A Quote by David Bowie

Making love with his ego. — © David Bowie
Making love with his ego.
In every bed you will find four persons sleeping together. It is very rare to find a double bed, because then four persons are there overcrowding it. The wife is there and the ego, and the husband is there and the ego - husband is hidden behind his ego, wife is hidden behind her ego, and those two egos go on making love. The real contact never happens.
That's why we cannot love, because with the ego, love is impossible. That's why we go on talking so much about love, but we never are in love. And whatsoever we call love is more or less sex, it is not love; because you cannot lose your ego, and love cannot exist unless the ego has disappeared. Love, meditation, godliness, they all require one thing - the ego must not be there. That's why Jesus is right in saying that God is love, because both phenomena happen only when the ego is not.
I have been continuously surprised by 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 and melting. You cannot love with the ego; the ego becomes a barrier. and when you want to drop the barrier the ego says, 'This is going to be a death. Beware!'
There are only two states of consciousness that exist - the state of the ego and the state of love. The ego is the narrow state, the seed-form, the atomic stage; love is all encompassing, love is God. The center of the ego is I; the ego exists for itself. The nectar of love is the universe. Love exists for all.
Love and ego cannot go together. Knowledge and ego go together perfectly well, but love and ego cannot go together, not at all. They cannot keep company. They are like darkness and light: if light is there darkness cannot be. Darkness can only be if light is not there. If love is not there the ego can be; if love is there the ego cannot be. And vice versa, if ego is dropped, love arrives from all the directions. It simply starts pouring in you from everywhere.
Ego is something that everybody, creative especially, has to grapple with. You need enough ego to keep going but not so much ego that you're deaf or blind, that you're making a mistake and can't fix the course.
The reason that ego and love are not compatible comes down to this: you cannot take your ego into the unknown, where love wants to lead. If you follow love, your life will become uncertain, and the ego craves certainty.
The love to which ego is attached is a form of jealousy - this is why nobody is as jealous as lovers are. The love which is attached to the ego is a conspiracy and a trick to possess the other. It is a conspiracy - that is why nobody suffocates so many people as those who talk of love. This situation is created because of the 'love' which comes from the ego - there can never be any relation between love and the ego.
The man of genius is he whose ego has acquired consciousness. He is enabled by it to distinguish the fact that others are different, to perceive the "ego" of other men, even when it is not pronounced enough for them to be conscious of it themselves. But it is only he who feels that every other man is also an ego, a monad, an individual centre of the universe, with specific manner of feeling and thinking and a distinct past, he alone is in a position to avoid making use of his neighbours as means to an end.
Man is important in one sense only. He was made in the image of God: That is his importance. He is not important for his body, ego, or personality. His constant affirmation of ego-consciousness is the source of all his problems.
With this ego arises all the problems, the thousand and one problems. This ego will not allow you to fall in love and millions of problems will arise in your life. This ego would like everybody to surrender to you; this ego will not allow you to surrender to anybody - and love happens only when you surrender. When you force somebody to surrender, it is hate, destruction, it is not love.
always thinks of the other; ego thinks only of oneself. Love is always considerate; ego is absolutely inconsiderate. Ego has only one language and that is of self. Ego always uses the other; love is ready to be used, love is ready to serve.
For me, love is a pure, unconditional, nonjudgmental feeling that I feel towards some people and some parts of nature. Most of us love, but the purest love is the one where we take ego out of the equation, and that is the hard part of love, keeping ego aside.
Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state -- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological -- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.
The challenge of abating one with a genuine ego problem is to not try to put him down. Any and all antagonization, in his mind, is merely compensated for by his own descriptions: his feelings of persecution by the envious and his ideals of worth. Arguably, the genuine ego is more of a circumstantial defense mechanism rather than a steady arrogance in need of starvation.
Instead of "I love you," it would be better to say "I am love-I am the embodiment of Pure Love." Remove the I and you, and you will find that there is only Love. It is as if Love is imprisoned between the I and you. Remove the I and you, for they are unreal; they are self-imposed walls that don't exist. The gulf between I and you is the ego. When the ego is removed the distance disappears and the I and you also disappear. They merge to become one - and that is Love.
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