Being a messenger of God simply means to be available to existence so that he can deliver his message through you. To be a messenger simply means to be a vehicle for the divine power to convey his words. It means to be an instrument so that existence can sing through you. How can one became such an instrument? The simple answer is by being egoless, by dropping one’s all identities, by being empty, by emptying one’s self totally, by becoming selfless so that existence can enter. To become a passage for the existence, to allow the formless to work through your form, that is the meaning of being an instrument. So being egoless is the key.

What is ego? It is one of the most misunderstood words. Ego is generally thought to be pride, arrogance, haughtiness. To be egoist is considered to be unforgiving, to be uncompromising. To be an egoist means always bothered about one’s own business, always looking for one’s own profit, no matter at what cost. To be egoist is considered to be the feeling of superiority. A person of ego is filled with this superiority complex. He always thinks himself superior, higher than others. He is all praise for himself and all scorn for others. He cannot think of anything other than himself. This is what we think ego is. No doubt all these things relate to ego. But they are just the tip of the iceberg.

Ego means a separate identity. Ego means “I”, the feeling of Iness. An egoist is someone who creates his own world because he does not belong to the whole. He builds his own world and he enjoys the feeling of being the owner of this world. He loves to control everything in this world. He tries to act as God. He wants to be “the monarch of all he surveys, his right there is none to dispute”. There is a shair हमने देखा है कई ऐसे ख़ुदाओं को यहाँ / सामने जिनके वो सचमुच का ख़ुदा कुछ भी नहीं । (humne dekha hai kai aise khudaon ko yahan / Samne jinke wo sachmuch ka khuda kuch bhi nahin) . They become Gods themselves. And how can someone who himself wishes to be God be the messenger of God? Such a person is full of arrogance. A messenger is humble. He is just a carrier, a conveyor. So an egoist becomes the master himself not a messenger. This is what ego is. Ego simply means a separate identity. The resistance to be merged with the whole, to give up, to surrender to the cosmos and enjoy oneness with this wholeness, with this non-dual reality that we call God or give it any name is the state of egolessness.

Since our definition of ego is very limited, though we use it very frequently but rarely do we understand it. And unless we understand ego, we cannot understand the messenger. A messenger is someone who is so totally dissolved with the master, with the giver of the message, with the divine, so totally dissolved that his “I” simply disappears. He is just a vacuum. He is just a silence and that silence is a signal to the existence that the message can be delivered now. That silence is the indicator. Here silence does not mean outward silence. Here silence means that there are no ripples of thoughts inside, that your inner space is absolutely clean. There are no waves inside. It is absolutely necessary to be silent for a messenger. When one is silent one is available to the existence. If a messenger is not empty, if a messenger has a separate identity within himself, that identity, that person is going to manipulate the message. Then whatever comes from the above will be judged, will be interpreted and then will be passed out and the message will be adulterated because it would lose its purity. It would no longer be the master’s message. It would be the messenger’s message because the messenger is going to add something from himself into the message. All this interpretation, adulteration happen very unconsciously so we just can’t see whether the message that is coming is coming directly from the above or it has been colored. That it has been given a different meaning by the one who is delivering.

A true messenger is just like a postman and when the postman delivers the message, the message is inside the envelope. The messenger does not know what is inside the envelope. It is an affair between the sender and the receiver. The postman does not take out the letter and add something from his own. He simply hands over what he has been assigned to do. This is what we call the passing of a message.

But the kind of people we are, we always add something from our own and this is the reason there is so much confusion in the world. Everybody is interpreting. Everybody is adding something from his own and the purity is lost. The message is lost. It is adulterated and is distorted and deformed. Here the question comes: What compels us to manipulate? It is our unconscious state of mind. No matter how much we try not to meddle with the message, we can’t help it because our self, our subjectivity is there and unless one is totally free from the subjectivity the message can never remain as it is.

So the precondition for a person to become a messenger is to become not. When he becomes not, when he is not, when he is not a separate identity, when he does not exist as a separate identity, he has qualified to be a messenger. Just observe your own life. How often are you empty? Very rarely. Your mind is always busy in one thing or the other – judging others, feeling jealous, talking ill. If not busy in all these things, then so-called productive things, trying to do some kind of research or writing something. But you just can’t tolerate your own empty self. And one who is always afraid of being empty, one who is always running away from his own aloneness is bound to miss the whole thing, because that aloneness is the key. It is going to open the door for the divine to enter. No wonder, very few of us ever feel divine inside. Yes, we can always create illusions of divinity, but deep down we all know whether it is truth or illusion. Illusions are just like bubbles, before long they burst. That means divinity seems to be something different from what we think it is. It is impossible to understand divinity as an ego. Unless all identities drop altogether, absolutely, there is no way to understand divine.

Even sometimes these moments of silence come very accidentally. All of a sudden one thing or the other pushes you into silence and a deep peace arises inside you. That momentary absence of ego, even that single moment of egolessness fills you with bliss. But because it is accidental, we fail to recognize it. And before we can hold on to it, it is already gone.

Further, ego means an identity as an 'I', that I am this or that. In the Vedas there is a beautiful term neti-neti. It means neither this nor that. I am neither this nor that. When one goes on saying this, I am neither this nor that, neither Hindu nor Muslim, neither Indian nor Pakistani, neither man nor woman, neither young nor old, neither sick nor healthy. When all these extremes, all these dualities drop, one becomes an empty presence. That empty presence is egolessness. The moment this egolessness arises, in that same moment, divinity also arises in you. This empty presence is the messenger. The messenger is never a person. Remember this. A messenger is never at all an individual. S/he is never a person. A messenger is a presence. An empty presence. An absent presence. You have read divine messages in the holy books. These words are just the shell, the outer covering of the message; they are not the message. Remember, the message is not words, the message is the presence of divinity.

This is why, most of the enlightened people have said “those who know the truth, cannot say it. It is unsayable”. It is unsayable yet they say. It simply means what they say is not the truth. Those words are just the covering, the outer shell. The message resides inside the words. Who can receive this message? Just like the messenger, only an empty presence can receive the message. Therefore, what a messenger says can be received only by another empty presence. So silence is the messenger, silence is the message and silence is the receiver. When one becomes totally silent, he is connected to the divine. Then through him the divine sends his message. What is that message? It is the message of silence hidden in words. It is the formless hidden in the form. One who is not silent will be trapped in the words. Then he is going to miss the whole message. So if you want to become a messenger be silent, if you want to receive a message be silent, because in silence alone one knows the God, the message and the messenger. How beautifully Muhammad said in his last sermon, called the Farewell Sermon, “O, Allah, be my witness that I have conveyed your message to your people.” The prophet knew he was just a medium, a silent, empty space and Allah was speaking through this space to the world. Muhammad was just a witness. A dissolved being. He was not the creator of the message but the carrier of the message. Whenever you are dissolved totally, absolutely, know well the divine is going to flood inside you.