Many authors on inner development write about the void, or ego death, as if it were one definite experience that ends the ego identity once and for all. This is false and misleading. Ego death is a repeated, and in time a continual, experience. The void is a repeated and deepening perception. Writing about it as if it were one definitive experience that will completely end the individual’s identification, and the accompanying suffering, in one shot is not only inaccurate, it is irresponsible and cruel. It will prejudice the student of inner development to seek a perfection or a kind of completeness that is unrealistic and will only add to the attachment to the identifications and to the already existing suffering.
Every realized human being continues to work on inner development. There is no end to the development and unfolding of essence. This development proceeds by exposing more and more, perhaps in time very subtle aspects of the personality. After the basic identification with personality is broken, the process of dissolving the subtler aspects of the self-image usually becomes easier. It is a continual dissolution of the boundaries of self-image, resulting in more expansion. It is not that personality is gone and now essence develops. It is rather that the more essence develops, the more personality is exposed and its boundaries dissolved. The fulfillment and expansion of essence is endless and boundless. – Essence with the Elixir of Enlightenment: The Diamond Approach to Inner Realization, Ch. 2
Complete flexibility of identity raises the phenomenon of disidentification to a new level, beyond the normal egoic experience. This flexibility involves the dissolution of self-identity, or more accurately, the cessation of the activity of identifying. This condition, which occurs in isolated experiences of self-realization but is the permanent condition of full self-realization (enlightenment), is what is referred to by some traditions as “ego death” or “the death of the self.”
In this state of complete annihilation of identity, one does not have identity in the usual sense; our identity is now with the presence of Being. In other words, our identity has shifted from the self-representation to Being. – The Point of Existence: Transformation of Narcissism in Self-Realization, Ch. 12
It is clear here that the ego or self which is annihilated in “ego death” is not the ego of depth psychology and it is not the actual self. It is specifically the self-identity. The death of this identity merely means that there is no barrier or resistance to the presence of Essence. There is no need to uphold an identity based on a psychic structure that is bound to have some rigidity for the simple reason that this psychic structure is based on a representation, and that the representation is based on past experience. This might prove to be irrelevant to the arising dimension of presence, but it is an irrelevance that is bound to function as a measure of inflexibility. Ego death also implies the total freedom from the overall self-representation. This condition does not necessarily mean there will be no more self-representation or identity; it means that this representation does not pattern the experience of the self and that the identity is not experienced as oneself. The self is the presence of Essence itself, and when the identity is present in experience, it is perceived to refer to a superficial manifestation of oneself. – A. H. Almaas, The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization