Page 25 - All India Magazine Mar-2026

in a boiling-pot! (Laughter) And yet it is the only thing about
which you can say with certitude, “It is”, and give a name to
it; yet even your name is a convention... but still, you are in the
habit of calling yourself by a certain name — say, “This, this is
I.” You look at yourself in a mirror, and although what you were
twenty years ago is very different from what you are now... it
is unrecognisable... still something makes you say all the same,
“Yes, this is I.” Yes? “I am so-and-so”— Peter, Louis, Jack, Andr´e,
whoever it may be....
(After a silence) And even this, if one were to look at oneself,
every seven years all the cells are changed, and it is only by a
kind of habit that it remains the same. Does it remain the same?
Do you have photographs of the time you were very young?
And the photographs when you were ten, twenty, thirty years
old — it is because one very much wants to do so that one rec-
ognises oneself; otherwise, truly, one is not at all the same....
When you were this height and now when you are this height,
that makes a considerable difference! So, there we are...

Necessity of the ego
All this... it is not in order to swamp you that I tell you all
this. It is only in order to tell you that before speaking of merg-
ing one’s ego in the Divine, one must first know a little what one
is. The ego is there. Its necessity is that you become conscious,
independent beings, individualised — I mean in the sense of
independent—that you may not be the public square where ev-
erything goes crisscross! That you may exist in yourselves. That
is why there is an ego. It is like that; that is why also there is a
skin, like that... though truly, even physical forces pass through
the skin. There is a vibration which goes a certain distance. But
still, it’s the skin that prevents us from blending into one an-
other. But everything else must be like that too.

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