Osho – Always listen to your own feelings, Listen to the heart

[A sannyasin says: I feel that I always try to impress people, and that I don’t know how to respond immediately. In the group (the Aum marathon that she had just completed) I had a lot of anger and I wanted to use it, but I waited and looked to other people to see how they react. Yet when I let the anger out I feel good, because that’s really me.]

Osho – Always listen to your own feelings – there is no need to look around. And by looking at people, you cannot see exactly what is happening to them, because their face is not their reality – just as your face is not your reality. Their outside appearance is not their inner, just as your outside appearance is not your inner.

That is the whole hypocrisy of society – not to show your inner, your centre, your real face; hide it. Show it only to someone who is very intimate and who will understand. But who is intimate? Even lovers don’t show their faces to each other. Because nobody knows – this minute somebody is a lover, next minute, maybe not. So each becomes like an island… closed.

Don’t look at others. Look at yourself and let anger out – whatsoever the risk. There is no greater risk than suppression. If you suppress you will lose all zest for life, all enthusiasm. You will lose all life if you go on suppressing. It is toxic; it poisons the being.

Listen to the heart, and whatsoever is there, bring it out. Soon you will become efficient in bringing it and you will enjoy it. And once you know how to be true, it is so beautiful that you will never settle for being false. We go on deciding to be false because we have never tasted the real.

From the very childhood the real was suppressed. Before a child becomes aware of what is real, he has been taught to suppress it. In unconscious ways, mechanical ways, he goes on suppressing without knowing what he is doing.

Be true to yourself – there is no other responsibility. One has to be responsible towards one’s being. You are answerable to your own being, and God is not going to ask you why you were not somebody else.

There is a story that when the hasid mystic Josiah was dying, somebody asked him why wasn’t he praying to God, and was he sure that Moses would be a witness to him. He replied, ’Let me tell you one thing. God is not going to ask me why I am not like Moses. He will ask me why I am not a Josiah.’

This is the whole problem – of how to be oneself. And if you can solve this, then every other problem becomes non-problematic. Then life is a beautiful mystery to be lived; not a problem to be solved, but just to be lived and enjoyed.

Source: from Osho Book “Be Realistic: Plan for a Miracle”