One needs to further understand more specifically the attitude which the ego takes up towards its incarnation in a personality. Since the method for evolution of the latent qualities of the ego is by means of impact from the external environment, it is clearly necessary that the ego should descend far enough to enable it to meet such impact which can affect it. The method of achieving this result is by reincarnation; the ego putting forth part of itself into the lower planes for the sake of the experience to be gained there and then withdrawing back into itself, carrying with it the results of its endeavour. It must not be misconstrued that the ego makes any movement in space. It endeavours to focus its consciousness at a lower level to obtain an expression through a denser variety of matter. This putting forth part of itself into incarnation has often been compared with an investment. The ego expects, if all goes well, to reclaim not only the whole of its capital invested but also a considerable amount of interest. But, as with other investments, there is occasionally loss instead of gain for it is possible that some portion of that which the ego has put down may become so entangled with the lower matter that it may be impossible wholly to reclaim it. If the matter be of the lower mental plane, then it results in an individual who is completely materialistic. One may perhaps be keenly intellectual, but not spiritual, one may very likely be intolerant of spirituality, and quite unable to comprehend or appreciate it. One may probably call oneself practical but from the point of view of the ego, one is a failure as one is not making any spiritual progress. If on the other hand, the matter in which one is so fatally entangled be astral then on the physical plane one will think only of one’s own gratification and will be totally ruthless in pursuit of some object which one strongly desires. An individual will be quite unprincipled and brutally selfish. Cases such as these have been spoken of as lost souls though they are not irretrievably lost. The ego, belonging as it does to a higher plane, is a much greater and grander thing than any manifestation of it can be. Its relation to its personalities is that of one dimension to another, that of a square to a line or a cube to a square. No number of squares could ever make a cube because the square has only two dimensions, while the cube has three. So no number of expressions on any lower plane can ever exhaust the fullness of the ego. For example if it could take a thousand personalities, it may not still sufficiently express all that it is. The most for which one can hope is that the personality will contain nothing which is not intended by the ego, that the personality will express as much of the ego as can be expressed in this lower world.
Slowly the animal nature is reduced and the human increased. At a certain stage during this progress, the personalities begin to answer to the higher vibrations and dimly to sense that they are something more than isolated lives, but are attached to something immortal. They may not quite recognise their goal, but they begin to thrill and quiver under the touch of the ego. Thereafter progress becomes more swift and the rate of development increasing enormously in the later stages. The consciousness of the ego may be reached by maintaining the mind in an attitude of attention, without the attention being directed to anything; the lower mind being stilled in order that consciousness of the higher mind may be experienced. Although we have seen that the personality is part of the ego, its only life and power being that of the ego, it nevertheless often forgets those facts and comes to regard itself as an entirely separate entity and works for its own ends. In the case of ordinary people who have never studied these matters, the personality is for all purposes the real individual, the ego manifesting itself only very rarely and partially.
The ordinary individual is hardly awake to the real and higher life at-all. If one complains that the ego takes very little notice of oneself, then let one ask oneself how much notice has one taken of one’s ego.
The article Is taken from the book Life Beyond Death by Anil Sharma