Lieh Tzu was going to Ch’i but turned back half way. On the road he met Po-hun Wu-jen who asked him why he had turned back.

Lieh Tzu said, “I was alarmed by something.”

“What was it?” asked the old man.

“I ate at ten inns and at five they served me first.”

“If that is all? Why should you be alarmed?”

“When a man’s inner integrity is not firm, sometimes, something oozes from his body and becomes an aura, which, outside him, presses on the hearts of others; it makes other men honor him more than his elders and betters, and gets him into difficulties.

“The only motive of an innkeeper is to sell his rice and soup, and increase his earnings. His profits are meager, and the considerations which sway him have little weight. If men with so little to gain from me value me so highly as a customer, will it not be even worse with the lord of ten thousand chariots who has worn out his body and drained his knowledge in state affairs? The Prince of Ch’i will appoint me to some office and insist that I fill it efficiently. This is what alarmed me.”

“An excellent way to look at it! But even if you stay, other men will lay responsibilities on you,” said the old man.

Not long afterward, when Po-hun Wu-jen went to call on him, Lieh Tzu’s porch was full of the shoes of visitors. Po-hun Wu-jen stood facing north; he leaned on his upright staff and wrinkled his cheek against it. After standing there for a while, he left without speaking. The doorkeeper told Lieh Tzu. Lieh Tzu ran out barefoot holding his shoes in his hands and caught up with him at the gate.

“Now that you have come, Master,” he said, “aren’t you even going to give me my medicine?”

“Enough! I told you confidently that others would lay responsibilities on you, and it turns out that they have. It is not that you are capable of allowing them to do so; you are incapable of preventing them. What use is it to you to have this effect on people which is incompatible with your own basic peace? If you insist on making an effect, it will unsteady your basic self, and to no purpose.”
To be is to miss Tao. To be is to miss the whole. To be is to be separate, therefore not to be is the door. To be is going astray. Not to be is coming home. When you are not, godliness is. When you are, godliness is not, and both have never been seen together; they cannot be together by their very nature. Just as darkness and light cannot exist together: if one is, the other is not.
So the basic, the very basic, teaching of Tao is to be in a state of nonbeing, what Buddhists call anatta, a state of no-self. Empty, a deep nothingness, nobody inside – then you really are. But then you are not: the whole is. The moment you start thinking about yourself as a separate individual, the part is claiming to be the whole; the part has gone mad. The ego is the only insane thing in the world. The ego is neurosis, and anybody who suffers from the ego suffers from neurosis because he thinks as if the part were the whole. The part is not the whole. If a leaf in the tree starts thinking, “I am,” then the leaf has gone mad. The tree is and the leaf exists only as a part, an organic part, of the tree. Even to conceive of the leaf as separate is impossible. The tree is flowing in it. It is the tree’s energy that has become the leaf. If a wave in the ocean thinks, “I am separate: I am,” then the wave has gone mad. The ocean is. All waves are nothing but the ocean waving.
All human beings are nothing but the universal consciousness waving. We are waves. The moment you understand that “I am a wave,” it means you have understood that you are not – only the ocean is. Sometimes the ocean waves and you are, and sometimes the ocean remains silent and you disappear.
Tao says that the ego is the only barrier. All other religions say the same, but Tao goes deepest in its approach; its insight is the greatest. All religions say that the ego has to be dropped, but if you listen, if you read, if you look into those religious people, you will find that their insight is not very deep and the ego comes up in different forms again and again.
Only two persons have touched the very substratum of the ego and those two are Lao Tzu and Gautam Buddha. Religions go on saying, “Drop the ego. Be egoless,” but in a subtle way, somehow, they go on protecting it too. They say, “If you drop the ego, you will become spiritual. If you drop the ego, you will be the first in the Kingdom of God. If you drop the ego, you will be the chosen one. If you drop the ego, great is going to be the payoff in the other world – heaven, paradise, moksha.” On the one hand they say, “Drop the ego,” on the other hand they persuade you, they bribe you, they buttress your greed. They say, “You will be special. You will be extraordinary.” On the one hand they say, “Drop the ego,” on the other hand they go on strengthening the same ego under different names. “You will become a miracle man. You will have siddhis – you will have spiritual powers, occult forces. You will be able to manipulate existence more deeply. You will become telepathic. You will be able to read others’ minds. You will be clairvoyant.” This and that – all the siddhis of the yogis – all the miraculous powers of Yoga. Again you are decorated, again you become very, very strong.
Remember, there are three layers of your being: the body, the mind, and the self. And beyond the three is your no-self. So there are three possibilities for the ego to assert itself. Either it asserts itself on the layer of body – a beautiful body, a strong body, “I have the most handsome body, the most powerful body.” Somebody is a beauty queen, a Miss Universe, and somebody is Mohammed Ali, the greatest man, Mr. Universe. On the layer of the body, the ego can assert itself. If the ego asserts itself on the layer of the body, one becomes animalistic. All your wrestlers, great wrestlers, are nothing but too attached to their animal part, so that when you see the body of a Mr. Universe you can feel it; he looks more like an animal than like a human being. Certainly he is very strong physically. His ego is asserting itself on that path. He will be very aggressive, brutal, violent. He will be very sexual, indulgent, unconscious. He will move like a robot, like a machine. He will not have any consciousness whatsoever. His whole life will be eat, drink and be merry. He will live on the very superficial layer of his life. Civilizations are against it, cultures are against it. They say “This is not good. Drop this ego.” They go on teaching to every child who is born on this earth, “Drop this ego. Become nonaggressive, become nonviolent. Don’t be brutal, have kindness, sympathy.” Then the ego starts asserting itself on another level, the level of the mind.
At the mind level it becomes knowledge, money. Money is a higher thing than sexuality, so those people who become interested in money forget all about sex; they are no longer interested in sex. Their whole sexuality becomes money oriented, or power, politics, ambition. Those people, who become politicians, become ambitious for power; they can also sacrifice sex, indulgence – they can sacrifice everything.
They can sacrifice on the first layer because they need all the energy available on the second layer. So they repress on the first layer and the ego asserts itself on the second layer. All cultures depend on this. In fact, all cultures use it as a technique: repress the child’s ego on the first layer and he will become egoistic on the second layer. Then he will start hankering for gold medals in the university, to become more knowledgeable, to come first in the university. He will start becoming more aggressive mentally than physically.
You can see it in the universities. All the students who are in sports are very poor as far as their mind development is concerned, and all the students whose minds are very clever and cunning are poor physically. The sportsman lives on the first layer and the scholar on the second layer. The scholar will have a delicate body, will wear glasses from the very beginning; he will be old even while he is young. On the physical level his ego has disappeared. He cannot fight, but he can argue. His fight now asserts itself as argument. He can discuss and debate; he has found a finer instrument to conquer and be aggressive with. He will not become a wrestler, he will become a lawyer. He will live through argument, through his knowledge – say anything against his knowledge and he is ready to fight. Of course his fight will be of words, verbal. If you fight with the body, he will call it brutal, animalistic, primitive; if you fight on the level of words and language and logic, he will say that it is a “civilized fight,” but the same ego is asserting itself on the second layer.
Religions depend on repressing this second layer of ego. Civilization depends on the first repression: repress the ego on the body level so that it asserts itself on the mind level. Religions depend on repressing on the second level so that the ego starts asserting itself on the third level, the level of the self. So religions say knowledge is nothing, politics is nothing, money is nothing, to become a great artist is nothing, to become a great novelist, writer, is nothing. Then what is real power? Real power is siddhi. If you can do miracles, if you touch a man and he is healed when he was ill, and if you touch a dead body and the dead body is resurrected, then you have something. If you can produce things out of nothing, if you become a miracle man, then you have something. So religions repress the ego on the second layer, then the ego asserts itself on the third layer.
Tao says that the ego has to disappear from all the layers. One has to understand it so totally that it cannot find another way to its existence, so that it cannot find another shelter in your being. When ego disappears completely and there is no way for it to assert itself, then you are not in one sense and you are, for the first time, in another sense. You are not as an individual any more, you are the whole.
This is the meaning of a holy man in Taoism: a holy man is one who is not. Very paradoxical. And remember, Tao does not teach you to become humble. If you become humble, the ego will continue – it will become the ego of the humble person, it will hide behind humbleness. So a practiced humbleness, a cultivated humbleness, is not going to help. Then what is to be done?
If you ask Lieh Tzu, Chuang Tzu or Lao Tzu, they will say that nothing has to be done because whatsoever you do will create the ego; ego is created out of doing. Nothing is to be done. One has just to see the ways of the ego, the subtle ways of the ego, the cunning ways of the ego; one has to see them so totally… One has to follow the ego into one’s being from body to mind, from mind to self, one has to seek and see all the hideouts. Once you have known all the possibilities of ego assertion, in that very understanding, in that very awareness, ego disappears.
When ego disappears, your body is different, your mind is different, your self is different. When ego disappears, many things happen. First, now you are no longer identified with your body. You are in the body, but you are not the body. When the ego disappears, you are no longer identified with the mind. You use the mind, the mind becomes an instrument – a beautiful instrument – but you are not identified with the mind either. When the ego disappears, you use the self, but you are not identified with the self either. You remain an individual: you walk and live like an individual, but remain continuously aware that the wave is just an appearance, the reality is the ocean, so that: “I am just a wave. God is the ocean, Tao is the ocean.”
The disappearance of the ego is the disappearance of what Gurdjieff calls identification. But the right word is disidentification. We get identified with everything, whatsoever we are close to. You are very close to the body, so you start thinking, “I am my body.” You feel hungry, and you say, “I am hungry.” That is not right. The body is hungry, you are the knower; you are the one who knows that the body is hungry. Sometimes you are insulted and the mind is feeling miserable, but you are not miserable. You are the knower who notices that the mind is miserable. Sometimes you see miracles happening in your life, but you know that you are not the doer; you are not the self. They are happening, but they are happening from the whole. That’s what Jesus goes on saying again and again.
A man came to Jesus and said, “We are very grateful to you. You are good and great.” And Jesus said, “Don’t assert such a thing. Only God is good and great. I am not.” What is he saying? He is saying, “I am not a self. I function as a self, but the function is not the reality, the function is just a function. The reality is far larger, far bigger, enormous, infinite.”
It is as if you were standing in your house by the side of a window and looking outside. The frame of the window becomes the frame of the sky, although you know well that the sky has no frame. There is a trend in modern painting not to frame the painting. It has significance. The moment you frame the painting it becomes artificial because existence is unframed; all frames are man-made. Existence has no frame. But if you look from the window, then the frame of the window becomes the frame of the sky; and the sky has no frame. If you have always looked from the window, and you have never been outside the house, then naturally you will think that the limitation of the window is the limitation of the sky. Looking from the body, you become framed within the body; it is just a window. Looking from the mind, you become framed within the mind; it is again just a window. Looking from the self, you become framed within the self; it is again just a window.
Once you start coming out of these windows, then you know that even the sky is not your limit; you are unlimited. You are as unlimited as the whole: you are the whole. There will be great transformations.
On the body level sexuality will disappear. Sex will be there, but sexuality will disappear. When you get identified with sex it becomes sexuality. When you are not identified with sex, then it is as beautiful as anything else, but it is not sexual; it is simple sex, natural sex. Animals are not sexual. They have sex, but they are not sexual. If you show a dog a nude picture of his girlfriend, he will not be interested – not at all. You cannot circulate magazines like Playboy to the animals; they will not be interested at all, they will not look. They are not sexual, they have no sexual fantasy, they don’t think about it. Their sex is pure and simple. It has not become cerebral; it has not entered their heads.
When sex enters the head it becomes sexuality. When sex is sex it is beautiful. When you eat because you are hungry it is beautiful, but when you become obsessed with food then you are mad. When you start thinking about food, sitting and meditating on food with closed eyes, in the night dreaming about food, then you are mad. Then your hunger has moved beyond the limits of sanity. You take a bath – good, but you don’t think about it the whole day. You don’t fantasize about standing under the shower again and again; if you start doing that, then something is wrong.
I have heard…

A woman was very fat. Her psychoanalyst suggested to her that she should find a beautiful nude picture of a woman and, “Stick it on your fridge so that whenever you open the fridge, you will see the beautiful, proportionate body of the woman and that will bring you to your senses: become aware of what you are doing with your body.”
And it helped. Again and again all day long she would be opening the fridge, taking things out, putting things in, and she would see the beautiful, proportionate body. Within one month she lost twelve pounds. But another thing happened – the husband gained twelve pounds! Because of that nude picture, he started going to the fridge again and again and when you go to the fridge – of course you drink and eat – Coca Cola, Fanta, ice cream – he started eating. So the wife lost, the husband gained.

Sexuality simply means that sex has become a mind thing; it has entered into mental states. Anything, when it moves beyond its center, becomes an illness. Gurdjieff used to say that man’s centers have gotten very confused. If you search in man, you will find great confusion. You will find sex in the head – where it should not be; that is not the center for sex.
Man has repressed, changed arrangements inside himself so much, that if God dissected man he would be surprised because he never made man this way. Everything has changed; the whole arrangement has changed. The greatest calamity that has happened is that everything which should function on its own is no longer functioning on its own – it needs the mind. Everything goes via the mind, so the mind has become very polluted, poisoned.
When the ego disappears from the body, there are two possibilities. If you repress it, it will assert itself on the mind level. If you don’t repress it, if you simply understand it – and through understanding it disappears – then it will not assert itself anywhere, and your body will change. You will attain to new insights. Your body will become more affectionate, warmer. Your body will have a certain new quality to it, the quality of weightlessness, as if gravitation does not affect you as much as it used to affect you before. You will feel that you can almost fly. You will become more loving.
When sex is no longer sexuality, then sex starts on the right path and, by and by, the sex energy starts turning into love energy. Love is a transformation of sex energy. Sexuality is a repression, and repression is never transformation. Remember, repression is regression. A transformation is a totally different thing: you reach higher levels – sex energy becomes love. A person becomes more loving and less sexual. His approach toward life becomes more sensitive and less sexual – more sensitive and less sensual. He no longer thinks in terms of sensuality; his bodymind, his body wisdom has changed: his body has become mature. Of course, if he looks at the trees, he will see more greenery than you can see because he has become more sensitive. If he looks at the sky, the sky will be bluer and deeper than you will find it. The whole of life becomes a great mystery.
It happens sometimes under drugs that your senses become so sensitive that you cannot believe it. When Aldous Huxley took LSD for the first time, he was sitting before a chair, and suddenly the chair became luminous, multicolored, as if it were a rainbow. He could not believe his eyes – an ordinary chair. And he had been seeing that chair for years; it had always been in his study – but there was never any color in it, it was never alive. Now suddenly it had a life of its own, so many colors, and so beautiful. He went and touched it, and he could not believe again that its texture was simply incredible. He wanted to hug the chair and to sing a song for it, to dance a dance for it. An ordinary chair can become extraordinary.
To painters it has always been so. You may have seen the great painting of Vincent Van Gogh, The Chair. Ordinarily you think, “Why should a painter think to paint a chair, an ordinary chair?” But to Van Gogh that chair was not ordinary. What happened to Aldous Huxley under the impact of the drug was very natural to Van Gogh. His eyes were very sensitive, he could see through and through: there were no longer any screens – nothing to bar the way. His sensitivity was very clear.
You will live more, you will love more, you will eat with taste more. When you touch something, you will know the texture. When you listen to a song, it will go to your very heart. Your body will not disturb it; your body will be just a passage, a tremendous receptivity – it will simply soak it up and take it to your heart. The whole of life will take on a different luminosity – it will become colorful, psychedelic.
Man needs drugs because civilization has dulled his senses. Now this is a problem. The government, the society, the politicians are against drugs. But these people are the source of the problem; they have created such an ugly humanity that people have lost all sensitivity. Now people are trying desperately to find that sensitivity in any way – even if it comes through drugs. Drugs are harmful, but to live without sensitivity is not to live at all. To live without sensitivity is to live a very dull life, a dead life. Five thousand years of acculturation, five thousand years of civilization, have dulled humanity so much that people are bound to rebel against it. Now, the politicians and the priests are the source. It is they who are responsible for driving humanity to such a desperate state where people want to take drugs. Drugs cannot be stopped unless man is made sensitive again. Drugs will disappear once man becomes sensitive again.
My approach is that if you are sensitive, you will not take drugs. Why would you? Just to do harm to yourself? When you are sensitive, even if somebody gives you a free drug you will not take it because a sensitive man will feel his sensitivity lessened through drugs. A dull person will feel that his sensitivity grows, and a sensitive person will feel that his sensitivity is dulled. It is relative: it depends on you. If you feel good through a drug, it simply shows that you have become very dull; and to feel sensitive through chemicals is simply meaningless because they are not going to make you sensitive. You will need more and more drugs, in larger and larger quantities, but the basic problem remains there. The basic problem is how to attain the receptivity, the sensitivity, of the body again – how to make your body alive again. The resurrection of the body is needed, and that resurrection is possible only when you are no longer using your body as an ego vehicle.
Ego is the greatest drug. LSD is nothing, marijuana is nothing, alcohol is nothing. Ego keeps you so drugged, so asleep, so unconscious. Once the body attains to sensitivity, you will find joy through the body, great joy. Small things become so delightful. Just taking a shower is so delightful that you will feel great gratitude toward God – just for a shower. The water falling on you, the coolness of it, the freshness that comes into you…
You will be lost in its beauty. Small things: eating, talking to a friend, holding the hand of a friend, looking at the sky or looking at the trees, just swimming in the river, or lying down on the sand taking a shower of sun rays, and everything becomes so joyful. The whole of life takes a new hue of rejoicing. You will be able to dance and sing if the body is resurrected.
The ego is the death of the body. The ego has to disappear. But let me repeat again: it cannot be repressed, otherwise it will bubble up on a deeper level. When the ego disappears from the mind, knowledge disappears, knowing arises – you don’t have any knowledge, but you have a capacity to know. Wherever you look, whatever your eyes see, you can see through and through. You may not have any information, but your insight is great. Scriptures disappear, borrowed knowledge becomes meaningless, your own knowing capacity arises. You have an inner lamp, and silence grows.
Knowledge is a continuous clattering inside you, a continuous talk. Sometimes you are puzzled: why do I go on talking inside? Why this monologue? For what? And you go on repeating the same thing again and again and again. You have thought those thoughts many times, then why are you repeating them again? There is a reason: only by continuously repeating them can you maintain your knowledge, otherwise your knowledge will disappear. By continuously repeating, chattering, muttering inside, you maintain your knowledge, otherwise it would disappear; you would not be able to possess it. This is the only way to possess it. Because it is borrowed, the only way to possess it is through constant repetition.
When the ego is no longer there in the mind, all the barriers disappear. Mind becomes a mirror: you reflect reality. It is your own experience, so you need not continuously keep it moving in your mind, you need not repeat it; it is your insight. Tomorrow, also, you will be able to look into reality in the same way – maybe even far more deeply because time will give you depth. So why repeat it?
A man of knowing never carries any load. He can depend on his knowing. You cannot depend on your knowing, so you have to carry knowledge, otherwise you will be in difficulty at any moment. If some problem arises, you cannot trust yourself: you have to carry the knowledge. If you can trust yourself, then there is no need. You can just look into the problem and the solution will come out of it because each problem has its own built-in solution. It does not have to be brought from the outside, the problem has just to be understood rightly, and it will give you the solution.
Silence will arise. A man of knowing is very silent. Words don’t go on floating in his consciousness; there is no monologue. He is not continuously in the inner talk – and awareness arises, and celebration; a man becomes creative. That’s what celebration is: one starts participating in God the creator. That’s what celebration is all about. Whenever you are really celebrating, you create something. Whatsoever it is, you create something: you become a participant in the creative process of life. And when on the third level, the self, the ego disappears, a great explosion happens. That’s what Zen people call satori, Yoga calls it samadhi.
When in the self, the self disappears, when you look inside yourself and you don’t find anybody there: just a pure awareness, a witnessing, a no-self, you have arrived home.
This is the very basic approach of Tao, that the ego has to disappear on three levels. The ego gone, the body becomes the temple, the mind becomes the innermost shrine, and the self becomes the whole – the God himself of the shrine. You become religious when your body is a temple, your mind is a shrine and you are nothing but God himself, the whole itself.
This is the vision to be carried. It is a dream now, but it can be transformed into reality any moment you are courageous enough to go into it. It can be transformed into reality very easily because the ego game is just a dream. Once you come out of the dream, the reality will be available. It is available right now – you are only dreaming.
It is as if you fall asleep here in Pune and you dream of Istanbul or Timbuktu. In the night you dream of Istanbul, but you are still in Pune: your dreaming does not take you to Istanbul. In the morning, when you open your eyes, you will not find yourself in Istanbul, you will be in Pune, and you will have a good laugh. In fact, in the night, when you had suddenly found yourself in the streets of Istanbul, you were worried about how you would manage to get back. And at eight o’clock in the morning you had to be here in Chuang Tzu Auditorium – how were you going to manage? You may have rushed to the airport to inquire whether there was a plane going right now. But in the morning, suddenly you find that there was no need to go to the airport, there was no need to go anywhere, that you had always, all the time, been here. In reality you had never gone anywhere.
The ego is a dream, and whatsoever you have dreamed through the ego is a falsity, it is illusory. That’s what Hindus call maya.
Now this beautiful story. It has to be understood step by step.
Lieh Tzu was going to Ch’i but turned back half way. On the road he met Po-hun Wu-jen who asked him why he had turned back.
Ch’i was the capital of the kingdom where Lieh Tzu lived, so he was going to the capital of his nation, but turned back in mid journey. When he came back, he met Po-hun Wu-jen. Po-hun Wu-jen was an old Taoist master, a man who had really arrived. So the old man asked, “Why have you come back?”
Lieh Tzu said, “I was alarmed by something.”
Listen carefully because nobody has gone as deeply into these phenomena as the Taoists.
“What was it?” asked the old man.

“I ate at ten inns and at five they served me first.”
Now look. He says: “I ate at ten inns and at five they served me first. That alarmed me.” Why should it alarm you? In fact, it should make you very delighted that people are recognizing that you are extraordinary, that you are exceptional, that you are a V.I.P., that you are being served before others. But Lieh Tzu is a disciple of Tao; he understands that this is dangerous. When people start thinking that you are exceptional, there is danger.
What is the danger? The danger is that you may fall again into an ego trip; the danger is they may again give you an ambition; the danger is that they will not allow you to relax and to be yourself. When people give importance to you, they start dominating you. That’s the whole art of manipulating people. When you want to manipulate a person what do you do? You make him feel very important. You say, “You are simply great.” And the moment you have said, “You are simply great,” you become powerful over him. Now, if he wants to maintain his greatness, he will have to consider you; now his greatness will depend on you. If you go against him, then what about his greatness? You have made him great – now you have the key. Now, in a subtle way, he will become your slave. So whenever somebody comes and exaggerates about you, beware! He is trying to catch hold of you, and once you allow it, it will be difficult to go back home.
Mind wants to play these games very much. Even when sometimes a person is saying a lie, if it is fulfilling to your ego, you accept it. You can try it. Say to an ugly woman, “You are very beautiful,” and she will not say, “No, I am not. Stop all this nonsense! I am just plain and homely.” If you say to an ugly woman that she is the most beautiful woman in the world, she will accept it; she will not say, “No, don’t deceive me.” Once she accepts it, she is deceived. Now she will be in your power; now she will always have to think about you and concede things to you because you are the only person who has made her beautiful. You are the only mirror in which she has looked beautiful. All other mirrors were saying that she is ugly, now she cannot afford to lose you. She will cling to you, she will become a servant to you, she will become a slave to you – but she cannot afford to lose you.
Remember, whenever you are being made important there is danger. Danger! If you are not alert that ego has disappeared from all the layers of your being, there is danger. Lieh Tzu must have been a disciple when this happened; he was not yet a master. A master can afford to be in any situation; a disciple cannot afford that; he has to be very alert because there are still dangers, he has not yet arrived. There are tremendous possibilities of getting lost.
“I ate at ten inns and at five they served me first.” “If that is all, why should you be alarmed?” asked the old man.

“When a man’s inner integrity is not firm, sometimes, something oozes from his body and becomes an aura, which, outside him, presses on the hearts of others; it makes other men honor him more than his elders and betters, and gets him into difficulties.”
This is a very great insight. Nobody has ever mentioned it – not even Patanjali who completely covered the map of consciousness, not even he mentioned it in this way. The credit goes to the Taoists.
He is saying: “When a man’s inner integrity is not firm…” Ordinarily you think that a man has an aura when his integrity is very firm. No, that is wrong; the aura comes from some leakage. Your integrity is not absolute yet, so your energy starts leaking, and it creates an aura, a subtle magnetism around you. Of course, whenever you come in contact with others they will be impressed. Your aura will function as an intoxicant; they will simply be impressed. You will have a very charismatic effect on them, but Taoists say that it simply shows that you have not yet become really ordinary – you are still hankering for something. Somewhere the ego is still there because only through the ego can your inner energies leak out.
“When a man’s inner integrity is not firm…” What do they mean by “inner integrity”? When there is no ego, you are integrated with the whole. When there is ego, you are not integrated with the whole. When there is ego, you are split; when there is ego… In fact, there are many egos – you are a crowd, and there is a constant fight inside. Each ego tries to be more powerful than the others, and there is a continuous struggle, and in that struggle your energy starts flowing out: it becomes a sort of aura.
Remember, this is not the aura that happens to a Buddha or a Lao Tzu or to Jesus. An aura happens to Buddha, but that aura is not energy coming out – no. His whole being has become so luminous, that even from his body you can see the subtle rays of his luminosity. It is as if a lamp is burning in a house and even through the curtains you can see that there is no darkness inside. It is not a leakage; it has a totally different quality to it. And how will you make out the difference?
When you come in contact with Buddha, his presence does not press your heart; in fact, his presence makes you freer. His presence does not turn you into a slave; his presence turns you into a master. His presence does not become binding on you, but becomes a freedom – he liberates.
When the energy oozes out, it becomes a very repressing force. It is almost violent. It is as if somebody has jumped upon you with a sword in his hand and forced you to submit. These words are good. When you come in contact with a Buddha, whose energy is not oozing out, who has no leakage left, surrender happens, but there is no submission in surrender.
When you come in close contact with a person who is not yet really integrated and he is creating great energy through his sadhana and the energy is leaking out, submission happens, but there is no surrender. You become a slave, you become an imitator. Your individuality is crushed and destroyed, you become a carbon copy.
Remember, this will help you always: only keep company with a master with whom you don’t become a carbon copy, with whom freedom is possible, with whom even surrender gives you individuality, following whom you don’t become a follower, with whom you earn more and more freedom. He makes you so free; he gives you tremendous freedom – more than you can give to yourself. He does not give you a discipline, he gives you awareness, and through awareness you flower. You are not repressed, you are not forced; great things happen, but they happen naturally, spontaneously.
You must have seen auras in the pictures of Buddha and Jesus and Krishna. They are not the aura Lieh Tzu is talking about. If you want to see this type of aura, then you have to come in contact with a man like Rasputin. Then you will find an aura, a great aura.
Whoever came in contact with Rasputin immediately submitted to him and became a slave, even the Tsar and the Tsarina. In fact, for a few years, Rasputin had become the real ruler of Russia. Whoever came in contact with him would simply lose his individuality, would lose his freedom and would become just an yea-sayer; would become more unconscious than he was before and would start doing things which he could never do in his right senses. Around Rasputin such things were an everyday affair. He could tell people to do foolish things, but his order was an order which they would do and not even for a single moment feel that they were being stupid. When they would go back home, then they would suddenly recognize the fact that what they had done was ridiculous.
Rasputin was killed by people who became more and more aware of this phenomenon; he was murdered, and he was really a man of great energy. The people who murdered him were his victims. By and by, many people became aware that whenever they were around him, something simply went off within their being and they became just puppets; and whenever they were far away from him they would again regain themselves. They started feeling this phenomenon so deeply that they conspired against him – his own disciples – and they killed him.
It was very difficult to kill him. He was a man of energy, of great energy – disintegrated, but still of great energy. And the energy was oozing so much… First they persuaded him to drink, and he drank too much, but nothing affected him. He was perfectly alert. Then they poisoned him, they gave him poison in food, but nothing affected him. Then they became afraid: they shot him – eighteen bullets – but he was still alive! Then they were very afraid that if he survived, what would become of them? So they tied him in a bag with rocks and threw him into the river. After forty-eight hours his body was found, and the post mortem report says that he was not dead when he was thrown in the water, that even under water he remained alive for at least four hours.
A man of tremendous energy – but the impact was evil, the impact was not good. Let this be your definition: whenever you are in close contact with a man whose energy makes you a slave – escape from him. Escape from him like the plague. Never look back. You are in danger: that man has an oozing energy. It is dangerous for him because he is losing the energy which can become integration, and it is dangerous for you.
“When a man’s inner integrity is not firm, something oozes from his body and becomes an aura, which, outside him, presses on the hearts of others…” It is a pressure. These are things to be felt. If in contact with such a person you feel a pressure on the heart, a crushing pressure, then that man has more energy than you; but that energy will prove evil – it is aggressive energy.
In the presence of somebody who is integrated, you feel that you are uplifted, that you are taken to a higher altitude, that you start floating upward, that gravitation is less; that the presence is soothing, gives you silence, awareness; makes you more conscious, no pressure in it. In fact, the ordinary pressures of your life dissolve in the presence of a man who has become integrated.
“…it makes other men honor him more than his elders and betters, and gets him into difficulties.” Lieh Tzu said, “It is bad for others, but that is not the point – it is bad for the person himself.” It is bound to get him into difficulties. That’s how Rasputin got into difficulties. He could have become a Buddha – he had the possibility. He was a man of great energy, he was really very rare, but others got into difficulty, he also got into difficulty. He got into many difficulties and he went astray. The more he became powerful over people, the more he forgot his own training, his own inner discipline.
He had worked hard on himself: for years he had meditated and prayed, and his prayer was going deep. Then he became aware that he had great influence over people. The moment he became aware that he had great influence over people, he forgot about his prayers. He became ambitious. The ego asserted itself on the last layer, the self – not on the body, not on the mind, but on the self. And when the ego asserts itself on the third, deepest, layer, many people are deceived because it is very difficult to make distinctions, sometimes the energy feels really helpful.
The Tsar had only one son and the son used to suffer from a disease for which there was no cure. The disease was that if he would get any wound, the wound would not heal and the blood would start oozing out of his body and not stop. His life was always in danger – a small wound and… A child is a child; playing, he would fall and get a small wound and a little blood would ooze. Then it would be impossible to prevent the blood flowing: that was the problem. And when too much blood would flow out, the child would become unconscious, would fall into a coma. There was no medicine to stop it, and there was no cure.
Then Rasputin came, and he simply touched the boy and the blood stopped. He would simply touch the child and the boy would become conscious. He was the Tsar’s only child; Rasputin became a must. They would not even allow him to go far from Moscow, from the capital, because it was dangerous: if he could not come in time… So his presence had to be there in the palace. The Tsarina became too impressed, then the Tsar became too impressed, then the whole court. Rasputin started ordering people: he became the real emperor. His orders had to be listened to, otherwise he would threaten, “I will leave,” and the life of the child would have been in danger. The doctors had said, “He has to be kept here, otherwise we cannot help at all. Any moment the child could die.”
But Rasputin forgot his prayers; he forgot his own inner discipline. He created many difficulties for others, and created many difficulties for himself. In fact, if some day the real history is written, then he will be seen as the cause for the Russian revolution, not Lenin, not Stalin, not Trotsky. He was the cause: he created such a ridiculous state that the people rebelled. The revolution came because of Rasputin; because of Rasputin Russia has suffered for almost half a century. The whole of Russia has become a great prison – all freedom lost; millions of people have been killed. And if you look, deep down you will find Rasputin at the beginning of this whole Communist myth – the myth of revolution, the myth of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nobody talks about him, but he was the provocation. His presence was so ugly, so repressive, so oppressive, that not only was he killed, the Tsar and the Tsarina and the child were all killed, and the whole empire disappeared into disorder and chaos.
Lieh Tzu says that it:
“…gets him into difficulties.

The only motive of an innkeeper is to sell his rice and soup, and increase his earnings. His profits are meager, and the considerations which sway him have little weight. “If men with so little to gain from me value me so highly as a customer, will it not be even worse with the lord of ten thousand chariots who has worn out his body and drained his knowledge in state affairs? The Prince of Ch’i will appoint me to some office and insist that I fill it efficiently. This is what alarmed me.”
Really a man of understanding. He says, “If I go to the capital and the king comes to know about me, I am bound to be in trouble. He will appoint me; he may make me a minister, a prime minister. He will certainly get hold of me. If ordinary people like an innkeeper, who has nothing much to gain from me, becomes so impressed, then what about the great king, the lord of ten thousand chariots, who has wasted his energy in state affairs, who has lost his soul in the world, who is really poor as far as the inner integrity is concerned? If I come in contact with him, he will immediately take hold of me. He will say, ‘Come here. Serve the kingdom, serve the state.’ And I will be in difficulty. That’s why I became alarmed.”
Look at the beautiful understanding of Lieh Tzu. He is still a disciple, but has great insight. One should avoid ambition; one should avoid any possibilities where one can get into unnecessary troubles.
“An excellent way to look at it! But even if you stay, other men will lay responsibilities on you,” said the old man.
One thing more before we go deeper into this parable: when your energies ooze out and you are not yet centered, you will certainly become a man of great influence, but your presence will be a violence to others, an aggression. Even if you are nonviolent, you will do violence to people.
The same thing happened in the case of Mahatma Gandhi. He believed in nonviolence, but his presence was very violent. All those who lived around him were very much pressed upon. For small things he would press them too much. For small flaws, human flaws, human limitations, he would create much fuss. He would very easily go on a fast; if a disciple did something wrong, he would go on a fast. Now this looks very nonviolent – he was not doing anything to the disciple – but look deeply, he was being violent, doing it in a very subtle way: he would go on a fast.
When you are on a fast, more energy oozes out of you than at any other time – that’s why people who fast become very, very influential. And when you are fasting for a particular person… For example, somebody was found smoking a cigarette – now, this was not allowed, or somebody was found enjoying a cup of tea – now, this was not allowed. Gandhi would go on a fast. And the disciple would certainly start feeling very, very guilty: Gandhi was suffering for him. He would not eat for three days. A disciple fell in love with a woman, and Gandhi fasted because this was not allowed. The disciple was no ordinary disciple; he was his secretary, so it created a great fuss, a great controversy. He should have told Gandhi why he lied – not that he had really lied. The only thing was that he had not declared it – but why should he have kept it secret? It should have been made public. He accepted that it was wrong: he asked to be forgiven, but it could not be forgiven so easily. Gandhi fasted.
Now, what would the situation be for the disciple? For three days Gandhi fasted. The disciple could not sleep; he cried and wept, and he would go again and again, he would say, “I am sorry; forgive me.” And Gandhi would say, “I am not doing anything to you. I am doing it to myself.” And he would say, “You are not at fault.” Look at his logic: he would say, “I must be at fault because if the master is right, the disciple has to be right. Then something must be wrong in me, so I am purifying my soul.” Now this is very violent; it is better to hit a person with a sword. This is more violent: you are pressing his heart with a subtle sword.
In the name of nonviolence much violence can be done to people. In the name of love much violence can be done to people. You all know. Parents go on being violent with their children in the name of love. They say, “…because we love you.” They go on making them feel guilty; they go on torturing them in subtle ways; in a thousand and one ways. And they are always doing it for you, for your own good.
Remember, Tao says: the desire to impress the other, the desire to change the other, the desire to do good to the other in any way is violence. There should be no desire. This is the beauty – when you don’t desire to help the other, others are helped. When you don’t desire to impress them, they learn out of their own insight. They are never pressed. They are transformed, but not because you want to transform them. Your simple presence with no pressure is a great transforming force.
The old man said: “An excellent way to look at it! But even if you stay home, other men will lay responsibilities on you.”
“Beware of it! If you don’t go to the capital, it doesn’t make much difference. Even if you stay home, other people are going to lay their responsibilities on you.”
Not long afterward, when Po-hun Wu-jen went to call on him, Lieh Tzu’s porch was full of the shoes of visitors. Po-hun Wu-jen stood facing north; he leaned on his upright staff and wrinkled his cheek against it. After standing there for a while, he left without speaking. The doorkeeper told Lieh Tzu. Lieh Tzu ran out barefoot holding his shoes in his hands and caught up with him at the gate.

“Now that you have come, Master,” he said, “aren’t you even going to give me my medicine?”
This is called “medicine” in the Taoist circles – when a master gives his presence to you. It is medicinal; his presence is therapeutic, his presence is a healing force. Just by being in close contact with him, just being in front of him, a great healing happens. This is called the medicine the master gives.
The word medicine comes from the same root as meditation. Both come from the same root – that’s very good; they have something in common. Medicine, meditation, both come from a root which means to take care – a caring, loving care. Medicine takes care of your body; meditation takes care of your soul. Certainly the master is a physician, Buddha used to call himself “the physician.” When people would come and ask him great philosophical questions he would simply put them aside, and he would say, “Don’t talk nonsense. I am not a philosopher, I am a physician.” Nanak also used to say, “I am a vaidya, I am a physician. I don’t answer questions, I treat people. I am not concerned about their questions, I am concerned with their illnesses, with their disease.”
In Taoist circles the presence of the master is called medicine, the medicine. You cannot find a more medicinal energy anywhere else. Whenever a man becomes enlightened, his surrounding is therapeutic. Just to be in close contact with him, you will be healed. Not that he will do something – no, a master never does anything. He has forgotten all doing. But because he is a non-doer healing happens. Because he is a nobody he gives you space: in that very space you become integrated, you become centered.
“Enough! I told you confidently that others would lay responsibilities on you, and it turns out that they have. It is not that you are capable of allowing them to do so; you are incapable of preventing them. What use is it to you to have this effect on people which is incompatible with your own basic peace? If you insist on making an effect, it will unsteady your basic self, and to no purpose.”
A great sentence, a great sutra.
“Enough!” said the old man. “I told you confidently that others would lay responsibilities on you, and it has happened. So many people are gathering around you. Why?”
And the old man said: “It is not that you are capable of allowing them to do so…” For that one needs to become perfectly enlightened – to allow others to do so – because one has come to his own center. Now there is no possibility of getting distracted. When one has arrived; there is no problem.
“But, Lieh Tzu,” said the old man, “you have not yet arrived. You are still struggling; you are still far away. You have not yet become really integrated. From the body the ego has disappeared, from the mind the ego has disappeared, but from the self it has not disappeared yet. On the most subtle layer, the ego is still hiding.”
To see that phenomenon, the old man stood there: …he leaned on his upright staff and wrinkled his cheek against it. After standing there for a while, he left without speaking.
What was he doing? He looked deeply into his friend, Lieh Tzu. He looked deeply into him: “Have you really become integrated? Then there is no problem. Then you can have disciples, then you can have a crowd around you, then you can allow them to lay their responsibilities on you because you don’t exist, so nothing burdens you. You are not, so how can you be burdened? How can you burden a nothingness? Then there is no problem.” The master looked deeply and found that at the third layer the ego was still vibrating. It can be heard. If you listen silently, it is very simple to hear the ego of the other, and a man who has come home can immediately see it.
“It is not that you are capable of allowing them to do so…” “No, it has not yet become possible.” “…you are incapable of preventing them.”
Your state is negative, not yet positive. You are enjoying it. You still need people to make you feel important. You still need them; and if you need them, you cannot help them. In fact, on the contrary, they will distract you, they will harm you.
The other day someone asked, “A disciple needs a master; does a master need a disciple too?” Now you will understand. The master is a master only when he needs nobody, when his need has completely disappeared. If he still needs somebody, then he is still far from his home; he has not yet arrived. If he needs disciples, then he is not a master. He is a master only when he needs no disciples, and only then can he be of help – not that he will help, but he can be of help.
“It is not that you are capable of allowing them to do so, you are incapable of preventing them. What use is it to you to have this effect on people which is incompatible with your own basic peace?” “Your own peace is not yet there. You are still wavering, swaying. Your center is still not fixed, and these people will make you go more astray; they will be a distraction, so what is the point of it all? You didn’t go to the capital, but the capital has come here; the people have come, and sooner or later the king will be coming. These people will spread the news. So what is the point?”
“If you insist on making an effect, it will unsteady your basic self; and to no purpose.” “And nobody gains out of it. You lose, and nobody gains out of it.”
It is a great parable. Let it sink deep into your heart. Think about it, and whenever you want to influence people, become capable first. The capability comes only when you don’t have any desire to influence people – only then will you be of help. If you want to influence people, that simply shows that you are on an ego trip. Enough! These games you have played long enough; for many lives you have been playing them. Now it is time to stop these games. Because of these games you cannot contact reality. Reality is not a game. When you stop all games and all play, then reality explodes into your being.
All the games have one thing in common and that is the ego; body games, mind games, self games: all have one thing in common – the ego. That’s why I say to you not to repress the ego, but to disperse it, and that dispersal comes.
Find out. Whenever you are feeling some ego arising, just go inside yourself and look at it. See its movement, how it moves from one space to another space, how it takes more and more energy from you, how it takes you on faraway journeys, how it always takes you away from yourself. Just watch. I am not saying, “Fight it.” I am not saying, “Stop it” – but just watch. First you will become aware of the ego in the body – that is the most gross. Then, by and by, you will start hearing the whisperings of the second layer – the ego in the mind: that is subtle. If you become capable of listening to that, then one day you will understand even a third layer which is very subtle. You want to become a mahatma, you want to become a great saint, you want to become a great yogi, mahayogi, you want to become this and that. You want to become a great benefactor to humanity, you want to become a buddha – then, again you are playing the same game on a very subtle level. The Zen people have the right word for it: when the ego asserts itself on the third level, they call it the buddha disease.
The body, the mind, the self – one has to go on looking, layer upon layer, into the ego, into its functioning. Just looking into it is enough. When you have seen well, when you have seen all the nooks and corners of your being, one day, you will suddenly find that it has evaporated, it is not there.
And when it is not there, godliness is, Tao is. When you are not, you really are. To die on one plane is to be born on another plane. To die on the plane of games is to be born on the plane of existence. That is the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Crucify yourself as far as ego is concerned, so that you can be resurrected.
Enough for today.

---