Pleasing

 

 

Whatsoever you do, you will be wrong, because you will be going against somebody's wishes, somebody's ideas. It is very difficult to please all, and if you go on trying to please.all you will be simply wasting your life. And nobody is pleased, nobody can be pleased, it is impossible to please anybody.

Stop fulfilling expectations of others, because that is the only way you can commit suicide. You are not here to fulfill anybody's expectations and nobody else is here to fulfill your expectations. Never become a victim of others' expectations and don't make anybody a victim of your expectations.

This is what I call individuality. Respect your own individuality and respect others' individuality. Never interfere in anybody's life and don't allow anybody to interfere in your life. Only then one day you can grow into spirituality.

Otherwise, ninety-nine percent of people simply commit suicide. Their whole life is nothing but a slow suicide. Fulfilling this expectation, that expectation... some day it was the father, some day it was the mother, some day it was the wife, husband, then come children -- they also expect. You have to fulfill their expectations. Then the society, the priest and the politician, and all around everybody is expecting. And poor you there, just a poor human being -- and the whole world expecting you to do this and that. And if you don't fulfill their expectations... and you can't fulfill all of their expectations, because they are contradictory.

I was staying in a family and I asked the small boy, 'What are you going to become?'

He said, 'I don't know. I think I will go mad.'

'What do you mean?'

He said, 'My father wants me to become an engineer, my mother wants me to become a doctor. My uncle says, "Be a businessman, only then you can...."

'Another uncle, he says be a professor because that is the most simple profession. And I don't know. But this much I know -- that if all expectations are fulfilled, I will go mad.'

That's how many people have gone mad. And when I am saying many people have gone mad, don't make an exception of yourself. You have gone mad fulfilling everybody's expectations. And you have not fulfilled anybody's; nobody is happy. This is the beauty. You are lost, completely destroyed, and nobody is happy.

 

Because people who are not happy with themselves cannot be happy in any way. Whatsoever you do, they will find ways to be unhappy with you, because they cannot be happy. Happiness is an art that one has to learn. It has nothing to do with your doing or not doing.

 

-Osho, "The Discipline of the Transcendence, Vol. 1, #2, Q3"