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night he would get up, go to the terrace and jump across to the other house which was close by. The distance was such that nobody could have dared, with consciousness, to take such a jump -- and it was an everyday routine!
Soon people became aware and started gathering underneath to see, because it was almost a miracle. The crowd started becoming bigger and bigger, and one day, when the man was just about to jump, the crowd shouted loudly, hailing the man. That made him wake up. But it was too late -- he had taken the jump. He could not reach the other terrace -- although each day he had been going to the other terrace, coming back, going to his room and falling asleep. But because he became conscious and he saw what he was doing.... But he had already taken the jump. He fell down from fifty stories and his body was shattered in fragments on the road.
The self of man is his sleep.
The soul is his awakening.
And to keep the self, the society has given you certain rules and disciplines. For example, every small child is made ambitious. Nobody says to anybody, "Just be yourself." Everybody is giving him great ideals: "Be a Gautam Buddha or a Jesus Christ or an Albert Einstein... but be someone! Don't just go on remaining yourself -- you are nothing."
Your self needs many degrees, your self needs recognitions, honor. Those are its nourishments; it lives on them. And even the people who renounce the world -- become sannyasins, monks -- do not renounce their selves. It is easy to renounce the world; it is very difficult to renounce the self, because you don't know anything else about yourself. You know your business, you know your education, you know your name -- and you know perfectly well you had come without a name. You had come a tabula rasa; nothing was written on you, and your parents and your teachers and your priests started writing all over you.
You go on believing in the self your whole life. It is very touchy, because it is very thin. Thin, in the sense that it is false. That's why the egoist is a very touchy person.
I used to go for a morning walk when I was a teacher in the university. I had no idea who he
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