You catch yourself in something small. A flicker of wanting to be right, or an edge in your voice you hear a second after it is out. Vivekananda calls the thing you just caught a rascal. Let’s stay with that word.
This rascal ego must be obliterated… Draw near the centre, check desire, stamp it out, let the false self go, then our vision will clear and we shall see God.
A rascal is a petty offender. He takes what is not his, he is a nuisance, and nobody convenes a trial for him. That is the word Vivekananda puts in front of ego, and the verbs he surrounds it with are severe ones — obliterate, check, stamp out.
Meeting it as something larger has a cost, and the cost is the thing you were trying to do. A serious fault needs a hearing. How long has this been going on, what does it say about me, where did it come from. The hearing is absorbing, it takes a while, and every minute of it is about me. Something arrived to be dropped, and instead it got a case file.
Calling it a rascal costs you as well. There is no weight in it. Nothing to report, no sense of having faced something in yourself, no depth. It is over in a second and you are left with an ordinary afternoon.
So what are we aiming at. We want to meet the thing we catch at its own size.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- Someone gets a small thing wrong in front of other people, and you feel the pleasure of having noticed.
- You hear the edge in your own voice a second after you have used it.
- You are telling someone about your day and you quietly adjust one detail in your favour.
In all three, watch the second right after the catching. One question, two answers. Am I dropping this, or am I opening a case about it.
You are not deciding anything in that second, and you are not trying to catch more of them. Watch what the catching turns into, and leave it as it is.