According to Osho, reverence does transcend jealousy-laced respect: respect is ambition-driven and secretly envies what can be seized—power, wealth, status—so it carries hostility. Reverence recognizes in the other a mirror of one’s own intrinsic nature, something unstealable and only learnable. Meeting the enlightened, reverence arises because they reveal what we already are; thus no comparison, no rivalry, only gratitude and learning.
Respect often hides envy for someone’s stuff; reverence is loving the one who shows you the goodness already inside you, so there’s nothing to steal.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, yesterday you said that jealousy is included in respect. I have immense respect for you, but the jealousy inherent in it keeps poisoning it, and I feel guilt and pain. Does reverence transcend this poison-laced respect?
It needs a little explaining—it's a delicate point. Whenever you respect someone, you do so because you see in that person something you do not have. You respect because you glimpse in the other something you would also like to possess. A beggar respects an emperor because he, too, longs to be an emperor. So on the one hand he respects, and inside he also envies. Because he is not yet an emperor but wants to be. You have attained what he wants to attain. He respects you as skillful, successful: “I stand far back in the line; you have gone ahead to where I should have been.” So you are powerful, clever, intelligent, strong—he respects you. But inside a fire of jealousy also burns—if he gets the chance, he would like to be in your place and push you aside. And if the beggar gets that chance, he will…
Osho, what is the relationship between meditation and patience?
If you sit to meditate to remove mental restlessness, you will keep looking back again and again: “Has it gone yet?” And the irony is that when you begin to meditate, restlessness will increase. Because what has been repressed will start surfacing; catharsis will begin. The rubbish you have kept hidden within and never allowed to express—meditation will break open those doors too. It will clean the house. Dust piled up for years, for births, will rise again; there will be gusts and storms. For a while even the little peace you had will be lost. Then you will panic: “I came for peace, and even what I had is gone.” Without patience, you could even become unhinged, because meditation brings such a great storm. The disease is not from a day or two; it’s from lifetimes. Meditation will break through all the layers to reach your innermost core. In…
Osho, what is jealousy? Does our jealousy show that we are very far from aloneness?
This was my routine, that I would always go to the examination fifteen minutes late. This I followed my whole career in school, in college, at university; I would go fifteen minutes late. It was well known. The examiner knew that my seat had to be kept empty; I would be coming, but exactly fifteen minutes late. And I would leave the examination hall fifteen minutes before everybody else, before the end. The time allowed was three hours and I could see that the examination could be managed in two and a half hours; there was no need to waste half an hour more there. The teacher, who was there looking after the students to see that they were not copying and not doing some mischief, that somebody was not concealing a book, would say, "There is no hurry; there are fifteen minutes left. Why are you finishing?" I would…
Osho, there are two parts to my personality: one lies down on the ground every day and offers you full prostrations and feels happy doing so; and the other, almost every day, blurts out, “How do you know that this is God!” Are both of these parts of my ego, and is reverence born only in egolessness?
Where does the mistake happen? If you get entangled in whether this person is God or not—whether this stone image is truly God’s image or not. If you obsess over this, gradually you will find that you have let go of faith’s hand and grasped doubt’s. Doubt is within you, and faith is within you; you hold the hand of faith—yet you have firmly taken doubt’s hand and are walking with it. And remember, do not hold faith’s hand so tightly that it becomes a prison. Do not tie knots, do not take binding vows. Do not turn it into a bondage that cannot be shaken off. This too is to be left—sooner or later it must be left. And if you keep this in mind—that sooner or later this too will go—then when doubt itself has gone, what will you do with faith? Faith was a medicine for the…
After hearing you for the last nine days and undergoing morning and evening meditations in your ashram, I came to the conclusion that I envy vivek, but I am not jealous of her. I feel she is holding the'parampada' of beloved disciple in the ashram. How to reach that stage?
MIND functions in such strange ways. You have been here to meditate; it has nothing to do with anybody else. In fact, a real meditator will not look at what is happening to others. A real meditator will be going inwards. It is said about Bayazid that he lived with his Master for twelve years, and he passed the same hall every day to come to the Master. One day the Master said to Bayazid, "You go back to the hall. There, in the cupboard, one book is Lying -- you bring that book." Bayazid said, "I will go, because I have never seen that there is a cupboard." The Master said, "You have been coming to see me continuously, every day, for twelve years, and you have to pass that hall every day; you have not looked around?" He said, "I was coming to you, Master. I am not…