Why Love Hurts

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

Understanding Meditation And Concentration

The ability to concentrate is not something to feel blessed about. It is a frozen state of mind, a very narrow state of mind. Useful, of course, useful — for others. Useful in scientific inquiry, useful in business, useful in the market, useful in politics — but absolutely useless for yourself. If you become too attuned with concentration you will become very, very tense. Concentration is a tense state of mind; you will never be relaxed. Concentration is like a torch, focused, and consciousness is like a lamp, unfocused.

My whole effort here is to teach you consciousness, not concentration. And this is the point to be remembered: if you become conscious, any moment you want to concentrate on a particular problem, you can. It is not a problem. But if you become too focused with concentration the vice versa is not true: you cannot relax. A relaxed mind can always concentrate. easily, there is no trouble about it. But a focused mind becomes obsessed. narrow. It is not easy for it to relax and leave the tension. It remains tense.

Meditation will allow you to concentrate whenever the need arises

If you meditate. first concentration will disappear and you will be feeling a little at a loss. But if you go on, by and by you will attain to an unfocused state of light — that’s what meditation is. Once meditation is attained. concentration is child’s play — whenever you need to, you can concentrate. There will be no problem about it and it will be easy and without any tension.

Right now, you are being used by society. Society wants efficient people. It is not worried about your soul, it is worried about your productivity. I am not worried about your productivity: man has already too much, more than he can enjoy — there is no need to go on producing more. Now there is more need to play around more and there is more need to be more conscious. Science has developed enough. Now, whatsoever science is doing is almost futile. Now, going to the moon is simply useless. But tremendous energy is wasted. Why? Because scientists are now obsessed — they have to do something. They have learned a trick of concentration and they have to do something. They have to produce, they have to go on producing something — they cannot relax. They will go to the moon, they will go to Mars, and they will persuade people that whatsoever they are doing is tremendously important. It is absolutely useless. But this happens.

Once you become trained in a certain thing, you go on in that line, blind, unless a cul de sac comes and you cannot go on anymore. But life is infinite. There comes no cul de sac. You can go on and on and on.
And now scientific activity has almost become ridiculous.

Religious activity is totally different. It is not worried about being more efficient; the whole point is how to be more joyful, how to be more celebrating. So if you be with me, by and by, concentration will relax. And in the beginning you will feel afraid because you will see your skill disappearing, your efficiency disappearing. You will feel you are losing something that you have gained with so much effort. In the beginning it will happen. The ice is melting and becoming water. The ice was solid, something concentrated; now it is water — loose, relaxed, flowing in all directions. But anytime you need ice, the water can be turned into ice again. There is no problem — just a little more cooling is needed.

This is my own experience. Whatsoever I say, I say from my own experience — the same has happened to me. First, concentration disappeared; but now I can concentrate on anything. There is no problem. But I don’t remain in concentration; I can concentrate and relax — whenever the need arises. Just as whenever the need arises, you walk; you don’t sit on the chair and go on moving your Legs. There are a few people who go on moving because they cannot sit relaxed — you will call this man restless!
Legs in perfect order are needed so that whenever you need to, you can walk, you can run. But when there Is no need, you can relax, and the legs will no longer be functioning.

But your concentration has become almost as focused as if you are continuously preparing for an Olympic Runners in an Olympic cannot relax. They have to run a particular amount every morning and evening; they are continuously on the go. If they relax for a few days they will lose their skill. But I call all Olympics political, ambitious, foolish. There is no need.

Competition is foolish. There is no need. If you enjoy running — perfectly good. Run. and enjoy. But why compete? What is the point of competition? Competition brings illness, unhealthiness; competition brings jealousy, and a thousand and one diseases.

Meditation will allow you to concentrate whenever the need arises, but if there is no need you will remain relaxed, flowing in all directions like water.
Feel blissful, blessed. What is the point of uttering logical sentences! Utter nonsense; make sounds, gibberish, like birds… Like trees! (At this moment a nearby tree decided, with the help of a passing breeze, to illustrate Osho’s words by shaking its branches and causing hundreds of leaves to fall with loud rustling sounds to the ground.) Look! This way! Is this logical? The tree is enjoying. Delighting. Simply shedding away the past.

Delight. Sing. Utter sounds. Forget all logic! And by and by you will become more alive. Less logical of course that is the price one has to pay — but you become dead if you become more logical and you become more alive if you become less logical.
Life is the goal, not logic. What are you going to do with logic? If you are hungry, logic is not going to feed you; if you need love, logic is not going to hug you; if you are thirsty, logic will tell you that water is H20! It is not going to give you water, real water. No. It simply functions in formulas, maxims.

Look at life, and by and by you will understand that life has its own very logical logic. Be attuned to it and that will become the door for your ecstasy, samadhi, nirvana.

OSHO – Ancient Music in the Pines, Chapter 8

Copyright © 2010 Osho International Foundation

Osho Explains Psychological & Physical Aspects Of Pain.

Psychological pain can be dissolved; and only psychological pain can be dissolved. The other pain, the physical pain, is part of life and death; there is no way to dissolve it. But it never creates a problem. Have you ever observed? — The problem is only when you are thinking about it. If you think of old age you become afraid, but old people are not trembling. If you think of illness you become afraid, but when the illness has already happened, there is no fear, there is no problem. One accepts it as a fact.

The real problem is always psychological. The physical pain is part of life. When you start thinking about it, it is not physical pain at all; it has become psychological. You think about death; there is fear. But when death actually happens there is no fear. Fear is always about something in the future. Fear never exists in the present moment. If you are going to the front in a war, you will be afraid, you will be very apprehensive. You will tremble, you will not be able to sleep: many nightmares will haunt you. But once you are on the front — ask the soldiers — once you are on the front, you forget all about it. Bullets may be passing and you can enjoy your lunch; and bombs may be falling and you can play cards.

You can ask Gurudayal. He has been in the war, he has been to the front, he has been a soldier; he knows: the fear is about the future. Then the problem is not physical — because the fear exists in your psychology. When the pain is actual, physical, there is no problem about it. Reality never comes as a problem; it is only the ideas about reality that create the problem.

So the first thing to be understood is: if you can dissolve the psychological pain, no problem is left. Then you start living in the moment. “Psychological” means: of the past, of the future, never of the present. Mind never exists in the present. In the present reality exists, not the mind. Mind exists in the past and the future, and in past and future reality does not exist. In fact, mind and reality never come across each other. They have never seen each other’s face. Reality remains unknown to mind, and mind remains unknown to reality.

The psychology is the problem, the reality never is a problem

There is an old fable…. Darkness approached God and said, “Enough is enough! Your sun goes on haunting me, chasing me. I can never rest; wherever I go to rest he is there, and I have to run away again. And I have not done any wrong to him. This is unjust. And I have come to you to get justice.” It was perfectly right; the complaint was true. And God called the sun and asked the sun, “Why do you go on chasing this poor woman, darkness? What has she done to you?” The sun said, “I don’t know her at all. I have never seen her. You just call her in front of me; only then can I say something. I don’t remember ever having done any wrong to her, because I don’t know her. We are not familiar. Nobody has ever introduced us to each other, we are not even acquainted. It is for the first time from you that I am hearing about this woman, this darkness. You call her!”

The case remains pending — because God could not call darkness before the sun. They cannot exist together, they cannot encounter each other. When darkness is, the sun cannot be; when the sun is, the darkness cannot be. Exactly the same is the relationship between mind and reality: the psychology is the problem, the reality never is a problem. You just dissolve your psychological problems — and they are dissolved by dissolving the center of them all: the ego. Once you don’t think yourself separate from existence, problems simply evaporate, as dewdrops disappear in the morning when the sun rises, not even leaving a trace behind. They simply disappear.

Physical pain will remain, but again I will insist that it has never been a problem to anybody. If your leg is broken, it is broken. It is not a problem. The problem is only in imagination: “If my leg is broken, then what am I going to do? And how am I to avoid, or how am I to behave and work my way so my leg is never broken?”

Now, if you become afraid about such things you cannot live, because your legs can be broken, your neck can be broken, your eyes can go blind. Anything is possible; millions of things are possible. If you become obsessed with all these problems which are possible….

I am not saying they are not possible. They are all possible. Whatsoever has happened to any human being, ever, can happen to you. Cancer can happen, TB can happen, death can happen; everything is possible. Man is vulnerable. You can just go outside on the road and you can be hit by a car. I am not saying don’t go outside on the road. You can sit in a room and the roof can fall. There is no way to save yourself totally and perfectly. You can be lying down on your bed, but do you know that ninety-seven percent of people die on a bed? That is the most dangerous place! Avoid it as much as you can; never go to bed. Ninety-seven percent of people die in bed. Even travelling by airplane is not so dangerous; it is more dangerous to be in bed. And remember, more people die in the night… so, remain trembling. Then it is up to you. Then you will not be able to live at all.

Psychological problems are the only problems. You can become paranoid, you can become split, you can become paralyzed because of fear — but this is nothing to do with reality. You see a blind man walking on the road perfectly well; blindness in itself is not the problem. You can see beggars — their legs broken, their hands gone, and still laughing, still gossiping with each other, still talking about women, making remarks, singing a tune.

Just watch life: life is never a problem. Man has tremendous capacity to adjust to the fact, but man has no capacity to adjust to the future. Once you try to protect yourself and secure yourself in the future, then you will be in a turmoil, in a chaos. You will start falling apart. And then there are millions of problems — problems and problems and problems. You cannot even commit suicide, because the poison may not be the right poison. In India you cannot rely on anything! They may have mixed something into it; it may not be poison at all. You may take it and you will lie down… and you will wait and wait and wait — and death is not coming. Then everything creates a problem.

Mulla Nasrudin was going to commit suicide. He came across an astrologer on the street, and the astrologer said, “Mulla, wait. Let me see your hand.” He said, “What do I have to do now with astrology? I am going to commit suicide! So there is no point; now there is no future.” The astrologer said, “Wait. Let me see whether you can succeed or not.” Future remains. You may not succeed, you may be caught by the police, you may misfire. There is no way to be certain about the future — not even about death, not even about suicide. What to say about life? Life is such a complex phenomenon; how can you be certain? Everything is possible and nothing is certain.

If you become afraid, this is just your psychology. Something has to be done to your mind. And if you understand me rightly, meditation is nothing but an effort to look at reality without the mind — because that is the only way to look at reality. If the mind is there it distorts, it corrupts. Drop the mind and see reality — direct, immediate, face to face. And there is no problem. Reality has never created any problem for anybody. I am here, you are also here — I don’t see a single problem. If I fall ill, I fall ill. What is there to be worried about? Why make a fuss about it? If I die, I die.

A problem needs space: in the present moment there is no space. Things only happen, there is no time to think about it. You can think about the past because there is distance; you can think about the future, there is distance. In fact, future and past are created just to give us space so that we can worry. And the more space you have, the more worry. Now in India they are much more worried because they think, “Next life… and… and” — ad infinitum — “what is going to happen in the next life?” A person is doing something and he does not think only about the consequences that are going to happen here now; he thinks, “What karma am I going to gather for my future life?” Now he will become even more worried; he has more space. And how is he going to fill that space? — he will fill it with more and more problems. Worry is a way to fill the empty space of the future.

The questioner says, “I have glimpses of how psychological, existential pain is created by ego. It is homemade, and it can be unmade.”

Just understanding it intellectually won’t help; you have to do it. Do it, and then the next question will disappear. Do it, and then you will find there is not any problem left. “But what about physical pain?” Now this is how problems arise. Intellectually you have understood one thing, but that doesn’t make any sense. The next question immediately brings your reality to the surface: you have not understood. It is as if a blind man goes on groping with his stick; he finds his path by it. And then we say, “Your eyes can be cured, but then you will have to drop your walking stick. It is not needed.” The blind man will say, “I can understand that my eyes can be cured, but how can I walk without my stick?” Now, intellectually he has understood that eyes can be cured, but existentially, experientially, he has not understood it — otherwise the next question wouldn’t arise.

Sometimes people come to me and they ask one question, and I say, “You go on; you ask the next too.” Because one question may not show the reality; they may be just showing their intellectual understanding. But with the next question they are bound to be caught. They are bound to be, because with the next question, immediately they will miss. The first part of the question is perfect, but you have got the point only through the mind. It is not yet chewed well, it is not yet digested. It has not become blood, bones, marrow. It is not yet part of your existence. Otherwise you can never ask, “What about the physical pain?” — because the very question is psychological. Physical pain is not a problem — when it is there, it is there; when it is not there, it is not there.

A problem arises when something is not there and you want it to be there, or when something is there and you don’t want it to be there. A problem is always psychological: “Why is it there?” Now this is all psychological. Who is to say why it is there? There is nobody to answer. Only explanations can be given, but those are not really answers. Explanations are simple. It is very simple: pain is there because pleasure is there. Pleasure cannot exist without pain.

If you want a life absolutely painless, then you will have to live a life absolutely pleasureless. They come together in one package. They are not two things really; they are one thing — not different, not separate, and cannot be separated.

That’s what man has been doing through the centuries: separating, to somehow have all the pleasures of the world and not have any pain; but this is not possible. The more pleasures you have, the more pain also. The bigger the peak, the deeper will be the valley by the side. You want no valleys and you want big peaks. Then the peaks cannot exist; they can exist only with valleys. The valley is nothing but a situation in which a peak becomes possible. The peak and the valley are joined together. You want pleasure and you don’t want pain.

For example: you love a woman or you love a man, and when the woman is with you you are happy. Now, you would like to be happy whenever she is with you, but when she goes away you don’t want the pain. If you are really happy with a woman when she is with you, how can you avoid the pain of separation when she is gone and she is no longer there? You will miss her, you will feel the absence. The absence is bound to become pain. If you really want that you should not have any pain, then you should start avoiding all pleasure. Then when the woman is there don’t feel happy; just remain sad, just remain unhappy — so that when she goes, there is no problem.

If somebody greets you and you feel happy, then when somebody insults you you will feel unhappy. This trick has been tried. This has been one of the most basic tricks that all of the so-called religious people have tried: if you want to avoid pain, avoid pleasure. But then what is the point? If you want to avoid death, avoid life — but then what is the point of it all? You will be dead. Before death, you will be dead.

If you want to be perfectly secure, enter into your grave and lie down there. You will be perfectly secure. Don’t breathe, because if you breathe there is danger… because there are all sorts of infections…. There is danger, so don’t breathe, don’t move… just don’t live. Commit suicide; then there will be no pain. But then why are you searching for it? You want no pain and all pleasure. You demand something impossible: you want that two plus two should not be four. You want them to become five, or three, or anything, but never four. But they are four.

Whatever you do, howsoever you deceive yourself and others, they will remain four. Pain and pleasure go together like night and day, like birth and death, like love and hate.

OSHO – The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol. 4
Copyright © 2010 Osho International Foundation

Theory Of Karma- A Hope Or A Law Or…?

The law of karma, in the first place, is not a law. That word gives it an aroma as if it is something scientific, like the law of gravitation. It is merely a hope, not a law at all. It has been hoped for centuries that if you do good you will attain to good results. It is a human hope in existence which is absolutely neutral.

If you look at nature, there are laws — the whole of science is nothing but discovery of those laws — but science has not come even close to detecting anything like the law of karma. Yes, it is certain that any action is going to bring certain reactions, but the law of karma is hoping for much more. If you simply say any action is bound to produce some reactions, it is possible to have scientific support for it. But man is hoping for much more. He is asking that a good action inevitably brings a good consequence with it, and the same with a bad action.

Now, there are many things implied in this. First, What is good? Each society defines good according to itself. What is good to a Jew is not good to a Jaina; what is good to a Christian is not good to a Confucian. Not only that, what is good in one culture is bad in another culture. A law has to be universal. For example, if you heat water to one hundred degrees centigrade, it will evaporate — in Tibet, in Russia, in America, even in Oregon. In Oregon it will be a little puzzled, but all the same at one hundred degrees water will evaporate. Certainly the law of karma is neither a scientific law nor part of any legal system.

Then what kind of law is it? It is a hope. A man wandering in immense darkness, groping his way, clings to anything that gives a little hope, a little light — because what you observe in life itself is something totally different from the law of karma. A man who is a well-known criminal may succeed and become the president, the prime minister; or vice versa: he was not a criminal before, but when he becomes the president or prime minister of a country he becomes a criminal… So in life this strange situation happens: bad people reach good positions, become respectable or honored, not only in their time but throughout history. It is full of their names. In history, Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Kanad, Gautam, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu — people like these you will not find even in the footnotes. And Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadirshah, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler — they make up the major portion of history. In fact, we have to write the whole of history again because all these people have to be completely erased. Even the memory of them should not be carried on, because even their memory may have evil effects on people.

A better humanity will not give these names even a place in the footnotes; there is no need. They were nightmares; it is better they are completely forgotten so they don’t follow you like shadows. And we have to discover people who have lived on this earth and made it in every way beautiful; shared their joy, their dance, their music, shared their ecstasies — but lived anonymously. People have completely forgotten even their names. To me, certainly each action has its result, but not somewhere far away in a future life. The action and the result are continuous, they are part of one process. Do you think sowing the seed and reaping the crop are separate? It is one process. What begins in sowing the seed, grows, and one day the one seed has become thousands of seeds. That’s what you call your crop. It is the same seed which has exploded into thousands of seeds. No death is intervening, no afterlife is needed; it is a continuum.

So the one thing to be remembered is: in my vision of life, yes, every action is bound to have some consequences, but they will not be somewhere else, you will have them here and now. Most probably you will get them almost simultaneously. When you are kind to someone, don’t you feel a certain joy? A certain peace? A certain meaningfulness? Don’t you feel that you are contented with what you have done? There is a kind of deep satisfaction. Have you ever felt that contentment when you are angry, when you are boiling with anger, when you hurt somebody, when you are mad with rage? Have you ever felt a peace, a silence descending in you? No, it is impossible. You will certainly feel something, but it will be a sadness that you again acted like a fool, that again you have done the same stupid thing that you decided again and again not to do. You will feel a tremendous unworthiness in yourself. You will feel that you are not a man but a machine, because you don’t respond, you react. A man may have done something, and you reacted. That man had the key in his hands, and you just danced according to his desire; he had power over you. When somebody abuses you and you start fighting, what does it mean? It means that you don’t have any capacity not to react.

OSHO – From Personality to Individuality, Talk #9

Copyright © 2010 Osho International Foundation

Laugh, And Save The World

Miserable people are dangerous for the simple reason they don’t care whether the earth survives or not. They are so miserable that deep down they may think it would be better if everything were finished. Who cares, if you are living in misery?

Only happy people, ecstatic people, dancing people would like this planet to survive forever.

Seriousness is simply a sickness of the soul, but sincerity is altogether a different phenomenon.

A serious man cannot laugh, cannot dance, cannot play. He is always controlling himself, he has become a jailer to himself. The sincere man can rejoice sincerely, can dance sincerely, can laugh sincerely. And in laughter your body joins, your mind joins, your being joins – the divisions disappear, the schizophrenic personality disappears.

Laughter brings your energy back to you.
Taking laughter away from you is spiritual castration.

The people who have gathered around me are learning how to be more happy, how to be more meditative, how to laugh more, live more, love more, and spread love, laughter around the world. This is the only protection against nuclear weapons.

If the whole globe can learn to love and laugh and enjoy and dance, then Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev will look surprised: What has happened? The whole world seems to have gone mad!

People who are happy, contented, are not the people to be forced to kill other people who have not done any harm to them. It is not surprising that all the armies down the ages have been kept sexually repressed – because those sexually repressed people are bound to be destructive. Their very repression forces them to destroy something.

Have you ever watched in your own being – when you are happy, joyful, you want to create something. When you are miserable, suffering, you want to destroy something. It is a revenge. All the armies are kept in a state of repressed sexuality so the moment they get to kill, that becomes their joy. At least their repressed energies are expressed, of course in a very ugly way, an inhuman way. But some expression is there.

Have you ever noticed painters, poets, sculptors, dancers are never sexually repressed people. In fact, they are oversexual; they love too much. They love too many people. Perhaps one person is not enough to exhaust their love. They have been condemned by the priests down the ages: “These poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, these are not good people.” And these are the only people who have made this humanity something beautiful, who have contributed to the world some flowers of joy, some flowers of music, some beautiful dances. It is one of the fundamentals of life that unless you create, you don’t reach to your fullest dignity.

Your creativity brings freedom, strength, intelligence and consciousness.

What have the priests done to the world? They have burned women, calling them witches. They have killed people who belong to other faiths. They have not been creative people. They have not enhanced the earth and they have not enhanced life.

We need a great respect for creative people of any dimension.

And we should learn how to transform our energies so that they are not repressed, so that they are expressed in your love, in your laughter, in your joy. And this earth is more than a paradise – you don’t have to go anywhere.

Paradise is not something that has to be achieved, it is something that has to be created.

It depends on us.

This crisis gives a chance for courageous people to disconnect themselves from the past and start living in a new way – not modified, not continuous with the past, not better than the past, but absolutely new.

And it has to be done now – because the time is very short. By the end of the twentieth century, either we will enter into the first century of a new history of man or there will be no one left, not even a single wildflower alive. Everything will be dead.

Apart from neutron bombs, which already exist, there are experiments going on in the Soviet Union and perhaps in America too, on death rays. Rather than dropping the bomb, it is far easier to spread death rays which simply kill the living people, the animals, birds, trees. Only dead things – houses, temples, churches – will remain. It will be really a nightmare. And those death rays are not visible. We know they exist, they are just trying to find out how to spread them, how to reach a certain destination and destroy all living beings that they come across.

We need more happy people around the earth to prevent the third world war. These nuclear weapons and these destructive war machines cannot work by themselves. They are being worked by human beings; behind them are human hands.

A hand that knows the beauty of a rose flower cannot drop a bomb on Hiroshima.

A hand that knows the beauty of love is not the hand to keep a gun loaded with death. Just a little contemplation and you will understand what I am saying.

I am saying: spread laughter, spread love, spread life affirmative values, grow more flowers around the earth. Everything that is beautiful, appreciate it – and everything that is inhuman, condemn it.

If you want to change the world into a totally new phenomenon with a new human consciousness, you will have to take this whole earth away from the hands of the politicians and the priests. Man has to be freed from these monsters.

Our work is to teach people consciousness, more awareness, more love, more understanding, more joy, and to spread the dance and celebration around the earth.

Reduced to one single statement, I can say: if we can make humanity happy, there is not going to be any third world war.

OSHO – Hari Om Tat Sat: The Divine Sound – That Is the Truth

Copyright © 2010 Osho International Foundation

Aching For Some ZZZZ’s..?

Q: An article in an American woman’s magazine says that as many as fifty million Americans suffer from so-called insomnia. After the common cold and headache, this disease ranks as number three for visits to the doctor. Would you comment?

Osho: Insomnia is not a disease. Insomnia is a certain way of life.
Man is made by nature to work hard for at least eight hours. Unless he works hard for eight hours he does not earn the right to have a deep sleep. And as a society grows richer, people are not working hard. There is no need; others can work for them. The whole day they are doing small things which they enjoy doing, but it is not hard work like that of a stonecutter or a woodcutter. The body is made so that after eight hours of hard work it naturally needs to fall into sleep to rejuvenate its energy. But it seems difficult…you have earned enough money and still you are chopping wood for eight hours? Then for what have you earned all that money? It seems stupid. You could have chopped wood even without becoming a millionaire.

So if fifty million people in America are suffering from insomnia, that simply means these are the people who are not earning the right to sleep. They are not working to create the situation in which sleep happens. You cannot find fifty million people in a poor country…you cannot find five people.

It has been known for centuries that beggars sleep better than emperors. Laborers, manual laborers sleep better than intellectuals. The poor sleep better than the rich, because they have to work hard to earn their bread and butter, but side by side they are also earning the right to have a beautiful sleep.

Insomnia is not a disease, it is the richest way of life. In fact what is happening is: the whole day you are resting; then in the night you are tossing and turning in the bed. That is the only exercise left for you, and you don’t want to do even that exercise. Toss and turn as much as you can. If the whole day is of resting then the night cannot be of sleep. You have already rested.

If the people who are suffering from insomnia really want to get rid of it they should not think of it as a disease. Visiting a doctor is meaningless. They should start working in their garden, doing some hard work, and forget all about sleep; it will come. It always comes, you don’t have to bring it.

Aching For ZZZZZZ's

These are the difficulties. Nature never intended that a few people should have all the riches in the world and most of the people should be poor. Looking at the intentions of nature, it seems it wanted everybody to work. It never wanted these classes of the poor and the rich; it wanted a classless society where everybody is working.

It is possible the work may be different. If you have been painting the whole day, that will also bring sleep. Or you have to create artificial exercises — go to the gym, run for miles, jog. Many idiots are doing it. A futile exercise — why jog when you can chop wood? Why jog when your garden is being looked after by somebody else who sleeps perfectly? You pay him for the work, and he sleeps perfectly well.

You jog, and nobody pays you and you find it difficult to sleep. How much can you jog? How much can you run? And a man who has not slept the whole night does not feel like running in the morning, because the whole night he has been struggling to find a little bit of sleep. Tired of tossing and turning, in the morning he finds a little bit of sleep — and that is the time suggested that he should run and he should jog!

Insomnia should not be counted among diseases. People should be made aware that you are not following the natural course that the body needs. Then you can do small things…swimming, tennis — but it will not be a real substitute for hard labor for eight hours. Man basically was a hunter — and not with machine guns, just with arrows — running after deer. It was not every day that he would get his food. The whole day he would run and follow the animals and would not be able to catch one, and he would come home empty-handed but utterly tired.

Your body is still asking you to do that. You can choose in what way you want to do it; then insomnia will disappear of its own accord.

Those fifty million insomnia sufferers do not need any compassion from anybody. They have to be told directly and straightforwardly, “Your way of life is wrong. Change it; otherwise suffer.” And it will bring a great revolution if fifty million people start working eight hours a day. They don’t need it for their food, for their clothing, for their shelter, but they can work for those who need food, who need medicine, who need other necessities of life.

If fifty million people turn out to work hard eight hours per day in the service of the poor, it will change the whole climate of the society. The very idea of fighting, of struggle between classes, will disappear — because there will be no classes.

And this is going to become a bigger problem every day because machines are replacing man in every field. Machines are more efficient, more obedient, can work twenty-four hours without any rest, seven days a week…no holiday, no religious holiday, because they are neither Jews nor Christians nor Hindus.

Machines don’t ask for anything, not even for a coffee break. And one machine can work in place of a hundred people or a thousand people, so soon the whole world is going to be in a trouble: insomnia is going to be one of the biggest troubles in the coming days because when the machine takes over, the man is free. He will be paid for his unemployment, and paid enough so that he does not ask for employment. He will have enough money.

So what can he do? He can play cards, chess, drink alcohol, have a fight — and suffer insomnia. Insomnia is going to be a worldwide phenomena. What is happening to fifty million people in America will be happening to almost every person whose work is taken from him. When people retire they start suffering from insomnia, and they had never suffered before.

So I don’t believe that it is a disease. Don’t categorize it as the third most prevalent disease. It is not of the category of diseases; it is our wrong way of life.

There may be a few people, a very few people, for whom it may be a disease — for example, the intellectuals whose minds are continuously working and get into the habit of working. Then in the night when they want to sleep the mind goes on working, and that’s enough for insomnia. And they have no control over the mind to stop it. They may shout; the mind doesn’t care about it.

The mind, while you are resting in bed, goes on unwinding itself, because in the day there were many sidelines of thoughts which have been left incomplete; they have to be completed. Mind is a perfectionist. It wants to do everything perfectly, so whatever has remained incomplete it is trying to complete. And it has no need of sleep. It is the body that needs sleep. If the body has not worked and has not earned any sleep, and the mind has been functioning too much and going so fast that it has become habituated to it, this type of man may even work with the body and still suffer insomnia. Then it will be a disease. Then he needs the medicine I call meditation, so that his mind can relax and allow the body to go into sleep.

But these people who cannot sleep are really suffering badly because in their life there is nothing — no meaning, all hypocrisy. “Socializing” they call it. And then in the night they cannot even sleep. The day is useless, the night is useless. They have lost all touch with life. They should be helped.

There should be more meditation centers specially for people who are suffering from insomnia. Meditation will help them to relax. And when they come to meditate then they should be told, “Alone meditation will not do; it is half of the work. Half you have to do — that is hard physical exercise.” And I think people are in such a suffering without sleep that they will be able to do anything that is suggested.

And hard work has a beauty of its own. Chopping wood and perspiring and a cool breeze comes…and there is such a beautiful feeling in the body, which a person who is not working hard cannot even understand. The poor man also has his luxuries. Only he knows about them.

OSHO – The Path of the Mystic, Talk #44
To read more go to OSHO Library
Copyright © 2010 Osho International Foundation

Seriously, Lighten Up!

The psychology of 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.

Psychology Of Anger

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

Ever So Lonely…

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.

OSHO – The Path of the Mystic, Talk #19
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What’s Sex Got To Do With It?

If you repress sex you will become angry; the whole energy that was becoming sex will become anger. And it is better to be sexual than to be angry. In sex at least there is something of love; in anger there is only pure violence and nothing else. If sex is repressed, the person becomes violent — either to others he will be violent, or to himself. These are the two possibilities: either he will become a sadist and will torture others, or he will become a masochist and will torture himself. But torture he will.

Do you know, down the ages, the soldiers have not been allowed to have sexual relationships? Why? Because if soldiers are allowed to have sexual relationships they don’t gather enough anger in them, enough violence in them. Their sex becomes a release, they become soft, and a soft person cannot fight. Starve the soldier of sex and he is bound to fight better. In fact, his violence will be a substitute for his sexuality….

I pulled back my sexual longings,
and now I discover that I’m angry a lot.
(Kabir)

A great observer he is, a very minute observer. This is what awareness is. He is watching: he represses his sexual desire and watches — “Now what is happening inside?” Soon he finds that he becomes more angry — for no reason at all, just angry, irritated, ready to fight with anybody, any excuse will do.

And remember, sex can be transformed because it is a natural energy; anger is not so natural, one step removed from nature. Now it will be difficult to change anger. First anger will have to be changed into sex, only then can anything be done — that’s what my work here is. And that’s what I am being condemned for all over the world.

I am trying to change your anger into sex — first that has to be done. That is the way of inner change. First all your perversions have to disappear, and you have to become a natural human being. You have to become a natural animal, to be exact. And then only can you become divine. The animal can be transformed into the divine, but your animal is also very perverted, your animal is not sane — your animal has become insane. First the insanity has to be transformed, changed. Change anger!

I gave up rage, and now I notice
that I am greedy all day.

So he repressed his anger — that’s what one will logically do. You repress sex, anger bubbles up; you repress anger. But he is a close observer, a very minute observer. He says: The moment I repressed my anger I became greedy.

This too is proved: if you watch human history you will find a thousand and one proofs for it. For example, in India Mahavira taught non-violence, and the result has been that all the followers of Mahavira became the most greedy people in the world — they are the Jews of India. The Jainas are the Jews of India. Why did they become so greedy?

Mahavira taught them to be non-violent. Obviously, they started repressing anger; that is the only way that seems possible to the stupid mind: Repress anger! Don’t be violent. And they tried really hard; in every possible way they tried not to be violent. They even stopped agriculture because it is a kind of violence: you will have to pull the plants and cut the crop, and that is violence because plants have life. So Jainas stopped agriculture completely.

Now, they cannot go to the army, they cannot be kshatriyas — they cannot become warriors — because of their ideology of non-violence, and they cannot even be agriculturalists, gardeners; that is impossible. They would not like to become sudras — the untouchables — who clean the roads, the sweepers and the cobblers, because that is too humiliating. And brahmins won’t allow them to function as brahmins — brahmins are very jealous about that. They have been in power for centuries and they don’t allow anybody: nobody can become a brahmin; one has to be a brahmin only by birth. You may become a great, learned man — that doesn’t matter — but you can’t be a Brahmin. There is no way of becoming a brahmin; you have to be born one only. You have to be very careful when you choose your parents; that is the only opportunity to become a brahmin.

So Jainas could not be brahmins, would not like to become sudras were not able to become warriors — then what was left for them? Only business — they became business people. And all their repressed anger became their greed. They became great money-maniacs. Their number is very small; in India their number is so small, not more than thirty lakhs. In a country of sixty crores thirty lakhs is nothing. But they possess more money than anybody else. You will not find a Jaina beggar anywhere; they are all rich people.

Mahavira wanted them to be non-violent, and what really happened was totally different: they became greedy. Repress your anger and you will be greedy….

I worked hard at dissolving the greed,
and now I am proud of myself.

So he repressed his greed and the ultimate result is: he has become a great egoist; he finds himself being very proud. “Look! I have repressed sex, repressed anger, repressed greed — I have done this, I have done that. I have done impossible things!” Now a great ‘I’ arises, the ego becomes strengthened.

That’s why you will find the most crystallized egos in the monks and the nuns. You will not find such crystallized egos anywhere else. The more a person renounces, the more he represses, the more egoistic he becomes. Indians are very egoistic and the reason? — they have all tried in some way or other to be religious. And the only way seems to be repression — and repression brings ego.

A non-repressed person becomes a non-egoist; he cannot carry the ego. There is no prop to support it. He becomes humble, he becomes simple, he becomes ordinary, he has no claim — he knows he is nothing. This whole process that Kabir is describing is beautiful.

Repression is not the way: transformation is the way. Don’t repress anything. If sexuality is there, don’t repress it otherwise you will create a new complexity — which will be more difficult to tackle. And if you repress anger, greed is even more difficult then, and if you repress greed, arises ego, pride, which is the most difficult thing to drop.

Move back: from pride to greed, from greed to anger, from anger to sex. And if you can come to the natural, spontaneous sexuality, things will be very simple. Things will be so simple that you cannot imagine. Then your energy is natural, and natural energy creates no hindrance in transformation. Hence I say: from sex to superconsciousness. Not from anger, not from greed, not from ego, but from sex to superconsciousness.

The transformation can happen only if first you accept your natural being. Whatsoever is natural is good. Yes, more is possible, but the more will be possible only if you accept your nature with totality — if you welcome it, if you have no guilt about it. To be guilty, to feel guilty, is to be irreligious. In the past you have been told just the opposite: Feel guilty and you are religious. I say to you: Feel guilty and you will never be religious. Drop all guilt!

You are whatsoever God has made you. You are whatsoever existence has made you. Sex is not your creation: it is God’s gift. Something tremendously valuable is hidden in it — it is just a shell of your samadhi. If the seed is broken, the shell is broken, the flower will bloom — but not by repression. You will have to learn inner gardening, you will have to become a gardener, you will have to learn how to use dirty fertilizers, manure, and transform manure into roses.

Religion is the most delicate art.

OSHO, The Fish in the Sea Is Not Thirsty, Talk #13
To read more on this subject go to OSHO library

Copyright © 2010 Osho International Foundation

Transforming Terrorism

Everything is deeply related with everything else that happens. The event of terrorism is certainly related with what is happening in the society. The society is falling apart. Its old order, discipline, morality, religion, everything has been found to be wrongly based. It has lost its power over people’s conscience.

Terrorism simply symbolizes that to destroy human beings does not matter, that there is nothing in human beings which is indestructible, that it is all matter ― and you cannot kill matter, you can only change its form. Once man is taken to be only a combination of matter, and no place is given for a spiritual being inside him, then to kill becomes just play.

The nations are irrelevant because of nuclear weapons. If the whole world can be destroyed together within minutes the alternative can only be that the whole world should be together. Now it cannot remain divided; its division is dangerous, because division can become war any moment. The division cannot be tolerated.

Only one war is enough to destroy everything, and there is not much time left for man to understand that we should create a world where the very possibility of war does not exist.

Transforming Terrorism- OSHO International.

Terrorism has many undercurrents. One is that because of nuclear weapons, the nations are pouring their energy into that field, thinking that the old weapons are out of date. They are out of date, but individuals can start using them. And you cannot use nuclear weapons against individuals ― that would be simply stupid. One individual terrorist throws a bomb ― it does not justify that a nuclear missile should be sent.

What I want to emphasize is that the nuclear weapon has given individual people a certain freedom to use old weapons, a freedom which was not possible in the old days because the governments were also using the same weapons.

Now the governments are concentrated on destroying the old weapons, throwing them in the ocean, selling them to countries which are poor and cannot afford nuclear weapons. And all those terrorists are coming from these poor countries, with the same weapons that have been sold to their countries. And they have a strange protection: you cannot use nuclear weapons against them, you cannot throw atom bombs at them.

They can throw bombs at you and you are suddenly impotent. You have a vast amount of atomic bombs, nuclear bombs in your hands ― but sometimes where a needle is useful, a sword may not be of any use. You may have the sword; that does not mean that you are necessarily in a superior position to the man who has a needle, because there are purposes in which only the needle will work ― the sword will not be of any use.

Those small weapons from the old times were piling up, and the big powers had to dispose of them ― either drown them in the ocean…. That meant so much money, so much manpower, so much energy had gone to waste; economically it was disastrous. But just to go on piling them up was also economically impossible. How many weapons can you gather? There is a limit. And when you get a new way of killing people more efficiently, then the old simply has to be got rid of. It was thought that it would be better to sell them to poor countries. Poor countries cannot create nuclear weapons ― it costs too much. And these weapons were coming cheap ― as help; they accepted it, but these weapons cannot be used in a war. In a war these weapons are already useless. But nobody has seen the possibility that these weapons can be used individually, and a new phenomenon ― terrorism ― can come out of it.

Now, a terrorist has a strange power, even over the greatest powers.

He can throw bombs at the White House without any fear, because what you have is too big and you cannot throw it at him. And these are the weapons sold by you! But the phenomenon was not conceived of, because human psychology is not understood.

My understanding is that the way he has lived, man needs every ten to twelve years ― a war. He accumulates so much anger, so much rage, so much violence, that nothing short of a war will give him release. So, war after war, there is a gap of only ten to fifteen years. That gap is a kind of relaxation. But again you start accumulating, because the same psychology is working ― the same jealousy, the same violence.

And man is basically a hunter; he is not by nature vegetarian. First he became a hunter, and for thousands of years he was just a meat-eater, and cannibalism was prevalent everywhere. To eat human beings caught from the opposing tribe you were fighting with was perfectly ethical. All that is carried in the unconscious of humanity.

Religions have imposed things on man very superficially; his unconscious is not in agreement. Every man is living in a disagreement with himself. So whenever he can find a chance ― for a beautiful cause; freedom, democracy, socialism ― any beautiful word can become an umbrella to hide his ugly unconscious, which simply wants to destroy and enjoys destruction.

Now the world war has become almost impossible; otherwise there would have been no terrorism. Enough time has passed since the second world war; the third world war should have happened around 1960. It has not happened. This has been the routine for the whole of history, and man is programmed for it.

It has been observed by psychologists that in wartime people are more happy than in peacetime. In wartime their life has a thrill; in peacetime they look bored. In wartime, early in the morning they are searching for the newspaper, listening to the radio. Things may be happening far away, but they are excited. Something in them feels an affinity.

A war that should have happened somewhere between 1955 and 1960 has not happened, and man is burdened with the desire to kill, with the desire to destroy. It is just that he wants good names for it.

Terrorism is going to become bigger and bigger, because the third world war is almost impossible. And the stupid politicians have no other alternative. Terrorism simply means that what was being done on a social scale now has to be done individually. It will grow.

It can only be prevented if we change the very base of human understanding ― which is a Himalayan task; more so because these same people whom you want to change will fight you; they won’t allow you to change them easily.

In fact they love bloodshed; they don’t have the courage to say so. In one of the existentialist’s novels, there is a beautiful incident which can almost be said to be true. A man is presented before the court because he has killed a stranger who was sitting on the beach. He had never seen the stranger. He did not kill him for money. He does not yet know how that man looked, because he killed him from the back, just with a big knife. They had never met ― there was no question of enmity. They were not even familiar; they had not even seen each other’s faces.

The magistrate could not figure it out, and he asked the murderer, “Why did you do it?” He said, “When I stabbed that man with a knife, and a fountain of blood came out of his back, that was one of the most beautiful moments I have ever known. I know that the price will be my death, but I am ready to pay for it; it was worth it. My whole life I have lived in boredom ― no excitement, no adventure. Finally I had to decide to do something. And this act has made me world famous; my picture is in every newspaper. And I am perfectly happy that I did it.”

There was no need for any evidence. The man was not denying ― on the contrary, he was glorifying it. But the court has its own routine way ― witnesses still have to be produced; just his word cannot be accepted. He may have been lying, he may not have killed the man. Nobody saw him ― there was not a single eyewitness ― so circumstantial evidences had to be presented by the police.

One of them was that possibly this man has killed according to his past life and his background. When he was young, his mother died. And when he heard that his mother had died, he said, “Shit! That woman will not leave me even while dying! It is Sunday, and I have booked tickets for the theater with my girlfriend. But I knew she would do something to destroy my whole day ― and she has destroyed it.”

His mother has died and he is saying that she has destroyed his Sunday! He was going to the theater with his girlfriend, and now he has to go to the funeral. And the people who heard his reaction were shocked. They said, “This is not right, what are you saying?”

He said, “What? What is right and what is wrong? Couldn’t she die on any other day? There are seven days in the week ― from Monday to Saturday, she could have died any day. But you don’t know my mother ― I know her. She is a bitch! She did it on purpose.”

The second evidence was that he attended the funeral, and in the evening he was found dancing with his girlfriend in a disco. And somebody asked, “What! What are you doing? Your mother has just died.”

He said, “So what? Do you mean now I can never dance again? My mother is never going to be alive, she will remain dead; so what does it matter whether I dance after six hours, eight hours, eight months, eight years? What does it matter? ― she is dead. And I have to dance and I have to live and I have to love, in spite of her death. If everybody stopped living with the death of their mother, with the death of their father, then there would be no dance in the world, no song in the world.”

His logic is very right. He is saying, “Where do you draw the demarcation line? After how many hours can I dance? ― twelve hours, fourteen hours, six weeks? Where will you draw the line? on what grounds? What is the criterion? So it doesn’t matter. One thing is certain: whenever I dance I will be dancing after the death of my mother, so I decided to dance today. Why wait for tomorrow?”

Such circumstantial evidences are presented to the court ― that this man is strange, he can do such an act. But if you look closely at this poor man, you will not feel angry at him; you will feel very compassionate. Now, it is not his fault that his mother has died; and anyway, he has to dance some day, so it makes no difference. You cannot blame this man for saying ugly things: “She deliberately died on Sunday to spoil my joy,” because his whole experience of life must have been that she was again and again spoiling any possibility of joy. This was the last conclusion: “Even in death she will not leave me.”

And you cannot condemn the man for killing a stranger… because he is not a thief; he did not take anything from him. He is not an enemy; he did not even see who was the man he was killing. He was simply bored with life and he wanted to do something that made him feel significant, important. He is happy that all the newspapers have his photo. If they had published his photo before, he would not have killed; but they waited ― until he kills they will not publish his photo. And he wanted to be a celebrity… just ordinary human desires.

And he was ready to pay with his life to become, at least for one day, known to the whole world, recognized by everybody. Until we change the basic grounds of humanity, terrorism is going to become more and more a normal, everyday affair. It will happen in the airplanes, it will happen in the buses. It will start happening in the cars. It will start happening to strangers. Somebody will suddenly come and shoot you ― not that you have done anything to him, but just, the hunter is back.

The hunter was satisfied in the war. Now the war has stopped and perhaps there is no possibility for it. The hunter is back; now we cannot fight collectively. Each individual has to do something to release his own steam.

Things are interconnected. The first thing that has to be changed is that man should be made more rejoicing ― which all the religions have killed.

The real criminals are not caught. These are the victims, the terrorists and other criminals. It is all the religions who are the real criminals, because they have destroyed all possibilities of rejoicing. They have destroyed the possibility of enjoying small things of life; they have condemned everything that nature provides you to make you happy, to make you feel excited, feel pleasant.

They have taken everything away; and if they have not been able to take a few things away because they are so ingrained in your biology ― like sex ― they have at least been able to poison them.

Friedrich Nietzsche, according to me, is one of the greatest seers of the Western world; his eyes really go penetrating to the very root of a problem. But because others could not see it ― their eyes were not so penetrating, nor was their intelligence so sharp ― the man lived alone, abandoned, isolated, unloved, unrespected.

He says in one of his statements that man has been taught by religions to condemn sex, to renounce sex. Religion has not been able to manage it; and man has tried hard but has failed, because it is so deeply rooted in his biology ― it constitutes his whole body. He is born out of sex ― how can he get rid of it except by committing suicide?

So man has tried, and religions have helped him to get rid of it ― thousands of disciplines and strategies have been used. The total result is that sex is there, but poisoned. That word poisoned is a tremendous insight. Religions have not been able to take it away, but they have been certainly successful in poisoning it.

And the same is the situation about other things: religions are condemning your living in comfort. Now, a man who is living in comfort and luxury cannot become a terrorist. Religions have condemned riches, praised poverty; now, a man who is rich cannot be a terrorist. Only the “blessed ones” who are poor can be terrorists ― because they have nothing to lose, and they are boiling up against the whole of society because others have things they don’t have.

Religions have been trying to console them. But then came communism ― a materialist religion ― which provoked people and said to them, “Your old religions are all opium to the people, and it is not because of your evil actions in this life or in past lives that you are suffering poverty. It is because of the evil exploitation of the bourgeois, the super-rich that you are suffering.”

The last sentence in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is: “Proletariats of the whole world unite; you have nothing to lose and you have the whole world to gain.”

You are already poor, hungry, naked ― so what can you lose? Your death will not make you more miserable than your life is making you. So why not take a chance and destroy those people who have taken everything away from you. And take those things back, distribute them.
What religions have somehow been consoling people with ― although it was wrong and it was cunning and it was a lie, but it kept people in a state of being half asleep ― communism suddenly made them aware of.

That means this world is now never going to be peaceful if we don’t withdraw all the rotten ideas that have been implanted in man.

The first are the religions ― their values should be removed so that man can smile again, can laugh again, can rejoice again, can be natural again.

Second, what communism is saying has to be put clearly before the people ― that it is psychologically wrong. You are falling from one trap into another. No two men are equal; hence the idea of equality is nonsense. And if you decide to be equal then you have to accept a dictatorship of the proletariat. That means you have to lose your freedom.

First the church took away your freedom, the God took away your freedom. Now communism replaces your church, and it will take away your freedom. And without freedom you cannot rejoice. You live in fear, not in joy. If we can clean the basement of the human mind’s unconscious… and that’s what my work is. It can be cleaned away.

The terrorism is not in the bombs, in your hands; the terrorism is in your unconscious.

Otherwise, this state of affairs is going to grow more bitter. And it seems all kinds of blind people have bombs in their hands and are throwing them at random.

The third world war would have released people for ten or, fifteen years. But the third world war cannot happen because if it happens it won’t relieve people, it will only destroy people.

So individual violence will increase ― it is increasing. And all your governments and all your religions will go on perpetuating the old strategies without understanding the new situation.

The new situation is that every human being needs to go through therapies, needs to understand his unconscious intentions, needs to go through meditations so that he can calm down, become cool ― and look towards the world with a new perspective, of silence.

OSHO – Beyond Psychology, Talk#18

Copyright © 2010 Osho International Foundation