WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

Sweet Mother,

How can one eliminate the will of the ego?

This amounts to asking how one can eliminate the ego. It is only by yoga that one can do it. There have been, throughout the spiritual history of humanity, many methods of yoga--which Sri Aurobindo has described and explained for us in The Synthesis of Yoga.

But before eliminating the will of the ego, which takes a very long time, one can begin by surrendering the will of the ego to the Divine Will at every opportunity and finally in a constant way. For this, the first step is to understand that the Divine knows better than we what is good for us and what we truly need, not only for our spiritual progress but also for our material well-being, the health of our body and the proper functioning of all the activities of our being.

Naturally, this is not the opinion of the ego, which thinks it knows better than anyone else what it needs, and claims for itself independence of judgment and decision. But it thinks and feels this way because it is ignorant, and gradually one has to convince it that its perception and understanding are too limited for it truly to be able to know and that it judges only according to its desires, which are blind, and not according to truth. [new p. 225]

For the desires are not the expression of needs but of preferences.

19 September 1959

Collected Works of The Mother, First Edition, Volume 16, p. 226