Osho – One can get bliss only if one deserves it, if one is worthy. and the way to deserve it is to disappear, not to be. To be is a hindrance.

The ego is the root of all misery. When the ego is not, from every nook and corner of existence bliss starts reaching you as if it were just waiting for the ego to disappear. Ego is a closed state of consciousness: all window, doors, are closed. You are living almost insulated, encapsulated; ego surrounds you like a capsule. Ego is like the egg: there is not even a small window to allow anything to enter. Ego is very much afraid; out of fear it closes itself, it shrinks into itself. That is how we create misery. Bliss is to be in the flow with existence, to be totally with it.

Ego is like frozen ice and egolessness is melted ice. Then you become part of the ocean. Then you don’t have any private goal, you have no destination. Then each moment is so blissful, so incredibly ecstatic, that the mind cannot comprehend it, cannot conceive it. Mind is part of the ego. It knows how to close, it does not know how to open up.

To be a sannyasin means that now your whole effort will be to open up to existence — to the flowers and to the bees and to the stars; how to open to this beautiful music that fills the whole of existence; how to open to this beautiful music that fills the whole of existence; how to open up to this celebration that goes on and on — flowers dancing in the wind and trees enjoying the wind and the stars, always in a state of bliss. Except for man everything is in harmony. Man falls out harmony because he has consciousness.

Consciousness can do two things: it can create ego, it can create egolessness. If it creates ego you live in hell, if it creates egolessness you are in paradise. The whole world is in paradise without knowing it. When man enter paradise he will be entering with full knowing. That is the grandeur, the beauty of man — and that is the danger also, because out of thousands of people only once in a while does a person enter; others simply go on falling into the trap of the ego. Be egoless and all the grace of God is yours. Bliss is by the grace of god.

Source: Osho Book “Scriptures in Silence and Sermons in Stones”

Osho Quotes on Ego

1. Whenever you are now and here there is no ego to be found. You are a pure silence.
2. Mind is desiring. And when there is no mind how can there be an ego? Ego is the center of the false mind.
3. 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.
4. To be separate as an ego is the base of all misery; to be one, to be flowing, with whatsoever life brings to you, to be in it so intensely, so totally, that you are no more, you are lost, then everything is blissful.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. On the moon, we have left behind flags. Man is busy desiring to find something which only he can do so that his ego acquires importance. But if you were born on Everest then you would be in great difficulty as to where to hoist the flag.
8. The ego stands for all your conditioning and heritage. But the ego cannot give you any nourishment and the ego cannot give you those tears of joy and gratitude; the ego can give you only misery, anguish, tension.
9. In the death of the ego love is born, God is born, light is born. In the death of the ego you are transformed; all misery disappears as if it had never existed. Your life right now is a nightmare. When the ego dies nightmares disappear and a great sweetness arises in your being, and a subtle joy, for no reason at all. You cannot explain it to anybody, you cannot explain it to yourself either. It is unexplainable, mysterious. But who cares for the explanation? When you are bathed, when you are in rejoicing, when the being is in a dance, who cares?
10. The ego only gives you goals, but whenever those goals arrive, it does not allow you to celebrate. One becomes more and more miserable! As life passes, we go on gathering misery, we go on piling up misery. And it is very difficult to realize this — that you are causing your own misery; that is against the ego. So you throw the responsibility on others.
11. Start looking for the ego, not in others, that is not your business, but in yourself. Whenever you feel miserable, immediately close your eyes and try to find out from where the misery is coming and you will always find it is the false center which has clashed with someone. You expected something, and it didn’t happen. You expected something, and just the contrary happened — your ego is shaken, you are in misery. Just look, whenever you are miserable, try to find out why.
12. The goal is part of the desiring mind and bliss is a state of no-mind. Desiring is a barrier: non-desiring is the bridge. And all goals are egoistic because they are ambitions. Ambitions are shadows of the ego, and wherever ego is bliss is not. When the ego completely disappears, when not even a trace is left behind, bliss is found. Even to say that it is found is not exactly right, because it is our nature; we don’t find it because we have never lost it in the first place. We have only become oblivious to it, we have become unconscious about it. We have gone into a deep sleep and we are dreaming all kinds of things. Because of our dreaming and sleep and unconsciousness, the bliss remains unexperienced. Otherwise it surrounds you.
13. The ego exists between the mind and the body. It is a false creation. The self exists not between body and mind, but beyond mind. And to reach to the self you have to learn the ways how the mind can be silenced, so its constant chattering is not there. Because the real self is absolute silence.
14. Stop your mind and the circle of thought disappears. Suddenly only your being is there and the circle is no more there. That circle is the ego.
15. Mind is such a thing; it turns everything into a possession, because the ego can exist only if it possesses. And ego is the barrier. Ego is the water in which only reflections can be caught, the real can never be known.

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.