According to Osho, becoming aware doesn't strengthen your barriers; it simply illuminates them. The 'walls' are only thought-structures; fighting them breeds tension and even breakdown. Instead, practice pure witnessing: don't judge or struggle. As witnessing deepens, the walls thin, gaps open, and the seeming prison dissolves, revealing spaciousness, ease, and natural self-love. Victory comes without fighting.
Seeing the inner wall doesn’t make it bigger; quietly watching your thoughts makes it fade until you realize there was never a real wall.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, I am becoming more and more conscious of the barriers I have built up in myself over the years against being a joyful self-loving open being. It feels like the wall in me is getting stronger and stronger the more I am aware of it, and I can't come through. Do I first need more courage? My beloved beautiful master, could you please help me with your understanding?
Shunyam Para, it is the same question again. I have been answering Amita but I have also answered you, although you have phrased your question in a different way. A few small details are different; otherwise it is the same problem. I will discuss those small differences in detail. You say, "I am becoming more and more conscious of the barriers that have built up in myself over the years against being a joyful self-loving open being. It feels like the wall in me is getting stronger and stronger the more I am aware of it, and I can't come through." The first thing to understand is that the wall is not becoming stronger; it is only that your awareness is becoming clear. There is no reason at all why the wall should become stronger when you are becoming more aware. It is simply like when you bring the light…
Beloved Osho, I think I am growing to love and accept myself, and then I recognize how much I hold back and keep separate from other people to hide myself, and I am ashamed. I try to show others how strong I am. Why can't I be strong, why can't I accept that I am weak? Why can't I even accept that I am not willing to show my weakness?
It is the society, the culture, the civilization in which you are born which gives you wrong ideas. Those wrong ideas go on haunting you from the cradle to the grave. There is nothing wrong in being weak. But this society trains every child to be strong. Just across from my house in my village there was a gymnasium. My uncles and my father were all going to the gymnasium -- it was the best in the town. They tried to persuade me. I said to them, "The idea of the strong man is primitive. It comes from the days when people were hunting. I am not going to be a hunter!" And I don't think that you can ever be so strong that the need for being stronger disappears. Even the strongest people have found weakness, disease, old age, death... There was one man in India, Gama, who was…
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.
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…
Next time it happens, just watch it. Become very objective, a detached watcher, just to see what exactly it is, how it arises just like a small seed, and then how it grows and becomes a big tree and how you are completely lost in it. Just see the whole process of its growth and just see how you help it to grow. Don't be in a hurry to drop it and don't be in a hurry to get out of it; that's where people are wrong. People are in such a hurry to get out that they can't see how they get in, and that is the secret: just watch how you get in. Once you have seen the whole process and the misery that comes out of it, in that very understanding something evaporates. It is not a question of dropping -- just an old habit evaporates.