The Ego Was the Helper, the Ego is the Bar

The spiritual seeker invariably hears, repeated constantly, the requirement to overcome the ego and find his true Self. The Self is one with the Divine and shares the divine consciousness, knowledge and impetus to action. The ego, which anchors the sense of a separate and distinct individuality, is an obstacle to this liberation taking place.

There is a purpose behind the emergence of the ego which identifies the need for a conscious individuality to arise out of what is otherwise a mass of relatively undefined action within any living species. Until that occurs, we act by genetic predisposition, habit, instinct, custom and societal training and remain parts of what can only be described as a form of “herd” being. It is the development of the mental consciousness, in particular, that gives rise to the possibility of a distinct, separate individuality, receiving various input, and interpreting it through an internal logic structure. What remains to be understood is why this is a necessary stage in human evolution, and why it is a basis for the conscious evolution beyond the mind and the individual ego-personality.

The physical-vital-mental complex within which most people operate is a limited framework and tends to strict adherence to repetitive response and tightly defined and regulated lines of understanding and action. Spiritual development, however, requires stepping outside this rigid framework. The rise of the ego-personality is the first attempt of Nature to distinguish and differentiate the responsiveness of the individual to create a basis for that further development. In Thoughts and Glimpses, Sri Aurobindo states: “When we have passed beyond individualising, then we shall be real Persons. Ego was the helper; Ego is the bar.”

A disciple asks: “Mother, you said one day that before being able to identify oneself with the Divine, one must first become an individual.”

The Mother observes: “Yes, well, that’s it, exactly. You are in the period of becoming an individual. And so long as one is in this period of becoming an individual, well, one must wait until this period passes, that is, till you have become a conscious individual. Perfectly. It is that.”

“Mother, you said there are very few, one in a million perhaps, who are really conscious.”

The Mother continues: “Oh, if you take humanity at large, certainly! And the great mass of mankind will never become individuals, it will always be an amorphous mass, all intermingled, like that (gesture). To become an individual is what Sri Aurobindo calls becoming truly a mental man. Well, if you have read The Human Cycle, you will see that already it is not so easy to become a truly mental man who thinks by himself, is free from all outer influences, who has an individuality, who exists, has his reality; even that is not so easy.”

“But, by a kind of Grace, it can happen that before becoming an individual, if someone has within himself an aspiration, if he feels the need to awaken to something which would want more, want something better, which feels how very much it is to be an individual, something which really seeks beyond the ordinary limits, well, even before becoming an individual, he may suddenly have the experience of a contact with his psychic which opens all the doors for him. They close again later, but once they have opened you never forget it. The remembrance remains very vividly….”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 3, Becoming an Individual, pp. 104-105