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[Guest guest]

Q: Beloved Bhagwan, 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¡K.

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 attached 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 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 being, 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 not 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 is 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 silence as if it is not there. Just

this silence¡K 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-affirmation 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 religious 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 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 ove yourself and you will love the whole existence too.

 

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Bhagwan.

 

Excerpted from The Invitation