The reason which lead me to hold the view that the ego does not die is that the Creator created it:
Page 139, Line 6
ਹਉਮੈ ਗਰਬੁ ਉਪਾਇ ਕੈ ਲੋਭੁ ਅੰਤਰਿ ਜੰਤਾ ਪਾਇਆ ॥
हउमै गरबु उपाइ कै लोभु अंतरि जंता पाइआ ॥
Ha▫umai garab upā▫e kai lobẖ anṯar janṯā pā▫i▫ā.
You created egotism and arrogant pride, and You placed greed within our beings.
Guru Nanak Dev
Perhaps I could help out here kaurhug
Through Blessed Juliana (ca. 1342 – ca. 1416) I learned about the distinction in Catholic mystical theology between what she calls the
sensuality and
substance within man - which corresponds roughly to the surface personality we wrongly identify as "me" and the deeper, genuine reality.
According to Juliana the soul has two aspects
substance and
sensuality - generally translated as 'essential being' and 'sensory being' or as higher nature and lower nature. Both were created by God. As she explains in Chapter 37 of Showings, "...
in every soul there is a godly will which never consented to selfishness and never shall; just as there is an animal will in our lower nature...".
The substance is the Ground that is directed towards and lifts itself up to God at all times; as distinct from the self (the sensuality) which is our ordinary physical and psychological life.
Our essential reality, our substance, our Ground is eternally united with God though we are not always aware of it. Our sensuality is different, indeed it is very far from always being united with God. Of the Ground/substance she writes:
"...It is a lofty understanding inwardly to see and to know that God, who is our maker, dwells in our soul, and it is a still loftier and greater understanding inwardly to see and to know that our soul, which is created, dwells in God's substance. From this substance we are what we are, by God.
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]I saw no difference between God and our substance, but saw it as if it were all God." [/FONT][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]
(pages 179-180)[/FONT]
There is no discernable difference between this deepest part our reality, the Ground or substance of our soul and God. Thus Meister Eckhart could say:
"...The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love. Your human nature and that of the divine Word are no different. To guage the soul we must guage it with God, for the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same. The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.
You must love God as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, but as He is - sheer, pure absolute Oneness, without any duality, sundered from all twoness, and in whom we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness. Separate yourself from all twoness. Be one in one, one with one, one from one. When is a man in mere understanding? When a man sees one thing separated from another. And when is a man above mere understanding? When a man sees All in all, then a man stands beyond mere understanding...”
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- Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 – c. 1327), Catholic Mystic & priest
The sad truth is that most people identify themselves with their "thoughts" and surface personalities and are not aware of their innate
Ground. They think that their thoughts, emotions, roles etc. are "them".
The ego/sensuality/sensory being matures as we develop and can become misdirected and obscured. Our essential being, our substance, is eternally united with God from whom it flows forth, though we are not always aware of it. Our sensuality is different. When our sensuality - the 'Me' - is not focused on God as the centre of our lives, then we are broken and fragmented because the higher self and the lower self are out of tune with each other. The task of spirituality is the reunifiction of our sensuality (our 'me') with our substance so that we can become whole again in God.
Do you know the word "salvation"? It comes from the Koine Greek word
sozo which means "to make whole again". peacesign A lot of Christians don't understand this because they read the Bible in English translations and do not know the meaning of the original words.
So in brief: Our essential being is always united with God, no matter how we feel or what we are concious of or what we do, it is the essential Ground of our Being which constitutes our deepest reality, flowing from Being Itself, and no matter what we do it is always still what is.
But our sensuality can be directed elsewhere, as it often is, away from God. This fragmentation must be healed. Our sensuality (Our "me") is focused away from God and fragmented from our substance and so we are divided against ourselves. As Jesus said a kingdom divided against itself will fall, ultimately.
We are created with a natural, in-built orientation to God in our inmost self, and are at odds with ourselves until this orientation is made the focus of our whole life, integrating our sensuality with our substance, which is always united with God.
Read:
"...Very few in Western society in our time would deny that we are individually and collectively fragmented. That is obvious enough from the mess and muddle of our lives and the society around us. Juliana would say the root of all this is that we are quite literally heart-broken. Our heart, our being, is split in two by the division between our substance and our sensuality. Human wholeness can never be achieved until this brokeness is healed. Our substance is always united to God; but our sensuality all too easily focuses on other things, most obviously on ourselves. We may call this sin, or brokeness or soul-sickness, or alienation; but whatever term we use, there is a fracture at the centre of our Personhood, the deep wound which divides us from ourselves and makes us hurting and hurtful people, spreading pain like an infectious disease in which everyone contaminates everyone else...Turning from God is turning from our deepest self. Because our substance is essentially united with God whether we know it or not, and because that is constitutive of our being human at all, the denial of God in our lives actually is the denial of our deepest reality. Juliana goes so far as to say that a person who persists in this denial ultimately annihilates himself or herself..."
- Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
The goal is not to destroy our ego or sensuality - ordinary psychological life which we wrongly assume to be our "self" or "me" - indeed that would not only be impossible but also not desirable, since it is natural to us and created by God.
Rather the goal is to subject the ego to the Ground of the soul, the Image of God in us, so as to become whole again.
We take refuge in our thoughts, fantasies and emotions because they provide us with a deceptive sense of security and self-sufficiency. But Christ tells us to abandon that security and make ourselves vulnerable, relying wholly on our Creator. Both Christ and Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism (a Chinese religion), likened this state of self-abandonment to the will of God in the present moment to the mind of a little child who has not yet developed a mature ego.... "
Become as little children," they said.
A child is much more in synch with the true Origin of knowing than is an adult. Simple and spontaneous, the little child knows without knowing
how he knows. He can be happy without knowing he is happy. Isn't that beautiful and wondrous? He just IS. What adults often consider joy or contentment is in truth the emotional excitement of their ego; while a little child's happiness consists in the simple, selfless joy of being alive.
Little children have a perfectly unified substance/sensuality. Their ego is completely subjected to their Ground.
When Christ told each person to "deny himself" and "lose his life," he was not suggesting that one obliterate the conscious mind, thereby denying our unique Personhood as some New Agey type people seem to want to do. Thinking, imagining, dreaming and emotion are not destroyed when we tame our ego, rather they are wholly submitted to the higher Will of God in the Ground of our soul.
When we die our ego will most likely dissappear, since it is physical, sensory and thus located in the brain (which none of us can take with us) leaving only the Ground/substance/essential being/higher nature which is one with God. I presume that this will be the case. That does not mean that our unique personhood ceases to exist but it will be a much deeper "I" than the ego and we will be aware of our true reality on a much higher level not constrained by temporal time or place.
However the Ground can be covered and tarnished by the residue of our wandering ego, leaving the remnants of our consciousness scarred when we die.
I get nonetheless why you do not believe that the ego/sensuality will die, however it is sensory and brain-located, conditioned since it is influenced and shaped by outside, exterior things, people and events whereas the Ground is unconditioned and at all times immobile and unaffected in its traquility by any outside conditions. Since all that can be conditioned is impermanent, finite and must change it cannot be equated with God who is unchangeable and Unconditioned, beyond time and place, who has no emotions or conflicting thoughts since these denote the ability to change. What are your thoughts?
