Self-Awareness

Beloved Osho, since being with you so much growth and maturity has happened in me -- I have changed in every aspect. At the same time, when I look into myself, I feel the same as I did when I was a little child. Is this my witness, or something else?

It is your witness. Just remember one thing, that the feeling of being a child can be experienced in two ways. You can be a witness and the experience of childhood can be an object. Then one more step is needed: You have to become the purity, the innocence of the child... not separate -- you are it. It will come. This is how it comes: first it comes as an object; you are still separate and watching it. This is beautiful and a great experience -- that all rubbish is thrown out and you are feeling a very pure, innocent state -- but you are still separate from it. Just go on witnessing it, and soon even the childhood will disappear, and there will be only the witness, the subjectivity. There will be only the mirror without mirroring anything. Then you have arrived home. You can mirror beautiful things,…

Beloved Osho, these days I feel like a fruitcake. Also I'm reading the idiot by fyodor dostoevsky. Do you think there is any connection?

Vimal, there is nothing wrong in feeling like a fruitcake. It is really delicious. It is so nice... and it cannot have any connection with the reading of the great masterpiece of Fyodor Dostoevsky, THE IDIOT. THE IDIOT is only the name, but the person he calls the idiot in that great novel... That novel has to be considered one of the ten great novels in the whole world literature. There is no way to think that anything better than Fyodor Dostoevsky's IDIOT can be created. The idiot is a sage. He is called idiot by the people because they can't understand his simplicity, his humbleness, his purity, his trust, his love. You can cheat him, you can deceive him, and he will still trust you. That's why people think he is an idiot. He is really one of the most beautiful characters ever created by any novelist. The novel…

Beloved Osho, can you talk about the difference between so-called self-consiousness and self-awareness? Is self-consciousness a form of unawareness, or is there something of awareness in it?

Prem Anudeva, self-consciousness is a disease, it is sickness. Self-awareness is health -- it is wholeness. Both words appear to be the same, but in fact, because language is created by unconscious people, they cannot make the fine demarcations. Self-consciousness simply means ego consciousness and self-awareness means soul consciousness. Your ego is a false entity. Because you have so much money, because you have so much power, because you are born in a very respected family... your education, your position in life -- all these things constitute your ego. But your soul comes with you when you are born, it has nothing to do with anything. Whether you are educated or uneducated -- Kabir was not educated; Jesus was not educated -- whether you come from a respectable family or not, does not matter. It is not known whether Kabir was born from a Hindu family or a Mohammedan family.…

Witnessing, awareness, meditation, suddenly seem distant and sterile adult ideas in the face of the flood of wild and childish adoration which fills me while I am listening to you talk about jesus. My adult self says, "beware; don't indulge in sloppy, sleepy sentimentality -- this is just the mind, childhood christian conditioning." but the impulsive, yearning seven-year-old feels like sticking out her tongue at the twenty-eight-year-old seriously spiritual seeker. Which is the real me?

Neither -- but the one who is watching both, the one who has asked the question. You are neither a seven-year-old nor a seventy-year-old. Oldness is irrelevant to you, age does not belong to you. You are eternal -- neither the child, nor the young man, nor the old man. Always fall back to the witness, go deeper and deeper into witnessing. Never allow any other identification to settle: of the child or the adult -- no. All identifications are bondages. Total freedom is not in identification; total freedom is in non-identification with each and every thing. Someday, when all identifications are broken and they fall down -- like clothes drop -- and you are absolutely nude in your freedom, then you will know who you are. You are gods in exile. Only by witnessing will you remember who you are. Then all misery disappears, all poverty disappears. You are…