Fear and Ego

Is fear or insecurity the cause of ego? And how can I break my ego?

Sadhguru: It is the other way around. It is only because of the ego that there is fear. There is fear because ego is the only thing that can get hurt.

The only thing that can feel trampled and be abused in you is your ego. You have set yourself a limited boundary and a limited identity of who you are, so fear is a natural outcrop. Fear is a fruit of your limited identification. If you take off this limited identification, then there is no room for fear.

If you really look at it, you are not afraid of physical death. The fact that the body is going to break up one day is not the thing. The thing is “What will happen to me?” This person that you think of as “me” is a self-created image.

You are not really afraid of losing the body as such, you are only constantly afraid of losing this image of yourself that you have built. For example, if in some way we devise ways to disgrace and abuse you, not physically but in every other way, you would actually wish death to this image of yourself. Because death would be a gift, death would be a benevolence rather than going through all that abuse.

Shiva, the first teacher of yoga, is described as a destroyer because unless you destroy this identity, unless you destroy what is most valuable to you right now, what is beyond will not happen; that is the biggest barrier.

It is a bubble that you are unwilling to get out of. Your fear is that it might break. But at the same time, there is something within you which wants to become unbounded.

What you think of as spirituality is about having an unbounded bubble. Actually there is no such thing as an unbounded bubble. The only thing is to prick the bubble.

You do not have to blow this bubble so big that it will contain the whole existence. If you prick it and break it, you are boundless. All boundaries will be gone.