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if you drop God." He dropped God, the ego disappeared. The moon disappeared. The reflection disappeared. He went away from the mirror, the mirror was empty. His reflection in the mirror disappeared. He had been fighting with the reflection.
I have heard about an ugly woman....
She was so neurotic about mirrors -- because only mirrors made her aware that she was ugly. Otherwise, without mirrors, as far as she was concerned, she was beautiful. Wherever she would see a mirror -- even in somebody else's house -- she would immediately break it. The reason was that mirrors made her look ugly.
Those poor mirrors had nothing to do with her ugliness. She was ugly, but she was forcing the responsibility on the mirrors, fighting with the mirrors.
That is the essence of all your religions: fighting with the mirrors, with the shadows, trying to drop the ego without dropping God. The ego is just a reflection of a lie in the small pond of your mind.
Gautam Buddha dropped the idea of God, and was amazed that as God disappeared, the ego disappeared. It was just a reflection of God. Hence my effort to remove God. Without removing God you cannot remove the ego. It is the shadow, in the small pond of your mind, of the ultimate lie. Then, as the ego disappeared with God, Buddha came to understand that even self has to disappear.
There are religions who have God, ego, and the self: Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Hinduism. And there are religions which don't have God -- Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism -- but they have the self. Because they don't have God, the ego disappears on its own. Now their whole effort is how to make their self pure, pious. Now a different kind of effort starts.
Buddha is the only man who said, "If there is no God and there is no ego, the self is also arbitrary, artificial. As you go deeper in your interiority, you suddenly find yourself disappearing into the oceanic consciousness. There is no self as such. You are no more, only existence is.
Hence, I call Zen essentially freedom from oneself. You have heard about other freedoms, but freedom from oneself is the ultimate freedom -- not to be, and allow the
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