Questioner: I heard you say that when people say, put the ego aside, don’t pay any attention. I thought maybe I misunderstood. I thought the practice was to see the falseness of my actions — I say one thing; I do something different, and, in that way, reduce the ego, and my assumption was that at some point it goes away, is that a false assumption?
Acharya Prashant: You cannot work upon the ego; you can only observe its ways, or you could say the only way to work upon the ego is to observe its ways. No trick would work there; you will have to do it the hard way. You will have to see everything happening in front of your eyes; you will have to see all the distortions, all the ugliness, all the self-deceptions.
You will have to see, you will have to acknowledge, you will have to acknowledge every tit bit of it, and you will have to say “Yes! Yes! Yes! This falseness is me! This is me! This is me! This is me!” So, in that sense you will have to inflict humiliation upon yourself, that humiliation becomes humility.
Do you see you have a lot of mess in your life, right? And then you discipline yourself to look at every bit of it, and the condition is that the mess would get cleared only if you acknowledge every part of it, every atom of it in its entirety.
That’s not easy, because you desperately want to avoid looking at it. It’s your own mess; every glance at every single part fills you up with shame and self-derision. That isn’t pretty, but that’s the only way to get rid of the mess.
