SELF LOVE The first friendship has to be with oneself, but very rarely will you find a person who is friendly toward himself or herself. We are enemies to ourselves, while hoping in vain that we can be friends to someone else. We have been taught to condemn ourselves. Self-love has been thought of as a sin. It is not. It is the foundation of all other loves. It is only through self-love that altruistic love is possible. Because self-love has been condemned, all other possibilities of love have disappeared from the earth. This has been a very cunning strategy to destroy love. It is as if you were to say to a tree, Dont nourish yourself through the earth; that is sin. Dont nourish yourself from the moon and the sun and the stars; that is selfishness. Be altruistic serve other trees. It looks logical, and that is the danger. It looks logical: If you want to serve others, then sacrifice; service means sacrifice. But if a tree sacrifices, it will die, it will not be able to serve any other tree; it will not be able to exist at all. You have been taught, Dont love yourself.That almost has been the universal message of the so-called organized religions. Not of Jesus, but certainly of Christianity; not of Buddha but of Buddhism--of all organized religions, that has been the teaching: Condemn yourself, you are a sinner, you are worthless. And because of this condemnation the tree of the human being has shrunk, has lost luster, can no longer rejoice. People are dragging themselves along somehow. People dont have any roots in existence, they are uprooted. They are trying to be of service to others and they cannot, because they have not even been friendly to themselves. osho
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 12:11:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015