The Ego Is A Puzzle
What can we do from our side to surrender the ego, when this wanting to surrender it is, in itself, an intrinsic part?
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.
Just a small candle has to be brought in. You don’t have to expel the darkness. You don’t have to fight with it – that is sheer stupidity. Just bring in a small candle, and the darkness is not found anymore. Not that it goes out – it cannot go out, because in the first place it does not exist. Neither was it in, nor does it go out.
The light comes in, the light goes out; it has positive existence. You can light a candle and there is no darkness; you can blow out the candle and there is darkness. To do anything with darkness, you will have to do something with light – very strange, very illogical, but what can you do? Such is the nature of things.
You cannot surrender ego, because it does not exist. You can bring a little awareness, a little consciousness, a little light. Forget completely about the ego; concentrate totally on bringing alertness into your being. And the moment your consciousness has become a flame, concentrated, you will not be able to find the ego.
So you cannot surrender when you are unaware and you cannot surrender when you are aware. The ignorant cannot surrender. And the wise man cannot even think of surrendering it, because it does not exist.
Ego is a mirage – it only appears to be. And when you are fast asleep spiritually, it is tremendously strong; naturally it creates problems for you. Your whole misery is created by it, your tensions, your anxieties. Your ego brings the whole hell into your life. Naturally you want to surrender it. And there are religious priests, teachers all over the world telling you how to surrender it.
Anybody who tells you how to surrender the ego is an idiot. He does not know anything about the nature of the ego, but he will look rational to you; he will be convincing. He will be appealing because he is speaking your own thinking aloud. He is your spokesman – this is what your mind says. He is more articulate than you are, and he brings all kinds of supportive arguments and proofs and quotations from scriptures, and they all say, “Unless you drop the ego you cannot attain to self-realization.” Naturally, nobody objects to such people.
The reality is just vice versa: it is not that you surrender the ego and the self-realization happens, no. The self-realization happens first, and then you cannot find the ego.
That is its surrender.
