Someone asks: how do we prevent the ego from arising? How do we outsmart it? Can we catch the ego in the process? Are there any practices to prevent it?
Short answer: surrender everything moment by moment vigilantly and keep doing it actively, do not watch or look for ego, as then you would be choosing to observe ego, merely surrender and dissolve into union with the environment
Long answer:
The thing is any predictive effort to match the ego will ALWAYS be outsmarted by the ego – all predictive methods use the very mechanism of the ego to carry out the predictions. Not even a catch-22 but you are simply caught. Then there is the spiritual ego, a higher level eternal ego. There is the finite ego which is easily transcended because it is so obvious and blatant but the spiritual ego, the eternal ego, that one will catch you whether you like it or not. In that case, you have to literally face yourself, there is no separation, you have to touch that naked glee and pride within oneself and feel it as your own self, no separation.
No running into ideas like “I am God at the root of it all”, they won’t save you. Spiritual ego is eternally clever, and will only crumble when faced directly and apprehended directly. It hides one layer behind who you think you are at all times. It hides as the Observer itself, so that there is the true observer, and then an observer within, then the rest of the universe, but your blindness will certainly lead you to feel it is the observer itself. True enlightenment is nothing at all – not even “IAMness”, not even that. If there is an IAMness, there is a blindness. It is absolutely nothing, no idea, no concept. Not even God, not even SatChidAnanda, just nothing. Nothing at all, not even void. Just nothing. Then you will begin grasping it.
Keep in mind, you have say, 20% of your faculties as the conscious mind. 80% of you is the subconscious mind which overrides the conscious until it is made conscious itself. Don’t worry about the irrelevant percentages. Focus. Your ego has 100% of your faculties, which is why it always wins. You have to use that 20% to access the 100% and only then will you win.
That is why the true Enlightenment is nothing at all. You have to outsmart the mind itself first with your Spirit Soul, you have to make the mind your tool and servant, if you are servant to the mind, you will fail, if your mind is the servant, you shall succeed. You must transcend the mind, the physical structure of your neural networks, epigenetics and DNA has to transcend it. When your neural network (connectome) reaches 100% self-reflectivity, then the stage of Nirvikalpa is attained. Then after that you can entertain things like SatChidAnanda and God and so on, but prior to the nothing-at-all-not-even-nothingness, your neural networks are physically and informatically non-capable of acting without distortion. This is the Clear Reality. After Nirvikalpa the physical ego is annihilated never to return but the spiritual ego remains. Then when Moksha is attained, the spiritual ego has been annihilated and the ego is dissolved once and for all and there is full body White Light bliss as in the state of Ayahuasca or Iboga.
So the practice you are seeking, has been explained to me by the white tantric enlightenment itself, the Moksha which is the stage of all soul lessons on the worldly plane having been completed, as far as I understand. To enter Moksha, you abide in perpetual surrender, deeper and deeper levels of surrender. Just when you thought you had surrendered, there is another layer of surrender. Always realise you are in a “false vacuum” state, and can always go deeper, a layer deeper, irrespective of how deep, even if you have completely enlightened yourself and there is no further to go, even then there is a deeper layer of surrender. It is literally turtles all the way down. And each turtle you get to, is always the top turtle of the pile and it is still turtles all the way down, unceasingly. So do not be deceived by any plateaus, they are just that. Even when you are consumed by the Light, you have an even deeper layer of surrender – I guess at the deepest worldly layer of surrender, you would surrender into spontaneous combustion and die on the spot.
You always and only ever have these two choices: false light, or True Light. Either stay frozen and block Unconditional Love or surrender and accept Unconditional Love. There is a winner to the human race and the winner is the one who can accept the most Unconditional Love, it is infinite, turtles all the way down. There are many realms available to the human self which have never even been discovered or touched or thought of, and these are realms accessible to all, which none of the buddhas or masters of the entirety of the past have accessed. Because the rabbit hole is that deep, it is bottomless.
It is not possible to observe the ego and act to dissolve the ego, it is only possible to observe continually the action which dissolves the ego. Otherwise you will be observing the ego, and if you are observing the ego at all, you are not observing the lack of ego, you are observing the presence of the ego. Spiritual qualities – spirit level pride, shame, despair, despondency, arrogance, untruth, carelessness, sorrow, sadness, grief, anger, all of these assorted qualities of the eternal ego are to be addressed within oneself. All of these have to be addressed and neutralised for the White Light of Infinite Truth to shine through. The White Light is The Pure, The Perfect, The Holy, The Sacred, The Sanctified, The Dignified, The Noble, The Honourable, The Majestic, The Wise, The Mighty, The Guardian, so any single trace or vestige anything contradictory to that Nature of Nature, shall hold oneself back from the True Enlightenment.
Prior to my own enlightenment (I am passing from Gate 1/Nirvikalpa to Gate 2/Moksha), I set out to destroy the spiritual ego via both self-exaltation and self-depracation. Neither mechanism succeeded. It never could have. Spiritual ego will always outmaneuver you. Always. This is an aspect of Nature, an inviolable irrefutable aspect, it has to be accepted then transcended, it cannot be resisted. The way to outmaneuver spiritual ego is to surrender all attachment and surrender altogether. Only then does spiritual ego dissolve. Nirvikalpa Samadhi is the total dissolution of the physical ego. Moksha is the total dissolution of the spiritual ego.
Thymus gland/higher heart chakra is what mediates here, learn to harness higher heart centre. The flow of the higher heart can either block the Love or accept the Love, it will always do one or the other.
Prior to full Thymus activation, there is no human life, only animal life as sapiens. With Thymus activation, the Christos Light can enter the body and the indwelling Christ begins to embody unto the physical plane. Prior to that, there is no Christ at all, and that is purely animal life, with no semblance or vestige of true Human Consciousness. There is no way or argument around anything I have said or presented herein, it is direct proof and experience from Nature.
http://ascensionglossary.com/index.php/Permanent_Seed_Atom