What happens when I embrace love and self-acceptance?

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.

You said the other day 'just love and accept yourself.' gradually self acceptance has been growing in my life. I have had several moments of experiencing unconditional love from the universe. In these three weeks since becoming a sannyasin, the most difficult and mind-blowing experience for me has been the reality of your unconditional acceptance of me and everything I am and do. I feel it like a soft caressing smoke from some distant fire enveloping me and penetrating the walls of my ego. Through so many ways your unconditional acceptance comes to me for the first time in my life. I weep as I

PREM Samma, life is happening, God is happening. This is what life is all about. The moment you accept yourself you become open, you become vulnerable, you become receptive. The moment you accept yourself then there is no need for any future, because there is no need to improve upon anything. Then all is good, then all is good as it is. In that very experience life starts taking a new color, a new music arises. If you accept yourself, that is the beginning of accepting all. If you reject yourself you are basically rejecting the universe; if you reject yourself you are rejecting God. If you accept yourself you have accepted God. Then there is nothing else to do but to enjoy, to celebrate. There is no complaint left, there is no grudge; you feel grateful. Then life is good and death is good, then joy is good and…

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.

Osho, what is the difference between surrender and blind imitation?

So be careful: the freedom you allow yourself, allow the other too. You have no right to judge another as blindly credulous or as a surrendered being. Drop that concern. You cannot judge anyway—how will you enter another’s heart? How will you know? Think only about yourself. See within whether, up to now, you have lived by blind belief or by surrender. Decide only there; leave worrying about others. Otherwise, all your judgments will be wrong. Jesus said: Judge not; do not set yourself up as a judge in relation to another. To the friend who has asked: if you are asking for yourself, good. Drop worrying about others. Look within and see: whatever I have been clinging to till now—have I ever staked my life to hold it? Have I meditated for it? Have I loved for it? Or am I just clutching what culture, society, civilization handed me?…

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.