Awake in This Life

Many seasoned spiritual seekers mistakenly believe that in order to experience living as a Big Self, they need to destroy the ego, or small self. But this idea is one of the greatest misunderstandings that new practitioners make as they ascend the Mountain of Spirit. Getting rid of the ego is a massive impediment to any authentic awakening, since attempting to do so exemplifies the unconsciousness from which practitioners wish to awaken in the first place. When we first become interested in the spiritual quest, we usually think that enlightened sages have no egos and have evolved into Infinitely Big Selves without human impulses. But it’s a naïve mistake for us to think that the enlightened among us have no physical or emotional desires, no wants, no passion, no humor, or any other qualities we might attribute to the small self. This simply isn’t true. Yet our egos would conveniently have us believe this in order to idealize Enlightenment and thus effectively discourage us from trying to awaken from our habitual slumber.

To be clear, Enlightenment will not prevent you or anyone else from getting hungry or thirsty. It won’t keep anyone from dying. It won’t bestow powers of healing upon you, nor will you be able to show off miracles to your friends. And it certainly won’t eliminate your desires—such as the desire for your next breath. Nor will an authentic awakening keep you from avoiding a foul ball that is hit in your direction. Nor will Enlightenment mean that you will no longer have any sexual desires. Having no desires isn’t Enlightenment. Having no ego isn’t Enlightenment either, but rather a form of mental illness we might call psychosis.

With all of this said, what the Enlightened people who live among us do have, that most of us fail to realize, is a different relationship with every thing and every one that they meet. The difference is that a new relationship with all things and all people informs the desire and avoidance patterns associated with the boundaries built by the ego. The Enlightened among us simply aren’t held by any of the ego’s trappings, nor are they enslaved by its perpetual activity of attachment. The Enlightened among us who have realized their True Nature have bodies and minds that are simply and radiantly informed by something more expansive—a Big Self that allows them perpetually to use their bodies and minds as conscious expressions of Spirit in action. The Sufi saying, “to be in the world but not of it,” sums this concept up beautifully. Twentieth century sages such as Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Ramana Maharshi are classic examples of people who consistently and purposefully generated articulations of Truth from places beyond their unconscious egoic needs for praise, pleasure, and gain. With very rare exception, the core of their words and deeds were free of being caught, either by themselves or by the world. Because of their expressions of deep freedom and compassion, they inspired millions, forever changing the way humankind sees itself.

This ability to respond as a Big Self to the world comes from recognizing the delusion brought about by our habitual identification with all that is contracted inside and outside of us. To be fair to the ego, we must never fail to see that no matter how meddlesome it might be, it is still a divine expression of the Infinite, just like everything else. As we expand our awareness of the ego and its contracted behaviors, we begin to see that shifting our relationship with it is critical. This shift automatically begins when we simply, and continually, observe its activity without getting caught by it. Doing so effectively diminishes its position of control.

This formula is nothing new. The Buddha, Jesus, and the rest of history’s spiritual heavy hitters have all done some version of observing the small and contracted self from an eternally huge and expansive vantage point. And none of them had to kill their little, contracted egos in the process. It’s entirely fair to say that all of history’s enlightened sages had egos; indeed, they had big egos in the most profound sense of what we mean by “Big.” The Enlightened always have more to work with because their everyday mind is informed not only by a personal sense of Spirit, or what we might call “soul,” but also by the impersonal, spacious, reality of Spirit at the same time. This simultaneous embodiment of a personal sense and an expansive impersonal sense shows up in an Ultimate Life as a Big Self. This conscious unification between the personal and the impersonal is what helps any one of us show up in the world with a deep, immovable strength and an undivided sense of purpose.

All of the greatest teachers of Awakening have lived in this undivided way. They have been able to use the functionality of the ego as an everyday tool, without being “tooled” by the ego or anything else that is contracted. With each step and breath, the Enlightened among us are literally free of ego because they are consciously connected with something much bigger. They are informed by the infinitely expansive and unchanging Awareness that is beyond both the confines of time and the judgmental nature of mind. And because of this, their lives have the ability to open our hearts and minds to an amazing mystery.