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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9785906791962 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Sophia Media |
| Publication date: | 09/17/2019 |
| Sold by: | Bookwire |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Language: | Russian |
Read an Excerpt
What is the ego?
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 of 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, through the church, college, university… By the time you come back home from the university you have completely forgotten your innocent being. You are now a very big ego with a gold medal, first class, topping the university. Now you are ready to go into the world.
This ego has all the desires, ambitions, wants to be always on the top of everything. You are exploited by this ego. It never allows you even a glimpse of your real authentic self, and your life is there, in your authenticity. Hence, this ego only produces misery, suffering, fighting, frustration, madness, suicide, murder – all kinds of crime.
A seeker of truth has to begin from this very point: that whatever you have been told you are by the society, discard it. Certainly you are not it, because nobody can know who you are except yourself – neither your parents, nor your teachers, nor your priests. Except yourself, nobody can enter the privacy of your being. So nobody knows about you; whatever they have said about you is all wrong.
Put it aside. Dismantle the whole ego! In destroying the ego, you will discover your being. And that discovery is the greatest discovery possible, because it starts a totally new pilgrimage toward ultimate bliss, toward eternal life.
You can choose: either frustration, suffering, misery – then go on holding the ego, nourishing it. Or peace, silence, bliss – but then you have to recover your innocence.
***
The child is not born with an ego
The child is not born with an ego. Ego is being taught by the society, religion, culture. You must have watched little babies: they don’t say, “I am hungry.” If the baby’s name is Bob, he says, “Bob is hungry. Bob wants to go to the toilet.” He has no sense of “I.” He indicates himself also in the third person. Bob is something that people call him, so he also calls himself Bob. But a day will come… As he grows, you will start teaching him that this is not right: “Bob is the name for others to call you; you have to stop calling yourself Bob. You are a separate personality, you have to learn to call yourself ‘I.’”
The day Bob becomes “I,” he loses the reality of being and falls into the dark abysmal pit of a hallucination. Once he calls himself “I” there is a totally different energy functioning. Now the “I” wants to grow, it wants to become big; it wants this, it wants that. It wants to rise higher and higher in the world of hierarchies. It wants a bigger territorial imperative.
If somebody has a bigger “I” than you, it creates an inferiority complex in you. You make every effort to be superior-than-thou, holier-than-thou, bigger-than-thou. Now your whole life is dedicated to one stupid thing – which does not exist in the first place. You are on a dream path. You will go on moving, making your “I” bigger and bigger. And it creates almost all your problems.
Even Alexander the Great had immense problems. The “I” within him wanted to be the world conqueror, and he had almost conquered the world. I say “almost” for two reasons. In his time, half of the world was not known, America was not known. Secondly, he entered India, but he could not conquer India; he returned from the boundaries.
He was not very old, he was just thirty-three. But in these thirty-three years he had been simply fighting, fighting, fighting. He had become sick, bored with the fight, killing, murder, blood. He wanted to go back home and rest, and even that was not fulfilled. He could not reach his home in Athens. He died just one day before he was supposed to reach Athens; Athens was only twenty-four hours away.
But his whole life’s experience – growing richer, bigger, more and more powerful, and then also feeling an utter helplessness, not even capable of postponing his death for twenty-four hours… And he had promised his mother that once he had conquered the world he would come and put the whole world at her feet as a gift. No son had done that for any mother before, so it was something absolutely unique that he was going to do.
But he felt helpless, surrounded by the best physicians. They all said, “You cannot survive. This twenty-four-hour journey… You will die. It is better to rest here, perhaps there is a chance. But don’t move. We don’t see much chance even for resting – you are drowning. You are getting closer and closer, not to your home, but to your death; not to your home, but to your grave.
“And we cannot help. We can cure sicknesses, we cannot cure death. This is not sickness. You are almost like a spent cartridge. In thirty-three years you have spent all your life energy fighting this nation, that nation. You have wasted your life. It is not sickness, it is simply that your life energy is spent, and spent uselessly.”
Alexander was a very intelligent man. He was a disciple of the great logician and philosopher, Aristotle; Aristotle was his private tutor. Alexander died before reaching the capital. Before his death he told his commander in chief, “This is my last wish, and this has to be fulfilled.” What was his last wish? A very strange wish. The wish was, “When you carry my coffin to the grave, you have to keep both my hands hanging out of the coffin.”
The commander in chief asked, “What kind of wish is this? The hands are always kept inside the coffin. Nobody has ever heard of a coffin being carried to the grave with the hands hanging out!”
Alexander said, “I don’t have much breath to explain to you, but in short, I want to show to the world that I am going with empty hands. I was thinking I was becoming bigger and bigger, richer and richer, but in fact, I was becoming poorer and poorer. When I was born I had come into the world with my fists closed, as if I was holding something within my fists. Now at the moment of death, I cannot go with my fists closed.”
To keep your fists closed you need life, some energy. No dead man has been able to keep his hands closed. Who will close them? A dead man is no longer there, all energy is gone, and the hands open of their own accord.
“Let everybody know that Alexander the Great is dying with his hands empty, just a beggar.”
But I don’t see that anybody has learned from those empty hands, because people after Alexander have continued to do the same in different ways.
Man’s ego is the source of all his problems, all wars, all the conflicts, all the jealousies, fear, depression. Feeling oneself as a failure, continuously comparing with others makes everybody hurt – and hurt tremendously, because you can’t have everything.
Somebody is more beautiful than you, that hurts; somebody has more money than you, that hurts; somebody is more knowledgeable than you, that hurts. Millions of things are there to hurt you, but you don’t know, it is not those things that are hurting you, because they don’t hurt me. They are hurting you because of your ego.
The ego is constantly trembling with fear, knowing perfectly well that it is an artifact, an artificial device created by the society to keep you running, chasing shadows.
The ego and all its games… Marriage is its game, money is its game, power is its game. All games are the games of ego. The society up to now has continued playing games; it is an ongoing Olympics all over the world. Everybody is fighting his way upward, and everybody else is pulling his legs down, because at the Everest peak there is not enough space for you all to stand.
It is a cut-throat competition. And it becomes so important to you that you completely forget that this ego was planted in you by the society, by the teachers. From the kindergarten to the university, what are they doing? – strengthening your ego. More and more degrees go on being added to your name, and you start feeling bigger and bigger and bigger.
The ego is the greatest lie – which you have accepted as a truth. But all the vested interests are very much in favor of it because if everybody becomes aware of egolessness, this whole Olympics going on around the world will simply come to a standstill. Nobody will want to climb Everest, they will enjoy wherever they are. They will be rejoicing.
The ego keeps you waiting: tomorrow when you succeed, you will rejoice. Today, of course, you have to suffer, you have to sacrifice. If you want to succeed tomorrow, today you have to sacrifice. You have to deserve success, and for that you are doing every kind of gymnastics. And it is only a question of suffering for a little time and then there is rejoicing. But that tomorrow never comes. It has never come.
Tomorrow simply means that which never comes. It is postponing living. It is a beautiful strategy to keep you suffering.
The ego cannot rejoice in the present. It cannot exist in the present; it exists only in the future, in the past – that which is not. The past is no more, the future is not yet; both are nonexistential. The ego can exist only with the nonexistential because it itself is nonexistent.
In the present pure moment, you will find no ego in you – simply a silent joy, a silent and pure nothingness.
From: Freedom from Illusion: The Book of Ego, Chapter #1 Ego: