DISCOURSES Volume II - Avatar Meher Baba Trust

THE NATURE OF THE EGO AND ITS TERMINATION: II 73the ego would fain develop, but abstains from it for other reasons.The ego is activated by the principle of self-perpetuationand has a tendency to live and grow by any and all means notclosed to it. If the ego faces curtailment in one direction it seeksTricks of the egocompensating expansion in another. If it isoverpowered by a flood of spiritual notions andactions, it even tends to fasten upon this very force which isoriginally brought into play for the ousting of the ego. If a personattempts to cultivate humility in order to relieve himself of themonstrous weight of the ego and succeeds in doing so, the ego can,with surprising alacrity, transfer itself to this attribute of humility.It feeds itself through repeated assertions like "I am spiritual," justas in primary stages it achieved the same task by assertions like "Iam not interested in spirituality." Thus arises what we might call aspiritual ego, or the ego which feels its separateness through theattainment of things which are considered to be good and highlyspiritual. From the truly spiritual point of view, this type ofspiritual ego is as binding as the primary and crude ego whichmakes no such pretensions.In fact, in the more advanced stages of the Path, the egodoes not seek to maintain itself through open methods but takesshelter in those very things which are pursued for the slimmingGuerilla warfaredown of the ego. These tactics of the ego arevery much like guerilla warfare and are themost difficult to counteract. The ousting of the ego fromconsciousness is necessarily an intricate process, and cannot beachieved by exercising a constantly uniform approach. Since thenature of the ego is very complicated, an equally complicatedtreatment is needed to get rid of it. Since the ego has almostinfinite