The Library
- #2
One important reason why the great spiritual teachers have always enjoined upon their disciples the need of surrendering the ego, of giving up the self, is that when the mind is continually preoccupied with its own personal affairs, it sets up a narrow limitation upon its own possibilities. It cannot reach to the impersonal truth, which is so different and so distant from the topics that it thinks about day after day, year after year. Only by breaking through its self-imposed pettiness can the human mind enter into the perception of the Infinite, of the divine soul that is its innermost being.
6.8.4.2• Email • Listen - #4
- #7
- #10
- #17
- #19
- #28
- #31
- #33
- #34
- #41
Man begins his search for the highest Truth with his ego and rises to its higher and higher levels, but in the end he must leave the ego if the Truth is to be found. The manner of finding truth is such that he must leave the ego's limitations and look to its origin, its universal source.
6.8.4.41• Email • Listen - #46
- #52
- #66
- #69
- #72
- #73
- #77
- #82
- #87
- #95
- #101
Memory creates for us the patterns, traditions, values, and habits by which we live. It is the dominant authority. But it is also the tyrant which keeps us captive and denies us freedom--a deprival which effectually prevents the finding of truth and effectually builds a barrier to reality. Anyone can remember the ego-coloured past in this way, but only the sage can forget it and dissolve all these patterns.
6.8.4.101• Email • Listen - #106
- #119
- #123
- #128
- #145
It is perhaps not that the multitudes of people are evil as that they get so immersed in working for a livelihood, rearing a family, finding some pleasures, that the little ego provides their sole being. How much they lose if they attend only to this and never to the supreme question: Why am I here?
6.8.4.145• Email • Listen - #150
- #151
To surrender the ego is to surrender the thought of it, and this is done by stilling the mind whenever, in daily life, one becomes self-conscious. This silenced, ego vanishes… This art of effacing the ego by stilling the mind, by suddenly stopping its whirling flood of thoughts, could not be practised at will and at any time if one had not practised it previously and frequently in deliberate exercises at set times…
6.8.4.151,• Email • Listen - #153
Until it is brought to his attention, he may not know that the idol at whose feet he is continually worshipping is the ego. If he could give to God the same amount of remembrance that he gives to his ego, he could quite soon attain, and become established in, that enlightenment to which other men devote lifetimes of arduous effort.
6.8.4.153• Email - #155
Whatever helps to lead him out of the ego's tyranny, be it an idea or a situation, an induced mood or a particular service, is worth trying. But it will be easier, and the result more successful, to the extent that he releases himself from his past history.
6.8.4.155• Email - #157
- #161
- #162
- #164
- #167
If he is willing to look for them, he will find the hidden workings of the ego in the most unsuspected corners, even in the very midst of his loftiest spiritual aspirations. The ego is unwilling to die and will even welcome this large attrition of its scope if that is its only way of escape from death…
6.8.4.167,• Email • Listen - #175
- #176
My dear Ego: ”It is obvious that in this world I cannot live without you. Your presence is overwhelming, fills every instinct, thought, feeling, and action. But it is also obvious that I cannot live with you. The time has come to adjust our relationship. So I have one request to make of you. Please get out of my way!”
6.8.4.176• Email • Listen - #177
We cannot help living in a human ego and feeling its wishes and desires, for most of us are infatuated with it. But it can be put in its place and kept there, first through a profound understanding, next through a lofty aspiration to transcend it, and third through a following of the Quest until its very end.
6.8.4.177• Email • Listen - #178
- #179
- #180
What is in your heart? Ramakrishna's was full of the Divine Mother, as he called God. Before long he found her. Saint Francis of Assisi gave humility highest place in his own. He became the humblest man of his time. Fix an ideal in your heart. That is the first step to finding it.
6.8.4.180• Email • Listen - #186
- #190
We have to learn to recognize the individual self, the person, the ego, as a mind-made thing and therefore to withdraw from it, away from it, to put space between ourselves and it, and to detach ourselves more and more and more from it. As this process develops we come more and more into the Truth, the enlightenment.
6.8.4.190• Email • Listen - #191
- #193
- #196
- #198
He will advance most on the Quest who tries most to separate himself from his ego. It will be a long, slow struggle and a hard one, for the false belief that the ego is his true self grips him with hypnotic intensity. All the strength of all his being must be brought to this struggle to remove error and to establish truth, for it is an error not merely of the intellect alone but also of the emotions and of the will.
6.8.4.198• Email • Listen - #207
- #211
No one else can do for a man what Nature is tutoring him to do for himself, that is, to surrender the ego to the higher self. Without such surrender no man can attain the consciousness of that higher self. It is useless to look to a master to make for him this tremendous change-over within himself. No master could do it. The proper way and the only way is to give up this pathetic clinging to his own power, to his own littleness, and to his own limitations...
6.8.4.211,• Email - #212
”The truth shall make you free,” promised Jesus. What kind of freedom was he talking about? The answer can only be--from the ego! And this is corroborated by his own statements, uttered at other times, concerning the need to die to oneself.
6.8.4.212• Email - #216
Those who are unable or unwilling to destroy the ego's rule from within must suffer its destruction from without. But whereas the first way brings emotional suffering and mental perturbation, the second brings that along with troubles, disappointments, sicknesses, and blows in addition.
6.8.4.216• Email • Listen - #220
Before we can cultivate the best in us, we must crucify the worst in us. The ego must be hung and nailed by degrees if the Overself is to be resurrected in our consciousness. This is why it is so important to cleanse our emotions and correct our thoughts. The desires and the negatives must be overcome to make a way for the truth, the beauty, and goodness.
6.8.4.220• Email • Listen - #222
- #223
- #229
- #230
The declaration of Jesus that whosoever will save his life shall lose it, is uncompromising. It is an eternal truth as well as a universal one... It means that the inexorable condition which the Overself imposes before it will reveal itself in all its beauty, its grandeur, its peace, and its power is that they should abnegate this unbalanced interest in the lower activities of this world in which they are so totally immersed...
6.8.4.230,• Email • Listen - #235
- #236
- #238
- #239
- #241
- #247
- #271
… He has transferred the object of his attentions from the worldly sphere to the spiritual sphere, but the ego is still active. When his meditation comes to the threshold of Truth, he stops, terrified by the feeling that he is losing his very self. His little personal world is the subject that really interests him.
6.8.4.271,• Email • Listen - #307
- #309
- #316
- #317
- #335
- #342
- #349
- #355
It is both the irony and tragedy of life that we use up its strictly limited quota of years in pursuits which we come later to see as worthless and in desires which we find bring pain with their fulfilment. The dying man, who sees the cinema-film of his past flash in review before his mental eyes, discovers this irony and feels this tragedy.
6.8.4.355• Email • Listen - #357
One day he will feel utterly tired of the ego, will see how cunningly and insidiously it has penetrated all his activities, how even in supposedly spiritual or altruistic activities he was merely working for the ego. In this disgust with his earthly self, he will pray for liberation from it…
6.8.4.357,• Email • Listen - #360
- #361
- #362
- #366
- #368
”Give up thyself” is the constant injunction of all the great prophets. Before we can understand why this was their refrain, we must first understand the nature of the self about which they were talking. There is in every man a false self--the ego--and the true one--the Overself.
6.8.4.368• Email • Listen - #369
The ego stands in the way: its own presence annuls awareness of the presence of the Overself. But this need not be so. Correct and deeper understanding of what the self is, proper adjustment between the individual and the universal in consciousness, will bring enlightenment.
6.8.4.369• Email • Listen - #372
- #379
- #380
It is easy to recognize some of the attachments from which he must loose himself--the greeds, the lusts, and the gluttonies--but it is not so easy to recognize the subtler ones. These start with attachment to his own ideas, his own beliefs; they end with attachment to his own ego.
6.8.4.380• Email • Listen - #384
Both Shankara and Ramana Maharshi blame identification with the body as ignorance, which the first says results in no hope of liberation and the second says is the root cause of all trouble. What they say is unquestionably so. But what else can happen in the beginning except this identification? It is the first kind of identity anyone knows. His error is that he stays at this point and makes no attempt to inquire further. If he did--in a prolonged, sustained, and continued effort--he would eventually find the truth: knowledge would replace ignorance.
6.8.4.384• Email • Listen - #387
- #391
The ego is always in hiding and often in disguise. It is a cunning creature, never showing its own face, so that even the man who wants to destroy its rule is easily tricked into attacking everything else but the ego! Therefore, the first (as well as the final) essential piece of knowledge needed to track it down to its secret lair is how to recognize and identify it.
6.8.4.391• Email • Listen - #396
- #397
Being what it is, a compound of higher and lower attributes which are perpetually in conflict, the ego has no assured future other than that of total collapse. The Bible sentence, A Kingdom divided against itself cannot stand, is very applicable to it: this is why the aspirant must take heart that one day his goal will be reached, even if there were no law of evolution to confirm it--as there is.
6.8.4.397• Email • Listen - #410
- #413
- #414
- #415
- #417
There would be no hope of ever getting out of this ego-centered position if we did not know these three things. First, the ego is only an accumulation of memories and a series of cravings, that is, thought; it is a fictitious entity. Second, the thinking activity can come to an end in stillness. Third, Grace, the radiation of the Power beyond man, is ever-shining and ever-present. If we let the mind become deeply still and deeply observant of the ego's self-preserving instinct, we open the door to Grace, which then lovingly swallows us.
6.8.4.417• Email - #418
The senses which tempt him to go astray from his chosen path of conduct may be subjugated in time by right thoughts. The thoughts which distract him from his chosen path of meditation may be subjugated by persistent effort. But the ego which bars his entry into the kingdom of heaven refuses, and only pretends, to subjugate itself.
6.8.4.418• Email • Listen - #421
That which keeps us busy with one kind of activity after another--mental as well as physical--until we fall asleep tired, is nothing other than the ego. In that way it diverts one's attention from the need of engaging in the supremely important activity--the struggle with and destruction of the ego itself.
6.8.4.421• Email • Listen - #422
- #425
- #430
When the ego is brought to its knees in the dust, humiliated in its own eyes, however esteemed or feared, envied or respected in other men's eyes, the way is opened for Grace's influx. Be assured that this complete humbling of the inner man will happen again and again until he is purified of all pride.
6.8.4.430• Email • Listen - #435
What or who is seeking enlightenment? It cannot be the higher Self, for that is itself of the nature of Light. There then only remains the ego! This ego, the object of so many denunciations and denigrations, is the being that, transformed, will win truth and find Reality even though it must surrender itself utterly in the end as the price to be paid.
6.8.4.435• Email • Listen - #442
- #443
Although the price of attainment, which is the gradual giving up of the lower self, is agonizing because the lower one is the only self we know ordinarily, there is for every such surrender a compensation equal in value at least to what is given up, and actually of more surpassing worth. This compensation is not only a theoretical one, it is a real experience; and at the last, when the whole of the lesser self is surrendered, the only description of it which mere words can give is blissful peace. Since agony of mind cannot coexist with peace, the agony falls away and only the peace remains. The warning must be given, however, that the Higher Self never yields its compensations until the requisite surrender is made. If this is done little by little, which is usually the only way it can be done, then the lovely compensation will follow also little by little.
6.8.4.443,• Email • Listen - #446
- #449
- #454
The egoistic way of viewing life is a narrowing one. It keeps him from what is best, holds him down to what is base, and prevents him from working with the miraculous forces of the Overself. The farther he moves himself away from it and the nearer he moves into the impersonal and cosmic way, the sooner will he receive the benediction of more wisdom, better health, smoother relationships, and grander character.
6.8.4.454• Email - #456
- #457
- #458
- #463
The unawakened ego submits passively to the lower influences which come to it out of the shadows of its own long past and to the sense-stirring suggestions which come to it out of the surroundings in which it moves. But when it has found and surrendered to the Overself in the heart, this blind, mechanical responsiveness comes to an end and an aroused, enlightened, fully aware, inner rulership replaces it.
6.8.4.463• Email • Listen - #465
Remove the concept of the ego from a man and you remove the solid ground from beneath his feet. A yawning abyss seems to open up under him. It gives the greatest fright of his life, accompanied by feelings of utter isolation and dreadful insecurity. He will then clamour urgently for the return of his beloved ego and return to safety once more--unless his determination to attain truth is so strong and so exigent that he can endure the ordeal, survive the test, and hold on until the Overself's light irradiates the abyss.
6.8.4.465• Email • Listen - #468
- #469
- #471
- #478
- #483
… After all, the personality is only a series of continuous thoughts, strongly held and centered around a particular body. He who can win the power to free himself from all thoughts, wins the power to free himself from the personal I-thoughts. Only such a man has really obeyed Jesus' injunction to lose his life…
6.8.4.483,• Email • Listen - #483
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30 Aug 2020
9 Nov 2016
29 Nov 2016
8 Feb 2013
20 Oct 2019
28 Oct 2016
21 Apr 2018
25 Oct 2017
6 Jan 2018
15 Aug 2016
19 Jun 2018
24 May 2015
8 Mar 2018
30 Oct 2012
10 Jul 2012
6 Oct 2015
7 Mar 2016
12 Mar 2019
6 Apr 2019
22 May 2016
26 Jan 2019
26 Jul 2016
11 Jun 2013
25 Feb 2019
26 Apr 2019
22 Apr 2017
26 Feb 2019
13 Sep 2020
2 Sep 2020
16 Feb 2019
4 Mar 2020
11 Apr 2018
15 Aug 2012
12 Nov 2014
14 Jan 2011
27 May 2019
6 Jan 2020
19 May 2019
12 Mar 2018
31 Aug 2016
30 Mar 2013
3 Aug 2011
5 Mar 2013
24 Apr 2018
30 Mar 2020
21 Dec 2010
15 Jan 2016
19 Jul 2011
27 Mar 2016
9 Dec 2011
15 Dec 2018
16 Oct 2018
29 Oct 2018
1 Dec 2015
5 Jan 2018
16 Apr 2018
13 Aug 2020
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