The brick wall of the ego, this is what The Cloud of Unknowing calls a ‘naked awareness’ of oneself. It’s not that we’re thinking about, ‘Oh, I should have gone to the supermarket,’ or ‘I should have called so and so’. We’re not thinking about psychological aspects of ourselves, feelings or hopes or hurts. Why is this a distraction? Why is this a wall or a resistance? Well, one way of expressing it is to say, this is the ‘I’ thought. Ramana Maharshi says, in meditation keep pursuing the source of the ‘I’, the source of consciousness – not intellectually but experientially, through the work of silence, the work of stillness, the work of simplicity. So the mantra then brings us to the sort of foundation of the I thought, in terms of the ego.
( The Brick Wall of the Ego 1 by Laurence Freeman OSB )
