Osho – Love needs the greatest courage in life, for the simple reason that the basic requirement for moving into the world of love is dissolving your ego — and that is the hardest thing to do.
We cling to the ego like anything. We are ready to die for it, but we are not ready to let it die because it defines us, it gives us an identity. It gives us a separate existence. It makes us feel important, significant. But because basically the ego is a false phenomenon all these feelings are rooted in a fallacy; hence deep down we are always aware that the importance that ego gives is bogus, it is phony.
We know it and yet we don’t want to know it. We are aware of it and yet we don’t want to know it. We are aware of it yet we want to be oblivious of it. This is the human dilemma, To get into love means to get out of this dilemma, to drop the fallacy, to drop the phony and the pseudo and to be simply a non-entity, a nothingness. But out of that nothingness something of immense value arises. life becomes a celebration.
With ego life is a misery, because if you are rooted in something false you cannot celebrate. Only truth can release the energies of celebration in you. Only truth can become a song in your heart. The ego is the greatest lie: all other lies are by-products of it. And because it is a lie it stinks, because it is a lie it creates a thousand and one problems around itself. It hides behind those problems. It creates a great facade of misery, so many clouds of misery that you get involved in misery and you forget everything about the root cause of it all.
The moment ego is dropped — and it is only a question of your decision, if you want to drop it you can drop it right now, nothing can prevent you from dropping it except yourself — instantly your life goes through a radical change, it goes through a revolution. Great poetry and great music arises in you. Just a few moments ago I was reading these lines of Walt Whitman — I love these lines! He was one of the most significant poets who has ever walked on the earth.
He says:
I celebrate myself, I sing myself.
And what I assume you shall assume.
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
That’s the message of all the seers, of all those who have known, and particularly my message is celebration.
Let your whole heart say ‘I celebrate myself, I sing myself.’ But remember, the self is not the ego, the self is something beyond the ego. The ego is your creation; the self is part of god, the self is part oh the supreme self. The self does not make you a separate individual, it does not make an island of you. It keeps you one with the whole; hence the celebration, hence the joy, hence the ecstasy.
Walt Whitman’s line defines my sannyas precisely. Remember it. Love, bliss, celebration, god, truth, freedom — they are different aspects of the same phenomenon. Ego dropped, you enter into a multi-dimensional reality which contains all these things. But one certainly needs courage, one needs guts. Be courageous enough to live whole-heartedly to live in tune with the infinite, with the eternal.
Source: Osho Book “The Imprisoned Splendor”