According to Osho, it’s absolutely impossible to be responsible for yourself without first loving yourself. Society and religion divert your inborn self-love outward, creating dependence and inner poverty. Reclaiming self-love makes you an inner emperor—centered, overflowing, and capable of sharing rather than begging. From that inner fullness, real responsibility, freedom, and authentic love for others naturally arise.
You can’t truly take care of your life until you like, value, and are kind to yourself first.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, is it possible to be responsible for oneself without first learning to love oneself?
Half of India is going to face the same fate as Ethiopia soon -- and India's government is selling wheat, exporting wheat to the outside world. Their own people are going to die -- not in small numbers: fifty percent of India is just on the borderline. Any moment it can become a bigger Ethiopia. But the political leaders are selling the wheat to other countries because they want nuclear plants, atomic energy, so they can also compete in the foolish race that is going on. Anybody can see that it will take at least three hundred years for India to be a nuclear power equal to America or the Soviet Union. And do you think for these three hundred years America and the Soviet Union will simply wait? They will be growing in the same direction of destruction and death. All this has happened in the name of altruism.…
Question: LOVE YOURSELF AND WATCH -- TODAY, TOMORROW, ALWAYS. FIRST ESTABLISH YOURSELF IN THE WAY, THEN TEACH, AND SO DEFEAT SORROW. TO STRAIGHTEN THE CROOKED YOU MUST FIRST DO A HARDER THING -- STRAIGHTEN YOURSELF. YOU ARE YOUR ONLY MASTER. WHO ELSE? SUBDUE YOURSELF, AND DISCOVER YOUR MASTER. WILLFULLY YOU HAVE FED YOUR OWN MISCHIEF. SOON IT WILL CRUSH YOU AS THE DIAMOND CRUSHES STONE. BY YOUR OWN FOLLY YOU WILL BE BROUGHT AS LOW AS YOUR WORST ENEMY WISHES. SO THE CREEPER CHOKES THE TREE. HOW HARD IT IS TO SERVE YOURSELF, HOW EASY TO LOSE YOURSELF IN MISCHIEF AND FOLLY. THE KATTHAKA REED DIES WHEN IT BEARS FRUIT. SO THE FOOL, SCORNING THE TEACHINGS OF THE AWAKENED, SPURNING THOSE WHO FOLLOW THE LAW, PERISHES WHEN HIS FOLLY FLOWERS. These are poisonous ideas, but you have been poisoned.
And only when one is full of light.... The first child of light is love. And love contains all that is beautiful, all that is divine: compassion, prayer, creativity, grace. They all follow love, you need not think about them, they are by-products, consequences of love. But love itself happens only through light. All meditation techniques are devices to bring you out of your sleep, to help you wake up. OSHO (to Aige) : Your heart starts pulsating in a different rhythm. The whole world remains the same but your eyes are no more the same; hence you start seeing things which you have never seen before and you stop seeing things which you have always been seeing. So in a sense the world remains the same and in another sense it is no more the same, because when the seer changes, the seen changes.
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.
If I am to be my brother's keeper, how far does my responsibility go?
No, you are not. Nobody is. Nobody is meant to be anybody's keeper. You are here to be yourself. Your only responsibility is towards yourself. I would like you to be totally selfish because only in that is there a possibility that you may be helpful to others. Unless you are deeply self-centred, unless you are so selfish in your being that you are happy, celebrating, you will not be able to share it. Humanity has been put on the wrong track by altruists, by people who say: Serve others, you are responsible for others. Nobody is responsible for anybody. The only responsibility is towards yourself. And if you are fulfilled in that responsibility you respond beautifully. A really fulfilled husband will love his wife, because out of his fulfilment love flows. But if he thinks he has to fulfil responsibilities, he has a duty to care because he has…