What others think of me...

Listen carefully: whenever you try to perform something, you are searching food for the ego. Whenever you are natural and let things happen, they are perfect, and then there is no problem. When you are natural and let things happen, God is at the back with you. When you are afraid, trembling, trying to prove something, you have lost God. In your fear, you have forgotten Him. You are looking more at the people and you have forgotten your source. Self-consciousness becomes a weakness. A person who is unself-conscious is strong, but his strength has nothing to do with himself -- it comes from the beyond.

WHEN YOU ARE SELF-CONSCIOUS, you are in trouble. When you are self-conscious, you are really showing symptoms that you don't know who you are. Your very self-consciousness indicates that you have not come home yet.

Whenever you are self-conscious you are simply showing that you are not conscious of the Self at all. You don't know who you are. If you had known, then there would have been no problem -- then you are not seeking opinions; then you are not worried what others say about you. It is irrelevant! In fact, nobody ever says anything about you -- whenever people say something about you, they are saying it about themselves.

Nobody can say anything about you. Whatsoever people say is about themselves. But you become very shaky, because you are still clinging to a false center. That false center depends on others, so you are always looking to what people are saying about you. And you are always following other people, you are always trying to satisfy them. You are always trying to be respectable. You are always trying to decorate your ego. This is suicidal.
Rather than being disturbed by what others say, you should start looking inside yourself. To know the real Self is not so cheap. But people are always hankering for cheap things.

It happened:

When the pain in Mulla Nasrudin's back became unbearable, he reluctantly went to a specialist to diagnose his problem.
"Well," said the doctor, "your problem can be cured by an operation, two weeks in the hospital and six months totally horizontal."
"Doctor, I can't afford the cost of all that!" shouted Nasrudin.
"Well then, for twenty-five rupees I can retouch the X-ray," suggested the doctor.

This is cheap! -- retouch the X-ray -- but that is not going to make you healthy. That's what we are doing: continuously retouching the X-ray, and thinking that somehow the miracle will happen. When you are decorating your ego you are retouching the X-ray. That is not going to help in any way; it is not going to help you become healthy. But it is cheaper: no operation is needed; at no cost. But what is the point? Your misery remains.
You become respectable and your misery remains. You become highly praised by the society -- your misery remains. You are decorated by medals, gold medals -- Padma Bhushan, Victoria Cross -- but your misery remains. These gold medals are not going to destroy your misery: they are like retouching the X-ray. All decoration on the ego, for the ego, is nothing but deceiving yourself.
And continuously you go on becoming weaker and weaker and weaker -- because the ego goes on becoming weaker every day. Your body will become weaker, your mind will become weaker, and by and by the ego that you have created out of the body and mind combination will become weaker. Fear will become greater and greater; you will be continuously sitting on a volcano that can any day explode. It will not allow you rest. It will not allow you relaxation. It will not allow you any moments of peace.
Once you understand it then the whole energy is put into another direction. One has to know oneself. One has not to be worried about what others say about you.

The ego is very deceptive. It goes on hearing what it wants to hear. It goes on interpreting what it wants to interpret. It never sees the fact. It never allows the fact to reveal itself to you. People who live in the ego live behind curtains. And those curtains are not inactive -- they are active curtains. Whatsoever passes through the curtain, the curtain changes it.
People go on living in a mental world of their own creation. Ego is the center of their world, of the false world -- call it 'illusion', 'maya' -- and around the ego they go on creating a world... which is nobody else's world. Only they live in that world.
When you drop the ego, you drop a whole world that you have created around it. For the first time you are able to see things as they are -- not as you would like them to be. And when you are capable of knowing the facts of life, you become capable of knowing the truth.
The facility of life is the first step towards truth. And ego is the most falsifying agent.

Osho: A Sudden Clash of Thunder