Osho - The greatest courage in life is to drop one's ego

Osho - The greatest courage in life is to drop one's ego and unless ones drops the ego one cannot know what love is. Love is the absence of ego. It is the experience of egolessness -- and that's what creates the whole problem around the subject of love.

People want to love, people want to be loved. It is natural, it is their basic need, to love and to be loved, but the problem arises that they have to drop the ego. And they want to do the impossible: they want to keep the ego and yet be capable of loving and capable of receiving love. That is not possible, it is not in the nature of things. It is like you can't have darkness and light both in the room together. If the light is there the darkness is not there, cannot be there. If you want darkness then you have to extinguish the light. They exist only in each other's absence. The absence of one becomes the presence of the other; hence both cannot co-exist.

And this is one of the basic anxieties of man: he wants them together, he would like to have his ego. Not
only that, he would like to feel more egoistic because of his love, because he is such a great lover, because he loves and he is being loved. Now this is sheer stupidity! And when both the persons who are in love doing the same stupid thing, it becomes a constant conflict. That is another meaning of Hilde, battle, fight, war. Avoid that meaning!

Courageous spirit is only the symbolic meaning. The literal meaning is war, but in a way both are
relevant as far as love is concerned. If you want to keep the ego also then love will become a war; if you can drop the ego then love becomes peace, but to drop the ego one needs great guts.

I think that is the greatest courage in life, to put one's ego aside. And what is true about love is true
about sannyas too, because it is a love affair on a different plane, on the highest plane possible. Is you want to keep your ego then that will be the barrier between you and me too. Then you can learn few things, you can become knowledgeable, but that is not the purpose of sannyas.

The purpose of sannyas is a total transformation of being -- not just learning a little bit of knowledge,
accumulating few more beautiful words, theories, philosophies, ideologies, becoming more informative --
that is not the purpose of sannyas. Information is not its goal but transformation. And all transformation
needs egolessness, or in other words, it needs love. Be courageous and let it happen!

Source - Osho Book "Nirvana now or never"