Playing the Part - 10.06.09

Student Question: We need to dissolve our ego to get in touch with our True Self. Is it bad under different circumstances to play roles in order to achieve objectives? For example, if we work in a company or we own a business or we’re doctors or lawyers and we need to act in a certain way to achieve an objective. Is that bad? “No. As long as you know that it is a role, then you can play the role accurately.” As Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains: “we talk about dissolving the ego or killing the ego. It’s not the ego as a whole that must be killed. It is the censor. . . . There is an intelligence that resides below the threshold of consciousness that is controlling what you are conscious of. And your conscious mind is enslaved to that—that is what must be killed, so your conscious mind is liberated to realize who you truly are.” The censor is a part of the unconscious mind, “And when I say unconscious, I mean that it is conscious, but you are not conscious of it.” This censor operates on the level of phantasy, and tries to protect the conscious mind of traumas that it does not think that the conscious mind can handle. But it also censors information from the Super-conscious mind, “And it causes our actions to be inaccurate because it leaks out and it stains our perceptions of the world. And so this is what must be purified and transformed.” “And so once all the denial and the falsehood have been killed off in the ego, then the ego realizes that all along it was an expression of the very God that it denied. So that creates a state of self-mastery or self-sovereignty rather than the self-enslavement that the ego is now in to the unconscious censor. . . . You’re achieving liberation from that state [of self-enslavement] so that your Real Self can now fully emerge with all of its potentialities.” And with that liberation, you can truly play your part in the world. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 6, 2009.