What happens when one is unable to transcend the ego despite spiritual practices?

Question: HASAN CAME UPON RABIA ONE DAY WHEN SHE WAS SITTING AMONG A NUMBER OF CONTEMPLATORS, AND SAID, 'I HAVE THE CAPACITY OF WALKING ON WATER. COME, LET US BOTH GO ON TO THAT WATER YONDER, AND SITTING UPON IT CARRY OUT A SPIRITUAL DISCUSSION.' RABIA SAID, 'IF YOU WISH TO SEPARATE YOURSELF FROM THIS AUGUST COMPANY, WHY DO YOU NOT COME WITH ME SO THAT WE MAY FLY INTO THE AIR AND SIT THERE TALKING?' HASAN SAID, 'I CANNOT DO THAT, FOR THE POWER THAT YOU MENTION IS NOT ONE WHICH I POSSESS.' RABIA SAID, 'YOUR POWER OF REMAINING STILL IN THE WATER IS ONE WHICH IS POSSESSED BY FISH. MY CAPACITY OF FLYING IN THE AIR CAN BE DONE BY A FLY. THESE ABILITIES ARE NO PART OF REAL TRUTH -- THEY MAY BECOME THE FOUNDATION OF SELF-ESTEEM AND COMPETITIVENESS, NOT SPIRITUALITY.' It is a subtle phenomenon.

Beloved Osho, I feel that through developing an attitude of endurance towards difficulties, I have become resigned to much of life. This resignation feels like a weight pushing against my effort to become more alive in meditation. Does this mean that I have suppressed my ego, and that I must find it again before I can really lose it?

If you are simply ignorant because you never attained to any knowledge, your ignorance cannot be wise, it cannot be wisdom -- it is simply absence of knowledge. And the hankering will be inside: How to gain more knowledge? How to gain more information? When you know too much -- you have known the scriptures, you have known the past, the tradition, you have known all that can be known -- then suddenly you become aware of the futility of it all, suddenly you become aware that this is not knowledge. This is borrowed! This is not your own existential experience, this is not what you have come to know. Others may have known it, you have simply gathered it. Your gathering is mechanical. It has not arisen out of you, it is not a growth. It is just rubbish gathered from other doors, borrowed, dead. Remember, knowing is alive…

Osho, into what should the power of the ego be transformed?

So those three experiments I have spoken of for the purification of life—purification of the body, of thought, and of feeling—if these three experiments continue, in doing them you will find the ego has dissolved. Anger will not dissolve in that sense; ego will dissolve. The energy of anger will continue in new forms. No “energy of ego” will remain. When ego dissolves, nothing is left behind—no residue. Anger or sex do not dissolve in that sense; they are transformed. They remain present in other forms. The energy of anger remains; it functions in another way. It may become compassion, but the energy is the same. And in this world, those who are very angry—if their energy is transformed—they can be filled with just that much compassion, because the energy takes a new form. Energy is not destroyed; it takes new forms. As I said, those who are very sexual…

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…

Another friend has asked: A person practices adharma—unrighteousness—because he thinks, “I am not ordinary, I am special.” That gives the ego confirmation. I too, to the best of my capacity, try to keep away from anger, to accept existence as it is, to practice sadhana. There is joy in these actions. It may be that in them too the ego gets confirmed. In the process of dissolving the ego, a different kind of ego also creeps in. What is an ordinary person, after all, if not ego? Is it possible that by modifying the ego itself in some desired direction, in the end some element worth attaining rem

But even in “I am,” two things are still there—“I” and “am-ness.” This “I” is also a hindrance, a weight. It ties being to the earth. The wings cannot open fully yet; the sky cannot be flown completely yet. This “I” too has to be dissolved, gently, and only “am-ness” remain—just being—only this much sense: “am.” This is the purest state of ego. But it is still a state of ego. When even this is lost—whether “I am” or “I am not”—when only existence remains, then from ego we have leapt into the soul. This was the way of purification. But even in purification, letting go has to continue. And one awareness must always be kept: whatever my state, half of it will be wrong and half right. So the fifty percent that is wrong, I go on sacrificing for the fifty percent that is right, and keep doing so…