Why should we not love and accept our ego as part of life?

Can we not love and accept our head, our mind, our ego, as part of the whole life? Why reject them?

And you ask, 'Why can't one love the ego?' The ego is the destroyer of all possibilities of love. It kills the heart. It makes it impossible to love. Love disappears. You become a desert, a wasteland. Love no longer grows in you. How are you going to love the ego? Love is not there. If you start being loving you will find the ego disappearing. If love starts flowing in you, you will not find any ego in yourself. Then the heart will become your centre. That's what Sufis call heart-wakefulness. Then the heart wakes. And the moment the heart wakes, the head disappears. The head can function only while the heart is asleep. It is -- as Gurdjieff used to say -- as if the master of the house is asleep and the watchman pretends to be the master. If somebody comes, the watchman talks as if he…

In the same way ego and love also cannot exist together. Ego is like darkness. It is the absence of love, it is not the presence of love. Within us love is absent so within us the voice of 'I' goes on resounding. And with this voice of 'I' we say that 'I' want to love, 'I' want to give love; 'I' want to receive love. Have you gone mad! There has never been any relation between 'I' and love. And this 'I' goes on speaking for love -- 'I' want to pray, 'I' want to attain god, 'I' want to be liberated." This is the same thing as darkness saying, "I want to hug the sun. I want to love the sun. I want to be a guest in the house of the sun." It is inconceivable. 'I' is the absence of love itself.

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…

Beloved Osho, what can we do from our side to surrender the ego, when this wanting to surrender it is, in itself, an intrinsic part?

Latifa, the ego is a puzzle. It is something like darkness -- which you can see, which you can feel, which can obstruct your way but which does not exist. It has no positivity. It is simply an absence, an absence of light. The ego does not exist -- how can you surrender it? The ego is only an absence of awareness. The room is full of darkness; you want the darkness to leave the room. You can do everything in your power -- push it out, beat it out -- but you are not going to succeed. Strangely enough, you will be defeated by something which does not exist. Exhausted, your mind will say the darkness is so powerful that it is not within your capacity to dispel it, to expel it. But that conclusion is not right; it is German, but it is not right. Just a small…

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…