Crush Your Ego - Andrew Cohen

Ego is a very big problem. In fact, ego is the only problem. For the next stage of human development, for the evolution of consciousness, for the evolution of enlightenment itself, ego is the only problem. And I think we may have forgotten what a mighty adversary to higher development ego actually is. But that’s understandable. In the narrow, personal context in which most of us live, ego is the fundamental emotional and psychological locus with which we are identified.

What is ego? Ego is the deeply felt sense of being separate and superior. Indeed, it is an emotional and psychological compulsion to see and feel the self as being separate from superior to the other; the world, and the whole universe. It is that locus point where the sense of individuality is also a sense of alienation, where the experience of autonomy is also one of isolation, and where even the experience of freedom is always shadowed by a deeper sense at the core of our being, by a sense of bondage, limitation, and hopelessness.

The more we evolve in our understanding of the human condition and awaken to our potential for freedom, the more we hear the message that ego actually doesn’t have to be a problem at all. The common refrain from many leading voices in the East-meets-West consciousness revolution is the more effort you make to transcend ego, the stronger is the identification with the very thing you want to transcend. Generally, we are told that the path beyond ego is through accepting it, or through what’s called self-acceptance: Acceptance of who we are, of how we are, of what is. We stop resisting the truth of who we are, and it is in this profound acceptance, which includes the ego, that transformation will occur.

I believe that for most of us, the only solution to this evolutionary cul-de-sac, the only way to our own higher development, lies in the context of human relationship, relationship based upon a breakthrough to a shared experience and recognition of consciousness beyond ego. Of course, consciousness beyond ego always means the state of enlightenment itself. So what I’m referring to is the shared experience and recognition of enlightened consciousness, where the shadow of ego or separate self-sense, is entirely absent. In this experience of inter subjective consciousness beyond ego, a momentous leap occurs. It is a leap from I to We, from extreme individuation to a living context of intersubjective non-duality – a higher We consciousness in which all parties experience simultaneously their own individual and collective transparency while remaining fully and completely themselves.

© "Times of India" (dated March 27, 2005). Reprinted with permission.

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