"Both have their merits and demerits.

"When you say 'being oneself' there is a danger that you may mistake your ego for your being. Being oneself may become your egoistic standpoint. That is dangerous.

"On the other hand, describing the experience as egolessness has no challenge in it, no excitement in it. It is emptiness, nothingness, negativity. Very few people will be attracted towards the negative. The negative expression may close the doors for them. But the negative way has a beauty in that it will not allow in any way – from the front door or from the back door – the possibility of the ego.

"So for the ignorant people, it is better to describe it as egolessness because they are accustomed to their ignorance.

"But for those who know, being oneself does not mean ego; being oneself means egolessness, but it is only for those who know.

"My own approach is that egolessness is the way to reach the experience of being oneself. So they don't appear two, and both are combined, and the merits of both are together.

Osho,
You spoke the other morning in response to a question, about the need for energy to be expressed sexually; until that point, if one simply tries to divert the energy into spirituality it will create a block.
On another occasion you spoke of Ramakrishna and how he would meditate on his wife's naked body whenever he felt sexuality arising. Was he already enlightened, or was he simply in a stage of consciousness not comparable to the state that was asked about the other morning?

"He was not enlightened, and whatever he was doing was a subtle way of repression. You do it by looking at a pornographic magazine – that looks ugly. He was doing it looking at his own wife, who was a beautiful woman. That doesn't seem to be ugly, but it is living pornography.

"And Ramakrishna was not enlightened at that point, and he became more and more repressed. That repression was coming into his mad dances before the god, singing for hours – that was simply expressing energy that he had been repressing.

"He became enlightened only in the end when he came in contact with a master."