What breaks first with an awakening, the ego or the illusion?

In the eastern philosophy, there is a concept of Maya. Maya means illusion. Maya is not something external. Maya is something which takes root within our consciousness. She goes inside different places, and she causes us to create an aberration of reality.

Illusion is outside of ourselves, and it is projected unto us. And there is an illusion within us, and when we look outside with it, we see something which is not there. Illusion works in both ways. Outside, the illusion is there, and within us, it is there as well. A lot of spiritual practices are about refining the ego and purifying the ego.  In Vedic Wisdom we do not try to annihilate the ego, rather, we work on understanding who we truly are.

Ego is a sense of who I am. There is a false ego and a true ego. The false ego is "I am Indian, I am American, I am European, I am 6 feet tall, I am black, I am white, I am a man, I am a woman," etc… Those are temporary egos. When time takes away all of this, what is left? That is the real ego.

In the Vedic tradition, we break the illusion within by removing the false ego. At the same time, when we see the world, we don’t see the illusory world because we look through the true ego. So, when we have purified our ego of any sense of illusion, then when we look around we cannot be tricked by illusion anymore.

The illusion is projected unto us. The programming we were born into, the religion, the culture, the parents etc…, All that societal stuff is an illusion! This whole thing is like a dream. And of course our understanding of how the world works is also an illusion. We discover our own path along the way. So when something makes sense to us, we just take that road.

A lot of religions will take you along a path to a certain point, but the dogma often does not make sense. Eastern philosophies such as the Vedic Wisdom coming from the Vedas, make more sense. We are born into a construct, an illusion, but we begin to seek out, and we find the path which makes sense.

When you keep on telling lies, and call it truth it becomes a so-called culture. And when that culture is perpetuated from one generation to the next, it becomes a so-called tradition, and people born in that fake tradition decide their goals and aspirations from the platform of that so-called culture, and they are just living a lie.

A spiritual journey means questioning those lies.! We have to disrupt the narrative and interrogate everything we have accepted without questioning, and we should ask “is it really true?”, or is it an illusion?

Please share your experience questioning the world or yourself on the reality of your faith. Where is the path of reality? Did you discover something you believed to be truth but revealed itself to be just a lie?

My painting today:

American Gothic Surfer Edition

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