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Osho on What happens when I feel, 'I am dissolving'?

What happens when I feel, 'I am dissolving'?

When you feel 'I am dissolving,' it is the ego that dissolves, revealing that the 'I' is merely a fleeting feeling, not an objective reality.

— Osho
According to Osho, when you feel 'I am dissolving,' the ego actually dissolves, because the sense of 'I' is only a feeling—not an objective reality. Unlike a house, which won’t vanish by feeling, the 'I' can be erased by its opposite feeling. Hence "false" spiritual methods (samadhi, imaginative cutting) effectively undo the "false" illness of ego.

Because the 'me' is just a feeling, if you truly feel it melting, it melts—unlike real things outside you.

In His Own Words

From the Discourses

Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.

Samadhi Ke Dwar Par · Discourse 3 1970-02-22 Pune Hindi

Another friend has asked: Osho, what is the relationship between the method of meditation and jati-smaran (recollection of past lives)?

But the one who becomes skilled in this—who can fully awaken any day’s memory up to the age of five—will find that the memories begin to awaken completely. And you should test it. As today passes, note down some events and lock them up. After two years, try to recall today. Most of it will have been forgotten. Then remember—and after remembering, break the lock and compare whether what you recalled matches what you had written. You will be amazed—astonished—that besides what you wrote, many more details have come back which you did not even note at the time. They will all be there in memory. Buddha called this alaya-vijnana. There is a corner of the human mind he called the storehouse of consciousness. Like a junk room in the house where we keep all the odds and ends, there is a storehouse that collects memories—where everything from birth after…

Feel: my thought, I-ness, internal organs -- me.

BEFORE DESIRE AND BEFORE KNOWING, HOW CAN I SAY I AM? CONSIDER. DISSOLVE IN THE BEAUTY. If you feel the presence of thoughts, the crowd, you can feel this also -- that they are not yours. The crowd has come to you, it has gathered around you, but it doesn't belong to you. And if this can be felt -- that no thought is mine -- only then you can throw the mind. If they are yours, you will defend them. And the very feeling that `this thought is mine' is the attachment. Then I give it roots in myself. Then I become the soil and the thought can remain rooted in me. If anything that I can see is not mine is uprooted, then I am not attached to it. The feeling of `mine' creates attachment. You can fight for your thoughts, you can even become a martyr for…

When I become more and more aware, my attention develops and there remains a feeling that I exist, I am present, I am aware. Please explain how this feeling can be dissolved into an egoless state of just awareness.

The light is there, and the darkness is immediately not there. There is not a single moment's gap, because if there is a gap then you can see darkness moving out. And if there is a single moment's gap, then there is no reason why there can't be a gap of one hour. There is no gap. The act is simultaneous. Really, the coming of the light and the going out of the darkness are two aspects of one phenomenon. The same happens with awareness: when you are aware, the ego is not. But the ego can go on playing tricks, and the ego can say, `I am aware.' The ego can say, `I am aware,' and can n you. Then the question will arise. And the ego wants to accumulate everything, even awareness. The ego not only wants wealth, power, and prestige; it wants meditation also, it wants samadhi…

Osho, yesterday you said, “Disappear—erase yourself—and union with the Divine will happen.” But I feel afraid to efface myself. Even while being with you I feel afraid to erase myself. Please explain how I can remove this fear.

When I say “erase yourself,” don’t misunderstand me. Don’t take it to mean that you truly exist and now you have to erase yourself. When I say “erase yourself,” I am saying only this: please look at yourself with full, unblinking attention; you will find you are not. That is what I mean by erasing yourself. If you were real, how could you erase yourself? What is, cannot be erased. If darkness were something, would it vanish simply by lighting a lamp? You light a lamp, but the furniture in the room does not disappear; only the darkness goes. The furniture remains where it is. In truth, it wasn’t visible in the dark; in the light it is seen—it becomes more manifest, more clear. Darkness disappears; the furniture does not. The walls and doors do not disappear. In the dark they merely seemed to be gone; in the light they…

Osho, I want to be happy. Whatever I do, I do it in the hope of being happy. Now I have come to practice religion also in that same hope. You say: dissolve the ego. It seems to me that if I dissolve the ego, I myself will be dissolved; then I won’t be there—so how will I be happy? Wouldn’t a miserable existence be preferable to losing my very existence?

They entered the city; people began removing turbans and caps, bowing. But the farmer said nothing. He remained silent. The emperor asked, “What is the matter? Do you understand?” The farmer said, “I am in a fix. You don’t remove your turban—and I don’t remove mine. So who is the emperor—you or I? This is a serious tangle.” Ego is such a delusion. Ego mistakenly believes itself to be the soul. Ego is not the soul—but both ride the same horse, very close. As a man rides a horse, his shadow too rides the horse. Similarly, with the soul rides the ego’s shadow. If the soul does not remove its hat, how will the shadow remove hers? The shadow too has a hat; she too struts, enjoying the full fun. You have taken the shadow to be yourself. When the shadow disappears, you will not. And the shadow must vanish…