xlr8happyxlr8happy

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the latest creative news from FooBar about art, design and business.

    What's Hot

    What Is the Difference Between Pesto and Chimichurri?

    Let’s Talk: How Much Does an IUD Cost?

    How to Prep for an IUD Insertion

    Facebook Twitter Instagram
    • About
    Facebook Twitter Instagram
    xlr8happy xlr8happy
    Subscribe
    • Homepage
    • EXIST
      • Body
        • How Body Works
          • What Body Is
        • Physical Fitness
          • Health
            • Reseting the Immune System: Quick Fasting
            • Sleep
            • Old Emotions
        • Happy Body
        • Tech
          • Gear
      • Mind
        • How Mind Works
          • What Mind Is
          • Mind Goal
          • Overactive Mind
            • Love: Limited Self
            • Relationships
            • Mind Twists
          • Balanced Mind
        • Mental Fitness
          • Meditation
          • Positive Psychology
          • Reseting the Nervous System: Ice Baths
        • Happy Mind
          • Presence
      • Soul
        • How Soul Works
          • What Soul Is
        • Soul Fitness
          • Motivation
          • Culture
          • Communication
            • Love: Limited Self
            • Relationships
        • Happy Soul
      • Eliminate Stress
        • Limited Identity
          • Attachment to Social Conventions
          • People Attachment
          • Attachment to Things
          • Be Flexible
          • Free from Ego
          • Let Go
          • Life as VR
        • Whole You
      • Exist Goal: Happiness
    • FLOW
      • Using Body
        • Sports: Being in the Zone
        • Yoga
          • Love: Unblocked Mind
      • Using Mind
        • Control of Brain Frequency
          • Abraham Hicks
          • Silva Method
        • Lucid Dreaming
          • Sleep Yoga
          • Herbal Supplements
      • Using Soul
        • Creativity
      • Flow Goal: Bliss
    • TRANSCEND
      • Dream Yoga
      • Dark Retreat
      • Induced Altered States
        • Ayahuasca
      • Thodgal
      • Transcend Goal: Enlightenment
    • Shop
    xlr8happyxlr8happy
    Home » Release the Grip of the Ego
    Control of Brain Frequency

    Release the Grip of the Ego

    xlr8happBy xlr8happSeptember 12, 2021Updated:November 5, 2022No Comments9 Mins Read
    Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
    Release the grip of ego
    Release the grip of ego. Source: Yoga International Magazine
    Share
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

    This article originally appeared in theMay 2003issue of Yoga International.

    Author: Georg Feuerstein

    So long as we are not enlightened, we experience ourselves as limited identities—islands of embodied consciousness. We think we are a particular body-mind and relate all our experiences to this inner center we call the ego. If we do this in an exaggerated fashion, others regard us as egomaniacs. If we attribute the workings of the larger world to ourselves, we are delusional. Psychologically speaking, the ego is an essential and necessary aspect of human development. From a spiritual perspective, however, the ego is a mechanism by which we distort reality.

    We only need to inspect our body-mind a little more carefully to realize that this is so. For instance, our heart is pumping blood without our own doing. Our lungs are sucking in and expelling air of their own accord. Our stomach breaks down food and our intestines assimilate its nutrients without our doing anything. Our brain generates electric waves all by itself.

    Similarly, thoughts pop in and out of our head whether we like it or not, as any meditator can readily verify. In the language of yoga, all these activities are simply nature (prakriti) at work. Yet we persistently lay claim to the body and the mind and their numerous activities.

    Me, my, and mine are labels by which we mentally and emotionally separate ourselves from the rest of existence.

    Nature is full of surprises. One such is the appearance of an inner reference-point—the ego—in higher organisms. In human individuals, we see its clear emergence first in the toddler who discovers the power of “me,” “my,” and “mine.” These are labels by which we mentally and emotionally separate ourselves from the rest of existence. Apparently other mammals—notably apes and some dolphin species—also possess a more highly developed sense of self. Even some birds seem to be endowed with this curious evolutionary attribute. For instance, the well-known parrot Alex enjoyed exercising his 500-word vocabulary until he got tired or bored and then pointedly refused to cooperate any further with his trainer, just as a human individual might do. But even an insect—think of a clever cockroach—will avoid potentially dangerous experiences so long as it can recognize them as such. As Patanjali notes, the will to live (abhinivesha) is rooted in all creatures, even in wise humans. But what is this will to live if not an outgrowth of the I-sense?

    Much has been said about the evolutionary advantage of having an egoic control center. A great deal has also been said in the spiritual traditions about the need to go beyond the ego. We must remember here that the purpose of spiritual disciplines like yoga is to help us to go back to the origin, which means consciously tracing our trajectory back through evolution. For this reason, the spiritual traditions often speak of a process of involution by which we can traverse the evolutionary sequence in reverse order—going from complexity to ever greater simplicity until we are reestablished in the transcendental singularity (eka), which is the ultimate Reality itself.

    Concretely speaking, this journey means simplifying our activities in the world; withdrawing our senses from the allurement of sense objects; focusing attention upon the subtle level of existence, which is the mind; discovering ever deeper (more subtle) aspects of the mind in order to transcend them as well; and finding out where the I-sense originates, which is in the transcendental superconscious identity itself. This ultimate being is called by various names. In yoga, the most common terms applied to it are atman (Self), brahman (Absolute), purusha (Spirit),purushottama (Supreme Spirit), and purna (Whole).

    In the Shaiva tradition of Kashmir, this ultimate identity is also known as ahamta (literally “I-ness”). It is the ego-I of everyone and everything anywhere whatsoever. What distinguishes this transcendental Ego from the human-size ego is its all-inclusiveness. In our own case, we lay claim only to our body-mind and its activities, properties, and relationships. If we were to lay claim to the activities, properties, and relationships of other ego-personalities, we would be judged greedy, egomaniacal, or psychotic. So we need to remember that, in general, ego-personalities are very conscious and protective of their boundaries. Everyone wants to be an island unto himself. Some more so than others.

    What distinguishes this transcendental Ego from the human-size ego is its all-inclusiveness.

    No boundaries exist in the infinite Ego, the transcendental Self. It is simply the essence of the entire universe—past, present, and future. Therefore it is the great reality lurking behind even our own limited self-sense. And this is indeed a saving grace. For without the omnipresence of the transcendental Self, we would never be able to overcome our insular existence, that is, our self-incarceration in a specific body-mind.

    All types of yoga—and there are many—give us the same basic message: Our present ego-habituation is a state of suffering (duhkha) from which we can and indeed ought to extricate ourselves. Our true nature is in fact the omni–present reality, call it Self, Spirit, God, or Emptiness. That is to say, at the bottom of our ego (ahamkara) is the Ego (ahamta). We just have to dig deep enough to locate it.

    The sages of India have invented a range of methods by which we can go beyond the limited ego and realize the transcendental Self. The classical method of jñana yoga, for instance, is the neti-neti procedure; neti-neti means “not this, not that.” This procedure, which must be applied rigorously in meditation, allows us to progressively eliminate all our numerous misidentifications. “I am not my little finger.” “I am not my eyes.” “I am not my brain.” “I am not the body.” “I am not the mind.”

    Ramana Maharshi, the great twentieth-century sage of Tiruvannamalai, proposed another method by which he himself had attained Self-realization. He called itatma-vicara, or self-inquiry in the form of “Who am I?” The practitioner asks this question and then listens inwardly without settling for an answer until the question, the questioner, and any possible answer are transcended in the flashing forth of the always-enlightened Self.

    In our quest for happiness, freedom, and enlightenment, it is helpful to understand that the ordinary ego is simply a particularly ingrained habit.

    In our quest for happiness, freedom, and enlightenment, it is helpful to understand that the ordinary ego is simply a particularly ingrained habit. And as with all habits, it can be unlearned. A further useful insight is provided by the philosopher-sages of Kashmir Shaivism. They have spoken of the ego as the act of self-contraction (atma-samkoca). In his Yoga Sutra, Patanjali speaks of the sense of “I-am-ness” (asmita), while other yogic schools refer to the same experience as the “I-maker” (ahamkara). This term better expresses the fact that the ego is not merely a persistent structure but an activity.

    The ego is what we are doing right now! We are contracting consciousness, that is, we are congealing around “our” particular body-mind and its experiences. At the moment, unless we are enlightened, we are not consciously present as the infinitely expansive consciousness (cid-akasha). Rather, our consciousness is strangely incarcerated in our brain, and we gaze out onto an apparently external world through a single pair of eyes. The enlightened being, by contrast, inhabits all brains and bodies and sees through all eyes. As the Rig Veda puts it:

    “Spirit (purusha) has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet….”

    The great thirteenth century German mystic Meister Eckhart expressed it similarly:

    “Listen to the wonder! How wonderful: to stand outside as well as inside, to grasp and be grasped, to look on and at the same time be seen oneself, to hold and be held—that is the goal.”

    The opposite of our common experience of self-contraction is expansion (vikasa)—not expansion of the ego but of awareness. The transcendental being is the most expansive “thing” there is. This concept is neatly captured in the Sanskrit termbrahman, which stems from the verbal root brih (“to grow big”), meaning that which has grown or is expansive. If the expansive transcendental Being-Consciousness-Bliss (sat-cid-ananda) were not our true identity, we would never be able to relieve ourselves of our limiting ego-sense.

    Fortunately, our present condition is secondary, or nonessential. It is entirely a product of ignorance (avidya), which we can correct by taking to heart the wisdom and testimony of the masters of yoga. They compare our current state to a person pinching himself very hard and then wondering why there is pain. To relieve his pain, all that person has to do is to stop pinching himself, to release his grip.

    The ego is a similar kind of grip. It is based in grasping or clinging. Therefore, to end our self-contraction, we must let go of the “consumer” habit. In yogic terms, we must cultivate the mood of inner renunciation. To put it another way, we have to value our true nature—the Self of all—more highly than any temporal or otherwise limited manifestation of it.

    The notion of self-contraction as an activity suggests a possible practice: to observe ourselves moment to moment and consciously release all tension at the level of the body and the mind. Physical tension—our holding pattern of muscular contraction—can be released by means of such techniques as posture practice. Emotional-mental tension—from anxiety to anger to feelings of rejection, and so on—can be released through consistent mindfulness and cultivation of the witnessing disposition. If we are especially contracted at the emotional-mental level, we might also benefit from conventional pschotherapeutic intervention. Both somatic and mental contractions, furthermore, are prevented and to some degree dismantled by a wholesome lifestyle based on the recognition that we ourselves are the cause of our suffering. In other words, there are plenty of tools available to undo the ego habit, but we must be prepared to engage this process for the long haul. We simply do not know how much resistance we will encounter in unclenching our fingers.

    The breakthrough to enlightenment can happen at any time, but we need to be patient and persistent in our spiritual practice.

    The breakthrough to enlightenment can happen at any time, but we need to be patient and persistent in our spiritual practice. We may not be as fortunate as Ramana Maharshi who realized the Self in a single session at the age of sixteen. In any case, when spiritual life has happened to us, we no longer really have a choice in the matter. Even prior to full enlightenment, the path brings many rewards, not the least of which is a greater sense of ease and inner freedom.

    Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
    xlr8happ
    • Website
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Instagram

    Related Posts

    Avoid Being Deceived by Social Conventions

    September 13, 2021

    All is One. The Entire World Can Be Reduced to this One Thing

    March 17, 2021

    Level Up on Life: So Much More to Life than the Accumulation of Riches

    March 13, 2021
    Add A Comment

    Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the latest creative news from SmartMag about art & design.

    Editors Picks

    Parkland Shooter Gets Life in Prison. Creativity Must Reign in Prevention

    What Is Happiness? Here is a New, More Definitive Answer

    How to Workout Your Soul

    For Long, Lasting Happiness Rely on the Whole, Not the Parts

    Recent Posts
    • What Is the Difference Between Pesto and Chimichurri?
    • Let’s Talk: How Much Does an IUD Cost?
    • How to Prep for an IUD Insertion
    • Buzz With Your Fizz: Does Root Beer Have Caffeine?
    • Hip Dips Surgery: Is It Worth It?
    Top Reviews
    SHOP
    Demo
    Advertisement
    Demo
    Our Picks
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Pinterest
    • Instagram
    • YouTube
    • Vimeo
    Don't Miss
    Uncategorized

    What Is the Difference Between Pesto and Chimichurri?

    By WebJanuary 26, 20230

    Pesto and chimichurri

    Let’s Talk: How Much Does an IUD Cost?

    How to Prep for an IUD Insertion

    Buzz With Your Fizz: Does Root Beer Have Caffeine?

    About Us
    About Us

    XLR8happy is your happiness accelerator. Unlike all others, we get rid of the root cause of your stress and anxiety, as opposed to just helping you cope with and adapt to the current world as it stands. We also own the world's shortest & simplest method to explain long-lasting happiness (and with it, Life itself). We happily share that with you throughout our site.

    And our information organizational skills are also bar none! As Master Synthesizers and lovers of all things happy, we believe that our most valuable contribution to our Planet Inheritors - Millennials, Gen Z and beyond - is to clean up the existing messy overload of happiness information out there, so that you can focus on what's most important to your generation - building the future we can't even imagine yet.

    In other words, XLR8happy completes the picture of true happiness for you, so that you can get to happy... fast.

    Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube LinkedIn
    Popular Posts

    Parkland Shooter Gets Life in Prison. Creativity Must Reign in Prevention

    What Is Happiness? Here is a New, More Definitive Answer

    How to Workout Your Soul

    From Instagram
    • What can Ye do now? He can evolve! To get the most out of life as an artist, it's prob the best. 

#wisdom #conscious #consciousness #why #ye #kanye #evolution #stophate
    • For the madness to end, we will have to work around the status quo. We must get creative and INVENT A NEW WAY! This article dives into an approach we've been experimenting with here @XLR8HAPPY. 

Click on link-in-bio for more! ❤️

#worldpeace #creativity #innovation #xlr8happy #love
    • Confused about what true happiness really is? We explore these themes and more at XLR8HAPPY! Checkout this article on what might make for a more complete definition of happiness which dares to imagine the part that might be missing in the world. Click on link in Bio to READ MORE!! ⭐️❤️

#hapiness #happy #xlr8happy #worldpeace #latte #starbucks
    • Tired with world chaos? READ THIS! To get your creative juices flowing to ideate together on how we can go about changing things for good. 💪

#creativity #worldpeace #happiness #soul #none #xlr8happy
    • Be a cupcake. Save the world! If you have a secret wish for world peace you gotta check this article out, where we dabble in experimental use of crowdsourced wisdom and the power of metaphor! 🧁🧁💕🌍

Click on the link in bio to READ MORE.

#happiness #happy #savethewrold #worldpeace #cupcakes #sweettooth #xl8happy #wisdom
    • I am an analyst, so I love organizing and fiddling with data until it shows me what I am looking for. To me, the reason the world is still not a happy place is actually quite simple. It is a matter of organization of data, of information. Makes sense, right? We face information overload every day, so it's time we organize it! 🤓

🔥Click on Link in Bio to READ MORE🔥

    Follow Me!

    • About
    • Contact
    © 2023 XLR8happy LLC. Designed by Htmlly.com.

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.