What happens to the "ego" during “enlightenment”?

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The ego is a collection of mental patterns that guide the responses that you have to things that happen to you. Actually anything you can point to is a mental pattern or collection of mental patterns, that’s what a ‘thing’ is. If you look at a chair, what’s telling you that that thing that you’re looking at is a chair is a mental pattern. All representations of all mental concepts live as a pattern in the brain, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to recognize it.

Much of the time we can change these patterns. If I prove something wrong to you that you believe in a convincing enough fashion, the mental pattern you use to represent that concept changes to reflect the new understanding.

This is not the case with the collection of identities and responses and concepts that we term ‘ego’. These identities persist no matter how much you try to push them aside and use something else to represent yourself. We hold on to them because we think of these patterns as ‘us’.

The process of disidentifying from these patterns is generally called ‘surrender’. You discover an aspect of the ego that you can give up, see just how much of your life it’s messing up, then realize you need to just give it up. The giving up process reveals more ego, and it can take years or lifetimes before the next surrender event.

Enlightenment results when the whole complex of ego just suddenly dissipates, leaving you with a clean, unsullied awareness that can choose responses freely rather than just be held to one of the ego-patterned responses.

So what happens to the ego upon enlightenment? Do the patterns of mind known as ego simply go away?

No. They’re still there. The enlightened person can simply reach for those patterns and they’ll be right there where they left them to chase off after the dream of enlightenment.

What happens to the ego after you become enlightened is that you find a new relationship with this bundle of programmed patterns, rather than being the thing you are, it becomes a thing that you have.

The thing that makes this tricky is that most everyone with a certain amount of consciousness can see and objectify the little self and so disidentify with it, however briefly. But this isn’t enlightenment for two reasons. One, the person isn’t completely disidentified with it, they will get caught up in the ego responses they thought they transcended from time to time. Two, there are still unidentified patterns in the person’s mind that, when they do become aware of them, they’ll see as ego patterns.

Over the last five years, I’ve been slowly wrapping my head around the finer distinctions between a person’s consciousness and their mind. Disidentification with mind is enlightenment, and people can be more or less disidentified with mind. They can also be more or less conscious. To be more or less conscious means that you come to awareness of new things, such that you can respond to them, faster. It’s what’s behind the classic intellect-wisdom disconnect, how some people can be really smart but also really unwise, and vice-versa. They’re very conscious but are still dealing with hard-to-grok mental patterns. The person who is wise finds it much easier to release and move on from patterns that just aren’t working for them. A person can waste a ton of conscious energy and get nowhere.

Overall progress happens when someone slowly, over the course of their lives, comes to the slow awareness of a new dimension of being. This may or may not lead to enlightenment, but it doesn’t really matter one way or another. The person is much better off with the wisdom that they built themselves, with their own two ‘hands’, than they ever would have been with enlightenment, which can be rather scary and difficult to understand, especially if you arrive at it suddenly.