You ask me: "Can you explain to us the difference between emptying oneself and effacing oneself?"
Effacing oneself is the way of the ego, emptying oneself is the way of understanding. In emptying yourself you simply understand the ways of the ego — and in that understanding, the ego disappears of its own accord. You don't drop it, you don't have to drop it. You don't fight with it. It is not found.
When you look within with attention, with the light of awareness, you cannot find any ego there. So the question does not arise of why or how one should efface oneself. There is nothing to efface! That which is, is, and cannot be effaced. And that which is not, is not, and there is no need to efface it.
Emptying oneself simply means seeing oneself. And then many things start dropping, because you were unnecessarily carrying them. In the first place, they don't exist. They are ghosts, nightmares; they disperse themselves when the light is brought in. Emptying oneself is a meditative process. Just looking in, deeply, with no prejudice, with no prefabricated ideology, neither for nor against, just looking in, and emptying starts happening.
And when you have emptied all content — thoughts, desires, memories, projections, hopes — when all is gone, for the first time you find yourself, because you are nothing but that pure space, that virgin space within you. Unburdened by anything, that contentless consciousness, that's what you are! Seeing it, realizing it, one is free. One is freedom, one is joy, one is bliss.
But effacing oneself is dangerous. It means you have accepted already that the ego is there and it has to be effaced. You have accepted an illusion, and now you want to destroy it. You have missed the first point. You have accepted that the rope is a snake, and now you are trying to kill the snake. You will be in great trouble. You will never be able to kill the snake, because in the first place there is none. You can go on beating the rope, but what about the snake? The snake will remain there.
The snake exists in your illusion; the snake does not exist outside, otherwise you could have killed it. But how can you kill a snake which is not? You are fighting with a shadow, and you are bound to be defeated.
Let this fundamental be remembered always: if you fight with anything false, you will be defeated. The false cannot be defeated, because it is false. How can you defeat something which is nonexistential? There is no way. The only way is, bring light and see.
Ihi passiko, come and see! In that very seeing, the snake is not found. The rope is there, the snake has disappeared. Now there is no need to efface yourself, no need to fight.
There are millions of people who try to become humble, but their whole effort is nonsense, sheer stupidity.
Once a man asked me, "Are you an egoist or a humble person?"
I said. "Neither. neti neti, neither this nor that. I cannot be either."
He said, "What are you talking about? One has to be either an egoist or a humble person."
I said, "You don't understand. You know nothing; you have never gone within yourself. If you are humble, you are an egoist standing on his head. Humbleness is an expression of the ego. I am neither. I am simply whatsoever I am, neither humble nor egoistic, because I have seen that there is no ego. How can there be humbleness then?"
Humbleness is diluted ego. But if there is no ego, how can you dilute it? If there is no snake, how can you take the poisonous teeth of the snake away? That's what humbleness is. The poisonous teeth have been removed from the snake; now the snake cannot hurt, now the snake cannot bite, now the snake cannot do any harm — but the snake is there.
Those teeth were false, because the snake itself is false.
Buddha is neither egoistic nor humble. Both are impossible for the man of understanding.
The ignorant person can be egoistic, can be humble — both are aspects of ignorance. And the ignorant person can try to efface the ego, because it is so respectable not to have the ego. One becomes a saint by effacing the ego, one attains great prestige and power by effacing the ego. But it is the same game; the game has not changed.
OSHO