My response? “Good grief, why would you want to undergo such a terrible procedure?!” (I really should have begun my reply with something more profound, like ‘Jumping Jehoshaphats!’ or ‘Blistering Barnacles!’) Surrender is not a state of being egoless. In fact, I might argue that the quest for egolessness is the ego’s last defence mechanism – its most patronizing trick that underscores an inability to recognize that it is not at all separate from the rest of the material equation we hesitantly (and often rudely) call ‘nature’.
The ego is not the problem; the problem is maybe the paradigm that treats it as diseased and alien, cut off from the rest of the world, out of touch. The ‘solution’ is not to empty ourselves of it, but to notice the umbilical cords that still tether us to a festival of vitality. The ego is the wilds beyond our fences.
