If you keep the ego’s nice parts and reject the bad, the ego stays; it fades only when you stop chasing rewards or escaping hurts.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved master, for a long time I thought that I wanted to drop my ego, but I've found that I just want to drop the pain that comes with having an ego, and I still want to keep that pleasure or romance and excitement of having an ego. So it seems that my only motivation for dropping is a kind of negative one, to avoid the pain. I'm wondering if there is any possible positive motivation that could mean beyond ego?
It is not only your question, it is almost everybody's question. It is very significant to understand it. Everybody wants to drop the misery, the pain, that comes from the ego. But from the ego also comes some pleasure, some excitement, so one does not want to drop the ego. Even if one wants to drop the ego, one wants to keep the pleasure part. The question is that the motivation to drop the ego is negative -- he wants to drop the misery, the pain, the negative part, and he is asking if there is some positive motivation which can help to drop the ego. There is no positive motivation, because the ego can exist with both -- the negative motivation or positive motivation. Any motivation will do for the ego's existence. The ego disappears only when you understand that all motivation fulfills the ego. The ways of the…Read the full discourse →
Osho, does the ego have some elixir of life? Even on the verge of dying it seems to revive—who knows from where, how, and why?
Haven’t you seen that the harder it is to obtain the woman you fall in love with, the more your love seems to grow? Had Majnu got his Laila, you would never even have heard his name. The whole crux of the Majnu-Laila story is that he never got her. Quite possibly, had he got her, they would have ended in divorce. Stories proceed in strange ways. Because he did not get her, he kept weeping, aching, wandering deserts and mountains, calling “Laila, Laila!” Have you ever seen any husband doing that? Ask a husband and perhaps he hasn’t even properly looked at his wife’s face in twenty years. You too are a husband or a wife—try this: close your eyes and try to recall your spouse’s face. You will find it difficult. The faces of film actresses will come, but your wife’s face will not come clearly. And if…Read the full discourse →
Beloved Osho, you have been telling us how easy it is to drop our egos and become one with the white cloud. You have also told us that we have had millions of lives and many of them have been with buddhas, krishnas and christs -- yet still we have not given up our egos. Aren't you creating false hopes in us?
All hopes are false. To hope is to be false. So it is not a question of creating false hopes: whatsoever you can hope will be false. Hope comes out of your falsity of being. If you are real there is no need for any hope. Then you never think about the future, about what is going to happen. You are so real, so authentic that the future disappears. When you are unreal then the future becomes very significant, then you live in the future. Then your reality is not here and now, your reality is somewhere in your dreams. And you make those dreams look real because through those dreams you gain your reality. As you are, you are unreal. That's why so much hoping goes on. All hopes are false; you are real. My whole effort is how to throw you to yourself. And the ego is all…Read the full discourse →
Osho, ego is the greatest obstacle to taking sannyas. How can it be removed? The ego-sense does not go.
Ego has no reality. Then how to define it? Understand ego in this way: when you look outward, there is ego; when you look inward, ego departs. Enter meditation; drop the very worry of fighting with ego. Fighting the ego is like someone fighting darkness—pushing at it, trying to throw it out. No, I say, light a lamp. Enter meditation, enter prayer; light the lamp—turn within. Close your eyes and begin to look inside—what is there? You will discover one thing: you will never find the ego. And where there is no ego, there is the Divine. The Divine is your true nature; ego is your delusion. As someone sees a rope and takes it for a snake—or sees a snake in a rope—so is ego: a mis-seeing. To see what is, as it is—that is God-experience. And certainly, ego is the greatest obstacle to taking sannyas. But sannyas is…Read the full discourse →
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…Read the full discourse →