After days of contemplative quiet — reading, writing, and circling the question of identity through Simply Vedanta — I stepped into something entirely different: central London.
We took the train to London Bridge, wandered through Borough Market, Hays Galleria, and along the riverside. The market was heaving — a sea of people jostling for space, aromas of world cuisine thick in the air, voices layered over one another. Beautiful in its way, but also disorienting. After about an hour of shoulder-to-shoulder sensory overload, we ducked into a quiet vegan Thai place, tucked just minutes from the station. Still London — but quieter, slower.
On the return train, seated in different rows, I found myself slipping into a familiar line of reflection: ego.
More specifically, I wondered — half-seriously — Is there a way to take ego death for a test drive?
Just a day, perhaps? What would it be like to move through the world with no ‘me’ at the centre?
But almost as soon as the thought appeared, so did its contradiction. Ramana would probably smile and say: “You can’t try it — because the ‘you’ who wants to test it is the very thing that has to dissolve.”
It’s like trying to preview deep sleep while staying awake. You can’t witness it directly — you only know it happened after you’ve returned.
That led to a subtler question:
If ego is absent in deep sleep, physical death, and some reported states of inner dissolution — what truly distinguishes them?
All three seem to involve the absence of ‘I’.
But we intuitively treat them very differently.
In deep sleep, the ego is gone — but so is any awareness of being aware.
In physical death, what remains is unknown. There’s no continuity of witnessing we can speak of.
But in what Vedanta sometimes calls manonāśa — the quieting or dissolution of the mind while living — the ego fades in the presence of awareness. Not imagined. Not forced. Simply seen through.
I’m not claiming that’s my lived state — but even logically, the contrast is striking.
I remembered a line from the Ashtavakra Gītā — one of those verses that doesn’t try to explain, just states:
“As space confined in a pot is imagined,
so is the Self seen enclosed in the body.”
— Ashtavakra Gītā, 6.1
The ego, then, isn’t something to fight — it’s the mistaken idea that what’s limitless could be inside a name, a memory, or a face.
When that false boundary dissolves, nothing new is gained — just space, seen as space again.
Ramana didn’t demand belief in karma or rebirth. He discouraged metaphysics for its own sake.
Instead, he invited a kind of spiritual empiricism:
“Don’t believe. Just look.”
His self-inquiry — Who am I? — isn’t mystical in the usual sense. It’s direct, even surgical.
It doesn’t offer a new belief, just a question — and the willingness to stay with it until the one asking dissolves into silence.
And that thought stayed with me.
What if I just kept giving this question a sincere try?
Either through Vedanta’s gradual but consistent sādhana, or through Ramana’s more direct path of self-investigation.
Both, in the end, ask the same thing: not to kill the ego, but to stop feeding it.
We pulled into the station. My wife stood up. I followed her.
Back in the body, back in the world, walking toward home.
The ego? Still there, of course.
But maybe slightly quieter.
Maybe a little less in charge.
Between Borough Market and the train ride home, something had softened. The question still hung in the air — not as a problem to solve, but as a thread to follow: Who is the one who walks, who wonders, who lets go?
Optional Listening:
🎧 Upadeśa Sāram – Ramana Maharshi
A meditative echo of the inquiry that remains.
Simply Vedanta 