“Before I can drop the ego, before I can disassociate myself from the incompleteness, I, the one attached to incompleteness, have to first get attached one last time.” And this last attachment is the attachment to the Guru. It is the end of all attachments. That’s the Guru. Read more....
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Questioner: Does the ego always shadow the intellect? Whenever I use the intellect, is some type of ego always associated with it? Like sāttvika anger, pure anger, does something like sāttvika ahaṃkāra also exist?
Acharya Prashant: Useful question. You see, what is ego? We are responding to the question, “Does a sāttvika ahaṃkāra exist?” What is ahaṃkāra? What is ego? Ego is a sense of impurity, incompleteness, hollowness. Ego is a longing. Ego is a restlessness. Ego is a continuous tension. That’s what the ego is.
So, the ego says, “I am in danger. I am incomplete. I am not yet settled. I have to reach somewhere.” That’s what the ego says. And man is born with the ego, and to be born is ego. The seeds of ego themselves are born, and every child is carrying the seeds of ego. So, ego is there, which means the sense of incompleteness is there; it is an inevitability. It is necessarily there.
So, he is incomplete, he is incomplete, he is incomplete, she is incomplete, she is incomplete, he is incomplete—all, because all are body forms. To be a body form is to have that sense of incompleteness. There is a hollow here, there is a hollow here, there is a hollow here, there is a hollow here and there and here (pointing at the listeners in the audience and himself) —everywhere there is a hollow.
