and unassailable harmony which comes after the melting away of the entire iceberg of the ego.
The digging out of the buried roots of the ego from the deeper layers of the subconscious and bringing them to the light of consciousness is one important part of the process of wiping out the ego. The other important part consists in the intelligent handling of desires after they gain entrance to the arena of consciousness. Ego lives through opposites of experience The process of dealing with the components of explicit consciousness is by no means clear and simple, for the explicit ego has a tendency to live through any one of the opposites of experience. If it is ousted from one opposite by the intensive operation of intelligent consciousness, it has a tendency to move to the other extreme and live through it. Through repeated alternation between the opposites of experience the ego eludes the attack of intelligent consciousness and seeks to perpetuate itself.
The ego is hydra-headed and expresses itself in numberless ways. It lives upon any type of ignorance. Pride is the specific feeling through which egoism manifests. Ego is hydra-headed A person can be proud of most unimportant and silly things. Instances are known of persons developing their nails to an abnormal length and preserving them, despite much inconvenience to themselves, for no other reason than to assert separateness from others. The ego must magnify its attainments in a grotesque manner if it is to live in them. Direct assertion of the ego through self-display in society is very common, but if such direct assertion is prohibited by the rules of decency, the ego has a tendency to seek the same result through the slander of others. To portray others as evil is to glorify oneself by suggesting a comparison, which
the ego would fain develop, but abstains from it for other reasons.
The ego is activated by the principle of self-perpetuation and has a tendency to live and grow by any and all means not closed to it. If the ego faces curtailment in one direction it seeks compensating expansion in another. Tricks of the ego If it is overpowered by a flood of spiritual notions and actions, it even tends to fasten upon this very force which is originally brought into play for the ousting of the ego. If a person attempts to cultivate humility in order to relieve himself of the monstrous 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,” just as in primary stages it achieved the same task by assertions like “I am not interested in spirituality.” Thus arises what we might call a spiritual ego, or the ego which feels its separateness through the attainment of things which are considered to be good and highly spiritual. From the truly spiritual point of view, this type of spiritual ego is as binding as the primary and crude ego which makes no such pretensions.
In fact, in the more advanced stages of the Path, the ego does not seek to maintain itself through open methods but takes shelter in those very things which are pursued for the slimming down of the ego. Guerilla warfare These tactics of the ego are very much like guerilla warfare and are the most difficult to counteract. The ousting of the ego from consciousness is necessarily an intricate process, and cannot be achieved by exercising a constantly uniform approach. Since the nature of the ego is very complicated, an equally complicated treatment is needed to get rid of it. Since the ego has almost infinite
