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which are your birthright. If you can drop those walls and open yourself to the immensity of reality, you will disappear as a separate entity.
But this is only one side. On the other side you will appear as the eternal, the immense, the vast reality -- the oceanic experience, which is the only experience of enlightenment or liberation.
You have to get rid of the ego first. That is your psychological trauma, or better, your psychological drama. There are religions which have accepted the false ego as the end of all, there is nothing beyond it. That is the religion of all the atheists of different trends, a communist. Or the atheist may not be a communist, but the atheist in any form stops himself at the ego; that is his ultimate reality.
He is the poorest man in the world. All other religions except atheism... because I take atheism also as a sort of religion, a lower form of religion than other religions. Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, go a step further. They all insist to drop the ego and to recognize your authentic reality, your real self.
But there are religions like Zen which go to the very end of the road. They are not satisfied just by dropping the ego. They are satisfied only when there is nothing left to drop -- even the self is gone -- when the house is absolutely empty, when you can say, "I am not."
This nothingness is creating the space for the ultimate to blossom. It does not come from anywhere else. It has always been there, just cluttered with rotten furniture, with unnecessary things. As you remove all those things and your subjectivity becomes empty -- just as a room becomes empty as you remove everything from it -- in this emptiness of your subjectivity, blossoms the flower of ultimate experience -- you are no more.
Naturally, you cannot have your old miseries, your old traumas and dramas. You cannot have any connection with your own past; you have abruptly cut yourself away from all that you used to be. Suddenly a new, totally fresh opening... in a way, you disappear. In a way your authentic essence has the first opportunity to come into its full glory, into its absolute splendor.
This is
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