Ego Death & Spiritual Awakening
Reconnecting With Your Higher Self:
First let’s understand What is ego & ego death?
When someone uses the term ‘ego’, the mind usually conjures up an image of someone who is arrogant, entitled and has a grandiose sense of self. We often judge people for having a huge ‘ego’ when their self obsession is so apparent that it overshadows all other semblances of their personality.
What’s not apparent then, is that the only difference between the person whom we are judging and ourselves is that our own ego is not as brashly pronounced – but it’s still there. The truth is that everyone has an ego – not just those arrogant people – and the more that we feed our own ego and cling onto our need to live a self-centred subjective life, the more miserable it makes us.
The ego is hiding in the shadows of the “I, Me and My” that fuel those beliefs. Our ego gives us our sense of identity, and our sense of identity is composed from these beliefs we have about ourselves, and also the ones other people have said about us that we have chosen to accept. Agreeing with these thoughts about ourselves, good or bad, is reinforcing our ego. This ego has been playing in our mind as long as we can remember, and we think of it as our ‘self’ – who we really are. ‘I am these thoughts, I am these beliefs, I am the voice in my head.’ The truth is that these thoughts and beliefs that make up our ego, our sense of self – these are not who we are. We are the soul listening to these thoughts, we are not the thoughts themselves.
What a liberation to realise that the voice in my head is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.
Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behaviour. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.
A common term for realising this distinction exists between soul and ego is ‘Ego Death’ – but you cannot kill your ego completely. Although it has negative implications when it remains unchecked, your ego is a necessary construct that has been created by your soul so that you experience life individually and have a unique experience – through your preferences, personality traits, interests etc. The issue here is that people become stuck living in their ego point of view and they think that is all of them that exists. They are unaware of their higher self, the soul that lies beneath everything. The ego has been controlling them for too long and when you live a life led by ego you suffer. The realisation that your ego is not all that is – and that you are a part of something far bigger – is what most people experience during a spiritual awakening. You begin to awaken to life; you realise how you have been asleep for a very long time once the illusion of ego has been revealed to you. The ego operates in an unconscious state, and when you realise you are the one who is observing the ego – when you can watch those thoughts instead of living by them and reacting to them as long the ego has led you – you have activated a higher level of consciousness.
Tags: Learn To Die
