The idea of the ego is a social institution. It has no physical reality. It is simply: the ego is your symbol of yourself, just as the word “water” is a noise which symbolizes a certain liquid reality. So the idea of the ego, the role you play, who you are, is not the same as your living organism. Your ego has absolutely nothing to do with the way you color your eyes, shape your body, circulate your blood. That’s the real you—but it’s certainly not your ego, because you don’t even know how it’s done from the standpoint of your conscious attention.
There’s no moralism in this whatsoever. It’s simply pointing out, like: if you put your hand into the fire, you’ll get burned. You can get burned if you want to. It’s okay. But if it so happens that you don’t want to get burned, then you don’t put your hand in the fire. So, in the same way, if you don’t want to be in a state of anxiety all the time—and again, I emphasize: if you like to be anxious, it’s perfectly alright! See, Buddhism never hurries anyone on. They say you’ve got all eternity through which to live in various forms, and therefore you don’t have just one life in which you’ve got to avoid eternal damnation. You can go running around the wheel in the rat race and play that game just as long as you want to, so long as you think it’s fun. But if there comes a time when you don’t think it’s fun, you don’t have to do it. So I wouldn’t say to anyone who disagrees with me, and who says, “Well, I think we ought to engage the forces of evil in battle and put this world to right,” and so on and so forth, and arrange everything in this world so that it’s all up—try it, please. It’s perfectly okay. Go on doing that. But if you see that it’s futile, then you can let go. Don’t try to cling. Relax.
Are you here; recollected? See, most people aren’t. They’re bothering about yesterday and wondering what they’re going to do tomorrow, and aren’t all here. That’s a definition of sanity: to be all there. So to be recollected is to be completely alert, available for the present. Because that’s the only place that you are ever going to be in. Yesterday doesn’t exist, tomorrow never comes. There is only today.