What Is the Ego? || AP Neem Candies

Acharya Prashant: 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 you of anything, 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 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 simply have 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.

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.

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