Known in Buddhist practice as self-grasping, in psychology as personality, and by writers as persona, Ego is considered to be our chief obstacle to spiritual practice. Western Tantra will use this term to designate our life plan for interacting with our environment, which includes our characteristic ways of relating to other people, the methods we use to do things, our “style,” the ways we see ourselves and the ways we hope other see us. It can include even our homes, cars, family and country identification. But Ego especially focuses on our physical body and the way we clothe and care for it. Think of Ego as our self-concept and its habitual way of relating to the world. Ego interferes with our spiritual progress in three primary ways.
First, the physical body belongs to the material realm, and its demands tie us to the material world. We then focus on the material world as the solution to our problems. It’s great to have a comfortable material life, but we should keep in mind that our physical body will eventually die, leaving all our material wealth behind. So to be realistic, we should use our time on earth to find our pathway to the eternal.
The second way our Ego interferes with our spiritual progress is by draining our Soul of its power. Our Ego is merely a mental concept, how we view ourselves, and the habitual ways we relate to the world, our personality. Our personality usually conflicts with the way others see us. We try to help others and people accuse us of selfish motives. If we think of ourselves as tough-minded, we are criticized for showing weakness. Wherever we go and whatever we do, we have to defend ourselves and our actions. This takes energy. On a purely physical level, the brain works hard to correct dissonance between personal and external perceptions, and this expends neurotransmitters. Threats to our self-concepts take mental work which exhausts us.
On a spiritual level, maintaining Ego also takes energy. If you are in tune with your inner mental realm, you realize that challenges to our self-concept weaken our Ego, and the Ego must draw consciousness energy, life force, from its source, the Soul, in order to restore the Ego. The more our Ego’s life plan fails to supply our needs, the more Ego drains our Soul of energy to maintain our image of ourselves in the face of reality. We experience blows to our Ego as Soul crushing.
Those of us with awareness of our life force, the energy of consciousness, realize how essential this life force is to our wellbeing. In different cultures, this life force is called: prana, chi, qi, kundalini, juju, esa, medicine, breath, light, love, and many other names. The spiritually aware can feel this energy and where it flows. Your life force flows to the focus of your attention. It’s why we say pay attention. It costs us something, our juju.
When the Ego hurts, we pay attention to ourselves, and life energy flows from our source of divine energy, our divine Soul, to heal our hurt Ego. The more the Ego is out of step with reality, the more wounds our Ego takes from the world, and the more energy it takes from the Soul to support itself. The Ego is a fixed self-concept that is trying to deal with an ever-changing reality, so our Egos are constantly draining our Souls of energy, leaving little of no energy for other uses, including healing our body or discovering our gateway to the beyond.
The third way our Ego interferes with our spiritual progress is by sabotage. We mistake our Ego as our true nature. We think the ways we see ourselves and all our support mechanisms that maintain the Ego are our true state of being. They are not. Our true nature is pure consciousness in union with all-that-is, what some call Soul in union with God, Consciousness dwelling in Emptiness, Enlightened consciousness, Nirvana, Satori, Paradise, and many other terms. Many people have described the ecstasy of discovering their true nature in the universe.
However, when we discover our true nature, we naturally abandon our false nature, our Ego. We stop feeding it our life force energy, and Ego dies. Our Ego knows it lives only by means of the consciousness energy it draws from the Soul. Because Ego thinks it is us, it thinks we will cease to exist without the Soul’s life energy, so Ego enslaves our Souls. When our Souls eventually discover this subterfuge as part of the spiritual path, we discover we do not need a concept to exist. We exist beyond concepts, and the Ego dissolves. We become selfless.
Ego is terrified of losing its life energy and will do anything to sabotage progress on the spiritual path to discover reality, that we are not our mental concepts of ourselves. That is why the Ego is known as the enemy we carry around inside us. As described in Western Tantra, the White Path of Ethics, Chapter 6 “The Enemy Within,” the Ego will even kill its host body to escape from the reality that Ego must surrender and dissolve in order to liberate the Soul. That is why most spiritual traditions forbid suicide. They realize that surrender of the Ego is an essential step on the spiritual journey.
As traumatic as losing your concept of self can be, there are great benefits. One is the feeling of freedom. You no longer need to feed your Ego, and it can no longer be hurt, because it is gone. The other great benefit is that without the need to feed your life energy to your self-concept, you now have energy for other uses. You can heal your body with your own life energy, you can heal others, and wishes backed by the power of your unselfish, divine Soul now have the power needed to manifest. Magic becomes real. Really.