“IT DEPENDS on you. You can be conditioned by me — but am not conditioning you. Let that be absolutely clear!

You can be conditioned by me. If you are listening only through the mind you will be conditioned, because the mind goes on gathering knowledge. The mind is very suggestible, corruptible, vulnerable. If you are listening to me through your mind, through your reason, through your argumentative faculty, through your intellect, you will be conditioned. Even if you are not convinced by me, even if you go thinking that you are not convinced by me, still you will be conditioned. Maybe against me, but that too will condition you. For or against does not matter: if you listen through the mind you will be conditioned — because mind is the faculty of conditioning.

Centuries of conditioning have made you more like machines. You have lost your manhood, you have bargained for security. You are secure and comfortable and everything has been planned by others. And they have put everything on the map, they have measured everything. This is all absolutely foolish because life cannot be measured, it is immeasurable. And no map is possible because life is in constant flux. Everything goes on changing. Nothing is permanent except change. Says Heraclitus, ‘You cannot step in the same river twice.’

The moment you are born, conditioning starts, from your very first breath; it cannot be avoided. The parents will condition you, the children you play with will condition you, the neighborhood will condition you, the school, the church, the state. And consciously not much conditioning is being done, but unconsciously the child goes on and on accumulating it. The child learns by imitating.

So don’t be worried. This is the normal situation in the world: everybody is conditioned.

And everybody has to come out of the conditioning. It is difficult. It is not like undressing — it is like peeling your skin. It is hard, it is arduous, because we have become identified with our conditioning. We know ourselves only as Catholics, communists, Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians. And the greatest fear of dropping the conditioning is the fear that you may fall into an identity crisis. Hence sannyas.

Whatever conditioning you have got can be dropped, because it has been forced on you from the outside — and because it has been forced on you from the outside it can be taken away from you from the outside.

I cannot give you God, I cannot give you truth, I cannot give you your inner core, but I can take all the rubbish that has been heaped upon you. And once that rubbish is removed, God starts becoming alive in you. Once all the obstacles are removed, the spring of your life starts flowing, the innocence is regained. Innocence regained is paradise regained; you enter again into the Garden of Eden.

Once you know that you are separate you are free from all conditioning, and then you can use your conditioning. I am not saying to become unnecessarily a nuisance in your society; I am not saying to get into unnecessary trouble for yourself and others. You can go on acting being a Catholic — it is beautiful! You can go to the church every Sunday and enjoy it, but remember that you are not a Catholic — the Catholic upbringing is just on the circumference. You are only a witness.

That’s the problem: one can become used to a certain conditioning, and one can start thinking as if it is one’s nature, or as if it is the truth. So one has to be very alert and watchful to find this lowest possibility in oneself and not get caught in it.

Nobody is made for anybody else, hence no two persons can fit absolutely. All your ideas about fitting with the other are illusions, and they are shattered sooner or later. Either you have to compromise or you have to separate. But nobody is made for the other.

Those who understand, they start accepting the uniqueness of the other, they start respecting the uniqueness of the other. They know they are different, yet they have decided to be together. And it is beautiful that they are different because that variety gives richness to life.

Nobody wants to be alone. The greatest fear in the world is to be left alone. People do a thousand and one things just not to be left alone. You imitate your neighbors so you are just like them and you are not left alone. You lose your individuality, you lose your uniqueness, you just become imitators, because if you are not imitators you will be left alone.

You become part of the crowd, you become part of a church, you become part of an organization. Somehow you want to merge with a crowd where you can feel at ease, that you are not alone, there are so many people like you — so many Mohammedans like you, so many Hindus like you, so many Christians, millions of them… you are not alone.

To be alone is really the greatest miracle. That means now you don’t belong to any church, you don’t belong to any organization, you don’t belong to any theology, you don’t belong to any ideology — socialist, communist, fascist, hindu, christian, jain, buddhist — you don’t belong, you simply are. And you have learnt how to love your indefinable, ineffable reality. You have come to know how to be with yourself.

Comparison is possible if there are many people alike, similar to each other, but this existence is so tremendously creative, so originally creative, it never repeats. It does not believe in carbon copies. It makes everybody an individual, unique. When personality is dropped you suddenly feel you are unique — but remember, you also feel everybody else is also unique. Uniqueness is a common quality of all, there is nothing to brag about. It is the universal quality of every being.

Uniqueness is very ordinary — everybody is unique.

No two human beings are equal. Yes, every human being is unique. There is no need for equality; what is needed is uniqueness.

Try to express your uniqueness, and help others to express their uniqueness. And destroy the inferiority complex first in yourself, then in your wife, then in your children, then in your neighbors, in your friends. And let this fire spread.” Osho

Source: Human Living Design