There are three layers of your being: the body, the mind. and the self. And beyond the three is your no-self. And so there are three possibilities for the ego to assert itself.
If ego asserts itself on the layer of body – a beautiful and strong body, ’I have the most handsome body, the most powerful body.’ She wants to be a beauty queen, or he wants to be a Mr Universe. 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. Civilisations 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 non-aggressive, become non-violent. Don’t be brutal, have kindness, sympathy.’ Then ego starts asserting itself on another level, the level of the mind.
At the mind level it becomes knowledge, knowledgeability, money. Money is a higher thing than sexuality, so those people who become interested in money forget all about sex; they are no more 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 – everything they can sacrifice.
On the first layer they can sacrifice, because on the second layer they need all the energy available. 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 this is ’civilised fight’... but the same ego is asserting itself on the second layer.
Religions depend on repressing this second layer of ego. Civilisation 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.
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 pay-off in the other world – the heaven, the 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 the 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.... But again you are decorated, again you become very, very strong. The ego asserts itself on the third layer.
Tao says: The ego has to disappear from all the layers. One has to understand it so totally that it cannot find another way for 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 practised 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 more identified with your body. You are in the body, but you are not the body. When the ego disappears you are no more 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 self either. You remain an individual: you walk and live like an individual. but continuously aware that the wave is just an appearance, the reality is the ocean; that ’I am just a wave. God is the ocean, Tao is the ocean.