Recently, on a particular website, I came across a beautiful statement by Wayne Dyer: \u201cYou can be a host to God or a hostage to your ego. It\u2019s your choice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Being hostage to the ego is the case with most people \u2014 and as a matter of fact, they seem to have no choice. This is something that everybody believes to be unavoidable \u2014 they have to live with it. It is the way the whole society functions \u2014 and everybody is expected to function this way only.<\/p>\n
It begins very early in life. The schools and the other educational institutions teach us to be competitive, and a stupid mantra is taught that to succeed in the world is to defeat others. This feeling of defeating others gives pleasure to the person who succeeds and misery to the one who cannot defeat others. In this race of ambition, everybody becomes trapped in a false sense of the self \u2014 an artificially created something that feels like the self. It is a hallucination \u2014 it is maya \u2014 about which all the enlightened sages have been warning us. And none of us has paid any heed to their warning. This unreal \u201cself\u201d has been created by the whole social conditioning \u2014 very unconsciously. We all have become imprisoned inside its thick concrete walls \u2014 even God cannot penetrate into such walls, forget about hosting God.<\/p>\n
In one of the talks compiled in the Book of Life, J. Krishnamurti explains it beautifully: You know what I mean by the self? By that, I mean the idea, the memory, the conclusion, the experience, the various forms of nameable and unnameable intentions, the conscious endeavor to be or not to be, the accumulated memory of the unconscious, the racial, the group, the individual, the clan, and the whole of it all, whether it is projected outwardly in action, or projected spiritually as virtue; the striving after all this is the self. In it is included the competition, the desire to be. The whole process of that, is the self; and we know actually when we are faced with it, that it is an evil thing. I am using the word evil intentionally because the self is dividing; the self is self-enclosing; its activities, however noble, are separated and isolated. We know all this. We also know that extraordinary are the moments when the self is not there, in which there is no sense of endeavor, of effort, and which happens when there is love.<\/p>\n
Call it love or meditation \u2014 only this can set us free. This realisation itself is the freedom from being hostage to our ego and realises the true self. Osho says: The ego is just the opposite of your real self. The ego is not you. The ego is the deception created by the society so that you can continue playing with the toy and never ask about the real thing. That\u2019s why my insistence that unless you drop the ego, you will never come to know yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently, on a particular website, I came across a beautiful statement by Wayne Dyer: \u201cYou can be a host to God or a hostage to your ego. It\u2019s your choice.\u201d Being hostage to the ego is the case with most people \u2014 and as a matter of fact, they seem to have no choice. This … Continue reading Mystic Mantra: Being a host or the hostage<\/span>