"And from where will you bring the fought? It will be just ego dividing into two parts, playing the game of fight. Sometimes one part can pretend to win, sometimes the other part can pretend to win, nobody ever wins. The struggle becomes infinite and meanwhile energy is dissipated, meanwhile life is wasted. Remember, you cannot fight the ego.

"Can you repress it? People have done that too. It has not helped. If you repress the ego, it goes deeper into your being. Rather than getting rid of it, you become more and more poisoned by it, because what will you do when you repress? You will force it into the unconscious; it will start going underground. But the unconscious is far more powerful than the conscious. Ego in the conscious has not much power. Once it enters into the unconscious it becomes nine times more powerful than it was before. Rather than getting rid of it, you will be more and more in its control. And one thing more: once the ego has become unconscious, you don't know anything about it. It has gone behind you. Now you cannot even watch it. Now you are completely a victim. Now you cannot protect yourself against it. Now you cannot make any arrangements to save yourself from it. It is there pulling your strings from behind. You will become a puppet, and you will be in the hands of the ego. And you were thinking that you had repressed it. Fight does not help, repression does not help.

"The third thing that has been tried down the ages is sublimation. Sublimate it – let it be identified with higher goals. Then it becomes very decorated, it becomes enthroned. And naturally it again becomes very powerful. Identify it with your church, identify it with your country, identify it with your color, identify it with ideology – socialism, communism, fascism, Christianity, Hinduism. Identify it with some high value, some utopian value, or you can even identify it with God. Then it rules suprememost. Then it rules in the name of God. God is just an excuse. The real sovereign becomes the ego. And these are the three available ways: either fight or repress or sublimate."