The person who is interested in fame remains a slave — because you have to compromise with people, you have to fulfill their demands, their expectations, their idea of how you should be. If you fulfill their ideas and ideologies, their notions of character, morality, religion, they will respect you, they will give you great honor.
The ego has to depend on others, hence it remains a slave. And you have to make a thousand and one compromises; slowly slowly you go on losing your soul. You become famous but you lose your soul, you lose your freedom.
To be free one needs to be free of the desire for fame and name. To be really free one has to have courage to be a nobody. That’s what I mean by transcending the idea of fame, by dropping it; it is futile. One need not be other-oriented, one should be self-oriented. One should look within wards, one should see oneself, how one is, what one is; one should not ask others.
It is so foolish, stupid, to ask others, “Who am I?” And that’s what the ego is continuously doing: directly, indirectly, it is waiting for others to say something good, something nice about you. And when they want to manipulate you, they say things nice to you. But because they have to say nice things to you, sooner or later they will take revenge and they will say bitter things about you, maybe behind your back.
So when they meet you they will be smiling and they will be very respectful, but because they have to be respectful and bow down to you their ego feels hurt. Behind your back they will take revenge, they will laugh at you, they will think you are stupid, they will think they are be-fooling you and how well they have succeeded in be-fooling you! That’s why this game goes on in the world: people say one thing to the face of the person and exactly the opposite behind their back. You can be absolutely certain about it: if somebody is saying something good to you, you can be certain that he will have to say something bad about you, because nature keeps a balance. Then the whole game looks so nonsensical. And how can they say anything about you? — they don’t know you! You yourself don’t know you!
The religious person is one who does not depend for his identity on others, who is not other-oriented, other-directed; who is self-oriented, self-rooted, who looks within, who creates a silent consciousness in himself so that it can mirror his reality — and that reality is absolutely egoless. It is but it has no idea of I. It is pure awareness, without any I in the center of it, without any wound of the I in its center. – Osho
