Remember it: love yourself, because if you don’t love yourself nobody else will ever be able to love you.

You cannot love a person who hates himself. And on this unfortunate earth, almost everybody hates himself, everybody condemns himself.
How can you love a person who is condemnatory towards himself? He will not believe you. He cannot love himself—how can you dare? He cannot love himself—how can you love him? He will suspect some game, some trick, some trip. He will suspect that you are trying to deceive him in the name of love. He will be very cautious, alert, and his suspicion will poison your being.
If you love a person who hates himself, you are trying to destroy his concept about himself. And nobody easily drops his concept about himself; that is his identity. He will fight with you, he will prove to you that he is right and you are wrong. That’s what is happening in every love relationship—let me call it every so-called love relationship. It is happening between every husband and wife, every lover and beloved, every man and every woman. How can you destroy the other’s concept about himself? That is his identity, that is his ego, that’s how he knows himself. If you take it away he will not know who he is. It is too risky; he cannot drop his concept so easily. He will prove to you that he is not worth loving, he is only worth hating.
And the same is the case with you. You also hate yourself; you cannot allow anybody else to love you. Whenever somebody comes with loving energy around you, you shrink, you want to escape, you are afraid. You know perfectly well that you are unworthy of love, you know that only on the surface do you look so good, so beautiful; deep down you are ugly. And if you allow this person to love you, sooner or later—and it is going to be sooner than later—he will come to know who you are in reality.
How long will you be able to pretend with a person with whom you have to live in love? You can pretend in the marketplace, you can pretend in the Lions’ Club and the Rotary Club—smiles, all smiles. You can do beautiful acting and role-playing. But if you live with a woman or a man for twenty-four hours a day, then it is tiring to go on smiling and smiling and smiling. Then the smile tires you, because it is phony. It is just an exercise of the lips, and the lips become tired. How can you go on being sweet? Your bitterness will surface. Hence by the time the honeymoon is over, everything is over. Both have known each other’s reality, both have known each other’s phoniness, both have known each other’s falsity.
One is afraid to become intimate. To be intimate means you will have to put aside the role. And you know who you are: worthless, just dirt. That’s what you have been told from the very beginning. Your parents, your teachers, your priests, your politicians, all have been telling you that you are dirt, worthless. Nobody has ever accepted you. Nobody has given you the feeling that you are loved and respected, that you are needed—that this existence will miss you, that without you this existence will not be the same, that without you there will be a hole. Without you this universe is going to lose some poetry, some beauty: a song will be missed, a note will be missed, there will be a gap—nobody has told you that.

And that’s what my work here is: to destroy the distrust that has been created in you about yourself, to destroy all condemnation that has been imposed on you, to take it away from you and to give you a feeling that you are loved and respected, loved by existence. God has created you because he loved you. He loved you so much that he could not resist the temptation to create you.

~OSHO
@GatelessGate

Guilt, regret, resentment, sadness & all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past & not enough presence.

~Eckhart Tolle
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To understand everything is to forgive everything.

~Gautama Siddhartha
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If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?

~Dogen
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Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft can you be extremely hard and strong.

~Zen Proverb
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I. 尋牛

I. The Search for the Bull

In the pasture of this world, I endlessly push aside the tall grasses in search of the bull. Following unnamed rivers, lost upon the interpenetrating paths of distant mountains, My strength failing and my vitality exhausted, I cannot find the bull.
I only hear the locusts chirring through the forest at night.

~Kuòān Shīyuǎn
@GatelessGate

2. 見跡

2. Discovery of the Footprints

Along the riverbank under the trees,
I discover footprints.
Even under the fragrant grass,
I see his prints.
Deep in remote mountains they are found.
These traces can no more be hidden
than one's nose, looking heavenward.

~Kuòān Shīyuǎn
@GatelessGate

3. 見牛

3. Perceiving the Bull

I hear the song of the nightingale.
The sun is warm, the wind is mild, willows are green along the shore,
Here no bull can hide!
What artist can draw that massive head, those majestic horns?

~Kuòān Shīyuǎn
@GatelessGate