' The ego vanished '...

The actual experience alone can settle this argument.

This is what I found:

The ego vanished; the everyday "I" which the world knew and which knew the world, was no longer there.

But a new and diviner individuality appeared in its place, a consciousness which could say "I AM" and which I recognized to have been my real self all along.

It was not lost, merged, or dissolved:

it was fully and vividly conscious that it was a point in universal Mind and so not apart from that Mind itself.

Only the lower self, the false self, was gone but that was a loss for which to be immeasurably grateful..



- Paul Brunton