Square 55: Egotism (ahamkara)

Square 55 in Leela is Egotism, ahamkara, the first square of row 7 and the crown chakra. It is the separate self that resists the flow of life, and Johari says anger is the inevitable result. A long snake waits here: it drops the player from the seventh row all the way down to square 3, Anger.

What square 55 means

Johari describes egotism as ahamkara cut off from the whole: the self identifying completely with the moving symbol on the board. In his words, if ahamkara fights the flow of sudharma, one's own right way, anger is the inevitable result. The rules put it more briefly: egotism leads to anger.

The Sanskrit ahamkara means the I-maker, the function that says this is mine, I did this. On its own it is a useful faculty. It becomes egotism when it forgets that it is part of something larger. Johari also defines it, in his framing of the board, as becoming elated with the arrow's rise and depressed with the serpent's bite.

Square 55 opens row 7, The Plane of Reality, and belongs to the Sahasrara chakra at the crown. This is the plane of truth, on the verge of liberation, and also the most dangerous row: three snakes and no arrows. Egotism is the first of them, waiting precisely where the player feels most advanced.

What it teaches is subtle. The risk near the top is not a lack of insight but ownership of it. Watching one's own movement without taking every rise and fall personally is the way through. Anger, when it comes, can then be read as a signal.

On the board

Square 55 is the first square of row 7, The Plane of Reality, reached by an ordinary throw from the end of row 6, since no arrow or snake ends here. It is the head of a snake. A player who lands on 55 slides down to square 3, Anger, falling from row 7 to row 1, one of the longest falls in the game.

The Bhagavad Gita and this square

Gita 3.27 says that one deluded by ego thinks 'I am the doer', though the gunas of nature do the acting. Nahusha, raised to the throne of Indra and then fallen through his arrogance, is the epic's image of a high position lost to the sense of being its only author.

Deluded by ego, one thinks 'I am the doer', though the gunas of nature do the acting. You are a participant, not the sole author of events.

Gita 3.27 · The fall of Nahusha

Questions to reflect on

• What in me needs to be right?
• Which recent success am I taking too personally?
• Where does my anger show me that my ego feels threatened?