Osho – When a person cannot love himself and hates himself, he hates everybody else

Osho – Remember life can be really lived only if you live it naturally. If you impose artificial commandments over it, you will destroy it. For example, I told you: unless you love yourself you cannot love anybody else. Hence I say to you, be selfish, because only out of selfishness is altruism born. But you have been told again and again that you are worthless. You have been told that you have no value — that as you are, you are only worth condemnation; that as you are, you are bound to hell.

You have to be worthy, you have to change, you have to become a saint, this and that. One thing is certain: that as you are, you are not of any worth. How can you love yourself? And when a person cannot love himself and hates himself, he hates everybody else, he hates the whole world. By hating himself he becomes life-negative, and the person who is life-negative is life-destructive.

Your monks and nuns have all been life-negative; they have not affirmed life, they have not nourished life, they have not beautified life, they have not been a blessing to the world. They have been a curse! Your monasteries should disappear; we don’t need monasteries. We certainly need sannyasins, but they should live in the world, part of the world, transforming the world. But the basic transformation that has to happen is that they should be lovers of themselves.

The person who does not love himself becomes a masochist, he starts torturing himself. And these masochists have been worshipped as saints down the ages. And a person who is a masochist cannot be anything else than a sadist too, because he who tortures himself would like everybody to be tortured. Torturing becomes his sacrifice to God.

So there have been masochists, there have been sadists. And because in life you cannot find any quality purely, so you will not find masochists and sadists separate. It is almost always the case that the same person is both: masosadist — everybody is like that. You have been conditioned by your religions in such a way that you are against yourself and against others. On the one hand you torture yourself with beautiful rationalizations, and on the other hand you torture others, again with beautiful rationalizations.

Life has become a torture chamber, a concentration camp; it is no more a celebration. It should be a celebration. If nature is allowed to take its own course, it is bound to be a celebration.

Source – Osho Book “The Book of Wisdom”