Love yourself, respect yourself, be gentle with yourself. Unless you are loving towards yourself you cannot be loving at all. Unless you care about yourself you will not care about anybody else; it is impossible.
I teach you to be really selfish so that you can be altruistic. There is no contradiction between being selfish and being altruistic: being selfish is the very source of being altruistic. But you have been told just the opposite up to now, you have been taught the contrary: that if you want to be altruistic, if you want to love others, DON’T love yourself — HATE yourself in fact. If you want to respect others, don’t respect yourself. Humiliate yourself in every possible way, condemn yourself in every possible way.
And what has happened out of such teaching? — nobody loves anybody. The person who condemns himself cannot love anybody. If you cannot love even yourself — because you are the closest person to yourself — if your love cannot even reach to the closest point, it is impossible for you to reach towards the stars. You cannot love anything — you can pretend. And that’s what humanity has become: a community of pretenders, hypocrites.
Please try to understand what I mean by being selfish.
First you have to love yourself, know yourself, BE yourself. Out of that you will radiate love, understanding, tenderness, care for others. Out of meditation arises true compassion, but meditation is a selfish phenomenon. Meditation means just enjoying yourself and your aloneness, forgetting the whole world and just enjoying yourself. It is a selfish phenomenon, but out of this selfishness arises great altruism.
And then there is no bragging about it; you don’t become egoistic. You don’t serve people; you don’t make them feel obliged to you. You simply enjoy sharing your love, your joy.
OSHO
