And when the distinction has disappeared, there arises something which is eternally there, which remains always there. That is witnessing.

See the dictionary under the letter ‘h’ — only there will you always find happiness. In life things are very mixed up. Day and night are together, so are happiness and unhappiness. Life and death are together, so is everything. Life is rich because of polar opposites. The very idea that one would like to be happy forever is stupid. the very idea will create only unhappiness and nothing else. You will become more and more miserable because more and more you will be missing your so-called eternal happiness.

Your greed is too much.

Then who is the happy person? The happy person is not one who is always happy. The happy person is one who is happy even when there is unhappiness. Try to understand it. The happy person is one who understands life and accepts its polarities. He knows success is possible only because failure is also possible. So when failure comes he accepts it.

I remember one incident of my childhood. A great wrestler had come to my town. Everybody was very interested in wrestling, so the whole town had gathered. I have seen many people and many wrestlers in my life but he was really rare. He had something of Zen in him.

For ten days the wrestling continued, and every day he defeated a famous wrestler. Finally he was declared to be the winner. The day he was declared to be the winner he went around and touched the feet of all the ten persons whom he had defeated.

Everybody was puzzled about why he did it. I was a small child, I went to him and I asked him, ‘Why did you do that? This is strange.’

He said, ‘It is only because of them that I am victorious. If they had not allowed themselves to be defeated, I would not be victorious. So I owe it to them. My victory depends on their defeat, so really I feel greatly thankful to them. There was only one possibility: either I was to be defeated or they were to be defeated. And they are good people, they accepted defeat.’

This is a very Sufi or Zen idea. Things are interdependent: failure/success, happiness/unhappiness, summer/winter, youth/old age, beauty/ugliness — all are interdependent, they exist together. And the man who starts seeking one pole against the other pole is getting into unnecessary trouble. It is not possible, he is desiring the impossible; and he will get very frustrated.

Then what should the attitude be? When happiness comes, enjoy happiness; when unhappiness comes, enjoy unhappiness. When there is happiness, dance with it; when there is unhappiness, cry with it. That’s what I mean when I say ‘Enjoy’. Unhappiness is a must. If you can accept unhappiness as smoothly as you welcome happiness, you will transcend both. In that very acceptance is transcendence. Then unhappiness and happiness will not make much difference to you, you will remain the same. When there is sadness you will have a taste of it; and when there is joy you will have a taste of it. And sometimes bitter things also taste beautiful.

And sadness has something of depth in it which no happiness can ever have. Happiness has something shallow. Laughter always looks shallow, tears always look deep. If you want to be happy always you will become a shallow person, a superficial person. Sometimes it is good to fall into the depths, dark depths, dismal depths of sadness. Both are good. And one should be total in both. Whatsoever happens, go totally into it. When crying, become the crying, and when dancing, become the dance. Then the ultimate happens to you. By and by you forget the distinction between what happiness is and what unhappiness is. You enjoy both! So by and by the distinction disappears. And when the distinction has disappeared, there arises something which is eternally there, which remains always there. That is witnessing.

Excerpted from Sufis The People of the Path, Vol 1 # 10/courtesy Osho International Foundation/www.osho.com

The Book of Secrets http://oshomedia.blog.osho.com/?p=2687 

%%http://oshotimes.blog.osho.com/%%

This peace is not dead, it is not flat.

The most difficult thing in your life — which should really be the easiest — is to sit by the side of the flow of your mind. Your mind is just like a river. Thoughts and thoughts and a crowd of thoughts go on passing. You simply sit by the bank, unconcerned, just a witness, and you are in for a great surprise.

Slowly slowly, as you become more and more centered and simply a witness, thoughts start disappearing. They can exist only with your identification.You give energy to your mind. When you pull yourself out, you have stopped giving nourishment to the mind. And once there is no nourishment — thoughts are very fragile things — they start dying out.

Soon there is silence, there is peace. And this peace is not the peace of a cemetery. This peace is not dead, it is not flat. It is such a tremendous experience that once you have reached the first rung of the ladder, the ladder goes to infinity. You can go on and on discovering new layers of peace. This is the real excitement, unending excitement. That’s the meaning of the word “ecstasy”: unending excitement. You cannot exhaust it, you cannot come to a point where you say, “There is no more to discover and I am feeling flat.” It has never happened. On my own authority I say to you, I have been going as fast as possible, deeper and deeper into silence, but there is no bottom, there is no limit.

Each moment of silence brings new fragrance. Peace brings new flowers. Nothing is said, but much is heard. Nothing is shown, but much is seen. Nobody guides you, but some magnetic force of peace itself takes you farther and farther away from the mind, from the body, from the neighbors, from the wife, from the husband. And the excitement is continuously deepening.

Unless we can create millions of people around the earth who have experienced this kind of peace, war is inevitable, because people cannot survive flat lives. It is better to go into a war and have a little excitement, although it means death.

If a man who has not known inner peace is forced to live peacefully, he will either murder or kill himself. Even that will provide some excitement. Excitement is a great nourishment, but only the right kind of excitement is nourishment. The wrong kind of excitement is poison. And up to now humanity has been dominated by the wrong kind of excitement.

You are here with me to learn a very simple thing: to enjoy peace, to enjoy silence, to enjoy something that is within you and you do not have to depend on others for.

From Death to Deathlessness/courtesy Osho International Foundation/www.osho.com
Watchfulness, Awareness, Alertness http://oshomedia.blog.osho.com/?p=2525

%%http://oshotimes.blog.osho.com/%%

A king became very angry with his prime minister for certain reasons, and. he sentenced him to death. It was the custom of that country that whenever a person was going to be crucified, the king himself used to come and see him. He was going to be crucified in the evening, so the king came in the morning. He came on his beautiful horse.

The prisoner could see the horse outside the window. The king came in, and the prisoner started crying.

The king said, ‘ Are you afraid of death?’

And the prime minister said, ‘No, I am not crying because of my death, I am crying because of the horse!’

‘When I was young I lived with an alchemist. I learned from him the art of teaching a horse to fly. But only a certain kind of horse can be taught. I have been looking for that special kind of horse my whole life  and today you have brought the horse!  I am crying because my long apprenticeship with the alchemist, has gone in vain! Now I will be dying in great turmoil.’

The king became very enchanted with the idea that the horse could fly. If it were possible then he would be the only king in the whole world whose horse could fly! He said, ‘How long will it take to teach the horse?’

The man said, ‘Only one year.’

The king said, ‘Okay, I trust you. I give you one year! If you can teach the horse to fly, not only will you be released from this sentence of death but you will get half my kingdom also. And if the horse cannot fly, of course, after one year you will be killed, so there is nothing for me to lose. ‘

The prime minister took the horse and went home. His family asked , ‘What has happened?  Have you escaped from the prison? ‘

The prime minister laughed and said, ‘Let me tell you the whole story!’ He told the whole story.

The wife started crying even more loudly. She said, ‘I know that this is absolutely false. You don’t know any art, you have never been an apprentice to any alchemist. Now this will be even harder for us. This whole year I will have to suffer now!’

The prime minister said, ‘ In one year anything can happen. The king can die, I can die, the horse can die! Everything is possible. One year is long enough — much is possible. And I am free. Don’t be worried!’

And the end of the story is unbelievable: all three died!

Excerpted from Zen: Zest, Zip, Zap and Zing/ courtesy Osho International Foundation/www.osho.com

Watchfulness, Awareness, Alertness http://oshomedia.blog.osho.com/?p=2525

%%http://oshotimes.blog.osho.com/%%

if you cannot be happy now/here, you cannot be happy anywhere.

Everybody is waiting for and dreaming about the vacations, whether they are simple weekends or long winter vacations, but they are an integral part of work.

The question  is: does the dream come true? Do people enjoy actual time spent on their favorite picnic spot?

I always wondered when I saw tourists with the usual paraphernalia going with great excitement from one point to another. The same crowd, the same gossips, the same gobbling between rushing. What is the difference from their daily routine

Now there is a research available to support my doubt.

Researchers from the Netherlands set out to measure the effect that vacations have on overall happiness and how long it lasts. They studied happiness levels among 1,530 Dutch adults, 974 of whom took a vacation during the 32-week study period.

The study, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, showed that the largest boost in happiness comes from the simple act of planning a vacation. In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks.

Not only that, there was no post-vacation happiness either. The exhaustion and subtle disappointment shadowed their much-hyped up trips.

Osho makes fun of this attitude of looking for fun elsewhere, not where you are right now. The bottom line is, if you cannot be happy now/here, you cannot be happy anywhere.

Here is an Osho excerpt:

“There are people who are working their whole lives just waiting for their retirement; then they will relax and enjoy. And they know perfectly well: six days they work in the office and wait for the seventh day, the holiday, and hope, “Soon Sunday will come and we will relax and enjoy.” And they cannot relax and they cannot enjoy. In fact, the holiday seems to be so long and so boring; they have to fill it with something.

They go for a picnic. The same things that they would have eaten at home, in a relaxed way, now they rush towards a picnic spot miles away to eat. And they are sitting in the grass, and ants are very clever; they know perfectly well where the picnic spots are.

And cars are going there bumper to bumper. And many more accidents happen on Sunday than on any other day, many more deaths on the road than on any other day. Strange! Some holiday!

And the whole city is going towards the same picnic spot, the same beach! I have seen pictures of beaches and I cannot believe what is happening. There is not even space to walk! They are packed. Six hours it takes them to reach the beach, then for one hour they lie down amidst this whole mass of fools under the sun, and then back home… And the whole way they were quarrelling with the wife and the wife is quarrelling with… This you can do at home more at ease, relaxed in an armchair — nag each other, do whatsoever you want! What is the point of going to the beach? Nobody is seeing the sea, nobody is seeing the sun. Nobody has time.”

Excerpted from Guida Spirituale/ www.osho.com/library

Pharmacy for the Soul http://oshomedia.blog.osho.com/?p=2671

%%http://oshotimes.blog.osho.com/%%

The more open you become, the more innocent, the more childlike you become

The more open you become, the more innocent, the more childlike you become, the more the winds of existence start flowing in and out of you.

The more you are knowing and have the gesture of knowledge, the more you are closed. Then you don’t allow the winds of existence to enter you, then you are always distrustful, you don’t trust life. A fool is one who goes on trusting; a fool is one who goes on trusting against all his experience. You deceive him, and he trusts you; and you deceive him again, and he trusts you; and you deceive him again, and he trusts you. Then you will say that he is a fool, he does not learn. His trust is tremendous; his trust is so pure that nobody can corrupt it.

Be a fool in the Taoist sense, in the Zen sense. Don’t try to create a wall of knowledge around you. Whatsoever experience comes to you let it happen, and then go on dropping it. Go on cleaning your mind continuously; go on dying to the past so you remain in the present, here-now, as if just born, just a babe. In the beginning it is going to be very difficult. The world will start taking advantage of you…let them. They are poor fellows. Even if you are cheated and deceived and robbed, let it happen because that which is really yours cannot be robbed from you, that which is really yours nobody can steal from you. And each time you don’t allow situations to corrupt you, that opportunity will become an integration inside. Your soul will become more crystallized.

Dang Dang Doko Dang- Osho

Read more on OSHO Library - http://osho.com/library/

Excerpted from Osho books/ Courtsey Osho International Foundation/www.osho.com

%%http://oshotimes.blog.osho.com/%%

In darkness, the body reveals itself

In darkness, everything else disappears because you cannot see.

Only you and the sound are there. That’s why, in all good restaurants, light is avoided; sharp light is avoided. They are candle-lit. Whenever a restaurant is candle-lit, taste is deeper: you eat well and you taste more. The fragrance surrounds you. If there is very bright light the taste is no longer there. The eyes make everything public.

All that is beautiful is inner, and the inner means privacy.

Do one thing one day: run the bath and then switch on and off the light. When there is darkness you will hear the water falling more clearly, the sound will be sharp. When the light is on, the sound will be not so sharp. What happens in darkness?

In the very first sentence of his Metaphysics, Aristotle says that sight is the highest sense of man. It is not. In fact, sight has become too domineering. It has monopolized the whole self and it has destroyed all the other senses. His master — Aristotle’s master, Plato — says that there is a hierarchy in the senses: sight at the top, touch at the bottom. He is absolutely wrong. There is no hierarchy.

All senses are on the same level and there should not be any hierarchy. But you live through the eyes: eighty percent of your life is eye-oriented. This should not be so; a balance has to be restored. You should touch also, because touch has something which eyes cannot give. But try: try to touch the woman you love or the man you love in bright light and then touch in darkness. In darkness, the body reveals itself; in bright light, it hides.

Have you seen Renoir’s paintings of feminine bodies? They have something miraculous in them. Many painters have painted the feminine body, but there is no comparison with Renoir. What is the difference? All other painters have painted the feminine body as it looks to the eyes. Renoir has painted it as it feels to the hands, so the painting has a warmth and a closeness, an aliveness.

When you touch, something happens very close. When you see, something is far away. In darkness, in secrecy, in privacy, something is revealed which cannot be revealed in openness, in the marketplace. Others are seeing and observing; something deep within you shrinks, it cannot flower. It is just as if you put seeds down on the open ground, for everybody to look at. They will never sprout. They need to be thrown deep in the womb of the earth, in deep darkness where nobody can see them. There they start sprouting and a great tree is born.Excerpted from Come Follow To You, Vol 1 Click To read More -> 

courtesy Osho International Foundation/www.osho.com

Meditation: First & Last Freedom- by Osho

%%http://oshotimes.blog.osho.com/%%

Psychology Of Anger

Anger is that you wanted something, and somebody prevented you from getting it.
Somebody came as a block, as an obstacle. Your whole energy was going to get something and somebody blocked the energy. You could not get what you wanted.

Now this frustrated energy becomes anger…anger against the person who has destroyed the possibility of fulfilling your desire.

You cannot prevent anger because anger is a by-product, but you can do something else so that the by-product does not happen at all.

In life, remember one thing: never desire anything so intensely as if it is a question of life and death. Be a little playful.

I am not saying, don’t desire — because that will become a repression in you. I am saying, desire but let your desire be playful. If you can get it, good. If you cannot get it, perhaps it was not the right time; we will see next time. Learn something of the art of the player.

We become so identified with the desire, then when it is blocked or prevented our own energy becomes fire; it burns you. And in that state of almost insanity you can do anything, for which you are going to repent. It can create a series of events that your whole life may get entangled with. Because of this, for thousands of years, they have been saying, “Become desireless.” Now that is asking something inhuman. Even the people who have said, “Become desireless” have also given you a motive, a desire: if you become desireless you will attain to the ultimate freedom of moksha, nirvana. That too is a desire.

You can repress desire for some bigger desire, and you may even forget that you are still the same person. You have only changed the target. Certainly, there are not many people who are trying to get moksha, so you will not have any great competition. In fact, people will be very happy that you have started going towards moksha — one competitor less in life. But as far as you are concerned nothing has changed. And if anything can be created which disturbs your desire for moksha, again the anger will flare up. And this time it will be far bigger, because now the desire is far bigger. Anger is always proportionate to desire.

I have heard….

There were three monasteries, Christian monasteries, very close together in the forest. One day three monks met at the crossroads. They were coming from the villages back to their monasteries; each belonged to a different monastery. They were tired. They sat down under the trees and started talking about something to pass the time.

One man said, “One thing you will have to accept is that as far as scholarship is concerned, learning is concerned, our monastery is the best.”

The other monk said, “I agree, it is true. Your people are far more scholarly, but as far as austerities are concerned, discipline is concerned, spiritual training is concerned, you don’t come anywhere near to our monastery. And remember, scholarship will not be able to help you realize the truth. It is only spiritual discipline, and we are the best as far as spiritual discipline is concerned.”

The third monk said, “You are both right. The first monastery is best in learning, scholarship. The second monastery is best in spiritual discipline, austerities, fasting. But as far as humbleness, egolessness is concerned, we are the tops.” Humbleness, egolessness…but the man seemed to be absolutely unaware of what he was saying: “As far as humbleness, egolessness is concerned, we are the tops.”

Even humbleness can become an ego trip. Egolessness can become an ego trip. One has to be very aware. You should not try to stop anger. You should not, in any way, keep the anger controlled, otherwise it will burn you, it will destroy you. What I am saying is: you have to go to the roots. The root is always some desire which has been blocked, and the frustration has created the anger. Don’t take desires very seriously. Don’t take anything seriously.

It is unfortunate that no religion in the world has accepted the sense of humor as one of the basic qualities for the religious man. I want you to understand that a sense of humor, playfulness, should be the fundamental qualities. You should not take things so seriously, then anger does not arise. You can simply laugh at the whole thing. You can start laughing at yourself. You can start laughing at situations in which you would have been angry and mad.

Use playfulness, a sense of humor, laughter. It is a big world, and there are millions of people. Everybody is trying to get to something. It is very natural that sometimes people may get into each other’s ways — not that they want to, it is just the situation, it is accidental.

I have heard about one Sufi mystic, Junnaid, who every day in the evening prayer used to thank existence for its compassion, for its love, for its care.

Once it happened that for three days they were traveling and they came across villages where people were very antagonistic against Junnaid, because they thought his teachings were not exactly the teachings of Mohammed. His teaching seemed to be his own, and, “He is corrupting people.”

So from three villages they had not got any food, not even water. On the third day they were really in bad shape. His disciples were thinking, “Now let us see what happens in the prayer. How can he now say to existence, ‘You are compassionate to us; your love is there. You care about us, and we are grateful to you.’ ?”

But when the prayer time came, Junnaid prayed the same way. After the prayer the followers said, “This is too much. For three days we have suffered hunger, thirst. We are tired, we have not slept, and still you are saying to existence, ‘You are compassionate, your love towards us is great, and you take so much care that we are grateful to you.’ ”

Junnaid said, “My prayer does not depend on any condition; those things are ordinary. Whether I get food or not I don’t want to bother existence about it — such a small thing in such a big universe. If I don’t get water…even if I die, it does not matter, my prayer will remain the same. Because this vast universe…it makes no difference whether Junnaid is alive or dead.”

This is what I mean when I say, don’t take anything seriously…not even yourself. And then you will see anger simply has not happened. There is no possibility of anger. And anger is certainly one of the great leakages of your spiritual energy. If you can manage to be playful about your desires, and still be the same whether you succeed or you fail.

Just start thinking about yourself at ease…nothing special; not that you are meant to be victorious, not that you have to succeed always in every situation. This is a big world and we are small people.

Once this settles in your being then everything is acceptable. Anger disappears, and the disappearance will bring you a new surprise, because when anger disappears it leaves behind it tremendous energy of compassion, of love, of friendship.

OSHO – The Sword and the Lotus, Talk #9
To read more go to OSHO Library
Copyright © 2010 Osho International Foundation

%%http://oshotimes.blog.osho.com/%%

 Love is painful because it creates the way for bliss.

Love is painful because it transforms. Love is mutation. Each transformation is going to be painful because the old has to be left for the new. The old is familiar, secure, safe, the new is absolutely unknown. You will be moving in an uncharted ocean. You cannot use your mind with the new’ with the old, the mind is skillful. The mind can function only with the old’ with the new, the mind is utterly useless.

Hence, fear arises, and leaving the old, comfortable, safe world, the world of convenience, pain arises. It is the same pain that the child feels when he comes out of the womb of the mother. It is the same pain that the bird feels when he comes out of the egg. It is the same pain that the bird will feel when he will try for the first time to be on the wing.

The fear of the unknown, and the security of the known, the insecurity of the unknown, the unpredictability of the unknown, makes one very much frightened.

And because the transformation is going to be from the self towards a state of no-self, agony is very deep. But you Cannot have ecstasy without going through agony. If the gold wants to be purified, it has to pass through fire.

Love is fire.

It is because of the pain of love, millions of people live a loveless life. They too suffer, and their suffering is futile. To suffer in love is not to suffer in vain. To suffer in love is creative’ it takes you to higher levels of consciousness. To suffer without love is utterly a waste’ it leads you nowhere, it keeps you moving in the same vicious circle.

The man who is without love is narcissistic, he is closed. He knows only himself. And how much can he know himself if he has not known the other, because only the other can function as a mirror? You will never know yourself without knowing the other. Love is very fundamental for self-knowledge too. The person who has not known the other in deep love, in intense passion, in utter ecstasy, will not be able to know who he is, because he will not have the mirror to see his own reflection.

Relationship is a mirror, and the purer the love is, the higher the love is, the better the mirror, the cleaner the mirror. But the higher love needs that you should be open. The higher love needs you to be vulnerable. You have to drop your armor’ that is painful. You have not to be constantly on guard. You have to drop the calculating mind. You have to risk. You have to live dangerously. The other can hurt you’ that is the fear in being vulnerable. The other can reject you’ that is the fear in being in love.

The reflection that you will find in the other of your own self may be ugly’ that is the anxiety. Avoid the mirror. But by avoiding the mirror you are not going to become beautiful. By avoiding the situation you are not going to grow either. The challenge has to be taken.

One has to go into love. That is the first step towards God, and it cannot be bypassed. Those who try to bypass the step of love will never reach God. That is absolutely necessary because you become aware of your totality only when you are provoked by the presence of the other, when your presence is enhanced by the presence of the other, when you are brought out of your narcissistic, closed world under the open sky.

Love is an open sky. To be in love is to be on the wing. But certainly, the unbounded sky creates fear.

And to drop the ego is very painful because we have been taught to cultivate the ego. We think the ego is our only treasure. We have been protecting it, we have been decorating it, we have been continuously polishing it, and when love knocks on the door, all that is needed to fall in love is to put aside the ego’ certainly it is painful. It is your whole life’s work, it is all that you have created — this ugly ego, this idea that “I am separate from existence. ”

This idea is ugly because it is untrue. This idea is illusory, but our society exists, is based on this idea that each person is a person, not a presence.

The truth is that there is no person at all in the world’ there is only presence. You are not — not as an ego, separate from the whole. You are part of the whole. The whole penetrates you, the whole breathes in you, pulsates in you, the whole is your life.

Love gives you the first experience of being in tune with something that is not your ego. Love gives you the first lesson that you can fall into harmony with someone who has never been part of your ego. If you can be in harmony with a woman, if you can be in harmony with a friend, with a man, if you can be in harmony with your child or with your mother, why can’t you be in harmony with all human beings? And if to be in harmony with a single person gives such joy, what will be the outcome if you are in harmony with all human beings? And if you can be in harmony with all human beings, why can’t you be in harmony with animals and birds and trees? Then one step leads to another.

Love is a ladder. It starts with one person, it ends with the totality. Love is the beginning, God is the end. To be afraid of love, to be afraid of the growing pains of love, is to remain enclosed in a dark cell.

Modern man is living in a dark cell’ it is narcissistic. Narcissism is the greatest obsession of the modern mind.

And then there are problems, problems which are meaningless. There are problems which are creative because they lead you to higher awareness. There are problems which lead you nowhere’ they simply keep you tethered, they simply keep you in your old mess.

Love creates problems. You can avoid those problems by avoiding love. But those are very essential problems! They have to be faced, encountered’ they have to be lived and gone through and gone beyond. And to go beyond, the way is through. Love is the only real thing worth doing. All else is secondary. If it helps love, it is good. All else is just a means, love is the end. So whatsoever the pain, go into love.

If you don’t go into love, as many people have decided, then you are stuck with yourself. Then your life is not a pilgrimage, then your life is not a river going to the ocean’ your life is a stagnant pool, dirty, and soon there will be nothing but dirt and mud. To keep clean, one needs to keep flowing. A river remains clean because it goes on flowing. Flow is the process of remaining continuously virgin.

A lover remains a virgin. All lovers are virgin. The people who don’t love cannot remain virgin’ they become dormant, stagnant’ they start stinking sooner or later — and sooner than later — because they have nowhere to go. Their life is dead.

That’s where modern man finds himself, and because of this, all kinds of neuroses, all kinds of madnesses, have become rampant. Psychological illness has taken epidemic proportions. It is no more that a few individuals are psychologically ill’ the reality is the whole earth has become a madhouse. The whole of humanity is suffering from a kind of neurosis.

And that neurosis is coming from your narcissistic stagnancy. Everyone is stuck with one’s own illusion of having a separate self’ then people go mad. And this madness is meaningless, unproductive, uncreative. Or people start committing suicide. Those suicides are also unproductive, uncreative.

You may not commit suicide by taking poison or jumping from a cliff or by shooting yourself, but you can commit a suicide which is a very slow process, and that’s what happens. Very few people commit suicide suddenly. Others have decided for a slow suicide’ gradually, slowly, slowly they die. But almost, the tendency to be suicidal has become universal.

This is no way to live, and the reason, the fundamental reason, is we have forgotten the language of love. We are no more courageous enough to go into that adventure called love.

Hence people are interested in sex, because sex is not risky. It is momentary, you don’t get involved. Love is involvement’ it is commitment. It is not momentary. Once it takes roots, it can be forever. It can be a lifelong involvement. Love needs intimacy, and only when you are intimate does the other become a mirror. When you meet sexually with a woman or a man, you have not met at all’ in fact, you avoided the soul of the other person. You just used the body and escaped, and the other used your body and escaped. You never became intimate enough to reveal each other’s original faces.

It is painful, but don’t avoid it. If you avoid it you have avoided the greatest opportunity to grow. Go into it, suffer love, because through the suffering comes great ecstasy. Yes, there is agony, but out of the agony, ecstasy is born. Yes, you will have to die as an ego, but if you can die as an ego, you will be born as God, as a Buddha. And love will give you the first tongue-tip-taste of Tao, of Sufism, of Zen. Love will give you the first proof that God is, that life is not meaningless.

The people who say life is meaningless are the people who have not known love. All that they are saying is that their life has missed love.

Let there be pain, let there be suffering. Go through the dark night, and you will reach to a beautiful sunrise. It is only in the womb of the dark night that the sun evolves. It is only through the dark night that the morning comes.

My whole approach here is that of love. I teach only love and only love and nothing else. You can forget about God’ that is just an empty word. You can forget about prayers because they are only rituals imposed by others on you. Love is the natural prayer, not imposed by anybody. You are born with it. Love is the true God — not the God of theologians, but the God of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, the God of the Sufis. Love is a tariqa, a method, to kill you as a separate individual and to help you become the infinite. Disappear as a dewdrop and become the ocean, but you will have to pass through the door of love.

And certainly when one starts disappearing like a dewdrop, and one has lived long as a dewdrop, it hurts, because one has been thinking, “I am this, and now this is going. I am dying. ” You are not dying, but only an illusion is dying. You have become identified with the illusion, true, but the illusion is still an illusion. And only when the illusion is gone will you be able to see who you are. And that revelation brings you to the ultimate peak of joy, bliss, celebration.

OSHO – The Secret, #2

Copyright © 2010 Osho International Foundation

%%http://oshotimes.blog.osho.com/%%

The darkness of loneliness cannot be fought directly.

It is something essential for everyone to understand, that there are a few fundamental things which cannot be changed. This is one of the fundamentals: you cannot fight with darkness directly, with loneliness directly, with the fear of isolation directly. The reason is that all these things do not exist; they are simply absences of something, just as darkness is the absence of light.

Now what do you do when you want the room not to be dark? You don’t do anything directly with darkness — or do you? You cannot push it out. There is no possible way to make any arrangement so that the darkness disappears. You have to do something with the light. Now that changes the whole situation; and that’s what I call one of the essentials, fundamentals. You don’t even touch the darkness; you don’t think about it. There is no point; it does not exist, it is simply an absence.

So just bring in light and you will not find darkness at all, because it was the absence of light, simply the absence of light — not something material, with its own being, not something that exists. But simply because light was not there, you got a false feeling of the existence of darkness.

You can go on fighting with this darkness your whole life and you will not succeed, but just a small candle is enough to dispel it. You have to work for the light because it is positive, existential; it exists on it own. And once light comes, anything that was its absence automatically disappears.

Loneliness is similar to darkness.

You don’t know your aloneness. You have not experienced your aloneness and its beauty, its tremendous power, its strength. Loneliness and aloneness in the dictionaries are synonymous, but existence does not follow your dictionaries. And nobody has yet tried to make an existential dictionary which will not be contradictory to existence.

Loneliness is absence.

Because you don’t know your aloneness, there is fear. You feel lonely so you want to cling to something, to somebody, to some relationship, just to keep the illusion that you are not lonely. But you know you are — hence the pain. On the one hand you are clinging to something which is not for real, which is just a temporary arrangement — a relationship, a friendship.

And while you are in the relationship you can create a little illusion to forget your loneliness. But this is the problem: although you can forget for a moment your loneliness, just the next moment you suddenly become aware that the relationship or the friendship is nothing permanent. Yesterday you did not know this man or this woman, you were strangers. Today you are friends — who knows about tomorrow? Tomorrow you may be strangers again — hence the pain.

The illusion gives a certain solace, but it cannot create the reality so that all fear disappears. It represses the fear, so on the surface you feel good — at least you try to feel good. You pretend to feel good to yourself: how wonderful is the relationship, how wonderful is the man or the woman. But behind the illusion — and the illusion is so thin that you can see behind it — there is pain in the heart, because the heart knows perfectly well that tomorrow things may not be the same…and they are not the same.

Your whole life’s experience supports that things go on changing. Nothing remains stable; you cannot cling to anything in a changing world. You wanted to make your friendship something permanent but your wanting is against the law of change, and that law is not going to make exceptions. It simply goes on doing its own thing. It will change — everything.

Perhaps in the long run you will understand one day that it was good that it did not listen to you, that existence did not bother about you and just went on doing whatever it wanted to do…not according to your desire.

It may take a little time for you to understand. You want this friend to be your friend forever, but tomorrow he turns into an enemy. Or simply — ”You get lost!” and he is no longer with you. Somebody else fills the gap who is a far superior being. Then suddenly you realize it was good that the other one got lost; otherwise you would have been stuck with him. But still the lesson never goes so deep that you stop asking for permanence.

You will start asking for permanence with this man, with this woman: now this should not change. You have not really learned the lesson that change is simply the very fabric of life. You have to understand it and go with it. Don’t create illusions; they are not going to help. And everybody is creating illusions of different kinds.

I used to know one man who said, “I trust only money. I trust nobody else.”

I said, “You are making a very significant statement.”

He said, “Everybody changes. You cannot rely on anybody. And as you get older, only your money is yours. Nobody cares — not even your son, not even your wife. If you have money they all care, they all respect you, because you have money. If you don’t have money you become a beggar.”

His saying that the only thing in the world to trust is money comes out of a long experience of life, of getting cheated again and again by the people he trusted — and he thought they loved him but they were all around him for the money.

“But,” I told him, “at the moment of death money is not going to be with you. You can have an illusion that at least money is with you, but as your breathing stops, money is no longer with you. You have earned something but it will be left on this side; you cannot carry it beyond death. You will fall into a deep loneliness which you have been hiding behind the facade of money.”

There are people who are after power, but the reason is the same: when they are in power so many people are with them, millions of people are under their domination. They are not alone. They are great political and religious leaders. But power changes. One day you have it, another day it is gone, and suddenly the whole illusion disappears. You are lonely as nobody else is, because others are accustomed to being lonely. You are not accustomed…your loneliness hurts you more.

Society has tried to make arrangements so you can forget loneliness. Arranged marriages are just an effort so that you know your wife is with you. All religions resist divorce for the simple reason that if divorce is allowed then the basic purpose marriage was invented for is destroyed. The basic purpose was to give you a companion, a lifelong companion.

But even though a wife will be with you or a husband will be with you for your whole life, that does not mean that love remains the same. In fact, rather than giving you a companion, they give you a burden to carry. You were lonely, already in trouble, and now you have to carry another person who is lonely. And in this life there is no hope, because once love disappears you both are lonely, and both have to tolerate each other. Now it is not a question of being enchanted by each other; at the most you can patiently tolerate each other. Your loneliness has not been changed by the social strategy of marriage.

Religions have tried to make you a member of an organized body of religion so you are always in a crowd. You know that there are six hundred million Catholics; you are not alone, six hundred million Catholics are with you. Jesus Christ is your savior. God is with you. Alone you may have been wrong — doubt may have arisen — but six hundred million people cannot be wrong. A little support…but even that is gone because there are millions who are not Catholics. There are the people who crucified Jesus. There are people who don’t believe in God — and their number is not less than Catholics, it is more than Catholics. And there are other religions with different concepts.

It is difficult for an intelligent person not to doubt. You may have millions of people following a certain belief system, but still you cannot be certain that they are with you, that you are not lonely.

God was a device, but all devices have failed. It was a device…when nothing is there, at least God is with you. He is always everywhere with you. In the dark night of the soul, he is with you — don’t be worried.

It was good for a childish humanity to be deceived by this concept, but you cannot be deceived by this concept. This God who is always everywhere — you don’t see him, you can’t talk to him, you can’t touch him. You don’t have any evidence for his existence — except your desire that he should be there. But your desire is not a proof of anything.

God is only a desire of the childish mind.

Man has come of age, and God has become meaningless. The hypothesis has lost its grip.

What I am trying to say is that every effort that has been directed towards avoiding loneliness has failed, and will fail, because it is against the fundamentals of life. What is needed is not something in which you can forget your loneliness. What is needed is that you become aware of your aloneness, which is a reality. And it is so beautiful to experience it, to feel it, because it is your freedom from the crowd, from the other. It is your freedom from the fear of being lonely.

Just the word “lonely” immediately reminds you that it is like a wound: something is needed to fill it. There is a gap and it hurts: something needs to be filled in. The very word “aloneness” does not have the same sense of a wound, of a gap which has to be filled. Aloneness simply means completeness. You are whole; there is no need of anybody else to complete you.

So try to find your innermost center, where you are always alone, have always been alone. In life, in death — wherever you are you will be alone. But it is so full — it is not empty, it is so full and so complete and so overflowing with all the juices of life, with all the beauties and benedictions of existence, that once you have tasted aloneness the pain in the heart will disappear. Instead, a new rhythm of tremendous sweetness, peace, joy, bliss, will be there.

It does not mean that a man who is centered in his aloneness, complete in himself, cannot make friends — in fact only he can make friends, because now it is no longer a need, it is just sharing. He has so much; he can share.

Friendship can be of two types. One is a friendship in which you are a beggar — you need something from the other to help your loneliness — and the other is also a beggar; he wants the same from you. And naturally two beggars cannot help each other. Soon they will see that their begging from a beggar has doubled or multiplied the need. Instead of one beggar, now there are two. And if, unfortunately, they have children, then there are a whole company of beggars who are asking — and nobody has anything to give.

So everybody is frustrated and angry, and everybody feels he is being cheated, deceived. And in fact nobody is cheating and nobody is deceiving, because what have you got?

The other kind of friendship, the other kind of love, has a totally different quality. It is not of need, it is out of having so much that you want to share. A new kind of joy has come into your being — that of sharing, which you were not ever aware of before. You have always been begging.

When you share, there is no question of clinging. You flow with existence, you flow with life’s change, because it doesn’t matter with whom you share. It can be the same person tomorrow — the same person for your whole life — or it can be different persons. It is not a contract, it is not a marriage; it is simply out of your fullness that you want to give. So whosoever happens to be near you, you give it. And giving is such a joy.

Begging is such a misery. Even if you get something through begging, you will remain miserable. It hurts. It hurts your pride, it hurts your integrity. But sharing makes you more centered, more integrated, more proud, but not more egoistic — more proud that existence has been compassionate to you. It is not ego; it is a totally different phenomenon…a recognition that existence has allowed you something for which millions of people are trying, but at the wrong door. You happen to be at the right door.

You are proud of your blissfulness and all that existence has given to you. Fear disappears, darkness disappears, the pain disappears, the desire for the other disappears.

You can love a person, and if the person loves somebody else there will not be any jealousy, because you loved out of so much joy. It was not a clinging. You were not holding the other person in prison. You were not worried that the other person may slip out of your hands, that somebody else may start having a love affair….

When you are sharing your joy, you don’t create a prison for anybody. You simply give. You don’t even expect gratitude or thankfulness because you are not giving to get anything, not even gratitude. You are giving because you are so full you have to give.

So if anybody is thankful, you are thankful to the person who has accepted your love, who has accepted your gift. He has unburdened you, he allowed you to shower on him. And the more you share, the more you give, the more you have. So it does not make you a miser, it does not create a new fear that “I may lose it.” In fact the more you lose it, the more fresh waters are flowing in from springs you have not been aware of before.

So I will not tell you to do anything about your loneliness.

Look for your aloneness.

Forget loneliness, forget darkness, forget pain. These are just the absence of aloneness. The experience of aloneness will dispel them instantly. And the method is the same: just watch your mind, be aware. Become more and more conscious, so finally you are only conscious of yourself. That is the point where you become aware of aloneness.

You will be surprised that different religions have given different names to the ultimate state of realization. The three religions born outside of India don’t have any name for it because they never went far in the search for oneself. They remained childish, immature, clinging to a God, clinging to prayer, clinging to a savior. You can see what I mean: they are always dependent — somebody else is to save them. They are not mature. Judaism, Christianity, Islam — they are not mature at all and perhaps that is the reason they have influenced the greatest majority in the world, because most of the people in the world are immature. They have a certain affinity.

But the three religions in India have three names for this ultimate state. And I remembered this because of the word aloneness. Jainism has chosen kaivalya, aloneness, as the ultimate state of being. Just as Buddhism chose nirvana, no-selfness, and Hinduism chose moksha, freedom, Jainism chose absolute aloneness. All three words are beautiful. They are three different aspects of the same reality. You can call it liberation, freedom; you can call it aloneness; you can call it selflessness, nothingness — just different indicators towards that ultimate experience for which no name is sufficient.

But always look to see if anything that you are facing as a problem is a negative thing or a positive thing. If it is a negative thing then don’t fight with it; don’t bother about it at all. Just look for the positive of it, and you will be at the right door.

Most of the people in the world miss because they start fighting directly with the negative door.

There is no door; there is only darkness, there is only absence. And the more they fight, the more they find failure, the more they become dejected, pessimistic…and ultimately they start finding that life has no meaning, that it is simply torture. But their mistake is they entered from the wrong door.

So before you face a problem, just look at the problem: is it an absence of something? And all your problems are the absence of something. And once you have found what they are the absence of, then go after the positive. And the moment you find the positive, the light — the darkness is finished.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1JegCiSmVg]

OSHO – The Path of the Mystic, Talk #19
For reading more on loneliness go to library.

%%http://oshotimes.blog.osho.com/%%

Misery makes you capable of attracting people

Whenever you are miserable you are attended to, sympathized with, loved. Everybody starts taking care of you. Who wants to hurt a miserable person? Who is jealous of a miserable person? Who wants to be antagonistic to a miserable person? That would be too mean. The miserable person is cared for, loved, attended to. There is great investment in misery.

When two miserable people meet it is not an ordinary addition, it is a multiplication. They create much more misery for each other than they could have created in their loneliness.

Your joy in a world full of misery has no relatedness to the miserable humanity. You are completely alone.

You would like to be happy, but then suddenly you start thinking about the world. The beggars on the street, the poverty, the starvation and the wars – all kinds of problems simply start coming from every direction to your mind. And your mind starts saying, “When the world is in such misery how can you be happy? You have to share, you have to go and serve society.” This is a very, very cunning device of the mind.

I have seen people living together for years, their whole life, thinking only of divorce – just thinking, but never being courageous enough to be alone. How are you going to live without misery? When you come home, it will look so empty, with nobody there to nag you.

You suffer misery in the hope of pleasure. If it is pure misery it is impossible to cling to it. Just watch, be more alert about your misery. For example, you are feeling jealous. It creates misery. But look around — there must be something positive in it. It also gives you some ego, some sense of your being separate from others, some sense of superiority. Your jealousy at least pretends to be love. If you don’t feel jealous you will think maybe you don’t love anymore. And you are clinging to jealousy because you would like to cling to your love — at least your idea of love.

If you want your love you will have to accept your jealousy and the misery that is created by it.

Man remains a slave of misery because he has chosen it. It is easier to be miserable because the whole crowd is miserable. It feels more comfortable to be with the crowd than to be alone. To be blissful means to be alone. To be blissful means to seek and search for something inside you and not to imitate the crowd.” Osho

Excerpted from Osho books/ Courtsey Osho International Foundation/www.osho.com

To read more go to OSHO Online Library

%%http://oshotimes.blog.osho.com/%%