Osho – Unconsciousness creates all kinds of ugliness in life; so whenever you find anything ugly in you, just look for the cause; somewhere in the roots will be unconsciousness. If there is ambition the person becomes ugly. Politicians are bound to be ugly, so much ambition, so much desire to dominate others, by any means — because time is short and competition is great. There are so many people who are trying to be the president, to be the prime minister in such a great competitive world, with such a short life, how can one bother about the means and the end? Then any means have to be used to fulfil your desire. Then one forgets all sense, all reason, all aesthetic sensibility.
If one has to murder people, one murders. Joseph Stalin killed at least ten million people, and the same is true about Mao Tse Tung, and the same is true about Adolf Hitler. The whole history of humanity is full of these monsters — but everybody is a politician more or less. You may not kill thousands of people or millions of people but in your own small way you will kill a few people, you will kill your husband, your wife, your children — whomsoever you can get hold of. You may not really murder but you may kill their spirit. The ambitious person is poisonous, whatsoever he touches becomes a poison.
But ambition exists because we are unconscious, otherwise who bothers to dominate anybody? It is enough to be a master of oneself. And one becomes an emperor, far greater than any Alexander the Great, because by knowing oneself one comes to know the inner kingdom of god — which is eternal and infinite. All that is thought to be valuable in the world suddenly becomes useless. When you know your inner world everything pales, everything starts losing all significance. Once you have real gold you will know that up to now you have been carrying an unnecessary load, it was not real gold, it was false. It only looked like gold, it glittered like gold, but all that glitters is not gold.
But one has to first know the real, then only can one judge what is unreal, otherwise there is no criterion. Anger, hatred — all are ugly. And if so many uglinesses are there in your mind, so many snakes and scorpions and dogs barking inside, and wolves and foxes (laughter)… it is impossible to become a human being with all these creatures inside.
Consciousness helps you in a very simple but very efficient way. The moment you start becoming ambitious, if you are conscious, suddenly you start laughing at the whole idea of ambition; it looks ridiculous, it drops like a dead leaf.
If you are getting into anger and you become conscious, anger evaporates, just like dewdrops in the early sun, leaving no trace behind. Once you have learned that to be conscious is the real miracle of life — because it drops all that is non — essential, all that is ugly — then what is left is beautiful. Beauty has not to be cultivated, the ugly only has to cease and the beauty rises.
Beauty is natural, ugliness is unnatural. Beauty is your self-nature and ugliness is something foreign.
That’s why nobody wants to be ugly — but because of unconsciousness everybody has to be ugly. Everybody wants to be beautiful, but not knowing how to be beautiful, people go on painting their faces, trimming their hair, trying this kind of dress or that kind of dress, dieting and all kinds of things, just to be beautiful. But they don’t know that this is not going to help much.
Beauty is something inner. Hence it is there, discovered, it starts radiating from your body, from your mind, from everything that you consist of. Once your inner beauty is there everything is beautified.
Source – Osho Book “The Old Pond… Plop”