What is the ego?

Beloved master, what is the ego? It seems a complementary question to "who am I?" and as much a koan.

The ego is just the opposite of your real self. The ego is not you. The ego is the deception created by the society so that you can continue playing with the toy and never ask about the real thing. That's why my insistence that unless you drop the ego, you will never come to know yourself. When you were born you had your authentic self. Then they started creating a false self: you are Christian, you are Catholic, you are white, you are German and you are the chosen race of God, you are supposed to rule over the world, and so on and so forth. They create a false idea who you are. They give you a name and around the name they create ambitions, conditionings. And by and by -- because it takes almost one-third of your life -- they work on your ego through the school,…

Osho, what is the fundamental anguish of human life?

There is only one anguish: that a human being cannot become what he was born to be. There is only one anguish: that the seed remains a seed and does not bloom like a flower; that it cannot scatter its fragrance to the infinite winds; cannot converse with the moon and stars; cannot offer its colors to the sky; cannot be expressed. If the poem within the poet cannot be revealed—anguish. If the painter cannot paint—anguish. If the dancer cannot dance—if chains lie on his feet—anguish. Anguish means only this: that what we are meant to be—our innate nature and destiny—does not come to fruition, and we are forced to be something else. Then anguish is born. Then melancholy gathers over life. And all those countless people you see burdened with sorrow, living in a kind of hell—the reason is only this: each has come carrying the seed of becoming…

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.

What is the ego?

IT IS A FALSE ENTITY. It is not. There are two great falsities in the world. One is ego and another is death. These two things exist not. And they are not separate, they are joined together. They are aspects of the same coin; two aspects of the same untruth. If you have ego, then you will be afraid of death, then death is bound to come -- because you are clinging to a falsity. How long can you cling to it? Sooner or later you will have to see that it is false. You can go on avoiding, you can go on delaying and postponing, but not for ever. Death is the death of the ego. And ego is not in the first place. So a person who becomes free of ego also becomes free of death. Then there is nobody to die! It is like: a great wave…

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…