According to Osho, yes: everyone carries the same inner wings—the capacity for self-respect and self-delight—but most remain unaware of them. Social conditioning and parental investments try to mold us, leaving our treasures unopened. With awareness, courage, and sometimes a loving “push,” potential becomes actual. Discovering your own flight—living from your individuality rather than a borrowed life—naturally flowers into self-trust, dignity, and joyous being.
We all have “wings” inside; when we stop copying others and bravely try our own way, we feel proud and joyful.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, seeing and hearing you speak, one thing continues to strike me: from your earliest childhood, up until the latest split second, you have always had so much self-respect and so much self-delight. Are we all capable of so much?
Each fragment may not give you the idea because it is out of context, but if you put it in the whole context.... I was being expelled from one college, another college, but I was enjoying it -- and that's what was shocking to them. When I was expelled from one college, my first college, it was this same principal who had to expel me. He felt very sorry, because it was not right to expel me; and by and by he had come to have a certain liking for me, for my absolute determination to be myself whatsoever the cost. He had grown, by and by, a certain respect: "This man can sacrifice anything even for buttons, just for the cap." He tried to persuade me, "If you wear the cap I guarantee you that you will get the first class first in the intermediate examination, because it is…
Beloved Osho, it seems to me that I don't understand anything
If I say something, there is no need to believe in it. There is no need to disbelieve either. Remain open. If I say something, then try it. Then look at the trees without any ideas whatever. Look at the birds and the sky with no knowledge. Drop language and see whether what I am saying gives you clarity. If you can drop the word "rose" and then see the rose flower, what happens? You will immediately feel a new kind of relationship arising between you and the flower. Don't even call it a flower; there is no need. Your language is not needed to support it; it exists without language. Why bring language in? Put language aside. Put aside your continuous gibberish that goes on inside the mind. Just look. In the beginning it is difficult -- the language will come up again and again, just out of old…
Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LOVE MYSELF? So the first thing is, avoid the priests. They have taught you life-negative values. And my effort here is to bring back life-affirmation. That's what I call loving yourself, accepting yourself not as a sinner. How can you accept yourself if you think you are a sinner? How can you love yourself if you think you are nothing but full of guilt, nothing but an accumulated past of evil acts of millions of lives? You will hate yourself. And that's what your priests have been saying: renounce life, hate life, hate pleasure, hate everything, and sacrifice everything if you want to enter into paradise. Nobody has ever returned from paradise, so there is no evidence of any paradise anywhere, no proof, it is just a futile exercise which has never been able to come to a conclusion.
For centuries the society has been using that strategy to destroy the integrity of the individual. It gives you ideals, it tells you how you should be. It never allows you to love yourself as you are. It creates division: you are one thing, the society says you have to be something else; you become two. Your ideal self creates a constant tension in you. Your real self also becomes a burden because you don't want it; the society says that it is worthless: Drop it. The real is denied and the unreal is imposed. Now this is the whole misery of man: how can one ever be in bliss if the real is denied, rejected, condemned, and the unreal is appreciated, valued? The unreal remains unreal but it hovers above your head continuously torturing you: You should be this.
Beloved Osho, in your presence, I feel showered with your unconditional love and compassion. My hungry heart is opening, and I have experienced a lot of joy and stillness here in your buddhafield. But my feelings of unworthiness still dominate my life, and I'm clinging to them so tightly that I despair of ever letting go. It has been a long and serious road so far. Dear Osho, will you please help me?
But people are such that even when they have come here and they have been listening to me, they are managing what to listen to, what not to listen to. Whatever gives nourishment to their prejudices, they are open to, very happy that their convictions are being supported. The moment I say something that goes against their convictions -- and those convictions are their misery, the foundation of their suffering and their hell -- immediately they close themselves. But how long can you keep yourself closed? I go on hitting you from every dimension, every direction. Sooner or later you have to listen. Then too, such is human stupidity that people start defending themselves. I sometimes wonder why you are wasting your time. If you are here to defend yourself, that you can do very well wherever you are. It will be easier to defend yourself somewhere else; here it…