Often, the spiritual path is understood to be the hard road of crushing that deadly monster, the ego; it is the slippery, many-armed ego that keeps us from knowing the Real, and it is only when the ‘enemy’ lies lifeless before us that we will be free. But there is a difference between the ‘True’ ego and the false, or between the ego and its false claim, as Hazrat Inayat Khan makes clear in answering the following question.
Q.: By annihilation of the false ego, is it completely and forever destroyed, or must it still exist in the mind-world?
A.: The ego is never destroyed, this is the one thing that lives and this is the sign of eternal life. In the knowledge of the ego there is the secret of immortality. When in the Gayan you read, “Death dies, life lives,” it is the ego which is life; it is its false conception which is death. False must fall away one day, real must always be, and so is the case of life. The true living being is the ego. That lives. All else that it has borrowed from different planes for its use and has been lost, is put away. Do we not see this with our own body? Things that do not belong there do not remain in it; in blood, in veins, everywhere, the body will not keep them. It will repel them, and so it is in every sphere. It does not take what does not belong to it. It keeps all that is outside, it keeps it outside. What belongs to the earth is kept on earth; the soul repels it. And destroying of the ego is a word. It is not destroying, it is discovering. Very often people are afraid of the reading in Buddhist books, where the interpretation of ‘nirvana’ is annihilation. No one wants to be annihilated, and people are very much afraid when they read ‘annihilation.’ It is only the matter of a word. The same in Sanskrit is a beautiful word. The same is the word ‘fana’ of the Sufis. Translated in English, it is ‘annihilation,’ but when we understand it, it is ‘going through’; it really means to go through. And to pass through what? Through the false conception, which is the first necessity, and so to arrive at the true realisation.
What does Inayat Khan means with the ego that lives forever? I do not understand, the soul lives forever but the ego???? Wat is the true ego and what its false perception?
Thank you for replying
Thank you for the question – although it is not so easy to answer. Or perhaps we can say, it is not difficult to answer, but very difficult to understand. The false perception of the ego, or the false self, is the belief that ‘I’ – as a limited person, as Iris, for example – exist, that ‘I’ am real. But the limited person is only there for a moment, like the wave on the surface of the sea. The real ‘Self’ – which Inayat Khan calls here the real Ego, is the ‘I’ of the Only Being – thus eternal and living forever.