freedom in dropping being respectable.

I have found freedom in dropping being respectable.

Respectability is a social strategy to keep you imprisoned. Around the world there are so many rumours.... I don’t care a bit.

Sometimes I have been told by my friends and lovers, ”Why don’t you contradict them? These are absolutely absurd, they destroy your respectability with people.”

I said, ”I don’t want to be respected by anyone, because if he respects me he will expect me to remain respectable” – and that I cannot promise.

It is better to be notorious, because it gives you immense freedom.

I am a notorious man. Jesus, Mohammed, Mahavira, Buddha, Lao Tzu – none of them was courageous enough to drop the desire for respectability.

People go on condemning me. The moment I come to know that they are
condemning me for a certain thing, then I go on doing the same thing on a bigger scale.

I had only one Rolls Royce.
They started condemning me, so I told my secretary, ”Arrange for two.”

In India it was very difficult, because the Rolls Royce after 1965 became a banned item, it could not enter the country. I was the only man who managed to have two Rolls Royces enter the country.

When I came to America, I said to my secretary, ”Now there is no limit.” I had seven, and they were condemning me – a spiritual man, an enlightened person, having seven Rolls Royces when people are dying of starvation? Now I have ninety.

Now they don’t condemn me. They know that if they continue condemning me, I will go on having more and more Rolls Royces until they are satisfied.

I have my own individuality.

I don’t need anybody’s respect, because I am so full there is no space for anything else.

And it has been a tremendous experience to be so notorious and yet to be loved by millions of people.

That gives a great hope, that even an ordinary man can be loved; you need not to be extraordinary to be loved.

How much love I have received!

I don’t think anybody before me has received so much love.

And certainly I have received more hostility, anger, condemnation than anybody else.

I am richest man in the world – I receive everything!

Love I have received – nobody can come even close to me.

Hatred I have received – nobody can come close to me.

And just for a single, simple thing: that I dropped the idea of respectability.

OshO 
CHAPTER 24. GO TO YOUR BATHROOM DANCING
From the False to the Truth 294/295