Letting Go of the Ego

Last week, we took a stab at letting go of our identification with our ego, our small sense of self.  Using the Dis-Identification Exercise, we explored letting go of our body, our emotions, and our intellect to see what happened.  Since I haven’t received any reports of people’s heads exploding or a sudden mass vanishing of readers of this newsletter, I have to suspect that everyone survived this.

You see, we are like the ugly duckling in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale of the same name.  We think of ourselves as beings that are much smaller in stature and capability than we actually are.  In the fairytale, a swan’s egg was put in a duck’s nest.  When the baby swan hatched, the mother duck and her little babies all looked at this interloper as ugly, awkward, clumsy, and somehow defective.  Since all the baby swan heard were these horrible things about himself, he believed them.  He concluded that he was a defective duck.  He only realized the truth about himself when he saw a flock of beautiful swans soaring overhead.  At that point, he realized his true identity.  He was not a duck; he was, in fact, the most beautiful and graceful of birds.

This story accurately depicts our human situation.  We think of ourselves as limited, and often defective or lacking.  This is a grotesque misunderstanding.  It completely overlooks the fact that the Divine dwells within us.  Within the Christian faith, it overlooks the astounding message found in John 14.  Here Jesus says, in effect, “I am in my father and my father is in me.  In just the same way, I am in you and you are in me.”

Let me state this as clearly as possible:  God lives within you.  Whatever you have been told about yourself, if this is not central to your understanding, then your understanding is incomplete.  As a result of all of the misinformation we have received over our lifetime, we have identified with the limited, small self and have been unaware of the larger Self that is within us.  The purpose of our work here is to let go of that small self so that we can participate fully in the Self, which is our true nature as human beings.

If this understanding were only found in Christianity, we might have to dismiss it as delusional.  Unicorns, after all, don’t really exist except in our imaginations.  But this Christian understanding is echoed in the scriptures of every major religion around the world.  I especially like the Hindu formulation of this truth, “Thou art That.”  In this formulation, ‘That’ refers to God, that Other that we all are searching for.

Think about this with me for a moment.  We have searched over and over in so many different ways to find a valid path to God.  Feeling separated from the Divine, it seems like there is an abyss that surrounds us – an unbridgable chasm that keeps us from our goal.  But when we look carefully, this abyss is actually something we have created with our own thoughts.

Jesus tells us there is no abyss.  Our minds tell us there is.  So, who are you going to believe?

Most of the time, we believe ourselves.  We fashion the truth about ourselves with our thoughts and our emotions.  We decide we’re pretty or ugly, smart or stupid, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy.  And then we put our trust in our own decisions, often with terrible results, and always with self-limiting results.

Our egos have created a protective envelope around us.  The original purpose of these envelopes was to protect us from hurt.  Sadly, hurt is an arrow that pierces all of our defenses.  Our efforts in this regard, as you have no doubt noticed, are both ineffective and inadequate.  Even though we recognize these inadequacies, we have not suspected that there was anything else, so we continue to hang onto that small self that we have created.

At this point, I need that crazy announcer for Ginsu knives to shout, “But wait, there’s more!”

The “more” is God.  You are not the little self you have created and held onto all these years.  You are a child of God, and God himself lives within you.  When you 

let go of the little self you have created, when you explore what is beyond that little self, you will experience the Divine.

So, how do we let go of this little self?

We will probably be more successful at this letting go if we understand more about the ego, so let’s look at the components that make up our little selves.  What exactly is this ‘I’ composed of?  Certainly, it contains all of our thoughts and emotions.  As such, it contains all our value judgements, all our understandings about ourselves and the world around us.  Using the image of the protective envelope that we developed above, it is as if this envelope serves as a movie screen, and we are projecting all of these thoughts, emotions, and judgments onto the screen.  Then comes the sleight-of-hand!  We identify with our projections.  We think we are those projections.  

This description sounds abstract, even a bit otherworldly, like it can’t really be real.  Well, let me give you a real-life example.  Back in the 1970s, before ethical considerations were considered important, one of my psychology professors conducted a study at a nearby elementary school.  He gave an individual intelligence test to all of the fourth-graders towards the end of the school year.  He then told the teachers who would have them for fifth grade that certain students were bright and others were kind of slow.  Unbeknownst to the teachers, he was lying.

In actual fact, he had randomly assigned students to the bright group or the slow group.  He returned to the school at the end of the students' fifth-grade year and interviewed the teachers.  The teachers, believing that he had given them accurate information, confirmed the information he had given them the previous year.  The ones he said were bright had, in fact, been generally perceived by the fifth-grade teachers as bright, and vice versa.

On the basis of his authority as a psychologist and as an expert in testing students' intelligence, this professor created a false reality for the teachers.  Sadly, on the basis of the teachers' interactions with their students, I suspect the students also began to perceive themselves in this false manner.  This experiment shows how we create false realities for ourselves with the thoughts that others have about us and with our own thoughts.

The message that most of us have received all of our lives is that ‘God is far away in the heavens,’ and we are down here on earth, and the only way that we will meet God is after our death.  Because we have been told of this by people we have trusted, we have come to believe it.  Once again, who are you going to believe?  Are you going to believe your parents and all of those who gave you this information, or are you going to believe Jesus and the great avatars of all the major religions who say that God is within you?  The choice is always ours, isn’t it?

To counter this mistaken identification, this mistaken programming, I have come across a spiritual exercise, found in many religions, which invites us to let go of these identifications.  It is one of those exercises that can be a bit frightening because it is something that most of us have never done before.  That being said, it also offers us the great promise of freedom from our projections, and freedom from the tyranny of our small self.  As we let go of the small self, which effectively blocks our perception of the Self, we open ourselves more and more to that wonderful Presence that lies within us.

Spiritual Exercise #4

Letting Go

1.  Position your body comfortably, spine erect, and ground yourself in your physical sensations.  Close your eyes and slowly become aware of the sensations of your physical body.  Feel the sensations as they flow through you.  The sensations in your head… In your neck and shoulders… Your elbows… Your wrists and the palms of your hands… The sensations in your knees… Your ankles and the soles of your feet.

2.  Move your awareness to the region of your heart and establish your attention there.

3.  Observe the flow of thoughts and feelings from the perspective of your heart center.  No need to chase after these experiences; just be aware of them.

4.  As you become aware of each object-of-awareness, let it go.  Simply release it, and refocus your attention in your heart center.

5.  Continue this process of letting go.  Let go of your thoughts over and over again.  Let go of everything that comes into your field of awareness.  When fear or other emotions come up, let go of them as well.

6.  After doing this for some time, you may become aware of the “self” who has these contents of awareness.  It is as if you step back from the moment-to-moment flow of data and become aware of the larger context in which this data flows.

This awareness will come to you naturally, in its own time.  When it occurs, view the “self” as just another content of your awareness.  Let go of this “self.”  And let go of what comes after the sense of self.  And let go of what comes after that as well.  Continue this process of letting go.

(To close your meditation)

7.  When you’re ready, let yourself come back to this place.  But the feeling return to your feet… Your hands… Your face.  Take a deep breath and open your eyes.

I want to encourage you to practice this exercise on a regular, daily basis.  Like many new things, it takes a bit of getting used to and a bit of practice.  Let’s face it, most of our lives have been aimed in the opposite direction – towards acquiring things, not letting go of them!  So this will likely feel very strange and unfamiliar when you first try it.  

That being said, how else can we get to that expansive Self that lies hidden behind our ego, our small self?  We have to find ways of letting go, and that is exactly what this exercise facilitates.  Please remember to email me at [email protected] when questions arise about your practice.

With love,

P.S.  Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class.  If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web.  If you have an interest, please write me at [email protected]. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

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