Dropping Ideals

Can negative emotions such as cowardice and hypocrisy also be beautiful?

If you have the idea to be a brave man then it looks ugly to be a coward. But cowardice is a fact, and the ideal is just an ideal, a fantasy of the mind.

Sacrifice fantasies to reality, drop all ideals, and then life starts becoming integrated. All the rejected fragments start coming back home, the repressed starts surfacing. For the first time you start feeling a kind of togetherness; you are no longer falling apart.

For example, if I hold myself to be a “kind” person, I will not be able to permit myself to recognize and accept angry feelings when they arise in consciousness, because kind people just don’t get angry.

Therefore, to bring about a personal unity in consciousness, I must first take my stand as being no thing fixed or enduring, but hold myself to be only the moment-to-moment experiential reality that arises in consciousness.

Thus some moments I am angry, then some moments I am sad, then some moments I am jealous, then some moments I am joyful. Moment-to-moment, whatsoever happens is accepted. Then you become one. And this oneness is the most fundamental thing to understand.

The master must help the disciple to confront and integrate with those rejected experiential aspects of self which he actually is at any given moment instead of trying to help him actualize its compensatory opposite or what the disciple feels that he ought to be, or that which he is trying to protect, enhance or affirm about himself.

My purpose, my function, is to take all ideals away from you. You have come with ideals; you would like me to enhance your ideals, you would like me to support you and help you to become that which you want to become. That may be your motivation in coming here, but that is not my work.

My work is just the opposite: to help you to accept that which is already the case and to forget all about your fantasies. I want you to become more realistic and pragmatic. I want to give you roots in the earth, and you are hankering for the sky and you have completely forgotten the earth.

Yes, the sky is also available, but only to those whose roots have gone deep into the earth. If a tree wants to rise high in the sky and whisper with the clouds and play with the winds and have some communion with the stars, then the tree will have to send deeper and deeper roots into the earth. The first thing is sending roots into the earth, the second thing happens of its own accord. The deeper the roots go, the higher the tree goes; there is no need to do anything else.

My effort here is to send your roots deep into the soil of truth. And the truth is that which you are.

Then suddenly things will start happening: you will start rising. The ideals that you have always tried for and have never been able to achieve will start happening of their own accord.

If a person can accept his reality as it is, in that very acceptance all tension disappears. Anguish, anxiety, despair — they all simply evaporate. And when there is no anxiety, no tension, no fragmentariness, no division, no schizophrenia then suddenly there is joy, then suddenly there is love, then suddenly there is compassion. These are not ideals, these are very natural phenomena. All that is needed is to remove the ideals, because those ideals are functioning as blocks. The more idealistic a person is, the more blocked he is.

As peculiar and contradictory as it may sound, peace is to be found only in the midst of pain and never by struggling against or running away from what is considered to be the negative or painful.

Yes, cowardice gives you pain, fear gives you pain, anger gives you pain — these are negative emotions. But peace can be attained only by accepting and absorbing the painful, not by rejecting it. By rejecting it you will become smaller and smaller and smaller, and you will have less and less power. And you will be in a constant inner war, a civil war, in which one hand will fight with the other, in which you will simply dissipate your energy.

A very fundamental thing to be remembered: only communion with psychological pain opens the door for its liberation and transcendence — only communion with psychological pain.

All that is painful has to be accepted; a dialogue has to be created with it. It is you.

There is no other way to go beyond it, the only way is to absorb it.

And it has tremendous potential. Anger is energy, fear is energy, so is cowardice. All that happens to you has great momentum, a great quantity of energy hidden in it. Once you accept it, that energy becomes yours. You become stronger, you become wider, you start becoming more spacious. You have a bigger inner world then.

Osho, Unio Mystica