Being in Love, English edition

BEYOND DEPENDENCY

AND DOMINATION

Breaking Out of the Shell of the Ego

I have been always surprised by the number of people who come to me and say they are afraid of love. What is the fear of love? It is because when you really love somebody your ego starts slipping away and melting. You cannot love with the ego; the ego becomes a barrier, and when you want to drop the barrier between yourself and the other, the ego says, "This is going to be a death. Beware!"

The death of the ego is not your death; the death of the ego is really your possibility of life. The ego is just a dead crust around you, it has to be broken and thrown away. It comes into being naturally--just as a traveler collects dust on his clothes, on his body, and he has to take a bath to get rid of the dust. As we move through time, the dust of our experiences, our knowledge, of the life we have lived, of the past, collects. That dust becomes the ego. It accumulates and becomes a crust around you, which has to be broken and thrown away. One has to take a bath every day, in fact every moment, so that this crust never becomes a prison.

It will be helpful to understand where the ego comes from, to understand the roots.

A child is born and is absolutely helpless, particularly the human child. He cannot survive without others' help. Most children of the animals, the trees, the birds, can survive without the parents, can survive without a society, without a family. Even if sometimes help is needed, it is very little--a few days, at the most a few months. But a human child is so helpless that he has to depend on others for years. It is there that the root has to be sought.

Why does helplessness create the human ego? The child is helpless, he depends on others, but the ignorant mind of the child interprets this dependence as if he is the center of the whole world. The child thinks, "Whenever I cry, my mother runs immediately; whenever I am hungry, I just have to give an indication and the

OSHO, known for his revolutionary contribution to the science of inner transformation, continues to inspire millions of people worldwide in their search to define a new approach to individual spirituality that is self-directed and responsive to the everyday challenges of contemporary life. The Sunday Times of London named him one
of the 1,000 Makers of the Twentieth Century, and novelist Tom Robbins called him the most dangerous man since Jesus Christ. For more information about Osho and his work, please visit www.osho.com.