How does the ego drop?

Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in this streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache. It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Identification is involved, pain is involved, difficulty is involved, you are not just keeping something aside, you are keeping a part of you aside. That’s what he means when he says that to keep one’s longing away, one has to go through a lot of pain.

Why must there be so much pain involved in giving up of the unnecessary? In giving up the skin, in peeling off the skin. Someone said can’t we just do it as the snakes do it, easily, periodically, necessarily and involuntarily? Remember that snakes even after casting off their skins a hundred times still remains just snakes. It is this snakeness of the snake that ensures that the skin is periodically lost and renewed. How can something coming from snakeness reduce the snakeness?

Similarly, how can something arising from the wrong center do away with the wrong center? How can something arising from the ego, how can something which is part and parcel of the complex of ego, reduce the ego?