Relinquishing Thought and Death of The Ego

All morning I've been looking for something that I lost. I wonder if you know what it is. I don't know if I found it or not. It. I've been suggesting various ways of becoming present, stepping out of the mind. For the first part of our questions, I'd like to invite you to address specifically what we've been talking about. And that is your practice, your ability to step out of thought, into awareness, into presence, or your inability, or what obstacles you encounter, or whatever your experience is of practicing, of being present rather than involved in thinking. So this faculty, one could say there is a dormant faculty in everyone that is just waiting to come to life in you. It has already awakened this faculty, and that is the faculty of being aware, being present. It's like it's been waiting inside humans for thousands of years, like an egg incubating inside the collective human consciousness. And that's the potential for the next leap forward. I'm talking almost like Mao Zedong, but. But this is the. That was a pseudo leap forward. It didn't quite work. The great Leap. This is a. Now humans are ready, not all humans, but we are beginning to be ready for this faculty to come out of its dormant state and actually begin to grow and blossom. So for the first part of our questions and answers, I'd like you to specifically address questions that are to do with stepping out of thought. What is your experience with that? Good or bad? Maybe. If it's not a question, I'd also like to invite anybody who wants to just simply, briefly. No need to go on for 10, 15 minutes, briefly, just share your experience of one question that I'd like to. I'm wondering how it is for you whether you're already able to, by choice, step out of thought and simply take your attention. The word we could use is reclaim. Reclaim your attention, your consciousness, from where it has been for a long, long time. Always in thought. Reclaim it. And so that you suddenly have the consciousness in its undiluted, unconditioned, no form, the formless, unconditioned, undiluted consciousness. So in practical terms, it's the ability to simply relinquish when you wish to relinquish thought. That is the ultimate renunciation. All the other renunciations are really substitute for that. Now I'm going to renounce coffee. Well, that's fine, but there's something more important, more fundamental. This is lemon and honey and hot water, by the way. Way. Can't get it at Starbucks. The renunciation of thought is also the renunciation of ego. Because without thought, ego immediately dissolves. So it is a big renunciation. It is not just the renunciation of thought, because it wasn't just thought, there was an entire mind made entity involved in thought, the self. So it is not just a renunciation of thought, it is a renunciation of the entire false self. That works not throughout your entire lifetime, but many lifetimes has claimed to be you. And so no matter what you renounce, if you are a spiritual person, you may practice different kinds of renunciation. And very often you just exchange one thought based entity for a slightly different one. So if you indulge in alcohol and sex and orgies for a few years and suddenly you get tired of it and you say, I'm now going to be a spiritual person, I'm done with all that. And then you live a very pure life. No more substances, celibacy, no more wild parties, and you get up at 4:30 every morning for three hour meditation and you begin to feel very good about yourself. But it's very, very cunning, this egoic entity, because without knowing it, you may have exchanged one egoic entity for a more subtle one. And the more subtle one is your sense of self has now become a spiritual one. Me, the one who has become pure, Me, the one who has renounced, as opposed to all these others who are still drinking coffee. And then you can walk Starbucks and feel very superior, let alone bars and nightclubs. So again, you have a mind based entity, the me, the self. Because you haven't renounced, it's kept going by identification with ideas in your head about who you are and you can get together with other spiritual people and then you can strengthen that idea, you can mutually strengthen the idea of who you are. And then you get a egoic group identity. It was very comforting. You feel really, oh, now I know where I belong. I'm not saying don't go to any spiritual group, there's just a danger in that, that you then partake in the collective egoic entity, which is usually becomes revealed because it starts to reject others, oppose others, to define its own collective identity more clearly. So you find many spiritual groups actually believe they are the only ones who really have got it. They are the only ones who are really in possession of the truth. And all the others are not more extreme forms of that. You are the only ones who are actually going to be saved. The rest of humanity is going, you are. We've all seen these, these are collective egos that develop when you join a group. It may not be that every group falls into that trap. But most of them do. And why? Again, because they derive their sense of identity. And now it has shifted from a personal sense of identity to a collective sense of identity. At first, when you look at the individual that makes up the collective, it looks as if the individual had become free of ego because he's totally free of the personal sense of ego. He has totally identified with the collective ego. And of course, as I might have said before, if there's one thing that's more insane than the personal ego, it's the collective one. Political parties. It's not just spiritual groups, religions, little groups within churches, within religions. Regarding others of the same religion as evil. They're the same religion. And you might even want to kill them. That's what happens on a daily basis if you listen to the news. Within the same religion. It's a different. This group, they call themselves this because they have certain different beliefs of what once happened hundreds of years ago. Others don't quite agree with those beliefs of these things that happened a few hundred years ago. They believe in somebody else. All insane. It's all mind stuff. It's all just thoughts. So they haven't renounced anything. They could have the most pure lifestyle. They haven't renounced the most basic renunciation, which is identification with thinking. And the collective ego. It's just unbelievably can be unbelievably insane. It can also cause the individuals that make up the collective to do things that as individuals they would not be capable of doing in the service of the collective. They can go out and kill people. It's happened. I mean, nations do it. Look at 20th century history of the 20th century. One nation becomes a huge ego. So you can see how vital it is to renounce. But foundation, the true renunciation is thought. That is the true shift. Without that, you can play around for many lifetimes.