Part 9: Kundalini Awakening, Ego Death, and the Thinning of the Ego
This exploration of the concept of the ego and the process of it being stripped away can be a little paradoxical. I’m going to do my best to be as clear as possible in expressing my ideas.
I’ll begin with a brief definition of the ego:
The ego is the separate sense of self, the little ‘me’, that we each have a concept of inside our heads.
The next major point that I want to share is that the ego is absolutely not something to be demonized. It is not a problem, a fault, a mistake, or something that we need to annihilate once and for all in order to attain the advanced stages of the spiritual process, specifically through the Kundalini transformation.
Self-Realization, or Enlightenment, is not about the total and permanent death of one’s ego.
There is an experience known as ego death. Ego death is a temporary, fleeting occurrence during which there is a total dissolution of one’s sense of separate self-identity.
So today I want to clear all of this up because I know that many misunderstand the spiritual path to be about attaining a permanent state of ego death. This is not true.
We typically begin the spiritual journey, sometime in our early teens, at the earliest. By this point, we already have a stabilized ego in operation. We have a sense of identity, a sense of separate self, a little ‘me’ somewhere between our ears.
Through the lens of our ego, we see that we are separate from others, that we have a unique experience, an individual story of the past, and a story of ourselves that we project sometime into the future too.
This seems benign, until we look deeper and find that this sense of separate self is the cause of much suffering. The story of our ego relies on past pain and trauma to maintain our identity of being victims. It relies on past success to maintain a sense of being special. It projects anxiety into the future which brings about fear. It also projects desires into the future under the false belief that once we attain those desires, we will be fulfilled. All of these patterns cause suffering to some degree.
So through the spiritual process, we begin to inquire into the validity of the ego and we begin to chip away at it through practices of self-inquiry, service, various healing modalities, meditation, therapy, and the like.
This is very important to understand. The spiritual process, whether we are working with Kundalini directly or not, is about subtraction, not addition. It is about the undoing of the ego, to a point where it no longer causes high degrees of suffering in our experience of life. It is about cutting away the layers of who we falsely believed ourselves to be, revealing our true divine nature.
However, it is not about the total, complete, and permanent undoing of the ego once and for all. That is unsustainable and impractical for functioning as a healthy human being in society. I will elaborate more on this in a minute.
Speaking of the spiritual process being about subtraction and not addition, there is a perfect quote by an incredible spiritual teacher named Adyashanti. He says:
"Make no mistake about it ⎯- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the façade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
Adyashanti is a spiritual teacher I adore who’s gone through the Kundalini process, though he doesn’t speak about it too much.
Enlightenment really is a destructive process. It’s the undoing of the ego. When the Kundalini awakens, it begins to facilitate this destructive process, eventually revealing our true divine nature as one with God, with all that is, which we then must embody.
But like I said, the total and complete annihilation of the ego is not the aim. That would be like experiencing a permanent ego death. Ego death is a real thing. It’s a very common occurrence at some significant points along the path, but it is not meant to be an ongoing sustained experience. It simply cannot be.
Let’s look at ego death more deeply so we can understand why this is. In doing so, we can hopefully come to understand why, though the ego is the cause of much suffering, it is not meant to be a complete write off. We still need it to function.
Ego death experiences can most commonly be brought about through direct or indirect spiritual practices, spontaneously based upon a person’s spiritual work in past lives, or through the use of drugs like hallucinogens and plant medicine.
When ego death occurs, generally speaking, one can no longer distinguish themselves as being a separate entity from the other entities in the world around them. The illusion of separation completely falls away and the oneness of reality is revealed and experienced directly. It’s a beautiful, profound, life changing experience, to say the least.
However, during these experiences of ego death, one can truly not distinguish themselves from the chair they sit on. They don’t know who they are in relation to anything or anyone around them. Basic functions of the body, like speaking, perhaps even moving, tend to cease. It’s like being frozen in a world where everything is one, where there’s no distinction between anything at all. It’s cool, but a person in a stage of ego death is basically an idiot during the experience.
I use the word idiot here to be a little disparaging on purpose. I don’t want to glorify this state as if it’s the peak of the spiritual journey. It’s not. It’s not practical and it’s impossible to function in it. There are great insights to be gained from it, but those insights are meant to be practiced and embodied once we return out of the ego death experience and back into the illusion of separation.
Through the ego death experience, even after we have seen that the ego, that false sense of separate self, the little me, is an illusion, it will still persist upon our return back into ordinary life.
When we come back down and find ourselves back in the world, the illusion of separation will still be there. However, now we will know that it is just an illusion. Just like in the desert, we may see what we believe is a body of water, only to discover that it is a mirage, even after we discover that it is a mirage, the illusion still persists.
It is the same with the ego and the illusion of separation. We see that it’s all an illusion, but then we begin to live with this new wisdom as we practice embodying it.
We cannot live in a state of ego death. If someone calls your name, you wouldn’t answer. You wouldn’t be able to tell your butt from the chair you’re sitting on. You would just be a useless fool. That’s not what you incarnated into this human life to be.
I have experienced ego death many times on my path. In one experience, I could not distinguish myself from the others in the room. It was incredible. There was a total and complete sense of oneness and love. But I truly had forgotten that I was Brent, that this body was mine, and that there was a distinction between myself and other people. It was disabling. Profound yes, but from a practical standpoint, I was disabled.
Consider the lives of spiritual masters. If they were living in an ego death state at all times, why would they use a name? Many of them go so far as to take up new names, in fact. They drop their old name and take up a new one. Why is this? Why abandon their old ego and suddenly pick up a new mask to wear, under a new name? For practical reasons, that’s why. People need a name. We need a mask to wear, a character to play. It’s necessary to function.
The difference is that a spiritual master has seen that their ego, their sense of separate self, is not who they really are. It’s just a useful tool. Who they really are, is Divinity, which cannot truly be named because it is beyond all words.
So that’s why ego death is not the aim. But the relative destruction of the ego, the stripping away of the conditioning of the past, the willingness to see beyond the little me, is necessary if we wish to attain Self-Realization, Enlightenment, and to know who we really are.
In order to know who we really are, we don’t need to completely eradicate the ego. It can be done without such extremes. Through the Kundalini process, the energy begins to uproot some of the deepest conditioning and trauma that we carry.
This conditioning makes up the foundation of our ego. The Kundalini brings these things to the surface and then releases it as it heals us. We release parts of our identity that are associated with being a victim, with being guilty, with being inferior, and the like. We let go of parts of our identity that operate under the false belief that future worldly attainments will complete us and make us happy.
In this way, the ego is thinned. Eventually, the veil becomes thin enough that we can see through it and recognize the light of divinity within us, which is who we really are. We just need a thin veil to see through it to the other side. The entire veil doesn’t need to be dropped completely and permanently.
With a thin ego, we can see and embody oneness. We can relate with other people, simultaneously recognizing them as ‘other people’ and yet also seeing them as not separate from ourselves. In this way, we can function and embody our spirituality, unlike just being stuck in an ego death state.
Matt Kahn explains this process clearly by saying something along the lines of how we begin this process with an inflamed ego. It’s sore, it’s red, it protrudes and stands out. It’s sensitive. It needs constant attention. It’s inflamed. But eventually, through healing, we can soothe the ego, reduce the inflammation, and have it return back to a state in which it is still present and useful, but not an unhealthy protrusion.
This is where unconditional self-love comes in. Many demonize their own ego. They criticize it, blame it, feel guilty for having it, feel ashamed about it, question whether all their actions are ego-based or not. It’s very unhealthy to be this way. Instead, we should simply treat the ego with unconditional self-love, as if it was an inflamed part of our body. In doing so, we soothe it and heal it.
This unconditional self-love means giving ourselves full permission to think, feel, or experience anything that may arise within our system, whether we feel it’s coming from our ego or not. This kind of self-love of our ego isn’t arrogant or egotistical in a sort of narcissistic way. It’s a very gentle and appropriate kind of self-love that is healing and soothing, that we will truly benefit from, as will all those that we encounter.
This process is not about attaining ego death. It is about going beyond ego, seeing oneness, and then returning back to integrate our ego into our human experience in a way that is seamless, smooth, functional, and practical, not troublesome, awkward, and fearful.
So, we should try and see that though the Kundalini process is kind of like a major upgrade of sorts, on the other hand, it’s important to also recognize that the process is returning us back to our natural state.
The final meditative state of this process is called sahaja samadhi. Sahaja means natural and samadhi means an absorption in consciousness. Sahaja samadhi is the natural state of being in a deep meditative state of consciousness. It is not a super state. It is just a natural state. It’s our true nature. It always has been.
So though we may experience certain upgrades throughout our Kundalini process, it’s important to remember that all of us were already living with very thin egos when we were babies and young children. They’ve shown through the study of children’s brain wave patterns that they basically live in ongoing states of meditation by default. So in a sense, the Kundalini process is simply returning us to that state, except this time, since we are no longer children, we can do grown up things with childlike innocence, freedom, flow, peace, and oneness.
Contact me with any questions about your Kundalini awakening process.
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