The Painful or Dignified Downfall of the Ego

The social and ecological crises that threaten mankind and our Earth force us to make a choice. We must reach beyond our Ego-dominated mind programs, because if we fail to do that, we will eventually destroy ourselves and a large part of the world.

The Ego must therefore fall, as it is against the evolutionary development of the Consciousness. The downfall of the Ego may take place in two ways: a beautiful, dignified way or a painful one, full of suffering. But both ways will take us to the same goal: the awakening Consciousness.

The Painful Way

We are very well acquainted with the journey full of pain. A basic aspiration of every Ego is growth, to become larger, stronger and more solid in the world of forms and shapes. It wants to posses more, to get higher and higher in the hierarchic structure of the world, and it wants to conquer a larger and larger territory. Under the spell of the forms and shapes, the Ego devotes all its energy to make the forms constant, disregarding the only constant law of the forms and shapes: every form is transient, and everything is subject to birth and death.

The Ego intends to elevate the forms (including its own form) to eternity, which is impossible. This intention of the Ego will be the source of all sufferings, because its world of forms and shapes shall collapse like a sandcastle after a while, until death snatches away the last of the forms: its body from it. It came empty-handed from Nothing, and that is how it is going to return there. The only treasure it could take along with it is its wakefulness, but the Ego considers that worthless in the world of forms and shapes, as it was not a means of increasing the tyrannical power the Ego.

The Dignified Way

The better, more attractive way leading begins around the middle of the human life, when the individual, under the effects of their experience, tends to recognize the operating mechanisms of the Ego and realizes how tyrannical the Ego is. The person then turns away from forms and shapes towards transcendental world, free of forms. That is what one of the psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, called the spiritual birth of man.

That spiritual birth starts with the recognition that most people only make in articulo mortis: that turning away from the Miracle and identification with the forms and shapes is the reason for all our sufferings. A person making that recognition gradually gives up their identification with the forms and shapes, and steps back from the whirling of the world into a more quiet area. In this way they will be more alert to themselves and their environment. The clear sky of Consciousness will be contaminated by fewer and fewer clouds, giving way to the return to the Miracle of Consciousness.

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