Now that we’ve laid out some of the biggest delusions of our ego, let’s talk about four big-picture insights into how it works.
First up: the more developed and conscious you are the less your egoic delusions traps will affect you and the less you’ll fall into them.
You start to realize what’s going on inside. You start to look at yourself and say “wait a minute here, am I that person? Am I really that person who’s looking back at me in the mirror? Am I that thing that’s looking back at me in the mirror? Do I need to go enforcing this thing on to other people?”
You start to question your whole identity. And you realize that actually all of that is the ego at work and is part of its attempt to perpetuate itself.
The second big-picture insight is that the highest levels of human development in all its dimensions (there are many dimensions to human development) are transpersonal. This means that our developmental destiny is to expand our identity beyond the mind and the body, our separate self-sense, the centralized self.
Trust that as you grow as a person, you actually start to ungrow as a person. You unravel yourself. It’s like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly: you grow so much that you basically end up destroying yourself. You see that the whole growth mechanism was necessary but it was also sort of a trick and that you were never that bunch of sensations and emotions that you’d become habitually identified with.
Big-picture insight number three is that taking up the witnessing mind and seeing the ego from it helps you to rewire it. The witnessing mind is a crucial concept it’s the ability to see everything that’s happening in your personal awareness.
When you’re in witnessing mind, you see all your thoughts, your emotions, your body sensations, the room around you, sounds, smells and so on, as like a screen and you discover your deeper identity sits beyond that. All that “stuff” is not you. You’re the one that witnesses it all as it arises in front of you.
Seeing this helps us to rewire it because we can, for the first time in our lives, see ourselves with remarkable clarity. This vantage point enables us to identify necessary improvements and undo our programming and habits.
Big-picture insight number four is that once you take this witnessing vantage point on the ego in a reliable and consistent way, you realize that the ego is like a block of marble, except it’s non-physical. It’s a non-physical block of marble that we can sculpt. Once we start to move into ego transcendence, we can actually start to really self-transform. because we can we’re no longer exclusively identified with all the content of our first-person awareness.
We can take a much more objective view on ourselves and our egoic self-sense. Then we canstart to really optimize it, to make it something worthwhile, to make it something that does good in the world and doesn’t harm other people. The ego is highly changeable, and a big step towards refining it is to hold witness awareness.