A child asked me: ”I want to become like the Buddha. Can you show me the way to reach my ideal?” That boy was very aged. He had seen at least sixty springs. But he who wants to become like others is still a child and has not yet become mature.

 

Is it not the sign of maturity of a man that, instead of being like others, he should wish to be like himself? And if somebody wants to become like another, will he ever become so? A person can only become like himself. It is impossible to be like others.

 

If I call that old man a ’boy, you might laugh. But if you probe into it, you will not laugh but weep, because you will find that childish mentality exists even in yourself. Do not you yourself want to be like some one else? Do you have the courage and maturity in you to be like your own self? If everybody is mature, then the question of following some one does not arise. Is it not because of the childlike mentality that the following and the followers, the disciple and the teacher, come into existence? And remember that the intellect that wants to follow is not only immature, but also blind.

 

What did I tell that old boy?

 

I told him: ”Friend, he who wants to become like someone else loses himself. Every seed contains in itself its own tree and so also each individual. There is no other way to be anything except one’s own self. In an attempt to be something else, it is possible that the individual may not become what he could have been. Search out what you are; and the way to develop lies in what you can be. Other than that there is no ideal for anybody. In the name of ideals persons get deflected from the path of self-development; they reach nowhere.

 

I see suicides behind the cover of ideals and there could be nothing but suicides. What shall I do whenever I will try to be like some one else? I will kill my own self; I will suppress myself: I will hate myself. Thus there will be suicide and hypocrisy; because it will be an acting to show what I am not, to look and to demonstrate what I am not. As soon as duality develops in individuality, hypocrisy sets in. Wherever there is self-contradiction in personality there is falsehood, there is irreligion; and it is only natural that such an unnatural attempt should bring pain, worry and repentance. The excess of such tensions becomes a hell for men.

 

Except the ideal, born out of the self-born truth, self-born possibilities, and the discipline which automatically follows like its shadow, everything else makes a man ugly and deformed. Frames or ideals and discipline, imported from outside, bring about suicide. Therefore, I say: ”Search for yourself and find yourself.

 

It is the door of God, only those are welcome who find themselves. Through that door the real ’Ram’ may pass but the ’Ram of Ram-Lila cannot. Whenever some one, inspired by the external ideals, wants to mould himself, he behaves like the ’Ram’ of Ram-Lila. It is different that some may succeed more, some less. But in the end the more successful he is the farther away he is from the self. The success of the ’Rams’ Or Ram-Lila is, in fact a, failure of the self. Ram, Buddha or Mahavir cannot be taken up as covers and whoever puts them on, has neither music, nor independence, nor beauty, nor truth in him individuality.

 

God will give him the same treatment as a king of Smarta gave to a man who had become so adept in imitating the voice of a bulbul that he had forgotten the voice of man. That person was very famous and people from far and wide came to listen to him. He wanted to demonstrate his skill even before he king. After great difficulty he could get the permission to appear before him. He had thought that the king would give him praise and honour him with reward.

 

This expectation of his was not unjustified after the praise and rewards he had been getting from others. But what did the king tell him? The king said: ”Gentleman, I have heard the bulbul itself singing, and I expect you to sing not the songs of bulbul but the songs for which you have been born. For songs of the bulbul, bulbuls are enough. You go and prepare your own song and when you have prepared it come to me. I will be ready to welcome you and rewards will also be ready for you.” Surely, life is not to imitate others, but to develop the tree which is hidden in the seed of the self. Life is not imitation; it is an original creation.

 

- Osho, “The Earthen Lamps, #13”