Osho says, "Every idea that 'I am' is unspiritual. The idea of the self is unspiritual.
And what is self-cultivation? It is an effort to polish; it is an effort to create a beautiful character, to drop all that is unrespectable and to create all that is respectable." p. 183 "Ah, This!"
Polishing the ego is nonsense. It is a waste of time and effort. In A Course Of Miralces, it is taught that the ego is illusory. It is a figment of our imaginations and a social construction.
In Unitarian Universalism they covenant together to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This inherent worth and dignity has nothing to do with the ego. The ego has no inherent worth and dignity. It is a mirage. A mirage is not the real deal. A mirage is a hallucination. To polish and improve the image of a mirage is silly, nonsensical, ridiculous. How could an aware, wise person engage in fool's play?
Billions of dollars are spent in the United States and Europe and other First World Countries on self cultivation and self improvement. Self-help books abound. They have become a whole genre of literature and "how-to" videos and programs proliferate.
The emptiness of it all, the vacuousness, the banality is saddening. We are not separate selves. A separate self is not our essential nature, and so we can conclude that we don't know who we are. If we don't have an accurate understanding of who we are, how can we successfully cultivate it?
The idea of the Perennial Philosophy of Aldous Huxley leads one to the idea that God is too big for any one religion. How is it that sometimes people outgrow their religion of childhood? James Fowler, among others, has mapped out a model of spiritual development. Osho says that a person cannot enter into a spiritual life until he/she rebels against childish religious beliefs. Notes On A Spiritual Life intends to explore deeper understandings of an authentic spiritual life.
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