The story of Truth has been told repeatedly throughout the ages, but it bears telling again. Into the void-like space created by the ego’s realization that in actuality it knows nothing suddenly flows the love of God, like a dam that has been opened. It is as though Divinity had been waiting all these millennia for this final moment. In a moment of serene ecstasy, one is home at last. The Real is so overwhelmingly, obviously, and totally present that it seems incredulous that belief in any other kind of ‘reality’ is even possible. It is like some strange kind of forgetting, like the story of the Hindu god who willed himself to be a cow and then forgot that he had done it and had to be rescued by another of the gods.
Sometimes the ego misidentifies itself more specifically as the personality. It thinks, “I am such-and-such a person.” And it says, “Well, that’s who I am.” From this illusion arises the fear that one will lose one’s personality if the ego is relinquished. This is feared as the death of ‘who I am’.
By internal observation, one can differentiate that the personality is a system of learned responses and the persona is not the real ‘I’. The real ‘I’ lies behind and beyond it. One is the witness of that personality, and there is no reason one has to identify with it at all.
From “The Eye of the I: From Which Nothing is Hidden” Chapter 6: The Resolution of the Ego, pp. 131-32