The work on the ego is the basis of true spiritual progress. Without working on it, we can only improve the quality of our energies to a very small degree, and can train ourselves to be a (seemingly) happier person, but in reality we won’t really be that much happier than when we had no clue about any spiritual teachings, but rather we will just concern ourselves more with things less mundane. The true happiness is achieved when we devote ourselves to the work on the ego. Peace, on the other hand, can be achieved even without the work on the ego, though in the course of a mundane life it is seldom felt. It is felt a bit more in the course of a life of someone who practices spiritual exercises but does not work on their ego, as it is only through the work on the ego and the subsequent results that we experience true and lasting peace and happiness.

Today we can hear in many spiritual groups that the ego should be transcended; that through meditation, the work on the chakras, the rising of Kundalini, the experience of heightened state of consciousness, and not going along with the ego, that the latter will be naturally transcended. If you ask them a bit more about this process, you will probably hear something along the line that transcending the ego does not mean that the ego is no longer there, but rather that we have risen above it and have control over it, but that the ego as such will always exist as long as we have the human body, because it is not meant to be fully gone, that we wouldn’t really be humans without it.

However, all of the above is said in ignorance of deep and real spiritual progress, as it is not possible to progress in a profound way if the ego is present. It can appear to one that they have gain dominance over their ego through continuous meditation and openness to new learning, and without a doubt this too can be a life changing and liberating process, however the dominance they hoped they gained is not really dominance but rather keeping the ego contained from explosions, and even the latter they cannot prevent as the ego is such a complex thing that has many layers and which complexity spans through many lifetimes. When someone who is not working on themselves think that they dominate their ego, they really self-deceive themselves and postpone the inevitable failure, and this failure keeps them continuously on the same incipient level of their spiritual unfoldment.

The deep development does not consist in how many spiritual talks or books or insights we have, but on how we have transformed our consciousness. Such development is the work on the consciousness, and the latter is stagnant and trapped within the ego if we do not apply an effort to liberate it from its entrapment. The way to achieve this is through continuous disintegration of the ego states that emerge throughout daily life in multitude of forms, such as anger, pride, ill-will, hatred, negativity, desire, fear, jealousy, envy etc. By dissolving these states, the consciousness that is trapped inside them returns to the free consciousness, and it expands in size, providing with a true dominance over the egos. I use the word true here because it is something that is much more substantial, as the ego that we work upon is actually being weakened and dissolved, whereas the false dominance is a temporary control over the ego until we arrive to a situation where it erupts from the subconscious layers that we didn’t even know that such exist.

However, in the deep form of the inner work such overtaking of control by the ego does not really happen, and the reason for this is that we consciously work on those subconscious layers where the ego resides (known as the 49 levels of the mind), we see those things through self-observation and through the order in the work upon the ego, and the particles of the consciousness that we have previously liberated from the ego gives us stability, centeredness, power and strength. The whole key of the inner work lies in those qualities that come from liberated essence, the qualities that we use to gradually go through a complete annihilation of the ego. Of course, we also need to create or activate our higher bodies and incarnate parts of the Being in order to reach later stages of the work upon the ego, but it all starts with becoming comfortable with the fact that the ego needs to be gone completely, so that our higher qualities that exist in the essence (which is sadly trapped in the ego states) replace the ego, filling up with consciousness and its spiritual virtues the previously ego occupied space.

We are not left with nothing when we eliminate the ego; on the contrary, we have so much more than what we could have imagined – we create a spiritual space in which our higher self (the Being) will incarnate. Through this transformation we become a true human being, in possession of our twin souls and the spirit, to later on become a liberated spiritual being.

HDP, February 2022.