According to Osho, you’re scared to accept yourself because centuries of conditioning teach you you’re unworthy as you are and must imitate ideals—Jesus, Buddha, societal norms—to gain love and respect. This creates fear that authenticity brings rejection. Liberation demands a courageous revolt: drop borrowed ideals, trust your own potential, and risk disapproval to be sincerely yourself; otherwise life remains anxious, barren, and meaningless.
You’re afraid to be yourself because you were taught love comes only if you act like someone else, but being truly you is the only path to real happiness.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: BELOVED MASTER, WHY AM I SCARED TO ACCEPT MYSELF THE WAY I AM? Kalyan Mitto, everybody is in the same situation. Everybody is scared to accept himself the way he is. This is how all the past centuries of mankind have cultivated, conditioned every child, every human being. The strategy is simple but very dangerous. The strategy is to condemn you and to give you ideals so that you are always trying to become someone else. The Christian is trying to become a Jesus, the Buddhist is trying to become a Buddha, and it seems so clever a device to distract you from yourself that perhaps the people who have been doing it are themselves unaware. What Jesus said on the cross, his last words to humanity, are immensely significant in many ways -- in this context particularly.
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…
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.
Osho, why am I still so scared of exposing myself?
Now what have you to lose, Gita? You have nothing to lose and you have everything to gain. You are fortunate that in the last phase of your life you have come in contact with this energy-field. You are fortunate that in the evening of your life a door is opening, and the person who comes back home even in the evening should not be thought lost. That is a proverb in India: Even in the evening when the sun is setting, if somebody comes back home he is not thought to be lost. He has arrived, finally he has arrived. Life has gone down the drain; now don't miss this last phase. And the last is the most important phase, because it will bring death. And if you can die as truth you will not be born again. If you can die with all the falsities dropped, with all…
Why am I afraid of other people?
If you are afraid of yourself. only then are you afraid of other people. If you love yourself, you love others. If you hate yourself, you hate others. Because in relationship with others, it is only you mirrored. The other is nothing but a mirror. So whatsoever happens in relationship, always know it must have happened before, within you -- because the relationship can only magnify. It cannot create; it can only show and manifest. If you love yourself, you love others. If you are afraid of yourself, you are afraid of others. Because, in coming in contact with others you will start manifesting your being. You have been conditioned -- in the East, in the West, everywhere. Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Jain -- you all have been conditioned to hate yourself. It has been taught to you continuously that to love oneself is bad. 'Love others. Hate yourself.' This is…