What Ego's Absence Reveals

          In the past few months, I’ve written about how ego felt like an entity or being that was here. I’ve shared how I’ve discovered that ego and Liz were not the same thing. I wrote a few weeks ago about ego as like something that was “inserted” here, something that was foreign and not a part of the fabric of what is. Here is an example that maybe conveys these experiences.

Liz loves dogs. This has not changed. Sometimes it comes up when she sees dogs or hears about them, but that is all now. She has no desire to have a dog again, and she no longer has the mechanism—what I call ego—for attachment to a dog or attachment to loving dogs. In fact, without ego, there is no attachment to anything or anyone. Without ego, there is nothing to regret the absence of attachment.

When ego was here, Liz’s love of dogs was a key feature of a sense of identity here, but without ego, Liz’s love of dogs is merely a neutral trait of Liz. Without ego, there is no longer anything to assert Liz’s traits as an identity, or to assert an identity at all. This experience shows me that Liz and ego were never the same thing. This shows me that Liz did not identify with ego, but ego used Liz for an identity. Ego used the neutral appearance of Liz to assert its seeming existence. So, it feels like ego was an entity, a being, that used to live here and fell away in the moment I call The Break. Ego falling away felt like a death because something that felt like a being did die in the sense that it ceased to seem to exist here as reality.

Ego had traits like an ongoing sense of lack and limitation and fear, and it formed attachments, projections, and judgments. It set itself up as the arbiter of reality and it asserted that reality (itself and the material world). But it was more than those traits; it was a distinct experience of existence. So, my experience is that those traits were not aspects of personality that Liz could work at releasing. She could not just decide to stop being attached, stop projecting, stop judging, etc. They only went away when ego went away.

Ego’s traits do sometimes show up. But they are recognized as just the passing appearances that they are—along with Liz and the rest of the material world. So, they have lost power and pass through quickly.

Some change their name after ego falls away. But to me, that would be like changing the address to a home because the occupant has left. It would not be accurate to say Liz has a new occupant, either. Truth does not occupy Liz; Liz is merely an appearance (illusion) in truth. Only ego made it seem she was something else, a being of her own, a reality apart from reality.

 

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