Only those who practice devotional service with faith and love receive from the Sovereign Lord the intelligence necessary to gradually ascend in the kingdom of God.
Logos 170
The soul embodied and conditioned by matter thinks “I am this body” but the liberated soul says “I am not this body, for I am a spiritual soul”. This “I am” represents the ego, or the identity of being.
Thinking “I am this body” or “all that is related to the body is mine” is a false ego, identification with his body, but when one has realized one's spiritual identity and one says to oneself “I am an eternal servant of the Supreme Lord”, this self-identification constitutes the true ego. The first conception bathes in the darkness of the three gunas, modes of influence of material nature, virtue, passion and ignorance, while the other is at the level of pure virtue. When we say that we are letting go of our ego, it means that we are letting go of the false ego; the true ego remains always present.
When the image of the being is reflected through the material defilement of the body and the mind under the blow of an erroneous identification of the soul, one says the conditioned being; but when it appears in all its purity, it is said to be liberated. The identification of being in the conditioned state, with its material possessions, must be purified; he must rediscover his identity in relation to the Supreme Lord. In the conditioned state, the being sees everything as an object of personal satisfaction, while in the liberated state, he sees everything in relation to the service of the Supreme Lord. So the consciousness of God, the devotional service, corresponds to the true liberated state. On the contrary, the acceptance or rejection of anything on the material plane, as part of nihilism or impersonnalism, places the pure soul in an imperfect situation.
Whoever devotes all his life energy, riches, intelligence and words to the Lord, or who wishes to do so, must be regarded as a liberated soul, whatever his condition, for this man has grasped things in their truth.
Logos 171
The Lord said: “We must establish ourselves at the spiritual level, beyond the different levels of material consciousness, and remain free from any other conception of existence. Freeing oneself from identification with one's body, one must learn to see one's own being as one sees the sun in the sky”.