THE EGO (THE GREATEST DISEASE)

You are continuously prepared by the society , by the family, by the school, by the church, by everybody around you, to be egoistic. Even modern psychology is based on stregthening the ego.

The whole idea of modern psychology, modern education, is that unless a person has a very strong ego he will not be able to struggle in life where there is so much competition that, if you are a humble man, anybody will push you aside; you will always remain backward. You need a very steely, strong ego to fight in this competitive world; then only can you become a success. In any field – it may be business, it may be politics, it may be any profession – you need a very assertive personality, and our whole society is geared to produce the assertive personality in the child.

From the very beginning we start telling him, “come first in your class”; when the child does come first in the class, everybody praises him. What are you doing? You are feeding his ego from the very beginning. You are giving him a certain ambition: “You can become the president of the country, you can become the prime minister of the country.” He starts the journey with these ideas, and his ego goes on becoming bigger and bigger as he succeeds.

In every way the ego is the greatest disease that can happen to man. If you succeed, your ego becomes big – thatis a danger, because then you will have to remove a big ROCK which is blocking the path. Or if the ego is small, you have not been successful, you have proved to be a FAILURE; then your ego will become a WOUND. Then it hurts, then it creates an inferiority complex – then too it creates a problem. You are always afrais to enter into anything, even meditation, because you know you are a failure, that you are going to fail – that has become your MIND. Everywhere you have failed, and MEDITATION is such a great thing .. you cannot succeed

If you enter into MEDITATION with this idea – that failure is bound to be, that is your destiny, that is your fate – then of course you cannot succeed. So if the EGO is big it prevents you. And if the EGO is very small it becomes a WOUND which also prevents you. NO EGO; JUST BE:

IN ANY CASE THE EGO IS ONE OF THE PROBLEMS.