A man in America killed seven persons, for no reason at all. Strangers! Just went on the beach and shot seven people. He had not met them before. He had not even seen their faces. He was asked in the court ”Why?”
He said, ”I wanted my picture on the first pages of the newspapers. And I am happy! Now I am somebody. Everybody knows about me. I am not dying as a nobody. You can give me any punishment – death is acceptable – but I had lived long enough as a nobody. I would have passed and nobody would have paid attention – now everybody knows that I exist, that I am important.”
Go deep into the criminal’s mind and you will find this. And this is the mind of the politician too. If the politician succeeds slowly slowly he becomes criminal. The more powerful he becomes, the more criminal he becomes. He is saintly only when he is out of power. His saintliness is only when he is powerless. Once he is powerful he does not care; then he starts doing all those things he has always been against.
But everybody is a politician in that sense. If you hanker for attention, watch – you have some politics in you. And politics is poison. If you pass through a street and nobody says hello to you, nobody says good morning, nobody looks at you, how do you feel? A nonentity. It hurts. If it hurts it shows only one thing: that you don’t have any self-awareness. Otherwise there is no need !
The man of self-awareness can live absolutely alone and utterly happy. He can move in the crowd and he will not think even for a single moment that anybody should pay attention to him. In fact, he would like nobody to pay attention to him, so that he can go on doing his thing without any interference from people.
A real Sufi has such presence that he does not ask for attention. The unreal Sufi can be immediately judged if he asks for attention.
Osho
The Perfect Master Vol 2
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