The greatest triumph of the tyrannical ego is to raise the banner of the Self over the headquarters of its selfish manoeuvres. The first step of the Self is to recognize and unmask these manoeuvres as being of the ego under the name of the Self.
The immunization of the Self facing the ego is possible only in a constant and loyal struggle with that ego and all its hosts. Outside this battlefield there can be escape, desertion, but not true victory and ultimate peace.
As long as man is still contaminated by the ego's commands, abuses and indiscipline, he is definitely not free and immune. Only when he acquires the invulnerability of light, which can penetrate all impurities without becoming impure achieving definitive liberation and triumph.
Only the man who has attained the experience of his true nature, his essential identity with the Infinite – “I and the Father are one” - is invulnerable. He does not identify himself as a slave of the ego world, nor desert as fearful of this world, but lives amid this world and silently transforms it by the power of his spiritual Self.
The problem is neither conformism nor escapism, but transformism, the transformation of all things of the ego by the divine power of the Self.
And the secret weapon that guarantees victory is the experiential knowledge of the truth about the central and real Christlike Self, the “spirit of God that dwells in man.”
--- “I am free from everything I know - I am a slave to everything I ignore.”
I know that I am not the objects around me that I have; I know that I am not my physical, mental and emotional ego, which I seem to be - if I really know all this, I am free from all these traditional illusions of the human being. The “poverty by the spirit” frees me from identification with external objects; “purity of heart” frees me from identification with my inner object, the ego. I am none of the objects, external or internal, that I have - I am the internal subject of my divine Being, of my eternal I AM.
The liberated man is not like certain Orientals who desert the world; nor even like certain Westerners who are enslaved to the world - he is the universal man, the cosmic man who is beyond Western slavery and Eastern desertion - he dwells in the zone of universal liberation and he can handle all things in the world: commerce, industry, politics, science, art, technique - he can embrace any honest profession without identifying himself internally with any of them, with any object. He can have any object - but cannot be any of them. He is neither a slave nor a deserter of anything - he is victorious over all that he possesses, without being possessed by anything.
The purpose of all true philosophy is to realize the integral man, the man freed from both the slavery of objects and the fear of those objects. Slavery and fear reveal a lack of liberation. Where there is liberation there is no slavery or fear of anything, because the liberated man is master of everything, by the omnipotence of his fully recognized and realized divine Self, for according to Paul of Tarsus - “where freedom reigns there reigns the spirit of God”.
This cosmoramic view gives man the most sublime experience of his true greatness, because he knows and feels that he is not irrevocably subject to the enslaving law of mechanical causality that apparently governs infra-human nature; know and savour the liberating force of his inner self-determination.
Infra-human nature does not feel enslaved; what is unconscious is nonexistent to us and with the advent of man, nature has entered the conscious zone - and thus the objective fact of slavery has become a subjective problem of enslavement - followed by the effort of liberation.
Nature lives in unconscious slavery. The man-ego and intellectual lives in conscious slavery. The man-Self and rational lives in conscious freedom.
Both ego and self are not ultimately two entities within man, but one which is the same and only human reality in two different evolutionary stages. The ego is potentially the Self - and the Self is the ego fully energized and realized. Just as the seed of any plant is the potential plant, and the plant is the seed in dynamic form - so is the ego-man, the man-Self, whether in embryonic and imperfect form or in adult form. Not only the Christ, the perfect man, is the “light of the world,” but other men are also, though in a very primitive and imperfect state. In Christ and in us is the same Father - consciously or unconsciously.
This is the cosmic philosophy of all the great masters - especially the Bhagavad Gita and the Gospel - that man enslaved by his delusional ego must discover his liberating Self to enjoy the true happiness that is within man. The great teachers assume that the kingdom of truth and happiness can and should be realized here and now, not elsewhere and later. They teach no substitution or juxtaposition, but complete organic interpenetration of all elements of man in perfect harmony. They do not claim that the ego should triumph here and now, and that the Self should enjoy happiness after death and in distant regions - they teach that the ego can and must attain its full maturity in the form of the Self here and now.
Philosophy is therefore essentially self-knowledge and self-realization.
Man must know the truth about himself - and he must realize in his individual and social life this known truth.
It is this, and only this, that frees him from the slavery of his ignorance.
Slavery is temporary - liberation is permanent.
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