Osho on Ugliness and Beauty

Question: I am so terribly Ugly and I have suffered much because of That. What should I do?

Osho : Ugliness has nothing to do with your body. Neither has beauty much to do with the body.  The beauty or the ugliness of the body is very superficial; the real thing comes from within. If you can become beautiful within, you will become luminous. It has happened many times: even an ugly person, when he becomes meditative, starts looking beautiful. This I have watched continuously, hear in and year out. When people come here they have totally different faces. 

When they start meditating, when they start dancing, when they start singing, their faces relax. Their tensions drop. Their misery, which had become part of their face, slowly slowly wars off. They become relaxed like children. Their faces start gleaming with a new inner joy, they become luminous. Physical beauty and ugliness is not very important. The real thing is the inner. I can teach you how to be beautiful from within, and that is real beauty. Once it is there, your physical form won't matter much. 

Your eyes will start shining with joy; your face will have a gleam, a glory. The form will become immaterial. When something starts flowing from within you, some grace, then the outer form is just put aside. Comparatively it loses all significance: don't be worried about it. And whatsoever I have been saying was just a joke. Don't become a politician, because if you become a politician you will become more ugly. It works both ways: ugly people become politicians, and politicians become more ugly.

It will be impossible for you not to become more ugly, because the whole world of politics is one of continuous quarrel, continuous violence, continuous competition. It will make you more tense, it will make you more graceless, it will make you more and more insipid and dull. Because only dullards can succeed in the world of politics. I would suggest to the researchers of the London Polytechnic that this is only half the story: please work to find the other half too. 

This is the half which finds that political success is more possible for ugly and unintelligent-looking people. The other half is that those who become politicians become more and more ugly, more and more unintelligent  looking. They have to, because whatsoever makes you successful, you have to practice it more --naturally, obviously. whatsoever helps you to succeed will become your very style of life. That is the other half of the story, that politicians become ugly. Meditate, love, dance, sing, celebrate here with me, and the ugliness will disappear. 

Bring something higher into yourself, and the lower will be forgotten, because it is all comparative, it is all relative. If you can bring something higher into yourself... It is as if there is a small candle burning in the room: bring a bigger light into the room and the small candle simply loses all significance. Bring the beauty of the within, which is easier. With the other beauty I cannot help much; I am not a plastic surgeon. You can find some plastic surgeon who can help you, but that will not help in any way. 

You may have a little longer nose, better shaped, but that will not help anything much. If you remain the same inside, your outer beauty will simply show your inner ugliness; it will become a contrast. Bring some inner beauty.

Denise felt very self-conscious about her face. "I'm ugly," she said to herself as she looked into the mirror. "My nose is crooked, my chin is weak, my ears stick out, and I have bags under my eyes."

In desperation she went to a plastic surgeon and had a face lift. Her chin was strengthened, her nose remodeled, her ears adjusted, and the bags under her eyes removed.

After months of suffering, the ordeal was finally over. She was now able to entertain friends, but she still sulked about herself.  One day her friend Joan looked at her in amazement. "I don't know why you look so sad. You now have the face of a movie star."

"I know," sobbed Denise. "But now my new face doesn't go along with my old body."

A very ugly girl was sitting at the beach, when the waves washed a bottle at her feet. She opened it -- and out blew a huge genie in a billow of smoke. "I have been a prisoner in this bottle for five thousand years," cried the genie, "and now you have freed me. As a reward, I will fulfill any wish you make." Ecstatic, the ugly girl announced, "I want a figure like Sophia Loren, a face like Elizabeth Taylor, and legs like Ginger Rogers."  The genie looked her over carefully, then sighed, "Baby, just put me back in the bottle." 

Osho