Challenges

 

 

The easiest is the most difficult; the difficult is not so difficult. The ego is always ready to do the difficult because doing the difficult the ego is enhanced; it feels good. It looks like a challenge, and the ego is ready to fight with the challenge. It is provoked out of its lethargy by the challenge. It fights back, it tries to conquer, it becomes aggressive. The greater the difficulty, the more aggressive the ego becomes. Aggression is its food. That’s why the simple is the most difficult. The ego does not feel interested in it. The ego feels a kind of death through it. The ego cannot lose control because in losing control it will lose itself. The ego cannot lose tenseness because the tenseness is its very existence. If you are non- tense, if you are relaxed, the ego simply evaporates. It cannot exist in a relaxed state of consciousness; it is no longer needed.

 

It is your disease, and you have to be alert about it. Unless your ego falls into pieces, is shattered, completely shattered, so utterly shattered that you cannot put it together again -- like humpty-dumpty it falls from the wall and nobody can put it together again -- only then will your real life start; only then will you be real. Otherwise you will remain unreal... and with unreality there is misery. Only the real person can be happy; only the real can be celebrated. With the real is festivity. With the unreal there is only dark, dismal depression. With the unreal we are in hell. Hell is not a reality; it is a nightmare created by the ego.

 

I wanted to see whether you could do it or not. It is good that you did not pretend -- that part is good. Sometimes it happens, when I say to relax, even if you don't feel like relaxing you just fall. So the bad news is that you have a very very controlled ego. The good news is that you are not a pretender, that you are not a hypocrite. Through that there is hope. That very sincerity will be helpful. We will use that sincerity as a key.

 

-Osho, “Don't Just Do Something, Sit There, #19“