Dear quarter lives,

There are many reasons we desire importance; many of which understandably come from the need for approval i.e. the need for another to recognise that our existence is meaningful. But the most important of all reasons and the reason behind all our desires including this desire for importance is our ego. Desire is what our ego craves to stay alive. Ego is neither good nor bad, it simply serves a function, some of which can be seen as favourable and some of which are not. In childhood, the ego can serve as a protective signaling tool to establish healthy boundaries and aid in the recognition of one’s self-worth. But after childhood, the ego can begin to stifle one’s growth. The ego’s main function is to split up our soul across many bodies thereby creating the illusion of distinguished selves that present as different people. So the ego is always the voice telling you you are different, unique, and special, sometimes to the point that it creates the illusion that you don’t belong or that you are better than everyone else and thus have a right to discriminate against others for whatever reasons, i.e lies, the ego has told you differentiate you from everyone and everything else.

So what would happen to us without the ego and subsequently without the desire to feel important?

Without the ego, without that feeling of importance, we are humble. When we are humble, our faces tend towards the earth, in other words we return our masks back to the earth. To be humble means to be without differentiation between you and others. To be humble means to recognise that you are not special, that you are not particularly important, that you are in fact only as important and unique as everyone else.

It is indeed a very difficult task to recognise at first what is the mask and what is really you. And perhaps it is the not knowing at first that scares us from letting go of the mask because we can’t seem to see our truth, and so we panic and think that if we aren’t the mask then we aren’t anything at all. But it takes us a while for our eyes to adjust to seeing nothing. And when they finally do, we begin to see that within nothing all things exist. It is just that nothing doesn’t recognise a particular thing over another. And what is more freeing than to be free of identities, to be anything and everything you want but only if you can let go of that one particular thing, that one particular identity, that one particular self you hold onto so tightly.

We don’t get everything we want when we achieve importance. It is in fact only through our lack of importance, through letting go of everything that we get everything, that includes who we think we are , how important we want to be, even if it’s because you want to save the world. You cannot free others if you have not freed your Self first and let it go. In a way, it is us who hold our egos captive. It is us who refuse to let them go. We are afraid of what would happen if there are no boundaries or borders and so we hold on tightly to the very fence that is limiting us. Our desires are what we use to ensure our egos never leave us. It is important to recognise we are not victims of our egos, but rather it is us who have the power to free our egos and not the other way round.

So dear quarter lives, freedom is attainable for all, both us and our egos, but only if we let go of our desire for anything at all, even freedom.

S.A.