Right now as I am speaking, you can observe the fact that if you are silent, totally alert, you are there, but with no feeling of “I.” And just the contrary happen: if you are troubled, in conflict, in anxiety, you feel a centered ego within you. When you are in anger, in passion, violent, aggressive, you feel a crystallized ego within you. Whenever you are in love, in compassion, it is not there.

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.

If you know love, there is no need to know God – you have known him already. Love is just another name for it. If you know love, there is no need to go into meditation – you have gone already. Love is just another name for it. So many techniques of meditation are needed, and so many teachers, and so many schools of meditation are needed, because there is no love. If love exists, there is no need to practice anything, because the thing has happened already. And the thing is the disappearance of the ego.

So the first thing to be understood: whenever you are silent, the ego is not. And don’t believe in me. I am not talking about a theory; this is a fact. You need not take my opinion; you can observe it in yourself. And there is no need to postpone it for the future; right now you can observe the fact that if you are silent, you are – but with no limitation, with no center. You exist without the center, there is no crystallized I. The presence is there, the consciousness is there, but there is no one who can say “I am.”

When you are silent, the ego is not. And when you are not silent, the ego is. So ego is the disease, all diseases combined together, hence the emphasis to surrender the ego. The emphasis is to surrender the disease.

Secondly: if in silence, for even a single moment you have the glimpse of your existence as egoless, then you can analyze it, and then you can enter the phenomenon of ego, of what it is. The mind is accumulated past. The mind is never here, it is never now. It is always from the past. It is accumulation. Mind is memory: all the experiences that you have gone through, all the information that you have come across, all the knowledge that you have gathered, heard, listened to, read – that is accumulated. The mind is constantly accumulating.

The mind is the greatest accumulator; it goes on accumulating. Even while you are not conscious it goes on accumulating; even while you are asleep the mind is accumulating. You may not be aware of it. While you are asleep, and there is noise in the road, the mind is accumulating. You can be hypnotized in the morning and you can be asked about it, and you will say everything, you will relate everything – whatsoever the mind has accumulated in the night. Even if you have fallen in a coma, or you are unconscious, or you have fallen in a fit, the mind is accumulating.