Osho [Hindi: ओशो] (11 December 1931 – 19 January 1990), born Chandra Mohan Jain [चन्द्र मोहन जैन], and also known as Acharya Rajneesh from the 1960s onwards, as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh during the 1970s and 1980s and as Osho from 1989, was an Indian mystic, guru, and spiritual teacher who inspired a controversial spiritual movement in India, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, and many other countries. His syncretic teachings emphasise the importance of meditation, awareness, love, celebration, courage, creativity and humour — qualities that he viewed as being suppressed by adherence to static belief systems, religious tradition and socialisation.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Sjakkelien Vollebregt (Public domain / CC0)
An alive and loving person simply loves. Love is a natural function. So the second thing to remember is, don’t ask for perfection; otherwise you will not find any love flowing in you. On the contrary, you will become unloving. People who demand perfection are very unloving people, neurotic. Even if they can find a lover they demand perfection, and the love is destroyed because of that demand. Once a man loves a woman or a woman loves a man, demands immediately enter. The woman starts demanding that the man should be perfect, just because he loves her. As if he has committed a sin! Now he has to be perfect, now he has to drop all his limitations — suddenly, just because of this woman? Now he cannot be human? Either he has to become superhuman or he has to become phony, false, a cheat. Naturally, to become superhuman is very difficult, so people become cheats. They start pretending and acting and playing games. In the name of love people are just playing games. So the second thing to remember is never to demand perfection. You have no right to demand anything from anybody. If somebody loves you, be thankful, but don’t demand anything — because the other has no obligation to love you. If somebody loves, it is a miracle. Be thrilled by the miracle.
It is not a question of money, power, and prestige; it is a question of what intrinsically you want to do. Do it, irrespective of the results, and your boredom will disappear.
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You have to remember that freedom is the highest value and if love is not giving you freedom then it is not love. Freedom is a criterion: anything that gives you freedom is right, and anything that destroys your freedom is wrong. If you can remember this small criterion your life, slowly, will start settling on the right path about everything: your relationships, your meditations, your creativity, whatever you are.
