Rajneesh Quotes About Ego
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If your ego is hurt you may become angry. Understand that ego itself is a disease. Dissolve your ego as far as possible. If you have inferiority complex, or have a very deficient ego you will loose your temper very easily.
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Forget the dancer, the center of the ego; become the dance. That is meditation.
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It is one of the greatest problems. It will appear very paradoxical, but this is true - before you can lose your ego, you must attain it. Only a ripe fruit falls to the ground. Ripeness is all. An unripe ego cannot be thrown, cannot be destroyed. And if you struggle with an unripe ego to destroy and dissolve it, the whole effort is going to be a failure. Rather than destroying it, you will find it more strengthened, in new and subtle ways.
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As the ego becomes strong it starts surrounding intelligence like a thick layer of darkness. Intelligence is light, ego is darkness. Intelligence is very delicate, ego is very hard. Intelligence is like a roseflower, ego is like a rock. And if you want to survive, they say - the so-called knowers - then you have to become rock-like, you have to be strong, invulnerable. You have to become a citadel, a closed citadel, so you cannot be attacked from outside. You have to become impenetrable.
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Love and ego cannot go together. Knowledge and ego go together perfectly well, but love and ego cannot go together, not at all. They cannot keep company. They are like darkness and light: if light is there darkness cannot be. Darkness can only be if light is not there. If love is not there the ego can be; if love is there the ego cannot be. And vice versa, if ego is dropped, love arrives from all the directions. It simply starts pouring in you from everywhere.
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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.
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The ego is an island in the ocean of Hell. You want to get rid of the Hell but you don't want to get rid of that island. Then there is trouble.
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The ego is like too many dark clouds around the sun - the sun gets lost
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This is something basic to be understood - the ego must come to a peak, it must be strong, it must have attained an integrity - only then can you dissolve it. A weak ego cannot be dissolved. And this becomes a problem.
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Die! Die to the ego, die to your past, and you will be resurrected. That resurrection will make you go beyond death, beyond time, beyond misery.
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Love can make a great celebration out of your life - but only love, not lust, not ego, not possessiveness, not jealousy, not dependence.
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The ego can exist only with goals, ambitions, desires.
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Misery makes you special. Misery makes you more egoistic. A miserable man can have a more concentrated ego than a happy man. A happy man really cannot have the ego, because a person becomes happy only when there is no ego. The more egoless, the more happy; the more happy, the more egoless. You dissolve into happiness. You cannot exist together with happiness; you exist only when there is misery. In happiness there is dissolution.
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Love makes you empty - empty of jealousy, empty of power trips, empty of anger, empty of competitiveness, empty of your ego and all its garbage. But love also makes you full of things which are unknown to you right now; it makes you full of fragrance, full of light, full of joy.
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Happiness is the death of the ego. If you want to remain a separate entity from existence as almost everybody is trying to do, you will be afraid of being blissful, cheerful. You will feel guilty in being blissful. You will feel suicidal because you are committing suicide on the psychological level, on the level of the ego.
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When your ego is no more, only then will you know who you are.
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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.
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This is going to be a hard task for you, first to attain and then to lose - because you can lose only something which you possess. If you don't possess it, how can you lose it?
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Each moment life is new and you have to respond from your inner newness, you have to be available to the new as the new. And you have to respond, not out of your knowledge, but out of your present awareness. Only then life works, otherwise life stops working. If your life is not working, remember, it is the ego that is hindering, the mechanical has encroached upon the organic. To be free from the mechanical is to be in God, because it is to be in the organic unity of existence.
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That is again the same story played on a more subtle level. That's what the religious people have been doing down the ages - pious egoists they have been. They have made their ego even more decorated; it has taken the color of religion and holiness. Your ego is better than the ego of a saint; your ego is better, far better - because your ego is very gross, and the gross ego can be understood and dropped more easily than the subtle. The subtle ego goes on playing such games that it is very difficult. One will need absolute awareness to watch it.
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If you are going towards the easy, the ego starts dying. And when there is no ego left, you have arrived to your reality - the right, the truth. And truth and right have to be natural. Easy means natural; you can find them without any effort. Easy is right means natural is right, effortlessness is right, egolessness is right.
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The ego does not, cannot live in the present, because the present is real and the ego is false - they never meet.
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"When you accept your life - when you take your breakfast, and when you sleep and when you walk and when you take your bath - how can you create an ego out of these things? Sleeping when feeling sleepy, eating when feeling hungry, how can you create your ego? No, if you fast, you can create ego. If you are on a vigilance for the whole night, and you say, "I am not going to sleep," you can create the ego. By the morning, the person who has slept well will have no ego, you will have a great ego."
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"The ego is created by the rift. When you are fighting, the ego comes in; when you are not fighting, the ego cannot come in. Ego is a tension. If you want the ego, then divide yourself as fully as possible - become two persons. That is what is happening to many people, that is what has happened to whole of humanity. Everybody has become two persons: one voice says "Do this," the other voice says "Don't do that" - then the ego arises. Out of friction ego arises, and ego is very intoxicating; it makes you unconscious. This is the whole mechanism."
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Looking at a sunset, just for a second you forget your separateness: you are the sunset. That is the moment when you feel the beauty of it. But the moment you say that it is a beautiful sunset, you are no longer feeling it; you have come back to your separate, enclosed entity of the ego. Now the mind is speaking. And this is one of the mysteries, that the mind can speak, and knows nothing; and the heart knows everything, and cannot speak.
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You cannot possess all and everything. Whatsoever you possess will not give you contentment. The mind, the ego, will always feel unfulfilled.
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"It almost always happens that people enjoy a few moments and then afterwards feel very guilty. The guilt arises because of the ego. The ego starts torturing them, "What are you doing? Have you decided to kill me? And I am your only treasure. Killing me? You will be destroyed. Killing me is destroying yourself."
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Meditation is the art of dying. Then your ego will be shocked. And it is also truer to cal I it the art of dying, because you r ego is not going to grow, your ego is going to die in meditation.
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Always make a note of what you are doing and where it leads. By and by, you will become aware of that which is ego and that which is nature; which is real and which is false. It will take time and alertness, observation. And don't deceive yourself - because only ego leads to misery, nothing else. Don't throw the responsibility on the other; the other is irrelevant. Your ego leads to misery, nobody else leads you into misery. Ego is the gate of hell, and the natural, the authentic, the real that comes from your center, is the door to heaven. You will have to find it and work it out.
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In the West the whole Western tradition of religion and psychology propounds, preaches, persuades people to have strong egos - because unless you have a strong ego, how can you survive? Life is a struggle; if you are egoless you will be destroyed. Then who will resist? Who will fight? Who will compete? And life is a continuous competition. Western psychology says: Attain to the ego, be strong in it.
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