Osho – You are there behind your eyes, just standing as if someone is standing behind a window and looking out. The man who is looking out of a window is just like you, looking out of the eyes towards me. But you can get identified with the eyes, you can get identified with the seeing. Seeing is a capacity, a vehicle. Eyes are just windows; they are not you.
Patanjali says, ‘Through the five senses you get identified with the vehicles, and then out of these five arises the ego.’ Ego is the false self. Ego is all that which you are not and you think you are.
A man standing in the window starts thinking that he is the window. What are you doing behind the eyes? — you are look. ing through the eyes. Eyes are the windows, ears are the windows; you are hearing with the ears. You stretch your hand towards me and I touch you; hand is just a vehicle. You are not the hand. And this you can watch, and this you can experiment with.
Many times it happens that something happens just in front of your eyes and you miss. Sometimes you have read the whole page and suddenly you become aware that you have been reading, but you have not read a single word. You don’t remember what you have read, and you have to go back. What happened? If you were the eyes how could this be possible?
You are not the eyes. The window was vacant, looking at the page. The consciousness behind the window was not there, it was engaged somewhere else. The attention was not there. You may have been standing at the window with closed eyes, or your back was to the window, but you were not looking out of the window. It happens every day — suddenly you realize that some thing has happened and you have not seen, you have not heard, you have not read. You were not there, you were somewhere else thinking some other thoughts, dreaming some other dreams, moving in some other worlds. This window was empty; only eyes were there.
Do you know the empty eye? Go and see a madman; you can see an empty eye there. He looks at you and doesn’t look. You can see that he looks at you and he is not looking at you at all. His eye is empty. Or you can go to a saint who has achieved; his eye again is also empty. It is not like the madman’s, but some thing similar to it — he looks through you. He does not stop at you, he goes beyond you. Or he looks not at your body, but at you. He penetrates: he leaves your body, your mind, your heart and he simply jumps on you. And you don’t know who you are.
That is why a saint’s look seems to be going through you. He does not stop at you, because for the saint, the ego that you think you are is not you. He bypasses the ego; he simply looks into you. A madman looks with an empty eye because his consciousness is not there. A saint also appears to be looking with an empty eye, because his consciousness is absolutely there. And he penetrates you so deeply, to the very depths of your being where you have not reached yet. That’s why he looks as if he is not looking at you, because the you that you are identified with is not the reality for him, but the you that you are not aware of is the reality for him.
Egoism is the identification of the seer with the seen, with the vehicle. If you drop identification with the vehicles, ego drops. And there is no other way to drop the ego. Don’t get identified with the body: eyes, ears, mind, heart, and suddenly there is no ego. You are, in your total purity, but there is no ego there. You are for the first time in your total presence, but no ego is there, no ‘I’ process, nobody saying, ‘I am.’
Source – Osho Book “Yoga, Vol4”
