Imitation will not transform your being

People have got into trouble because they have started imitating. You can imitate a buddha, you can have the same clothes, you can walk the same way, you can eat the same kind of food. You can follow all the moral principles, but you will still be an actor, you will not be a buddha.

It happened ... There were three monasteries deep in the mountains. All three belonged to different Christian sects. One day it happened by coincidence that the three abbots of the monasteries had gone for a morning walk and they all met on the crossroads. They talked about matters concerning their monasteries and other problems.

Finally one of them said, "I have to tell you that as far as scholarship is concerned, my monastery is far higher than your monasteries."

The second one said, "That is true. As far as scholarship is concerned, your people are great scholars. But don't forget, as far as discipline is concerned, my monastery is far higher than yours. And also remember, scholarship is not going to help. It can make you knowledgeable, but it cannot make you wise. You have to walk the path of discipline; then only can you become a wise man."

The third was silent up to now. He laughed, and he said, "You both are right. But as far as humbleness is concerned, we are the tops!"

Humbleness ... and the desire is to be the tops. You can be humble, you can force yourself to be humble, you can repress your ego -- but that humbleness will not be true humbleness. It will be just inverted ego. It will be lowkey ego.

Once a man touched my feet. I told him, "There is no need ...."
He said, "It is not your concern. I am just the dust underneath your feet."
To provoke that man, I said, "That's right!"
Immediately he became angry. He said, "You tell me that I am just the dust under your feet?"
I said, "I have not said anything. You were saying it, I simply agreed."

Humbleness, or any other quality which makes you religious, if practiced from the outside makes you an actor. If it arises from the inside, out of your own experience of the intelligence of existence, then it has a different flavor, a different fragrance -- the fragrance of the freshly-opened rose. Then you are neither egoist nor humble, because humbleness and ego, both are two sides of the same phenomenon. You simply are. This being, simply to be, makes you enlightened, gives you new insight into matters.

The world is living in tremendous misery because of the so-called moralists, puritans, who have been imposing things from the outside. Those things enter into the unconscious, and the man starts behaving in a certain manner -- but he is a robot. Unless your potential that you have brought with you, which you have been carrying from eternity -- unless that potential, that seed sprouts and starts gathering more and more foliage, and brings blossoms to your being, then morality is a small matter. You don't have to listen to Moses and his Ten Commandments; you will find your own commandments. Unless you are in direct contact with the divineness of existence, all that you are doing is creating a persona, a personality ... fake, fraud, hypocrisy.

But any commandments taken from anybody -- even from God -- are not going to give you a revolution in your being. They will only create an actor, a pretender, a hypocrite, a repressed person, inhibited, feeling guilty on every account. Whatever he does goes against the commandments.

When you awake, in your awareness you cannot do anything wrong. You cannot harm anybody, you cannot violate anybody's freedom, you cannot interfere into anybody's territory. A great respect for life, reverence for life, arises in you, and it has nothing to do with your religion, it has nothing to do with your belief systems.

A man of awareness does not belong to any organized religion. Organized religion is against religiousness. Every organized religion kills the truth!

Postface :
Mind can understand everything that is outside you. All that is objective is available to the mind: science and technology, philosophy and theology -- all are mind-oriented.
But that which is within you is behind the mind, beyond the mind. It opens itself in your meditations, when you start dropping your thoughts and relaxing deeper and deeper,
when only a witness is left. The body is far away and no more you, the mind is just an
echo in the valleys, and is no more you. In the innermost core of your being there is no
thought, no cloud, a great silence.

In that silence arises authentic understanding. In that silence you are closest to the divine.

That silence is a way, a bridge, a path, a connection to the ultimate.

[Osho]