What matters is your own respect for yourself

Osho

For millions of years, our whole way of life has been of adjustment, of compromise. And compromise with whom? With a crowd in which everybody else is also compromising, where nobody is opening up his reality – where everyone is afraid of being himself because from the very beginning he has been told, “The way you are is not going to be acceptable.”

You have to be acceptable, and that means you have to live according to ideals, formalities, manners. You have to be, more or less, an actor in a drama – and do your best. Never expose yourself, never be naked and nude. Hide yourself – first from others, and finally from yourself.

This is our social reality. It is the way we have been manufactured, modified, continuously painted, whitewashed – according to others’ ideas. Just because those ideas are ancient and old, and because man has lived according to those ideas for centuries, it has been thought that they must be right. Otherwise, people would have rejected them long ago. The longer an ideal has lived, the more valuable it becomes. The more rotten it is, the deadlier it is – the more respectable, the more honorable it must be.

It is difficult to fit with these ideals. It is arduous: it is a tremendous struggle against yourself, nature, existence, against life. But you have been told by your parents, teachers, priests, by everybody, and with good intentions, “Don’t assert yourself. Keep yourself out of the way, be a perfect hypocrite and your life will be successful.”

In short, it is ambition, success and desire to fulfill the ego that has been used to force you into darkness. If you want success, if you want to be honored by society, respected by people, then you absolutely have to do one thing: never be yourself. Hide yourself, and just function according to the expectations of others.

It is this very conditioning that I am absolutely against. I want you to be yourself. It may bring disrespect; it may take away your so-called success. From being a very famous celebrity, you may become a nobody. But there will be tremendous satisfaction and contentment, and a great relaxation. Who cares, in the first place, to be crowned by idiots? It is an insult. It is not respectability.

There is no point being worried about other people; their opinions mean nothing. The only thing that matters in life is your own opinion about yourself, your own respect for yourself. Then nobody can destroy your dignity because it is not dependent on anybody’s opinion.

Abridged from The Rebel, Osho Times International. The 87th birth anniversary of Osho Rajneesh will be observed on December 11