Sexual self-restraint is only a preliminary stage in the ego’s evolution.
Ego
The physical ego, the active consciousness in man, should uplift its body-identified self into unity with the soul, its true nature; it should not allow itself to remain mired in the lowly delusive strata of the senses and material entanglement.
A wrong concept misleads the understanding; a wrong deed degrades the whole man, and may eventually demolish the structure of the human ego.
The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It’s the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
No one can be a yogi, maintaining a state of mental equilibrium, free from inner involvement in planned desireful activities, unless he has renounced identification with his ego and its unsatisfiable lust for the fruits of actions.
I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue – rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also a rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego.
The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment.
The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
I have friends who died being successful bohemians. Today, I see people my age who are gifted but who insisted on staying in this group, and it’s beaten them so bad. They have to spend so much time on ego maintenance, they can’t get any work done. They’d be very happy to sell out, but there are no buyers, and that hurts.
If there is anything besides the Self there is reason to fear? Who sees the second? First, the ego arises and sees objects as external. If the ego does not rise, the Self alone exists and there is no second.