Osho on Ego and Misery

Osho – Bliss is beauty; misery is ugliness. It not only cripples your body, it cripples your very soul. It paralyzes, it poisons, it is very destructive. But people cling to misery because it gives one thing which bliss can never
give. That thing is the ego.

Ego thrives on misery. Misery is food for the ego, nourishment. In bliss ego dies, disappears, melts, is no more found. And to be without ego is beauty. To have no ego, just to be a nobody is the ultimate beauty. Think of it, contemplate on it — just to be a nobody. And as the ego goes all the fuss that it creates disappears, and all that was unnecessary but which appeared very necessary because of the ego is no more needed. Life becomes the essential, not the accidental; life becomes intrinsic; it consists of only that which is absolutely necessary.

That’s what I call sannyas. It is not renunciation of the world, it is renunciation of misery. It is rejoicing. It means becoming more and more blissful, more and more dance-full, more and more song-full. Sannyas means making your life a celebration. For that, space is needed.

If you want to dance you will have to remove the furniture. And our beings are so full of furniture, rotten furniture of no use at all, bur we just go on keeping it in case we need it sometimes. It leaves no space to dance. In fact it leaves no space for us to enter; our inner being becomes so full of rubbish that we have to live outside. We become so full of ego that we can’t enter in. We are even debarred from our own being. Sannyas means seeing clearly that this is being stupid.

In my vision the problem is not of making sinners saints, the problem is of making stupid people a little more intelligent. So it is not a question of sinners versus saints, it is a question of stupidity versus intelligence. That’s a great change that I want to bring into the world of religion.

Be more intelligent and look into things and whatsoever seems to be creating misery, drop it — and don’t drop it slowly. The moment you see that it is creating misery, in a single blow cut it off. Even if it hurts — it may hurt — so what? It hurts because it has been there for so long. It has become a part of you and now you are cutting it off: it hurts. It is like taking pus out of a wound, it hurts. But that’s the only way for the wound to heal: the pus has to be taken out. The ego is the pus and the ego has made us wounds. Rather than being blissful beings, rather than being flowers, it has reduced us to wounds, to crippled, ill people, pathological people.

Drop the ego and drop the miseries on which it lives — it is a parasite. And start moving more and more into bliss. In the beginning you will feel it is a little difficult. It is just as when one starts dancing; in the beginning it is a little awkward. One needs to learn the art, and then grace comes. Then you can dance as if you don’t have any body. And in fact you don’t have any body, any mind. You are neither the body nor the mind but a pure consciousness. That is experienced only when you become a dance, a celebration.

Source – Osho Book “Fingers Pointing to the Moon”