The Ego and the Higher Planes

Some sadhaks say that as one enters into higher planes one meets with a greater ego, ignorance and falsehood. How can this be?

It is because they go higher and higher in the same plane of consciousness as before and do not rise beyond — e.g. higher and higher in the realm of vital-mental formations — not higher beyond mind into the planes that lead to the full supramental.

Before or while rising to the higher spiritual ranges, often we imagine that the ego has been dropped altogether. But we must not be careless. For it cannot completely disappear before the Overmind border is crossed.

Even if there is no consciousness of ego in the higher parts where oneness of all things has been realised, it does not follow that in the lower parts ego has been abolished. It can on the contrary become very strong and the action can be very egoistic even while the mind is thinking “I have no ego”.

People speak of the “spiritual ego”. The question is: “Is there really an ego on the higher spiritual planes?” Certainly not. There is absolutely no element of ego there. For they are all (from the Higher mind to Overmind) divine planes of consciousness.

On the higher spiritual planes there is no ego, because the oneness of the Divine is felt, but there may be the sense of one’s true person or individual being — not ego, but a portion of the Divine.

Some travellers of the overhead ranges ask: “Even we do notice ego here and there and sometimes even in greater mass than below. How is it so?”

The ego they perceive there is not the inhabitant of the spiritual heights. But the thing is, man being a mental being, when he ascends he carries with him subtly or unconsciously the ego of the lower nature. And as his consciousness is naturally heightened and cosmicised in the spiritual planes, the ego too feels extended and enlarged! But there is no such thing as “spiritual ego”.

All the same a sadhak cannot wait to be egoless before he attempts the higher flights. For it is impossible to have a complete annihilation of ego at such an early stage of sadhana.

Although there is no ego in the spiritual planes, yet by the spiritual experience the ego on the lower planes may get aggrandised through pride and wrong reception of the experience. Also one may by entering into the larger mental and vital planes aggrandise the ego. These things are always possible so long as the higher consciousness and the lower are not harmonised in the being and the lower transformed into the nature of the higher.

In effect, a poet sadhak, H, sang to the Mother:

“One day from my begging condition I shall grow divine
And sit beside Thee on Thy throne!”

It is a dream of the ego hoping for its own highest possible (or impossible) aggrandisement.

Those who consciously carry in them ambitious ideas about developing in sadhana and becoming equal in status with the Divine Himself or with one’s guru may be detained long, if not in the larger planes, at least in the Overmind, so long as the ego is there.

They cannot get beyond unless they lose it. Even in these planes it prevents them from getting the full consciousness and knowledge. For in the Overmind cosmic consciousness too ego is absent, though the true person may be there.