Repentance Becomes Forgiveness – Osho

Christianity has a tremendously beautiful concept of forgiveness. Christianity says: If you ask to be forgiven from your deepest core, you will be forgiven. Why? Is there somebody who can forgive you? No, but if you ask in intense passion to be forgiven, the very idea of repentance becomes forgiveness. If you have really asked, realized that you have done something wrong; if it has been a total realization and you accept the responsibility that it was wrong and that you are ready to repent for it and you repent wholeheartedly, the very repentance becomes the forgiveness. Then there is no need to do anything else, because all sins are nothing but unconscious acts. Repentance makes you conscious, alert. Sin is like darkness. You bring a light, a lamp into darkness and darkness disappears. Sin is because you are asleep.

If you repent, you awake yourself. Because there is no other way to repent unless you awake yourself, unless you come to realize and see what you have been doing, how you have been living, how you have been wasting, how you have been hurting. When you come to realize it, a flame starts burning in you, an awareness; and in that awareness, in that light, darkness disappears. It is not that there is a God personified sitting somewhere on a throne in heaven who goes on forgiving you. There is nobody to forgive you. But if you repent, you will be forgiven.

God is not a person; God is the totality. God is existence, the totality of being. It is not that you have to pray to Him so that He can forgive, no. In your praying you are forgiven. The very prayer, the very recognition that you have been wrong and you recognize it and you repent, is enough. All that you have been up to then is wiped, washed. You are cleansed of it. The old is gone, the new is born. This is resurrection.

-Osho

Excerpt from Come Follow To You, V. 4, Discourse #11 (previously titled Come Follow Me, V. 4)

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