Question 1
Beloved Osho,
How can i leave my ego outside the front gate? it follows me like a shadow and even hides behind my back and then i am not able to see it.
Anand Shantideva, the question shows you have not understood the meaning of the ego. It is not something visible or tangible; it is not even a shadow that follows you. It is something that sits upon your head, that's why you cannot see it. It is all that you know about yourself, your name, your respectability, your power; whatever you have, it is your ego.
The ego is simply a mind formation. To understand it is a very subtle process. The society you have been brought up in does not want you to know yourself. But it will be very dangerous not to allow you to know yourself and to leave you in a state of chaos. The danger is that in that chaos you may start looking for yourself.
One cannot live in a chaos. One has to find the center of the cyclone; it is an absolute necessity for survival. The society creates the mind as a substitute for your being. And on its own part, the mind creates the idea of "I," the ego. That substitute is absolutely necessary to keep you away from yourself, because once you believe that this is you, the very question of any search for yourself does not arise.
That has happened to millions of people who have lived on this earth and that is happening even today to the millions of people that are on the earth. Today we have more ignorance in the world than ever, just because of the population.
Now there are five billion idiots on the earth. It has never happened before; it is absolutely unique. You are living in a world which is very special -- five billion people knowing nothing about themselves. The ignorance was never so thick and the night was never so long. But whatever the case with the world, each individual is capable of coming out of this darkness. The first thing he has to realize is that he does not know himself. And whatever he knows about himself is just opinions imposed on him by others.
Somebody has said to you, "You are so intelligent" -- and it was so satisfying to believe in it that you have believed it. It needs tremendous courage to disassociate yourself from all that you have been believing you are.
Shantideva, you are the ego; hence you find it difficult to leave it outside the gate. Because you don't know anything else about yourself except the ego, if you leave it outside you will be leaving yourself outside. It can be left outside the gate only if you understand the very structure of it.
To keep you engaged and busy it is a false substitute so that you don't have time, you don't have energy, you don't have any need to look for your authentic self.
In short, you are completely false.
I don't believe in compromises. Either you are real or you are unreal; it is not possible that half of you is real and half of you is unreal. The real and the unreal cannot meet. It cannot be that a certain percentage in you is real and the remainder is unreal. It is impossible. It is not allowable by the universal law of consciousness. The real and the unreal never meet.
Have you ever seen light and darkness meeting? Either it is light or it is dark; you cannot have both together in your room -- one sitting on this side of you, the other sitting on the other side of you so that you can enjoy both the light and darkness.
A meditator enters into his mind and starts watching how the mind functions. Just the very fact of watching the mind makes him aware that he is not the mind, and he is not anything that belongs to the mind. He is a faraway entity, qualitatively different, just a pure watching… in other words: just a pure mirror which only reflects the reality but is not imprinted by any reality.
If the ugly face comes in front of it, without any judgment it shows the ugly face in its full detail, without any condemnation. And when the beautiful face appears, there is no appreciation and no evaluation either. It shows the ugly face and the beautiful face with the same detached, faraway reflective witnessing.
The moment you become a witness there will be no need to leave your ego outside the gate. In fact, the ego will have left you; even if you run after it you cannot catch hold of it. So the right process has to be understood. The ego is not something like your umbrella and your shoes and your raincoats that you leave outside the gate.
The ego is hidden inside your mind. Of course you cannot leave your head outside, and the ego comes along wherever you go. The ego has to be understood. In that understanding it disappears. Only a witness knows that the ego is a false entity and you need not fight with any false entity.
Do you ever fight with darkness? When you find darkness in your room, do you struggle with it to throw it out? Do you wrestle with it? Do you start taking out your sword to cut off the head of darkness? If you do any of these stupid things, you will simply show your unintelligence. You will not be able even to touch it – the darkness that is in your room. You cannot put it into bags and take the bags our and throw them into the neighbor’s yard.
With the negative nothing can be done directly. If you want to do anything with the negative, do something for the positive. When you don’t want darkness in the room you bring the light, you don’t bother about the darkness. Your whole approach is totally different. You bring the light in and the moment the light is in you don’t find any darkness.
The same is true about your ego. It has no existence of its own; it is a false substitute that has been given to you so that you can go on playing with it and completely forget the search for the real self. And the demands of this false ego are immense, never fulfilled. It will demand money, it will demand respect, it will demand power, and you go on fulfilling it but it will always remain empty.
You cannot make an egoist contented. The ego is always like an open wound; It goes on growing bigger. The more you try to fill it the more you find it is empty and the more demanding it becomes. You become almost a slave to a false entity. Your whole life is wasted in ambitions created by the ego.
The ego is the most dangerous invention that society has managed to create. So when you want to drop… don’t think in terms of dropping it, because even the word ‘drop’ gives you the idea that it is something. It is nothing. You cannot drop it, you cannot put it out of doors. You have to look into the reality of it.
In deep meditations you have to become a witness of all the functioning of the mind, because the ego is the combined by-product of your mind’s functioning. Its thoughts, its desires, its ideologies, its prejudices, its politics, its philosophy, its religion – everything contributes in some way to create a certain ego in you.
I had a professor, Doctor Das, a very famous philosopher not only in India but in almost every country. He had been teaching around the world, and he had come back to India to his home just to retire. He was my teacher for only three months; after those three months he went into retirement. But those three months were of great revelation to me and to him.
The first day when he entered the classroom I was sitting in his chair. He looked so embarrassed standing by my side and I was so relaxed in the chair – the students started laughing and he said, ”What is going on?”
I said, ”Nothing is going on. I find this chair more comfortable than the other chairs; and I am not a stupid person, I can choose what is right for me.”
He said, ”You seem to be a very strange person. This chair is for the teacher.”
I said, ”Then there is no problem. I will teach. What is the problem? – if this chair is for the teacher, then the teacher is sitting in it. You can find some other chair and sit down.”
He was an old man, a world-famous philosopher, and his ego was immensely hurt. He said, ”You don’t understand with whom you are talking.”
I said, ”I understand perfectly well. You don’t understand with whom you are talking.”
But I did not leave the chair. I told him that whatever he wants to do, he can do. He can go to the vice-chancellor, he can bring the vice-chancellor… ”I am going to remain in this chair.”
He said, ”What is the purpose of all this mess?”
I said, ”The purpose is to show you that it is not my sitting in the chair that is hurting you, it is your ego. If you accept it I will leave the chair. If you don’t accept, then you can bring anybody to help you… but as far as I know the students, nobody is going to help.”
He waited a minute. There was utter silence in the class. Everybody was afraid that if the vice-chancellor came and the proctor came, there was going to be trouble for me. They would immediately expel me. I had already been expelled from so many places, but I always continued to do strange things. What was the need to sit in his chair?
But Doctor Das was certainly an intelligent man. He did not go out. He said, ”Perhaps you are right. It is my ego that is hurting, it is not a question of the chair.”
I said, ”Then I can leave it. But remember, before you retire you have only three months more in this university. It will be good if you retire but don’t take your ego away with you. Leave it here in this chair for somebody else to use.”
I left the chair, and he was in such confusion that he told the students, ”Today it will not be possible for me to teach.” And to me he said, ”I would like you to come with me to my home. I want to discuss some important matters with you.”
He was an unmarried man. He had written many beautiful books, and before encountering him I had read everything that he had written. He took me in his car to his home. On the way he said, ”I am sorry that I did not understand your purpose. You are the first man in my life who has pointed out my ego. I certainly have a very big ego and it went on becoming bigger and bigger as I became more and more respected in the world of philosophy. You will have to help me to get rid of it. I am also feeling the torture of it, I am also feeling the burden of it, but I don’t know what to do with it.”
He had never thought about meditation. Philosophers never meditate; their whole approach to life is intellectual. They think about and about everything, but never become a witness of any experience – particularly the experience of their inner thought processes.
Shantideva, if you really want to get rid of the ego, you will have to go so deep into your meditations that you can create a distance between you and your mind. Immediately you will see the phoniness of your ego, and the moment you have seen it, it is dropped. Not that you can drop it – but your seeing it, your understanding it, your witnessing it… and it drops on its own accord.
Little Elmer was in the toy section of the huge department store checking out the latest electronic kids' toys. Over the loudspeaker came an announcement, "Ms. Ethel Evan is missing her son Elmer Evan. Will little Elmer please come to the manager's office immediately."
Little Elmer was visibly depressed. "Damn it," he grumbled, "I am lost again."
But in fact everybody is lost -- lost because you don't know who you are, lost because you have not encountered your being, lost because you are not a real, integrated individual but only a phony personality.
An Englishman was marooned on a desert island where he was looked after by a beautiful native girl. On the first night she gave him the most exotic drinks. On the second night she fed him the most delicious food imaginable. On the third night she said to him, "Would you like to play games with me now?"
"Don't tell me," replied the passionately excited Englishman, "that you have got a football here as well!"
An Englishman is just an Englishman....
Everybody has grown a certain ego, and the ego goes on dominating you in every sphere of life. It dictates to you the style in which you should live. It dictates to you what is right and what is wrong. And if you look deeply, the day you will be able to see your ego as a false entity you are bound to feel so sorry for yourself that you have been dictated to by a false entity your whole life. Now you will be able to see that whatever you have been told is right is nothing but nourishment for the ego, and whatever you have been told is wrong is nothing but deprivation of nourishment to the ego.
All your right and wrong, all your moral and immoral acts, all your good and evil can be demarcated with a single thing, a definition perhaps you may never have thought about. All that fulfills your ego is moral, virtuous, spiritual, religious, and all that goes against your ego is a sinner's life, a criminal way of living, immoral, unspiritual, condemnable. All the honor is for the person who is not fulfilling the demands of the ego.
Once you become a witness, you can see this subtle strategy, this whole psychology of destroying you and keeping you away from yourself and the very center of existence.
Your ego is your hell, your ego is your misery, your ego is the cancer of your soul. The only way out of it is to become a witness of your mind processes.
- Osho, “Satyam Shivam Sundram, #12, Q1”