All Life Is Yoga: The Ego

"...the ego‘s factories and marts surround the beautiful temple of the soul." (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, II.5.436-37) The soul is a spark, a portion of the Divine and the centre of light in our being. Being divine in its nature, its qualities and powers are also divine. Beauty, harmony, love , joy and other verities of the Divine Truth are present wherever the soul is awake making the chamber of the soul a veritable temple. But we do not normally have access to this temple for around the soul there are formations of the ego, of the desire-self which errects its clumsy edifice of cravings, claims, deceits and falsehood shutting out the soul from sight. And these constructions are prolific, the go on plying their trade and convert our being into a smoky thoroughfare where every passing desire, passion, ambition is welcomed, battened and multiplied. "An entire removal of this separative ego-sense is an essential aim of our Yoga. If any ego is to remain in us for a while, it is only a form of it which knows itself to be a form and is ready to disappear as soon as a true centre of consciousness is manifested or built in us. That true centre is a luminous formulation of the one Consciousness and a pure channel and instrument of the one Existence. A support for the individual manifestation and action of the universal Force, it gradually reveals behind it the true Person in us, the central eternal being, an everlasting being of the Supreme, a power and portion of the transcendent Shakti." (Sri Aurobindo)