The Mystic Death ...

The truth of your own nature, the mystics all testify, is that you are nothing, which reveals that you are everything. In your deepest essence, you are identical with God or ultimate reality. Your real Life is the birthless and deathless Life of God, and the Life of God embraces the whole of creation. But as long as your identity is centered in the limited life of the ego, you cannot live in full consciousness of this Life. Thus, you must die to your self-centered life in order to awaken into the Life of God. As Rumi says, “You want Reality unmasked? Choose death! Not the death that drags you to the tomb—the death that is a transmutation, so you at last change into the Light” (Rumi, Odes). Or, as Jesus says, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matt. 16:25-26). Thus, the genuine mystic lives in and as God only insofar as the life in and as the ego is dead. It is the ego’s delusion of grandeur that imagines you can escape suffering and attain immortality, when in fact your life centered in the ego must be completely sacrificed in the mystical death. Any teacher or teaching that is not clear about this just feeds the ego’s propensity for megalomania and self-deception. The genuine mystical path involves the perpetual surrender and sacrifice of all self-centered egoistic activity, up to and including the complete sacrifice of ego-centered life itself. Thus all genuine mysticism teaches the cultivation of selflessness, love, and compassion........from integralscience.org