Dream and Reality: How the Ego Builds Its False Foundation
Questioner: Sir, is the root here the ego? And if the ego is without any support, how can it still continue to nourish samsara (world)?
Acharya Prashant: Yes, you could say the root is the ego.
Then you are saying, “If the ego is without any support, how can it still continue to nourish samsara?” It’s a very good question—please answer it. How do you manage to live? It’s almost like asking, “Why was I shrieking in the dream?” Because you were in a dream. It’s only now that you can say that the dream was a dream. In the dream, you hardly took the dream as a 'dream'.
When you are with an Ashtavakra, when you are sending over questions to me, then you come up with the fantastic revelation that the ego is without any support. But look at your dream like day-to-day life, there do you realize that the ego is without any real support? And in your dream, all appears so real; in your everyday life, all that the ego creates appears so real. The ego itself appears to be the foundation of your world. That is why the world stands. Otherwise, having seen that the foundation is non-existent, your world would have collapsed. The very fact that a personal world stoutly stands erect for you testifies that for you its foundation is not unreal. You are inhibiting that world; you are living in that building.
Would you ever live in a building if you fully well knew that it has no foundation? But not only do you live in the building of your samsara, you invest a lot in it, you decorate it. In that same building is your house and your office. Would you build your house and your office in a building that has no foundation? No. But you have done that. And if you have done that, what does it prove? That you assume that the building has a very solid foundation. So now you are saying that the ego has no support. But look at your actions and your decisions—they prove that you think that the ego has a lot of support. What is the ego? Please tell me. The ego is your sense of yourself.
The ego is not you; it is your sense of yourself.
You are walking along an empty street in the middle of the night—nobody around you, nobody to really disturb you, nobody to talk to you, nobody to point to you, nobody to intercept you, nobody to remind anything to you, and still do you see how much keeps going on in the mind? That’s the ego.
All might appear alright around you, in your body, and yet your mind might be very-very laden, very gloomy, burdened, and distraught. That’s the ego—your sense of yourself. It does not have any foundation, it has no reality, it is not grounded in anything objective or metaphysical; it just needlessly exists.
You can walk through that empty lane even without the buzz in the head. The buzz in the head serves no real, beneficial, practical purpose, but it still exists like the buzz in the minds of many of you right now, even as I speak. Does it serve any purpose? You do far better to just shut down the buzz and simply listen. But the buzz refuses to be shut down—that’s the ego.
It needlessly exists and makes itself feel indispensable. “Without me, how would things work?” As if without all the internal chaos, you cannot walk through that street. Can you, or can you not? But if you ask the ego, the ego would say, “How dare you dismiss me and keep walking when something so very important is pending for you? So, even as you walk, you must attend to the very important matter that I am presenting to you.” Walking then becomes a sideshow, the center stage is occupied by the inner buzz. Does that happen or not? That’s the ego.
The ego of all important matters, the ego of things momentous, the ego of heaven and hell, the ego of life and death, the ego of urgencies, the ego of emergencies, the ego that does not allow you to do one thing straight in life because it always presents you with too many things too important to not to consider. And as you slowly get lost considering those greatly important things, that which is real keeps fading away from your inner radar.
All that is inconsequential becomes your life, reality turns into a distant star to be seen, to be coveted, but never to be had.
One thing that ensures that the ego continues is its great weakness. It is not the ego’s strength that enables it to continue, but its great handicap. What is that handicap? The ego has no power to observe itself; the ego cannot self-reflect, and that enables it to continue.
The ego cannot know itself. Had it had the faculty to know itself, it would have simply collapsed. It is quite strange, but it is the blindness of the ego that helps it survive. That is why the day the ego comes to learn about itself, it finds nowhere to hide. Therefore, the ones who know the least about themselves would be the ones who would live the longest. As you grow in self-knowledge, you find that death is nearer and nearer.
So, bad news: Your D-day just came closer by a couple of years. A few more months with me, and you would probably be ready to take off—bad news.
नायमात्मा बलहीनेन लभ्यो न च प्रमादात् तपसो वाप्यलिङ्गात् ।
एतैरुपायैर्यतते यस्तु विद्वांस्तस्यैष आत्मा विशते ब्रह्मधाम ॥ 1.2.४ ॥
nāyamātmā balahīnena labhyo na ca pramādāt tapaso vāpyaliṅgāt
etairupāyairyatate yastu vidvāṁstasyaiṣa ātmā viśate brahmadhāma || 1.2.4 ||
This Self cannot be won by any who is without strength, nor with error in the seeking, nor by an askesis without the true mark: but when a man of knowledge strives by these means his self enters into Brahman (Absolute Truth), his abiding place.
~ Mundaka Upanishad, Chapter 1, Section 2, Verse 4
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Questioner: Sir, you said that the ego continues just because it is weak. In one of the scriptures, I came across a sentence, “Nāyamātmā balahīnena labhyo ,” (‘this Self cannot be won by any who is without strength’) where balahīn or strengthless-ness has been related to the ego. How are these things linked?
Acharya Prashant: I said that the ego is weak; it has a handicap. What is that handicap? That it cannot look at itself; that it has no capacity to self-reflect—that is what I called as the 'weakness'. So, if you have no capacity for self-knowledge, if you have no capacity to look at yourself and know who you are, then would you ever know how weak you are? So, the ego, in spite of being weak, support-less, foundation-less, rootless keeps thinking and assuming that it is strong. Actually, it is weak, but it takes itself to be strong. And the illusion continues because the ego cannot know itself.
Hence, nāyamātmā balahīnena labhyo , because it cannot know itself. Hence, the Truth is not available to it. Then, it keeps wondering. It says, “The Truth should not have been available only to the balahīn, to the powerless one. Who am I? The powerful one. Why is the Truth eluding me?” You think that you are powerful—you are not.
The very fact that the Truth is not available to you proves that you are powerless. But then, instead of admitting that you are powerless, you keep struggling with the contradiction or a supposed contradiction that, “In spite of being so powerful, why do I not get the Truth?” If you do not get the Truth, that merely means that you are not powerful.
Happens you know. There was a time when re-checking of board papers used to be free. For free but that brought in a deluge of re-examination requests, rather re-checking requests. People would not say that, “I did not do well,” they would say, “There lies a contradiction. I did well but the marks are not as per the expectations.”
It’s another matter that 99% of the re-checking requests proved to be of no avail. There were people who would attempt questions worth 70 marks and would be surprised when they would get 72. They would say, "We were expecting 85." Having attempted questions worth 70 marks, they would find it highly surprising that they got only 72. Finally the board authorities realized that a fee has to be kept, and the fee was kept high enough to deter some of the daydreamers.
We do not look at the hard facts; we operate from the center of our assumptions.
We say, “My assumption has to be the Truth. If the fact does not tally with my assumption, then there is something wrong with the fact.” Now, the fact is a fact, how can there be something right or wrong with the fact? The fact is an objective reality—you cannot quarrel with it. Obviously, if something within you is in disagreement with the fact, then the thing within you has to be challenged, and scrutinized, and changed. But we don’t want to do that. That’s the ego—the ‘I’-assumption, which has no grounding in fact, but still exists.
Could we learn to really live by facts alone sans any spirituality? That too would lead to liberation. Just living by facts alone is in itself liberation.
But we live in a dirty contradiction, a chaotic mess—sometimes respectful to the fact, sometimes siding with the assumption; never fully knowing which way to go.
निराधारा ग्रहव्यग्रा मूढाः संसारपोषकाः । एतस्यानर्थमूलस्य मूलच्छेदः कृतो बुधैः ॥ 18.३८ ॥
nirādhārā grahavyagrā mūḍhāḥ saṃsārapoṣakāḥ etasyānarthamūlasya mūlacchedaḥ kṛto budhaiḥ || 18.38 ||
Even when living without any support and eager for achievement, the stupid are still nourishing samsara (world), while the wise have cut at the very root of its unhappiness.
~ Ashtavakra Gita, Chapter 18, Verse 38
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