| |
they don't write their names. You are not new: anybody having a little intelligence would do the same."
In this whole world what can you gain?
What can you take away with you?
Your name, your prestige, your respectability? Your money, your power -- what? Your scholarship?
You cannot take anything.
Everything will have to be dropped here.
And in that moment you will understand that all that you possessed was not yours; the very idea of possession was wrong. And because of that possession you were corrupted.
To increase that possession -- to have more money, to have more power, to conquer more lands -- you were doing things which even you cannot say were right. You were lying, you were dishonest. You were having hundreds of faces. You were not true even for a single moment to anybody or to yourself; you could not be.
You had to be false, phony, pretending, because these are things that help you to succeed in the world. Authenticity is not going to help you. Honesty is not going to help you. Truthfulness is not going to help you.
Without possessions, success, fame; who are you?
You don't know.
You are your name, you are your fame, you are your prestige, your power. But other than these, who are you?
So this whole possessiveness becomes your identity. It gives you a false sense of being.
That's the ego.
Ego is not something mysterious, it is a very simple phenomenon. You don't know who you are, and to live without knowing who you are is impossible. If I don't know who I am, then what am I doing here? Then whatsoever I am doing becomes meaningless. The first and the foremost thing is to know who I am. Perhaps then I can do something that fulfills my nature, makes me contented, brings me home.
But if I don't know who I am, and I go on doing things, how can I manage to reach where my nature was supposed to reach, to lead? I have been running hither and thither but there is not going to be any point that I can say, "Now I have arrived, this was the place I was searching for."
You don't know who you are, so some false identity is needed as a substitute. Your possessions
|
|
|