. Our worlds are consumed all the time and created anew.

Impermanence is a reality we touch and experience daily, and so every moment can become an opportunity to renew ourselves.
We know ourselves to have consciousness, a deeper inner reality than what is apparent on the surface. Even if we have never meditated, read any spiritual books or been told of this, we still have had moments of deepening, quietening and connection that we might not necessarily label as “spiritual”, but that feed our spirit and intimate us of the vast ocean of consciousness within. We now have to get off our surface reality, and actually find the ocean and dive into it.
Advaitin guru Nisargadatta Maharaj was fond of explaining this situation using the parable of a pot. We fill a pot with water and put it in a river. The water in the pot cannot touch the water in the river because of the confines of the pot. Break the pot and all is one. How to break the pot? By letting go of one’s limited identity, one’s ego and finding the thread of consciousness to lead one towards the vast, unlimited clarity of reality.
For eons, the goal of spiritual seeking has been transcendence, liberation, moksha or nirvana. Liberation from what? The earthly state, the bondage into human suffering. Liberation into what? A non-dual state of oneness that has been variously called Brahman, all-encompassing God, or extinguishing into nothingness.
Must we die to attain this state? The Ashtavakra Gita and the Bhagavad Gita talk of the state of jivanmukta — free in life. The pot of the ego has already been broken through effort, and the self has dissolved into the ocean of consciousness. The free-living one does nothing that is attached to the demands of the ego and lives in complete awareness of all his or her actions, thoughts and ideas.
To break the pot, the tantric practitioner sees the whole world as a shamshan, a crematorium where everyone is in the process of dying, including oneself. What then can one become attached to? If this body linked to this limited self is already dead, why spend any time upon it? Why not search for truth, the universal element? For that alone matters.
The way to do this is to move one’s sense of self from the body-mind-personality complex to include the complex of all life. The death therefore that really matters is ego-death, or the complete annihilation of the small self, leaving one free to contact and realise truth/reality. That, then, is a worthwhile aim to focus on in the New Year, and indeed in all the years of our lives.

Swati Chopra writes on spirituality and mindful living. Her most recent book is Women Awakened: Stories of Contemporary Spirituality in India.