From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 29. POSITIVE THINKING: PHILOSOPHY FOR PHONIES
The whole philosophy can be condensed into a simple sentence: if you want people to be influenced
by you, just behave the way they think is the right way to behave. You prove to be their ideal, which
they also want to be but have not been able to be yet. Of course, you cannot become anybody else’s
ideal, but you can pretend. You will become a hypocrite.
And if you are going to influence many people, then of course you will have to have many
personalities, many masks, because each person is influenced by a different mask.
If you want to influence a Hindu, you have to have a different kind of personality than when you
are trying to influence a Christian. To Christians, Jesus crucified on the cross is the symbol of the
greatest sacrifice anybody can make to redeem humanity.
To the Hindus, crucifixion simply means this man must have committed a great sin in the past. Their
philosophy is of karma and its consequence. You cannot be just crucified without any karma on your
part. You must have acted in evil ways, and this is the outcome of that. The crucifixion of Jesus
does not prove to the Hindu or the Jaina or the Buddhist that he is a messiah.
But to the Christian, Mahavira, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu – nobody seems to be comparable to
Jesus. In fact to a Christian mind they all look very selfish: they are just working for their own
redemption while Jesus is working for the redemption of the whole of humanity. A man who is
interested in his own ultimate realization is obviously the most selfish man in the world. What
selfishness is possible which can go beyond this selfishness?
If he renounces the world that is selfish, because he simply wants his soul to be freed from the
wheel of life and death. He wants to meet the universal spirit of God, or he wants to enter nirvana
and disappear into the cosmos where there is no suffering, where there is only bliss, eternal bliss.
And this man does not bother about anybody else. You call him a saint?an incarnation of God? – a
tirthankara? No, not to the Christian; that is not appealing.
If you want to influence many people you will have to have many personalities, many masks.
You will have to continuously pretend that which you are not, and you will have to hide that which
you are.
Now this is what makes a man phony.
Dale Carnegie’s whole philosophy is for phonies.
In fact, the word ”phony” is also a contribution of America. Strangely, it exactly means what
personality means. In Greek drama the actors used masks and they spoke through the mask.
Sona means sound, and sound coming from a mask is called persona in Greek – it is not the real
man, but the mask. You don’t know who is behind it; all that you hear is the sound, and you see a
mask. The mask is a mask, it cannot speak. And the one who can speak you don’t see; he is hiding.
From persona comes the English word ”personality”. And phony is exactly the same.
Since telephones came into existence, you can hear people’s voices through the telephone, and you
don’t see the person. And of course the voice also is not exactly the same; coming through wires
From Ignorance to Innocence 427 Osho