Page 10 - All India Magazine Mar-2026

egos. And then the horizon begins to widen. It is as when one
tries to widen his mind, to understand many different things,
study many languages, the knowledge of many countries and
ages, one widens his ego very much, one begins to grow less
narrow-minded. Naturally, with yoga one can overcome all this
consciously.
CWM 07: 12-13

Ego of asceticism
You cannot imagine it, you don’t know how very difficult it
is to separate oneself from this little ego; how much it gets into
the way though it is so small. It takes up so much room while
being so microscopic. It is very difficult. One pushes it away in
certain very obvious things; for example, if there is something
good and someone rushes forward to make sure of having it
first, even jostling his neighbour (this happens very frequent-
ly in ordinary life), then here one becomes quite aware that
this is not very, very elegant, so one begins to suppress these
crudities, one makes a big effort — and one becomes highly
self-satisfied: “I am not selfish, I give what is good to others,
I don’t keep it for myself”, and one begins to get puffed up.
And so one is filled with a moral egoism which is much worse
than physical egoism, for it is conscious of its superiority. And
then there are those who have left everything, given up every-
thing, who have left their families, distributed their belong-
ings, gone into solitude, who live an ascetic life, and who are
terribly conscious of their superiority, who look down at poor
humanity from the height of their spiritual grandeur — and they
have, these people, such a formidable ego that unless it is bro-
ken into small bits, never, never will they see the Divine.
CWM 04: 333

10 All India Magazine, March 2026