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Buffalos are not so foolish. If you throw away your mind like a banana peel, no buffalo is going to eat it.

Yes, there is a possibility that some man may swallow it—that much stupidity exists only in man. Buffalos are not interested in minds at all: they are perfectly okay, mindlessly.

But mind and ego are not synonymous. Ego is an illness of the mind. Ego means an ill mind; non-ego means a healthy mind. Ego is a constriction, a limitation on the mind. When the ego disappears, mind becomes Mind with a capital M.

In Buddhist literature they use mind in two ways: mind with a small, lower-case m, and Mind with a capital M. The capital-M Mind is cosmic mind: the ego has disappeared, the whole has taken possession of you, you have surrendered. You are no more; God is. And the lower-case mind is you, the ego. It is against God; it separates you.

It is like an earthen pot... You take the earthen pot to the river, you fill the earthen pot with water; the pot is underneath the water. The water inside the pot is the same, and that outside the pot is the same, but there is a wall—an earthen wall—dividing. The wall disappears... then again the inside of the pot and the outside of the pot are one.

Ego is like a wall, an earthen wall that surrounds you and divides you from God. The question is not of the mind; the question is of the ego.

But you don't know any other mind; you only know this ego-mind. So when I am talking to you and I say to you, "Drop the mind," I mean, "Drop the ego." When you have dropped this mind, the ego-mind, then the cosmic Mind arises in you. Then you start functioning not from your own; you start functioning from the original source. Then God functions through you.

Beware of the ego. Sometimes even the idea of God can be used by the ego.

One man came to me. He had a big suitcase with him. He opened the suitcase and there were many files. And he said, "Now, look. God comes every day to me in the night, and he gives me messages. And in the middle of the night I have to write the messages."

He was a Mohammedan, and the Mohammedans were very angry because he was saying, "The next Koran is descending on me, just as it descended one thousand years before on Mohammed. A higher dispensation is coming to me."

I looked in his files. They were all rubbish! There was not a single word of any significance. But that man had come to me; he wanted me to recognize that he was a prophet, that God had spoken through him, that here was the proof.

And he said, "I know nobody else will recognize me, but you will recognize me."

Now he had come with great hope, and I felt great compassion for him. He was in a very, very ill state; he was almost schizophrenic. One part of his mind was befooling another part of the mind. One part was saying things to the other part, and the other part was writing. No, he was not deceiving anybody; he was himself deceived. But the ego was feeling very good—that God had chosen him to be a special messenger.

The ego can even play with the idea of God. It can claim to be God; it can claim God's realization. One has to watch very carefully because the ego and its games are very subtle.

It is related of Bernard Shaw that he once opened his front door to find himself face to face with two earnest young men, one of whom had some pamphlets in his hand.

"Who are you, and what do you want?" asked Shaw.
"We're Jehovah's Witnesses," said one of them.
"Really?" replied Shaw. "I'm Jehovah. How are we doing?"

Now he is simply joking, but this is how the ego functions.

It happened in Baghdad that a man was caught because he declared himself a prophet of God. He was thrown in jail. After seven days the Caliph went to see the man. For seven days he had been kept starving, had been beaten continuously, and was tied to a pole, swollen, scratched all over the body, very badly beaten, starving, dirty.

The Caliph asked him, "Now, what do you think? Do you still think that you are the prophet of God? Because there is only one God and there is only one prophet, Mohammed. So take your statement back; otherwise you will be killed."

The man started laughing, and he said, "But when I was coming from God, when he appointed me as the prophet, he told me, 'You will be tortured, people will beat you, just as in the old days they have done with other prophets. They will insult you, they will kill you, as they have done with Jesus.' So your beating, this jail, and all this torture simply prove that I am a prophet. It does not disprove a thing. So I was right! In fact I was thinking that so many days had passed and nobody was beating me, and nobody was torturing me—am I a prophet or not? You have proved that I am a prophet!"

And just then another man, who was tied to another pole, started laughing very loudly.

The Caliph asked, "Why are you laughing? What is the matter with you?"

And the man said, "This man is a liar. I myself am God, and I never sent this man!" He had been caught one month before because he had declared himself to be God.

And I am not saying that there have not been people who have become God. Mansoor was right when he declared: Ana Al-Haqq—I am God. The seers of the Upanishads were right when they declared: Aham Brahmasmi—I am God. Jesus is right when he says: "My Father in heaven and I are one and the same. If you have seen me, you have seen my Father."

But it is a very delicate matter because pretenders are there, egoists are there, ego-maniacs are there. You have to be very careful. You have to watch; you have to see into yourself so no ego starts claiming. When the ego has disappeared, when you have become just an emptiness, a nothingness, then the voice of God starts floating through you. That is cosmic Mind.

Ego and mind are not synonymous. In you they are! Right now they are. But if the ego is dropped, then a totally new quality of mind arises in you which has nothing to do with you, which has existed before you, which is eternity.

That's what Jesus means when he says, "Before Abraham was, I am." He is using "Abraham" as the ego, as the personality. And when he says, "Before Abraham was, I am," he is using the words "I am" as cosmic mind.

I can say to you, "Before Jesus was, I am." Then "I" is no more used in the sense of ego; it is just a linguistic way of saying that the eternal precedes the temporal, that the formless precedes the form, that the nameless precedes the name, that the egoless precedes the ego.

You are right: mind and ego are not the same. But don't get deceived by the idea. It can be dangerous; it can prove fatal. In you they are the same.

Drop the ego—just peel it like a banana skin and throw it away. And don't throw it on the road because, that's true, somebody can slip on it. You have been slipping on it for so many lives. And don't throw it on the road. As far as I know, no buffalo will eat it, but who knows? Some buffalo may have become stupid through living with men too long and may eat it and get into trouble.