Love and Selfishness

Why Self-Love Is the Foundation of Any Love

By: OSHO

Narrated by: OSHO

Osho bashes another basic assumption of our society: Loving others is good, loving yourself is egotistical and selfish. He asserts that all love is based on self-love. Only when you love yourself, can you love someone else. If you don't love yourself your love for others is only a pretense.

Every child has been conditioned not to love himself but to love others. That is impossible. Only a very deeply selfish person can be unselfish. Being self-centered is basic. A self-centered person seeks to maximize his happiness. The happier you become, the more you will seek to share that happiness with others. That is the only way to be happy.

Osho then talks about why a happy person is the most dangerous person in the world.

©1975 OSHO International Foundation (P)2015 OSHO International Foundation

one of the many OSHO talks

one of the many Q&A sessions of OSHO . Delightful as usual his parfume of knowledge wisdom and non duality .

Osho word play with hopelessness and selfishness and a few other things.

This Osho talk is far more than just love and selfishness and that was only the first question Osho answered. In fact so many topics were covered that it is beyond my ability to comment in a review but I will mention a few things. He starts with selfishness and suggests that being selfish is the only way a person is capable of being giving. It's an unusual viewpoint for sure but Osho is a master of wordplay and many times a statement he makes is to break your old archetypes and open his audience to a new way of viewing things. The concept is even when a person is being nice to others he isn't doing it for their benefit but for his own desire of creating a comfortable place where everyone is happy, thus he is helping himself when he helps others. Same goes for anything whether it's giving food or giving money. He then goes on to talk about abandoning hope and living in the moment. To be like a drop of water in a river unconcerned where it is going. If you wish to make changes then those changes are made through awareness rather than planning or having some idea of the future. He then answered many other questions and this was only the first three I have described here. This is one of those talks that are all over the place.