When we take the diverse phenomena of experience as a single whole and call it “world,” this seems perfectly normal. After all, everyone does it. Likewise, when features of experience are grouped together under the heading “I,” the assumption of the I’s existence is taken for granted. But Bhagavan tells us that both are tricks of the mind. The composite parts of ego are merely conceptually conjoined features of reality. The same applies to “world.” The parts themselves do not call themselves “I” or “world,” nor do they know themselves as constituting an “I” or a “world.” They simply are what they are.

The work of vichara is to get beneath this constitutive illusion and see its parts. Nature does not need our names and labels. Neither does the spiritual Heart. The Heart simply IS.

To deconstruct the nominal realm is to see that names are not fundamental or ontically independent. It means disassembling conceptually formed agglomerations and seeing them as manifestations of the Self passing through the prism of ego, much as the wave is only a manifestation of the ocean.

Viewed spatially, the ego is an agglomeration of functions operating together: the thinker, the planner, the rememberer, the doer, the sufferer, the defender, the seeker. These appear to be bound together by a single “I,” but on closer inspection each is itself an agglomeration, and no solitary entity called “I” can be found.

Viewed temporally, the ego is a succession of events arising one after another. We imagine these events are linked by a continuing separate self, but in fact they unfold as a causal chain, each conditioned by what came before, without requiring any separate entity to bind them together.

In this sense, vichara functions as an inward dissection. It does not merely analyse the personality intellectually; it exposes the hidden assumption of a separate self standing behind experience. As this assumption weakens, the ego is less and less taken as the owner, controller, or centre of life.

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