I teach you to be selfish

 

 

 

Your love for yourself is a basic necessity for your growth. Hence, I teach you to be selfish-which is natural.

 

All your religions have been teaching you to be altruistic. Sacrifice yourself for any idiotic idea: the flag -- just a rotten piece of cloth. You sacrifice yourself to the nation -- which is nothing but fantasy, because the earth is not divided anywhere into nations. It is the politicians' cunningness, to divide the earth on the map. You are sacrificing for the lines drawn on the maps! Die for your religion: Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism. And they have managed it in such a way that the individual is caught.

 

If you die for your nation you will be called a martyr -- you are simply committing suicide, and that too for a foolish reason. If you die for your religion you will reach paradise, you will enjoy eternal blessings. They have manipulated you. But one thing is basic in that manipulation, that is, don't love yourself; hate yourself, because you are not worth anything.

 

Everybody is full of hate for himself. And do you think if you hate yourself you can find someone who is going to love you? Even you are not ready to love yourself; it is impossible for anybody else to love you. You have accepted the idea that unless you follow certain rules, religious dogmas, political ideologies, you are not of any worth.

 

When you were born, you were not born as a Christian, as a Catholic; you were not born as a communist. Every child comes into the world as a tabula rasa, completely clean. Nothing is written on him -- the BIBLE, KORAN, GITA, DAS KAPITAL -- no, nothing is written on him. He brings no holy book with himself. He comes in utter innocence. But his innocence becomes his greatest trouble, because all around him are wolves -- hiding in politicians, in priests, in parents, in teachers. They all jump upon your innocence. They start writing things on you which later on you will believe is your heritage.

 

They have destroyed your heritage. Now it is possible for them to enslave you, to make you do anything they want. If they want you to murder innocent people....

 

-Osho, “From Death to Deathlessness, #8, Q1”

 

 

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I teach only one responsibility, and that is towards yourself. Everything else will follow on its own accord without any effort on your part. And when things happen effortlessly, they have a tremendous beauty to them.

 

When you love somebody because she is beautiful, your love is not much. Tomorrow the woman will become old, tomorrow she may fall sick, tomorrow she may become ugly. Perhaps an operation has to be done on her nose -- what will happen to your love? It was her beautiful nose that had provoked your love. Now that nose is gone, your love will disappear. The woman will become a burden to you.

 

No, when out of your self-realization love comes, it is not dependent on the object of love. It has nothing to do with the person's beauty or intelligence or any other talent. You are full of love and you want to share it. And whoever is ready to receive it, you are thankful to the person. It is a gift, and it has no cause in the person to whom you are giving it. You are giving it out of your fullness; you are overflowing.

 

When your responsibilities are just an overflow of your experience of your being, of your center, of your eternal life, then they have a totally different quality.

 

I repeat again: I teach you only one responsibility. I have been condemned for that all over the world; they say that I am teaching people selfishness. In a way it is right, but not in the sense they are using the word `selfishness'. But I am certainly teaching you responsibility towards yourself -- if that is selfishness, I accept it as selfishness. But it is not against altruism.

 

The moment you know your self in its totality, for the first time you will be able to be altruistic, compassionate, loving, kind, helpful. Not that service is your motto....

 

-Osho, “From Death to Deathlessness, #20”

 

 

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Education at least should be kept free from all kinds of criminals. And politicians are the worst criminals in the world. A man murders somebody, he is a criminal. And Adolf Hitler kills almost ten million people and he is not a criminal. Alexander -- nobody knows how many people he killed, but he is "Alexander the Great." He is not a criminal.

 

Your whole history is the history of great criminals! Small criminals -- somebody stealing a few dollars, somebody stealing your clothes, somebody stealing your car -- these are criminals. They will suffer indignities in the court, by the police, then in the jail. And your greatest criminals? -- their names will be remembered in history as great men.

 

My people cannot be responsible to any nation. We claim the whole earth as ours! And we claim nature as part of us, and we are part of nature. Our responsibility is to remain organically whole with nature.

 

And what are our values? Freedom is a value; doubt is a value; skepticism is a value; agnosticism is a value. I don't think Reagan will agree with any of these values. Who is going to decide the values?

 

To me there is nothing greater than doubt, because it can lead you to everything that is true. There is nothing more criminal than belief, because it is going to lead you into more and more lies. It will make you blind. All beliefs are blind. And to make people blind cannot be called a value; cannot be called education.

 

Education is tremendously valuable. It has to teach you respect for yourself -- which all the religions have destroyed. It has to teach you acceptance of yourself — which all the religions have denied. It has to teach you love for yourself -- because a man who cannot love himself cannot love anybody else in the world. You have to start with yourself. If you are full of love for yourself, you can share it.

 

But all the religions are against self-love; they call it selfishness. They want you to love everybody else except yourself. To me, just the opposite is a value, because I know that a man who is not full of light within himself cannot share his light with others. He has none to share. This is the problem around the world.

 

Every partner in a couple is expecting the other to love him. The husband wants the wife to love him; the wife wants the husband to love her -- and both are unaware that they don't know the art of love, because they never loved themselves. They are going to quarrel, fight and destroy each other's life. I teach you clearly to be selfish.

 

It is natural to be selfish. And the miracle is, if you are really selfish, out of your selfishness there will be so much abundance of intelligence, love, respect, that you are bound to share it with others. Because the economics of the inner world is: the more you share, the more you have. Naturally, you want to share it more and more. Why only to Americans? Why not to the Canadians? Why not to the Brazilians? Why not to the whole world?

 

A small human heart is capable of filling the whole universe with love. But first it has to learn the art; and you have to begin with yourself.

 

-Osho, “From Death to Deathlessness, #28”

 

 

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My effort here is not to change the society but to transform the individual -- to help the individual to become whole, to help the individual to drop this rift between the conscious and the unconscious; to help the individual not to repress any more but to accept himself, not to condemn but to love himself.

 

You can call it a 'self-regarding cult' -- because I teach self-love. And you have been told that there is something wrong with self-love. You have been told, "Love others, but never love yourself." But how can you love others if you cannot even love yourself?

 

Meditate on the great statement of Jesus: "Love thy neighbour as thou lovest thyself." But the fundamental is loving thyself.

 

You cannot love anybody else -- because love has to well up within you first. And you are the closest to yourself: if you hate yourself, you will hate your neighbour. Whatsoever the priests and the leaders go on saying, it will not make any difference. You will hate your neighbour, you will hate humanity, you will hate the earth -- because you will hate yourself.

 

Love yourself, and out of that love grows love for others.

 

I teach you to be selfish, because only out of true selfishness is altruism born. A really selfish person cannot be against anybody, a really selfish person cannot hurt anybody -- because hurting somebody you have to hurt yourself first. You cannot create suffering for others without creating suffering for yourself. Before you are angry with someone, you have to be angry within yourself. Before you are violent with somebody, you have to go through many nightmares.

 

The person who really loves himself, who is in tremendous love with himself, cannot do any harm to anybody -- because he cannot do any harm to himself.

 

So in a way we are escapists, because whatsoever you call real life is not real -- it is a distortion of life; it is something else in the name of life. And we are certainly self-regarding, because out of that regard, regard for the other is born.

 

If the individual can be helped, if the individual can be enlightened, if the individual can be persuaded to celebrate life, to enjoy life, only then will we be able to change the climate around the earth. But that is not our purpose, that is not our goal -- that is going to be just a consequence.

 

-Osho, “Philosophia Perennis, Vol 2, #8, Q1”