Approval Seeking I

People live their whole lives in believing what others say, dependant on others. That's why people are very afraid of others' opinions. If they think you are bad, you become bad. If they condemn you, you start condemning yourself. If they say you are a sinner you start feeling guilty. Because you have to depend on their opinions, you have to continuously conform to their ideas; otherwise they will change their opinions. This creates a slavery a very subtle slavery. If you want to be known as good, worthy, beautiful, intelligent, then you have to concede, you have to compromise continuously with people on whom you are dependant.
And another problem arises. Because there are so many people, they go on feeding your mind with different types of opinions - conflicting opinions, too. One opinion contradicting another opinion; hence a great confsuion exists inside you. One person says you are very intelligent, another person says you are stupid. How to decide? So you are divided. You become suspicious about yourself, about who you are .... a wavering. And the complexity is very great because there are thousands of people around you.
You come in contact with so many people, and everybody is feeding his ideas into your mind, and nobody knows you - not even you yourself know - so all this collection becomes jumbled up inside. This is a maddening situation. You have many voices inside you. Whenever you ask who you are, many answers will come. Some answers will be your mother's some will be your father's, some will be your teachers and so on and so forth. And it is impossible to decide which one is the right answer. How to decide? What is the criterion? This is where man is lost. This is self-ignorance.
But because you depend on others, you are afraid to go into aloneness - because the moment you start going into aloneness, you start becoming very afraid of losing yourself. You don't have yourself in the first place, but whatever self you have created out of the opinions of others will have to be left behind. Hence, it is very scary to go in. The deeper you go the less you know who you are. So in fact before you are moving towards self-knowledge, before it happens you will have to drop all believes about the self. There will be a gap; there will be a kind of nothingness. You will become a nonentity. You will be utterly lost because all that you know is no longer relevant, and that which is relevant you don't know yet.
Christian mystics call this "the dark night of the soul". It has to be passed, and once you have passed it, there is the dawn. The sun rises, and one comes to know oneself for the first time. the first ray of the sun and all is fulfilled. The first songs of the birds in the morning, and all is attained.

Osho, Intimacy


I love this.
Imagine how fucking awesome it would be, if you are attending your fathers 60th birthday standing in front of one hundred people sniffing a line (of course you take this fake "sniff" stuff :-D) and fucking your girlfriend. If this makes you shrink I'll guess you have to work on your approval seeking issues =). If this line I just said even offends you, that's probably a sign that you have even more approval seeking issues. If this is frightening you, you can also begin with some smaller "goals" of course, and step by step try to disidentify with what other people told you what you are truely not. As soon as I have more time, I'll experiment with this and tell you what worked for me and what did not. I think this is the biggest Inner Game issue you can work on. It will enrich your life tremendously.