Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Drop the ego for enlightenment


Life is filled with truth, auspiciousness and beauty (satyam, shivam and sundaram) but our self is filled with a false ego. As long as the ego lives, we may not experience true beauty but our mind will be filled with dreams of expectations that define beauty in a subjective way. Ego is nothing but a self image of who we truly are.

This self image projects a reality defined by the expectations of the ego. When these expectations are not fulfilled, it creates its own resentments and regrets. These create a life of deficiency called 'samsara' and life becomes a movement from incompleteness to incompleteness.

If one increases one's awareness, which is a part of meditation, one realizes that resentment is nothing but a mental resentment to what has happened. It is a negative emotional fight of some unalterable past. Like a broken record one replays, relives the past injuries. Then they become mental constructs which project a subjective reality and hence we never see the objective reality. This mental construct act as a thermostat. To change the temperature of the room one has to reset the thermostat, to change the temperature of the internal room one has to drop the ego.

While listening to the chirping of the bird or music hear the foundation or the backbone of the sound. Look at the bird or the musician and see the formless presence in the form. Every form exists in a formless presence. A form is defined by the formless. It is only in the contrast the forms gets defined. This formless is the backbone of the form. Thoughts are moving. Any movement is change. Change happens in the changeless presence. Thoughts are internal sounds. See the soundless space while noisy thoughts are moving. When one deeply "sees" which is called 'Darshan' in Sanskrit, then one sees a formless, soundless, changeless presence as the backbone or foundation of life. This principle cannot be contained in any self image and hence self image is a prison in which most of us live. To drop this prison is enlightenment.

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