The Collapse of the Ego

I woke up this morning already spiralling.

Trying to solve something about someone.Trying to figure out something I will never actually know.

There is no way of knowing.

And the thinking became pointless.

So I stopped and told myself:I need to be okay with not knowing.

I’ve never been good at that.

Sometimes it’s curiosity. Sometimes it’s comparison. Sometimes it’s that quiet need to know where I stand, to feel seen, safe, placed somewhere in the imaginary hierarchy I built from old life experiences.

Real? Not really.

And then I remembered the two times in my life when grief hit so hard that my entire sense of identity collapsed.

In my book, I described it as the closest I had ever been to nirvana.

The shock was so intense, so overwhelming, that it felt like my body and mind shut down. There were no thoughts. No questions. Just a basic survival routine that kept me alive. Drink water. Breathe. Get through the next hour.

The thinking mind went quiet.

And in that quiet, there was clarity.There was space.There was stillness.

Emails didn’t matter. Impressions didn’t matter. Reputation didn’t matter. Social importance collapsed.

Nothing mattered.

It felt almost holy.

And don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t numbness. It was the opposite. My senses were heightened. Everything was vivid. There were synchronicities. A strange sense of unity. A reduced fear of death. A complete detachment from identity, yet an increased aliveness.

It was freeing not to perform. Not to seek validation. Not to attach to people, outcomes, or imagined futures. Not to obsess over meaning. Not to control.

I accessed that state because survival took over. The ego shut down.

In safety, the ego runs wild. It performs. It scans (often for danger). It compares. It attaches. It hopes. It fears.

But when the crisis is so intense, the ego stops running the show. It collapses.

And somehow, in that collapse, there was a glimpse of something I can only describe as awakened presence. Everything is vivid. The ego dissolves under impact. No rejection can hurt you. No future matters. Identity doesn’t matter.

And then…slowly…it fades.

The ego returns.

Today, when I caught myself spiralling about something unknowable, I realised something important.

Saying, “I will never know, and that’s okay,” is a small voluntary step toward what grief once forced on me.

This time, by choice.

It doesn’t feel as intense. It’s not nirvana. It’s not transcendence. It’s not cosmic.

It’s subtle.

And that’s the work.

The ego probably won’t collapse permanently. Nothing is permanent, not even that heightened state I once experienced. It faded.

So ego dissolution isn’t suppression. It’s awareness.

It’s a muscle.

It’s built in the small decisions taken every day, when you detach from the story, when you don’t identify with the version of yourself that needs to know, needs to rank, needs to control.

You just observe.

You let the feeling move through you without assigning meaning.

You stop trying to fix it.

So today I chose:

I will never know and that is okay.

Not magic. Not enlightenment. Not forced by pain.

But conscious awareness.

And maybe that is quieter. But it is stronger.