Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
~ Be Yourself: Who Else Could You Be? ~
The ego is the idea of separation from the whole. It is the original lie, useful but never true or real.
[The Twister: Everything He Said Sounded Like a Lie]
The mind is the world's greatest reality distortion mechanism, useful but never true or real.
Words, thoughts, ideas and images are dualistic. But truth and reality are nondualistic.
The mind is a projector, never a true reflector. The mind projects and sees what it wants to see.
Ego, mind, thought, language, conscience, personality and character are social constructs - products of social conditioning.
Individuals are born whole; society splits them with lifelong, divisive conditioning as a hypnotic spell.
[Your Problem Is Obvious]
Osho explains the split in "Guida Spirituale", 1998, pages 180 - 199; paraphrased excerpts.
The agents of social conditioning are parents, priests, politicians, pundits and pedagogues.
The social agents tell us to be like somebody else, a Krishna, a Buddha, a Christ.
Everyone is trying to be somebody else, but they are never going to succeed. It is not in the nature of things. Existence never repeats.
To repeat somebody else is nothing but pretending, cheating, deceiving. It is ugly and humiliating to repeat others, to be imitators.
For centuries humanity has been conditioned to be somebody else. There are vested interests against you being yourself.
The vested interests want you never to be yourself because they are afraid of anything new.
[The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills]
[The Power Elite diagram: Social Upper Class, Corporate Community, Policy-Planning Network]
[The Power Elite triangle: Persons with True Power = 1 in a million; Intellectuals, Academics, Activists = 1 in a thousand; Everyone Else]
[Global Corporate Fascism diagram: Government, NGOs, Multinationals/Foundations; Citizens Are Now Customers]
[Democrat or Republican: Same F**king Difference]
[Plutocracy = Tyranny + Exploitation]
[No to Women-Hating Christian-Fascist Theocracy]
The new has been condemned because the new cannot be absorbed by the establishment.
A man who goes against tradition, convention and conformity, is a danger to society.
Such a man shakes the foundations of the prevailing ideals and ideology.
[Total Freedom]
[Ideology: The War of Ideas]
[Ideology: Devil's Harvest]
[Ink and Blood]
[Books by German Thinkers]
[Ideology versus Practice; Rhetoric versus Reality]
[Ideals = Equality, Liberty, Order; Ideologies = Liberals, Populists, Libertarians, Conservatives]
[Anarchism versus Totalitarianism; Socialism versus Capitalism]
[American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century]
[Class Wars]
The unconscious humanity always worships the established structure, because it is familiar to them.
The masses are afraid to go into the unknown, into the unexperienced.
They cling to the old, to the past, to the dead. They worship the dead and they destroy the living.
To perpetuate this dead ideology everybody is told to be somebody else, and that helps the establishment.
By trying to be somebody else your life will be a mess because you can never be somebody else.
It is impossible to be somebody else - you can only be yourself.
By trying to be somebody else you are distracted from your authentic being; your energies will be wasted.
You will be in constant conflict with yourself, you will be in a civil war.
Your mind will represent the past and your heart will go on saying, "Be yourself."
But your mind makes so much noise, you cannot hear your heart.
You will be split, you will be schizophrenic: one part moving in one direction and the other part moving in the opposite direction.
You will be always in a kind of tug-of-war. You life will be full of tension, anxiety, anguish.
And a man who lives in anguish can be easily enslaved, because he is always enervated.
He has no energy to be rebellious. To be rebellious one needs energy, one needs to be a reservoir of energy.
A rebel will be fighting many, many vested interests, and they are powerful people.
The rich, the religious, the political, those who are dominating the society and exploiting it - they are bound to be powerful.
This is a very subtle psychological strategy to destroy your energy.
Your parents, teachers, everybody around you goes on saying to you, "Be like a Krishna, a Buddha, a Christ," but never, "Be yourself.
This is psychological castration: they create guilt in you - if you are yourself you will feel guilty.
And you can never be the other person you are trying to be, but in the effort energy is wasted and their purpose is fulfilled.
And your life will be a life of misery, because you can feel joy only if you are yourself.
Everywhere, people look so sad, so burdened. They are carrying a psychological weight; they have been burdened, they have been knowingly burdened.
A child is continuously told that he is not to be himself, that he is worthless.
The parents say, "I will love you only if you behave a certain way" - that is, according to them, and their ideas.
[No Sex: Abstaining from the Truth: Sex Education as Ideology]
The child has to survive; hence he has to listen to the parents and obey them.
We start creating a small prison around the child - a psychological prison.
By the time he comes out of the university he is stupid. Now he is just an imitator, a copy.
Buddha said, "Be a light unto yourself"… don't imitate anybody.
Imitation makes you weak, and it makes you miserable. Weak and miserable, that is how the vested interests want you.
The idea of being like Buddha or Jesus hypnotizes. And it does tremendous harm: it makes you hate yourself.
You cannot love yourself, and the more you fail in being like the other, the more you hate yourself.
The real difficulty is to love yourself, to respect yourself, to accept yourself as you are, unconditionally.
And that is the beginning of the revolution, the beginning of the transformation.
The whole message can be condensed into these two words: Be yourself.
The authentic seeker has nothing to do with God; he wants to know himself.
That is the most fundamental thing - to know oneself - because out of that knowing, all light arises.
If one knows oneself one will know God too.
In fact, only by knowing oneself does one become capable of knowing the ultimate,
because at the innermost center of your being the ultimate is present.
Religions say: Know God! That is again the same strategy - to distract you from yourself.
Know thyself is the same as be thyself.
If you know who you are, you will be yourself; and if you be yourself, you will know who you are.
God is not a person that you have to come across.
God is a quality. But to experience that quality, the first, basic thing needed is self-knowledge.
Mahatma Gandhi imitated Krishna. He also imitated Tolstoy and Thoreau, and they imitated Christ.
Gandhi was imitating other imitators, and he and they all missed.
The mind is always on a power trip of ambition and achievement.
The ordinary, unconscious humanity go on thinking and behaving in this way.
And the greatest root cause of it all is that you have been told constantly: "Don't be yourself."
You have been conditioned and hypnotized constantly for thousands of years: "Don't be yourself."
It has not been said so directly, it is said in a roundabout way: "Be a Buddha, be a Christ."
But have you ever heard your parents saying to you, "Just be yourself"?
No parent will ever say that to a child, for the simple reason that he himself is afraid.
If the child is allowed to be just himself he may not be obedient.
The child on his own may start doing things that are against the ideas of the parents.
He may start living a life that is not conforming, is not conventional.
He may turn out to be a rebel. And it is better to kill that rebellion in the very seed.
Hence so much misery in the world, no laughter at all and no love - because if you cannot love yourself, how can you love anybody else?
The first person to be loved is your own being. Unless love happens inside you for yourself it cannot radiate and reach to others.
A man who is a darkness inside cannot be a light to others.
Only a man who is a light in himself may be capable of radiating a little light to others too.
When you are trying to be somebody else, naturally you start acting.
And particularly when you start imitating, you will imitate everything. You will imitate love, and that is the most dangerous thing.
But how can you love unless you attain the consciousness that Jesus attained?
If you start feigning it, that will be just artificial.
And once a person starts feigning love, his whole life becomes false, because love is the center of life.
If you feign affection you will feign intelligence, you will feign freedom - you will start pretending everything else.
A man who is capable of deceiving himself that he loves without loving is so stupid that he will imitate everything and will believe it,
but his life will show that that's not so.
Pseudo people are bound to hear something else, to see that which is not.
They are bound to miss that which is, because in their very beings they have deceived themselves.
Now their whole lives will be again and again missing the point.
The first thing one has to remember is to be whole, not to be divided, not to become two persons.
And the teaching "Be like somebody else" always creates two persons in you.
One is just a façade, superficial, and you have to live a double life.
This split can become so deep that you completely forget.
When you are one you forget the other, when you are the other you forget the first one.
This is what happens to schizophrenic patients. (And that completes the paraphrase of Osho.)
Social conditioning divides and conquers. A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The main psychological dynamic is: Identify, Repress, Deny and Project.
Identifications include ideologies of all types: social, political, economic, religious and cultural.
Everyone is made to be egocentric, verbalized, identified, conditioned, programmed and hypnotized.
Everyone is socialized, indoctrinated, cultivated and civilized.
Everyone is developmentally arrested, paralyzed, immobilized, crippled, wounded and enervated.
Everyone is ensnared, imprisoned, enslaved and spellbound.
Everyone behaves like a robot, puppet, automaton, sleepwalker and zombie.
The power elite in every society exploit the people by strategies of psychological control using fear, greed and guilt.
The unconscious repression of rejected, non-ideal parts requires great ongoing energy.
The ideal will enervate individuals so they have no energy to rebel against the establishment.
The vested interests want each individual to be split and divided, and then to fight against himself.
Individuals are liberated by disidentifying with all social conditioning.
When the spell is broken, the ego and mind become your slaves instead of your masters.
To be yourself, you must know yourself. To know yourself, you must answer: "Who am I?"
To answer, "Who am I?", you must experience the highest consciousness, even for a single moment.
The highest state of consciousness is only experienced personally, directly, without mediation.
Meditation can break the hypnotic spell of social conditioning.
To know about Truth is merely intellectual. Rather, one must be the Truth; it is existential.
Be yourself means be original, without imitation; be direct, without intermediaries, and be awake, without spellbinding.
To be yourself, go within, beyond the mind, to the innermost center of being.