Before you can Love yourself you have to know yourself
Question - Beloved Osho, What does it mean to
Love Myself?
Osho - Prem Kabir, one has to begin not by loving oneself,
because you don't know who you are. Who are you going to love? If you start by
loving yourself, you will love only your ego, which is not your self, which is
your false personality. Almost everybody loves his personality; everybody loves
his ego. Even the ugliest woman, if you say to her, "How beautiful you are,"
will not refuse to accept it.
I have heard... Two old men meet on a street corner. "Where have
you been for the past eight weeks?"
"In jail," says the second man.
"In
jail? How come?" says the first man.
The second old man replies, "Well, about
eight weeks ago I was standing on a street corner and this beautiful young girl
rushes up with a policeman and says, `He is the man, officer. He is the one who
attacked me.' And you know, I felt so flattered, I admitted it."
How many
things you have admitted that you know perfectly well are not true. People say
you are so loving, so sincere, so truthful, so beautiful, so honest -- and you
never deny. This is not the love I have been talking about.
Yes, I would like you to love yourself, because unless you love
yourself you cannot love anybody else. You don't know what love is if you have
not loved yourself. But before you can love yourself you have to know yourself;
hence love is secondary, meditation is primary.
And the miracle is, if you meditate and slowly, slowly get
out of the ego and out of your personality and realize your real self, love will
come on its own. You don't have to do anything, it is a spontaneous flowering.
But it blossoms only in a certain climate, and that climate I call meditation.
In the climate of silence -- no-mind, no disturbance inside, absolute clarity,
peace and silence -- suddenly, you will see thousands of flowers have opened
within you, and their fragrance is love.
Naturally, first you will love yourself, because that will be
your first encounter. First you will become aware of the fragrance that is
arising in you and the light that has been born in you, and the blissfulness
that is showering on you. Then loving will become your nature. Then you will
love many; then you will love all.
In fact, what we know in our ignorance is a relationship, and
what we know in our awareness is no longer a relationship. It is not that I love
you; it is that I am love.
And you have to understand the difference. When
you say, "I love you," what about others? What about the whole existence? The
more narrow your love is, the more imprisoned. Its wings are cut; it cannot fly
in the sky across the sun. It does not have freedom; it is almost in a golden
cage. The cage is beautiful, but inside the cage the bird is not the same bird
that you see in the sky opening its wings.
Love has to become not a relationship, not a narrowing, but a
broadening. Love has to become your very quality, your very character, your very
being, your radiance. Just as the sun radiates light not for anyone in
particular, unaddressed, meditation radiates love unaddressed.
Of course, first it is felt within oneself, for oneself, and
then it starts radiating all around. Then you love not only human beings, you
love trees, you love birds; you simply love, you are love.
You are asking, Prem Kabir, "What does it mean to love myself?"
It means meditation. It means to be yourself. And nature will bring love as a
reward. Just don't listen to the priests. They are the enemies of love. They
have been teaching the world to hate yourself and to hate the world, because
they have been teaching either it is a sin that you were born or it is because
of the evil acts of your past life that you are suffering in this life. But no
religion accepts this life with joy and rejoicing, as a gift, as a reward of
which you are not worthy, of which you don't claim any right. You have not
earned it.
So the first thing is, avoid the priests. They have taught you
life-negative values. And my effort here is to bring back life-affirmation.
That's what I call loving yourself, accepting yourself not as a sinner. How can
you accept yourself if you think you are a sinner? How can you love yourself if
you think you are nothing but full of guilt, nothing but an accumulated past of
evil acts of millions of lives?
You will hate yourself. And that's what your priests have been
saying: renounce life, hate life, hate pleasure, hate everything, and sacrifice
everything if you want to enter into paradise. Nobody has ever returned from
paradise, so there is no evidence of any paradise anywhere, no proof, it is just
a futile exercise which has never been able to come to a conclusion.
The
old priest was warning his congregation about sin.
"Sin," he said, "is like a
big dog. There is the big dog of pride, and the big dog of envy, and the big dog
of greed, and finally, there is the big dog of sex. And you have to kill those
big dogs before they kill you and prevent you from getting to heaven. It can be
done. I know, because over the years I have done it. I killed the big dog of
envy, the big dog of pride, the big dog of greed -- and yes, my children, I
killed the big dog of sex."
"Father," came a voice from the back of the
church, "are you sure that last dog did not die a natural death?"
You
cannot change nature. If you can simply live naturally, transformations come. If
they come, then sex disappears -- but not by your efforts. By your efforts it
goes on hanging around you. The more you repress it, the more you have it. The
more you live it, the more is the possibility to go beyond it.
An old
couple were sitting at home one evening listening to the faith healer on the
radio.
"Okay folks," he began, "God wants to heal you all. All you have to do
is put one hand on the radio and the other hand on the part that is
sick."
The old lady got up, shuffled over to the radio and put her hand
on her arthritic hip. Then the old man put one hand on the radio and the other
hand on his fly. His wife looked at him with contempt and said, "You old idiot.
The man said he would heal the sick, not raise the dead!"
Live naturally.
Live peacefully. Live inwardly. Just give a little time to yourself, being
alone, being silent, just watching the inner scene of your mind. Slowly, slowly
thoughts disappear. Slowly, slowly one day the mind is so still, so silent as if
it is not there. Just this silence... in this moment you are not here, as if the
whole Buddha Hall is empty.
In this silence within you, you will find a new
dimension of life. In this dimension greed does not exist, sex does not exist,
anger does not exist, violence does not exist. It is not a credit to you; it is
the new dimension beyond mind where love exists, pure, unpolluted by any
biological urge; where compassion exists for no other reason -- not to get any
reward in heaven -- because compassion is a reward unto itself.
A deep longing exists to share all that treasure that you have
discovered within yourself, and to shout from the housetops to the people, "You
are not poor! Paradise is within you.
You need not be beggars, you are born
emperors." You just have to discover your empire, and your empire is not of the
outside world; your empire is of your own interiority. It is within you and it
has always been there, just waiting for you to come home. Love will come, and
will come in abundance -- so much that you cannot contain it. You will find it
is overflowing you, it is reaching all directions.
Just discover your hidden splendor. Life can be simply a song, a
song of joy. Life can be simply a dance, a celebration, a continuous
celebration. All that you have to learn is a life-affirmative lifestyle. I call
only that man religious who is life-affirmative. All those who are life-negative
may think they are religious; they are not. Their sadness shows they are not.
Their seriousness shows they are not.
A man of authentic religion will have a sense of humor. It is
our universe, it is our home. We are not orphans. This earth is our mother. This
sky is our father. This whole vast universe is for us, and we are for it. In
fact, there is no division between us and the whole. We are organically joined
with it, we are part of one orchestra.
To feel this music of existence is the only religion that I can
accept as authentic, as valid. It does not have any scriptures, it need not
have. It does not have any statues of God, because it does not believe in any
hypotheses. It has nothing to worship, it has only to be silent, and out of that
silence comes gratitude, prayer, and the whole existence turns into a
godliness.
There is no God as a person. God is spread all over: in the
trees, in the birds, in the animals, in humanity, in the wise, in the otherwise.
All that is alive is nothing but godliness ready to open its wings, ready to fly
into the freedom, ultimate freedom of consciousness. Yes, you will love yourself
and you will love the whole existence too.
Source - Osho Book "The Invitation"
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