The ego

There are only two difficulties on the path of meditation: one is the ego. You are continuously prepared by the society, by the family, by the school, by the church, by everybody around you, to be egoistic. Even modern psychology is based on strengthening the ego. The whole idea of modern psychology, modern education, is that unless a person has a very strong ego he will not be able to struggle in life where there is so much competition that, if you are a humble man, anybody will push you aside; you will always remain backward. You need a very steely, strong ego to fight in this competitive world; then only can you become a success. In any field —it may be business, it may be politics, it may be any profession—you need a very assertive personality, and our whole society is geared to produce the assertive personality in the child. From the very beginning we start telling him, “Come first in your class”; when the child does come first in the class, everybody. praises him. What are you doing? You are feeding his ego from the very beginning. You are giving him a certain ambition: “You can become the president of the country, you can become the prime minister of the country.” He starts the journey with these ideas, and his ego goes on becoming bigger and bigger as he succeeds. In every way the ego is the greatest disease that can happen to man. If you succeed, your ego becomes big—that is a danger, because then you will have to remove a big rock which is blocking the path. Or if the ego is small, you have not been successful, you have proved to be a failure, then your ego will become a wound. Then it hurts, then it creates an inferiority complex—then too it creates a problem. You are always afraid to enter into anything, even meditation, because you know you are a failure, that you are going to fail—that has become your mind. Everywhere you have failed, and meditation is such a great thing… you cannot succeed. If you enter into meditation with this idea—that failure is bound to be, that it is your destiny, that it is your fate—then of course you cannot succeed. So if the ego is big it prevents you. And if the ego is very small it becomes a wound which also prevents you. In each case the ego is one of the problems. § In the mother’s womb each child is profoundly blissful. Of course he is unaware of it, not knowing anything about it. He is so one with his bliss that there is no knower left behind. Blissfulness is his being, and there is no distinction between the knower and the known. So of course the child is not aware that he is blissful. You become aware only when you have lost something. It is so. It is very difficult to know something without losing it, because when you have not lost it you are so totally one with it. There is no distance: the observer and the observed are one; the known and the knower are one. Every child is in a profoundly blissful state. Psychologists also agree with this. They say that the whole search of religion is nothing but a way to again find the womb of the mother. They use it as a criticism of religion, but to me it is not criticism at all. It is simply true. Yes, the search for religion is again a search for the womb. The search for religion is again a search to make this whole existence a womb. The child is absolutely in tune with the mother. The child is never out of tune with the mother. The child does not know that he is separate from the mother. If the mother is healthy the child is healthy; if the mother is ill the child is ill. If the mother is sad the child is sad; if the mother is happy the child is happy. If the mother is dancing the child is dancing; if the mother is sitting silently the child is silent. The child has no boundaries of his own yet. This is the purest bliss, but it has to be lost. The child is born, and suddenly he is thrown off-center. Suddenly he is uprooted from the earth, from the mother. He loses his moorings and he does not know who he is. There was no need to know it when he was with the mother. There was no need to know—he was all, and there was no need to know, there was no distinction. There was no ‘you’, so there was no question of ‘I.’ The reality was undivided. It was adwaita—pure adwaita, pure non-duality. But once the child is born, the umbilical cord is cut and he starts breathing on his own; suddenly his whole being becomes a quest to know who he is. It is natural. Now he starts becoming aware of his boundaries—his body, his needs. Sometimes he is happy, sometimes unhappy; sometimes he is fulfilled, sometimes not fulfilled; sometimes he is hungry and crying and there is no sign of mother anywhere; sometimes he is on the mother’s breast, again enjoying oneness with the mother. But now there are many moods and many climates, and he will start, by and by, to feel the separation. A divorce has happened; the marriage is broken. He was absolutely married to the mother; now he will always be separate. And he has to find out who he is. For the whole life one goes on trying to find out who one is. This is the most fundamental question. First the child becomes aware of ‘mine’, then of ‘me’, then of ‘you’, then of ‘I.’ This is how it proceeds. This is precisely the procedure, exactly in this order. First he becomes aware of ‘mine.’ Watch it, because this is your construction, the structure of your ego. First the child becomes aware of ‘mine’—this toy is mine, this mother is mine. He starts possessing. The possessor enters first; possessiveness is very basic. Hence all the religions say: become non-possessive, because with possession hell starts. Watch small children: very jealous, possessive, each child trying to snatch everything from everybody else and trying to protect his own toys. And you will see children who are very violent, almost indifferent to others’ needs. If a child is playing with his toy and another child comes you can see an Adolf Hitler, a Genghis Khan, a Nadirshah. He will cling to his toy; he is ready to hit, he is
ready to fight. It is a question of territory, a question of domination. Possessiveness enters first; that is the basic poison. And the child starts saying, “This is mine.” Once the ‘mine’ enters, then you are a competitor with everybody. Once the ‘mine’ enters, your life will now be a life of competition, struggle, conflict, violence, aggression. The next step after ‘mine’ is ‘me.’ When you have something to claim as yours, suddenly through that claim arises the idea that now you are the center of your possessions. The possessions become your territory, and through those possessions arises a new idea: ‘me.’ Once you are settled with ‘me’, you can see clearly that you have a boundary, and those who are outside the boundary are ‘you.’ The other becomes clear; now things start falling apart. The universe is one, it is a unity. Nothing is divided. Everything is connected with everything else; it is a tremendous connectedness. You are connected with the earth, you are connected with the trees, you are connected with the stars; stars are connected with you, stars are connected with the trees, with the rivers, with the mountains. Everything is interconnected. Nothing is separate; nothing can be separate. Separation is not possible. Each moment you are breathing—you breathe in, you breathe out— continuously there is a bridge with existence. You eat, existence enters into you; you defecate, it becomes manure—the apple on the tree will become part of your body tomorrow, and some part of your body will go and become manure, will become food for the tree…a continuous give-and-take. Not for a single moment does it stop. When it stops, you are dead. What is death?—separation is death. To be in unity is to be alive, to be out of unity is to be dead. So the more you think, “I am separate,” the less sensitive you will be, more dead, dragging, dull. The more you feel you are connected, the more this whole existence is part of you and you are part of this whole existence. Once you understand that we are members of each other, then suddenly the vision changes. Then these trees are not alien; they are continuously preparing food for you. When you breathe in, you take oxygen in, when you breathe out, you give carbon dioxide; the trees breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen—there is a continuous communion. We are in tune. The reality is a unity, and with the idea of ‘me’, ‘you’, we are falling out of reality. And once a wrong conception settles inside, your whole vision becomes upside down…. ‘Me’, then ‘you’, and then as a reflection arises ‘I.’ ‘I’ is the subtlest, the most crystallized form of the possessiveness. Once you have uttered ‘I’, you have committed sacrilege. Once you have said ‘I’, you are broken completely from existence—not really broken, otherwise you would die; but in your ideas you are completely broken from reality. Now you will be in a continuous fight with reality. You will be fighting your own roots. You will be fighting with yourself. That’s why Buddha says: “Be a driftwood.” You can be a driftwood only if you have dropped the idea of ‘I’—otherwise you cannot be a driftwood; struggle will persist. That’s why it becomes so difficult when you come to meditate. If I say to just sit silently, you cannot do that—such a simple thing. One would think it is the most simple thing; there should be no need to teach it. One should simply sit and be. But you cannot sit because the ‘I’ cannot allow you a moment of relaxation. Once a moment of relaxation is allowed, you will be able to see reality. Once reality is known, the ‘I’ will have to be dropped. Then it cannot persist. So the ‘I’ never even allows you a holiday. Even if you go to the hills, to the summer resorts, the ‘I’ never allows you a holiday even there. You take your radio, you take your TV set; you take all your problems and you remain occupied. You had gone there to relax, but you continue your whole pattern in the same way. You don’t relax. The ‘I’ cannot relax. It exists through tensions. It will create new tensions, it will create new worries; it will constantly manufacture new problems, it won’t allow you any rest. Even a minute’s rest and the whole house of the ‘I’ starts toppling down—because the reality is so beautiful and the ‘I’ is so ugly. One continues to fight his way unnecessarily. You are fighting for things which are going to happen of their own accord. You are unnecessarily fighting. You are desiring things which are going to be yours if you don’t desire. In fact, by desiring you will lose them. That’s why Buddha says: “Float with the stream. Let it take you to the ocean.” ‘Mine’, ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘I’—this is the trap. And this trap creates misery, neurosis, madness. Now the problem is: the child has to go through it, because he does not know who he is and he needs some sort of identity—maybe a false identity, but it is better than no identity. He needs some identity. He needs to know exactly who he is, so a false center is created. The ‘I’ is not your real center. It is a false center—utilitarian, make-believe, just manufactured by you. It has nothing to do with your real center. Your real center is the center of all. Your real self is the self of all. At the center, the whole existence is one—just as at the source of light, the sun, all rays are one. The farther away they go, the farther away they are from each other. Your real center is not only your center, it is the center of the whole. But we have created small centers of our own, homemade, manufactured by ourselves. There is a need…because the child is born without any boundary, with no idea of who he is. It is a survival necessity. How will he survive? He has to be given a name; he has to be given an idea of who he is. Of course this idea comes from the outside: somebody says you are beautiful, somebody says you are intelligent, somebody says you are so vital. You gather the things that people say. Out of all that people say about you, you gather a certain image. You never look into yourself, at who you are. This image is going to be false—because nobody else can know who you are, and nobody else can say who you are. Your inner reality is not available to anybody else except you. Your inner reality is impenetrable to anybody else except you. Only you can be there. The day you realize that your identity is false, put together, that you have collected opinions from people…sometime just think; just sit silently and think who you are. Many ideas will arise. Just go on watching from where they come and you will be able to find the source. Some things come from your mother— much, about eighty to ninety percent. Something comes from your father, something comes from your schoolteachers, something comes from your friends, something from the society. Just watch: you will be able to divide from where it comes. Nothing comes from you, not even one percent comes from you. What type of identity is this, in which you have not contributed at all? And you are the only one who could have contributed, in fact, the whole hundred per cent.  The day you understand this, meditation becomes important. The day you realize this you start seeking for some technique, some method to enter into your being; how to know exactly, really, existentially, who you are. No more collections of images from the outside, no more asking others to mirror your reality—but to face it directly, immediately; to enter into your nature, to feel it there. What is the need to ask anybody? And whom are you asking? They are as ignorant about themselves as you are about yourself. They don’t know themselves; how can they know you?
Just see how things are functioning, how things go on functioning, how things go on happening: one falsity leads to another falsity. You are almost swindled, duped. You are conned, and those who have swindled you may not have done it knowingly. They may have been swindled by others. Your father, your mother, your teachers, have been duped by others—their fathers, their mothers, their teachers. And they have duped you in turn. Are you going to do the same to your children too? In a better world, where people are more intelligent, more aware, they will teach the child that the idea of identity is false: “It is needed, we are giving it to you, but it is only for the time being, before you yourself discover who you are.”It is not going to be your reality. And the sooner you find out who you are, the better. The sooner you can drop this idea, the better—because from that very moment you will really be born, and you will be really real, authentic. You will become an individual. The ideas that we gather from others give us a personality, and the knowledge that we come to know from within gives us individuality. Personality is false, individuality is real. Personality is borrowed; reality, individuality, your authenticity, can never be borrowed. Nobody can say who you are.  At least one thing can never be done by anybody else—that is, to give you the answer to who you are. No, you have to go, you have to dig deep into your own being. Layers and layers of identity, false identity, have to be broken. There  is fear when one enters into oneself, because chaos comes in. Somehow you have managed with your false identity. You have settled with it. You know your name is this or that; you have certain credentials, certificates, degrees, universities, colleges, prestige, money, heritage. You have certain ways to define yourself. You have a certain definition—howsoever workable, but it works. Going in means dropping this workable definition…there will be chaos. Before you can come to your center, you will have to pass through a very chaotic state. That’s why there is fear. Nobody wants to go in. People go on teaching: “Know thyself”; we listen, but we never listen. We never bother about it. There is a very certain idea in the mind that chaos will be let loose and you will be lost in it, you will be engulfed in it. Because of the fear of that chaos, we go on clinging to anything from the outside. But this is wasting your life.your mind. Everywhere you have failed, and meditation is such a great thing… you cannot succeed. If you enter into meditation with this idea—that failure is bound to be, that it is your destiny, that it is your fate—then of course you cannot succeed. So if theego is big it prevents you. And if the ego is very small it becomes a wound which also prevents you. In each case the ego is one of the problems. § In the mother’s womb each child is profoundly blissful. Of course he is unaware of it, not knowing anything about it. He is so one with his bliss that there is no knower left behind. Blissfulness is his being, and there is no distinction between the knower and the known. So of course the child is not aware that he is blissful. You become aware only when you have lost something. It is so. It is very difficult to know something without losing it, because when you have not lost it you are so totally one with it. There is no distance: the observer and the observed are one; the known and the knower are one. Every child is in a profoundly blissful state. Psychologists also agree with this. They say that the whole search of religion is nothing but a way to again find the womb of the mother. They use it as a criticism of religion, but to me it is not criticism at all. It is simply true. Yes, the search for religion is again a search for the womb. The search for religion is again a search to make this whole existence a womb. The child is absolutely in tune with the mother. The child is never out of tune with the mother. The child does not know that he is separate from the mother. If the mother is healthy the child is healthy; if the mother is ill the child is ill. If the mother is sad the child is sad; if the mother is happy the child is happy. If the mother is dancing the child is dancing; if the mother is sitting silently the child is silent. The child has no boundaries of his own yet. This is the purest bliss, but it has to be lost. The child is born, and suddenly he is thrown off-center. Suddenly he is uprooted from the earth, from the mother. He loses his moorings and he does not know who he is. There was no need to know it when he was with the mother. There was no need to know—he was all, and there was no need to know, there was no distinction. There was no ‘you’, so there was no question of ‘I.’ The reality was undivided. It was adwaita—pure adwaita, pure non-duality. But once the child is born, the umbilical cord is cut and he starts breathing on his own; suddenly his whole being becomes a quest to know who he is. It is natural. Now he starts becoming aware of his boundaries—his body, his needs. Sometimes he is happy, sometimes unhappy; sometimes he is fulfilled, sometimes not fulfilled; sometimes he is hungry and crying and there is no sign of mother anywhere; sometimes he is on the mother’s breast, again enjoying oneness with the mother. But now there are many moods and many climates, and he will start, by and by, to feel the separation. A divorce has happened; the marriage is broken. He was absolutely married to the mother; now he will always be separate. And he has to find out who he is. For the whole life one goes on trying to find out who one is. This is the most fundamental question. First the child becomes aware of ‘mine’, then of ‘me’, then of ‘you’, then of ‘I.’ This is how it proceeds. This is precisely the procedure, exactly in this order. First he becomes aware of ‘mine.’ Watch it, because this is your construction, the structure of your ego. First the child becomes aware of ‘mine’—this toy is mine, this mother is mine. He starts possessing. The possessor enters first; possessiveness is very basic. Hence all the religions say: become non-possessive, because with possession hell starts. Watch small children: very jealous, possessive, each child trying to snatch everything from everybody else and trying to protect his own toys. And you will see children who are very violent, almost indifferent to others’ needs. If a child is playing with his toy and another child comes you can see an Adolf Hitler, a Genghis Khan, a Nadirshah. He will cling to his toy; he is ready to hit, he is
ready to fight. It is a question of territory, a question of domination. Possessiveness enters first; that is the basic poison. And the child starts  saying, “This is mine.” Once the ‘mine’ enters, then you are a competitor with everybody. Once the ‘mine’ enters, your life will now be a life of competition, struggle, conflict, violence, aggression. The next step after ‘mine’ is ‘me.’ When you have something to claim as yours, suddenly through that claim arises the idea that now you are the center of your possessions. The possessions become your territory, and through those possessions arises a new idea: ‘me.’ Once you are settled with ‘me’, you can see clearly that you have a boundary, and those who are outside the boundary are ‘you.’ The other becomes clear; now things start falling apart. The universe is one, it is a unity. Nothing is divided. Everything is connected with everything else; it is a tremendous connectedness. You are connected with the earth, you are connected with the trees, you are connected with the stars; stars are connected with you, stars are connected with the trees, with the rivers, with the mountains. Everything is interconnected. Nothing is separate; nothing can be separate. Separation is not possible. Each moment you are breathing—you breathe in, you breathe out— continuously there is a bridge with existence. You eat, existence enters into you; you defecate, it becomes manure—the apple on the tree will become part of your body tomorrow, and some part of your body will go and become manure, will become food for the tree…a continuous give-and-take. Not for a single momentdoes it stop. When it stops, you are dead. What is death?—separation is death. To be in unity is to be alive, to be out of unity is to be dead. So the more you think, “I am separate,” the less sensitive you will be, more dead, dragging, dull. The more you feel you are connected, the more this whole existence is part of you and you are part of this whole existence. Once you understand that we are members of each other, then suddenly the vision changes. Then these trees are not alien; they are continuously preparing food for you. When you breathe in, you take oxygen in, when you breathe out, you give carbon dioxide; the trees breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen—there is a continuous communion. We are in tune. The reality is a unity, and with the idea of ‘me’, ‘you’, we are falling out of reality. And once a wrong conception settles inside, your whole vision becomes upside down…. ‘Me’, then ‘you’, and then as a reflection arises ‘I.’ ‘I’ is the subtlest, the most crystallized form of the possessiveness. Once you have uttered ‘I’, you have committed sacrilege. Once you have said ‘I’, you are broken completely from existence—not really broken, otherwise you would die; but in your ideas you are completely broken from reality. Now you will be in a continuous fight with reality. You will be fighting your own roots. You will be fighting with yourself. That’s why Buddha says: “Be a driftwood.” You can be a driftwood only if you have dropped the idea of ‘I’—otherwise you cannot be a driftwood; struggle will persist. That’s why it becomes so difficult when you come to meditate. If I say to just sit silently, you cannot do that—such a simple thing. One would think it is the most simple thing; there should be no need to teach it. One should simply sit and be. But you cannot sit because the ‘I’ cannot allow you a moment of relaxation. Once a moment of relaxation is allowed, you will be able to see reality. Once reality is known, the ‘I’ will have to be dropped. Then it cannot persist. So the ‘I’ never even allows you a holiday. Even if you go to the hills, to the summer resorts, the ‘I’ never allows you a holiday even there. You take your radio, you take your TV set; you take all your problems and you remain occupied. You had gone there to relax, but you continue your whole pattern in the same way. You don’t relax. The ‘I’ cannot relax. It exists through tensions. It will create new tensions, it will create new worries; it will constantly manufacture new problems, it won’t allow you any rest. Even a minute’s rest and the whole house of the ‘I’ starts toppling down—because the reality is so beautiful and the ‘I’ is so ugly. One continues to fight his way unnecessarily. You are fighting for things which are going to happen of their own accord. You are unnecessarily fighting. You are desiring things which are going to be yours if you don’t desire. In fact, by desiring you will lose them. That’s why Buddha says: “Float with the stream. Let it take you to the ocean.” ‘Mine’, ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘I’—this is the trap. And this trap creates misery, neurosis, madness. Now the problem is: the child has to go through it, because he does not know who he is and he needs some sort of identity—maybe a false identity, but it is better than no identity. He needs some identity. He needs to know exactly who he is, so a false center is created. The ‘I’ is not your real center. It is a false center—utilitarian, make-believe, just manufactured by you. It has nothing to do with your real center. Your real center is the center of all. Your real self is the self of all. At the center, the whole existence is one—just as at the source of light, the sun, all rays are one. The farther away they go, the farther away they are from each other. Your real center is not only your center, it is the center of the whole. But we have created small centers of our own, homemade, manufactured by ourselves. There is a need…because the child is born without any boundary, with no idea of who he is. It is a survival necessity. How will he survive? He has to be given a name; he has to be given an idea of who he is. Of course this idea comes from the outside: somebody says you are beautiful, somebody says you are intelligent, somebody says you are so vital. You gather the things that people say. Out of all that people say about you, you gather a certain image. You never look into yourself, at who you are. This image is going to be false—because nobody else can know who you are, and nobody else can say who you are. Your inner reality is not available to anybody else except you. Your inner reality is impenetrable to anybody else except you. Only you can be there. The day you realize that your identity is false, put together, that you have collected opinions from people…sometime just think; just sit silently and think who you are. Many ideas will arise. Just go on watching from where they come and you will be able to find the source. Some things come from your mother— much, about eighty to ninety percent. Something comes from your father, something comes from your schoolteachers, something comes from your friends, something from the society. Just watch: you will be able to divide from where it comes. Nothing comes from you, not even one percent comes from you. What type of identity is this, in which you have not contributed at all? And you are the only one who could have contributed, in fact, the whole hundred per cent. The day you understand this, meditation becomes important. The day yourealize this you start seeking for some technique, some method to enter into your being; how to know exactly, really, existentially, who you are. No more collections of images from the outside, no more asking others to mirror your reality—but to face it directly, immediately; to enter into your nature, to feel it there. What is the need to ask anybody? And whom are you asking? They are as ignorant about themselves as you are about yourself. They don’t know themselves; how can they know you? Just see how things are functioning, how things go on functioning, how things go on happening: one falsity leads to another falsity. You are almost swindled, duped. You are conned, and those who have swindled you may not have done it knowingly. They may have been swindled by others. Your father, your mother, your teachers, have been duped by others—their fathers, their mothers, their teachers. And they have duped you in turn. Are you going to do the same to your children too? In a better world, where people are more intelligent, more aware, they will teach the child that the idea of identity is false: “It is needed, we are giving it to you, but it is only for the time being, before you yourself discover who you are.”It is not going to be your reality. And the sooner you find out who you are, the better. The sooner you can drop this idea, the better—because from that very moment you will really be born, and you will be really real, authentic. You will become an individual. The ideas that we gather from others give us a personality, and the knowledge that we come to know from within gives us individuality. Personality is false, individuality is real. Personality is borrowed; reality, individuality, your authenticity, can never be borrowed. Nobody can say who you are. At least one thing can never be done by anybody else—that is, to give you the answer to who you are. No, you have to go, you have to dig deep into your own being. Layers and layers of identity, false identity, have to be broken. There is fear when one enters into oneself, because chaos comes in. Somehow you have managed with your false identity. You have settled with it. You know your name is this or that; you have certain credentials, certificates, degrees, universities, colleges, prestige, money, heritage. You have certain ways to define yourself. You have a certain definition—howsoever workable, but it works. Going in means dropping this workable definition…there will be chaos. Before you can come to your center, you will have to pass through a very chaotic state. That’s why there is fear. Nobody wants to go in. People go on teaching: “Know thyself”; we listen, but we never listen. We never bother aboutit. There is a very certain idea in the mind that chaos will be let loose and you will be lost in it, you will be engulfed in it. Because of the fear of that chaos, we go on clinging to anything from the outside. But this is wasting your life. see children who are very violent, almost indifferent to others’ needs. If a child is playing with his toy and another child comes you can see an Adolf Hitler, a Genghis Khan, a Nadirshah. He will cling to his toy; he is ready to hit, he is ready to fight. It is a question of territory, a question of domination. Possessiveness enters first; that is the basic poison. And the child starts saying, “This is mine.” Once the ‘mine’ enters, then you are a competitor with everybody. Once the ‘mine’ enters, your life will now be a life of competition,
struggle, conflict, violence, aggression. The next step after ‘mine’ is ‘me.’ When you have something to claim as yours, suddenly through that claim arises the idea that now you are the center of your possessions. The possessions become your territory, and through those possessions arises a new idea: ‘me.’ Once you are settled with ‘me’, you can see clearly that you have a boundary, and those who are outside the boundary are ‘you.’ The other becomes clear; now things start falling apart. The universe is one, it is a unity. Nothing is divided. Everything is connected with everything else; it is a tremendous connectedness. You are connected with the earth, you are connected with the trees, you are connected with the stars; stars are connected with you, stars are connected with the trees, with the rivers, with the mountains. Everything is interconnected. Nothing is separate; nothing can be separate. Separation is not possible. Each moment you are breathing—you breathe in, you breathe out— continuously there is a bridge with existence. You eat, existence enters into you; you defecate, it becomes manure—the apple on the tree will become part of your body tomorrow, and some part of your body will go and become manure, will become food for the tree…a continuous give-and-take. Not for a single moment does it stop. When it stops, you are dead. What is death?—separation is death. To be in unity is to be alive, to be out of unity is to be dead. So the more you think, “I am separate,” the less sensitive you will be, more dead, dragging, dull. The more you feel you are connected, the more this whole existence is part of you and you are part of this whole existence. Once you understand that we are members of each other, then suddenly the vision changes. Then these trees are not alien; they are continuously preparing food for you. When you breathe in, you take oxygen in, when you breathe out, you give carbon dioxide; the trees breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen—there is a continuous communion. We are in tune. The reality is a unity, and with the idea of ‘me’, ‘you’, we are falling out of reality. And once a wrong conception settles inside, your whole vision becomes upside down…. ‘Me’, then ‘you’, and then as a reflection arises ‘I.’ ‘I’ is the subtlest, the most crystallized form of the possessiveness. Once you have uttered ‘I’, you have committed sacrilege. Once you have said ‘I’, you are broken completely from existence—not really broken, otherwise you would die; but in your ideas you are completely broken from reality. Now you will be in a continuous fight with reality. You will be fighting your own roots. You will be fighting with yourself. That’s why Buddha says: “Be a driftwood.” You can be a driftwood only if you have dropped the idea of ‘I’—otherwise you cannot be a driftwood; struggle will persist. That’s why it becomes so difficult when you come to meditate. If I say to just sit silently, you cannot do that—such a simple thing. One would think it is the most simple thing; there should be no need to teach it. One should simply sit and be. But you cannot sit because the ‘I’ cannot allow you a moment of relaxation. Once a moment of relaxation is allowed, you will be able to see reality. Once reality is known, the ‘I’ will have to be dropped. Then it cannot
persist. So the ‘I’ never even allows you a holiday. Even if you go to the hills, to the summer resorts, the ‘I’ never allows you a holiday even there. You take your radio, you take your TV set; you take all your problems and you remain occupied. You had gone there to relax, but you continue your whole pattern in the same way. You don’t relax. The ‘I’ cannot relax. It exists through tensions. It will create new tensions, it will create new worries; it will constantly manufacture new problems, it won’t allow you any rest. Even a minute’s rest and the whole house of the ‘I’ starts toppling down—because the reality is so beautiful and the ‘I’ is so ugly. One continues to fight his way unnecessarily. You are fighting for things which are going to happen of their own accord. You are unnecessarily fighting. You are desiring things which are going to be yours if you don’t desire. In fact, by desiring you will lose them. That’s why Buddha says: “Float with the stream. Let it take you to the ocean.” ‘Mine’, ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘I’—this is the trap. And this trap creates misery, neurosis, madness. Now the problem is: the child has to go through it, because he does not know who he is and he needs some sort of identity—maybe a false identity, but it is better than no identity. He needs some identity. He needs to know exactly who he is, so a false center is created. The ‘I’ is not your real center. It is a false center—utilitarian, make-believe, just manufactured by you. It has nothing to do with your real center. Your real center is the center of all. Your real self is the self of all. At the center, the whole existence is one—just as at the source of light, the sun, all rays are one. The farther away they go, the farther away they are from each other. Your real center is not only your center, it is the center of the whole. But we have created small centers of our own, homemade, manufactured by ourselves. There is a need…because the child is born without any boundary, with no idea of who he is. It is a survival necessity. How will he survive? He has to be given a name; he has to be given an idea of who he is. Of course this idea comes from the outside: somebody says you are beautiful, somebody says you are intelligent, somebody says you are so vital. You gather the things that people say. Out of all that people say about you, you gather a certain image. You never look into yourself, at who you are. This image is going to be false—because nobody else can know who you are, and nobody else can say who you are. Your inner reality is not available to anybody else except you. Your inner reality is impenetrable to anybody else except you. Only you can be there. The day you realize that your identity is false, put together, that you have collected opinions from people…sometime just think; just sit silently and think who you are. Many ideas will arise. Just go on watching from where they come and you will be able to find the source. Some things come from your mother— much, about eighty to ninety percent. Something comes from your father, something comes from your schoolteachers, something comes from your friends, something from the society. Just watch: you will be able to divide from where it comes. Nothing comes from you, not even one percent comes from you. What type of identity is this, in which you have not contributed at all? And you are the only one who could have contributed, in fact, the whole hundred per cent. The day you understand this, meditation becomes important. The day you realize this you start seeking for some technique, some method to enter into your being; how to know exactly, really, existentially, who you are. No more collections of images from the outside, no more asking others to mirror your reality—but to face it directly, immediately; to enter into your nature, to feel it there. What is the need to ask anybody? And whom are you asking? They are as ignorant about themselves as you are about yourself. They don’t know themselves; how can they know you? Just see how things are functioning, how things go on functioning, how things go on happening: one falsity leads to another falsity. You are almost swindled, duped. You are conned, and those who have swindled you may not have done it knowingly. They may have been swindled by others. Your father, your mother, your teachers, have been duped by others—their fathers, their mothers, their teachers. And they have duped you in turn. Are you going to do the same to your children too? In a better world, where people are more intelligent, more aware, they will teach the child that the idea of identity is false: “It is needed, we are giving it to you, but it is only for the time being, before you yourself discover who you are.”It is not going to be your reality. And the sooner you find out who you are, the better. The sooner you can drop this idea, the better—because from that very moment you will really be born, and you will be really real, authentic. You will become an individual. The ideas that we gather from others give us a personality, and the knowledge that we come to know from within gives us individuality. Personality is false, individuality is real. Personality is borrowed; reality, individuality, your authenticity, can never be borrowed. Nobody can say who you are. At least one thing can never be done by anybody else—that is, to give you the answer to who you are. No, you have to go, you have to dig deep into your own being. Layers and layers of identity, false identity, have to be broken. There is fear when one enters into oneself, because chaos comes in. Somehow you have managed with your false identity. You have settled with it. You know your name is this or that; you have certain credentials, certificates, degrees, universities, colleges, prestige, money, heritage. You have certain ways to define yourself. You have a certain definition—howsoever workable, but it works. Going in means dropping this workable definition…there will be chaos. Before you can come to your center, you will have to pass through a very chaotic state. That’s why there is fear. Nobody wants to go in. People go on teaching: “Know thyself”; we listen, but we never listen. We never bother about it. There is a very certain idea in the mind that chaos will be let loose and you will be lost in it, you will be engulfed in it. Because of the fear of that chaos, we go on clinging to anything from the outside. But this is wasting your life.