Fix your inside first—when your heart is clear and kind, real beauty shines out by itself; pretending on the outside only hides problems and makes you tense.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
A friend has asked: Osho, yesterday you said that to know anger completely, one must experience it in its totality. Then how is one to know lust completely? Because the experienced say that lust is never satisfied; the more you indulge it, the more it grows. So how can one go beyond lust?
Surely there is an inherent purpose. And it is this: even these saints could not have been born without lust. They too went beyond only by passing through the experience. They too entered it and found it to be futile. That realization of futility is precious—and it comes only when it happens in your own experience. So do not be in a hurry. Do not rely on borrowed experience. That does not mean you tell the experienced, “You are wrong.” You should simply say, “We do not yet know. We wish to enter and know for ourselves what this lust is. We will know it fully. If it turns out to be wrong, that very knowing will bring liberation. And if it turns out to be right, then there is no need for liberation.” One thing is certain: whoever has known rightly has become free. And another thing is also…Read the full discourse →
Beloved Osho, your inner beauty I can only feel as far as I have discovered myself. But for ten years, whenever I see you entering the auditorium, there is this surprise about your unbelievable outer beauty too. Osho, is the outer appearance always just a reflection of the inner?
Janak asked him, "I can understand why they are laughing -- because of your body; but I cannot understand why you are laughing. And you stopped all their laughing with your laughter." A single man stopped one thousand people's laughter. Ashtavakra said to Janak, "I thought this conference was for scholars and philosophers, but these are all shoemakers. They can understand only the skin. They cannot see the inner, they can only see the outer." There was a great silence. What he was saying had a great truth in it. Janak dissolved the conference and said, "Now I would like to inquire of Ashtavakra only. He has defeated you all just by his laughter and his statement that, `You can't see the inner, you can only see the outer; you are all shoemakers.' Shoemakers work with the skin of different animals. I dissolve the conference and, Yagnavalka, return those one…Read the full discourse →
Unconsciousness creates all kinds of ugliness in life; so whenever you find anything ugly in you, just look for the cause; somewhere in the roots will be unconsciousness. If there is ambition the person becomes ugly. Politicians are bound to be ugly, so much ambition, so much desire to dominate others, by any means -- because time is short and competition is great. There are so many people who are trying to be the president, to be the prime minister in such a great competitive world, with such a short life, how can one bother about the means and the end? Then any means have to be used to fulfil your desire. Then one forgets all sense, all reason, all aesthetic sensibility. If one has to murder people, one murders.Read the full discourse →
The more I look into myself, the more I find that I'm such a narcissist -- and my only and real concern is not enlightenment, liberation... And all that, but beauty. I want to make myself and the world as beautiful as possible. And the beauty of beauties seems not to be. Am I an okay student of your aesthetics?
Religions of the past have either been of the first or of the second. The third, the highest, stage is evolving: the religion of beauty. That's why I say the first is logical, the second is ethical, and the third is aesthetical. The third is nothing but aesthetics. The man who is trying to be good has to impose goodness on himself; he has to practise and cultivate it. Deep down there is a split, and that split will remain. You think celibacy is good; logically you have arrived at the conclusion that celibacy is good, that sexuality is just a waste of life energy, and that it is stupid also, and that it is animal-like also, and that unless you transcend sexuality, you will not be able to transcend your body, because body is the body of sex. It consists of sex, it is made of sex cells; it…Read the full discourse →
A sister has asked: Yesterday you said that a beautiful woman waits for the perfect man. Then can an ugly woman not wait for the perfect man? Does an ugly woman not have the right to wait for the perfect man? She, too, she has written, feels the desire to have a handsome man. And she has also asked: Why does an ugly woman want to get a handsome man? And why does an ugly man want to get a beautiful woman?
The reason is that no one considers themselves ugly—there is no other reason. No one thinks they are ugly! People take themselves to be beautiful. Even the ugliest person considers themselves beautiful. So they don’t even think about it in that sense. And if it were only a matter of the body, I wouldn’t even answer this question. This is the state of our inner life as well. We take ourselves to be right and make ourselves the yardstick by which we weigh the whole world. That is the mistake. If a person were to look at themselves for the first time, they would not find anyone more ugly than themselves, anyone worse than themselves, anyone more dishonest than themselves. And when they truly see themselves, then whoever they meet in this world will seem like the grace of the divine—because they will feel, “I was not worthy of this…Read the full discourse →