If you don’t love yourself you will never be able to love anybody else. If you are not kind to yourself you cannot be kind to anybody else. Your so-called saints who are so very hard on themselves are just pretending that they are kind to others. It is not possible. Psychologically it is impossible. If you cannot be kind to yourself, how can you be kind to
others?
Whatsoever you are with yourself you are with others. Let that be a basic dictum. If you hate yourself you will hate others — and you have been taught to hate yourself. Nobody has ever said to you, “Love yourself!”
The very idea seems absurd: loving oneself? The very idea makes no sense — loving oneself? We always think that to love one needs somebody else. But if you don’t learn it with yourself you will not be able to practise it with others.
You have been told, constantly conditioned, that you are not of any worth. From every direction you have been shown, you have been told, that you are unworthy, that you are not what you should be, that you are not accepted as you are. There are many shoulds hanging over your head, and those shoulds are almost impossible to fulfill. And when you cannot fulfill them, when you fall short, you feel condemned. A deep hatred arises in you about yourself.
How can you love others? So full of hatred, where are you going to find love? So you only pretend, you only show that you are in love. Deep down you are not in love with anybody; you cannot be. Those pretensions are good for a few days, then the color disappears, then reality asserts itself.
Every love-affair is on the rocks. Sooner or later, every love-affair becomes very poisoned. And how does it become so poisoned? Both pretend that they are loving, both go on saying that they love. The father says he loves the child; the child says he loves the father. The mother says she loves her daughter, and the daughter goes on saying the same thing. Brothers say they love each other. The whole world talks about love, sings about love...and can you find any other place so loveless? Not an iota of love exists — and there are mountains of talk, Himalayas of poetry about love.
It seems all these poetries are just compensations. Because we cannot love, we have somehow to believe through poetry, singing, that we love. What we miss in life we put in poetry. What we go on missing in life, we put in the film, in the novel. Love is absolutely absent, because the first step has not been taken yet.
The first step is: accept yourself as you are; drop all shoulds. Don’t carry any ought on your heart! You are not to be somebody else; you are not expected to do something which doesn’t belong to you. You are just to be yourself. Relax and just be yourself. Be respectful to your individuality and have the courage to sign your own signature. Don’t go on copying others signatures.
You are not expected to become a Jesus or a Buddha or a Ramakrishna; you are simply expected to become yourself. It was good that Ramakrishna never tried to become somebody else, so he became Ramakrishna. It was good that Jesus never tried to become like Abraham or Moses, so he became Jesus. It is good that Buddha never tried to become a Patanjali or Krishna; that’s why he became a Buddha.
When you are not trying to become anybody else, then you simply relax; then a grace arises. Then you are full of grandeur, splendor, harmony...because then there is no conflict! nowhere to go, nothing to fight for; nothing to force, enforce upon yourself violently. You become innocent.
In that innocence you will feel compassion and love for yourself. You will feel so happy with yourself that even if the divine comes and knocks at your door and says, “Would you like to become somebody else?” you will say, “Have you gone mad?! I am perfect! Thank you, but never try anything like that — I am perfect as I am.”
The moment you can say to existence, “I am perfect as I am, I am happy as I am, “this is what in the East we call shraddha — trust; then you have accepted yourself and in accepting yourself you have accepted your creator. Denying yourself you deny your creator.
If you go and see a painting of Picasso’s and you say, “This is wrong and that is wrong, and this color should have been this way,” you are denying Picasso. The moment you say, “I should be like this,” you are trying to improve upon existence. You are saying, “You committed blunders; I should have been like this, and you have made me like this?” You are trying to improve upon existence. It is not possible. Your struggle is in vain; you are doomed to failure.
And the more you fail, the more you hate. The more you fail, the more you feel condemned. The more you fail, the more you feel yourself impotent. And out of this hatred, impotency, how can compassion arise? Compassion arises when you are perfectly grounded in your being. You say, “Yes, this is the way I am.” You have no ideals to fulfill. And immediately fulfillment starts happening!
The roses bloom so beautifully because they are not trying to become lotuses. And the lotuses bloom so beautifully because they have not heard the legends about other flowers. Everything in nature goes so beautifully in accord, because nobody is trying to compete with anybody, nobody is trying to become anybody else. Everything is the way it is.
Just see the point! Just be yourself and remember you cannot be anything else, whatsoever you do. All effort is futile. You have to be just yourself.
There are only two ways. One is: rejecting, you can remain the same; condemning. you can remain the same; or: accepting, surrendering, enjoying, delighting, you can be the same. Your attitude can be different, but you are going to remain the way you are, the person you are. Once you accept, compassion arises. And then you start accepting others!
Have you observered: it is very difficult to live with a saint, very difficult. You can live with a sinner; you cannot live with a saint because a saint will be condemning you continuously: by his gesture, by his eyes, the way he will look at you, the way he will talk at you. A saint never talks with you; he talks at you. He never just looks at you; he has always some ideals in his eyes, clouding. He never sees you. He has something far away and he goes on comparing you with it...and, of course, you always fall short. His very look makes you a sinner. It is very difficult to live with a saint... because he does not accept himself, how can he accept you? He has many things in him. Jarring notes he feels. he has to go beyond. Of course, he sees the same things in you in a magnified way.
But to me only that person is a saint who has accepted himself, and in his acceptance has accepted the whole world. To me, that state of mind is what sainthood is: the state of total acceptance. And that is healing, therapeutic. Just being with somebody who accepts you totally is therapeutic. You will be healed.
Osho, A Sudden Clash of Thunder, Talk #8
The journey isn't over yet, as that white bird flying into the vastness of the sky is trying to show. Your complacency might have arisen from a real sense of achievement, but now it's time to move on. No matter how fuzzy the slippers, how tasty the piña colada, there are skies upon skies still waiting to be explored.
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