An Enlightened Being will take a spiritual aspirant's personal consciousness, or ego, and expand it -- that is, enlighten it, by dissolving it into the Supreme, Non-Dual Reality. On the other hand, a religious authoritarian or fundamentalist zealot will capture, or take hostage, a human beings's vulnerable ego, or personal consciousness, (and use it) for personal, idealogical or collective gain. He will afford that desperate ego "a purpose-driven life." The zealot will manipulate that ego with hope and fear and colorful promises of a blissfully privatized afterlife in which the personal ego lives forever.

