The ego with its protective defense mechanisms is the biggest impediment to attaining spiritual growth.

The ego is the culmination of our preferences and dislikes. Our ego represents the firm edges of how we perceive ourselves. An ego death involves a merciless destruction of the autobiographical memory system that sustains a person’s collective of bodily and mental images. In order to provoke an ego death, one might choose to pare down their sense of self to a bare skeleton divested of all flesh and blood. It might even be useful to visualize a person’s own burial and then imagine a rebirth. A person who undergoes an ego death might experience a transformation in their life that duplicates a reincarnation.

Life gives us many gifts that we could hardly imagine. When we let go of preconceptions and witness life without the turmoil that a self-indulgent ego perpetuates we perceive what heretofore eluded us.

Life flows at ease whenever a person ceases complaining about the past, worrying about the future, lives in the now without resisting pain, and accepts the moral sublimity of living in a state of grace.

The road to enlightenment requires a life dedicated to self-study, accepting the minor tragedies of life as an ineluctable part of the human condition.

We can only hope to live a meaningful life by serving as earnest witnesses to life’s tragic beauty.