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To be precise, your ego and conscience hang in such balance inside you that the sum total of their percentages in your personality at any time is 100. Hence your conscience and ego are inversely proportional to each other, which means as one of them grows, the other one drops. Accordingly, if you have 70% ego at a point in time, the percentage of your conscience is 30. This percentage is different for different people and it may be different, even in the case of the same person at different points during his journey of spiritual growth.
It means a native can have 80% ego and 20% conscience at a time, he may have 70% ego and 30% conscience twenty years later as he may have grown more conscience during these years; and he may have 75% ego and 25% conscience as another twenty years pass, because he may have grown more ego during these twenty years. This equation keeps changing until you reach a point where 100% conscience is achieved.
Let’s try to understand it through the example of sunlight. If 50% of your body is under shade and the remaining 50% is under sunlight; you can change this equation to any possible combination you want. It means you can adjust your body in different ways in order to change the percentage of light as well as that of the shade. However, the sum total of the percentage of your body which is under shade and the percentage of your body which is under light is always 100 in all the situations. It means if are absolutely under shade, the percentage of your body under the sunlight becomes 0 and that under the shade becomes 100; which gives a total of 100 again. Similarly; if you’re absolutely under sunlight; the percentage of your body under shade is 0 and that under light is 100; which too gives a total of 100.
Coming back to the personality; when you reach the point of 100% conscience, you can’t go back even if you want to; or to be precise, you’ll never want to have even 1% of ego and hence you stay away from it. This is the final stage which is called liberation because as soon as your ego leaves you, the whole universe becomes you and you become the whole universe as the boundaries that separate the two of you dissolve. It should be noted that in order for such things to exist which are not yours, it is essential that those things should exist first, which are yours or which you think are yours.
It means as soon as the words like ‘I, me, my and mine are lost’; the other words like ‘his, her, theirs and yours’ are also lost. This is because in order for there to be someone called ‘You’, there must first be someone called ‘Me’. When two people are talking and they use words like ‘You and me’, these words are used to define boundaries between them. Since most boundaries are defined by the ego, they dissolve as soon the ego leaves you.
When that happens, the words like ‘I, me, my and mine’ get lost and when they get lost, all other such words defining other people also get lost. This is because you now don’t have ‘Me’ and hence you can’t define other words. For instance, while talking to someone, when you use the word ‘your’ for a cup of coffee, it means this cup of coffee belongs to him and it also means that it doesn’t belong to you. Hence you use this word to draw a comparison and the possession of this other person is relative to your possessions.
Now imagine the words ‘me, my and mine’ are lost. How will you define his cup of coffee now? Physically, there are only two of you present; you’ve already lost sense of the words like ‘me, my and mine’, so what is there to compare with? It means if you now say, ‘this is your cup of coffee’; this sentence also includes the hidden meaning, ‘this is not my cup of coffee’. In fact, you use the first sentence, only in order to make the second sentence clear as otherwise; you don’t need to use the first sentence at all. Hence in reality, you’re telling him that this is not my cup of coffee.
When all the pronouns representing you are lost, how can you use this sentence now? As you go beyond the domain of personal pronouns, you can’t engage in relative comparisons because you need at least two people or things to compare. However, as your ego leaves you, the concept of two is lost and accordingly, all comparisons are lost. Therefore, you won’t say, ‘this is your cup of coffee’ because there is no ‘me’ and hence there is no ‘you’. As the comparison goes away, you use a sentence like, ‘a cup of coffee’ and you eliminate all personal pronouns.
This happens because this cup of coffee now belongs to everyone in this universe and it is related to no one in particular. It happens in case of your house, your car as well as in case of your other belongings; and you start seeing them simply as things and not as your things. It means that instead of thinking, ‘this is my house’; you start thinking, ‘this is a house’. It may sound strange to you and some of you may even think that this type of mindset may not be correct, but it is absolutely correct. As this mindset comes; your house or your car may be lost but then the entire universe is available for you because all the boundaries have been dissolved now and everything belongs to everyone.
When you say ‘my house’, it means you possess this house. Since you’re a soul and not a body in reality, if you actually possess this house, you should be able to take it anywhere your soul goes or let’s say, this house should be yours in every life, the moment you start possessing it for the first time. This doesn’t happen and this house stops being yours as soon as you leave this body or even before that. So how can you call this house as your house? It is there with you today and it may not be there with you tomorrow. Hence there is no wisdom in calling it your house.
This topic needs great details in order to be understood well and hence we’ll discuss it in one of the coming parts of this book. Back to the topic, if you achieve 100% conscience, there is no turning back and you get rid of ego forever. However, if on the opposite end of this spectrum, you achieve 100% ego and 0% conscience at a point in time, the same rule doesn’t apply. It means you’re not eternally doomed to have 100% ego till the end of time and you’re fully capable of growing conscience once again.
This is because every game has a starting point as well as an ending point. When you start playing it, you can keep playing it as long as you don’t reach the finishing point. Consider you’re playing the game of snakes and ladders and you’re playing it alone. There’s a snake at 99 and it sends you back to 1 or 2. If you’re bitten by this snake and you go back to 1, it doesn’t mean you can’t rise again. You can play and rise as many times as it takes to reach 100.
Hence the snake at 99 as well as other snakes in this game may send you back in your journey; they can’t stop you from moving ahead once again. However, as your reach 100, you reach the finishing point, the journey ends and no snake can bite you now. It’s just like this in case of journey of your soul. You may keep playing this game of ego versus conscience as long as you don’t reach 100% conscience and in order to do so, you are allowed to rise again and again, even if you touch 100% ego or 0% conscience again and again.
In reality, the game of the journey of our soul only means growing conscience. Hence ego is introduced as a hurdle and not as an objective. Conscience is what you wish to achieve and ego is what stops you along the way. Hence this journey doesn’t end as long as you don’t achieve complete conscience, which means you become completely free of ego.
It should be noted that apart from the percentage of conscience, the amount of conscience also matters a lot. This means that having a higher percentage of conscience is not sufficient on its own and you must possess high amount of conscience at the same time. For instance, a person may not have high ego but at the same time, he may not have high conscience also. Technically speaking, this person may have 80% conscience and 20% ego but the amount or net quantity of both these entities may not be sufficient to call him a spiritually grown man. In fact, he may lie on the opposite spectrum, which means he may be at the beginning of his spiritual journey.
Let’s make it easier to understand by taking an example. Suppose a native has savings of Rs. 10,000 and he owes debts of Rs. 2000. When we calculate the net savings of this native, we find that he has Rs. 8000 as savings, after deducting the amount of debt from it, as his net savings are equal to his apparent savings minus his liabilities. Hence this native has an overall amount of Rs. 10,000 and his actual savings are Rs. 8000, which means 80% of his overall savings or let’s say his overall assets. Though this native has 80% assets and 20% liabilities and it looks like a healthy ratio, this native can’t be called rich, according to the established standards of richness, as of today.
Now consider another native who has Rs. 100 million as assets and Rs. 20 million as debts. After doing the calculations, it can be found that the percentage assets of this native are also 80% and his percentage debts are also 20%, as in case of the first native. However, there is a big difference between the quantum of assets possessed by these two natives as there is a significant difference between net worth of Rs. 8000 and net worth of Rs. 80 million. Though both of them have the same percentage of assets, the first one is poor and the second one is rich, according to the prevailing standards of today.
Now imagine yet another native who has Rs. 100 billion in assets and Rs. 20 billion in debts. This native also has the same percentage of assets but he’s far ahead of the first two natives in reality. This way, though all three natives have the same percentage of net assets, the first one is poor, the second one is rich and the third one is super rich. This is what happens in case of conscience also and the quantum of conscience is a very important factor, along with the percentage of conscience.
Hence a native may have 90% conscience but he may still have nothing much to offer whereas another native with 90% conscience may shine like the Sun and he may enlighten a large number of people with the amount of conscience he has. The quantum of conscience possessed by different souls can be compared to the quantum of light generated by different stars like our Sun. There are stars which don’t produce so much light as our Sun and there are stars which produce much more light than our Sun.
Once you grow higher amounts of conscience, it starts controlling your body, intellect and heart; instead of your ego doing so. This is when you may witness that you’re reaching the balancing point where you become aware about how to use all these entities at their proper places. Hence you start using your body, intellect and heart in harmony with each other as well as in order to maintain collective harmony. As you move closer to this balancing point which means as you grow more conscience, all these entities stop interfering with each other’s job.
For instance, when you engage in a business deal, your conscience may keep your heart out of it. This is because the primary objective of this deal is to make profits, which may be earned better by using your intellect. Likewise, when you engage in acts of love, your conscience may keep your intellect out of it because the last thing you want in the domain of love is to let your intellect interfere. The matters of love are best dealt with by heart and hence they should be left to it.
This way, you learn to use all these entities in the best possible ways and this is when you have reached the point of high spiritual growth. In its deepest sense, spiritual growth means learning the theme of universe, playing your role in it and acting in a balanced way, according to the demand of the situation. At this stage, your conscience is in charge of all other entities and they can’t mislead you; as and when they may want to do so. We’ll discuss more about this topic in the next parts of this book.
An interesting point to note here is that though your ego may cause so many problems, it can prove helpful; as long as you don’t grow high amount of conscience. This is because majority of the greatest achievements can only be reached either with the help of conscience or with the help of ego, and the latter may even surpass the former in some cases, especially when it comes to materialistic achievements. Your body, intellect and emotions on their own are not able to work as a team due to diversity in interests; and this job is done by your conscience or by your ego.
For instance, your intellect and heart don’t like each other and hence they don’t go well with each other. The only two entities which can make them reach a state of compromise are your conscience and ego. It means a person with high conscience can use both of them to his advantage and a person with high ego can also do the same, though their goals may be different. In the absence of both these entities, there may be no common platform between your intellect, heart and even your physical body. In fact, you may end up having a physical body and some emotions; and having minimum amount of intellect, just like the animals.
This is because your intellect grows when it is asked to do something that it is incapable of doing at that stage. In order to meet this demand, it expands and hence it grows and this process continues. However, this demand for something extra can only be given; either by your conscience or by your ego and by no other entity. This is because these are the only two entities which want to achieve things which are much bigger than your basic requirements at a time. This is why you may find that animals still have the same level of intellect as they used to have in the beginning.
Animals neither have much conscience, nor do they have much ego. Hence the desire to achieve much more than the basic needs doesn’t rise in them due to the absence of both these entities. This is why animals have not made any contribution towards materialistic achievements or advancements since the beginning of the time and only humans have done so. The reason humans have done so lies in the fact that they have ego as well as conscience and hence they have the desires to achieve things bigger than their basic needs at any point in time or to be precise, they have the desire to evolve.
As conscience lies at the third level and as it is the most difficult thing to grow, ego comes handy till the time you develop high conscience. In simple words, a big part of the job that your conscience should do is done by your ego in the absence of the former, though the latter may have a different style of working. For example, a scientist driven by his conscience may work on a project with the intention that the entire mankind should benefit whereas a scientist driven by his ego may do the same, primarily in order to satisfy his ego by receiving recognition; and the benefits of the mankind may become secondary.
However, whether the benefits of mankind becomes primary or secondary; such benefits may be witnessed almost equally well in both these cases. Hence the primary objectives of these two scientists may be different but the world may benefit the same; though the results witnessed by these scientists will be different depending on whether the ego or the conscience has put them to this work.
Therefore, ego can be used as a tool to achieve things in the absence of conscience as ego grows almost without any effort. This is why it may be useful though it may come at a high price at times. We’ll discuss this topic in details in one of the next parts of this book. To summarize, ego can be used as a high cost substitute for conscience, until the latter becomes available. Imagine you’re temporarily crippled in an accident and you need someone’s support, even in order to do your day to day activities. There is only one person who offers this support but he comes with high cost which means he charges significant amount of money for this help.
It is wise for you to bear the costs of this person until you become healthy once again and at the same time, you should try hard to become healthy as soon as you can. When that happens, you become capable of doing things on your own as you’ve achieved your natural state of being healthy and hence you don’t need to pay high costs any longer. The other person in this example is your ego and your natural state of health is your conscience. As long as you don’t grow conscience, let your ego do certain things at high cost. It’s like you choose to pay high cost for this person’s help as you understand that you may have to suffer a lot if he doesn’t help or you may not even survive as you may not be able to feed yourself.
However, keep working hard to develop conscience so that you may get rid of your ego at the earliest and the operations may be taken over by your conscience, which is your natural way of doing things. Acting upon the advice of your conscience is the natural way for you and using ego in the absence of conscience is the unnatural way of doing things and this way comes at high cost. The reason your conscience is the natural way is that the natural tendency of each soul is to be joyful and peaceful; and this state can be achieved through conscience only; as only a person with high conscience can achieve a natural state of joy and peace.
The natural state here means that such person with high conscience continues to be in a state of joy and peace forever, like the ocean continues to have water in it. On the other hand, the peace and joy achieved through ego are illusionary as well as temporary and they may go away any time, being substituted by sorrows and disturbances which are the costs you pay for such illusionary and momentary peace and joy. Hence you should keep working towards achieving this natural state of joy and peace, which means you should keep working to grow more and more conscience. Until you accomplish this very difficult but certainly doable job, you can enjoy such joy and peace on temporary basis through your ego; of course by paying high costs for them.
After looking at the complex pattern of human behavior, let’s go back to the cup of coffee that you and your lover have together. When your girlfriend asks for your opinion about extra sugar in coffee and she at once adds that some people don’t like this habit of hers but she doesn’t care; this is what is happening in reality. Her liking for you has reached a point where she may have started considering her future with you. This is why she’s opening up and she’s trying to tell you about some of her habits which she thinks may cause small or big differences of opinion between the two of you, depending on the habits in question.
When you really like someone and you want to spend the rest of your life with him or many years of your life with him, you want him to like you too. Hence she may now start opening up and she may start discussing those aspects of her personality with you one by one and at different times, which have generally not been liked by majority of people. This is because she may have a personality type which encourages her to make sure that you’re fine with such habits of her so that problems may not rise later on.
However, the number of such habits shared by her with you versus the actual number of such habits may vary depending on her overall personality. In general, you tend to discuss small negative habits in the beginning phase of a relationship, you tend to discuss relatively bigger ones as the relationship progresses and you may not discuss the biggest ones even when the relationship reaches its peak. These biggest negative habits may be found by the other party and you may not speak about them at all. This is because deep down, you also realize that they’re big negative habits and hence you may not want to share them at all as you may be afraid that doing so may seriously affect your relationship in a negative way.
Hence this girl likes you, she’s opening up and at the same time, she wants you to either like some of her habits or at least not to dislike them. This is due to the reason that as soon as you say extra sugar is not good, you may hurt her ego and hence the problem may start. As you hurt her ego and ego is much more valuable for her than you are at this time, she may start developing dislike for you, as she developed for other people. However, as she knows that if you speak against extra sugar, it may go against her perception of you that she has and at the same time, she doesn’t want to add negative points to this perception because she’s planning a future with you, she gives you a strong hint.
Kindly pay attention that when she says some people don’t like this habit of hers and she doesn’t care about them, she gives you two hints. The first hint is that if you also speak against this habit, she may stop caring for you also and the second hint is that she really doesn’t want you to dislike this habit as she wants to care for you and in fact, she’s already started caring for you. It should be noted that if you really don’t care for someone in a special way, you don’t try to impress him and hence you don’t add such extra lines.
For instance, you may simply tell one such person that you like extra sugar in your coffee and you may not add the second line. This is because you don’t care for him and hence you don’t bother about his opinion about this habit of yours. Whether he likes this habit or he dislikes it, doesn’t matter much to you. On the other hand, when you really care for someone, your behavior changes and hence you may add these extra lines so that the other person may take a hint and speak in favor of your habit as you don’t want him to hurt your ego because that may cause you to add a negative point to his overall assessment done by you.
You see, how much thinking is happening even behind simple lines like these. This is what makes human behavior so complex as even a simple looking sentence may carry a hidden history of a number of experiences and it may try to convey much more than appears on the surface. Hence this girl wants you to know that she likes extra sugar in her coffee and she wants you to be fine with it. Accordingly, you should ideally tell her that you’re cool with it and it is not a bad habit. As you do so, she adds a plus point to your overall assessment, she may start liking you even more and she may start telling you about some of her even bigger negative habits, which she may be aware of.
Hence you should speak in favor of this habit if this girl is important for you and you’re considering a future with her. However, as you do that, you may go against your intellect which may keep repeating that this habit is negative for sure and you must tell her this. Since your heart may have deeply attached to this girl by this time, you may ignore the advice of your intellect and you may instead listen to your heart. During the course of this relationship, you may come across thousands of incidents when you ignore your intellect and all these acts send specific types of signals to your subconscious mind. These signals ask your subconscious mind to stop your intellect from growing beyond a point.
Applying this theory to all spheres of your life, the more you choose not to pay attention to what your intellect says, the less you start caring for it and accordingly, it may stop growing. In fact, your subconscious mind may even start reducing its already achieved size because even in order to maintain that size, energy is required. When you don’t use your intellect beyond a point for a long period of time, your subconscious mind starts reducing the size of your intellect to that point. For instance, if you reach an intellect score of 300 over the course of a number of lives due to your desire to have more and more intellect, where the maximum score is 10,000; this is what may happen in case of present example.
As you start using more heart and less intellect in a particular life, your subconscious mind may start reducing the size of your intellect from 300 to a level which best fits your needs, by sending less amount of energy to your mental plane so that it may send more energy to your emotional plane; as you’re putting demand for it. Accordingly, your intellect may start reducing and it may follow a pattern like this. Over the next ten years, it may drop to 280, it may then drop to 250 over the next ten years and this process may go on. By the time you reach the end of this life, it may have dropped to 220 or any other level, depending on how much reduction you have indicated through your acts of using less and less intellect.
This process goes on and hence your intellect may keep rising and falling throughout the journey of your soul. This way, you may grow your mental plane more and more for a number of lives say ten lives, you may then start paying less attention to it and you may start paying more attention to another plane like emotional plane for the next seven lives. Accordingly, your intellect may start reducing for these seven lives. You may once again start putting demand for more intellect in the eighth life and your intellect may start rising once again. This happens in case of all the entities that you have and hence their sizes may keep growing or reducing, depending on the desire element controlled by you.
We’ll discuss the detailed working of heart and emotions in the next part of this book. For the time being, we’ll take a break in this journey of knowing and understanding ourselves, but I’ll be back soon and we’ll resume this journey. Till then, try to understand and absorb the concepts explained in this book.
Lord Shiva Bless You
Himanshu Shangari