Osho Quotes on Ego – Ego exists in fight

Osho Quotes on Ego

1. Sometimes the ego is such that people confess sins they never committed. The ego is such that if you start confessing, you may become so involved in it that you may start confessing sins you never committed. To be a greater sinner is so ego-filling — the greater the sinner, the greater will be the forgiveness of the divine.
2. To be close to a master is death, your ego will have to go. The ego thinks, starts thinking, “I must escape before something happens; before I am lost, I must escape.”  The ego will continuously tell you to escape. The ego will find rationalizations; it will find faults in me just to help you escape; it will convince you in every way that this is the wrong man. Love is deathlike, and no love is as deathlike as loving a master.
3. When your ego is no more, only then will you know who you are.
4. The ego plans and whatsoever it plans will miss reality. Reality can only be encountered spontaneously; if you think about it beforehand you may be ready but you will miss. A ready person will miss; this is the contradiction. A person who is not ready, who has not planned anything, who acts spontaneously, reaches the very heart of reality.
5. The only miracle, the impossible miracle, is to be just ordinary. The longing of the mind is to be extraordinary. The ego thirsts and hungers for the recognition that you are somebody. Somebody achieves that dream through wealth, somebody else achieves that dream through power, politics, somebody else can achieve that dream through miracles, jugglery, but the dream remains the same: I cannot tolerate being nobody.
6. People come to me and ask how to drop the ego. I tell them, Who will drop it? If you try to drop it you will be the ego, and someday you will claim that you have dropped the ego. And who is this claimer, who is claiming it? This is the ego, and the most subtle ego always tries to pretend egolessness.
7. Why do soldiers feel so happy fighting? Fighting is not such a beautiful thing, war is just ugly, but why do soldiers feel so happy fighting? If you have once been to a war you will never be happy again in peace because the ego comes to such a peak fighting. Why, in competition, do you feel so happy? It is because something, your ego, arises; fighting, you become stronger. But fighting with another is never so ego-fulfilling because you may be defeated —  the possibility is there —  but fighting with yourself you cannot be defeated. You are always going to be the winner, “There is nobody else except you. Fighting with another there is fear, the fear of being a failure; fighting with yourself there is no fear, you are alone. You are going to win today or tomorrow, but finally you will win because there is nobody else. The ascetic is fighting with himself; the soldier is fighting with others; the businessman, fighting with others; the monk, fighting with himself. The monk and the ascetic are more cunning, they have chosen a path where victory is inevitable. You are not so calculating, your path is hazardous. You may be a success, you may be a failure, and your success can turn into a failure any moment because there are so many fighters around you, and you are such a small, tiny existence — you can be destroyed.
8. Mahavira and Buddha both insisted on nonviolence. The basic reason for not fighting is that once you stop fighting the ego cannot exist. Ego exists in fight; it is a consequence of fight. The more you fight the more ego exists. If you alone remained on the earth, nobody to fight with, would you have an ego? You would not have an ego. The other is needed to create it; the other is a must. Ego is a relationship, it is not in you.  Remember, the ego is not in you, it is not located within you. It is always located within you and the other — somewhere in between, where fight exists.
9. Ego is nothing but the center of all the non-essential possessions that you have. Ego is nothing but the accumulated ‘my’ and ‘mine’ — my house, my car, my prestige, my religion, my scripture, my character, my morality, my family, my heritage, my tradition. All these ‘my’s’, all these ‘mines’, go on getting accumulated: they become crystallized as the ego.
10. Consciousness has no idea of ‘I’, of ego. It has no idea of one’s separation from existence. It does not know any barrier, it knows no boundaries. It is one with existence; it is in a deep at-onement. There is no conflict between the individual and the Whole. One is simply flowing into the Whole, and the Whole is flowing into one. It is like breathing: you breathe in, you breathe out — when you breathe in the Whole enters you, when you breathe out you enter the Whole. It is a constant flow, a constant sharing. The Whole goes on giving to you, and you go on giving to the Whole. The balance is never lost.
11. The ego is always an effort to go upstream. People don’t like to do easy things. Before they want to do them, they want to make them hard, difficult. People enjoy doing hard things. Why? Because when you face a hard thing, your ego becomes subtle, sharp; there is a challenge.
12. You watch your own life: many things you are doing only because of the ego. You want to make a big house. You may be perfectly comfortable in your house as it is, but you want to make a big palace. That big palace is not for you, that big palace is for the ego. You may be perfectly comfortable as you are, but you go on accumulating money. That money is not for you; that money is for the ego. How can you rest unless you have become the richest man in the world? — but what are you going to do by becoming the richest man in the world? You will become more and more miserable — because misery comes out of conflict. Misery is an indication that you are in conflict. So don’t throw your responsibility on something else.