Let’s look now at four long-term strategies for going beyond the ego and all its delusions.
One of these strategies is like a playful practice, or a kind of thought experiment, except it’s not mental. Think of it like a life experiment that you enact.
This experiement is basically to live as if you weren’t you. When I say live, I’m talking about everything that you do on a daily basis. Do it as if you weren’t you, as if you’d woken up in someone else’s body.
Imagine being another person, imagine that this this ego that you’re experiencing isn’t yours, but someone else’s. You’re just watching their crazy inner world from the inside. You’re like a fly on the wall, except you’re a fully embodied fly on the wall, seeing everything that’s going on for this ego, from the inside. Think of it like a character in a movie, with all its quirky traits, hangups, wishes, likes, dislikes, and so on.
You can do this is a 24-hour practice potentially. After some time doing this, you might realize that this is actually your ordinary experience of life. You’re playing a character, but you’re addicted to the character.
The recognition that we are not the ego is inside us, latent within us. What happens is that after so many years of running these mental and emotional patterns, we just forget about this latent understanding. We get totally lost in the character that we are playing.
We can get so lost in there that we try and become a dictator, or a very famous political leader, because having that level of standing perpetuates the ego.
This can be a 24-hour practice. Even while I’m typing this article, I can do it. I imagine that I am not who I’ve always thought I am and I’m experiencing a new body, a new ego. That helps you go beyond the ego. Once you do that, you can then look at it in a more objective way.
The second method is to watch your mind like a hawk, especially when you’re around other people.
Many of the ego delusions I discuss are interpersonal in nature. You’re trying to convince other people, you’re trying to be better than other people. Watch your mind like a hawk. Watch what’s going on there, and you’ll see that there’s always comparison. The ego is comparing, comparing, comparing, and judging, making comments, monologues, dialogues, and more. It’s just constantly doing this all the time. You’ve got to watch over your mind like a hawk to see this mechanism. That’ll help you free yourself from the ego over time, slowly but surely.
The third one is spiritual practice. This could be meditation, yoga, contemplation work, prayer, whatever. As long as it’s powerful spiritual practice. These practices are not about just relaxation or well-being, it’s actually about destroying this idea that you are this this thing that’s created by the thoughts and emotions that you experience. That really is what spirituality is about: about self-transcendence and seeing the the reality of this ego.
The final one is a personal favorite, and it is to grow through the stages of human development. It’s not so easy to give advice on growing through the stages of human development, because we don’t know exactly why some people grow and others don’t. This one is more about trust. A trust that the human path, if we keep walking it, is actually towards self-transcendence.
It just requires continual growth through these stages until you reach the transpersonal levels. At that point, you’ll deeply contact the reality of everything we discuss here.