According to Osho, these traits are symptoms of one disease: ambition and living in the future. Ambition makes you poor, hoarding money, virtues, and images; you prepare to live and never live. The remedy is presence and sharing: drop the future, clean the inner junkyard, relax ideals, stop performing, and be simple and available now. By sharing and enjoying this moment, miserliness dissolves, pride softens, and authenticity flowers.
Stop saving yourself for later or trying to look perfect—share and be real right now, and the stinginess and pride fade away.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
How exactly to treat the following ailments: first: miserliness. Second: nagging, worrying perfectionism. Third: actor personality, that is, always behaving as if on show. Fourth: pride. This includes pride about what I have lately begun to think is my peacefulness. Is meditation sufficient to deal with these, or is anything additional needed, such as consciously indulging in them to the extreme or trying to ignore them or perhaps consciously avoiding them?
Perfection is a false ideal, but the ego wants it The ego wants to be perfect, so it goes on nagging you: "Become perfect." Then it creates tensions, madness, insanities, and the ego goes on creating ego trips. Just the other day I was reading a definition. The definition says, "The neurotic person is one who makes castles in the air, and the psychotic person is one who lives in those castles, and the psychiatrist one who collects the rent." If you want to become neurotic, psychotic, then try to become perfect. And all the religions on the earth up to now -- organized religions, the church -- have been teaching people to become perfect. Jesus has not taught that. Christianity has. Buddha has not taught that. But Buddhism has. All the organized religions have been teaching people to become perfect. Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu, they told something totally different;…
Three sutras that are basic for life transformation, that are ultimate in a way. The first: Be nonambitious. KILL OUT AMBITION TOTALLY. UNLESS AMBITION IS KILLED, you will remain in misery. Ambition is the source of all miseries. What is ambition? 'A' wants to be 'B', the poor wants to be rich, the ugly wants to be beautiful. Everyone longs to be someone else, something other than what he is. No one is content with himself. That's what ambition is. Whatsoever you are, you are not content with it. This is ambition. Then you are bound to be in misery, because you cannot be anything else. You can only be yourself; nothing else is possible. All else is just futile, harmful, dangerous. You can waste your whole life, your whole existence. Whatsoever you are, you are. Accept it; don't desire it to be otherwise. This is what nonambition means.
You cannot get rid of symptoms directly; you will have to go to the root. And the stupidity of man is such that he goes on watering the root and cutting the branches. Both things he goes on doing simultaneously because he cannot see the relationship. There is a certain reason why he cannot see the relationship between the branches, the leaves, the foliage, and the roots: the roots are invisible. You need a very penetrating consciousness to reach the roots, because they are underground and everything else is above the ground -- you can see it. So you see anger, you see jealousy, you see possessiveness, you see greed, ambition, and a thousand and one problems -- and naturally because you see them and you see that they all bring misery... Who does not know that anger brings misery? Who has not suffered from answer?
You need not surrender yourself; the ego remains intact, and things go on fattening the ego. In love, the ego will be lost. In love of things it remains—and grows. The more your wealth, the more your ego rises. Love of objects is not truly love; it is a counterfeit of love. Yet it is the first love into which ninety-nine percent fall. Therefore the Buddha is against trishna—craving. For trishna is the name of love of objects. Mahavira is against parigraha—possessiveness—because parigraha is love of objects. All the wise are against hoarding. For hoarding means your love is travelling on a wrong journey. Look at the person mad after things. Have you seen a miser? Have you ever studied his face? If you yourself are a miser, have you ever looked in the mirror and seen the image of your miserliness?
Can cowardice and hypocrisy also be beautiful? Can I accept even my cowardice, my hypocrisy, my miserliness and a tendency towards privacy that you yourself have called "idiocy"? And if I accept such tendencies, all of which tend to bottle me up, how will I get free?
See the beauty of fear, see the alchemical work of fear. It is simply trying to prepare you for the situation so that you can accept the challenge. But rather than accepting the challenge, rather than understanding fear, you start rejecting it. You say, "Ashoka, you are such a great man, a great sannyasin, and you are trembling? Remember what Osho used to say, that there is no death, that the soul is immortal. An immortal soul, and trembling? Remember what Krishna said: 'Death cannot destroy you, fire cannot burn you, weapons cannot penetrate you.' Remember! And don't tremble: hold yourself in control!" Now you are creating a contradiction. Your natural process is that of fear, and you are bringing in an unnatural process to contradict fear. You are bringing ideals to interfere in the natural process. There will be pain, because there will be conflict. Don't bother whether the…