Why does one have ego? || Acharya Prashant, on Saint Lalleshwari (2019)

Questioner (Q): Why do I have ego?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Do not ask why does the will-o’-the-wisp or the ego or your personal center still exist. If you’ll ask why does it exist, the answer is your birth. It exists because you do. When was the ego born? When ‘I’ was born. As long as you keep taking yourself as the born one, as the one who took birth one day and is going to die one day, the ego is definitely going to remain.

So, if Parmeshwari asks, why do I have ego? Do you see what comes before the ego? What is the question? Why do I have the ego? ‘I’ doesn't even need to have the ego, the ‘I’ is the ego. Till there is Parmeshwari, there is bound to remain the ‘I’. Don't you see what Parmeshwari means? A body that is separate from the universe—that is ego. As someone who is localized, temporally and spatially. Parmeshwari is in this hall, at 12 noon. Had she been the Truth, she would have continued wherever she was. But at 3 p.m., she would be at the Ganga, not here. So, she's localized. Similarly, spatially, at 12 noon, because she is here, so she cannot be at the Ganga.

This is what is ego: a thing of time and space; a thing that is severely limited by time and space. And therefore suffers, and is therefore debilitated. Even if you want to, you cannot be at the ghāt at this very time. And that you see, is at the center of a lot of your suffering. Were you not limited in time, you would have immediately gone back to the past and corrected it. But you are limited in time. If you are here, you can neither be in the past nor in the future. If you were not limited in space, then you would have controlled the entire universe by being present wherever you wanted to be. Or maybe, by being present everywhere in the universe, and therefore, being the universe itself. But you cannot do that. And therefore you suffer.