Nope. Human egos don’t go away or get destroyed. They simply recede way into the background.

Imagine your ego takes up most of your foreground. You think you are your ego and the body-mind that contains it. This is the condition of most people on the planet.

Now imagine you somehow become absorbed in the deepest Silence, Awareness and Pure Being. Everything just Is, and it’s all perfect. Your sense of an individual “you” gives way to the direct knowing of your Pure Beingness, Pure Consciousness, with no subject or object present, This is the “experience” of enlightenment. (“Experience” here, is said with poetic license because in full enlightenment there is no “experiencer” left to experience it:-)

If that “enlightenment experience” recurs many times, or is simply strong enough the first time, what happens is you begin to recognize, and get used to, your True Identity as that Pure Being Consciousness, and stop believing your identity is this temporary, illusory ego.

The ego doesn’t disappear or die, it just recedes way into the background of your Awareness, like random notes of music coming from a house three doors down the street, or barely noticeable ripples on a vast calm ocean. You can call the ego to the foreground whenever it is needed, to perform “normal” daily functions like being social at a dinner party, balancing your checkbook, driving down a busy highway, etc.

Once it is no longer needed, once again it recedes into the background.

In this way, you could say, enlightenment is nothing other than which “identity” floods your foreground, and which is still there but way in the background. It’s really quite simple.

Truly enlightened, you abide in Being constantly, it becomes your constant foreground Awareness, not just for a “prolonged period of time,” but permanently. But you keep your ego, at least until that ego-body’s allotted time is up.

And even if we live to 100, that allotted time is very brief indeed, just a blip,, and it’s gone. Bye-bye ego…you were just an illusion.

• Teja