I remember the actor Sean Penn. He was married to Madonna a long time ago. His house burned down in Malibu during a big fire there. He was on public radio in an interview with Terry Gross, and she was asking him: 'So, your house burned down. What was it like?'

And he goes, 'Well, you know, all those nagging duties you’re supposed to do? All the papers, the notebooks full of stuff, the to-do lists that piled up? You’ve got so many things you’re supposed to deal with—all those drawers you wanted to clean out?' She goes, 'Yeah, yeah.' He goes, "I don’t have that anymore."

I’m not advocating for nihilism, you know—just like 'wipe everything out'—but I am talking about changing perspective. Regarding your point about the false ego, it’s a practice in seeing what the Upaniṣads say: 'What if my body turns to ashes? How does life go on after that?'

In fact there have been books and writings where people come back and visit themselves after their own demise. I think it’s one of the themes of It’s a Wonderful Life. Yes or yes? Nobody has seen that except for Mālini and a couple of people, because I told them to. A person feels completely overwhelmed by his life, and just as he is about to commit suicide, an angel comes—and the angel’s duty is to save him. So, they’re both standing on the bridge; the angel jumps into the water and preempts his suicide attempt, so he jumps in to save the angel.

Then the angel says, 'I’m going to show you what the world would have looked like if you were never born.' And he takes him around and shows him the consequence of his life. There’s a sort of otherworldly, out-of-body sense, because he’s going around to all the places he knows and people, seeing how different everything is—and nobody knows him because he’s not him anymore. He’s taken out of the picture.

So, he got a different perspective. You view it from far away, and you see that vanishing point where everything becomes simple. There is a point at which we can realize that carrying the false ego around is complicating my life. Caitanya Mahāprabhu said to work on this (Śikṣāṣṭakam, Verse 3):

tṛṇād api sunīcena

taror api sahiṣṇunā

amāninā mānadena

kīrtanīyaḥ sadā hariḥ

Which basically means: practice leaving your ego behind and see how your life is without the false ego. You could practice that for an hour, right?

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