Rediscovering the Wholeness Within: Embracing Consciousness as the Source and Letting Go of the Illusion of the Ego

Over the past twenty years, the word “holistic,” like the word “organic,” has moved from the fringes to the center stage. It is a buzzword with positive connotations and yet remains hard to define. The main reason for this, I believe, is that wholeness is caught in a seeming contradiction. Do you aim, as millions do, to become whole, taking this as a spiritual goal?

But in spiritual terms, you are already whole. This lesson was learned long ago in evolutionary terms, when multicellular organisms found a path to survival through constant coordination. At this moment, your body’s trillions of cells are precisely organized into thousands of processes. Evolution promotes wholeness, and when wholeness breaks down, organisms malfunction and die.

Understanding such complex wholeness is beyond anyone’s current intellectual grasp, and things are likely to remain that way. The only working model of a neuron, it has been said, would be a neuron. But the wholeness of mind and spirit is even more baffling. If every organism innately chooses wholeness, why do we struggle to attain it?

For the mind, wholeness is the same as consciousness. If you are conscious, you will be as innately whole as organisms on their level of physical wholeness. It is now commonly accepted that meditation and Yoga offer a path to expanded awareness, but there is a deeper message that relates to wholeness and how it works.

In the ancestral Indian tradition, two diametrically different approaches reached the same aim, which is to exist in wholeness as your normal, constant state. The first approach (known in Sanskrit as Neti, Neti) works by the process of elimination. The word Neti translates as “not this,” referring to the false identity we carry around with us.

The ego, the everyday “I” that we automatically refer to, is built up as an accumulation of experience and memory. “I” can be defined as a collection of tags, such as age, gender, race, religion, income, marital status, etc. The tags are endless, and we unthinkingly collect more of them as life unfolds, so that “I” feels unique, accomplished, complete, and whole. But if looked at closely, you are not these tags. Winnow them down one by one — “I am not this, not that, not this, not that” — and that objectified “I’ begins to shrink.

The ego’s wholeness is a thin disguise for what really exists, a sense of self that has no automatic responses, memories, inclinations, beliefs, prejudices, hopes, wishes, or fears. These are add-ons to something much simpler: a sense of your true or whole self. Without applying any of the elaborate trappings that “I” requires in order to keep the focus on itself, your sense of a unified self has been silently present throughout your life. Neti, Neti serves as a reminder of your wholeness. You are rediscovering your status as an all-embracing consciousness that needs no temporary identities of the kind we all accumulate from infancy onward.

The opposite procedure from the Indian traditions expands your awareness until it is unbounded. The most common Sanskrit formula for this is “Tat Tvam Asi,” which translates as “You are That,” where “that” is the infinite field of awareness. Instead of winnowing out illusions, this is a process of going beyond boundaries. In meditation, the mind ceases to be active and finds itself drawing closer to its source, which is the simple state described in the pop phrase “Be here now.” Aside from anything your mind is doing. You exist here and now.

The implications of this apparently empty statement are immense. Being here now sounds passive, even inert (like a Pet Rock), but it is far from that. In reality, very few people exist in the present moment. They are preoccupied with the same ego demands that Neti, Neti seeks to discard. The active mind is too absorbed in thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, fears, and habits to really know itself. In a way that most of us don’t recognize, we haven’t really met ourselves, because if we did, the essence of “be here now” would dawn on us.

This essence is the infinite pure consciousness from which reality rises. Compared to infinity, the ego is barely a speck of dust, so Tat Tvam Asi, despite being the complete opposite of Neti, Neti, leads to the same end. The incredible shrinking ‘I” is eclipsed so that wholeness can predominate. The terminology is secondary here. Wholeness should be understood as the true basis of human life. I don’t claim that this is so through any arcane metaphysics.

Instead, there is only a single proposition that needs to be brought to light, experienced, and tested. The proposition is this: Existence is consciousness. The two are the same. The physical world didn’t evolve through some chemical or electromagnetic chicanery to allow consciousness to emerge. Consciousness isn’t an add-on, because nothing is more basic. What is literally true is that reality is consciousness modifying itself into space, time, matter, and energy. This is the setup for the human gift of self-awareness. Every living thing participates in wholeness, because, by definition, wholeness excludes nothing.

Exclusion takes place in the human mind, which adopts beliefs, habits, and conditioning on behalf of the ego’s agenda. The ego’s agenda is to get more for “I, me, mine” through the increase of pleasure and the decrease of pain. Most people are so unsuccessful at this that the ego has to keep promising that fulfillment is just around the next corner. In fact, the ego setup is deficient and false to begin with.

The only valid setup is consciousness as the all-pervading source, from which the qualities of life we most value spring, including love, compassion, creativity, intelligence, beauty, truth, and personal growth. As “I” begins to grow less significant, its agenda shrinks, and eventually the provisional identity we call “I,” the separate isolated self, vanishes altogether. When that happens, the worst trappings of “I” — self-doubt, insecurity, dread, fear of death, free-floating anxiety, and depression — no longer exist. They have nothing to hang on to anymore.

I’ve given only a brief sketch of a profound idea, that each of us is created whole and only needs to discover our true status. For deeper immersion on the path of awakening, you are invited to read two of my books that expand on all these issues: Metahuman and Total Meditation. They offer a great deal in the way of experience, which is just as necessary as the knowledge of liberation.

For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution. His mission is to create a more balanced, peaceful, joyful, and healthier world. Through his teachings, he guides individuals to embrace their inherent strength, wisdom, and potential for personal and societal transformation.