The Functions Will Remain - 03.25.10

Student Question: In this spiritual path, does one separate from the ego and see it as a witness or does it just dissolve? And if it remains, then what is our relationship to the ego? When I am in the Real Self, does the ego remain or does the ego fall away?

“The ego, really, is a set of functions OK? It is a set of capacities that the psyche or soul has. But then those functions get covered over by belief systems and complexes and personalities,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And the functions of the ego—thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting—will remain. “So, in that sense, an ego remains. But it is not an ego that identifies as those functions. And it realizes those functions are a conduit of the Supreme Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 25, 2010.