Your being is always centered. Your mind is always at the periphery. Your mind constantly seeks outward led by the senses. Your being stays centered at the core and is directed inwards you are constantly tugged between the centre and the perimeter.
When you are at the periphery you are mad, truly mad. You are overcome with fear and greed. You are consumed by lust, desire of power and wealth. When you are at the centre, you are in cosmic Consciousness.
Over time, you develop the capability to stay somewhere in between. You have to choose madness otherwise, because your mind will not let you stay at the centre. You become eccentric, moving only briefly back and forth between the bliss of your core and the illusions of your periphery.
At the periphery your senses control you; they make merry. Once in a while, if you are intelligent, you realize that you are getting nowhere. You go wherever your senses lead you and try to enjoy the sense objects presented to you.
Over time, the enjoyment decreases; you need more and more of the same object, while the enjoyment gets less and less. You are about to get addicted. Some bit of intelligence in you warns to get out. You move away from the periphery and try to move towards the centre where you have experienced brief moments of great peace and happiness.
Your awareness does not last long. You now move back towards the periphery. Please understand that at the peripheral level you are in the grip of the need to survive and possess. You are governed by your ego, or ‘I’ based survival needs and ‘mine,’ the need to possess.
Your fear of losing your identity and your greed to possess more and more are the two strong forces that keep you tethered to the periphery. Your ego reduces when you realize you connectivity with others, and when you understand that you can collaborate with others far more effectively than if you compete.
Your need to possess more and more decreases when you develop the awareness of enjoying what you have with you, instead of rushing to acquire more. As you move from being eccentric to the centre, you move away from the past and future to the present moment. You move away from suffering into bless.
Getting rid of ego? How are you going to surrender the ego, when it does not exist? Suppose you are sitting in a dark room. You want the darkness to disappear. But can you push it out? Can you fight darkness to disappear? But can you push it out? Can you light darkness and force it to leave the room? No! No matter how long you keep trying, you are ultimately going to be defeated- and that to by something which does not exist!
Ego is all about the illusory identity we build about ourselves, around ourselves, so that we can feel secure. A child has no ego. It is free to explore. As we grow, our education and conditioning helps us build this barrier around ourselves. It is an ‘unreal’, non-existent barrier that separates us from our true self. It is a barrier that keeps us in bondage.
The ego is like darkness, it has no positive existence. Just like darkness is simply the absence of light, the ego is nothing but the absence of awareness. To struggle to kill the ego is like trying to push the darkness out of the room. To really expel the darkness, what you need to do is to forget all about dealing with the darkness.
Focus you energy on light instead. Just bring a small lamp in to the room, and you will find that darkness has fled on its own! So, I tell you to forget all about the ego. Instead, focus on bringing a lamp of awareness into your being. When your entire consciousness has become a flame, you will find that the ego is no more.
The ego is an illusion. You cannot surrender it when you are unaware- because you don’t know how. Of course, you cannot surrender it when you become aware either- because then you realize there is nothing left to surrender! What you have heard, read, been taught- "Surrender the ego in order to attain Self-realization" this is unworkable. It can happen only the other way round. Self-realization dawns, and suddenly you cannot find the ego anymore.
The surrender has already happened, just like that.
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