Among the constants that appear in the different mystical traditions, the annulment of the individual self has a preponderant, even stellar, place as a path of wisdom and integration.
It is common to the different religions the idea that when the individuality personality is annulled, the true divine nature emerges (the unity in annulling the multiplicity absorbs the individuality in the totality). Particularly the different philosophies that are born in India teach that the true being is not the individual being or ego. In Hinduism it is fundamentally taught that he who knows himself knows God -atman is Brahman; therefore when investigating the individual self one discovers that this self is illusory (according to the Vedanta) or only a manifestation or emanation of the Supreme Being who is pure consciousness and who is the One who experiences all experience (for example in the Shivaism of Kashmir) .
Ramana Maharshi, perhaps the greatest Indian saint of the twentieth century, taught that there are two main ways to attain the state of gnosis of Being. The first is bhakti yoga, or devotion, in which the individual forgets himself or herself. feet of his teacher, in whom he sees a manifestation of Being, free and enlightened, which according to his belief can be a living image of Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma or even Buddha; the other method is the interrogation of the Self, an analytical meditation process in which the individual seeks to answer the question "who am I?" using the neti neti method: this does not, this either. When inquiring into the origin or basis of his being, this process of discarding - I am not my body, I am not my senses, I am not my thoughts and so on - leads him to conclude that He must be the totality of the universe, the Self , God, the Absolute, or whatever you want to call yourself. "Let me find out who the thoughts are. Where do they come from? They must arise from the conscious Being. Apprehending it even for a moment helps extinguish the ego. From then on, the integration of a single Infinite Existence becomes possible. In that state there are no individuals besides the Infinite Existence. Therefore, there is no thought of death or suffering, "says Maharshi. When the ego ceases to have prominence and the mind withdraws, the perception of the world ceases as an objective reality. This teaching is based on the notion that a deep inquiry into the nature of being will discover that the origin of the mind and the "I" is the Being, which transcends the individual and yet is his only intimacy. (Here you can download this meditation in its extensive form as designed by Ramana Maharsi).
In Buddhism, although the tradition has interpreted that the Buddha taught the doctrine of anatta (the non-existence of a stable self and an immortal individual soul) this should not be confused with the nihilistic notion that nirvana is non-existence or non-existence. -being or that emptiness (Shunyata) is nothingness. Buddhism teaches that the essential nature of all beings is Buddha (the doctrine of the tathagatagharba or Buddha's embryo) and that this nature is not conspicuously experienced only by ignorance (avidya) and impurity. Buddhism teaches that there is a state of consciousness beyond the self that is equal to space, which is described as luminous and joyful; the pristine and natural immanence of all things is this original mind that unfolds like the phenomena that we confuse as separate and substantial. To cultivate this state of consciousness liberated from the ego, Buddhism has a series of practices aimed at cultivating the bodhicitta, the awakened mind, which are fundamentally linked to compassion, that is to say the abandonment of the self for the benefit of all sentient beings.
Western traditions also have this idea rooted in their doctrines. Perhaps the most explicit expression of this idea comes from Meister Eckhart, the German mystic:
-In your judgment, what has made you achieve eternal truth?
-It's because I abandoned my self as soon as I found it.
And also:
Those who have not freed fear the joy of the hearts of those who have been liberated. No one is rich in God, but he has died entirely for himself.
And equally Eckhart, in what could be a theistic definition of nirvana or extinction in the unconditioned:
The kingdom of God is only for those who have died totally.
According to St. John (3:30), "until man is born again, he can not see the kingdom of God." To be born again you have to die. Saint John also "No man has ascended to heaven more than he who descended from heaven." There is only one man, who is the God incarnated in multiplicity. Saint Paul says to the Corinthians: "what you sow is not vivified, if it does not die before". This dead seed is vivified by God who gives "each seed its own body". Divinize, the esoteric religion tells us, it is possible, even inevitable, but it necessarily means
Says the philosopher Ananda K. Coomaraswamy:
That in "we" is the Spirit, and that in us is not the Spirit, they are distinguished and contrasted sharply; the Spirit being that which remains "when all the other factors of the personality composed of" identity-and-appearance "or" soul-and-body "have been eliminated.
The great Sufi mystic from Murcia Ibn Arabi in his Treaty of Unity:
That is why the Prophet has said "Who knows himself, knows his Lord" ... You must know that what you call existence, is not really your existence or your non-existence. You must understand that you do not exist or are nothing, that you are not different from what exists or different from nothing. Your existence and your nonexistence constitute His Absolute Existence, the one from which you can not and should not debate whether it is or is not. The substance of your being or your nothingness is His existence.
Mnaly P. Hall poses a paradox, inspired by the mystery of Golgota, who lives for himself and seeks to perpetuate himself, will perish; who forgets himself and gives himself to others, will live forever. The mind can not possess the truth nor find its origin (in the same way that one can not see one's eyes); the heart, however, mysteriously has the inherent capacity not to know the truth but to allow itself to be possessed by it, in a state of non-duality, of communion, being the cave or temple of Being, according to Hall.
This death of the ego or renunciation of the self is what Saint Bernard called the four and highest state of love, in which "one becomes divine. As the cup of water poured into the wine loses itself and takes the taste and color of the wine; or as an iron rod when heated, it becomes red and like fire, forgetting its own nature; or like the air, radiant with the sun-shining, and it seems not to be illuminated but to be the light itself. " "To lose your own self even for a moment, as if you emptied and were swallowed up in God - that is not human love, it is heavenly love". And St. Bernard adds that this is the meaning of the prayer that says "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."