Unconditionally Accepting Yourself Brings Transformation
Question: CAN COWARDICE AND HYPOCRISY ALSO BE BEAUTIFUL? CAN I ACCEPT EVEN MY COWARDICE, MY HYPOCRISY…? AND IF I ACCEPT SUCH TENDENCIES, ALL OF WHICH TEND TO BOTTLE ME UP, HOW WILL I GET FREE?
Osho
“The very desire to be free keeps one unfree. Every desire is a chain, a bondage, an imprisonment. No desire can ever be fulfilled. By dropping the desire, its fulfillment happens.
Now, the greatest desire in the world is that of inner transformation. The desire for money is nothing; the desire for more power, prestige, is nothing. The greatest desire is the so-called spiritual desire. And once you are caught in that desire you will remain miserable forever.
Transformation is possible, but not by desiring it. Transformation is possible only by relaxing into that which is, whatsoever is. Unconditionally accepting yourself brings transformation.
Man is in misery, man is in anguish. Hence everybody is searching for a state of bliss, a state of unity with existence. Man feels alienated, uprooted. Hence the desire is natural — to get roots into existence again, to be green again, to be blossoming again.
CONSCIOUSNESS MUST FIRST UNIFY ITSELF
First: to establish that perfect unity, consciousness must first unify itself…
You feel fear. Now the fear is an existential reality, an experiential reality; it is there. You can reject it: by rejecting it, you will be repressing it. By repressing it, you will create a wound in your being.
You feel cowardice. You can manage not to look at it. But it is a fact, a reality. Just by not looking at it, it is not going to disappear. You are behaving like an ostrich. Seeing the enemy, seeing the danger of death, the ostrich hides its head in the sand. But by hiding his head in the sand, by closing his eyes, the enemy does not disappear.
In fact the ostrich becomes more vulnerable to the enemy. Thinking that now there is no enemy because nobody is seen, thinking that seeing the enemy is what gives it existence, now the ostrich is relieved of the fear. But he is more in danger: the enemy is more powerful because it has not been noticed. Something can be done if the ostrich does not hide its head.
And that’s what people are doing.You see cowardice, you try not to notice it. But it is a fact. By not noticing it, you have created a part of your being which you will not be able to see. You have divided yourself into segments.
Now one day there is something else, anger, and you don’t want to accept that there is anger in you. You stop looking at it. Then some other day there is greed, and so on and so forth. And whatsoever you stop looking at remains. But now you go on shrinking. Many more parts of your being become separate from you. You have separated them on your own. And the more fragmentary you are, the more miserable you will be.
The first step towards bliss is to be one…
You feel a coward — so what? So “I am a coward.” Just see the point: if you can accept cowardice you have already become brave. Only a brave person can accept the fact of being a coward, no coward can do that. You are already on the way to transformation.
So the first thing: nothing that is experienced as a fact has to be denied reality…
If you have a certain idea of how you should be, then you cannot accept the truths of your being. If you have the idea that you have to be a brave man — that bravery is a value, then it is difficult to accept your cowardice. If you have the idea that you have to be a Buddha-like person — compassionate, absolutely compassionate, then you cannot accept your anger. It is the ideal that creates the problem.
If you don’t have any ideals, then there is no problem at all. You are a coward, so you are a coward. And because there is no ideal of being a brave man, you don’t condemn the fact. You don’t reject it, you don’t repress it, you don’t throw it into the basement of your being so that there is no need for you ever to look at it.
But anything that you throw into your unconscious will go on functioning from there. It will go on creating problems for you. It is like a disease that you have pushed inwards.
It was coming to the surface; and from the surface, there was a possibility that it might have disappeared. If a wound comes to the surface it is good, it is on the way to being healed, because it is only on the surface that it will be in contact with fresh air and the sun and can be healed. If you force it inwards, if you don’t allow it to come to the surface, then it is going to become a cancer. Even a small disease, repressed, can become a dangerous disease. No disease should ever be repressed. But the repression is natural if you have some ideal. Any ideal will do…
Ideals create hypocrisy in people. And now look at the absurdity — people have the ideal of not being hypocrites, and hypocrisy comes through ideals! If all ideals disappear there will be no hypocrisy. How can hypocrisy exist? It is the shadow of the ideal. The bigger the ideal, the bigger the hypocrisy…
The more ideals you have, the more will be your suffering, and the more will be your hypocrisy because if you cannot fulfill the ideals, then at least you have to pretend. That’s how hypocrisy comes in…
Don’t have certain ideas about yourself.
You must be carrying many ideas of how you should be. Hence the problem arises: CAN COWARDICE AND HYPOCRISY ALSO BE BEAUTIFUL?
Now if you have the idea to be a brave man, then it looks ugly to be a coward. But cowardice is a fact, and the ideal is just an ideal — a fantasy of the mind.
Sacrifice fantasies to reality, drop all ideals, and then life starts becoming integrated. All the rejected fragments start coming back home, the repressed starts surfacing. For the first time you start feeling a kind of togetherness; you are no longer falling apart.
For example, if I hold myself to be a “kind” person, I will not be able to permit myself to recognize and accept angry feelings when they arise in consciousness, because kind people just don’t get angry.
Therefore, to bring about a personal unity in consciousness, I must first take my stand as being no thing fixed or enduring, but hold myself to be only the
moment-to-moment reality which arises in consciousness. Thus some moments I am angry, then some moments I am sad, then some moments I am jealous, then some moments I am joyful.Moment-to-moment, whatsoever happens is accepted. Then you become one. And this oneness is the most fundamental thing to understand…
If a person can accept his reality as it is, in that very acceptance all tension disappears. Anguish, anxiety, despair — they all simply evaporate. And when there is no anxiety, no tension, no fragmentariness, no division, no schizophrenia then suddenly there is joy, then suddenly there is love, then suddenly there is compassion.
These are not ideals, these are very natural phenomena. All that is needed is to remove the ideals, because those ideals are functioning as blocks. The more idealistic a person is, the more blocked he is.
PEACE IS ONLY TO BE FOUND IN THE MIDST OF PAIN
As peculiar and contradictory as it may sound, peace is to be found only in the midst of pain and never by struggling against or running away from what is considered to be the negative or painful.Yes, cowardice gives you pain, fear gives you pain, anger gives you pain — these are negative emotions. But peace can be attained only by accepting and absorbing the painful, not by rejecting it. By rejecting it you will become smaller and smaller and smaller, and you will have less and less power. And you will be in a constant inner war, a civil war, in which one hand will fight with the other, in which you will simply dissipate your energy.
A very fundamental thing to be remembered: only communion with psychological pain opens the door for its liberation and transcendence — only communion with psychological pain. All that is painful has to be accepted; a dialogue has to be created with it. It is you. There is no other way to go beyond it, the only way is to absorb it.
And it has tremendous potential. Anger is energy, fear is energy, so is cowardice. All that happens to you has great momentum, a great quantity of energy is hidden in it. Once you accept it, that energy becomes yours. You become stronger, you become wider, you start becoming more spacious. You have a bigger inner world then…
Psychological pain ends only by accepting it in its totality…
Try to understand it: psychological pain is your own creation. Cowardice is not painful, only your idea that cowardice is wrong, your interpretation that cowardice should not be there…Psychological pain is part and parcel of the process of escape and resistance. Pain is not inherent in any feeling, but arises only after the intent to reject it arises. The moment you decide to reject something, pain arises…
In unity is the ending of pain…
This is the root cause of all misery, of all split. Thus, one must not judge good or bad, one must not label or have any kind of desire or goal in regard to what arises in consciousness. There must be no sense of avoidance, resistance, condemnation, justification, distortion or attachment in regard to what arises, but only a choiceless awareness. And self-communion is established.
A choiceless awareness: that is the ultimate key to open the innermost mystery of your being. Don’t say it is good, don’t say it is bad. When you say something is good, attachment arises, attraction arises. When you say something is bad, repulsion arises. Fear is fear, neither good nor bad. Don’t evaluate, just let it be. Let it be so.
When without condemnation or justification you are there, then in that choiceless awareness, all psychological pain simply evaporates like dewdrops in the early morning sun. And left behind is a pure space, left behind is virgin space.
THE TAO
This is the One, the Tao, or you can call it God. This One that is left behind when all pain disappears, when you are not divided in any way, when the observer has become the observed, this is the experience of God, samadhi, or whatever you will. And in this state there is no self as such, because there is no observer-controller-judger.
One is only that which arises and changes from moment to moment. Some moments it may be elation, other moments it may be sadness, tenderness, destructiveness, fear, loneliness, etcetera.
I will repeat the question again: CAN COWARDICE AND HYPOCRISY ALSO BE BEAUTIFUL?
Everything that is, is beautiful — even ugliness.
CAN I ACCEPT EVEN MY COWARDICE, MY HYPOCRISY…?
Whatsoever is, is, whether you accept it or not. Your acceptance or rejection makes no difference at all. That which is, is. If you accept it, you have joy arising in you, if you reject it you have pain. But the reality still remains the same.
You may have pain, psychological pain. That is your creation because you were not able to accept and absorb something that was arising. You rejected truth. In rejection, you became a prisoner. The truth liberates, but you rejected it. Hence you are in chains. Reject truth, and you will remain more and more imprisoned.
The truth remains; it does not matter whether you reject it or accept it. It does not change the fact, it changes your psychological reality. And there are two possibilities: either pain or joy, either dis-ease or health. If you reject it there will be dis-ease, discomfort, because you are cutting a chunk of your being away from you; it will leave wounds and scars on you. If you accept, there will be celebration and health and wholeness.”
Unio Mystica, Vol.1
