Osho International Foundation - Accepting myself the way I am: learning to go your own way

learning to go your own way

ISBN: 978-0-88050-711-0

Copyright 19 7,2016 OSHO International Foundation,

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Accepting Myself the Way I Am , by Osho

From a series of OSHO Talkstitled: Satyam Shivam Sundaram, #8

Accepting Myself the Way IAm is also available as an original audio recording, spoken byOsho

Published by

OSHO MEDIAINTERNATIONAL

an imprint of

OSHOINTERNATIONAL

www.osho.com/oshointernational

ISBN: 978-0-88050-711-0

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Why am I scared to accept myself the way I am?

Everybody is in the same situation. Everybody is scared to accepthimself the way he is. This is how all the past centuries of mankind havecultivated, conditioned every child, every human being.

The strategy is simple but very dangerous. The strategy is tocondemn you and to give you ideals so that you are always trying to becomesomeone else. The Christian is trying to become a Jesus, the Buddhist is tryingto become a Buddha. To distract you from yourself seems so clever a device thatperhaps the people who have been doing it are themselves unaware of it.

What Jesus said on the cross his last words to humanity isimmensely significant in many ways, particularly in this context. He prayed toGod, Father, forgive these people because they know not what they are doing.

This is applicable to every father and to every mother, to everyteacher and every priest and every moralist; to the people who manage culture,society, civilization, and who try to mold every individual in a certain way.Perhaps they also dont know what they are doing. Perhaps they think they aredoing everything for your good. I dont suspect their intentions, but Icertainly want you to be aware that they are ignorant, they are unconsciouspeople.

A small child is born into the hands of an unconscious society.And the unconscious society starts molding the child according to its ownideals, forgetting the one thing which is the most fundamental: that the childhas a potential of his own. He has to grow, not into a Jesus or into a Krishnaor into a Buddha. He has to grow to be himself.

If he misses growing into being himself he will remain utterlymiserable his whole life. His life will become just a hell and a curse, and hewill not know what has gone wrong. He has been put in the wrong direction fromthe very beginning.

And he thinks the people who have put him in the wrong directionlove him, are his benefactors. Actually they are his greatest enemies. Theparents, the teachers, the priests and the leaders of the society are thegreatest enemies of every individual who has been born on the earth up to now.Without being aware, they are distracting you from yourself.

And to distract you, you have to be absolutely conditioned aboutone thing: that you are unworthy, undeserving, of no use at all as you are. Ofcourse you can become worthy of respect, dignity, if you follow the rules andregulations given to you by others. If you are able to manage to be a hypocriteyou will be a prestigious citizen of the society.

But if you insist on being sincere, honest, authentic, yourself,you will be condemned by everybody. And it needs tremendous courage to becondemned by everybody. It needs a man with a steel spine to stand on his ownand declare: I am not going to be anybody else but myself. Good or bad,acceptable or not acceptable, prestigious or not prestigious, one thing iscertain that I can be only myself and nobody else.

This needs a tremendously revolutionary approach toward life.This is the basic revolt that each individual needs if he wants ever to be outof the vicious circle of misery.

You are asking me: Why am I scared to accept myself the way Iam? Because you have not been accepted by anyone the way you are. They havecreated the fear and the apprehension that if you accept yourself you will berejected by everybody.

This is an absolute condition of every society and every culturethat has existed up to now: that either you accept yourself and be rejected byall, or you reject yourself and gain the respect and honor of your wholesociety and culture. The choice is really very difficult.

Obviously the majority is going to choose respectability. Butwith respectability come all kinds of anxieties, anguishes; a meaninglessness,a desert-like life where nothing grows, where nothing is green, where no flowerever blossoms, where you will walk and walk and walk and you will never evenfind an oasis.

I am reminded of Leo Tolstoy. Just a few days ago in Moscow therewas an international exhibition of books, and one of my sannyasins, Lani, wasthere. She was surprised and my Russian sannyasins were there, and they werealso surprised: world-famous publishing houses were exhibiting their books, butour stall was the most crowded. At any one time there were not less than onehundred people there the whole day that the exhibition was open.

One old man, looking at my picture, asked Lani, Is this mansomething like Leo Tolstoy? just because of my beard. Tolstoy had abeautiful beard.

Tolstoy used to have a dream that psychoanalysts of differentschools have been interpreting for almost the whole century. The dream was verystrange, but not to me. To me it needs no psychoanalysis, but simple commonsense. The dream was repeated every night continuously for years. It wasstrangely nightmarish, and Tolstoy awoke in the middle of every night,perspiring, although there was no danger in the dream.

But if you can understand the meaninglessness of the dream Thatwas the problem that became the nightmare. This dream represents almosteverybodys life. No psychoanalytic school has been able to figure out whatkind of dream it is because there is no parallel, it is unprecedented.

The dream used to be the same every night. A vast desert, as faras you can see just desert and desert and two boots, which Tolstoy recognizedas his, go on walking. But he is missing, just the boots go on making noise inthe sand. And it continues because the desert is endless. They never reachanywhere. Behind he can see the prints of the boots for miles, and ahead he cansee the boots going on walking.

Ordinarily you will not think it is a nightmare. But if you thinka little more closely: every day, every night the same dream of utter futility,reaching nowhere. There seems to be no destiny, and nobody is in the boots,they are empty.

He told all the well-known psychoanalysts of his day in Russia.Nobody could figure out what it meant because there is no book that describesany dream which can even be called a little bit similar to this. It isabsolutely unique.

But to me there is no question of any psychoanalysis. It is asimple dream, representing every human beings life. You are walking in adesert because you are not walking toward the goal that is intrinsic in yourbeing. You are not going to reach anywhere. The more you go away, the more youwill be going away from yourself. And the more you look for any meaning themore you will find utter emptiness and nothing else. That is the meaning. Theman is missing; only the boots are walking.

You are not in what you are doing. You are not in what you arebeing. You are not in what you are pretending. It is utter hollowness, purehypocrisy.

But the way it has been created is a simple method: Telleverybody, As you are, you are absolutely undeserving even to exist. As youare, you are just ugly, an accident. As you are, you should be ashamed ofyourself because you dont have anything worthy of honor and respect.Naturally, every child starts doing things that are supposed to be honorable.He goes on becoming more and more false, more and more phony, more and moredistant from his authentic reality, his very being and then the fear arises.