Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the
egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not
being whole. In some people, this is conscious, in others unconscious.
If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of
not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be
felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing. In either
case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-
gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they
feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power,
recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel
better about themselves, feel more complete. But even when they
attain all these things, they soon find that the hole is still there, that it
is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot
delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more
difficult.
As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot truly be at
ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals
when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been
fulfilled. Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify
with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly.
The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions,
the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and
education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships,
personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political,
nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None
of these is you.
Do you find this frightening? Or is it a relief to know this? All of these
things you will have to relinquish sooner or later. Perhaps you find it
as yet hard to believe, and I am certainly not asking you to believe
that your identity cannot be found in any of those things. You will
know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when
you feel death approaching. Death is a stripping away of all that is not
you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there
is no death.
CHAPTER THREE
MOVING DEEPLY
INTO THE NOW