0

Osho on Freedom and Intimacy

One is afraid to become intimate. To be intimate means you will have to put aside the role. And you know who you are: worthless, just dirt; that’s what you have been told from the very beginning. Your parents, your priests, your politicians – all have been telling you that you are dirt, worthless. Nobody has ever accepted you. Nobody has given you the feeling that you are loved and respected, that you are needed – that this existence will miss you, that without you this existence will not be the same, that without you there will be a hole. Without you this universe will lose some poetry, some beauty: a sound will be missed, a note will be missed, there will be a gap – nobody has told you that.

And that’s what my work here is: to destroy the distrust that has been created in you about yourself, to destroy all condemnation that has been imposed on you, to take it away from you and to give you a feeling that you are loved and respected, loved by existence. God has created you because he loved you. He loved you so much that he could not resist the temptation to create you.

When a painter paints, he paints because he loves. When a poet composes a song, it is because he loves it. God has painted you, sung you, danced you. God loves you! If you don’t see any meaning in the word God, don’t be worried. Call it existence, call it the whole. The existence loves you, otherwise you would not be here.

Relax into your being, you are cherished by the whole. That’s why the whole goes on breathing in you, pulsating in you. Once you start feeling this tremendous respect and trust and love of the whole in you, you will start growing roots in your being. You will trust yourself. And only then can you trust me, only then can you trust your friends, your children, your husband, your wife. Only then can you trust the trees, the animals and the stars and the moon. Then one simply lives as trust. It is no longer a question of trusting this or that; one simply trusts. And to trust is simply to be religious.

It is not just accidental that priests are against me, politicians are against me, parents are against me, the whole establishment is against me; it is not accidental. I can understand the absolute clear logic of it. I am trying to undo what they have done. I am sabotaging the whole pattern of this slave society.

My effort is to create rebels, and the beginning of the rebel is to trust in oneself. If I can help you to trust in yourself, I have helped you. Nothing else is needed; everything else follows of its own accord.

Excerpted from ‘intimacy – trusting yourself and the other’ by Osho

Related: