Objects and desires exist in me as in others. So accepting, let them be transformed.
- The double standard is the disease: your anger was ‘necessary correction’; their anger is ‘madness.’ Your sex is ‘love’; theirs is ‘lust.’ Every nation calls its military ‘defense.’ A mind with two measuring rods cannot see reality as it is — it is permanently unjust and permanently in misery.
- The single standard: whatever rationalization you give for yourself, give to others. Whatever criticism you apply to others, apply to yourself first. You are not exceptional — every ordinary mind believes it is exceptional. Knowing you are ordinary is the most extraordinary thing.
- This is the fork between the religious and the political impulse: the politician sees a problem in the world and wants to change it (he is already the model); the religious person sees the same problem and searches for it in himself first. Only the religious question — ‘how to change myself?’ — leads anywhere.
- Suppression is not acceptance: when you reject greed or anger as ‘not me,’ you push it into the unconscious, where it gains power in darkness and operates from roots you can no longer see. Acceptance — acknowledging ‘greed is here, anger is here, as a natural fact’ — brings everything to the surface, where it can be seen and dissolved. A disease you are aware of can be cured; one you are unaware of cannot.
- The mechanism of transformation: knowingly, you cannot be greedy or angry (just as knowingly you cannot put your hand in a flame). Awareness is the transforming agent — no other effort is required. Desire/violence need unawareness as their basic fuel. As ‘knowingness’ grows, greed becomes fire and anger becomes poison: they become self-evidently impossible, not suppressed.
- When desire dissolves through awareness rather than through a forced anti-desire ideal, it disappears beautifully without residue. A man who has forced himself into non-violence is still deeply violent — his non-violence is a subtle violence on himself and others. The technique produces genuine transformation, not a facade.
- Nuance from Q4: ‘When I accept my desires I feel I have become animal-like instead of transformed.’ Osho: this is exactly right — this is the transformation beginning. The ‘humanity’ that disappears first was always skin-deep (scratch a person and the animal emerges). Acceptance first uncovers your actual animal nature, which is your real ground. Animals are at ease in existence: they do not need psychoanalysts. Within that animal reality, with full alertness sustained, a deeper layer surfaces — the divine. The divine is in animals, trees, rocks — it is the basic center of everything. It can be reached only through reality and is lost only through falsity. Be a real animal rather than a false spiritual human.