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Many people don’t realize until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are. In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless.

For a moment, I was able to stand back from my own mind and see it from a deeper perspective, as it were. There was a brief shift from thinking to awareness. I was still in the men’s room, but alone now, looking at my face in the mirror. At that moment of detachment from my mind, I laughed out loud. It may have sounded insane, but it was the laughter of sanity... “Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be.” That’s what the laughter seemed to be saying.

Paradoxically, what keeps the so called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn’t work: The ego satisfaction is short lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.

Trying to become a good or better human being sounds like a commendable and highminded thing to do, yet it is an endeavor you cannot ultimately succeed in unless there is a shift in consciousness.

Ego identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more.

A mature first year student at twenty five, I saw myself as an intellectual in the making, and I was convinced that all the answers to the dilemmas of human existence could be found through the intellect, that is to say, by thinking. I didn’t realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.

That sense of pride, of needing to stand out, the apparent enhancement of one’s self through “more than” and diminishment through “less than” is neither right nor wrong – it is the ego.

The people in the advertising industry know very well that in order to sell things that people don’t really need, they must convince them that those things will add something to how they see themselves or are seen by others; in other words, add something to their sense of self. They do this, for example, by telling you that you will stand out from the crowd by using this product and so by implication be more fully yourself.

The ego identifies with having, but its satisfaction in having is a relatively shallow and shortlived one. Concealed within it remains a deepseated sense of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of “not enough.” “I don't have enough yet,” by which the ego really means, “I am not enough yet.”

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus said, “for theirs will be the kingdom of heaven.” What does “poor in spirit” mean? No inner baggage, no identifications. Not with things, nor with any mental concepts that have a sense of self in them.

As we shall see later, making yourself right and others wrong is one of the principal egoic mind patterns, one of the main forms of unconsciousness. In other words, the content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps it alive does not.

The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past.