Ego is living without paraphernalia🔗

When you live with ego, you need some paraphernalia, some support, some people around you all the time. This support is what gives you your identity. Without that, you are nobody. A king is a king only when he has his kingdom. On the other hand, a Paramahamsa, an egoless being, is a king unto himself. He needs no kingdom! He sleeps when he stretches his leg and eats when he stretches his hand! He simply follows the flow of Existence. He is a realized soul.

But when you become a Paramahamsa, a great kingdom will automatically form around you, and you will be neither touched nor tainted by it. Only the weak ones create a kingdom for themselves and derive their support and strength from it. Only the weak need the status to support them, their ego to support them. For a Paramahamsa, his 'state' will do everything for him; he will be untouched by the status that surrounds him.

You search for paraphernalia because you feel life is too empty and mundane otherwise. And you feel life is mundane because you are searching for miracles all the time. The greatest miracles of Existence are happening every moment in front of your eyes. But you are so pre-occupied with your ego that you are missing it!

Your own body is a miracle. It is greater than any supercomputer that can ever be invented. The millions of cells and the thousands of synchronized activities that happen in your body is the greatest miracle on planet earth. If you know how to drop your mind and live in tune with Existence, you will understand that what you search for in the name of miracles is nothing but the natural synchronous events that happen in Existence. Your ego simply makes these things look ordinary, that's all. Your knowledge reduces it to mundane logic.

Q: Why is it that we know, but we still decide to suffer?

This is a nice question! When we have the choice to live happily, why do we choose suffering?

You see, you don't know your Self, your being, which is actually your real identity. Over time, you start relating with the outer world and create a pseudo identity for yourself. With this pseudo identity, you can relate with the outer world. This pseudo identity is your ego. It is purely made up of the labels that others paste on you. You don't know who you really are.

Suppose I ask you who you are, what will you say? You will say, 'I am the father of so and so,' or 'I am the sister of so and so,' or 'I am a doctor,' or something else similar. But what are all these identities? They are only your relationships and professions. You are daughter to your father, wife to your husband, mother to your children. But what are you to yourself?

You currently exist only in relationships and professions. Your ego is built up on this. Your identity is only through this. That is why there is always a danger of losing your identity. It is a man-made fragile thing and so it may break at any time. That is why you need to work so hard in maintaining it.

Your inherent nature is actually 'being alone'. When you were in your mother's womb, you were alone. You are actually enough unto yourself. This is your individuality. Over time, this individuality is taken over by what you call personality. Individuality is natural; personality is societal.

It is like this: A parcel moves from one place to another and at every place, it starts getting stamped with various details. The parcel is actually not these stamps but the stuff inside it, is it not? In the same way, you are not the stamps that people put on you; you are the stuff inside yourself.

With time, your ego is built on these stamps and you need more and more people to feed it. That is why you will observe that you are totally unable to be alone, with yourself. When you are with yourself, you don't hear the voices of the others feeding your ego. Your ego goes unfed. So what do you do? You at least turn on the television and watch!

A small story:

A man belonging to a long-standing political party was dying.

His friends came to know that he had switched his loyalties to the opposition party at the time of his impending death. They were astonished and asked him why he did that. The man replied, 'Oh! I'd rather one of them die!'

So strong is our pseudo-identification! It has become such a solid reality to us that it blinds us from seeing anything else. Even at the time of death, we find it difficult to drop our prestige! We live and die unconsciously.

The fear of losing your personality, which is your only anchor point, causes you to behave in the ways that you behave. That is why we say your ego is playing up. The whole of spirituality is all about losing this personality, this pseudo identification.

This can happen when you start watching. When you start watching, you will understand that you are the stuff inside the parcel and not the labels on it. When this awareness happens, you need no lecture, no sermon, no teaching or preaching.