The third question:

Question 3

OSHO, WHY AM I STILL SO SCARED OF EXPOSING MYSELF?

Deva Gita,

WHO is not? To expose oneself creates great fear. It is natural, because to expose oneself means to expose all the rubbish that you carry in your mind, the garbage which has been piling up for centuries, for many, many lives. To expose oneself means to expose all one's weaknesses, limitations, faults. To expose oneself ultimately means to expose one's vulnerability. Death.... To expose oneself means to expose one's emptiness.

Behind all this garbage of the mind and the noise of the mind there is a dimension of utter emptiness. One is hollow without God, one is just emptiness and nothing without God. One wants to hide this nakedness, this emptiness, this ugliness. One covers it with beautiful flowers, one decorates those covers. One at least pretends that one is something, somebody. And this is not something that is personal to you; this is universal, this is the case with everybody.

Nobody can open himself like a book. Fear grips: "What will people think about me?" From your very childhood you have been taught to wear masks, beautiful masks. There is no need to have a beautiful face, just a beautiful mask will do; and the mask is cheap. To transform your face is arduous, to paint your face is very simple.

Now suddenly to expose your real face gives you a shivering in the deepest core of your being. A trembling arises: will people like it? will people accept you? will people still love you, respect you? Who knows? -- because they have loved your mask, they have respected your character, they have glorified your garments. Now the fear arises: "If I suddenly become naked are they still going to love me, respect me, appreciate me, or will they all escape away from me? They may turn their backs, I may be left alone."

Hence people go on pretending. Out of fear is the pretension, out of fear arises all pseudoness. One needs to be fearless to be authentic.

And one of the fundamental laws of life is this: whatsoever you hide goes on growing, and whatsoever you expose, if it is wrong it disappears, evaporates in the sun, and if it is right it is nourished. Just the opposite happens when you hide something: the right starts dying because it is not nourished. It needs the wind and the rain and the sun. It needs the whole of nature available to it. It can grow only with truth, it feeds on truth. Stop giving it its nourishment and it starts getting thinner and thinner.

And people are starving their reality and fattening their unreality. Your unreal faces feed upon lies, so you have to go on inventing more and more lies. To support one lie you will have to lie one hundred times more, because a lie can be supported only by bigger lies. So when you hide behind facades the real starts dying and the unreal thrives, becomes fatter and fatter. If you expose yourself the unreal will die, is bound to die, because the unreal cannot remain in the open. It can remain only in secrecy, it can remain only in darkness, it can only remain in the tunnels of your unconscious. If you bring it to consciousness it starts evaporating.

That's the whole secret of the success of psychoanalysis. It is a simple secret, but the WHOLE secret of psychoanalysis: the psychoanalyst helps to bring up all that is inside your unconscious, in the darker realms of your being, to the level of the conscious. He brings it to the surface where you can see it, others can see it, and a miracle happens: even your seeing it is the beginning of its death. And if you can relate it to somebody else -- that's what you do in psychoanalysis, you expose yourself to your psychoanalyst -- even exposing to a single person is enough to bring great changes in your being. But to expose to a psychoanalyst is limited: you have exposed only to one person, in deep privacy, with the condition that he is not going to make it public. That is part of the profession of the physician, psychoanalyst, therapist, that is part of his oath: that he will not tell it to anybody, it will be kept secret. So it is a very limited exposure, but still it helps. And it is a professional exposure; still it helps. It takes years, that's why; that which can be done within days takes years in psychoanalysis -- four years, five years -- and even then psychoanalysis is never complete. The world has not yet known a single case of total psychoanalysis, of the process completed, terminated, finished, no, not yet. Not even your psychoanalysts are completely psychoanalyzed -- because the exposure itself is very limited and with conditions. The psychoanalyst listens to you as if he is not listening, because he is not to tell it to anybody. But even then it helps, it helps tremendously to unburden.

If you can expose yourself religiously -- not in privacy, not to the professional, but simply in all your relationships -- that's what sannyas is all about. It is self-psychoanalysis. It is twenty-four hour psychoanalysis, day in, day out. It is psychoanalysis in all kinds of situations: with the wife, with the friend, with the relative, with the enemy, with the stranger, with the boss, with the servant. For twenty-four hours you are relating.

If you go on exposing yourself... In the beginning it is going to be really very scary, but soon you will start gaining strength because once the truth is exposed it becomes stronger and the untruth dies. And with the truth becoming stronger you become rooted, YOU become centered. You start becoming an individual; the personality disappears and individuality appears.

Personality is bogus, individuality is substantial. Personality is just a facade, individuality is your truth. Personality is imposed from the outside; it is a persona, a mask. Individuality is your reality -- it is as God has made you. Personality is social sophistication, social polishing. Individuality is raw, wild, strong, with tremendous power.

Only in the beginning, Gita, will the fear be there. Hence the need for a Master, so that in the beginning he can hold your hand, so that in the beginning he can support you, so that in the beginning he can take you a few steps with him. The Master is not a psychoanalyst; he is that and far more. The psychoanalyst is a professional, the Master is not a professional. It is not his profession to help people, it is his vocation. It is his love, it is his compassion. And because it is his compassion he takes you only as far as you need him. The moment he starts feeling that you can go on your own he starts slipping his hand out of your hands. Although you would like to go on clinging, he cannot allow that.

Once you are ready, courageous, daring, once you have tasted the freedom of truth, the freedom of exposing your reality, you can go on your own. You can be a light unto yourself.

But the fear is natural because from the very childhood you have been taught falsities, and you have become so much identified with the false that to drop it almost looks like committing suicide. And the fear arises because a great identity crisis arises.

 

For fifty years, sixty years, you have been a certain kind of person. Now Gita must be reaching sixty. For sixty years you have been a certain kind of person. Now at this last phase of your life, dropping that identity and starting to learn about yourself from ABC is frightening. Death is coming closer and closer every day -- is this the time to start a new lesson? Who knows if you will be able to complete it or not? Who knows? You may lose your old identity and you may not have time enough, energy enough, courage enough to attain to a new identity. So are you going to die without an identity? Are you going to live in the last phase of your life without an identity? That will be a kind of madness, to live without an identity; the heart sinks, the heart shrinks. One thinks, "Now it is okay to go on for a few days more. It is better to live with the old, the familiar, the secure, the convenient." You have become skillful about it. And it has been a great investment: you have put sixty years of your life into it. Somehow you have managed, somehow you have created an idea of who you are, and now I tell you to drop that idea because you are not THAT! No idea is needed to know yourself. In fact, all ideas have to be dropped, only then can you know who you are.

Fear is natural. Don't condemn it, and don't feel that it is something wrong. It is just part of this whole social upbringing. We have to accept it and go beyond it; without condemning it we have to go beyond it.

Expose, slowly, slowly -- there is no need to take jumps that you cannot manage; go by steps, gradually. But soon you will learn the taste of the truth, and you will be surprised that all those sixty years have been a sheer wastage. Your old identity will be lost, you will have a totally new conception. It will not really be an identity but a new vision, a new way of seeing things, a new perspective. You will not be able to say 'I' again with something behind it; you will use the word because it is useful, but you will know all the time that the word carries no meaning, no substance, no existential substance at all; that behind this 'I' is hidden an ocean, infinite, vast, divine.

You will never attain to another identity; your old identity will be gone, and for the first time you will start feeling yourself as a wave in the ocean of God. That is not an identity because you are not in it. You have disappeared, God has overwhelmed you.

If you can risk the false, the truth can be yours. And it is worth it, because you risk only the false and you gain the truth. You risk nothing and you gain all.

My work here is to somehow persuade you, seduce you this way or that, to drop the old identity. Many, many fears will come: many things that you have done in the past, and you have been able to hide them, and you have succeeded. Now again opening the closed chapters for no reason at all, the closed chambers, and releasing the ghosts of the past...

You may not have been faithful to your husband once in a while, but you have been able to manage a certain face of sincerity, faithfulness. Now unnecessarily exposing yourself is bound to create fear. You may not have been faithful, now what is the point of exposing it? Or you may have been faithful in action but not in thought, but what is the point in exposing it? The mind will say, "There is no need! There are so many problems already, why create new problems?"

You may have succeeded in telling many lies and circulating those lies as true. You may have succeeded, and those lies are almost truths for others now, and even for you. Now going back and looking again -- it is very, very natural to be afraid, not to look back, not to go into all those nightmares.

Harry constantly irritated his friends with his eternal optimism. No matter how bad the situation was he would always say, "It could have been worse!"

To cure him of this annoying habit his friends decided to invent a situation so completely black, so dreadful, that even Harry would find no hope in it.

Approaching him at the club bar one day one of them said, "Harry, did you hear what happened to George? He came home last night, found his wife in bed with another man, shot them both, then turned the gun on himself."

"Terrible!" said Harry, "but it could have been worse."

"How in hell," asked the dumbfounded friend, "could it possibly have been worse?"

"Well," said Harry, "if it had happened the night before, I would be dead now!"

It is better to keep quiet, the mind says; it is better not to bring all the old ghosts, not to release them. It is better to go on sitting on them. For sixty years you have been able to manage a certain demeanor, a certain gracefulness, a certain personality -- polished, civilized, respectable -- now to suddenly expose it for no reason at all? Have you gone mad? The mind will say you have waited so long, you can wait a little more.

Little Siddhartha writes me again and again, "Osho, now I want to become part of the ashram." I have been telling him to just wait a little more, a little more, a little more, but he is persistent. After one month or two he asks for a darshan, and the only question he asks is, "When am I going to come into the ashram?"

Three or four days ago, again he wrote a letter asking, "Now it is time! When am I going to be in the ashram?" So I said to Laxmi, "Now tell him within four or five days. Make any arrangement and let him come in."

Laxmi told him, "Just wait four or five days." He said, "Why four or five days? Osho always says 'Do it now!' Why four or five days? Why wait? Why can't I come right now? Osho's insistence is always on the right now, here!"

Laxmi told him that the room had to be prepared, the room had to be painted -- "You will find it very difficult right now." So he said, "Okay. If I can wait for so long, I can wait for four or five days more. Okay, I will wait. It is only a question of four or five days more, so I CAN wait. And I have waited so long."

After sixty years of life the idea simply arises in the mind, "You have waited so long, why can't you wait for a few days more? Why create any disturbance? Why create any ripples unnecessarily?" Things have settled, everybody respects you -- your children respect you, your husband respects you, your society respects you. It has been a hard struggle -- it has been a struggle with the outside, it has been a struggle with the inside. Somehow you have repressed all that is wild in you: you have repressed sex, anger, greed, jealousy; you have repressed all that the society condemns. You have somehow managed a beautiful character. Now why, in the last phase of your life, expose it? For what? What are you going to gain out of it?

Mind will give all these cunning reasonings; these are rationalizations.

If you have lived for sixty years in a false way, enough is enough! It is time now to drop that whole falsity. What can people take away from you now? Sooner or later you will be dead, and all respect and all character and everything will be gone; soon you will be forgotten. A few people will remember you for a few days, then they will die; then even your memory will be gone from the earth.

How many millions of people have lived on the earth? Nobody even knows their names now. In their own time they must have bragged about their character, personality, strength, truth, courage, religiousness, saintliness, this and that. Now nobody even knows their names.

When a person dies, almost ninety-nine percent of his life disappears; one percent lingers a little bit as memory in the few people who had known him. Yes, they will remember him once in a while; that is all that is left. Then THESE people will die and even that memory will disappear. Within a few years a person disappears so totally, as if he had never been there in the first place.

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 false identities disconnected from you, renounced, if you can die utterly naked before God, absolutely naked before God like a small child before his parents, your death will be the most beautiful experience that you have ever experienced.

Those who have known death, they say that life is nothing compared to death. Life has extension -- seventy years, eighty years -- it is spread out over eighty years. Hence it cannot have that intensity which death can have, and ONLY death can have, because death happens in a split second. Over eighty years you live and in a split second you die. Death has intensity, not extension but intensity. It has depth.

Life is a long way to live -- you can postpone for tomorrow and you can live in a lukewarm way -- but death is so total. If you can die consciously... And you can die consciously only if you expose yourself totally, so all that the unconscious is carrying is poured out, all that the unconscious is repressing is released, so the unconscious becomes empty and there is nothing to hide; you can expose yourself in the moment of death totally and you can die consciously.

Remember, a person who has ANY repression cannot die consciously; repression creates the unconscious. The more repressed you are the bigger unconscious you have. What actually is the unconscious? It is that part of your mind that you don't want to see, it is that part of your mind that you bypass, it is that part of your house where you never go, the basement. You go on throwing all kinds of things in it and you never go into it.

The unconscious is not a natural phenomenon. The more man becomes civilized the more the unconscious becomes bigger. The uncivilized people have very small unconscious minds. You will be surprised to know that the aboriginals, the very primitive people who still exist in some parts of the world... In India, in some deep forests, in the hills, there are still people who are as primitive as you can find anywhere else; they are at least five thousand years behind.

One of the most important things about these people  -- I have' lived with them -- is they don't dream. It is tremendously important. It is very rare that a primitive dreams, because he has no unconscious. He lives his life so naturally, so truthfully. He represses nothing. When you don't repress anything you cannot create dreams.

A dream is the boiling unconscious. The whole day you go on repressing, and in the night, when you fall asleep -- when the repressor falls asleep -- all that is repressed starts surfacing. That's what your dreaming is. And if your dreams are nightmares that simply means you are REALLY repressing. Your repression is dangerous. You are repressing neurotic things inside your unconscious, and the deeper they go the more damage they do.

I have lived with the primitives; I have noted many things in them, but the most important is that they don't dream. If you ask them, "What was your dream last night?" they say, "What dream? We slept well." Yes, once in a while somebody dreams, only once in a while, and the person who dreams has a totally different kind of dream than you. His dream is not the dream that Freud, Jung and Adler study. His dream is intuitive, his dream is a prediction of the future, his dream is a foreshadowing of something that is going to happen.

So in a primitive society the dreamer becomes the seer. He becomes the SHAMAN; he becomes a tremendously important person because he can dream. In a civilized society the psychoanalyst becomes very important because he can analyze dreams, he can interpret dreams. In a primitive society the dreamer becomes the most important person -- he becomes the religious head of the commune, because his dreams become predictions, his dreams always prove true. He does not dream about the past because he never represses it. If he dreams at all he dreams about the future, that which has not happened yet and is going to happen. And his dreams are almost always true.

Now his dreams have to be understood in a totally different way. Modern psychoanalysis will not be able to understand his dreams; it is too obsessed with the civilized man, his unconscious. The primitive man has no unconscious.

And the same happens to a Buddha: his unconscious disappears because he goes on exposing, pouring out whatsoever is in his being. He never represses it, he never creates the unconscious.

The unconscious is a creation of civilization: the more civilized you are the more unconscious you are. If you become absolutely civilized you will be robots, you will be absolutely unconscious. That's what is happening. That calamity is happening all over the world; it has to be stopped. And the only way to stop it is to help people to pour out their unconscious in meditations.

Gita, expose yourself That will be unburdening. And I am here -- don't be worried and don't be afraid. I am coming with you. I will keep company with you to the point where you don't need me. I will only leave you in the unknown when I see that now you can walk on your own. And then there will be no fear.

But don't miss this opportunity. This time, die consciously. But you have to start right now to live consciously; only then can you die consciously: Even if you can live consciously for a few years, that will be enough. Even a few months or even a few days and if intensity is great even a few minutes are enough to live consciously; then one becomes capable of dying consciously. And to die consciously is to be resurrected into a totally different dimension, the dimension of the divine.