The False Self

All doing belongs to nature. The self merely imagines itself to be the actor.”
— Ramana Maharshi

The false self—also called the ego—resembles those little children sitting behind the steering wheel of their toy car.

They agitate the wheel left and right, imitate the sound of the engine, activate the plastic horn… and delight in feeling like kings on the road.

Who cares that they were never actually in control, as someone else was, all along pushing and guiding the car from behind?

The false self thrives on believing it is in control.

It reinforces this belief not by blaring the horn, but by constantly seeking support and approval for its ego-based narratives.

That is why it is constantly striving for advantages—material, intellectual, moral, or even spiritual—even though all of those realms are only the product of its own imagination.

In reality, the ego is absolutely powerless.

It is nothing but a story, a phantom born of imagination.

Whether life expresses itself in one way or another, there is not—and never was—a “me” in charge.

It’s all a spontaneous unfolding.

To explore such territory, thought may help,  but only up to a certain point. As some sages have said, as if using a thorn to remove another thorn.

Anyone who decides to look honestly into this will inevitably stumble upon large cracks in the story of an independent doer—because that story ultimately doesn’t really make sense.

Yet it doesn’t belong to thought—limited and now largely hijacked by the ego as its main instrument of self-validation—to fully accept this as reality.

In other words, the person, from Latin “persona”—the mask, which is but a construct made of thought, can never experience its own absence. 

A thought is an image. As such, it is lifeless, unable to experience anything. 

What to do then?

Well, if there is no self here, who needs to recognize what?

Beyond the illusion of the self, there is the selfless. Beyond separation, there is what has never heard of any distinction.

Beyond space and time there is the eternal.

In that never, that nothing and that nowhere, no question has ever penetrated, thus no answer ever needed to be answered.

Ultimately, what cannot recognize and what doesn’t need to recognize are not distinct. They are two aspects of the same energy.

And what binds together these two aspects—is simply Love.

See if the following resonates with something deeper within you:

No one who has a life, and there is no one in life.

Life simply is.

It is One, whole and complete.

It alone is in charge of everything that happens, completely free to express itself however it wishes.

And you are That. 

IMF - La Cathedrale Verte, Lausanne 20 June 2025