You Can't Put the Ego Aside
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.
No trick will work; you cannot say I will remain oblivious to the whole thing, but I have a technique through which the whole thing can just be swept aside; it won’t work.
You will have to acknowledge it to yourself and if you want to make doubly sure then you may just go and acknowledge it to somebody else as well. Because we never know of our own self-deceptions, maybe, this acknowledgment itself carries a tinge of self-deception.
So, know all your rubbish and acknowledge it to yourself and then to somebody else as well. Unless you come to terms with the total foolishness of it and the absurdity and the horror contained in it, how will you dispose it away? You will still continue to entertain the charm it has, the mythical charm, are you getting it.
Stuff remains in our drawers and trunks at home while it has turned rotten long back. Does it happen or not? Rotten or unuseful or something. How does the stuff still continue to hold its place? You don’t pull out the drawer. The moment you see what’s rotten within, now you can’t tolerate it; it gets disposed of. But if you don’t pull the thing out, it can stay there comfortably for years, and it does often, does it not?
That’s the mind. You have to go into every single recess, each nook and corner, and figure out what lies there, and the moment you throw light at it, it disappears. That’s the only method to throw light at it, and acknowledge its presence. Yes, it’s there! Yes, it’s there!
And that’s the one thing that vanity does not allow us to do: acknowledge the presence of rubbish within. It feels shameful, so you don’t want to do it.
How do I acknowledge that I am deeply, deeply jealous within. How do I acknowledge that I am deeply jealous of my best friend, how do I acknowledge that I am jealous of my wife? I don’t want to, because if I do; that changes the entire structure of the relationship and has a cost, you don’t want to bear that cost, right?
Internal acknowledgment is extremely important, so that’s honesty and that’s humility and what you experience in the process is humiliation, you will have to allow yourself that humiliation. If your vanity does not allow you to bow your head down to even the facts, then there is no hope.
Questioner: What they are trying to say is don’t look at yourself and the whole practice is seeing that whatever I think of myself is a lot of rubbish and dirt inside and it focuses on that, not on the concept that one day I will not have any of that.
Acharya Prashant: A lot of the neo spirituality stuff is not merely useless; it’s actually evil.
