What Does it Mean to Kill Your Ego?

So Sri Ramana speaks often, especially to his advanced disciples, of killing the ego, and we will sometimes use that phrase as well, but if you’re in the ego you tend to take that literally, and then get very upset by it. And you assume that it means you have to somehow crush yourself, and make yourself feel as bad as possible, strangle yourself, somehow smother yourself, destroy yourself with some violent act—and of course, none of that could possibly be meant by Ramana or by any of the teachers of Truth, because the Truth is pure love. So it’s a shorthand—the signifier kill the ego has to be understood in this way: the ego is an illusory belief in duality, an illusory identification of pure consciousness with a material body. To kill the ego simply means eliminate that false belief, let it drop away, so that the reality of the blissful nature of the Self is not obscured. If you think about it, because nonduality is the Real—who is there to kill the ego? You’d need two egos to do that. And then if the second one killed the first who would kill the second one? It would become an infinite regress. So the ego can’t be killed because it’s not alive, it doesn’t exist, it’s a fictional image of the Self.

Now, where did this fictional image come from? When the body was born out of the body of the mother, the consciousness attaching to that infant body took on the energy field and the psychological state of the mother; and depending on the relationship of the mother and the father, or the mother and the other siblings, or members of an extended family, took on the structure of that psychological system, and took on the fantasies of the parents of who you should be, and how you should be. So it took on an illusory fictional identity in order to fit into the system that it felt it had been born into. And that attachment to the body was necessary in childhood because the body needed to learn how to adapt to the social order, even though it was an illusory order, but the ego that was created was intended to be the larval state of consciousness, and as soon as the body reached physical biological adulthood, which is the age 13, the ego was to be put aside, to be dropped. In the Jewish tradition, you’d have a Bar Mitzvah, a Bat Mitzvah—you would take on the duties, responsibilities, powers, and privileges of adulthood. But in many tribal cultures you wouldn’t have a determined configuration of commandments or traditions, and of all of that, that you had to be the next generation to sustain, but in fact, you would go into a vision quest to discover from the Infinite who you are, and you’d receive a name from that Infinite Power of Presence; going through an ordeal alone in a jungle or a desert or in a mountain, and fasting, and going through the ordeal of letting all of one’s identity fall away, to discover in that state of not knowing—that total cloud of unknowing—the Supreme Knowledge that cannot be gained from experience, but that can only come from within, when all of the belief systems have been removed.

But this culture doesn’t have a vision quest. It doesn’t even have the old Bar Mitzvahs or Confirmations, or any of that, except in a very nominalist fashion. They are not real rites of passage, they are simply the continuation of a child’s identity structure, trying to get the approval of adults. But adulthood in its true sense of all of the freedom that it should connote, is never attained in this culture. And the ego is angry about that, because the ego knows it is a stunted entity that has never been able to outgrow its anxieties and depressions, and feeling of being unloved and unlovable, and angry that it didn’t get its needs met, etc., etc. And so it stays stuck in a constant repetition of its complaint that it never got to grow up. And instead of growing up, it simply complains about its condition over and over again, and it compensates for its feeling of lack and stuntedness with a narcissistic sense of grandiosity. And will get into building up its ego, whether with body building, or with development of some kind of a narcissistic front, or an ability to impress people with a talent or whatever—but underneath that is that total sense of lack of essence.

And this became so common that philosophies like existentialism began to develop in the twentieth century. What is existentialism? It means: “I exist, but I don’t know who I am.” That’s the philosophy: you have existence but somehow you never found your essence, and so your life consists in trying to figure out who you are, or artificially fabricate an identity because there is no essence—there’s a loss of faith or belief that there is anything real in you—you are an imitation of imitations. And then people, by believing that, will literally imitate movie stars, and whatever, the sports heroes, or whoever, or just the popular people in their crowd or whatever—but they will become imitations, and their whole life will proceed by mimesis, never by original recognition of the wisdom that arises from within. And no one will ever feel that they are understood because what they are presenting is not authentic, and they don’t understand their authentic self, and so, of course, they cannot authentically understand another. And so this leads to a whole life of miscommunication and of sorrow, and of a sense of the hopelessness and meaninglessness of existence.

How many can relate to that? It’s almost universal today.

So this internal confusion, chaos, that leads, because mimesis, imitation, becomes the modus operandi of the ego, in different situations it learns that it has to imitate different others. Sometimes you have to imitate the mother, sometimes the father, sometimes the sibling, sometimes your uncle or your aunt, or your grandmother, or whoever, or the rabbi or the priest, or the mullah or the Zen master that your parents take you to, or the Sufi Sheikh, or whatever, you learn to imitate. And you may be designated as a scapegoat and as the black sheep, and the loser, or the oppositional one, and then you have to rebel. But you are not free to rebel against the designated position of the rebel. And so there is no free will within the ego. And because it creates a number of different identities for different situations, it becomes ever more confused, and no one of those identity fragments has the power to overrule the other and say, “I’m the real one, the other should go away so I have a unified consciousness”—there is no authority to do that within the ego structure, because none of them are real. And so the ego is living in a hall of mirrors, reflecting images and identifying, in a way, with all of them, and yet knowing it’s none of them, but not able to recognize the mirror itself as the consciousness that is containing this chaos, and is not affected by it.

And so liberation can only come when you recognize that all of this, the entire psychology of the ego, is an illusion, and you cannot use psychology to get out of psychology. It is the illusion that there is a psyche, and that that psyche needs to be studied and improved, and straightened out and made more refined and etc., etc.—all the self-improvement methods and techniques that people are constantly trying to learn—all of those are futile—they just create more confusion, and more sense of failure, more sense of lack of willpower, and lack of motivation, and sense of being split and internally conflicted, and in a deadlock between the child and the superego parent, and a war that never ends, except in total depression and desire just to die. And so there’s an epidemic of suicide in the world because life isn’t worth living if one’s in a hell realm.

And so the spiritual sadhana, the practice, is to get out of that hell realm. But the ego has the belief that it cannot get out of it, that this is its reality. And if you believe that, you have doomed yourself to a hopeless situation.

So Ramana, in the in the second sloka of The Forty Slokas On the Real…

Audio File: What Does it Mean to Kill Your Ego? – Audio File.mp3