WHETHER SOMEBODY HATES YOU OR SOMEBODY LOVES YOU SHOULD NOT MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE IN YOU.

If you are, you remain the same. If you are not, then you are immediately changed. If you are not, then anybody can pull you, push you; then anybody can push your buttons and change you. Then you are a slave, then you are not a master. Your mastery begins when whatsoever happens outside does not change you; your inner climate remains the same.

A psychoanalyst was attending a convention. At one of the lectures one ugly woman sitting next to him began to pinch him. Annoyed, he was about to give her an angry retort, when he changed his mind: “Why should I get angry,” he decided. “After all, it is her problem.”
Whether somebody loves you or hates you, it is his or her problem. If you are, if you have understood your being, you remain in tune with yourself. Nobody can disturb your inner harmony. If somebody loves, good; if somebody hates, good. Both remain somewhere outside you. This is what we call mastery. This is what we call crystallization — becoming free of impressions, influences.
You ask me, “What do you do when somebody hates you?”

What can I do? It is that person’s problem; it has nothing to do with me. If I was not here he would have hated somebody else. He would have hated. If there were nobody and he were alone, he would have hated himself. Hatred is his problem. It has nothing to do with me, not in the least. Basically it does not even refer to me; I am just an excuse. Somebody else would have done as well, would have functioned as an excuse for him.

Have you not watched it? that when you are angry, you are simply angry. It is not that your anger is addressed to somebody. That ‘somebody’ is nothing but an excuse. Angry, you come home from the office; you jump on your wife. Angry, you go from your home; you are angry in the office with the peon, with the clerk, with this and that. If you analyze your states of mind, you will come to see that they belong to you. You live in your own world, but you go on projecting it on others.
When you are angry, YOU are angry — not at me. When you are full of hate, you are full of hate — not at me. When you are full of love, you are full of love — not at me. Once you understand it, you remain like a lotus leaf in the world. You remain in the water but the water does not touch; it touches you not.

You remain in the world and yet aloof, not of it. Then nobody can disturb your silence, and nobody can distract you. Your compassion goes on flowing. If you love me, you receive my compassion. If you hate me, you will not receive my compassion — not because I will not give to you. I will be continuously giving to you, as much as I give to those who love me, but you will be closed and you will not receive it.
Once being is attained, one is compassion, unconditional compassion. Not that in some moments he becomes compassionate and some moments he is not compassionate. Compassion then is his natural climate, compassion is his permanent mood, compassion is his integrated being. Then whatsoever you do, his compassion goes on showering on you. But there are moments when you will receive it, when you will be open, and there are moments when you will not receive it because you will be closed.

So in hate you will not receive that, in love you will receive that. And you may even feel the difference — because one who loves me will start growing, one who hates me will start shrinking. Both will become so totally different that you may start thinking that I must be giving more to the one I Love, or one who loves me, and I’m not giving to one who hates me or is angry at me or is closed towards me. But I am not doing that. The clouds are there and they are showering: if your pot is not broken it will be filled. Or even if your pot is not broken, but is upside-down, then you will miss. Hate is a state of upside-downness. Then rains can go on showering but you will remain empty, because your opening is not there.
Once you are put rightside-up, that’s what love is. Love is nothing but an opening, a receptivity, a welcome, an invitation, that “I am ready; come, please.”

– OSHO