What is the difference between a crystallized self and a strong ego?

What is the difference between waiting for godot and waiting for god?

It is as if the sun has risen in the morning and you are sitting in your room with closed doors and windows, in darkness. Open the doors, you become available to the sun. The sun was already available -- just the meeting happens. You cannot wait for God. All waiting is for Godot. Godot means the one who never comes, who CANNOT come, whose arrival is impossible. And the only impossible thing is that which has already happened -- how can it happen again? You are alive, and you are waiting for life, Now, this is ridiculous. The real man of religion does not think in terms of God. He thinks in terms of life or, even better, of living -- because life can again become an abstract idea. Living, moment-to-moment living. In that very living, one knows what God is, because one knows who one is. Your idea…

Osho, you said last night that to realize the that, the transcendental truth everywhere, one must first realize it at one's own center of being. Then you said that a centering for this is needed. Is this centering the same as that of gurdjieff's crystallization? Please tell us how this centering or crystallization is different from strengthening one's own ego, and how does it lead to the transcendental truth, the that?

This is absolutely incorrect. If you surrender, only then can you be an individual, because the ego is not your individuality. It is false, it is just a facade. If you surrender the false, then you are bound to explode into the real. And this is the beauty of surrender: you cannot surrender the Self -- mm? -- that is impossible; you can only surrender the ego. You can give up only that which has been given tb you. You cannot give up your Self; that is impossible. There is no possibility. How can you give up your Self? You can give up something which has been put into you, which is a social penetration. Really, you can give only that which doesn't belong to you, which you are not. This will look contradictory, paradoxical. You can give only that which you are not. That which you are you cannot…

These four (truth, knowledge, infinity and bliss) are the characteristics, and that which is changeless, in spite of symbolic objects like space, time, et cetera, is called tat or that, which is the equivalent of paramatma or the supreme self.

Then there are so-called teachers who will say, "Be humble. Be egoless" -- and then we begin to cultivate humility. With the ego on the throne, we begin to cultivate humility; then the ego takes on the garb of humility. And really, it is difficult to find a more egoist person than the so-called humble one. So what to do now? I feel it as a necessity: ego has to be developed. As far as the child is concerned, ego has to be developed -- it is a necessary evil. It has to be developed, but a moment comes where it becomes useless. The moment you are mature, the moment you are conscious, the moment you are alert, grown-up, you need not have the ego -- you can step beyond it. One has to be on the step of the ego, and then one has to step out of it.…

And whenever there is a man with a sincere enquiry the answer is not very far. In fact the answer is always hidden in the question itself; all that is needed is a sincere heart to enquire. When the question is authentic... Our questions also are not authentic, they come out of borrowed knowledge. For example if a Christian comes he will ask a question that no Hindu is ever going to ask. If a Hindu comes he will ask a question that no Mohammedan is ever going to ask. A Mohammedan asks a question which no Buddhist would ever ask. I have known all these people -- they come with different questions. I was puzzled, puzzled because if the question is real then it can't be that a Christian will not ask something and only a Hindu will ask it. If the question is real it is everybody's question.

Osho, according to what you say and what all enlightened ones say, the ego has no existence—and yet you tell us to witness the ego! Please kindly help us understand this baffling riddle.

To live through that moment is tapascharya, spiritual austerity. It is a great austerity when you have absolutely no sense of who you are. When all the palaces built by your concepts have collapsed, when you stand in dense darkness, in emptiness, with not a single ray of light about who you are—the Christian mystics have aptly named this the Dark Night of the Soul. And only after this dark night does the dawn come. Whoever is afraid to pass through it never reaches the morning. So first the false notions have to be dropped, false identifications abandoned. A time will come when you will forget who you are; it will be a state like madness. If you are courageous and pass through this, then another time will come when the morning sun rises; for the first time you will know who you are. When it is revealed to you…