Osho Quotes on Ego

 

 

 

All our dreams are our ego projections.

 

♦

 

The ego is your enemy, not your friend.

 

♦

 

The ego is a deep desire to dominate. The ego is a deep desire that says, "I am special, higher, bigger, greater than you."

 

♦

 

The ego does not, cannot live in the present, because the present is real and the ego is false -- they never meet.

 

♦

 

If the ego is fulfilled through giving, nothing is being given. Ego cannot share. The ego can never be generous; that is not its nature.

 

♦

 

The ego is your enemy, not your friend. It is the ego that gives you wounds and hurts you. It is the ego that makes you violent, angry, jealous, competitive. It is the ego that is continuously comparing and feeling miserable.

 

♦

 

To be a nobody is to be divine, because you have dropped your ego and you have allowed God to enter in you. When you are somebody, you are just an ugly ego, and you have closed the doors for God to enter within you -- because God and your ego cannot exist together. They are just like darkness and light: you cannot have them both.

 

♦

 

Self-consciousness simply means ego consciousness and self-awareness means soul consciousness. Your ego is a false entity. Because you have so much money, because you have so much power, because you are born in a very respected family... your education, your position in life -- all these things constitute your ego. But your soul comes with you when you are born, it has nothing to do with anything. Whether you are educated or uneducated -- Kabir was not educated; Jesus was not educated -- whether you come from a respectable family or not, does not matter.

 

♦

 

Sufis say, pray in such a way that nobody knows. Why? For the simple reason that ego is very cunning. It wants to brag; it wants to brag even about religion, about spirituality, about prayer, about meditation. It wants to brag; it does not matter what it brags about. It will brag about money, it will brag about meditation, it will brag about power, it will brag about prayer. The ego wants to brag: "I am doing something special, something great, something extraordinary. Don't think that I am nobody -- I am somebody!"

 

♦

 

That which is imposed upon you is non-essential; it creates your personality. The essential is your individuality; the non-essential is your personality. In other words, the essential is your very soul, your being; the non-essential is your ego. All that helps the ego is non-essential; all that helps you to become egoless is essential. Ambition is non-essential, greed is non-essential; desire, any kind of desire, is non-essential.

 

♦

 

Surrender is the quantum leap from mind to no-mind, from ego to egolessness. And in a single step the whole journey is contained. It is not a long journey from you to God, it is a single-step journey. It is not a gradual phenomenon; it is not that slowly slowly, gradually you come to the divine. It is a quantum leap! One moment you were in darkness and the next moment all is light. All that is needed is to put the ego aside.

 

♦

 

The ego is always goal-oriented. It is always greedy, it is always grabbing. It is always searching for more and more and more; it lives in the more. If you have money it wants to have more money; if you have a house it wants to have a bigger house; if you have a woman it wants to have a beautiful woman, but it always wants more. The ego is constantly hungry. It lives in the future and in the past. In the past it lives as a hoarder -- "I have this and this and this." It gets a great satisfaction: "I have got something" -- power, prestige, money. It gives a kind of reality to it. It gives the notion that, "When I have these things, I must be there." And it lives in the future with the idea of more. It lives as memory and as desire.

 

♦

 

The moment you put the ego aside, the curtain disappears. God is not hidden, only your eyes are closed. Open your eyes!

 

♦

 

The ego is the problem; that's why you cannot know yourself. The ego gives you certain false images of yourself, and if you carry those images for a long time, you become afraid. The fear enters that if your image falls, then your identity will be broken. You create a false face and then you become afraid: if this false face falls, who will you be? You will go mad. You have invested too much in it. And everybody thinks about himself in such lofty terms, in such false terms; nobody agrees with him, nobody approves, but then your ego thinks that everybody is wrong.

 

♦

 

Ego is a hallucination. You are not separate from the whole -- trying to be, of course, hence the whole misery. Trying to do something which is not possible, which is impossible, is bound to create misery. Misery is unnatural; it is your invention. Misery does not exist; it is your hallucination. It is a nightmare created by you. It is your great work!

 

♦

 

The ego is the center of all your sleep and all your dreaming. If you can put the ego aside... seeing that it is a false thing, why go on carrying it? -- put it aside. In fact, there is no need to put it aside -- seeing that it is false, it drops of its own accord. And the moment it drops a tremendous explosion happens in you. For the first time you are awake, fully awake, totally awake. There is no unconscious in you, there is no darkness in you. All becomes light; hence the word "enlightenment." You are pure light, made of light, eternal light. And when you open your eyes and look at existence, the whole existence is made of light!

 

♦

 

I am saying the ego exists not! How can you drop something which doesn't exist? And Buddha has not said that the ego has to be dropped, he is saying the ego has to be only looked into -- and you don't find it, hence it disappears. What can you do then -- when you go inside your being and you don't find any ego, you find silence there; no self dominating, no center like an ego there? Dropping the ego does not mean that you have to drop it. Dropping the ego is only a metaphor. It simply means that when you go in, you look in and you don't find anything, the ego disappears. In fact, even to say 'disappears' is not right, because it was not there in the first place. It is a misunderstanding.

 

♦

 

The mind that relies on something else is the spurious self, the ego. The ego cannot exist without props, it wants props. Something has to support it. Once all props have been removed, the ego falls to the ground and disappears. But only when the ego falls to the ground does that consciousness arise in you which is eternal, which is timeless, deathless.

 

♦

 

You have to move through fire, and only in that fire will your ego drop. Looking at the whole ugliness of it, it drops automatically.

 

♦

 

To be ordinary is the greatest virtue -- because when you are just ordinary, nothing to claim, of this world or that, the ego disappears. The ego feeds on imbalance, the ego feeds on extremes. The ego lives on the polarities -- in the middle it disappears. And in every area, in every direction of life, remember this: just stop in the middle and soon you will find the mind has stopped, the ego has stopped. Nothing to claim, it disappears. And when it disappears you have become virtuous. Now the door is open for the divine. In the middle you meet him; at the extremes you miss.

 

♦

 

Hell is for all extraordinary people. They may be in politics, in art, literature -- wherever they are, hell is for all geniuses, for all extraordinary people, all egoists. Ego is the hell, it gives you suffering -- because unnecessarily you start conflicting with everything. You are never at ease, unease becomes your style of life; with the ego you will always be at unease. Ego is a discomfort; it is a nail in the shoe, it continuously pinches, but you want to be extraordinary.

 

♦

 

The ego is goal-oriented. The ego is hankering for the future. It can hanker even for the other life, it can hanker for heaven, it can hanker for nirvana. It doesn`t matter what it hankers for -- hankering is what it is, desiring is what it is, projecting into the future is what it is.

 

♦

 

Man is busy desiring to find something which only he can do so that his ego acquires importance.

 

♦

 

Wherever desire exists ego exists, and wherever ego exists illusion exists because ego is the greatest illusion there is. Even in a beggar who has nothing else you will find the same ego as you will find in Alexander the Great, because desiring is the same. Alexander the Great may have much money and much power, that does not matter; he is still desiring. The beggar may not have anything, but he is also desiring.

 

♦

 

You may be trying to attain power in this world, then you start trying to attain power in that world. First you want to attain wealth in this world, then you try to attain wealth in that world. But you remain the same, and the mind and the functioning and the whole scheme remains the same: Attain! Reach! This is the ego trip. The achieving mind is the ego.

 

♦

 

When desiring ceases, the other world opens. The other world is hidden in this world. But because your eyes are full of desire, full of the ego, you cannot see it.

 

♦

 

Your ego is just an idea implanted in your mind. It is poisonous. Your ego keeps driving you madder and madder.

 

♦

 

I is a great prison. It is your slavery and bondage to the mind. The moment you enter beyond the mind, you are -- but you don`t have any notion of being an ego, of being an I. In other words: the more you think you are, the less you are; the more you experience that you are not... the more you are.

 

♦

 

Remember: ego can create misery, ego can create anguish, ego can create hate, ego can create jealousy. Ego can never become a vehicle for the divine, it can never become the passage for the beyond.

 

♦

 

Jealousy means ego, jealousy means unconsciousness. Jealousy means that you have not known even a moment of joy and bliss; you are living in misery. Jealousy is a by-product of misery, ego, unconsciousness.

 

♦

 

Will power is nothing but another name of ego power. A man of wisdom has no will, just as he has no mind -- because to will means to keep yourself separate from existence. It is a little subtle, but try to feel it. The moment you will it means you are always willing against things as they are. You want them to be some other way.

 

♦

 

I would like you to drop the ego, to dissolve, to disappear, because only then is there fulfillment. The ego knows only emptiness; it is always unfulfilled. By the very nature, by its very intrinsic nature, it cannot attain to fulfillment. When you are not, fulfillment is. Call it God, or give it a name Patanjali would like -- samadhi -- the attainment of the ultimate, but it comes when you disappear.