Ego is separation from God

Extracted from Neville Jayaweera’s autobiography entitled

 “The Fork in the road” written in the third person so as to avoid using the word “I”.

The full autobiography is available under the "About Neville Jayaweera" menu on this website.

The underlying premise here is that the one barrier that stands between God and humankind, between the Infinite and the finite, is Ego, (not to be confused with egoism, which is only one manifestation of Ego. Ego itself is the belief in an illusory life, separate and independent of God).

The underlying claim is also that before human beings can be reconciled to God and find true fulfilment, Ego has to be annihilated – not merely civilised, not just improved, not refurbished or repackaged, but utterly and absolutely annihilated!

As long as Ego is on the field, our lives are lived out by Satan and not by the Christ.

Ego is the affirmation of a spurious personal life, separate and apart from God, comparable to a broken branch, cut off from the parent trunk and pretending to be the trunk itself, and heading inevitably towards decay and death. Being separated from God, Ego is a closed system, and is therefore subject to the law of entropy. Ego is another word for separation from God, and before reconciliation can take place, it has to die.

It may be useful to quote here Jayaweera's concept of Ego as set out in the introductory chapter to his autobiography. Jayaweera says that by the term "Ego", he means something far more fundamental than egoism, or ordinary self-centeredness which, although they are obvious expressions of Ego, are not Ego itself. There are other blatant expressions of Ego as well, such as ambition and pride, fear and insecurity, acquisitiveness and greed, anger and impatience, hostility and aggression, bitterness and resentments, and most of all, disease, decay and death. Although disease, decay and death are not normally associated with Ego, they are, nevertheless, unmistakable evidence that it is very much on the throne.

Ego arises from lumping together a human being’s physical apparatus – the form and the name – and making a single entity of them. It is like isolating a wave on the surface of the sea and giving to its physical appearance a name and making of it a thing in itself, forgetting that its reality is not in itself, but in the ocean that supports it.

Lacking substance or reality, Ego sees itself separate from and in opposition to other egos. Being separated from substance, Ego is constantly overwhelmed by a sense of its own insecurity and loneliness and tries to overcome them through frenetic activities, often seeking to clothe itself in power, wealth, name and fame, and through accomplishments in diverse fields of activities. The Guinness Book of Records is a perfect testimony to how desperate is Ego’s need for recognition. One entry is from a man who claims to be able to stand on one leg for the longest period of time, and another from a man who claims to be able to spit further than anyone else!

Loneliness and insecurity drive Ego to find compensation through the most diverse external activities. It seeks to scale the tallest mountains and plumb the deepest oceans, it reaches out to the farthest limits of space and it seeks to accumulate knowledge of any and every kind, even pertaining to stamp collecting. Ego is constantly seeking a niche where it can be an expert, the world’s biggest and best. It seeks solace in sensuality, in human love, in home and family, in nationalism and patriotism, in social service and charity, and not least in glorifying war, all of which bear witness to Ego’s frantic need for recognition and substance. True, some of these activities are clearly beneficial to the human race, but the driving motor is always Ego, and that is why there is so much cut-throat competition even among science researchers and eminent academics who are trying to find remedies for deadly diseases.

Ego is at the heart of, and is the driving motor of, all conflicts, whether personal, social or political. Most of all, Ego is the driving motor of war.

Following all the great religious masters of the world, as well as all of the world's mystics, Jayaweera says that Ego, defined as an illusory self, is the root of all the world's problems, as well as of all our personal problems. He says that in so far as Ego has no basis in reality, it is the greatest of superstitions, and like all superstitions, has the capacity to hold the human mind in thrall.

Taking the world's great religions chronologically, Jayaweera looks at how each of them treats the overarching problem of Ego.

In Hindu belief, Ego is an illusion or maya, standing between human beings and Brahman (God). Brahman individualises himself as Atman, and in every detail Atman has all that Brahman has, which is the equivalent of Jesus’ claims, “I and the Father are one." (John 10:30) and “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." (John 14:9).

However, when Brahman individualises as Atman, it encases itself in a visible, tangible sheath, our body equipment, which constitutes our so-called individuality. The belief that that external sheath constitutes a self-subsistent entity, or Ego, is the illusion or maya, from which arise all of the problems of life, and the break-out from Ego or moksha (emancipation) is achieved through a rigorous four-fold discipline, to be perfected over countless births and rebirths.

In Buddhist belief also, Ego is an illusion, the product of avijja (ie ignorance of things as they are). In his doctrine of paticcasamupaada (dependent origination) the Buddha sets out clearly and elaborately how this spurious "i" consciousness comes into being and incurs the Law of anicca (impermanence), dhukka (sorrow) and anatta (soullessness). Living under the tyranny of Ego is endless suffering and sorrow, and Enlightenment consists of progressively realising the truth concerning Ego's spurious nature; Nirvana being the final break-out from its tyranny. However, to achieve this break-out will require perfecting oneself and attaining higher and higher states of consciousness over countless births and rebirths in sansaara.

In Christian belief, Ego was born at the Garden of Eden, when ignoring God's admonition about the consequences of his free choice, Adam chose to disobey God and go his own way (i.e. The Fall). At that point, man not only set himself up as a spurious Ego, but also became a closed system and came under the law of cause and effect and incurred the law of entropy (i.e. the equivalent of anicca, dhukka and anatta in Buddhism).

Ego is the Fallen Adam, and the only way back to God is for the Ego to repent and submit to crucifixion, but since Ego will never commit suicide (that would be too much to expect of Ego) it has to be done deus ex machina (literally - through a divine intervention from outside the system) which was what the Crucifixion was all about. Jesus of Nazareth was the deus ex machina, manifesting on earth as archetypal man, to take on voluntarily the sin (i.e. the Fall) of the world.

The sharp contrast between the Hindu and Buddhist understanding of deliverance from Ego on the one hand, and the Christian understanding on the other, is that whereas in the former instances, deliverance depends on the understanding and effort of human beings and can take millions of years of journeying through sansaara, in the latter, it can be achieved here and now, through faith that the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ have already achieved it.

In Islam, the Ego is denounced as a rival of God and as Satan's representative on earth. The term used in the Quran and Sunnah for Ego is kibr (arrogance and pride). The Quran says that Ego is the one disastrous idol that believers must fight against and defeat (2:54.) It says that if we have even a mustard seed weight of kibr (Ego) in us we can never be accepted by God. Our ego always justifies the arguments offered by Satan to idolize one's own opinions, get more attached to one's culture, cherish one's inherited religion, hesitate to choose rightfully, reject guidance, refuse to increase one's knowledge because one already knows it all, and so on. In other words, Satan relies on our egos to carry out his plan for diverting us from God's path.

When one surveys how the great religious masters of the world have looked at the human problem, regardless of the many doctrinal differences that distinguish one from the other, there is one ground of unanimity among them, and that is that Ego is the heart of the problem, and the only way out of the problem is to remove Ego from the scene. Every other remedy, whether scientific, political or economic, is not even palliative, but serves primarily to conceal the problem under dense layers of spurious solutions.

How to obliterate this spurious Ego, and gain liberation, has been at the centre of humanity’s perennial quest. The world has its own internal mechanisms for pulverising Ego, not because it wants it out of the way, but because to inflict pain and anguish is the way of the world, which itself is Ego’s outworking. The world, which is the Ego externalising itself as a corporate entity, is programmed by default to inflict pain and anguish. However, when the world pulverises it, rather than go under, Ego often rebounds with renewed vigour, like the evil giant in Greek mythology who rebounded with greater strength every time Hercules hurled it to the ground, and that pleases Satan so that he can continue to use Ego to channel pain and sorrow into the world.

In a few, however, the world's demolition of Ego triggers a different reaction. Ego succumbs, bends its knees and submits to God in surrender, opening the way for Spirit to take over and commence the awesome work of replacing it with the Spirit of Christ. Humanity's reconciliation to God, or the restoration of the broken branch to the parent tree, can take place only after Ego, who had initially triggered the separation, has been overpowered by Spirit, and has been supplanted with the Christ.

Jayaweera believes that rather than risk being pulverised by the world, with the attendant possibility of reinvigorating itself, the human ego has a literally heaven-sent opportunity to die voluntarily and vicariously, in and through the Christ, that is, through faith in His Death and Resurrection.