What is the relationship between feeling special and the desire to be ordinary?

Beloved master, I feel that I am a very special person. I am so special that I want just to be ordinary. Please can you say something about this?

Anand Sangito, everybody here thinks exactly the same. And not only here, but everywhere else. Everyone deep in their heart knows that he is special. This is a joke God plays on people. When he makes a new man and pushes him down towards the earth, he whispers in his ear, "You are special. You are incomparable, you are just unique!" But this he goes on doing to everybody and everybody goes on carrying it deep in the heart, although people don't say it as loudly as you are doing, because they are afraid others may feel offended. And nobody is going to be convinced, so what is the point of saying it? If you tell somebody, "I am special," you cannot convince him because he himself knows that he is special. How can you convince anybody? Yes, maybe sometimes somebody may be convinced, at least pretend to be convinced.…

Not only in meditation but in routine life also, I constantly feel a oneness with the existence, egolessness, timelessness. Yet I feel myself ordinary. And I do not find in me the total transformation about which you talk very often.

When you are somebody, you become a rock, you disturb the flow -- life cannot move through you. There is a struggle, a resistance, and of course you create much noise. And you may think that because you are creating so much noise that you are something extraordinary. Be an empty vessel, passage, with no resistance, so that life can flow through it, flow through it easily. Then no noise will be created. You may not be able to feel that you are, because you only feel that you are when you fight. The more you fight, the more you feel. Life flows so smoothly through you that you may even completely forget that you exist. There is no barrier, no resistance, no rejection, no negation. And you are so welcoming that you even forget that you are. It was heard about one Zen master that he would call his…

One last question. A small, final question a friend has asked: Osho, can the capacity for egolessness be available to an ordinary person too?

From his question it sounds as if, poor fellow, how could an ordinary person ever get it? Whereas the truth is: for the extraordinary it is very difficult. Because “extraordinary” itself means egoistic. It can be attained only by the ordinary. But not by the merely ordinary—by the extraordinarily ordinary, one who is ordinary in an extraordinary way. Whom do I call “ordinary-ordinary”? I call him ordinary-ordinary whom everyone else calls ordinary, but who himself does not accept he is ordinary. And whom do I call extraordinarily ordinary? The one whom the world may call extraordinary, yet he knows himself to be ordinary. For twelve years I traveled across the country. I met hundreds of thousands of people. Hundreds came to me and said, “What you say—how will it ever be understood by the ordinary man?” I asked them, “Do you understand it?” They said, “I do understand; but how…

How can I stop wanting to be special?

Because you ARE special, and there is no need to be special. You ARE special, you ARE unique -- God never creates anything less than that. Everyone is unique, utterly unique. There has been no person like you before, and there will NEVER be a person like you again. God has taken this form for the first time and the last time, so there is no need to try to become special, you already are. If you are trying to be special you will become ordinary. Your very effort is rooted in misunderstanding. It will create confusion, because when you try to become special you have taken one thing tor granted -- that you are not special. You have become ordinary already. You have missed the point. Now, once you have taken it for granted that you are ordinary, how can you become special? You will try this way and…

In the process of becoming more ordinary, what is happening, to the ego?

Somebody asked Jesus, "What is the secret of entering into your kingdom of God?" and he said, "Ask the lilies or the fish or the flowers. Ask!" What is the secret of a lily flower? What is the beauty of the poor lily? What is the richness of the poor lily? The richness is that it is always here and now, it knows only the present time. It knows nothing of the past and nothing of the future. Remember, if you are interested in the future you will always remain attached to the past. Why? Because if you want to become somebody, from where will you get the knowledge to become? The knowledge will be supplied by the past, by the memory, by the skill that you have learned, by all the experiences that you have passed through. The knowledge will be supplied by the past, the know-how will be…