82. Feel: my thought, i-ness, internal organs — me.
83. Before desire and before knowing, how can i say i am? consider. dissolve in the beauty.
Once a visitor asked many people in a small town about the mayor: `What type of man is your mayor?’
Said the priest, `He is no good.’
Said the filling-station attendant, `He is a bum.’
And said the barber, `I never in my life voted for that rascal.’
Then the visitor met the mayor, a much maligned man, and the visitor asked, `What pay are you getting for your job?’
Said the mayor, `My goodness, I am not getting any pay for it. I have accepted this job just for the honor of it!’
This is the situation of the ego — only YOU think about your ego, no one else. Only you think that your ego is enthroned; for everyone else it is not so. No one agrees with your ego except you; everyone else is against it. But you go on living in a dream, in a delusion. You create your own image. You feel that image, you protect that image, and you think the whole world exists for it. This is a delirium, a madness. This is not reality.
The world is not existing for you. No one is concerned with your ego; no one at all. Whether you are or you are not, it makes no difference. You are just a wave. The wave comes and goes; the ocean is not worried about it. But you think yourself very important.
Those who want to dissolve the ego have first to recognize this fact. And unless you can put aside your egoistic structure, you will not be able to see the reality, because whatsoever you see, whatsoever you perceive, your ego distorts it. It tries to manipulate everything for itself. And nothing is for it, because reality cannot help anything which is false. Remember that.
Reality cannot support anything which is not, and your ego is the most impossible thing, the greatest falsity. It is not there; it is your creation, your imaginative creation. The reality cannot help it. The reality is always shattering it, always destroying it. Whenever your ego comes in contact with reality, the reality proves shocking. Just to defend yourself against these shocks which are always coming, continuously coming to destroy your ego, by and by you avoid seeing reality.
Rather than lose your ego, you try to avoid seeing the reality. And then around your ego you create a false world which you think is the reality. Then you live in your own world. You are not in contact with the real world, you cannot be, because you are afraid. You are living in a glasshouse of the ego. The fear is there: whenever the reality comes in contact, your ego may be destroyed, so it is better not to come in contact with the reality. We go on escaping from reality just to protect, to defend, this impossible ego.
Why do I call it impossible? Why do I say it is false? Try to understand this. The reality is one: the reality exists as a whole, as a totality. You cannot exist alone, or can you? If the trees are not existing you will not be able to exist, because they are producing oxygen for you. If the air disappears you will simply die, because that air is giving you vitality, life. If the sun goes out you will be no more here, because thew warmth, the rays, they are your life.
Life exists as a cosmic totality. You are not alone, and you cannot exist alone. You exist in a world. You exist not as an atomic, separate, isolated existence; you exist in the cosmic whole as a wave. You are interrelated. And the ego gives you the feeling that you are individual, alone, separate, isolated. The ego gives you the feeling that you are in island — you are not. That’s why the ego is false. It is unreal, and the reality cannot support it.
So there are only two ways. If you come in contact with reality, if you become open to it, your ego will dissolve. Or, you have to create your own dream-world, and then live in it. And you have created that world. Everyone is living in his own dream.
People come to me and I look at them, and I see that they are fast asleep, dreaming. Their problems are out of their dreams, and they want to solve them. They cannot be solved because they are not real. How can you solve an unreal problem? If it exists, it can be solved — but it is nowhere; it cannot be solved. An unreal problem — how can it be solved? It can be solved only by an unreal answer. But that unreal answer will create other problems which again will be unreal. And then you fall ad nauseum; there is no end to it.
If you want to come to meet reality…. And to meet reality is to meet God. God is not something hidden somewhere in the sky; it is the reality around you. God is not hidden; you are hidden in an unreality. God is the nearest immediate presence, but you are hidden in a capsule of your own unreal world and you go on protecting it — and the center of it is the ego.
The ego is unreal, because you are not isolated; you are one with reality. You exist as an organic part of it. You cannot be separated from it. If separated, not even for a single moment can you be alive. Every breath, and you are bridged with the cosmos; every moment you are moving in and out, meeting the real and coming back.
You are a pulsation, not a dead entity, and that pulsation exists in a deep harmony with the real. But you have forgotten that pulsation. You have created a dead ego, a concept — I AM — and this I AM is always against the whole: defending itself, struggling, in conflict, in war. Hence the emphasis of all religions to dissolve the ego.
The first thing: it is unreal; that’s why it can be dissolved. Nothing real can be dissolved. How can you dissolve it? If something is real, it cannot be destroyed; it will remain. And it will remain whatsoever you do. Only unreal things can be dissolved. They can disappear, they can simply evaporate into nowhere, into nothingness. Your ego can dissolve because it is unreal. It is just a thought, a notion; it has no substance to it.
Secondly: you cannot even carry this ego continuously for twenty-four hours. It is so unreal that you have to constantly fuel it, feed it. While you are asleep, the ego is not there. That’s why in the morning you feel so fresh, because you have been in a deep contact with reality. The reality has rejuvenated you, revitalized you.
In deep sleep, your ego is not. Your name, your form, all have dissolved. You don’t know who you are — educated or uneducated, poor or rich, a sinner or a saint — you don’t know. In deep sleep you have fallen back to the cosmic whole; the ego is not there. In the morning you feel vitalized, fresh, young. Energy has come to you from some deep source. You are again alive. But if in the night there are dreams and dreams and dreams, in the morning you feel tired because in the dreams the ego persists. In the dreams the ego persists, it is there, so it is not allowing you to fall into the original source. You will feel tired in the morning.
In deep sleep, the ego is not. When you are in deep love, the ego is not. When you are relaxed, silent, the ego is not. When you are absorbed in something so totally that you have forgotten, the ego is not. Listening to music, you have forgotten that you are — the ego is not. And really, the peace that comes to you is not coming through music; it is coming because you have forgotten the ego. The music is instrumental.
Looking at a beautiful sunrise or sunset, you forget yourself. Then suddenly you feel that something has happened to you. You are not there; something greater than you is there. This presence of the great… Jesus calls it God — that word is just symbolic. Mohammed calls it God — that word is just symbolic. `God’ means greater than you — a moment when you feel that something greater than you is happening to you. And you can feel this only when you are not. While you are there, the greater cannot happen to you, because you are the barrier.
In any moment, if you are absent, the God is present there. Your absence is the presence of the divine. Remember it always: your absence is the presence of the divine; your presence is the absence of the divine. So really the question is not how to reach God, the question is not how to attain God; the question is how to be absent.
You need not worry about the divine, you can forget it completely. There is no need to remember even the word god. It is irrelevant, because the basic thing is not God, the basic thing is your ego. If it is not there, God happens to you. And if you try, if you make effort to reach God, to attain God, or to be liberated, you may miss, because this whole effort may be ego-centered.
That’s the problem for the spiritual seeker. It may be just the ego which is thinking to attain God. You cannot be satisfied by your worldly successes. You have achieved; in the outer world you have reached a certain status, position, prestige. You are powerful, you are rich, knowledgeable, respected, but your ego is not satisfied. The ego is never satisfied. And the reason? — the same. A real hunger can be satisfied. The hunger of the ego is false; it cannot be satisfied. Whatsoever you do will be futile. Because the hunger is false, no food can satisfy it. If the hunger is real, it can be satisfied.
All natural hungers can be satisfied — it is nothing, not a problem at all — but unnatural hungers cannot be satisfied. In the first place they are not hungers — how can you satisfy them? And they are unreal; just emptiness exists there. You go on throwing food, and you are throwing food into an abyss, a bottomless abyss. You will not reach anywhere. The ego cannot be satisfied.
I have heard that when Alexander was coming to India someone said to him, `Have you ever meditated upon the fact that there is only one world, and if you win it then what will you do?’
And it is reported that upon hearing this Alexander became very sad and he said, `I have not thought about it, but it makes me very very sad. Really, there is only one world and I am going to win it. And when I have won it, what am I going to do then?’
Even this whole world will not quench your thirst, because the thirst is false, unreal. The hunger is not natural.
The ego can go in search of God. In almost ninety-nine cases out of a hundred this has been my feeling — that the ego is in search. And then the search is bound to be doomed from the very beginning, because the ego cannot meet the divine, and the ego is making every effort to reach it. Remember well, your meditation, your prayer, your worship, should not be an ego-trip. If it is, you are unnecessarily wasting your energy. So be perfectly aware.
And this is only a question of awareness. If you are aware, you can find out how your ego moves and works. It is not difficult; no particular training is needed. You can close your eyes and you can see what the search is. You can ask the question whether you are really seeking the divine, or whether it is again just an ego-trip — because it is respectable, because people think you are religious, because deep down you think, `How can I be satisfied — I — unless I possess God?’
Is God going to be your possession? The Upanishads say that one who says that he has achieved God, has not achieved, because the very assertion that `I have achieved God’, is an ego-assertion. The Upanishads say that one who claims that he has known, has not known. The very claim shows that he has not known, because the claim that `I have known’, comes from the ego. And the ego cannot know. The ego is the only barrier.
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