The more you prune a plant, the more it grows. So too the more you seek to annihilate the ego, the more it will increase. You should seek the root of the ego and destroy it.
That is again the same story played on a more subtle level. That's what the religious people have been doing down the ages - pious egoists they have been. They have made their ego even more decorated; it has taken the color of religion and holiness. Your ego is better than the ego of a saint; your ego is better, far better - because your ego is very gross, and the gross ego can be understood and dropped more easily than the subtle. The subtle ego goes on playing such games that it is very difficult. One will need absolute awareness to watch it.
Meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using the ego to observe and tame its own manifestations.
The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.
The ultimate meditation is: surrender to reality.
The more you fight, the more you are in conflict with it, the more you will be a loser.
In deep surrender, the ego disappears.
And when the ego is not there, for the first time you become aware of that which has always been there.
The more successful you become, the more the demands of your ego will increase. In the beginning, you simply want to succeed, but your ego will not be satisfied. When you become a little more successful your ego wants to kill your competition. And when you become even more successful, it wants to make you the universal king. There's no telling what ego wants because our desire doesn't have any limit; therefore, its demands continually increase.
Ego is neither positive nor negative. Those are simply concepts that create more boundaries. Ego is just ego, and the disaster of it all is that you, as a spiritual seeker, have been conditioned to think of the ego as bad, as an enemy, as something to be destroyed. This simply strengthens the ego. In fact, such conclusions arise from the ego itself. Pay no attention to them. Don't go to war with yourself; simply inquire into who you are.
I think when you love a child, it's a different kind of love. You think, 'I love more every day. I love more every day, more every day, I couldn't possibly love any more, I'm going to blow up.' And then you blow up. Your chest actually starts to hurt. You love so much, you think I can't love any more.
I think, honestly, that ego makes you most vulnerable. When you are in humility you are much more comfortable, open and okay with BEING vulnerable, whereas the ego is the protecter, and even though you think you're protecting, I think you are more vulnerable if you're in ego.
You cannot drop the ego. Once you start trying to drop the ego you will get in a very deep mess; you will become more and more worried and puzzled. And this is not the way to get rid of the ego. The only way to get rid of the ego is to look at it.
The ego isn't wrong; it's just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don't take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.
Oh, some day I'll tell you about why I wrote more than 1,500 Gmail filters. They throw away more than 300 emails every day. Every day. It's the best thing I ever did for my productivity.
The more tremendous the divinity is represented, the more tame and submissive do men become his ministers: And the more unaccountable the measures of acceptance required by him, the more necessary does it become to abandon our natural reason, and yield to their ghostly guidance and direction.
Misery makes you special. Misery makes you more egoistic. A miserable man can have a more concentrated ego than a happy man. A happy man really cannot have the ego, because a person becomes happy only when there is no ego. The more egoless, the more happy; the more happy, the more egoless. You dissolve into happiness. You cannot exist together with happiness; you exist only when there is misery. In happiness there is dissolution.
Every time you choose a perfume, you are voting. And, of course, I hope you vote for me. Not only for my ego, but for my pocketbook. The more you buy, the more money I make.
In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling - a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.