Question – Can we not love and accept our head, our mind, our ego, as part of the whole life? Why reject them?
Osho – I have not told you to reject them. How can you reject something which is not? I have been telling you only to see, to look into them. I am not telling you to reject them – rejected they will remain, rejected they will remain deep in your unconscious, repressed. They will remain. Rejection means repression. What will you do? Rejected they will not disappear, they will move into the dark corner of your soul and they will function from there.
No, I am the last person to tell you to reject. I don’t say ’reject the darkness’, I only say ’bring light’. Bring a lamp and see around – where is darkness? It disappears. It is not to be rejected, it cannot be rejected. Look into your ego and it starts disappearing. Not that you reject it, not that you do anything to it – with just a deep insight into it, it disappears. It exists only because you have not looked into it.
It is like a shadow. You are walking and the shadow follows you. Now, if you are alone and in a desert, or in a cemetery, and you become afraid that somebody is following you, you start running. And the more you run, the more the shadow runs with you. Then you become even more afraid and the logical mind will say ’Run faster.’ This way you will not be able to win.
Go faster and faster! But how are you going to win? You can go as fast as you can but the shadow will be with you. All that is needed is to stand and turn around – a hundred and eighty degree about-turn – and look into the shadow. There is nobody. it is your shadow. It is just a shadow. A shadow means nothing. It exists not. That very moment the shadow has disappeared. By disappearance I mean it will not affect you any more. It will not be powerful over you any more. It will not make you frightened any more.
You say: CAN WE NOT LOVE AND ACCEPT OUR HEAD, OUR MIND, OUR EGO, AS PART OF THE WHOLE LIFE? It is impossible because the very mechanism of the ego is that the part tries to pretend, the part tries to claim that it is the whole. That is the whole problem. The ego says ’I am the whole. ’ The ego is not ready to accept that it is only a part. The ego says ’I am the king and I am the whole. ’
How can you love the ego and accept it as a part? That is the very thing the ego denies. It says ’I am not the part, I am the whole.’ The part claiming to be the whole is what the ego is all about. The head claims ’I am the whole.’
CAN WE NOT LOVE AND ACCEPT OUR HEAD, OUR MIND, OUR EGO, AS PART OF THE WHOLE LIFE? No, there is no way. You will have to look into the ego. When the ego disappears you will know what the whole is – otherwise the ego goes on pretending that it is the whole. And you will never know the whole.
When the ego has disappeared, when no part claims to be the whole, then the whole comes into existence, starts functioning on its own. Then there is great accord, great harmony. And you cannot love the ego because who are you? The ego says that you are not separate. The
ego claims your totality. The ego is your identity. When you say ’Can I not love my ego?’ do you think you have two ’I’s? ’I’ and the ego? Who is going to love whom? It is a trick of the ego. The question is from the ego. The ego is trying to befool you.
The ego is saying, ’Why destroy me? Can’t you love me?’ But who are you? If you know yourself as separate from the ego then the question will not arise. Then you have come to be your soul, you have attained to your centre. And in that very attainment there is no ego, there is nobody left to love. And if you think that you can love the ego then you are not. This is the dilemma. If the ego is, you are not. If you are, the ego disappears. They cannot both exist together, just like darkness and light cannot exist together.
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 is the master. And the master is asleep. Then the master awakes and he comes out – the watchman again becomes a servant. He is no more a master. He cannot pretend. The master is present.
Have you not seen it happening in a class of small children? The master is not there, the teacher is not there, and they are all shouting and screaming and doing a thousand and one things. And then comes the master. Suddenly they are sitting at their desks. Everybody is reading very concentratedly, as if there had been no noise, no chaos. What has happened? His very presence has been a transformation.
It happens exactly like that inside you. When you are awake, ego disappears. Then your head and your mind become your servants. You cannot accept them, you cannot reject them, you have only to understand them. And then all happens of its own accord.