The Ego Is Not the Enemy: What Actually Dies During Spiritual Awakening?
Few concepts in spirituality have been misunderstood as thoroughly as the ego.
We are repeatedly told to transcend the ego, destroy the ego, become egoless, or surrender the self. The implication is that spiritual maturity requires becoming less of a person, less defined, less assertive, and somehow psychologically smaller.
I see it differently.
A profound spiritual awakening does not require a weak ego. It may require an exceptionally developed one.
The problem is not that we have an ego. The problem is what the ego believes itself to be.
Ego Means a Sense of Self
At its most basic level, the ego refers to the sense of self.
It is the psychological structure through which we organize experience around the perception of “I,” “me,” and “mine.” It allows us to establish boundaries, make decisions, assume responsibility, navigate relationships, pursue goals, withstand social pressure, and function as individuals within the world.
When someone says, “He has a big ego,” they are usually not talking about the existence of a strong sense of self. They are describing narcissism, defensiveness, arrogance, grandiosity, insecurity, or excessive self-importance.
Those are qualities that can characterize an ego.
They are not the definition of ego itself.
This distinction matters because spiritual communities sometimes confuse psychological weakness with spiritual transcendence.
A person can be passive, poorly differentiated, unable to establish boundaries, dependent upon approval, easily manipulated, and afraid of confrontation while imagining these characteristics to be signs of egolessness.
They may be nothing of the sort.
Sometimes what appears to be egolessness is simply an ego that has not sufficiently developed.
You Need a Self Before You Can Transcend the Self
A healthy sense of self is necessary for functioning within a difficult world.
This becomes especially important for anyone carrying leadership, spiritual, community, social, or global responsibilities. Without sufficient psychological structure, other people’s expectations, projections, demands, criticisms, and agendas can overwhelm you.
The world can trample over a poorly developed self.
Meditation, when properly integrated, should not merely dissolve psychological structure. It can strengthen our capacity to remain centred while encountering stress, emotional activation, social pressure, uncertainty, and outside influence.
Paradoxically, spiritual practice can make the ego both stronger and more transparent.
Stronger does not necessarily mean louder.
It can mean more stable.
Less reactive.
Less easily manipulated.
Less dependent upon validation.
More capable of holding contradiction.
More capable of surrender.
This produces one of the great paradoxes of awakening:
The ego may need to become strong enough to let go of itself.
Egoic Death Is Not the Same as Ego Death
I make an important distinction between egoic death and ego death.
Egoic death refers to the collapse, surrender, or transformation of defensive ego structures. Identification with certain beliefs, roles, wounds, narratives, attachments, fears, and psychological defenses may loosen dramatically.
Something about “me” dies.
Yet the basic sense that there is still a “me” experiencing reality can remain.
Ego death, as I use the term, is more radical.
During a profound nondual awakening, the sense of being a separate subject can disappear altogether. There is no longer an individual standing apart from experience, observing reality from somewhere behind the eyes.
The subject-object structure collapses.
There is seeing, but no separate seer.
There is awareness, but no independently existing owner of awareness.
There is existence, but the familiar psychological centre claiming, “I am the one to whom existence is happening,” is absent.
That is what I mean by ego death.
The difference is enormous.
A person can undergo an extraordinary emotional, mystical, psychedelic, religious, or psychological transformation without experiencing the complete dissolution of the subject-object boundary.
Not every dramatic spiritual experience is a nondual awakening.
Not every loss of psychological defenses is ego death.
The Ego Dies, Then It Has to Come Back
Permanent inability to function as a self is not the goal.
After a profound awakening, the practical personality returns because life requires it.
Your name returns.
Your responsibilities return.
Your relationships return.
Your preferences return.
Your history remains accessible.
Someone still has to answer the phone, pay the bills, make decisions, protect boundaries, honour commitments, create, teach, lead, and respond when another human being calls your name.
The ego resurrects itself as a functional structure.
But something can be fundamentally different.
Before awakening, the ego can appear to be a solid psychological object at the centre of existence.
After awakening, it can become increasingly transparent.
The self still functions, but its apparent solidity has been penetrated.
You can use the self without completely mistaking yourself for it.
The ego returns, but it does not necessarily return to the throne.
Stages of Development Are Not States of Awakening
This distinction is essential.
Psychological development and spiritual awakening are two different dimensions of a human being.
A person can have profound mystical states while remaining psychologically immature.
Another person can be extraordinarily mature, ethical, rational, compassionate, and psychologically integrated without ever experiencing nondual awakening.
Development does not automatically produce awakening.
Awakening does not automatically produce development.
Psychological stages describe the increasing complexity and capacity of the ego.
One developmental sequence can be described as:
Archaic → Magic → Mythic → Magic/Mythic → Rational → Pluralistic → Integral → Super-Integral
Each movement represents a transformation in how the self organizes reality, interprets experience, understands other people, constructs meaning, and relates to increasingly complex perspectives.
States of consciousness describe something different:
Waking → Dreaming → Dreamless Sleep → Turiya → Turiyatita
Turiya and turiyatita point toward dimensions associated with spiritual realization and enlightenment rather than merely greater psychological complexity.
Development asks:
How mature, complex, inclusive, and perspectivally capable is the self?
Awakening asks:
What is ultimately true about the self?
Those are not the same question.
You Can Wake Up Without Growing Up
This distinction explains something that otherwise seems contradictory.
How can someone have an authentic mystical awakening and still hold immature beliefs?
Because the state that was experienced and the psychological structure interpreting that state are not necessarily at the same level of development.
A person may enter an extraordinary state of consciousness and later interpret it through a Magic worldview.
Another may interpret a similar state Mythically.
Another Rationally.
Another Pluralistically.
Another Integrally.
The awakening may be profound while the interpretation of the awakening remains constrained by the developmental structure available to the person.
This is why spiritual experience alone does not automatically produce psychological maturity.
Someone can experience oneness and still be narcissistic.
Someone can experience emptiness and still lack healthy boundaries.
Someone can experience profound love and still hold ethnocentric beliefs.
Someone can experience the dissolution of the separate self and later reconstruct an identity around being “the awakened one.”
The ego is remarkably capable of claiming ownership of the experience in which its own separate existence temporarily disappeared.
That is one of the great ironies of spiritual awakening.
The Ego Can Grow Beyond Egocentricity
Another common misunderstanding is equating ego with egocentricity.
They are not synonymous.
Egocentricity describes a particular organization of identity in which one’s own needs, interests, desires, fears, and perspective dominate.
Development can progressively widen that identity:
Egocentric → Ethnocentric → Worldcentric → Kosmocentric
The egocentric self says:
I am primarily concerned with me.
The ethnocentric self expands:
I am one of us. My people, culture, religion, nation, group, or community matter.
The worldcentric self expands further:
My concern includes all human beings regardless of race, sex, class, nationality, culture, religion, creed, or social identity.
Kosmocentric identity expands beyond humanity:
My concern includes life, consciousness, the planet, the universe, and existence itself.
Something fascinating happens here.
From one perspective, the ego becomes smaller because self-centredness decreases.
From another perspective, the ego becomes enormous because what the person includes within the meaning of “self” has expanded dramatically.
The boundaries of identity become increasingly porous.
This is why calling a worldcentric or kosmocentric person “egoless” can be misleading.
They still require a functioning ego.
They still need boundaries.
They still need discernment.
They still need the ability to say yes and no.
They still need enough psychological strength to withstand manipulation, criticism, projection, conflict, responsibility, and pressure.
What has changed is the circumference of concern.
The self has expanded beyond its previous boundaries.
The Bigger the Ego Becomes, the More Transparent It Can Become
There is another paradox here.
At lower levels of development, the ego can feel like a small but extremely solid object.
Everything revolves around protecting it.
My status.
My identity.
My beliefs.
My group.
My worldview.
My importance.
My security.
My story.
As development proceeds, the ego can become larger while simultaneously becoming less solid.
More perspectives can be included.
More contradictions can be tolerated.
More identities can be understood.
More complexity can be held without psychological collapse.
Eventually the ego becomes capable of questioning the very structure through which it has been interpreting reality.
This is where psychological development can become extraordinarily important for spiritual realization.
A highly developed ego may possess enough complexity to recognize the limitations of its own perspective.
The self becomes capable of seeing itself as a perspective rather than simply assuming that its perspective is reality itself.
That is a major shift.
What Does a Highly Developed Ego Look Like?
Perhaps the highest development of ego is not an ego that dominates every room.
It is an ego capable of holding many rooms.
A highly developed person can recognize multiple perspectives without immediately collapsing them into their own.
They can understand why another person sees reality differently.
They can distinguish perspective from truth claims.
They can hold paradox without immediately demanding resolution.
They can examine their own assumptions.
They can move between subjective, interpersonal, cultural, systemic, spiritual, global, and kosmic perspectives.
They can possess strong boundaries without becoming rigid.
They can exercise authority without requiring superiority.
They can experience criticism without psychological collapse.
They can surrender without becoming submissive.
They can become transparent without becoming weak.
At increasingly integral and super-integral stages, the ego becomes capable of holding multiple perspectives simultaneously.
This is a very different picture of ego development from the stereotype of the dominant personality.
Perhaps the strongest ego is the one that no longer needs to constantly prove its strength.
Development Expands the Self. Awakening Sees Through It.
This is where psychological development and spiritual awakening finally encounter one another.
Development progressively asks the ego to become larger, more complex, more inclusive, and more capable of perspective-taking.
Awakening eventually asks something completely different:
Who is this “I” that has been developing?
Development can take us from egocentric identity toward ethnocentric, worldcentric, and kosmocentric identity.
The circle becomes larger.
Awakening questions the centre of the circle itself.
Who is standing there?
Who is experiencing?
Who is aware?
Where exactly is the boundary between the observer and the observed?
At the highest psychological stages, the ego may become capable of seeing reality through multiple perspectives simultaneously.
At the deepest levels of awakening, something even more radical can be recognized.
The apparent observer is itself part of what is being observed.
From one nondual perspective, all existence is The Self.
From another, there is No Self anywhere to be found.
These statements appear contradictory only while we assume that Self must mean the individual personality.
The Self of nonduality is not the autobiographical self.
It is not the personality.
It is not your name, history, occupation, nationality, race, sex, religion, ideology, accomplishments, wounds, preferences, or social identity.
The startling recognition is that what you ultimately are cannot be contained within the psychological structure you previously called yourself.
Advaita can express this realization as Self.
Buddhist traditions may approach it through emptiness and no-self.
The language differs.
The ordinary assumption of an independently existing psychological subject is being challenged at its root.
The Ultimate Expansion of Self Becomes No-Self
There is an intriguing convergence between the highest reaches of development and the deepest reaches of awakening.
Development expands identity.
Awakening dissolves the assumption that identity possesses an independently existing centre.
At first:
I am me.
Then:
I am one of us.
Then:
All human beings are within my circle of concern.
Then:
Life, consciousness, the planet, and the cosmos are within my circle of concern.
Nondual awakening can take the inquiry somewhere even stranger:
Where is the boundary separating “me” from existence in the first place?
From the perspective of Self, everything is Myself.
From the perspective of no-self, there is no separate “myself” anywhere.
Absolute inclusion and absolute emptiness begin pointing toward the same mystery from opposite directions.
The ego cannot manufacture this realization simply by becoming more psychologically developed.
But a developed ego may be far better equipped to integrate what happens when its assumed centrality collapses.
Do Not Destroy What You Have Not Finished Developing
This may be one of the most important cautions in serious spiritual work.
Trying to destroy the ego prematurely can become another form of avoidance.
Someone who needs boundaries may try to become egoless.
Someone who needs confidence may practice self-erasure.
Someone who needs psychological integration may pursue transcendence.
Someone who needs to learn how to say no may interpret surrender as saying yes to everyone.
Someone who needs a coherent identity may attempt to dissolve identity altogether.
Someone who needs to develop personal agency may mistake passivity for spiritual surrender.
This can become especially dangerous around spiritual authority.
A poorly developed sense of self may make someone highly susceptible to manipulation while they interpret their inability to resist authority as humility.
That is not necessarily transcendence.
Spiritual awakening should not require becoming incapable of being human.
The work is subtler than that.
Develop the self.
Strengthen it.
Integrate it.
Expand it.
See through it.
Let it become transparent.
And when consciousness finally discovers what exists prior to the distinction between self and other, allow the ego to surrender completely.
Then let it return.
Not necessarily as the ruler of consciousness, but as one of its instruments.
Two Dimensions of Every Human Being
Psychological stages of development and states of awakening are two different facets of every individual.
One concerns the development of the self.
The other concerns awakening beyond the assumed limitations of that self.
One can grow horizontally and vertically through increasingly complex structures of identity, morality, cognition, perspective, and concern.
One can also awaken into increasingly profound states in which the ordinary construction of self and reality becomes transparent or disappears altogether.
Neither dimension should be mistaken for the other.
A sophisticated worldview does not prove enlightenment.
A profound mystical experience does not prove psychological maturity.
The extraordinary possibility is the development of both.
A human being can become psychologically strong without becoming psychologically rigid.
Deeply individual without becoming egocentric.
Worldcentric without losing personal boundaries.
Kosmocentric without abandoning practical responsibilities.
Capable of inhabiting multiple perspectives without losing discernment.
And spiritually awakened without becoming psychologically diminished.
Perhaps the mature spiritual question is therefore no longer:
“How do I get rid of my ego?”
A more interesting question is:
How fully can the self develop before it discovers that it was never the whole of what I am?
Beyond even that lies a question no psychological stage can answer for us:
When the sense of being a separate self disappears completely, what remains?
Morgan O. Smith
Morgan O. Smith 