The ego resists truth.
Why does the ego resist truth?
It’s because the ego is mental identification with a specific body-mind-personality as what I am.
I say that again:
The ego is mental identification with a specific body-mind-personality as what I am.
The truth is:
The body-mind-personality is not what I am. The body-mind-personality is a temporary manifestation that has come about through the Third Principle of God, the creative principal. Like all temporary manifestations, it had a beginning, and it will have an end.
The ego, being mental identification with the body-mind-personality, does not like the truth. It wants to believe that some part of what it is identified with—the body, the mind, or the personality—will in some way continue forever. The idea of an eternal soul is the ego’s wish, a hope for something that is ‘me’ that continues beyond the body’s physical death.
But that’s not the truth.
That’s why the ego resists truth. It doesn’t like the truth. When the ego looks at the truth, it can’t find itself. It doesn’t like that at all.
What is the truth?
The truth is we are life itself.
Temporary manifestations come and go. They always have, and they always will. However, as everything else comes and goes, there is one thing that always remains—life. As today’s reading says:
… all that can be final is that which lasts when all else has ended …
Let’s imagine being at a funeral. There is a body in the casket. It is a friend that you’ve known for several years. Your friend died unexpectedly of a heart attack.
If you focus your eyes and thoughts on the body in the casket, death seems very real. However, in order for death to appear real, you have to narrow your focus to the casket. You have to ignore the life that you are as you look at the casket. You have to ignore the life that is present in all of the other people at the funeral. You have to ignore the life in the plants that fill the room and in the birds singing outside the window. In order to believe in death, which is the end of life, you have to ignore so much!
The truth is that you are not the body-mind-personality that your thoughts currently identify with. You are life—that which was before this body, that which is while this body is present, and that which continues when this body ends.
Look with open eyes. See that life never ends!
Look at nature. Specific plants and animals come and go, but nature itself remains.
Consider Ramana Maharshi’s statement to his devotees, as they gathered around him mourning his impending death:
I am not going anywhere. Where would I go?
Look. Does life die, or does it recycle, reorder and rearrange into new and different forms? Can you find the end of life, or do you find only ongoinginess?
Mental identification fears the end of a specific form that it is identified with. It wishes for a “truth” that will give it eternal life. Many people believe different religious stories about continuation of the ‘me’ in one way or another. Do you know why there are so many different religious beliefs about continuation? Because those beliefs are stories; they are not truth.
The truth is beyond any specific form and beyond mental identification with it.
Awakening is the end of mental identification with a specific form. When that identification ends, one sees one’s Self as life itself. In that realization, fear is impossible, because ‘end’ is impossible.
