When someone takes a game too seriously, it very quickly loses its fun.
Human incarnation is like that, but worse.
The ego is an emergent self, meaning it "emerges" from a collection of things that aren't a self.
Primarily the ego exists in reference to the body-mind but it may also grow to include habits, likes, dislikes, physical appearance, language, culture, and education.
If any of those are removed or changed, you still exist. Yet the character you feel yourself to be may or may not feel different. The distinction between the feeling of existence and our felt identity is vital to understand.
The feeling of existence is awareness. Awareness knows itself; it exists and knows it exists. It is changeless and continuous.
Awareness illuminates the play of consciousness. To us, consciousness is the perpetually changing experience of a human body-mind. It is all we have known since birth. Our felt identity, the ego, emerges in the body-mind from certain collected patterns of consciousness.
A metaphor may make understanding this more intuitive and clear:
Think of awareness as electricity, consciousness as the images produced on a TV screen by means of electricity, and the ego as the character appearing on the TV screen with whose life and story we identify.
Your feeling of existence (awareness), is entirely uncaused and untouched by the appearance, changes, and disappearance of the character on the show, or even by the show itself (consciousness). Despite this, we live our lives unaware of being anything other than our character and their story.
This is the illusion. Not the show or the characters but the belief that you are the character, that your feeling of existence comes from the character. That is existential ignorance and it creates immense suffering--both for ourselves and for each other.
Three consequences arise inherent to the ego:
We feel that our existence begins with our character's birth and ends with our character's death. Imagine if you were playing a video game and you were brainwashed to believe the same thing about your game character. Would the game be fun or would it be terrifying?
Our human life and everything we know regarding it will end. Who knows what if anything endures after death. It's fair to assume basically nothing. That's something with which we all need to come to terms. But our sense of existence, of being alive, does not end. That is a big deal and makes a big difference.
2. The sense of separation.
As we live wholly identified with that character, we take their side in all matters. It creates a sense of separateness and it is the basis for disharmony, conflict, and confusion. It is also the sense of separateness that creates the feeling that we are lacking something, that something is missing in life. This then leads to the drive described next.
3. The search for happiness.
The combination of our felt sense of separation with our belief that our existence begins and ends with our character poses a problem. It means our starting point is that of incompleteness and we have only a limited time to find completion. So we seek happiness and try to avoid suffering.
This seeking drives us even deeper into the illusory predicament. Because 99% of the time, due to our identification with the character, that seeking only ever occurs within the TV show. We try to make that character happy through the things in the TV story and avoid bad things in the story, which just tangles us deeper in the whole belief that the character story is us.
Temporary happiness or temporary relief from suffering is possible, but it is only ever a partial happiness or relief and it is never sustained indefinitely.
The good news is that there is a way to freedom.
"You are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between life and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation." -- Eckhart Tolle
To review, we all appear as different characters and we all have the feeling of "I," the feeling of existence. That is awareness; it is the electricity underlying the whole TV show. Consciousness is the medium in which the body's senses and mind's thoughts appear. Within the display of consciousness, a derived identity forms in the mind-body shaped by our culture, language, psychological imprints, and the like, as the story plays out.
I have explained why we will never be at ease let alone truly happy so long as we live as if we are a fragment in a story beyond our control. We will be grasping at scraps of pleasure and resolving to endure innumerable hardships only to be facing inevitable obliteration at our moment of death.
When the ego's illusion is broken, the TV show is seen to be an inert play on a screen and the infinite play of awareness and consciousness stands revealed as having been there all along. That is realization, or enlightenment.
The next few points are important to understand, as they are the very reason for why I explained all of this in the first place.
1. The character, the ego, doesn't become enlightened, nor is it destroyed.
Ramana Maharshi once said that enlightenment is like the sun discovering there is no such thing as night or day. Nothing actually changes other than the arising of clarity regarding what has always been the case.
2. Freedom doesn't mean the character gets to do whatever they want.
Freedom is from the illusion of feeling yourself to be the character. This kind of freedom releases a tremendous amount of tension and fear built up within the character.
3. At the same time, the character doesn't go anywhere.
The character still participates in the TV story but now it can do so without such profound confusion and suffering. It can truly begin to have fun. Also, compassion for others spontaneously arises because there are no "others" and there are no sides.
"We're all just walking each other home." -- Ram Dass
For lack of a better term, we call this existential path of awakening "spirituality." One day, I would like to find a better word for it.
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