Osho – A secondhand truth is a lie. A truth, to be true, has to be firsthand

Osho – There are two ways to seek the true: one is to borrow knowledge, the other is to seek yourself. Of course borrowing is easy, but whatsoever you borrow is never yours, and that which is not yours cannot be true. This condition must be fulfilled: truth must be yours.

I may have known truth, but I cannot transfer it to you. In the very act of transferring it becomes a lie. That is the nature of truth. So nobody can give it to you, you cannot borrow it, you cannot steal it, you cannot purchase it — you have to know it. And unless you know, your knowledge is not a knowing — it is a hiding place for your ignorance. You are deceiving yourself, you are completely misguided.

The first thing to remember is that truth is a lived phenomenon. Who can live for you? You have to live for yourself, nobody can be a substitute. Who can love for you? Servants cannot do that, friends cannot be of any help — you have to love. Jean-Paul Sartre says somewhere that sooner or later a time will come when people will engage servants to love for them. Of course, rich people are already on the way. Sooner or later those who can afford it, they will not bother themselves. Why bother when a servant can do it? You can find a beautiful, good servant, and he can love for you. You have other more important things to do — love can be left to servants.

Mulla Nasruddin once told me, “I am very much interested in my wife’s happiness.”
So I asked, “What are you doing?”
He said, “I have hired a private detective to search for the reasons.”

But can anybody else love for you? No, there is no possibility. You cannot be alive by proxy, you cannot love by proxy — and you cannot reach truth by proxy either. That is the very nature of things. There is no way to be cunning about it and clever about it. Man has tried: “There is one who knows; we can get it from him, we can borrow it.” But truth has to be lived. It is not something outside, it is an inner growth. It is not a thing, it is not an object; it is your
subjectivity.

Truth is subjectivity, so how can you get it from anybody else, from scriptures, from vedas, korans and bibles? No, Jesus is not of much help, neither is Buddha. You have to go through it, there is no shortcut. You have to travel, suffer. Many times you will fall, many times you will err, many times you will go astray — that’s how it is. Come back again and again; start the search again and again. Many times the path is lost. Many times you move in a circle, you come back to the same point again and again. There seems to be no progress — but go on searching. Go on searching and don’t feel hopeless and dejected. Keep the hope: that is the quality of a seeker.

A seeker trusts, he hopes; he can wait, he can wait infinitely. He has patience and he goes on seeking. Not that every step leads to the goal, sometimes he is moving in just the opposite direction. But even moving in the opposite direction one learns; even erring is a part of learning. Nobody can learn if they are very much afraid of being in error.

If one is very much afraid that he may go astray, then there is no possibility of traveling. This is why the mind says, “Ask the awakened, those who know — gather from them.” But then it is secondhand, and there is no such thing as a secondhand truth, it is simply a lie. A secondhand truth is a lie. A truth, to be true, has to be firsthand, original. It has to be fresh, you have to reach it — it is always virgin.

Source – Osho Book “The Hidden Harmony”