Remove the idea that anybody else is responsible for your misery and suffering; remove the idea that somebody can give meaning to your life. Accept that you are alone, born alone, and you will die alone.
And you have to accept the fact that you are living alone — maybe in a crowd, but you are living alone; maybe with your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, but they are alone in their aloneness, you are alone in your aloneness, and those alonenesses don't touch each other, never touch each other.
That you may live with someone for twenty years, thirty years, fifty years — it makes no difference, you will remain strangers. Always and always you will be strangers. Accept the fact that we are strangers; that we don't know who you are, that you don't know who I am. I myself don't know who I am, so how can you know?
But people are presuming that the wife should know the husband, the husband is assuming the wife should know the husband. Everybody is functioning as if everybody is a mind reader, and he should know, before you say it, your needs, your problems. He should know, she should know — and they should do something. Now this is all nonsense.
Nobody knows you, not even you, so don't expect that anybody else should know you; it is not possible in the very nature of things. We are strangers. Perhaps by chance we have met and we are together, but our aloneness is there. Don't forget it, because you have to work upon it. Only from there is your redemption, your salvation.
But you are doing just the opposite: how to forget your aloneness? The boyfriend, the girlfriend; go to the movie, the football match; get lost in the crowd, dance in the disco, forget yourself, drink alcohol, take drugs, but somehow don't let this aloneness come to your conscious mind — and there lies the whole secret.
You have to accept your aloneness, which in no way you can avoid. And there is no way to change its nature. It is your authentic reality. It is you. And you are escaping from yourself. Then there will be misery, there will be problems. And in solving one problem you will create ten more, and so on and so forth.
Soon there will be only problems surrounding you and you will be drowning in your own problems. Then you call out, "Why are the tensions increasing? Why is there so much suffering? Why is there so much misery?" — as if somebody has a readymade answer for it. Yes, somebody has it; it is you.
Because I have found the answer within me, hence I say it to you with authority. The authority is not derived from any God, from any messiah, from any Veda, from any Koran, Bible, no. The authority is derived from my experience.
My whole life I have lived amongst millions of people, but never for a single moment forgetting that I am alone, that my aloneness is unreachable; nobody can reach to it. It is available only to me, because it is me.
So the moment you stop escaping from yourself, drowning yourself in all kinds of drugs, relationships, religions, service to humanity… now a few are doing that. It is nothing but escape from themselves. But their ego is fulfilled because they are doing service to humanity.
I know many servants, great servants, and when I talked with them, brought them to the point and nailed them down exactly, they all literally broke into tears and said, "Perhaps you are right — we are escaping. We were thinking we were going to serve these poor people, but it seems that we have not been able to solve any of our own problems." This seemed to be a very preferable escape; you can put aside problems. And how can you be so selfish, to be bothered by your problems when the whole of humanity is suffering? When everybody is suffering, help them. So you can, in a beautiful garb, put aside your problems — even to think about them is selfish.
But with those problems, whom are you going to help and how? You will dump all your problems on somebody whom you are going to serve. The husband will dump on the wife, the wife will dump on the husband. The parents will dump on the children, and everybody is dumping his problems on others without seeing that the other is also trying to do the same.
Stop dumping problems on others. You have to solve your problems, and every individual has to solve his own problems. And the problems are not so many. It is one problem which you have not solved which has created a chain of unsolved problems. The problem is: how to enter your aloneness without fear? And the moment you enter your aloneness without fear… it is such a beautiful and ecstatic experience that there is nothing compared to it.
It is not a problem at all. It is the solution of all your problems. But you have made it a problem because you have listened to others and followed them: the blind following blind leaders and priests. They are all going in a circle, and everybody believes that the man ahead of him is capable of seeing, and the same is the case with the man who is ahead. He is holding somebody else's coat or shirt, believing that he knows where he is going, and they all are moving in a circle; nobody is going anywhere. The followers are following the leader, the leader is following the followers….
You have to stop and come out of this stupid game of followers and leaders. You have just to be yourself, and remember that you were born alone, so aloneness is your reality; that you will die alone, so aloneness is your reality. And between birth and death, between these two points where you are absolutely alone, how can life be anything else? It is in each moment alone. So accept it joyously; go into it as much as possible, as many times as possible.
This is the temple of my religion. It is not made of rocks, marbles; it is made of your consciousness. Go into it, and the deeper you go, the farther away are the problems. The moment you touch the center of your being you have arrived home. And from that point you can come out and do whatsoever you want to do. It will be a help, it will be service, it will be sharing. You will not be dumping anything on anybody.
OSHO