I mentioned in the last post that illumination or enlightenment is about allowing consciousness to naturally expand towards ever greater fields of awareness. It is essentially a very simple process. However, it is by no means an easy thing to accomplish, because there are natural obstacles that hinder the natural expansion of the light of the soul, or consciousness itself. The main obstacle is called “ego”.
Ego is basically our personality, our sense of being somebody, of being the person we believe we are. Since we can become conscious of what ego is within us, of what our personality is made of, this, again, suggest it is something completely different from consciousness.
The first major spiritual realization is when we realize that ego is a completely illusory thing, that it has no reality of its own. It is nothing but a bundle of various elements, such as our memory, our beliefs, our experiences, the influence of family, parents or surroundings, our education, the influence of the culture, country, era in which we live, etc. Our personality is fundamentally something that is in a constant state of change, and something that is 100% impermanent, time-bound. It is a material thing. It is the whole of our psyche plus our physical body we are so identified with. Consciousness, before its first spiritual realization worthy of the term, is ignorant of its own nature. It instead believes it is the body, the psyche and the whole ego-self. We do not know our true self, consciousness itself, but believe we are our temporary physical body and this temporary thing called ego or personality. We do not make the distinction between what consciousness is, and what consciousness is conscious of.
Since the nature of consciousness is like light, what is not consciousness is like an obstacle to light. It hinders the natural radiation of consciousness and tends to encumber it. Consciousness is therefore caught in a state where it is full of these personal thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and desires and where it believes it is these things, that it is the body, that it is the personality. It is caught in a state where it can't see beyond these and believes it is these things. The result that, of course, is suffering.