Going inwards, going godwards

Osho
Satyam Shivam Sundram
Truth Godliness Beauty

Going inwards, going godwards

WHY AM I ALWAYS RUNNING SO FAST?
IS THERE SOMETHING THAT I DON’T WANT TO SEE?

Almost everybody is running as fast as he can from himself. And the problem is, you cannot run away from yourself. Wherever you go you will be yourself.

The fear is of knowing oneself. It is the greatest fear in the world. It is because you have been so immensely condemned by everybody for the smallest things – for the smallest mistakes, which are absolutely human – that you have become afraid of yourself. You know that you are not worthy.

That idea has sunk very deep into your unconscious – that you are not deserving, that you are utterly worthless. Naturally, the best way is to get away from yourself. Everybody is doing it in different ways: somebody is running for money, somebody is running for power, somebody is running for respectability, somebody is running for virtue, saintliness.

But if you look deep down, they are not running for anything, they are running from. This is just an excuse, that somebody is running after money madly; he is deceiving himself and the whole world. The reality is that money gives him a good excuse to run after it, and hides the fact that he is running from himself. That’s why when he accumulates money; he comes to a point of tremendous despair and anguish. What has happened? That was his goal; he has achieved it – he should be the happiest man in the world.

You cannot run from yourself.

On the contrary, you have to come closer to yourself, deeper into your being, and to drop all the condemnatory tones that have been handed over to you by everybody you have known in your life.

Humanity has created a very strange situation for itself in which nobody is at ease, nobody can relax, because the moment you relax you face yourself. Relaxation becomes almost a mirror, and you don’t want to see your face because you are so much impressed by the condemnatory opinions of others.

Your running away is nothing but creating more hypocrisy, more masks so that you can hide yourself completely from the eyes of everyone. You may succeed in hiding yourself from others, but how can you succeed in hiding yourself from yourself? You can go to the moon; you will find yourself there. You can go to Everest; you may be alone but you are with yourself. Perhaps in that aloneness on Everest you will become more alert and aware of yourself.

That is one of the reasons why people are also afraid of aloneness; they want a crowd, they want always to have people surrounding them, they want friends. It is very difficult for people to remain silent and peaceful in aloneness. The reason is that in aloneness you are left with yourself – and you have accepted the stupid ideas that you are ugly, that you are sensuous, that you are lustful, that you are greedy, that you are violent; there is nothing that can be appreciated in you.

Be a child again and you will not be running away from yourself. You will be running within yourself – and that is the way of the meditator. The worldly man runs away from himself, and the seeker runs within himself to find the source of this life, this consciousness. And when he discovers the source, he has discovered not only his life source, he has discovered the life source of the universe, of the whole cosmos.

A tremendous celebration arises in him. Life becomes just a song, a dance, moment to moment. One becomes absolutely free from all the jargon that the society has handed down. One simply throws away all conditionings, all traditions, the whole past.

This is simply the situation in which you are born, in which you have been conditioned. Nobody wants you to know that life is simply romance. And that is my crime – because that is my whole teaching, that life is nothing but romance.

Life is a continuous romance. And I teach you not only the romance of the body, which is very ordinary; I teach you the romance of the spirit which is eternal, which begins but never ends. But this is possible only if you start going inwards.

Going inwards is going Godwards.

Going inwards is the whole secret of all alchemical transformation of being. Running away is simply wasting tremendously valuable time, and a life that could have been a great song, a great creativity, a tremendous festival of lights. The farther away you are from yourself, the darker your life will become, the more miserable, more anxiety ridden, more wounded, condemned, rejected by yourself.

And the farther away you are the more difficult it becomes to find the way back home. You have been going away from yourself for many, many lives, but if you move on a right, meditative path you are not gone very far.

Meditation is the short cut from where you are to where you should be. And meditation is such a simple method that anybody, even a small child, can enter into its wonderland.

Come closer to yourself to have a better look. Nobody else can see your inner reality; only you can see that splendor and that glory. Because nobody else can see your inner beauty they go on condemning you. Only you can assert your blissfulness, only you can assert ultimately your enlightenment.