Osho on Aloneness - We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone
Question: You said the other day that we are born alone, we live Alone and we die alone. Yet it seems as if from the day we Are born, whatever we are doing, whoever we are, we Seek to relate to others; in addition, we are usually
Attracted to being intimate with one person in Particular. Would you please comment?
Osho: The question that you have asked is the question of every human being. We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Aloneness is our very nature, but we are not aware of it. Because we are not aware of it, we remain strangers to ourselves, and instead of seeing our aloneness as a tremendous beauty and bliss, silence and peace, at-easeness with existence, we misunderstand it as loneliness. Loneliness is a misunderstood aloneness. Once you misunderstand your aloneness as loneliness, the whole context changes.
Aloneness has a beauty and grandeur, a positivity; loneliness is poor, negative, dark, dismal. Everybody is running away from loneliness. It is like a wound; it hurts. To escape from it, the only way is to be in a crowd, to become part of a society, to have friends, to create a family, to have husbands and wives, to have children. In this crowd, the basic effort is that you will be able to forget your loneliness. But nobody has ever succeeded in forgetting it. That which is natural to you, you can try to ignore -- but you cannot forget it; it will assert again and again.
And the problem becomes more complex because you have never seen it as it is; you have taken it for granted that you are born lonely. The dictionary meaning is the same; that shows the mind of the people who create dictionaries. They don't understand at all the vast difference between loneliness and aloneness. Loneliness is a gap. Something is missing, something is needed to fill it, and nothing can ever fill it because it is a misunderstanding in the first place. As you grow older, the gap also grows bigger.
People are so afraid to be by themselves that they do any kind of stupid thing. I have seen people playing cards alone; the other party is not there. They have invented games in which the same person plays cards from both sides. Somehow one wants to remain engaged. That engagement may be with people, may be with work.... There are workaholics; they are afraid when the weekend comes close -- what are they going to do? And if they don't do anything, they are left to themselves, and that is the most painful experience.
You will be surprised to know that it is on the weekends that most of the accidents in the world happen. People are rushing in their cars to resort places, to sea beaches, to hill stations, bumper to bumper. It may take eight hours, ten hours to reach, and there is nothing for them to do because the whole crowd has come with them. Now their house, their neighborhood, their city is more peaceful than this sea resort. Everybody has come. But some engagement....
People are playing cards, chess; people are watching television for hours. The average American watches television five hours a day; people are listening to the radio... just to avoid themselves. For all these activities, the only reason is -- not to be left alone; it is very fearful. And this idea is taken from others. Who has told you that to be alone is a fearful state?
Those who have known aloneness say something absolutely different. They say there is nothing more beautiful, more peaceful, more joyful than being alone. But you listen to the crowd. The people who live in misunderstanding are in such a majority, that who bothers about a Zarathustra, or a Gautam Buddha? These single individuals can be wrong, can be hallucinating, can be deceiving themselves or deceiving you, but millions of people cannot be wrong. And millions of people agree that to be left to oneself is the worst experience in life; it is hell.
But any relationship that is created because of the fear, because of the inner hell of being left alone, cannot be satisfying. Its very root is poisoned. You don't love your woman, you are simply using her not to be lonely; neither does she love you. She is also in the same paranoia; she is using you not to be left alone. Naturally, in the name of love anything may happen -- except love. Fights may happen, arguments may happen, but even they are preferred to being lonely: at least somebody is there and you are engaged, you can forget your loneliness.
But love is not possible, because there is no basic foundation for love. Love never grows out of fear. You are asking, "You said the other day that we are born alone, we live alone and we die alone. Yet it seems as if from the day we are born, whatever we are doing, whoever we are, we seek to relate to others."
This seeking to relate to others is nothing but escapism. Even the smallest baby tries to find something to do; if nothing else, then he will suck his own big toes on his feet. It is an absolutely futile activity, nothing can come out of it, but it is engagement. He is doing something. You will see in the stations, in the airports, small boys and girls carrying their teddy bears; they cannot sleep without them. Darkness makes their loneliness even more dangerous. The teddy bear is a great protection; somebody is with them.
And your God is nothing but a teddy bear for grown-ups. You cannot live as you are. Your relationships are not relationships. They are ugly. You are using the other person, and you know perfectly well the other person is using you. And to use anybody is to reduce him into a thing, into a commodity. You don't have any respect for the person.
"In addition," you are asking, "we are usually attracted to being intimate with one person in particular."
It has a psychological reason. You are brought up by a mother, by a father; if you are a boy, you start loving your mother and you start being jealous of your father because he is a competitor; if you are a girl, you start loving your father and you hate your mother because she is a competitor. These are now established facts, not hypotheses, and the result of it turns your whole life into a misery.
The boy carries the image of his mother as the model of a woman. He becomes conditioned continuously; he knows only one woman so closely, so intimately. Her face, her hair, her warmth -- everything becomes an imprint. That's exactly the scientific word used: it becomes an imprint in his psychology. And the same happens to the girl about the father. When you grow up, you fall in love with some woman or with some man and you think, "Perhaps we are made for each other." Nobody is made for anyone.
But why do you feel attracted towards one certain person? It is because of your imprint. He must resemble your father in some way; she must resemble your mother in some way. Of course no other woman can be exactly a replica of your mother, and anyway you are not in search of a mother, you are in search of a wife. But the imprint inside you decides who is the right woman for you. The moment you see that woman, there is no question of reasoning. You immediately feel attraction; your imprint immediately starts functioning - - this is the woman for you, or this is the man for you.
It is good as far as meeting once in a while on the sea beach, in the movie hall, in the garden is concerned, because you don't come to know each other totally. But you are both hankering to live together; you want to be married, and that is one of the most dangerous steps that lovers can take. The moment you are married, you start becoming aware of the totality of the other person, and you are surprised on every single aspect -- "Something went wrong; this is not the woman, this is not the man" -- because they don't fit with the ideal that you are carrying within you.
And the trouble is multiplied because the woman is carrying an ideal of her father -- you don't fit with it. You are carrying the ideal of your mother -- she does not fit with it. That's why all marriages are failures. Only very rare marriages are not failures -- and I hope God should save you from those marriages which are not failures, because they are psychologically sick. There are people who are sadists, who enjoy torturing others, and there are people who are masochists, who enjoy torturing themselves.
If a husband and wife belong to these two categories, that marriage will be a successful marriage. One is a masochist and one is a sadist -- it is a perfect marriage, because one enjoys being tortured and one enjoys torturing. But ordinarily it is very difficult to find out in the first place whether you are a masochist or a sadist, and then to look for your other polarity.... If you are wise enough you should go to the psychologist and enquire who you are, a masochist or a sadist? and ask if he can give you some references which can fit with you.
Sometimes, just by accident, it happens that a sadist and masochist become married. They are the happiest people in the world; they are fulfilling each other's needs. But what kind of need is this? -- they are both psychopaths, and they are living a life of torture. But otherwise, every marriage is going to fail, for one simple reason: the imprint is the problem. Even in marriage, the basic reason for which you wanted to have the relationship is not fulfilled. You are more alone when you are with your wife than when you are alone.
To leave husband and wife in a room by themselves is to make them both utterly miserable. his whole effort -- whether of relationships or remaining busy in a thousand and one things -- is just to escape from the idea that you are lonely. And I want it to be emphatically clear to you that this is where the meditator and the ordinary man part. The ordinary man goes on trying to forget his loneliness, and the meditator starts getting more and more acquainted with his aloneness.
He has left the world; he has gone to the caves, to the mountains, to the forest, just for the sake of being alone. He wants to know who he is. In the crowd, it is difficult; there are so many disturbances. And those who have known their aloneness have known the greatest blissfulness possible to human beings -- because your very being is blissful. After being in tune with your aloneness, you can relate; then your relationship will bring great joys to you, because it is not out of fear.
Finding your aloneness you can create, you can be involved in as many things as you want, because this involvement will not anymore be running away from yourself. Now it will be your expression; now it will be the manifestation of all that is your potential. Only such a man -- whether he lives alone or lives in the society, whether he marries or lives unmarried makes no difference -- is always blissful, peaceful, silent. His life is a dance, is a song, is a flowering, is a fragrance. Whatever he does, he brings his fragrance to it.
But the first basic thing is to know your aloneness absolutely. This escape from yourself you have learned from the crowd. Because everybody is escaping, you start escaping. Every child is born in a crowd and starts imitating people; what others are doing, he starts doing. He falls into the same miserable situations as others are in, and he starts thinking that this is what life is all about. And he has missed life completely.
So I remind you, don't misunderstand aloneness as loneliness. Loneliness is certainly sick; aloneness is perfect health.
Ginsberg visits Doctor Goldberg. "Ja, you are sick."
"Not good enough. I want another opinion."
"Okay," said Doctor Goldberg, "you are ugly too."
We are all committing the same kinds of misunderstandings continually.
I would like my people to know that your first and most primary step towards finding the meaning and significance of life is to enter into your aloneness. It is your temple; it is where your God lives, and you cannot find this temple anywhere else. You can go on to the moon, to Mars....
Once you have entered your innermost core of being, you cannot believe your own eyes: you were carrying so much joy, so many blessings, so much love... and you were escaping from your own treasures. Knowing these treasures and their inexhaustibility, you can move now into relationships, into creativity. You will help people by sharing your love, not by using them. You will give dignity to people by your love; you will not destroy their respect. And you will, without any effort, become a source for them to find their own treasures too.
Whatever you make, whatever you do, you will spread your silence, your peace, your blessings into everything possible. But this basic thing is not taught by any family, by any society, by any university. People go on living in misery, and it is taken for granted. Everybody is miserable, so it is nothing much if you are miserable; you cannot be an exception. But I say unto you: You can be an exception. You just have not made the right effort.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Hell Living With And Without A Woman
Osho on hell of living with a woman and the hell of living without a woman
Question: My love-life drama now reflects an old saying of Humphrey Bogart's: Women -- they're hell to live with, and hell to live Without. What to do?
Osho : One has to pass through this hell. One has to experience both the hell of living with a woman and the hell of living without a woman. And it is not only true about women, it is exactly true about men too. So don't be a male chauvinist pig! It is applicable both ways, it is a double-edged sword. Women are also tired of living with men and they are also frustrated when they have to live alone. It is one of the most fundamental of human dilemmas; it has to be understood. You cannot live without a woman because you don't know how to live with yourself.
You are not meditative enough. Meditation is the art of living with yourself. It is nothing else than that, simply that: the art of being joyously alone. A meditator can sit joyously alone for months, for years. He does not hanker for the other, because his own inner ecstasy is so much, is so overpowering, that who bothers about the other? If the other comes into his life it is not a need, it is a luxury. And I am all for luxury, because luxury means you can enjoy it if it is there and you can enjoy it when it is not there. A need is a difficult phenomenon.
For example, bread and butter are needs, but the flowers in the garden are a luxury. You can live without the flowers, you will not die, but you cannot live without bread and butter. For the man who cannot live with himself, the other is a need, an absolute need, because whenever he is alone he is bored with himself -- so bored that he wants some occupation with somebody else. Because it is a need it becomes a dependence, you have to depend on the other. And because it becomes a dependence you hate, you rebel, you resist, because it is a slavery.
Dependence is a kind of slavery, and nobody wants to be a slave. You meet a woman – you are not able to live alone. The woman is also not able to live alone, that's why she is meeting you ; otherwise there is no need. Both are bored with themselves and both are thinking that the other will help to get rid of the boredom. Yes, in the beginning it looks like that, but only in the beginning. As they settle together, soon they see that the boredom is not destroyed -- it is not only doubled but multiplied.
Now, first they were bored with themselves, now they are bored with the other too -- because the closer you come to the other, the more you know the other, the more the other becomes almost a part of you. That's why if you see a bored couple walking by you can be certain they are married. If they are not bored you can be certain they are not married. The man must be walking with somebody else's wife, that's why there is so much joy.
When you are in love -- when you have not yet persuaded the woman and the woman has not yet persuaded you to be together forever -- you both pretend great joy. And something of it is true, too, because of the hope that "Who knows, I may come out of my boredom, my anguish, my anxiety, my aloneness. This woman may help me." And the woman is also hoping. But once you are together the hopes soon disappear, despair sets in again. Now you are bored and the problem has become multiplied. Now, how to get rid of this woman?
Because you are not meditative you need others to keep you occupied. And because you are not meditative you are not able to love either, because love is an overflowing joy. You are bored with yourself. What have you got to share with the other? Hence, being with the other also becomes hell. In that sense Jean-Paul Sartre is right that the other is hell. The other is not hell really; it only appears so. The hell exists in you, in your nonmeditativeness, in your incapacity to be alone and ecstatic. And both are unable to be alone and ecstatic.
Now both are at each mother's throats, continuously trying to snatch some happiness from each other. Both are doing that and both are beggars.
I have heard: One psychoanalyst met another psychoanalyst on the street. The first said to the other, "You look fine. How am I?" Nobody knows about himself, nobody is acquainted with himself. We only see others' faces. A woman looks beautiful, a man looks beautiful, smiling, all smiles. We don't know his anguish. Maybe all those smiles are just a facade to deceive others and to deceive himself. Maybe behind those smiles there are great tears. Maybe he is afraid if he does not smile he may start weeping and crying.
But when you see the other you simply see the surface, you fall in love with the surface. But when you come closer, you soon know that the inner depths of the other person are as dark as your own. He is a beggar just as you are. Now... two beggars begging from each other. Then it becomes hell.
Yes, you are right: "Women -- they're hell to live with, and hell to live without."
It is not a question of women at all, nor a question of men; it is a question of meditation and love. Meditation is the source from which joy wells up within you and starts overflowing. If you have joy enough to share, then only will your love be a contentment. If you don't have joy enough to share, your love is going to be tiring, exhausting, boring. So whenever you are with a woman you are bored and you want to get rid of her, and whenever you are alone you are bored with yourself and you want to get rid of your loneliness, and you seek and search for a woman. This is a vicious circle! You can go on moving like a pendulum from one extreme to the other your whole life. See the real problem! The real problem has nothing to do with man and woman.
The real problem has something to do with meditation and the flowering of meditation in love, in joy, in blissfulness. First meditate, be blissful, then much love will happen of its own accord. Then being with others is beautiful and being alone is also beautiful. Then it is simple, too. You don't depend on others and you don't make others dependent on you. Then it is always a friendship, a friendliness. It never becomes a relationship, it is always a relatedness. You relate, but you don't create a marriage. Marriage is out of fear, relatedness is out of love.
You relate; as long as things are moving beautifully, you share. And if you see that the moment has come to depart, because your paths separate at this crossroad, you say goodbye with great gratitude for all that the other has been to you, for all the joys and all the pleasures and all the beautiful moments that you have shared with the other. With no misery, with no pain, you simply separate. Nobody can guarantee that two persons will be happy together always, because people change. When you meet a woman she is one person, you are one person.
After ten years you will be another person, she will be another person. It is like a river: the water is continuously flowing. The people who had fallen in love are no more there, both are no more there. Now you can go on clinging to a certain promise given by somebody else -- but you have not given it. A real man of understanding never promises for tomorrow, he can only say, "For the moment." A really sincere man cannot promise at all. How can he promise? Who knows about tomorrow?
Tomorrow may come, may not come. Tomorrow may come: "I will not be the same, you will not be the same." Tomorrow may come: "You may find somebody with whom you fit more deeply, I may find somebody whom I go with more harmoniously." The world is vast. Why exhaust it today? Keep doors open, keep alternatives open. I am against marriage. It is marriage that creates problems. It is marriage that has become very ugly. The most ugly institution in the world is marriage, because it forces people to be phony: they have changed, but they go on pretending that they are the same.
One old man, eighty years old, was celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary with his wife who was seventy-five. They went to the same hotel, to the same hill-station where they had gone on their honeymoon.
The nostalgia! Now he is eighty, she is seventy-five. They booked into the same hotel and took the same room. They were trying to live those beautiful days of fifty years ago again. And when they were going to sleep, the woman said, "Have you forgotten? Are you not going to kiss me the way you kissed me on our honeymoon night?"
The old man said, "Okay." So he got up.
The woman asked, "Where are you going?"
He said, "I am going to get my teeth from the bathroom."
Everything has changed. Now this kiss without teeth or with false teeth is not going to be the same kiss. But the man says, "Okay." The journey must have been tiring, and for an eighty year- old.... But people go on behaving as if they were the same.
One old woman and one old man got married. It must have happened in America, where else! In America nobody seems to be getting old, everybody is pretending to be young.
So they went on their honeymoon. The old man took the wife's hand in his hand and pressed it for two, three minutes -- that was all they could do as far as lovemaking was concerned -- then they went to sleep.
Next day he again pressed the old woman's hand -- but this time only for one minute -- three minutes may have been too long. And the third day, just as he was going to press the woman's hand, she said, turning to the other side, "Today I have a headache."
Very few people really grow up; even if they become aged, they don't grow up. Growing old is not growing up. Real maturity comes through meditation. Learn to be silent, peaceful, still. Learn to be a no-mind. That has to be the beginning for all Sannyasins. Nothing can be done before that and everything becomes easier after that. When
you find yourself utterly happy and blissful, then even if the third world war happens and the whole world disappears leaving you alone, it won't affect you. You will be still sitting under your tree doing vipassana.
The day that moment comes in your life you can share your joy -- now you are able to give love. Before that it is going to be misery, hopes and frustrations, desires and failures, dreams... and then dust in your hand and in your mouth. Beware, don't waste time. The earlier you become attuned to no-mind, the better it is. Then many things can flower in you: love, creativity, spontaneity, joy, prayer, gratitude, God.
Question: My love-life drama now reflects an old saying of Humphrey Bogart's: Women -- they're hell to live with, and hell to live Without. What to do?
Osho : One has to pass through this hell. One has to experience both the hell of living with a woman and the hell of living without a woman. And it is not only true about women, it is exactly true about men too. So don't be a male chauvinist pig! It is applicable both ways, it is a double-edged sword. Women are also tired of living with men and they are also frustrated when they have to live alone. It is one of the most fundamental of human dilemmas; it has to be understood. You cannot live without a woman because you don't know how to live with yourself.
You are not meditative enough. Meditation is the art of living with yourself. It is nothing else than that, simply that: the art of being joyously alone. A meditator can sit joyously alone for months, for years. He does not hanker for the other, because his own inner ecstasy is so much, is so overpowering, that who bothers about the other? If the other comes into his life it is not a need, it is a luxury. And I am all for luxury, because luxury means you can enjoy it if it is there and you can enjoy it when it is not there. A need is a difficult phenomenon.
For example, bread and butter are needs, but the flowers in the garden are a luxury. You can live without the flowers, you will not die, but you cannot live without bread and butter. For the man who cannot live with himself, the other is a need, an absolute need, because whenever he is alone he is bored with himself -- so bored that he wants some occupation with somebody else. Because it is a need it becomes a dependence, you have to depend on the other. And because it becomes a dependence you hate, you rebel, you resist, because it is a slavery.
Dependence is a kind of slavery, and nobody wants to be a slave. You meet a woman – you are not able to live alone. The woman is also not able to live alone, that's why she is meeting you ; otherwise there is no need. Both are bored with themselves and both are thinking that the other will help to get rid of the boredom. Yes, in the beginning it looks like that, but only in the beginning. As they settle together, soon they see that the boredom is not destroyed -- it is not only doubled but multiplied.
Now, first they were bored with themselves, now they are bored with the other too -- because the closer you come to the other, the more you know the other, the more the other becomes almost a part of you. That's why if you see a bored couple walking by you can be certain they are married. If they are not bored you can be certain they are not married. The man must be walking with somebody else's wife, that's why there is so much joy.
When you are in love -- when you have not yet persuaded the woman and the woman has not yet persuaded you to be together forever -- you both pretend great joy. And something of it is true, too, because of the hope that "Who knows, I may come out of my boredom, my anguish, my anxiety, my aloneness. This woman may help me." And the woman is also hoping. But once you are together the hopes soon disappear, despair sets in again. Now you are bored and the problem has become multiplied. Now, how to get rid of this woman?
Because you are not meditative you need others to keep you occupied. And because you are not meditative you are not able to love either, because love is an overflowing joy. You are bored with yourself. What have you got to share with the other? Hence, being with the other also becomes hell. In that sense Jean-Paul Sartre is right that the other is hell. The other is not hell really; it only appears so. The hell exists in you, in your nonmeditativeness, in your incapacity to be alone and ecstatic. And both are unable to be alone and ecstatic.
Now both are at each mother's throats, continuously trying to snatch some happiness from each other. Both are doing that and both are beggars.
I have heard: One psychoanalyst met another psychoanalyst on the street. The first said to the other, "You look fine. How am I?" Nobody knows about himself, nobody is acquainted with himself. We only see others' faces. A woman looks beautiful, a man looks beautiful, smiling, all smiles. We don't know his anguish. Maybe all those smiles are just a facade to deceive others and to deceive himself. Maybe behind those smiles there are great tears. Maybe he is afraid if he does not smile he may start weeping and crying.
But when you see the other you simply see the surface, you fall in love with the surface. But when you come closer, you soon know that the inner depths of the other person are as dark as your own. He is a beggar just as you are. Now... two beggars begging from each other. Then it becomes hell.
Yes, you are right: "Women -- they're hell to live with, and hell to live without."
It is not a question of women at all, nor a question of men; it is a question of meditation and love. Meditation is the source from which joy wells up within you and starts overflowing. If you have joy enough to share, then only will your love be a contentment. If you don't have joy enough to share, your love is going to be tiring, exhausting, boring. So whenever you are with a woman you are bored and you want to get rid of her, and whenever you are alone you are bored with yourself and you want to get rid of your loneliness, and you seek and search for a woman. This is a vicious circle! You can go on moving like a pendulum from one extreme to the other your whole life. See the real problem! The real problem has nothing to do with man and woman.
The real problem has something to do with meditation and the flowering of meditation in love, in joy, in blissfulness. First meditate, be blissful, then much love will happen of its own accord. Then being with others is beautiful and being alone is also beautiful. Then it is simple, too. You don't depend on others and you don't make others dependent on you. Then it is always a friendship, a friendliness. It never becomes a relationship, it is always a relatedness. You relate, but you don't create a marriage. Marriage is out of fear, relatedness is out of love.
You relate; as long as things are moving beautifully, you share. And if you see that the moment has come to depart, because your paths separate at this crossroad, you say goodbye with great gratitude for all that the other has been to you, for all the joys and all the pleasures and all the beautiful moments that you have shared with the other. With no misery, with no pain, you simply separate. Nobody can guarantee that two persons will be happy together always, because people change. When you meet a woman she is one person, you are one person.
After ten years you will be another person, she will be another person. It is like a river: the water is continuously flowing. The people who had fallen in love are no more there, both are no more there. Now you can go on clinging to a certain promise given by somebody else -- but you have not given it. A real man of understanding never promises for tomorrow, he can only say, "For the moment." A really sincere man cannot promise at all. How can he promise? Who knows about tomorrow?
Tomorrow may come, may not come. Tomorrow may come: "I will not be the same, you will not be the same." Tomorrow may come: "You may find somebody with whom you fit more deeply, I may find somebody whom I go with more harmoniously." The world is vast. Why exhaust it today? Keep doors open, keep alternatives open. I am against marriage. It is marriage that creates problems. It is marriage that has become very ugly. The most ugly institution in the world is marriage, because it forces people to be phony: they have changed, but they go on pretending that they are the same.
One old man, eighty years old, was celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary with his wife who was seventy-five. They went to the same hotel, to the same hill-station where they had gone on their honeymoon.
The nostalgia! Now he is eighty, she is seventy-five. They booked into the same hotel and took the same room. They were trying to live those beautiful days of fifty years ago again. And when they were going to sleep, the woman said, "Have you forgotten? Are you not going to kiss me the way you kissed me on our honeymoon night?"
The old man said, "Okay." So he got up.
The woman asked, "Where are you going?"
He said, "I am going to get my teeth from the bathroom."
Everything has changed. Now this kiss without teeth or with false teeth is not going to be the same kiss. But the man says, "Okay." The journey must have been tiring, and for an eighty year- old.... But people go on behaving as if they were the same.
One old woman and one old man got married. It must have happened in America, where else! In America nobody seems to be getting old, everybody is pretending to be young.
So they went on their honeymoon. The old man took the wife's hand in his hand and pressed it for two, three minutes -- that was all they could do as far as lovemaking was concerned -- then they went to sleep.
Next day he again pressed the old woman's hand -- but this time only for one minute -- three minutes may have been too long. And the third day, just as he was going to press the woman's hand, she said, turning to the other side, "Today I have a headache."
Very few people really grow up; even if they become aged, they don't grow up. Growing old is not growing up. Real maturity comes through meditation. Learn to be silent, peaceful, still. Learn to be a no-mind. That has to be the beginning for all Sannyasins. Nothing can be done before that and everything becomes easier after that. When
you find yourself utterly happy and blissful, then even if the third world war happens and the whole world disappears leaving you alone, it won't affect you. You will be still sitting under your tree doing vipassana.
The day that moment comes in your life you can share your joy -- now you are able to give love. Before that it is going to be misery, hopes and frustrations, desires and failures, dreams... and then dust in your hand and in your mouth. Beware, don't waste time. The earlier you become attuned to no-mind, the better it is. Then many things can flower in you: love, creativity, spontaneity, joy, prayer, gratitude, God.
Osho On Christian Dictum Love Thy Neighbour As Thyself
Osho on Christian dictum love thy neighbor as thyself
Question: The Christian dictum is : love thy neighbor as thyself. But how can I love others if I don't love myself?
Osho: The first and foremost thing is to be loving towards yourself. Don't be hard; be soft. Care about yourself. Learn how to forgive yourself -- again and again and again -- seven times, seventy-seven times, seven hundred seventy-seven times. Learn how to forgive yourself. Don't be hard; don't be antagonistic towards yourself. Then you will flower.
And in that flowering you will attract some other flower. It is natural. Stones attract stones; flowers attract flowers. And then there is a relationship which has grace, which has beauty, which has a benediction in it. And if you can find such a relationship, your relationship will grow into prayer... your love will become an ecstasy... and through love you will know what God is.
Question: The Christian dictum is : love thy neighbor as thyself. But how can I love others if I don't love myself?
Osho: The first and foremost thing is to be loving towards yourself. Don't be hard; be soft. Care about yourself. Learn how to forgive yourself -- again and again and again -- seven times, seventy-seven times, seven hundred seventy-seven times. Learn how to forgive yourself. Don't be hard; don't be antagonistic towards yourself. Then you will flower.
And in that flowering you will attract some other flower. It is natural. Stones attract stones; flowers attract flowers. And then there is a relationship which has grace, which has beauty, which has a benediction in it. And if you can find such a relationship, your relationship will grow into prayer... your love will become an ecstasy... and through love you will know what God is.
Osho On Relationships And Living Partners
Osho on Relationships and Living Partners
Question: Would you talk to us about our living partners -- our Wives, husbands and lovers. When should we persevere with a partner, and when Should we abandon a relationship as hopeless -- or even Destructive?
Osho : Relationship is one of the mysteries. And because it exists between two persons, it depends on both. Whenever two persons meet, a new world is created. Just by their meeting, a new phenomenon comes into existence -- which was not before, which never existed before. And through that new phenomenon, both persons are changed and transformed. Unrelated, you are one thing; related, immediately you become something else. A new thing has happened. A woman when she becomes a lover is no longer the same woman.
A man when he becomes a father is no longer the same man. A child is born, but we miss one point completely; the moment the child is born, the mother is also born. This never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother never. And a mother is something absolutely new. Relationship is created by you, but then, in its turn, relationship creates you. Two persons meet, that means two worlds meet. It is not a simple thing but very complex, the most complex.
Each person is a world unto himself or herself, a complex mystery with a long past and an eternal future. In the beginning only peripheries meet. But if the relationship grows intimate, becomes closer, becomes deeper, then by and by centers start meeting. When centers meet, it is called love. When peripheries meet, it is acquaintance. You touch the person from the without, just from the boundary, then it is acquaintance. Many times you start calling your acquaintance your love. Then you are in a fallacy. Acquaintance is not love.
Love is very rare. To meet a person at his center is to pass through a revolution yourself, because if you want to meet a person at his center, you will have to allow that person to reach to your center also. You will have to become vulnerable, absolutely vulnerable, open. It is risky. To allow somebody to reach your center is risky, dangerous, because you never know what that person will do to you. And once all your secrets are known, once your hiddenness has become unhidden, once you are exposed completely, what that other person will do, you never know. The fear is there. That's why we never open.
Just acquaintance, and we think that love has happened. Peripheries meet, and we think we have met. You are not your periphery. Really, the periphery is the boundary where you end, just the fencing around you. It is not you! The periphery is the place where you end and the world begins. Even husbands and wives who may have lived together for many years may be just acquaintances. They may not have known each other. And the more you live with someone, the more you forget completely that the centers have remained unknown.
So the first thing to be understood is: don't take acquaintance as love. You may be making love, you may be sexually related, but sex is also peripheral. Unless centers meet, sex is just a meeting of two bodies. And a meeting of two bodies is not your meeting. Sex also remains acquaintance --physical, bodily, but still acquaintance. You can allow somebody to enter to your center only when you are not afraid, when you are not fearful. So I say to you that there are two types of living. One: fear-oriented; one: love-oriented.
Fear-oriented living can never lead you into deep relationship. You remain afraid, and the other cannot be allowed, cannot be allowed to penetrate you to your very core. To an extent you allow the other and then the wall comes and everything stops. The love-oriented person is the religious person. The love-oriented person means one who is not afraid of the future, one who is not afraid of the result and the consequence, who lives here and now. Don't be bothered about the result. That is the fear-oriented mind. Don't think about what will happen out of it.
Just be here, and act totally. Don't calculate. A fear-oriented man is always calculating, planning, arranging, safeguarding. His whole life is lost in this way.
I have heard about an old Zen monk. He was on his deathbed. The last day had come, and he declared that that evening he would be no more. So followers, disciples, friends started coming. He had many lovers. They all started coming. From far and wide people gathered. One of his old disciples, when he heard that the master was going to die, ran to the market.
Somebody asked: The master is dying in his hut, why are you going to the market?
The old disciple said: I know that my master loves a particular type of cake, so Iam going to purchase the cake.
It was difficult to find the cake, because now it had gone out of fashion, but by the evening somehow he managed. He came running with the cake. And everybody was worried -- it was as if the master was waiting for someone. He would open his eyes and look, and close his eyes again.
And when this disciple came, he said: Okay, so you have come. Where is the cake? The disciple produced the cake -- and he was very happy that the master asked about the cake. Dying, the master took the cake in his hand, but his hand was not trembling. He was very old, but his hand was not trembling. So somebody asked: You are so old and just on the verge of dying. The last breath is soon to leave you, but your hand is not trembling.
The master said: I never tremble, because there is no fear. My body has become old, but I am still young, and I will remain young even when the body is gone. Then he took a bite, started munching the cake. And then somebody asked: What is your last message, Master? You will be leaving us soon. What do you want us to remember?
The master smiled and said: Ah, this cake is delicious.
This is a man who lives in the here and now: This cake is delicious. Even death is irrelevant. The next moment is meaningless. THIS moment this cake is delicious. If you can be in this moment, this present moment, this presentness, the plenitude, then only can you love.
Love is a rare flowering. It happens only sometimes. Millions and millions of people live in the false attitude that they are lovers. They believe that they love, but that is their belief only. Love is a rare flowering. Sometimes it happens. It is rare because it can happen only when there is no fear, never before. That means love can happen only to a very deeply spiritual, religious person. Sex is possible for all. Acquaintance is possible for all. Not love. When you are not afraid, then there is nothing to hide, then you can be open, then you can withdraw all boundaries. And then you can invite the other to penetrate you to the very core.
And remember, if you allow somebody to penetrate you deeply, the other will allow you to penetrate into himself or herself, because when you allow somebody to penetrate you, trust is created. When you are not afraid, the other becomes fearless. In your love, fear is always there. The husband is afraid of the wife, the wife is afraid of the husband. Lovers are always afraid. Then it is not love. Then it is just an arrangement of two fearful persons depending on each other, fighting, exploiting, manipulating, controlling, dominating, possessing -- but it is not love.
If you can allow love to happen, there is no need for prayer, there is no need for meditation, there is no need for any church, any temple. You can completely forget God if you can love -- because through love, everything will have happened to you: meditation, prayer, God. EVERYTHING will have happened to you. That's what Jesus means when he says: Love is God. But love is difficult. Fear has to be dropped. And this is the strange thing, that you are so afraid and you have nothing to lose.
Kabir has said somewhere: I look into people. They are so much afraid, but I can't see why -- because they have nothing to lose. Says Kabir: They are like a person who is naked, but never goes to take a bath in the river because he is afraid -- where will he dry his clothes? This is the situation you are in -- naked, with no clothes, but always afraid about the clothes. What have you got to lose? Nothing. This body will be taken by death. Before it is taken by death, give it to love. Whatsoever you have will be taken away.
Before it is taken away, why not share it? That is the Only way of possessing it. If you can share and give, you are the master. It is going to be taken away. There is nothing which you can retain forever. Death will destroy everything. So, if you follow me rightly, the struggle is between death and love. If you can give, there will be no death. Before anything can be taken away from you, you will have already given it, you will have made it a gift. There can be no death. For a lover there is no death.
For a non-lover, every moment is a death, because every moment something is being snatched away from him. The body is disappearing, he is losing every moment. And then there will be death, and everything will be annihilated. What is the fear? Why are you so afraid? Even if everything is known about you and you are an open book, why fear? How can it harm you? Just false conceptions, just conditionings given by the society, that you have to hide, that you have to protect yourself, that you have to be constantly in a fighting mood, that everybody is an enemy, that everybody is against you.
Nobody is against you! Even if you feel somebody is against you, he too is not against you -- because everybody is concerned with himself, not with you. There is nothing to fear. This has to be realized before a real relationship can happen. There is nothing to fear. Meditate on it. And then allow the other to enter you, invite the other to enter you. Don't create any barrier anywhere, become a passage always open, no locks, no doors on you, no closed doors on you. Then love is possible.
When two centers meet, there is love. And love is an alchemical phenomenon -- just like hydrogen and oxygen meet and a new thing, water, is created. You can have hydrogen, you can have oxygen, but if you are thirsty, they will be useless. You can have as much oxygen as you want, as much hydrogen as you like, but the thirst will not go. When two centers meet a new thing is created. That new thing is love. And it is just like water, the thirst of many, many lives is satisfied. Suddenly you become content. That is the visible sign of love; you become content, as if you have achieved everything. There is nothing to achieve now; You have reached the goal.
There is no further goal, destiny is fulfilled. The seed has become a flower, has come to its total flowering. Deep contentment is the visible sign of love. Whenever a person is in love, he is in deep contentment. Love cannot be seen, but contentment, the deep satisfaction around him...his every breath, his every movement, his very being -- content. You may be surprised when I say to you that love makes you desireless, but desire is with discontent. You desire because you don't have. You desire because you think if you have something it will give you contentment.
Desire is out of discontent. When there is love and two centers have met and dissolved and merged, and a new alchemical quality is born, contentment is there. It is as if the whole existence has stopped -- no movement. Then the present moment is the only moment. And then you can say: Ah, this cake is delicious. Even death doesn't mean anything to a man who is in love. So I say to you, love will make you desireless. Be fearless, drop fears, be open. Allow some center to meet the center within you. you will be reborn through it, a new quality of being will be created.
This quality of being says: This is god. God is not an argument, it is a fulfillment, a feeling of fulfillment. You may have observed that whenever you are discontent, you want to deny God. Whenever you are dissatisfied, your whole being wants to say: There is no God. Atheism is not out of logic, it is out of discontent. You may rationalize it -- that's another thing. You may not say you are an atheist because you are discontent. You may say: There is no God and I have got proofs. But that is not the true thing.
If you are satisfied, suddenly your whole being says: THERE is god. Suddenly you feel it! The whole existence becomes divine. If love is there you will be really for the first time in the feeling that existence is divine and everything is a blessing. But much has to be done before this can happen. Much has to be destroyed before this can happen. You have to destroy all that creates barriers in you.
Make love a SADHANA, an inner discipline. Don't allow it just to be a frivolous thing. Don't allow it just to be an occupation of the mind. Don't allow it just to be a bodily satisfaction. Make it an inner search, and take the other as a help, as a friend. If you have heard anything about Tantra, you will know that Tantra says: If you can find a consort, a friend, a woman or a man, who is ready to move with you towards the inner center, who is ready to move with you to the highest peak of relationship, then this relationship will become meditative.
Then through this relationship you will achieve the ultimate relationship. Then the other becomes just a door. Let me explain it: if you love a person, by and by first the periphery of the person disappears, the form of the person disappears. You come more and more in contact with the formless, the inner. The form becomes, by and by, vague and disappears. And if you go deeper, then even this formless individual starts disappearing and melting. Then the beyond opens. Then that particular individual was just a door, an opening.
And through your lover, you find the divine. Because we cannot love, we need so many religious rituals. They are substitutes, and very poor substitutes. A Meera needs no temple to go to. The whole existence is her temple. She can dance before a tree and the tree becomes Krishna. She can sing before a bird and the bird becomes Krishna. She creates her Krishna around her everywhere. Her love is such that wherever she looks the door opens and the Krishna is revealed, the beloved is revealed.
But the first glimpse will always come through an individual. It is difficult to be in contact with the universal. It is so big, so vast, so beginningless, endless. From where to start? From where to move into it? The individual is the door. Fall in love. And don't make it a struggle. Make it a deep allowance for the other, just an invitation. And allow the other to penetrate you without any conditions. And suddenly the other disappears and God is there. If your lover or beloved cannot become divine, then nothing in this world can become divine. Then all your religious talk is just nonsense. This can happen with a child. This can happen with an animal, your dog.
If you can be in deep relationship with a dog, it can happen -- the dog becomes divine! So it is not a question of man and woman only. That is one of the deepest sources of the divine and it reaches you naturally, but it can happen from anywhere. The basic key is this: you should allow the other to penetrate you to your very deepest core, to the very ground of your being. But we go on deceiving ourselves. We think we love. And if you think that you love, then there is no possibility for love to happen -- because if this is love, then everything is closed.
Make fresh efforts. Try to find in the other the real being that is hidden. Don't take anybody for granted. Every individual is such a mystery that if you go on and on into him it is endless. But we get bored with the other -- because just the periphery, and always the periphery. I was reading a story: A man was very ill and he tried all types of "pathies," but nothing would help. Then he went to a hypnotist and the hypnotist gave him a mantra, to repeat continuously: I am not ill.
For at least fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes at night: I am not ill, I am healthy. And the whole day, whenever you remember, repeat it. Within a few days he started getting better. And within weeks he was absolutely okay. Then he told his wife: This has been a miracle! Should I go to this hypnotist for another miracle also? Because lately I am feeling no sexual appetite and the sexual relationship has almost stopped. There is no desire.
The wife was happy. She said: You go -- because she was feeling very frustrated. The man went to the hypnotist. He came back, his wife asked: What mantra, what suggestion now has he given? The man wouldn't tell her. But within weeks his sexual appetite started returning. He started feeling desire again. So the wife was very much puzzled.
She continuously persisted in asking, but the man would laugh and would not say anything. So one day she tried, when he was in the bathroom in the morning doing his meditation, that fifteen-minute mantra, she tried to hear what he was saying. And he was saying: She is not my wife. She is not my wife. She is not my wife.
We take persons for granted. Somebody is your wife -- relationship is finished. Somebody is your husband -- relationship is finished. Now there is no adventure, the other has become a thing, a commodity. The other is not now a mystery to be searched the other is no longer new.
Remember, everything goes dead with age. The periphery is always old, and the center is always new. The periphery cannot remain new, because every moment it is getting old, stale. The center is always fresh and young. Your soul is neither a child, nor a young man, nor an old man. Your soul is simply eternally fresh. It has no age. You can experiment with it: you may be young, you may be old, just close your eyes and find out. Try to feel how your center is -- old? young? You will feel that the center is neither.
It is always new, it never gets old. Why? Because the center doesn't belong to time. In the process of time, everything becomes old. A man is born -- the body has started becoming old already! When we say that a child is one week old, it means one week of oldness has penetrated into the child. The child has already passed seven days towards death, he has completed seven days of dying. He is moving towards death -- sooner or later he will be dead. Whatsoever comes in time becomes old. The moment it enters time, it is already becoming old.
Your body is old, your periphery is old. You cannot be eternally in love with it. But your center is always fresh, it is eternally young. Once you are in contact with it, love is an every-moment discovery. And then the honeymoon never ends. If it ends it was not a honeymoon at all -- it was just an acquaintance. And the last thing to remember is: in the relationship of love you always blame the other if something goes wrong. If something is not happening as it should, the other is responsible. This will destroy the whole possibility of future growth.
Remember: you are always responsible, and change yourself. Drop those qualities which create trouble. Make love a self-transformation. As they say in salesmen's courses: The customer is always right. I would like to say to you: In the world of relationship and love, you are always in the wrong, the other is always right. And this is how lovers always feel. If there is love, they always feel: Something is wrong with me if things are not happening as they should. And both feel the same way! Then things grow, then centers open, then boundaries merge.
But if you think that the other is wrong, you are closing yourself and the other. And the other also thinks that you are wrong. Thoughts are infectious. If you think the other is wrong even if you have not said it, even if you are smiling and showing that you don't think the other is wrong -- the other has got the point -- through your eyes, through your gestures, through your face. Even if you are an actor, a great actor, and you can just arrange your face, your gestures as you like, then too the unconscious is continuously sending signals: You are wrong.
And when you say that the other is wrong, the other starts feeling that you are wrong. Relationship is destroyed on this rock, and then people become closed. If you say somebody is wrong, somebody starts protecting, safeguarding. Then closure happens.
Remember always: in love, you are always wrong. And then the possibility will open and the other will also feel the same. We create the feeling in the other. When lovers are close, immediately thoughts go jumping from one to the other. Even if they are not saying anything, they are silent, they communicate. Language is for non-lovers, those who are not in love. For lovers, silence is enough language. Without saying anything, they go on speaking. If you take love as sadhana, then don't say the other is wrong.
Just try to find out: somewhere, something must be wrong in you, and drop that wrongness. It is going to be difficult because it is going to be against the ego. It is going to be difficult because it will hurt your pride. It is going to be difficult because this will not be dominating, possessing. You will not be more powerful through possessing the other. This will destroy your ego -- that's why it is going to be difficult.
But destruction of the ego is the point, the goal. From wherever you like to approach the inner world -- from love, from meditation, from yoga, from prayer -- whatsoever the path you choose, the goal is the same: the destruction of the ego, throwing the ego away. Through love it can be done very easily. And it is so natural! Love is the natural religion.
Question: Would you talk to us about our living partners -- our Wives, husbands and lovers. When should we persevere with a partner, and when Should we abandon a relationship as hopeless -- or even Destructive?
Osho : Relationship is one of the mysteries. And because it exists between two persons, it depends on both. Whenever two persons meet, a new world is created. Just by their meeting, a new phenomenon comes into existence -- which was not before, which never existed before. And through that new phenomenon, both persons are changed and transformed. Unrelated, you are one thing; related, immediately you become something else. A new thing has happened. A woman when she becomes a lover is no longer the same woman.
A man when he becomes a father is no longer the same man. A child is born, but we miss one point completely; the moment the child is born, the mother is also born. This never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother never. And a mother is something absolutely new. Relationship is created by you, but then, in its turn, relationship creates you. Two persons meet, that means two worlds meet. It is not a simple thing but very complex, the most complex.
Each person is a world unto himself or herself, a complex mystery with a long past and an eternal future. In the beginning only peripheries meet. But if the relationship grows intimate, becomes closer, becomes deeper, then by and by centers start meeting. When centers meet, it is called love. When peripheries meet, it is acquaintance. You touch the person from the without, just from the boundary, then it is acquaintance. Many times you start calling your acquaintance your love. Then you are in a fallacy. Acquaintance is not love.
Love is very rare. To meet a person at his center is to pass through a revolution yourself, because if you want to meet a person at his center, you will have to allow that person to reach to your center also. You will have to become vulnerable, absolutely vulnerable, open. It is risky. To allow somebody to reach your center is risky, dangerous, because you never know what that person will do to you. And once all your secrets are known, once your hiddenness has become unhidden, once you are exposed completely, what that other person will do, you never know. The fear is there. That's why we never open.
Just acquaintance, and we think that love has happened. Peripheries meet, and we think we have met. You are not your periphery. Really, the periphery is the boundary where you end, just the fencing around you. It is not you! The periphery is the place where you end and the world begins. Even husbands and wives who may have lived together for many years may be just acquaintances. They may not have known each other. And the more you live with someone, the more you forget completely that the centers have remained unknown.
So the first thing to be understood is: don't take acquaintance as love. You may be making love, you may be sexually related, but sex is also peripheral. Unless centers meet, sex is just a meeting of two bodies. And a meeting of two bodies is not your meeting. Sex also remains acquaintance --physical, bodily, but still acquaintance. You can allow somebody to enter to your center only when you are not afraid, when you are not fearful. So I say to you that there are two types of living. One: fear-oriented; one: love-oriented.
Fear-oriented living can never lead you into deep relationship. You remain afraid, and the other cannot be allowed, cannot be allowed to penetrate you to your very core. To an extent you allow the other and then the wall comes and everything stops. The love-oriented person is the religious person. The love-oriented person means one who is not afraid of the future, one who is not afraid of the result and the consequence, who lives here and now. Don't be bothered about the result. That is the fear-oriented mind. Don't think about what will happen out of it.
Just be here, and act totally. Don't calculate. A fear-oriented man is always calculating, planning, arranging, safeguarding. His whole life is lost in this way.
I have heard about an old Zen monk. He was on his deathbed. The last day had come, and he declared that that evening he would be no more. So followers, disciples, friends started coming. He had many lovers. They all started coming. From far and wide people gathered. One of his old disciples, when he heard that the master was going to die, ran to the market.
Somebody asked: The master is dying in his hut, why are you going to the market?
The old disciple said: I know that my master loves a particular type of cake, so Iam going to purchase the cake.
It was difficult to find the cake, because now it had gone out of fashion, but by the evening somehow he managed. He came running with the cake. And everybody was worried -- it was as if the master was waiting for someone. He would open his eyes and look, and close his eyes again.
And when this disciple came, he said: Okay, so you have come. Where is the cake? The disciple produced the cake -- and he was very happy that the master asked about the cake. Dying, the master took the cake in his hand, but his hand was not trembling. He was very old, but his hand was not trembling. So somebody asked: You are so old and just on the verge of dying. The last breath is soon to leave you, but your hand is not trembling.
The master said: I never tremble, because there is no fear. My body has become old, but I am still young, and I will remain young even when the body is gone. Then he took a bite, started munching the cake. And then somebody asked: What is your last message, Master? You will be leaving us soon. What do you want us to remember?
The master smiled and said: Ah, this cake is delicious.
This is a man who lives in the here and now: This cake is delicious. Even death is irrelevant. The next moment is meaningless. THIS moment this cake is delicious. If you can be in this moment, this present moment, this presentness, the plenitude, then only can you love.
Love is a rare flowering. It happens only sometimes. Millions and millions of people live in the false attitude that they are lovers. They believe that they love, but that is their belief only. Love is a rare flowering. Sometimes it happens. It is rare because it can happen only when there is no fear, never before. That means love can happen only to a very deeply spiritual, religious person. Sex is possible for all. Acquaintance is possible for all. Not love. When you are not afraid, then there is nothing to hide, then you can be open, then you can withdraw all boundaries. And then you can invite the other to penetrate you to the very core.
And remember, if you allow somebody to penetrate you deeply, the other will allow you to penetrate into himself or herself, because when you allow somebody to penetrate you, trust is created. When you are not afraid, the other becomes fearless. In your love, fear is always there. The husband is afraid of the wife, the wife is afraid of the husband. Lovers are always afraid. Then it is not love. Then it is just an arrangement of two fearful persons depending on each other, fighting, exploiting, manipulating, controlling, dominating, possessing -- but it is not love.
If you can allow love to happen, there is no need for prayer, there is no need for meditation, there is no need for any church, any temple. You can completely forget God if you can love -- because through love, everything will have happened to you: meditation, prayer, God. EVERYTHING will have happened to you. That's what Jesus means when he says: Love is God. But love is difficult. Fear has to be dropped. And this is the strange thing, that you are so afraid and you have nothing to lose.
Kabir has said somewhere: I look into people. They are so much afraid, but I can't see why -- because they have nothing to lose. Says Kabir: They are like a person who is naked, but never goes to take a bath in the river because he is afraid -- where will he dry his clothes? This is the situation you are in -- naked, with no clothes, but always afraid about the clothes. What have you got to lose? Nothing. This body will be taken by death. Before it is taken by death, give it to love. Whatsoever you have will be taken away.
Before it is taken away, why not share it? That is the Only way of possessing it. If you can share and give, you are the master. It is going to be taken away. There is nothing which you can retain forever. Death will destroy everything. So, if you follow me rightly, the struggle is between death and love. If you can give, there will be no death. Before anything can be taken away from you, you will have already given it, you will have made it a gift. There can be no death. For a lover there is no death.
For a non-lover, every moment is a death, because every moment something is being snatched away from him. The body is disappearing, he is losing every moment. And then there will be death, and everything will be annihilated. What is the fear? Why are you so afraid? Even if everything is known about you and you are an open book, why fear? How can it harm you? Just false conceptions, just conditionings given by the society, that you have to hide, that you have to protect yourself, that you have to be constantly in a fighting mood, that everybody is an enemy, that everybody is against you.
Nobody is against you! Even if you feel somebody is against you, he too is not against you -- because everybody is concerned with himself, not with you. There is nothing to fear. This has to be realized before a real relationship can happen. There is nothing to fear. Meditate on it. And then allow the other to enter you, invite the other to enter you. Don't create any barrier anywhere, become a passage always open, no locks, no doors on you, no closed doors on you. Then love is possible.
When two centers meet, there is love. And love is an alchemical phenomenon -- just like hydrogen and oxygen meet and a new thing, water, is created. You can have hydrogen, you can have oxygen, but if you are thirsty, they will be useless. You can have as much oxygen as you want, as much hydrogen as you like, but the thirst will not go. When two centers meet a new thing is created. That new thing is love. And it is just like water, the thirst of many, many lives is satisfied. Suddenly you become content. That is the visible sign of love; you become content, as if you have achieved everything. There is nothing to achieve now; You have reached the goal.
There is no further goal, destiny is fulfilled. The seed has become a flower, has come to its total flowering. Deep contentment is the visible sign of love. Whenever a person is in love, he is in deep contentment. Love cannot be seen, but contentment, the deep satisfaction around him...his every breath, his every movement, his very being -- content. You may be surprised when I say to you that love makes you desireless, but desire is with discontent. You desire because you don't have. You desire because you think if you have something it will give you contentment.
Desire is out of discontent. When there is love and two centers have met and dissolved and merged, and a new alchemical quality is born, contentment is there. It is as if the whole existence has stopped -- no movement. Then the present moment is the only moment. And then you can say: Ah, this cake is delicious. Even death doesn't mean anything to a man who is in love. So I say to you, love will make you desireless. Be fearless, drop fears, be open. Allow some center to meet the center within you. you will be reborn through it, a new quality of being will be created.
This quality of being says: This is god. God is not an argument, it is a fulfillment, a feeling of fulfillment. You may have observed that whenever you are discontent, you want to deny God. Whenever you are dissatisfied, your whole being wants to say: There is no God. Atheism is not out of logic, it is out of discontent. You may rationalize it -- that's another thing. You may not say you are an atheist because you are discontent. You may say: There is no God and I have got proofs. But that is not the true thing.
If you are satisfied, suddenly your whole being says: THERE is god. Suddenly you feel it! The whole existence becomes divine. If love is there you will be really for the first time in the feeling that existence is divine and everything is a blessing. But much has to be done before this can happen. Much has to be destroyed before this can happen. You have to destroy all that creates barriers in you.
Make love a SADHANA, an inner discipline. Don't allow it just to be a frivolous thing. Don't allow it just to be an occupation of the mind. Don't allow it just to be a bodily satisfaction. Make it an inner search, and take the other as a help, as a friend. If you have heard anything about Tantra, you will know that Tantra says: If you can find a consort, a friend, a woman or a man, who is ready to move with you towards the inner center, who is ready to move with you to the highest peak of relationship, then this relationship will become meditative.
Then through this relationship you will achieve the ultimate relationship. Then the other becomes just a door. Let me explain it: if you love a person, by and by first the periphery of the person disappears, the form of the person disappears. You come more and more in contact with the formless, the inner. The form becomes, by and by, vague and disappears. And if you go deeper, then even this formless individual starts disappearing and melting. Then the beyond opens. Then that particular individual was just a door, an opening.
And through your lover, you find the divine. Because we cannot love, we need so many religious rituals. They are substitutes, and very poor substitutes. A Meera needs no temple to go to. The whole existence is her temple. She can dance before a tree and the tree becomes Krishna. She can sing before a bird and the bird becomes Krishna. She creates her Krishna around her everywhere. Her love is such that wherever she looks the door opens and the Krishna is revealed, the beloved is revealed.
But the first glimpse will always come through an individual. It is difficult to be in contact with the universal. It is so big, so vast, so beginningless, endless. From where to start? From where to move into it? The individual is the door. Fall in love. And don't make it a struggle. Make it a deep allowance for the other, just an invitation. And allow the other to penetrate you without any conditions. And suddenly the other disappears and God is there. If your lover or beloved cannot become divine, then nothing in this world can become divine. Then all your religious talk is just nonsense. This can happen with a child. This can happen with an animal, your dog.
If you can be in deep relationship with a dog, it can happen -- the dog becomes divine! So it is not a question of man and woman only. That is one of the deepest sources of the divine and it reaches you naturally, but it can happen from anywhere. The basic key is this: you should allow the other to penetrate you to your very deepest core, to the very ground of your being. But we go on deceiving ourselves. We think we love. And if you think that you love, then there is no possibility for love to happen -- because if this is love, then everything is closed.
Make fresh efforts. Try to find in the other the real being that is hidden. Don't take anybody for granted. Every individual is such a mystery that if you go on and on into him it is endless. But we get bored with the other -- because just the periphery, and always the periphery. I was reading a story: A man was very ill and he tried all types of "pathies," but nothing would help. Then he went to a hypnotist and the hypnotist gave him a mantra, to repeat continuously: I am not ill.
For at least fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes at night: I am not ill, I am healthy. And the whole day, whenever you remember, repeat it. Within a few days he started getting better. And within weeks he was absolutely okay. Then he told his wife: This has been a miracle! Should I go to this hypnotist for another miracle also? Because lately I am feeling no sexual appetite and the sexual relationship has almost stopped. There is no desire.
The wife was happy. She said: You go -- because she was feeling very frustrated. The man went to the hypnotist. He came back, his wife asked: What mantra, what suggestion now has he given? The man wouldn't tell her. But within weeks his sexual appetite started returning. He started feeling desire again. So the wife was very much puzzled.
She continuously persisted in asking, but the man would laugh and would not say anything. So one day she tried, when he was in the bathroom in the morning doing his meditation, that fifteen-minute mantra, she tried to hear what he was saying. And he was saying: She is not my wife. She is not my wife. She is not my wife.
We take persons for granted. Somebody is your wife -- relationship is finished. Somebody is your husband -- relationship is finished. Now there is no adventure, the other has become a thing, a commodity. The other is not now a mystery to be searched the other is no longer new.
Remember, everything goes dead with age. The periphery is always old, and the center is always new. The periphery cannot remain new, because every moment it is getting old, stale. The center is always fresh and young. Your soul is neither a child, nor a young man, nor an old man. Your soul is simply eternally fresh. It has no age. You can experiment with it: you may be young, you may be old, just close your eyes and find out. Try to feel how your center is -- old? young? You will feel that the center is neither.
It is always new, it never gets old. Why? Because the center doesn't belong to time. In the process of time, everything becomes old. A man is born -- the body has started becoming old already! When we say that a child is one week old, it means one week of oldness has penetrated into the child. The child has already passed seven days towards death, he has completed seven days of dying. He is moving towards death -- sooner or later he will be dead. Whatsoever comes in time becomes old. The moment it enters time, it is already becoming old.
Your body is old, your periphery is old. You cannot be eternally in love with it. But your center is always fresh, it is eternally young. Once you are in contact with it, love is an every-moment discovery. And then the honeymoon never ends. If it ends it was not a honeymoon at all -- it was just an acquaintance. And the last thing to remember is: in the relationship of love you always blame the other if something goes wrong. If something is not happening as it should, the other is responsible. This will destroy the whole possibility of future growth.
Remember: you are always responsible, and change yourself. Drop those qualities which create trouble. Make love a self-transformation. As they say in salesmen's courses: The customer is always right. I would like to say to you: In the world of relationship and love, you are always in the wrong, the other is always right. And this is how lovers always feel. If there is love, they always feel: Something is wrong with me if things are not happening as they should. And both feel the same way! Then things grow, then centers open, then boundaries merge.
But if you think that the other is wrong, you are closing yourself and the other. And the other also thinks that you are wrong. Thoughts are infectious. If you think the other is wrong even if you have not said it, even if you are smiling and showing that you don't think the other is wrong -- the other has got the point -- through your eyes, through your gestures, through your face. Even if you are an actor, a great actor, and you can just arrange your face, your gestures as you like, then too the unconscious is continuously sending signals: You are wrong.
And when you say that the other is wrong, the other starts feeling that you are wrong. Relationship is destroyed on this rock, and then people become closed. If you say somebody is wrong, somebody starts protecting, safeguarding. Then closure happens.
Remember always: in love, you are always wrong. And then the possibility will open and the other will also feel the same. We create the feeling in the other. When lovers are close, immediately thoughts go jumping from one to the other. Even if they are not saying anything, they are silent, they communicate. Language is for non-lovers, those who are not in love. For lovers, silence is enough language. Without saying anything, they go on speaking. If you take love as sadhana, then don't say the other is wrong.
Just try to find out: somewhere, something must be wrong in you, and drop that wrongness. It is going to be difficult because it is going to be against the ego. It is going to be difficult because it will hurt your pride. It is going to be difficult because this will not be dominating, possessing. You will not be more powerful through possessing the other. This will destroy your ego -- that's why it is going to be difficult.
But destruction of the ego is the point, the goal. From wherever you like to approach the inner world -- from love, from meditation, from yoga, from prayer -- whatsoever the path you choose, the goal is the same: the destruction of the ego, throwing the ego away. Through love it can be done very easily. And it is so natural! Love is the natural religion.
Osho - Why Do You Ask Some People To Get Married
Osho on Marriage - Marriage should be transcended
Question - Why do you appear to put down Marriage and yet tell people to get Married?
Osho - This is from Anurag. To me, marriage is a dead thing. It is an institution, and you cannot live in an institution; only mad people live in institutions. It is a substitute for love. Love is dangerous: to be in love is to be in a storm, constantly. You need courage and you need awareness, and you are to be ready for anything. There is no security in love; love is insecure. Marriage is a security: the registry office, the police, the court are behind it. The state, the society, the religion -- they are all behind it. Marriage is a social phenomenon. Love is individual, personal, intimate.
Because love is dangerous, insecure.... And nobody knows where love will lead. It is just like a cloud -- moving with no destination. Love is a hidden cloud, whereabouts unknown. Nobody knows where it is at any moment of time. Unpredictable -- no astrologer can predict anything about love. About marriage? -- astrologers are very, very helpful; they can predict.
Man has to create marriage because man is afraid of the unknown. On all levels of life and existence, man has created substitutes: for love there is marriage; for real religion there are sects -- they are like marriages. Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, Jainism -- they are not real religion. Real religion has no name; it is like love. But because love is dangerous and you are so afraid of the future, you would like to have some security. You believe more in insurance companies than in life. That's why you have created marriage.
Marriage is more permanent than love. Love may be eternal, but it is not permanent. It may continue forever and forever, but there is no inner necessity for it to continue. It is like a flower: bloomed in the morning, by the evening gone. It is not like the rock. Marriage is more permanent; you can rely on it. In old age it will be helpful.
It is a way to avoid difficulties, but whenever you avoid difficulties and challenges you have avoided growth also. Married people never grow. Lovers grow, because they have to meet the challenge every moment -- and with no security. They have to create an inner phenomenon. With security you need not bother to create anything; the society helps. Marriage is a formality, a legal bondage. Love is of the heart; marriage is of the mind. That's why I am never in favor of marriage.
But the question is pertinent, relevant, because sometimes I tell people to get married. Marriage is a hell, but sometimes people need it. What to do? So I have to tell them to get into marriage. They need to pass through the hell of it, and they cannot understand the hell of it unless they pass through it. I am not saying that in marriage love cannot grow; it can grow, but there is no necessity for it. I am not saying that in love marriage cannot grow; it can grow, but there is no necessity, no logical necessity in it.
Love can become marriage, but then it is a totally different kind of marriage: it is not a social formality, it is not an institution, it is not a bondage. When love becomes marriage it means two individuals decide to live together -- but in absolute freedom, nonpossessive of each other. Love is nonpossessive; it gives freedom.
When love grows into marriage, marriage is not an ordinary thing. It is absolutely extraordinary. It has nothing to do with the registry office. You may need the registry office also, the social sanction may be needed, but those are just on the periphery; they are not the central core of it. In the center is the heart, in the center is freedom.
And sometimes out of marriage also love can grow, but it rarely happens. Out of marriage love rarely happens. At the most, familiarity. At the most, a certain kind of sympathy, not love. Love is passionate; sympathy is dull. Love is alive; sympathy is just so-so, lukewarm.
But why do I tell people to get married? When I see that they are after security, when I see that they are after social sanction, when I see they are afraid, when I see that they cannot move into love if marriage is not there, then I tell them to go into it -- but I will go on helping them to go beyond it. I will go on helping them to transcend it.
Marriage should be transcended; only then real marriage happens. Marriage should be forgotten completely. In fact the other person you have been in love with should always remain a stranger and never should be taken for granted. When two persons live as strangers, there is a beauty to it, a very simple, innocent beauty to it. And when you live with somebody as a stranger....
And everybody is a stranger. You cannot know a person. Knowledge is very superficial; a person is very profound. A person is an infinite mystery. That's why we say everybody carries a god within. How can you know a god? At the most you can touch the periphery. And the more you know about a person, the more humble you will become -- the more you will feel that the mystery is untouched. In fact the mystery becomes more and more deep. The more you know, the less you feel that you know.
If lovers are really in love, they will never reduce the other person to a known entity; because only things can be known -- persons never. Only things can become part of knowledge. A person is a mystery -- the greatest mystery there is.
Transcend marriage. It is not a question of legality, formality, family -- all that nonsense. Needed, because you live in a society, but transcend; don't be finished at that. And don't try to possess a person. Don't start feeling that the other is the husband -- you have reduced the beauty of the person into an ugly thing: husband. Never say that this woman is your wife -- the stranger is no longer there; you have reduced it to a very profane level, to a very ordinary level of things. Wives and husbands belong to the world. Lovers belong to the other shore.
Remember the sacredness and holiness of the other. Never impinge on it; never trespass it. A lover is always hesitant. He always gives you space to be yourself. He is grateful; he never feels that you are his possession. He is thankful that sometimes in rare moments you allow him your innermost shrine to enter and to be with you. He is always thankful.
But husbands and wives are always complaining, never thankful -- always fighting. And if you watch their fight it is ugly. The whole beauty of love disappears. Only a very ordinary reality exists: the wife, the husband, the children, and the day-to-day routine. The unknown no longer touches it. That's why you will see dust gathers around -- a wife looks dull, a husband looks dull. Life has lost meaning, vibrancy, significance. It is no longer a poetry; it has become gross.
Love is poetry. Marriage is ordinary prose, good for ordinary communication. If you are purchasing vegetables, good; but if you are looking at the sky and talking to God, not enough -- poetry is needed. Ordinary life is proselike. A religious life is poetrylike: a different rhythm, a different meter, something of the unknown and the mysterious.
I am not in favor of marriage. Don't misunderstand me -- I am not saying to live with people unmarried. Do whatsoever the society wants to be done, but don't take it as the whole. That is just the periphery; go beyond it. And I tell you to get married if I feel that this is what you need. In fact if I feel that you need to go in hell I would allow you -- and push you -- to go in hell, because that is what you need, and that is how you will grow.
Source: from Osho Book "Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 6"
Question - Why do you appear to put down Marriage and yet tell people to get Married?
Osho - This is from Anurag. To me, marriage is a dead thing. It is an institution, and you cannot live in an institution; only mad people live in institutions. It is a substitute for love. Love is dangerous: to be in love is to be in a storm, constantly. You need courage and you need awareness, and you are to be ready for anything. There is no security in love; love is insecure. Marriage is a security: the registry office, the police, the court are behind it. The state, the society, the religion -- they are all behind it. Marriage is a social phenomenon. Love is individual, personal, intimate.
Because love is dangerous, insecure.... And nobody knows where love will lead. It is just like a cloud -- moving with no destination. Love is a hidden cloud, whereabouts unknown. Nobody knows where it is at any moment of time. Unpredictable -- no astrologer can predict anything about love. About marriage? -- astrologers are very, very helpful; they can predict.
Man has to create marriage because man is afraid of the unknown. On all levels of life and existence, man has created substitutes: for love there is marriage; for real religion there are sects -- they are like marriages. Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, Jainism -- they are not real religion. Real religion has no name; it is like love. But because love is dangerous and you are so afraid of the future, you would like to have some security. You believe more in insurance companies than in life. That's why you have created marriage.
Marriage is more permanent than love. Love may be eternal, but it is not permanent. It may continue forever and forever, but there is no inner necessity for it to continue. It is like a flower: bloomed in the morning, by the evening gone. It is not like the rock. Marriage is more permanent; you can rely on it. In old age it will be helpful.
It is a way to avoid difficulties, but whenever you avoid difficulties and challenges you have avoided growth also. Married people never grow. Lovers grow, because they have to meet the challenge every moment -- and with no security. They have to create an inner phenomenon. With security you need not bother to create anything; the society helps. Marriage is a formality, a legal bondage. Love is of the heart; marriage is of the mind. That's why I am never in favor of marriage.
But the question is pertinent, relevant, because sometimes I tell people to get married. Marriage is a hell, but sometimes people need it. What to do? So I have to tell them to get into marriage. They need to pass through the hell of it, and they cannot understand the hell of it unless they pass through it. I am not saying that in marriage love cannot grow; it can grow, but there is no necessity for it. I am not saying that in love marriage cannot grow; it can grow, but there is no necessity, no logical necessity in it.
Love can become marriage, but then it is a totally different kind of marriage: it is not a social formality, it is not an institution, it is not a bondage. When love becomes marriage it means two individuals decide to live together -- but in absolute freedom, nonpossessive of each other. Love is nonpossessive; it gives freedom.
When love grows into marriage, marriage is not an ordinary thing. It is absolutely extraordinary. It has nothing to do with the registry office. You may need the registry office also, the social sanction may be needed, but those are just on the periphery; they are not the central core of it. In the center is the heart, in the center is freedom.
And sometimes out of marriage also love can grow, but it rarely happens. Out of marriage love rarely happens. At the most, familiarity. At the most, a certain kind of sympathy, not love. Love is passionate; sympathy is dull. Love is alive; sympathy is just so-so, lukewarm.
But why do I tell people to get married? When I see that they are after security, when I see that they are after social sanction, when I see they are afraid, when I see that they cannot move into love if marriage is not there, then I tell them to go into it -- but I will go on helping them to go beyond it. I will go on helping them to transcend it.
Marriage should be transcended; only then real marriage happens. Marriage should be forgotten completely. In fact the other person you have been in love with should always remain a stranger and never should be taken for granted. When two persons live as strangers, there is a beauty to it, a very simple, innocent beauty to it. And when you live with somebody as a stranger....
And everybody is a stranger. You cannot know a person. Knowledge is very superficial; a person is very profound. A person is an infinite mystery. That's why we say everybody carries a god within. How can you know a god? At the most you can touch the periphery. And the more you know about a person, the more humble you will become -- the more you will feel that the mystery is untouched. In fact the mystery becomes more and more deep. The more you know, the less you feel that you know.
If lovers are really in love, they will never reduce the other person to a known entity; because only things can be known -- persons never. Only things can become part of knowledge. A person is a mystery -- the greatest mystery there is.
Transcend marriage. It is not a question of legality, formality, family -- all that nonsense. Needed, because you live in a society, but transcend; don't be finished at that. And don't try to possess a person. Don't start feeling that the other is the husband -- you have reduced the beauty of the person into an ugly thing: husband. Never say that this woman is your wife -- the stranger is no longer there; you have reduced it to a very profane level, to a very ordinary level of things. Wives and husbands belong to the world. Lovers belong to the other shore.
Remember the sacredness and holiness of the other. Never impinge on it; never trespass it. A lover is always hesitant. He always gives you space to be yourself. He is grateful; he never feels that you are his possession. He is thankful that sometimes in rare moments you allow him your innermost shrine to enter and to be with you. He is always thankful.
But husbands and wives are always complaining, never thankful -- always fighting. And if you watch their fight it is ugly. The whole beauty of love disappears. Only a very ordinary reality exists: the wife, the husband, the children, and the day-to-day routine. The unknown no longer touches it. That's why you will see dust gathers around -- a wife looks dull, a husband looks dull. Life has lost meaning, vibrancy, significance. It is no longer a poetry; it has become gross.
Love is poetry. Marriage is ordinary prose, good for ordinary communication. If you are purchasing vegetables, good; but if you are looking at the sky and talking to God, not enough -- poetry is needed. Ordinary life is proselike. A religious life is poetrylike: a different rhythm, a different meter, something of the unknown and the mysterious.
I am not in favor of marriage. Don't misunderstand me -- I am not saying to live with people unmarried. Do whatsoever the society wants to be done, but don't take it as the whole. That is just the periphery; go beyond it. And I tell you to get married if I feel that this is what you need. In fact if I feel that you need to go in hell I would allow you -- and push you -- to go in hell, because that is what you need, and that is how you will grow.
Source: from Osho Book "Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 6"
Osho On Non-Attachment In Love
Question - You seem to advocate Commitment and Non-Attachment in Love, Whether with master or lover. I don't understand how one can be committed and unattached at the same time.
Osho - In fact, they always happen together, they cannot happen separately. It is impossible to separate them, because they are two aspects of the same coin: commitment and unattachment. If you are attached, then it is not a commitment. Then you are using the other for yourself because it is an attachment.
You love a person and you say, 'I am committed and attached.' What does attachment mean? It means that you are using the other person for yourself, you are using the other person as a means. How can one be committed to a means?
Commitment is possible only towards an end, not towards a means. You cannot be committed to a car, you cannot be committed to a house. They are means; they have to be used. You can only Be committed to an alive person, because each person is the goal.
Love is not using the person for your own pleasure. Much pleasure comes through it, but that is a by-product. You love the person as an end; you are committed. You can give your very life to the person, but there is no attachment, because attachment means that you are using the person for yourself.
Commitment with nonattachment means that now the other has become the goal, the end, the very end. They always happen together, and if they cannot happen together then you are missing something. If commitment is with attachment, then you are just deceiving yourself that it is a commitment. Sooner or later, if the person dies, you will find another person -- because you were using the person. Now that he is not available, you will find another person.
A commitment is eternal. Your wife dies: on that day, all women disappear from the world for you. You loved her as a goal. Now it is even impossible to conceive that you can love another. It was so total that nothing is left behind. And it was so total that only the body can die, not the soul of that being. Death cannot part two lovers. If they really loved, they had conquered death already. Love is immortal.
But if there was only an attachment, then after a few weeks or a few days the wound is healed. You loved the person because of you, for your own pleasure. Now you will find another person. In fact, you love your husband, you say that you love, and he's dying -- or your wife -- and when the wife is dying, on the deathbed, if somebody could open a window in your head and look, you are already planning and trying to find a new woman.
The mind, at the most, exploits. It can never become a deep commitment. Deep commitment is of being. It knows no time, it knows no death. I am not saying that it is permanent, because permanence is part of time. It is eternal. It has the fragrance of divineness.
Let me tell you one anecdote: A politician named Strange lay dying. A friend asked him what he would like inscribed on his tombstone,'Just put,' said the politician: Here lies an honest politician.
'But,' said the friend,'that doesn't tell who it is.'
'Oh yes, replied the politician,'the passer-by will say,'That is strange -- a politician, and honest?' -- no need to say the name. Passers-by will by themselves say,'That is strange.'
Attachment and love never go together; commitment and attachment never go together. Love goes with unattachment. Then love has a purity of the other world. Then love is absolute essence, absolute pureness, innocence. And then there is a commitment. That commitment is eternal.
Source - Osho Book "Come Follow to You, Vol4"
Osho - In fact, they always happen together, they cannot happen separately. It is impossible to separate them, because they are two aspects of the same coin: commitment and unattachment. If you are attached, then it is not a commitment. Then you are using the other for yourself because it is an attachment.
You love a person and you say, 'I am committed and attached.' What does attachment mean? It means that you are using the other person for yourself, you are using the other person as a means. How can one be committed to a means?
Commitment is possible only towards an end, not towards a means. You cannot be committed to a car, you cannot be committed to a house. They are means; they have to be used. You can only Be committed to an alive person, because each person is the goal.
Love is not using the person for your own pleasure. Much pleasure comes through it, but that is a by-product. You love the person as an end; you are committed. You can give your very life to the person, but there is no attachment, because attachment means that you are using the person for yourself.
Commitment with nonattachment means that now the other has become the goal, the end, the very end. They always happen together, and if they cannot happen together then you are missing something. If commitment is with attachment, then you are just deceiving yourself that it is a commitment. Sooner or later, if the person dies, you will find another person -- because you were using the person. Now that he is not available, you will find another person.
A commitment is eternal. Your wife dies: on that day, all women disappear from the world for you. You loved her as a goal. Now it is even impossible to conceive that you can love another. It was so total that nothing is left behind. And it was so total that only the body can die, not the soul of that being. Death cannot part two lovers. If they really loved, they had conquered death already. Love is immortal.
But if there was only an attachment, then after a few weeks or a few days the wound is healed. You loved the person because of you, for your own pleasure. Now you will find another person. In fact, you love your husband, you say that you love, and he's dying -- or your wife -- and when the wife is dying, on the deathbed, if somebody could open a window in your head and look, you are already planning and trying to find a new woman.
The mind, at the most, exploits. It can never become a deep commitment. Deep commitment is of being. It knows no time, it knows no death. I am not saying that it is permanent, because permanence is part of time. It is eternal. It has the fragrance of divineness.
Let me tell you one anecdote: A politician named Strange lay dying. A friend asked him what he would like inscribed on his tombstone,'Just put,' said the politician: Here lies an honest politician.
'But,' said the friend,'that doesn't tell who it is.'
'Oh yes, replied the politician,'the passer-by will say,'That is strange -- a politician, and honest?' -- no need to say the name. Passers-by will by themselves say,'That is strange.'
Attachment and love never go together; commitment and attachment never go together. Love goes with unattachment. Then love has a purity of the other world. Then love is absolute essence, absolute pureness, innocence. And then there is a commitment. That commitment is eternal.
Source - Osho Book "Come Follow to You, Vol4"
Osho On Commitment In Relatinship
Osho on Commitment in a Relationship
[A sannyasin who had recently left hospital after an attack of typhoid fever, said that she was feeling paranoid and that her partner did not love her. Osho said it was natural to feel negative after illness, unless one was aware, and that illness was a great catharsis. He then asked her partner how he was feeling. He replied that he didn’t hate her, he loved her, but that his initial response to her paranoia was one of anger.]
Osho - It is natural. There is a little misunderstanding that you have to understand, and which is a good thing to understand. When you love somebody, and when you are happy with somebody, of course health is part of that happiness. You share the energy with somebody because the person is healthy, flowing. Then suddenly the partner is ill, health disappears; you are left alone.
The very reason to be with the person is no more there. You were with the person because you were feeling happy and healthy, because the other person was healthy and happy. So everything was good. Now the other person is ill. He or she is no more flowing, and the whole point of being with them is lost – you feel angry. Unless you understand that this is a part of love, that sometimes the other will be ill and that it is natural.... Sometimes you will be ill.
You have to be aware and responsible and see that when the other was healthy and happy, you enjoyed her health and happiness. Now the other person is ill. You have to serve, you have to care so that the person becomes healthy and loving and flowing again. In the West this is happening too much because something very basic is being misunderstood. People think that relationships are for when they are happy, good. When something goes wrong – even a physical illness – then why bother? Find another woman, another man – this seems very inhuman.
If this attitude remains, love cannot grow. Then whatsoever you call love is nothing but sex, because love means that you care for the person in health, in illness. You care for the person. When the person is loving – and sometimes the person is not loving – then too you care. You care for the person and you accept all summers and winters. You accept everything that is in the person. Health is there, illness is there, old age is going to be there, youth is there, anger is there, hatred is there – everything is possible.
When you choose a person, you commit yourself to the person’s totality. I’m not saying that you should celebrate her illness. I’m not saying that you should want her to remain ill, because that is a part of life. Try in every way to bring her back to health but don’t be angry with her. If you want to be angry, be angry with the illness. Don’t create any trouble for her in any way, and then she will come out of the illness sooner.
The illness is frustrating you, but don’t direct it towards her. Of course Geeta is ill, but she is not ill on her own accord – she has not chosen to be ill. One day you will be ill. And this is part of the game of being together – that we care about each other. In fact love is known only when the other partner is in tremendous need of you. When everything is going well, it is nothing much.
When things are going wrong and you still stick to the person, still stand by the person, then only you show that you belong, that the person belongs to you; that you are really together. A togetherness is a sacred commitment. It is a great involvement – for better, for worse, for life, for death. If you really love a person even death can not destroy that love. Death may come and your beloved may die, but your love and your commitment remain. When love reaches to that depth and height, it has a fragrance of the divine – otherwise it is very low, animal-like.
So nothing is wrong. These are the situations one has to grow through. Put your anger against her illness. Because you are feeling angry, she is feeling that you don’t love her, that you hate her or something. So a misunderstanding has been created. Make it clear to her that you don’t want her to be ill and that you are angry because you don’t want her to be ill. You are angry with the illness but not with her. In fact you are angry because you love her. Do you follow me? Put your anger in the right direction and help her to come out of this, mm? She loves you very much. Good.
[A sannyasin who had recently left hospital after an attack of typhoid fever, said that she was feeling paranoid and that her partner did not love her. Osho said it was natural to feel negative after illness, unless one was aware, and that illness was a great catharsis. He then asked her partner how he was feeling. He replied that he didn’t hate her, he loved her, but that his initial response to her paranoia was one of anger.]
Osho - It is natural. There is a little misunderstanding that you have to understand, and which is a good thing to understand. When you love somebody, and when you are happy with somebody, of course health is part of that happiness. You share the energy with somebody because the person is healthy, flowing. Then suddenly the partner is ill, health disappears; you are left alone.
The very reason to be with the person is no more there. You were with the person because you were feeling happy and healthy, because the other person was healthy and happy. So everything was good. Now the other person is ill. He or she is no more flowing, and the whole point of being with them is lost – you feel angry. Unless you understand that this is a part of love, that sometimes the other will be ill and that it is natural.... Sometimes you will be ill.
You have to be aware and responsible and see that when the other was healthy and happy, you enjoyed her health and happiness. Now the other person is ill. You have to serve, you have to care so that the person becomes healthy and loving and flowing again. In the West this is happening too much because something very basic is being misunderstood. People think that relationships are for when they are happy, good. When something goes wrong – even a physical illness – then why bother? Find another woman, another man – this seems very inhuman.
If this attitude remains, love cannot grow. Then whatsoever you call love is nothing but sex, because love means that you care for the person in health, in illness. You care for the person. When the person is loving – and sometimes the person is not loving – then too you care. You care for the person and you accept all summers and winters. You accept everything that is in the person. Health is there, illness is there, old age is going to be there, youth is there, anger is there, hatred is there – everything is possible.
When you choose a person, you commit yourself to the person’s totality. I’m not saying that you should celebrate her illness. I’m not saying that you should want her to remain ill, because that is a part of life. Try in every way to bring her back to health but don’t be angry with her. If you want to be angry, be angry with the illness. Don’t create any trouble for her in any way, and then she will come out of the illness sooner.
The illness is frustrating you, but don’t direct it towards her. Of course Geeta is ill, but she is not ill on her own accord – she has not chosen to be ill. One day you will be ill. And this is part of the game of being together – that we care about each other. In fact love is known only when the other partner is in tremendous need of you. When everything is going well, it is nothing much.
When things are going wrong and you still stick to the person, still stand by the person, then only you show that you belong, that the person belongs to you; that you are really together. A togetherness is a sacred commitment. It is a great involvement – for better, for worse, for life, for death. If you really love a person even death can not destroy that love. Death may come and your beloved may die, but your love and your commitment remain. When love reaches to that depth and height, it has a fragrance of the divine – otherwise it is very low, animal-like.
So nothing is wrong. These are the situations one has to grow through. Put your anger against her illness. Because you are feeling angry, she is feeling that you don’t love her, that you hate her or something. So a misunderstanding has been created. Make it clear to her that you don’t want her to be ill and that you are angry because you don’t want her to be ill. You are angry with the illness but not with her. In fact you are angry because you love her. Do you follow me? Put your anger in the right direction and help her to come out of this, mm? She loves you very much. Good.
Osho On Trust In Partner
Osho on Trust in Partner
Question - Beloved Master, I very much doubt my wife. What should I do?
Osho - Narayan, the wife is not your God. You need not doubt, you need not trust. It is a game -- don't make it so serious! But you have been told to trust your wife, to trust your husband. And because of this very teaching, distrust arises. In fact, you have been told to trust. For centuries it has been known that it is very difficult to trust your own wife, very difficult to trust your own husband; it is next to impossible.
If your wife is interested in you, how can you trust her? If she is still interested in men -- and you are only a man, and there are many many men who are far more beautiful -- how can you trust your wife? If she is interested in you she must be interested in others too. She can be trusted only when she loses all interest in you too; then, of course, you can trust her. She has lost all interest in men -- she is almost dead.
You can trust your husband only if he is no longer interested in your body. If he is interested in your face, your body, your proportion, your beauty, how can he avoid being interested in other women's bodies, other women's faces, other women's beauty? It is impossible. You are asking something inhuman or something superhuman. And your poor husband is neither -- neither inhuman nor superhuman. He is just a poor husband, a poor human being... or a poor wife.
Don't demand such impossible things. It is natural; your wife is bound to fantasize about other men. It is impossible for her to dream about you, remember. I have never heard of a wife dreaming about her own husband. Who dreams about one's own husband or one's own wife? For what? Is the day not enough? Do you have to devote your night and your dreams also to the same woman, to the same man?
In dreams you are free; that is the only freedom left. In dreams you have a private world of your own. Your wife cannot peep in your dreams and say, "What are you doing? Stop!" In dreams you can have a few parties with the neighbors' wives. And nothing is wrong in it, nobody is harmed. Just, you have a good sleep and in the morning you have a smile on your face. Don't ask the impossible.
Mulla Nasruddin was saying to me, "For the whole ten years of our married life I always trusted my wife. And then we moved from Calcutta to Poona -- and I discovered we still had the same milkman!"
There is no need, Narayan, to trust or not to trust. Why bring in the question of trust? It is just a game! Play it joyfully. You make it too serious. And when you start demanding, "Be faithful to me!" you are creating a situation in which it will become impossible for the poor woman to be faithful to you. Give her total freedom; then she may be faithful to you.
Life functions in a very strange way. If you give her total freedom you are WORTH trusting. A great faith may arise in her. If a wife gives total freedom to the husband, that shows she loves him so much that she would like him to be happy in every possible way. Even if sometimes he is happy with some other woman she will feel happy because he is happy. And then a totally different quality of trust may arise. I am not saying that it is bound to arise -- it is not an inevitability. I am saying perhaps, because about human beings nothing can be predicted.
The relationship between wife and husband is a very strange relationship because these are two different worlds. The woman functions in a different way, from a different center. She is more intuitive and the man is more intellectual. That's why they are attracted to each other. Not only physiologically they are polarities, but psychologically also they are polar opposites. They are intimate enemies. There is bound to be a little conflict, and that is not bad; it keeps the relationship alive. Whenever you see that the husband and wife have stopped fighting completely, that means the marriage is really finished; nothing is left now. Even fight is not left... all is finished.
The butcher and the milkman were discussing the pros and cons of married life. "Do you really believe it is better than being single?" demanded Weiss, the butcher.
"In a way," said the milkman, who was fond of philosophizing. "After all, if it were not for marriage, we would have to do all our fighting with strangers."
Yes, that is true. It is good to fight with your own wife; at least the fight is with the friend. Otherwise you will have to do your fighting with strangers.
There is no need to demand these things -- trust, faith. Live together joyously. Make as much out of your being together as possible. Rather than doing that, people create such problems, useless problems, and destroy all their joys. The wife has no obligation to be faithful to you, neither do you have any obligation to be faithful to her. You love her, she loves you; that's enough. Don't bring faith into it. If love cannot keep you together, nothing else can keep you together. And if love cannot keep you together, then anything that can keep you together is dangerous.
Source: from Osho Book “Dhammapada Volume 10”
Question - Beloved Master, I very much doubt my wife. What should I do?
Osho - Narayan, the wife is not your God. You need not doubt, you need not trust. It is a game -- don't make it so serious! But you have been told to trust your wife, to trust your husband. And because of this very teaching, distrust arises. In fact, you have been told to trust. For centuries it has been known that it is very difficult to trust your own wife, very difficult to trust your own husband; it is next to impossible.
If your wife is interested in you, how can you trust her? If she is still interested in men -- and you are only a man, and there are many many men who are far more beautiful -- how can you trust your wife? If she is interested in you she must be interested in others too. She can be trusted only when she loses all interest in you too; then, of course, you can trust her. She has lost all interest in men -- she is almost dead.
You can trust your husband only if he is no longer interested in your body. If he is interested in your face, your body, your proportion, your beauty, how can he avoid being interested in other women's bodies, other women's faces, other women's beauty? It is impossible. You are asking something inhuman or something superhuman. And your poor husband is neither -- neither inhuman nor superhuman. He is just a poor husband, a poor human being... or a poor wife.
Don't demand such impossible things. It is natural; your wife is bound to fantasize about other men. It is impossible for her to dream about you, remember. I have never heard of a wife dreaming about her own husband. Who dreams about one's own husband or one's own wife? For what? Is the day not enough? Do you have to devote your night and your dreams also to the same woman, to the same man?
In dreams you are free; that is the only freedom left. In dreams you have a private world of your own. Your wife cannot peep in your dreams and say, "What are you doing? Stop!" In dreams you can have a few parties with the neighbors' wives. And nothing is wrong in it, nobody is harmed. Just, you have a good sleep and in the morning you have a smile on your face. Don't ask the impossible.
Mulla Nasruddin was saying to me, "For the whole ten years of our married life I always trusted my wife. And then we moved from Calcutta to Poona -- and I discovered we still had the same milkman!"
There is no need, Narayan, to trust or not to trust. Why bring in the question of trust? It is just a game! Play it joyfully. You make it too serious. And when you start demanding, "Be faithful to me!" you are creating a situation in which it will become impossible for the poor woman to be faithful to you. Give her total freedom; then she may be faithful to you.
Life functions in a very strange way. If you give her total freedom you are WORTH trusting. A great faith may arise in her. If a wife gives total freedom to the husband, that shows she loves him so much that she would like him to be happy in every possible way. Even if sometimes he is happy with some other woman she will feel happy because he is happy. And then a totally different quality of trust may arise. I am not saying that it is bound to arise -- it is not an inevitability. I am saying perhaps, because about human beings nothing can be predicted.
The relationship between wife and husband is a very strange relationship because these are two different worlds. The woman functions in a different way, from a different center. She is more intuitive and the man is more intellectual. That's why they are attracted to each other. Not only physiologically they are polarities, but psychologically also they are polar opposites. They are intimate enemies. There is bound to be a little conflict, and that is not bad; it keeps the relationship alive. Whenever you see that the husband and wife have stopped fighting completely, that means the marriage is really finished; nothing is left now. Even fight is not left... all is finished.
The butcher and the milkman were discussing the pros and cons of married life. "Do you really believe it is better than being single?" demanded Weiss, the butcher.
"In a way," said the milkman, who was fond of philosophizing. "After all, if it were not for marriage, we would have to do all our fighting with strangers."
Yes, that is true. It is good to fight with your own wife; at least the fight is with the friend. Otherwise you will have to do your fighting with strangers.
There is no need to demand these things -- trust, faith. Live together joyously. Make as much out of your being together as possible. Rather than doing that, people create such problems, useless problems, and destroy all their joys. The wife has no obligation to be faithful to you, neither do you have any obligation to be faithful to her. You love her, she loves you; that's enough. Don't bring faith into it. If love cannot keep you together, nothing else can keep you together. And if love cannot keep you together, then anything that can keep you together is dangerous.
Source: from Osho Book “Dhammapada Volume 10”
Osho Discourse On Love - Am I In Love ?
Question: During my whole life, I always thought that I loved Somebody. Now, being here for the first time with you, I Ask myself: have I ever really been in Love? Am I even able To love? Am I able to Love you?
Osho : The basic fallacy that you are carrying within you is that you always loved somebody. This is one of the most significant things about all human beings; their love is always for somebody, it is addressed -- and the moment you address your love, you destroy it. It is as if you are saying, "I will breathe only for you -- and when you are not there, then how can I breathe?"
Love should be like breathing. It should be just a quality in you -- wherever you are, with whomsoever you are, or even if you are alone, love goes on overflowing from you. It is not a question of being in love with someone -- it is a question of being love. People are frustrated in their love experiences, not because something is wrong with love... they narrow down love to such a point that the ocean of love cannot remain there. You cannot contain the ocean -- it is not a small stream; love is your whole being -- love is your godliness.
One should think in terms of whether one is loving or not. The question of the object of love does not arise. With your wife, you love your wife; with your children, you love your children; with your servants, you love your servants; with your friends, you love your friends; with the trees, you love the trees; with the ocean, you love the ocean. You are love. Love is not dependent on the object, but is a radiation of your subjectivity -- a radiation of your soul. And the vaster the radiation, the greater is your soul.
The wider spread are the wings of your love, the bigger is the sky of your being. You have lived under a common fallacy of all human beings. Now you are asking, "Am I able to love You?" -- again, the same fallacy. Just ask: Am I able to become love? When you are in my presence, you need not think of loving me; otherwise, you have not come out of your ordinary fallacies. Here, you have to learn... just being loving. Of course your love will reach me too; it will reach others too.
It will be a vibe surrounding you, spreading all over; and if so many people are simply broadcasting their love, their song, their ecstasy, the whole place becomes a temple. There is no other way of making a temple. Then the whole area is filled with a new kind of energy, and nobody is at a loss -- because on you is showering the love of so many people: on each single person, so many people's love is showering.
Drop that fallacy. And because of that fallacy, another question arises in you: "... or has life brought me to the point where happiness in love does not happen anymore?"
Life is nothing but an opportunity for love to blossom. If you are alive, the opportunity is there -- even to the last breath. You may have missed your whole life: just the last breath, the last moment on the earth, if you can be love, you have not missed anything -- because a single moment of love is equal to the whole eternity of love.
Osho : The basic fallacy that you are carrying within you is that you always loved somebody. This is one of the most significant things about all human beings; their love is always for somebody, it is addressed -- and the moment you address your love, you destroy it. It is as if you are saying, "I will breathe only for you -- and when you are not there, then how can I breathe?"
Love should be like breathing. It should be just a quality in you -- wherever you are, with whomsoever you are, or even if you are alone, love goes on overflowing from you. It is not a question of being in love with someone -- it is a question of being love. People are frustrated in their love experiences, not because something is wrong with love... they narrow down love to such a point that the ocean of love cannot remain there. You cannot contain the ocean -- it is not a small stream; love is your whole being -- love is your godliness.
One should think in terms of whether one is loving or not. The question of the object of love does not arise. With your wife, you love your wife; with your children, you love your children; with your servants, you love your servants; with your friends, you love your friends; with the trees, you love the trees; with the ocean, you love the ocean. You are love. Love is not dependent on the object, but is a radiation of your subjectivity -- a radiation of your soul. And the vaster the radiation, the greater is your soul.
The wider spread are the wings of your love, the bigger is the sky of your being. You have lived under a common fallacy of all human beings. Now you are asking, "Am I able to love You?" -- again, the same fallacy. Just ask: Am I able to become love? When you are in my presence, you need not think of loving me; otherwise, you have not come out of your ordinary fallacies. Here, you have to learn... just being loving. Of course your love will reach me too; it will reach others too.
It will be a vibe surrounding you, spreading all over; and if so many people are simply broadcasting their love, their song, their ecstasy, the whole place becomes a temple. There is no other way of making a temple. Then the whole area is filled with a new kind of energy, and nobody is at a loss -- because on you is showering the love of so many people: on each single person, so many people's love is showering.
Drop that fallacy. And because of that fallacy, another question arises in you: "... or has life brought me to the point where happiness in love does not happen anymore?"
Life is nothing but an opportunity for love to blossom. If you are alive, the opportunity is there -- even to the last breath. You may have missed your whole life: just the last breath, the last moment on the earth, if you can be love, you have not missed anything -- because a single moment of love is equal to the whole eternity of love.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Self Empowerment
Self Empowerment
Your strengths, talents, capabilities and resources are very important as the foundation of your self progress. Having a clear knowledge of them will help to keep you moving forward, and enable you to take up new opportunities when they arise. Our internal strengths create the foundation on which we make our decisions in life, how we relate to others and how we understand ourselves. For most people their strengths are understood but never made very conscious. They lie below the surface and are not openly talked about. Bringing them into our conscious understanding improves our process of self-empowerment. Also assess your areas of weakness or those aspects of life that are holding you back in some way and/or are causing you some sorrow or discomfort.
Exercise: Make a list of your strengths and weaknesses (5 each)
Now create questions (5-6) which will help in your self progress. Looking at your strengths and weakness, judge how effectively you are using these strengths to improve your personal and professional life, and what negative effects are your weaknesses (shortcomings) having on the same. These are some examples of questions that you can ask yourself at the end of each week:
How are my present strengths being used to improve my worth (value) at the workplace (office)? Is any weakness of mine proving to be an obstacle (barrier) in maintaining a healthy relationship with my spouse (partner)? Am I using my strengths in helping others or doing social service? Does any weakness exist inside me, which if removed, would make my relationships harmonious (peaceful) in the family and office
Your strengths, talents, capabilities and resources are very important as the foundation of your self progress. Having a clear knowledge of them will help to keep you moving forward, and enable you to take up new opportunities when they arise. Our internal strengths create the foundation on which we make our decisions in life, how we relate to others and how we understand ourselves. For most people their strengths are understood but never made very conscious. They lie below the surface and are not openly talked about. Bringing them into our conscious understanding improves our process of self-empowerment. Also assess your areas of weakness or those aspects of life that are holding you back in some way and/or are causing you some sorrow or discomfort.
Exercise: Make a list of your strengths and weaknesses (5 each)
Now create questions (5-6) which will help in your self progress. Looking at your strengths and weakness, judge how effectively you are using these strengths to improve your personal and professional life, and what negative effects are your weaknesses (shortcomings) having on the same. These are some examples of questions that you can ask yourself at the end of each week:
How are my present strengths being used to improve my worth (value) at the workplace (office)? Is any weakness of mine proving to be an obstacle (barrier) in maintaining a healthy relationship with my spouse (partner)? Am I using my strengths in helping others or doing social service? Does any weakness exist inside me, which if removed, would make my relationships harmonious (peaceful) in the family and office
OSHO STORY - TRUST
"A man just got married and was returning home with his wife. They were crossing a lake in a boat when suddenly a great storm arose. The man was a warrior, but the woman became very much afraid because it seemed almost hopeless -- THE BOAT WAS SMALL AND THE STORM WAS REALLY HUGE, AND ANY MOMENT THEY WERE GOING TO BE DROWNED. But the man sat silently, calm and quiet, as if nothing was happening.
The woman was trembling and she said, "Are you not afraid? This may be our last moment of life! IT DOESN'T SEEM THAT WE WILL BE ABLE TO REACH THE OTHER SHORE. Only some miracle can save us, otherwise death is certain. Are you not afraid? Are you mad or something? Are you a stone or something?"
THE MAN LAUGHED AND TOOK THE SWORD OUT OF ITS SHEATH. The woman was even more puzzled -- what he is doing? Then he brought the naked sword close to the woman's neck -- so close that just a small gap was there, it was almost touching her neck.
He said, "ARE YOU AFRAID?"
She started to giggle and laugh and said, "WHY SHOULD I BE AFRAID? If the sword is in your hands, why should I be afraid? I know you love me."
He put the sword back and said, "This is my answer. I know God loves me, and the sword is in His hands, and the storm is in His hands -- so WHATSOEVER IS GOING TO HAPPEN IS GOING TO BE GOOD. If we survive, good; if we don't survive, good -- because EVERYTHING IS IN HIS HANDS, AND HE CANNOT DO ANYTHING WRONG."
This is the trust one needs to imbibe. SUCH TREMENDOUS TRUST IS CAPABLE OF TRANSFORMING YOUR WHOLE LIFE! And ONLY such tremendous trust is capable of transforming your life -- less than that won't do."
~ Osho
The woman was trembling and she said, "Are you not afraid? This may be our last moment of life! IT DOESN'T SEEM THAT WE WILL BE ABLE TO REACH THE OTHER SHORE. Only some miracle can save us, otherwise death is certain. Are you not afraid? Are you mad or something? Are you a stone or something?"
THE MAN LAUGHED AND TOOK THE SWORD OUT OF ITS SHEATH. The woman was even more puzzled -- what he is doing? Then he brought the naked sword close to the woman's neck -- so close that just a small gap was there, it was almost touching her neck.
He said, "ARE YOU AFRAID?"
She started to giggle and laugh and said, "WHY SHOULD I BE AFRAID? If the sword is in your hands, why should I be afraid? I know you love me."
He put the sword back and said, "This is my answer. I know God loves me, and the sword is in His hands, and the storm is in His hands -- so WHATSOEVER IS GOING TO HAPPEN IS GOING TO BE GOOD. If we survive, good; if we don't survive, good -- because EVERYTHING IS IN HIS HANDS, AND HE CANNOT DO ANYTHING WRONG."
This is the trust one needs to imbibe. SUCH TREMENDOUS TRUST IS CAPABLE OF TRANSFORMING YOUR WHOLE LIFE! And ONLY such tremendous trust is capable of transforming your life -- less than that won't do."
~ Osho
Osho on Aloneness
Osho on Aloneness - We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone
Question: You said the other day that we are born alone, we live Alone and we die alone. Yet it seems as if from the day we Are born, whatever we are doing, whoever we are, we Seek to relate to others; in addition, we are usually
Attracted to being intimate with one person in Particular. Would you please comment?
Osho: The question that you have asked is the question of every human being. We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Aloneness is our very nature, but we are not aware of it. Because we are not aware of it, we remain strangers to ourselves, and instead of seeing our aloneness as a tremendous beauty and bliss, silence and peace, at-easeness with existence, we misunderstand it as loneliness. Loneliness is a misunderstood aloneness. Once you misunderstand your aloneness as loneliness, the whole context changes.
Aloneness has a beauty and grandeur, a positivity; loneliness is poor, negative, dark, dismal. Everybody is running away from loneliness. It is like a wound; it hurts. To escape from it, the only way is to be in a crowd, to become part of a society, to have friends, to create a family, to have husbands and wives, to have children. In this crowd, the basic effort is that you will be able to forget your loneliness. But nobody has ever succeeded in forgetting it. That which is natural to you, you can try to ignore -- but you cannot forget it; it will assert again and again.
And the problem becomes more complex because you have never seen it as it is; you have taken it for granted that you are born lonely. The dictionary meaning is the same; that shows the mind of the people who create dictionaries. They don't understand at all the vast difference between loneliness and aloneness. Loneliness is a gap. Something is missing, something is needed to fill it, and nothing can ever fill it because it is a misunderstanding in the first place. As you grow older, the gap also grows bigger.
People are so afraid to be by themselves that they do any kind of stupid thing. I have seen people playing cards alone; the other party is not there. They have invented games in which the same person plays cards from both sides. Somehow one wants to remain engaged. That engagement may be with people, may be with work.... There are workaholics; they are afraid when the weekend comes close -- what are they going to do? And if they don't do anything, they are left to themselves, and that is the most painful experience.
You will be surprised to know that it is on the weekends that most of the accidents in the world happen. People are rushing in their cars to resort places, to sea beaches, to hill stations, bumper to bumper. It may take eight hours, ten hours to reach, and there is nothing for them to do because the whole crowd has come with them. Now their house, their neighborhood, their city is more peaceful than this sea resort. Everybody has come. But some engagement....
People are playing cards, chess; people are watching television for hours. The average American watches television five hours a day; people are listening to the radio... just to avoid themselves. For all these activities, the only reason is -- not to be left alone; it is very fearful. And this idea is taken from others. Who has told you that to be alone is a fearful state?
Those who have known aloneness say something absolutely different. They say there is nothing more beautiful, more peaceful, more joyful than being alone. But you listen to the crowd. The people who live in misunderstanding are in such a majority, that who bothers about a Zarathustra, or a Gautam Buddha? These single individuals can be wrong, can be hallucinating, can be deceiving themselves or deceiving you, but millions of people cannot be wrong. And millions of people agree that to be left to oneself is the worst experience in life; it is hell.
But any relationship that is created because of the fear, because of the inner hell of being left alone, cannot be satisfying. Its very root is poisoned. You don't love your woman, you are simply using her not to be lonely; neither does she love you. She is also in the same paranoia; she is using you not to be left alone. Naturally, in the name of love anything may happen -- except love. Fights may happen, arguments may happen, but even they are preferred to being lonely: at least somebody is there and you are engaged, you can forget your loneliness.
But love is not possible, because there is no basic foundation for love. Love never grows out of fear. You are asking, "You said the other day that we are born alone, we live alone and we die alone. Yet it seems as if from the day we are born, whatever we are doing, whoever we are, we seek to relate to others."
This seeking to relate to others is nothing but escapism. Even the smallest baby tries to find something to do; if nothing else, then he will suck his own big toes on his feet. It is an absolutely futile activity, nothing can come out of it, but it is engagement. He is doing something. You will see in the stations, in the airports, small boys and girls carrying their teddy bears; they cannot sleep without them. Darkness makes their loneliness even more dangerous. The teddy bear is a great protection; somebody is with them.
And your God is nothing but a teddy bear for grown-ups. You cannot live as you are. Your relationships are not relationships. They are ugly. You are using the other person, and you know perfectly well the other person is using you. And to use anybody is to reduce him into a thing, into a commodity. You don't have any respect for the person.
"In addition," you are asking, "we are usually attracted to being intimate with one person in particular."
It has a psychological reason. You are brought up by a mother, by a father; if you are a boy, you start loving your mother and you start being jealous of your father because he is a competitor; if you are a girl, you start loving your father and you hate your mother because she is a competitor. These are now established facts, not hypotheses, and the result of it turns your whole life into a misery.
The boy carries the image of his mother as the model of a woman. He becomes conditioned continuously; he knows only one woman so closely, so intimately. Her face, her hair, her warmth -- everything becomes an imprint. That's exactly the scientific word used: it becomes an imprint in his psychology. And the same happens to the girl about the father. When you grow up, you fall in love with some woman or with some man and you think, "Perhaps we are made for each other." Nobody is made for anyone.
But why do you feel attracted towards one certain person? It is because of your imprint. He must resemble your father in some way; she must resemble your mother in some way. Of course no other woman can be exactly a replica of your mother, and anyway you are not in search of a mother, you are in search of a wife. But the imprint inside you decides who is the right woman for you. The moment you see that woman, there is no question of reasoning. You immediately feel attraction; your imprint immediately starts functioning - - this is the woman for you, or this is the man for you.
It is good as far as meeting once in a while on the sea beach, in the movie hall, in the garden is concerned, because you don't come to know each other totally. But you are both hankering to live together; you want to be married, and that is one of the most dangerous steps that lovers can take. The moment you are married, you start becoming aware of the totality of the other person, and you are surprised on every single aspect -- "Something went wrong; this is not the woman, this is not the man" -- because they don't fit with the ideal that you are carrying within you.
And the trouble is multiplied because the woman is carrying an ideal of her father -- you don't fit with it. You are carrying the ideal of your mother -- she does not fit with it. That's why all marriages are failures. Only very rare marriages are not failures -- and I hope God should save you from those marriages which are not failures, because they are psychologically sick. There are people who are sadists, who enjoy torturing others, and there are people who are masochists, who enjoy torturing themselves.
If a husband and wife belong to these two categories, that marriage will be a successful marriage. One is a masochist and one is a sadist -- it is a perfect marriage, because one enjoys being tortured and one enjoys torturing. But ordinarily it is very difficult to find out in the first place whether you are a masochist or a sadist, and then to look for your other polarity.... If you are wise enough you should go to the psychologist and enquire who you are, a masochist or a sadist? and ask if he can give you some references which can fit with you.
Sometimes, just by accident, it happens that a sadist and masochist become married. They are the happiest people in the world; they are fulfilling each other's needs. But what kind of need is this? -- they are both psychopaths, and they are living a life of torture. But otherwise, every marriage is going to fail, for one simple reason: the imprint is the problem. Even in marriage, the basic reason for which you wanted to have the relationship is not fulfilled. You are more alone when you are with your wife than when you are alone.
To leave husband and wife in a room by themselves is to make them both utterly miserable. his whole effort -- whether of relationships or remaining busy in a thousand and one things -- is just to escape from the idea that you are lonely. And I want it to be emphatically clear to you that this is where the meditator and the ordinary man part. The ordinary man goes on trying to forget his loneliness, and the meditator starts getting more and more acquainted with his aloneness.
He has left the world; he has gone to the caves, to the mountains, to the forest, just for the sake of being alone. He wants to know who he is. In the crowd, it is difficult; there are so many disturbances. And those who have known their aloneness have known the greatest blissfulness possible to human beings -- because your very being is blissful. After being in tune with your aloneness, you can relate; then your relationship will bring great joys to you, because it is not out of fear.
Finding your aloneness you can create, you can be involved in as many things as you want, because this involvement will not anymore be running away from yourself. Now it will be your expression; now it will be the manifestation of all that is your potential. Only such a man -- whether he lives alone or lives in the society, whether he marries or lives unmarried makes no difference -- is always blissful, peaceful, silent. His life is a dance, is a song, is a flowering, is a fragrance. Whatever he does, he brings his fragrance to it.
But the first basic thing is to know your aloneness absolutely. This escape from yourself you have learned from the crowd. Because everybody is escaping, you start escaping. Every child is born in a crowd and starts imitating people; what others are doing, he starts doing. He falls into the same miserable situations as others are in, and he starts thinking that this is what life is all about. And he has missed life completely.
So I remind you, don't misunderstand aloneness as loneliness. Loneliness is certainly sick; aloneness is perfect health.
Ginsberg visits Doctor Goldberg. "Ja, you are sick."
"Not good enough. I want another opinion."
"Okay," said Doctor Goldberg, "you are ugly too."
We are all committing the same kinds of misunderstandings continually.
I would like my people to know that your first and most primary step towards finding the meaning and significance of life is to enter into your aloneness. It is your temple; it is where your God lives, and you cannot find this temple anywhere else. You can go on to the moon, to Mars....
Once you have entered your innermost core of being, you cannot believe your own eyes: you were carrying so much joy, so many blessings, so much love... and you were escaping from your own treasures. Knowing these treasures and their inexhaustibility, you can move now into relationships, into creativity. You will help people by sharing your love, not by using them. You will give dignity to people by your love; you will not destroy their respect. And you will, without any effort, become a source for them to find their own treasures too.
Whatever you make, whatever you do, you will spread your silence, your peace, your blessings into everything possible. But this basic thing is not taught by any family, by any society, by any university. People go on living in misery, and it is taken for granted. Everybody is miserable, so it is nothing much if you are miserable; you cannot be an exception. But I say unto you: You can be an exception. You just have not made the right effort.
Question: You said the other day that we are born alone, we live Alone and we die alone. Yet it seems as if from the day we Are born, whatever we are doing, whoever we are, we Seek to relate to others; in addition, we are usually
Attracted to being intimate with one person in Particular. Would you please comment?
Osho: The question that you have asked is the question of every human being. We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Aloneness is our very nature, but we are not aware of it. Because we are not aware of it, we remain strangers to ourselves, and instead of seeing our aloneness as a tremendous beauty and bliss, silence and peace, at-easeness with existence, we misunderstand it as loneliness. Loneliness is a misunderstood aloneness. Once you misunderstand your aloneness as loneliness, the whole context changes.
Aloneness has a beauty and grandeur, a positivity; loneliness is poor, negative, dark, dismal. Everybody is running away from loneliness. It is like a wound; it hurts. To escape from it, the only way is to be in a crowd, to become part of a society, to have friends, to create a family, to have husbands and wives, to have children. In this crowd, the basic effort is that you will be able to forget your loneliness. But nobody has ever succeeded in forgetting it. That which is natural to you, you can try to ignore -- but you cannot forget it; it will assert again and again.
And the problem becomes more complex because you have never seen it as it is; you have taken it for granted that you are born lonely. The dictionary meaning is the same; that shows the mind of the people who create dictionaries. They don't understand at all the vast difference between loneliness and aloneness. Loneliness is a gap. Something is missing, something is needed to fill it, and nothing can ever fill it because it is a misunderstanding in the first place. As you grow older, the gap also grows bigger.
People are so afraid to be by themselves that they do any kind of stupid thing. I have seen people playing cards alone; the other party is not there. They have invented games in which the same person plays cards from both sides. Somehow one wants to remain engaged. That engagement may be with people, may be with work.... There are workaholics; they are afraid when the weekend comes close -- what are they going to do? And if they don't do anything, they are left to themselves, and that is the most painful experience.
You will be surprised to know that it is on the weekends that most of the accidents in the world happen. People are rushing in their cars to resort places, to sea beaches, to hill stations, bumper to bumper. It may take eight hours, ten hours to reach, and there is nothing for them to do because the whole crowd has come with them. Now their house, their neighborhood, their city is more peaceful than this sea resort. Everybody has come. But some engagement....
People are playing cards, chess; people are watching television for hours. The average American watches television five hours a day; people are listening to the radio... just to avoid themselves. For all these activities, the only reason is -- not to be left alone; it is very fearful. And this idea is taken from others. Who has told you that to be alone is a fearful state?
Those who have known aloneness say something absolutely different. They say there is nothing more beautiful, more peaceful, more joyful than being alone. But you listen to the crowd. The people who live in misunderstanding are in such a majority, that who bothers about a Zarathustra, or a Gautam Buddha? These single individuals can be wrong, can be hallucinating, can be deceiving themselves or deceiving you, but millions of people cannot be wrong. And millions of people agree that to be left to oneself is the worst experience in life; it is hell.
But any relationship that is created because of the fear, because of the inner hell of being left alone, cannot be satisfying. Its very root is poisoned. You don't love your woman, you are simply using her not to be lonely; neither does she love you. She is also in the same paranoia; she is using you not to be left alone. Naturally, in the name of love anything may happen -- except love. Fights may happen, arguments may happen, but even they are preferred to being lonely: at least somebody is there and you are engaged, you can forget your loneliness.
But love is not possible, because there is no basic foundation for love. Love never grows out of fear. You are asking, "You said the other day that we are born alone, we live alone and we die alone. Yet it seems as if from the day we are born, whatever we are doing, whoever we are, we seek to relate to others."
This seeking to relate to others is nothing but escapism. Even the smallest baby tries to find something to do; if nothing else, then he will suck his own big toes on his feet. It is an absolutely futile activity, nothing can come out of it, but it is engagement. He is doing something. You will see in the stations, in the airports, small boys and girls carrying their teddy bears; they cannot sleep without them. Darkness makes their loneliness even more dangerous. The teddy bear is a great protection; somebody is with them.
And your God is nothing but a teddy bear for grown-ups. You cannot live as you are. Your relationships are not relationships. They are ugly. You are using the other person, and you know perfectly well the other person is using you. And to use anybody is to reduce him into a thing, into a commodity. You don't have any respect for the person.
"In addition," you are asking, "we are usually attracted to being intimate with one person in particular."
It has a psychological reason. You are brought up by a mother, by a father; if you are a boy, you start loving your mother and you start being jealous of your father because he is a competitor; if you are a girl, you start loving your father and you hate your mother because she is a competitor. These are now established facts, not hypotheses, and the result of it turns your whole life into a misery.
The boy carries the image of his mother as the model of a woman. He becomes conditioned continuously; he knows only one woman so closely, so intimately. Her face, her hair, her warmth -- everything becomes an imprint. That's exactly the scientific word used: it becomes an imprint in his psychology. And the same happens to the girl about the father. When you grow up, you fall in love with some woman or with some man and you think, "Perhaps we are made for each other." Nobody is made for anyone.
But why do you feel attracted towards one certain person? It is because of your imprint. He must resemble your father in some way; she must resemble your mother in some way. Of course no other woman can be exactly a replica of your mother, and anyway you are not in search of a mother, you are in search of a wife. But the imprint inside you decides who is the right woman for you. The moment you see that woman, there is no question of reasoning. You immediately feel attraction; your imprint immediately starts functioning - - this is the woman for you, or this is the man for you.
It is good as far as meeting once in a while on the sea beach, in the movie hall, in the garden is concerned, because you don't come to know each other totally. But you are both hankering to live together; you want to be married, and that is one of the most dangerous steps that lovers can take. The moment you are married, you start becoming aware of the totality of the other person, and you are surprised on every single aspect -- "Something went wrong; this is not the woman, this is not the man" -- because they don't fit with the ideal that you are carrying within you.
And the trouble is multiplied because the woman is carrying an ideal of her father -- you don't fit with it. You are carrying the ideal of your mother -- she does not fit with it. That's why all marriages are failures. Only very rare marriages are not failures -- and I hope God should save you from those marriages which are not failures, because they are psychologically sick. There are people who are sadists, who enjoy torturing others, and there are people who are masochists, who enjoy torturing themselves.
If a husband and wife belong to these two categories, that marriage will be a successful marriage. One is a masochist and one is a sadist -- it is a perfect marriage, because one enjoys being tortured and one enjoys torturing. But ordinarily it is very difficult to find out in the first place whether you are a masochist or a sadist, and then to look for your other polarity.... If you are wise enough you should go to the psychologist and enquire who you are, a masochist or a sadist? and ask if he can give you some references which can fit with you.
Sometimes, just by accident, it happens that a sadist and masochist become married. They are the happiest people in the world; they are fulfilling each other's needs. But what kind of need is this? -- they are both psychopaths, and they are living a life of torture. But otherwise, every marriage is going to fail, for one simple reason: the imprint is the problem. Even in marriage, the basic reason for which you wanted to have the relationship is not fulfilled. You are more alone when you are with your wife than when you are alone.
To leave husband and wife in a room by themselves is to make them both utterly miserable. his whole effort -- whether of relationships or remaining busy in a thousand and one things -- is just to escape from the idea that you are lonely. And I want it to be emphatically clear to you that this is where the meditator and the ordinary man part. The ordinary man goes on trying to forget his loneliness, and the meditator starts getting more and more acquainted with his aloneness.
He has left the world; he has gone to the caves, to the mountains, to the forest, just for the sake of being alone. He wants to know who he is. In the crowd, it is difficult; there are so many disturbances. And those who have known their aloneness have known the greatest blissfulness possible to human beings -- because your very being is blissful. After being in tune with your aloneness, you can relate; then your relationship will bring great joys to you, because it is not out of fear.
Finding your aloneness you can create, you can be involved in as many things as you want, because this involvement will not anymore be running away from yourself. Now it will be your expression; now it will be the manifestation of all that is your potential. Only such a man -- whether he lives alone or lives in the society, whether he marries or lives unmarried makes no difference -- is always blissful, peaceful, silent. His life is a dance, is a song, is a flowering, is a fragrance. Whatever he does, he brings his fragrance to it.
But the first basic thing is to know your aloneness absolutely. This escape from yourself you have learned from the crowd. Because everybody is escaping, you start escaping. Every child is born in a crowd and starts imitating people; what others are doing, he starts doing. He falls into the same miserable situations as others are in, and he starts thinking that this is what life is all about. And he has missed life completely.
So I remind you, don't misunderstand aloneness as loneliness. Loneliness is certainly sick; aloneness is perfect health.
Ginsberg visits Doctor Goldberg. "Ja, you are sick."
"Not good enough. I want another opinion."
"Okay," said Doctor Goldberg, "you are ugly too."
We are all committing the same kinds of misunderstandings continually.
I would like my people to know that your first and most primary step towards finding the meaning and significance of life is to enter into your aloneness. It is your temple; it is where your God lives, and you cannot find this temple anywhere else. You can go on to the moon, to Mars....
Once you have entered your innermost core of being, you cannot believe your own eyes: you were carrying so much joy, so many blessings, so much love... and you were escaping from your own treasures. Knowing these treasures and their inexhaustibility, you can move now into relationships, into creativity. You will help people by sharing your love, not by using them. You will give dignity to people by your love; you will not destroy their respect. And you will, without any effort, become a source for them to find their own treasures too.
Whatever you make, whatever you do, you will spread your silence, your peace, your blessings into everything possible. But this basic thing is not taught by any family, by any society, by any university. People go on living in misery, and it is taken for granted. Everybody is miserable, so it is nothing much if you are miserable; you cannot be an exception. But I say unto you: You can be an exception. You just have not made the right effort.
Osho - Before You Can Love Yourself You Have To Know Yourself
Osho - Before you can Love yourself you have to know yourself
Question - Beloved Osho, What does it mean to Love Myself?
Osho - Prem Kabir, one has to begin not by loving oneself, because you don't know who you are. Who are you going to love? If you start by loving yourself, you will love only your ego, which is not your self, which is your false personality. Almost everybody loves his personality; everybody loves his ego. Even the ugliest woman, if you say to her, "How beautiful you are," will not refuse to accept it.
I have heard... Two old men meet on a street corner. "Where have you been for the past eight weeks?"
"In jail," says the second man.
"In jail? How come?" says the first man.
The second old man replies, "Well, about eight weeks ago I was standing on a street corner and this beautiful young girl rushes up with a policeman and says, `He is the man, officer. He is the one who attacked me.' And you know, I felt so flattered, I admitted it."
How many things you have admitted that you know perfectly well are not true. People say you are so loving, so sincere, so truthful, so beautiful, so honest -- and you never deny. This is not the love I have been talking about.
Yes, I would like you to love yourself, because unless you love yourself you cannot love anybody else. You don't know what love is if you have not loved yourself. But before you can love yourself you have to know yourself; hence love is secondary, meditation is primary.
And the miracle is, if you meditate and slowly, slowly get out of the ego and out of your personality and realize your real self, love will come on its own. You don't have to do anything, it is a spontaneous flowering. But it blossoms only in a certain climate, and that climate I call meditation. In the climate of silence -- no-mind, no disturbance inside, absolute clarity, peace and silence -- suddenly, you will see thousands of flowers have opened within you, and their fragrance is love.
Naturally, first you will love yourself, because that will be your first encounter. First you will become aware of the fragrance that is arising in you and the light that has been born in you, and the blissfulness that is showering on you. Then loving will become your nature. Then you will love many; then you will love all.
In fact, what we know in our ignorance is a relationship, and what we know in our awareness is no longer a relationship. It is not that I love you; it is that I am love.
And you have to understand the difference. When you say, "I love you," what about others? What about the whole existence? The more narrow your love is, the more imprisoned. Its wings are cut; it cannot fly in the sky across the sun. It does not have freedom; it is almost in a golden cage. The cage is beautiful, but inside the cage the bird is not the same bird that you see in the sky opening its wings.
Love has to become not a relationship, not a narrowing, but a broadening. Love has to become your very quality, your very character, your very being, your radiance. Just as the sun radiates light not for anyone in particular, unaddressed, meditation radiates love unaddressed.
Of course, first it is felt within oneself, for oneself, and then it starts radiating all around. Then you love not only human beings, you love trees, you love birds; you simply love, you are love.
You are asking, Prem Kabir, "What does it mean to love myself?" It means meditation. It means to be yourself. And nature will bring love as a reward. Just don't listen to the priests. They are the enemies of love. They have been teaching the world to hate yourself and to hate the world, because they have been teaching either it is a sin that you were born or it is because of the evil acts of your past life that you are suffering in this life. But no religion accepts this life with joy and rejoicing, as a gift, as a reward of which you are not worthy, of which you don't claim any right. You have not earned it.
So the first thing is, avoid the priests. They have taught you life-negative values. And my effort here is to bring back life-affirmation. That's what I call loving yourself, accepting yourself not as a sinner. How can you accept yourself if you think you are a sinner? How can you love yourself if you think you are nothing but full of guilt, nothing but an accumulated past of evil acts of millions of lives?
You will hate yourself. And that's what your priests have been saying: renounce life, hate life, hate pleasure, hate everything, and sacrifice everything if you want to enter into paradise. Nobody has ever returned from paradise, so there is no evidence of any paradise anywhere, no proof, it is just a futile exercise which has never been able to come to a conclusion.
The old priest was warning his congregation about sin.
"Sin," he said, "is like a big dog. There is the big dog of pride, and the big dog of envy, and the big dog of greed, and finally, there is the big dog of sex. And you have to kill those big dogs before they kill you and prevent you from getting to heaven. It can be done. I know, because over the years I have done it. I killed the big dog of envy, the big dog of pride, the big dog of greed -- and yes, my children, I killed the big dog of sex."
"Father," came a voice from the back of the church, "are you sure that last dog did not die a natural death?"
You cannot change nature. If you can simply live naturally, transformations come. If they come, then sex disappears -- but not by your efforts. By your efforts it goes on hanging around you. The more you repress it, the more you have it. The more you live it, the more is the possibility to go beyond it.
An old couple were sitting at home one evening listening to the faith healer on the radio.
"Okay folks," he began, "God wants to heal you all. All you have to do is put one hand on the radio and the other hand on the part that is sick."
The old lady got up, shuffled over to the radio and put her hand on her arthritic hip. Then the old man put one hand on the radio and the other hand on his fly. His wife looked at him with contempt and said, "You old idiot. The man said he would heal the sick, not raise the dead!"
Live naturally. Live peacefully. Live inwardly. Just give a little time to yourself, being alone, being silent, just watching the inner scene of your mind. Slowly, slowly thoughts disappear. Slowly, slowly one day the mind is so still, so silent as if it is not there. Just this silence... in this moment you are not here, as if the whole Buddha Hall is empty.
In this silence within you, you will find a new dimension of life. In this dimension greed does not exist, sex does not exist, anger does not exist, violence does not exist. It is not a credit to you; it is the new dimension beyond mind where love exists, pure, unpolluted by any biological urge; where compassion exists for no other reason -- not to get any reward in heaven -- because compassion is a reward unto itself.
A deep longing exists to share all that treasure that you have discovered within yourself, and to shout from the housetops to the people, "You are not poor! Paradise is within you.
You need not be beggars, you are born emperors." You just have to discover your empire, and your empire is not of the outside world; your empire is of your own interiority. It is within you and it has always been there, just waiting for you to come home. Love will come, and will come in abundance -- so much that you cannot contain it. You will find it is overflowing you, it is reaching all directions.
Just discover your hidden splendor. Life can be simply a song, a song of joy. Life can be simply a dance, a celebration, a continuous celebration. All that you have to learn is a life-affirmative lifestyle. I call only that man religious who is life-affirmative. All those who are life-negative may think they are religious; they are not. Their sadness shows they are not. Their seriousness shows they are not.
A man of authentic religion will have a sense of humor. It is our universe, it is our home. We are not orphans. This earth is our mother. This sky is our father. This whole vast universe is for us, and we are for it. In fact, there is no division between us and the whole. We are organically joined with it, we are part of one orchestra.
To feel this music of existence is the only religion that I can accept as authentic, as valid. It does not have any scriptures, it need not have. It does not have any statues of God, because it does not believe in any hypotheses. It has nothing to worship, it has only to be silent, and out of that silence comes gratitude, prayer, and the whole existence turns into a godliness.
There is no God as a person. God is spread all over: in the trees, in the birds, in the animals, in humanity, in the wise, in the otherwise. All that is alive is nothing but godliness ready to open its wings, ready to fly into the freedom, ultimate freedom of consciousness. Yes, you will love yourself and you will love the whole existence too.
Source - Osho Book "The Invitation"
Question - Beloved Osho, What does it mean to Love Myself?
Osho - Prem Kabir, one has to begin not by loving oneself, because you don't know who you are. Who are you going to love? If you start by loving yourself, you will love only your ego, which is not your self, which is your false personality. Almost everybody loves his personality; everybody loves his ego. Even the ugliest woman, if you say to her, "How beautiful you are," will not refuse to accept it.
I have heard... Two old men meet on a street corner. "Where have you been for the past eight weeks?"
"In jail," says the second man.
"In jail? How come?" says the first man.
The second old man replies, "Well, about eight weeks ago I was standing on a street corner and this beautiful young girl rushes up with a policeman and says, `He is the man, officer. He is the one who attacked me.' And you know, I felt so flattered, I admitted it."
How many things you have admitted that you know perfectly well are not true. People say you are so loving, so sincere, so truthful, so beautiful, so honest -- and you never deny. This is not the love I have been talking about.
Yes, I would like you to love yourself, because unless you love yourself you cannot love anybody else. You don't know what love is if you have not loved yourself. But before you can love yourself you have to know yourself; hence love is secondary, meditation is primary.
And the miracle is, if you meditate and slowly, slowly get out of the ego and out of your personality and realize your real self, love will come on its own. You don't have to do anything, it is a spontaneous flowering. But it blossoms only in a certain climate, and that climate I call meditation. In the climate of silence -- no-mind, no disturbance inside, absolute clarity, peace and silence -- suddenly, you will see thousands of flowers have opened within you, and their fragrance is love.
Naturally, first you will love yourself, because that will be your first encounter. First you will become aware of the fragrance that is arising in you and the light that has been born in you, and the blissfulness that is showering on you. Then loving will become your nature. Then you will love many; then you will love all.
In fact, what we know in our ignorance is a relationship, and what we know in our awareness is no longer a relationship. It is not that I love you; it is that I am love.
And you have to understand the difference. When you say, "I love you," what about others? What about the whole existence? The more narrow your love is, the more imprisoned. Its wings are cut; it cannot fly in the sky across the sun. It does not have freedom; it is almost in a golden cage. The cage is beautiful, but inside the cage the bird is not the same bird that you see in the sky opening its wings.
Love has to become not a relationship, not a narrowing, but a broadening. Love has to become your very quality, your very character, your very being, your radiance. Just as the sun radiates light not for anyone in particular, unaddressed, meditation radiates love unaddressed.
Of course, first it is felt within oneself, for oneself, and then it starts radiating all around. Then you love not only human beings, you love trees, you love birds; you simply love, you are love.
You are asking, Prem Kabir, "What does it mean to love myself?" It means meditation. It means to be yourself. And nature will bring love as a reward. Just don't listen to the priests. They are the enemies of love. They have been teaching the world to hate yourself and to hate the world, because they have been teaching either it is a sin that you were born or it is because of the evil acts of your past life that you are suffering in this life. But no religion accepts this life with joy and rejoicing, as a gift, as a reward of which you are not worthy, of which you don't claim any right. You have not earned it.
So the first thing is, avoid the priests. They have taught you life-negative values. And my effort here is to bring back life-affirmation. That's what I call loving yourself, accepting yourself not as a sinner. How can you accept yourself if you think you are a sinner? How can you love yourself if you think you are nothing but full of guilt, nothing but an accumulated past of evil acts of millions of lives?
You will hate yourself. And that's what your priests have been saying: renounce life, hate life, hate pleasure, hate everything, and sacrifice everything if you want to enter into paradise. Nobody has ever returned from paradise, so there is no evidence of any paradise anywhere, no proof, it is just a futile exercise which has never been able to come to a conclusion.
The old priest was warning his congregation about sin.
"Sin," he said, "is like a big dog. There is the big dog of pride, and the big dog of envy, and the big dog of greed, and finally, there is the big dog of sex. And you have to kill those big dogs before they kill you and prevent you from getting to heaven. It can be done. I know, because over the years I have done it. I killed the big dog of envy, the big dog of pride, the big dog of greed -- and yes, my children, I killed the big dog of sex."
"Father," came a voice from the back of the church, "are you sure that last dog did not die a natural death?"
You cannot change nature. If you can simply live naturally, transformations come. If they come, then sex disappears -- but not by your efforts. By your efforts it goes on hanging around you. The more you repress it, the more you have it. The more you live it, the more is the possibility to go beyond it.
An old couple were sitting at home one evening listening to the faith healer on the radio.
"Okay folks," he began, "God wants to heal you all. All you have to do is put one hand on the radio and the other hand on the part that is sick."
The old lady got up, shuffled over to the radio and put her hand on her arthritic hip. Then the old man put one hand on the radio and the other hand on his fly. His wife looked at him with contempt and said, "You old idiot. The man said he would heal the sick, not raise the dead!"
Live naturally. Live peacefully. Live inwardly. Just give a little time to yourself, being alone, being silent, just watching the inner scene of your mind. Slowly, slowly thoughts disappear. Slowly, slowly one day the mind is so still, so silent as if it is not there. Just this silence... in this moment you are not here, as if the whole Buddha Hall is empty.
In this silence within you, you will find a new dimension of life. In this dimension greed does not exist, sex does not exist, anger does not exist, violence does not exist. It is not a credit to you; it is the new dimension beyond mind where love exists, pure, unpolluted by any biological urge; where compassion exists for no other reason -- not to get any reward in heaven -- because compassion is a reward unto itself.
A deep longing exists to share all that treasure that you have discovered within yourself, and to shout from the housetops to the people, "You are not poor! Paradise is within you.
You need not be beggars, you are born emperors." You just have to discover your empire, and your empire is not of the outside world; your empire is of your own interiority. It is within you and it has always been there, just waiting for you to come home. Love will come, and will come in abundance -- so much that you cannot contain it. You will find it is overflowing you, it is reaching all directions.
Just discover your hidden splendor. Life can be simply a song, a song of joy. Life can be simply a dance, a celebration, a continuous celebration. All that you have to learn is a life-affirmative lifestyle. I call only that man religious who is life-affirmative. All those who are life-negative may think they are religious; they are not. Their sadness shows they are not. Their seriousness shows they are not.
A man of authentic religion will have a sense of humor. It is our universe, it is our home. We are not orphans. This earth is our mother. This sky is our father. This whole vast universe is for us, and we are for it. In fact, there is no division between us and the whole. We are organically joined with it, we are part of one orchestra.
To feel this music of existence is the only religion that I can accept as authentic, as valid. It does not have any scriptures, it need not have. It does not have any statues of God, because it does not believe in any hypotheses. It has nothing to worship, it has only to be silent, and out of that silence comes gratitude, prayer, and the whole existence turns into a godliness.
There is no God as a person. God is spread all over: in the trees, in the birds, in the animals, in humanity, in the wise, in the otherwise. All that is alive is nothing but godliness ready to open its wings, ready to fly into the freedom, ultimate freedom of consciousness. Yes, you will love yourself and you will love the whole existence too.
Source - Osho Book "The Invitation"
Forget Relationship And Learn How To Relate
Osho - Forget Relationships and learn how to Relate
Question - Beloved Osho, Is Relationship there because Love is Not?
Osho - Mukti Gandha, yes. Love is not a relationship. Love relates, but it is not a relationship. A relationship is something finished. A relationship is a noun; the full stop has come, the honeymoon is over. Now there is no joy, no enthusiasm, now all is finished.
You can carry it on, just to keep your promises. You can carry it on because it is comfortable, convenient, cozy. You can carry it on because there is nothing else to do. You can carry it on because if you disrupt it, it is going to create much trouble for you.
Relationship means something complete, finished, closed. Love is never a relationship; love is relating. It is always a river, flowing, unending. Love knows no full stop; the honeymoon begins but never ends. It is not like a novel that starts at a certain point and ends at a certain point. It is an ongoing phenomenon. Lovers end, love continues. It is a continuum. It is a verb, not a noun.
And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? -- because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a security, relationship has a certainty. Relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say goodbye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid that we want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable. We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don't allow it freedom to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun.
You are in love with a woman or a man and immediately you start thinking of getting married. Make it a legal contract. Why? How does the law come into love? The law comes into love because love is not there. It is only a fantasy, and you know the fantasy will disappear. Before it disappears settle down, before it disappears do something so it becomes impossible to separate.
In a better world, with more meditative people, with a little more enlightenment spread over the earth, people will love, love immensely, but their love will remain a relating, not a relationship. And I am not saying that their love will be only momentary. There is every possibility their love may go deeper than your love, may have a higher quality of intimacy, may have something more of poetry and more of God in it. And there is every possibility their love may last longer than your so-called relationship ever lasts. But it will not be guaranteed by the law, by the court, by the policeman.
The guarantee will be inner. It will be a commitment from the heart, it will be a silent communion. If you enjoy being with somebody, you would like to enjoy it more and more. If you enjoy the intimacy, you would like to explore the intimacy more and more.
And there are a few flowers of love which bloom only after long intimacies. There are seasonal flowers too; within six weeks they are there in the sun, but within six weeks again they are gone forever. There are flowers which take years to come, and there are flowers which take many years to come. The longer it takes, the deeper it goes.
But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another heart. It has not even to be verbalized, because to verbalize it is to profane it. It has to be a silent commitment; eye to eye, heart to heart, being to being. It has to be understood, not said.
It is so ugly seeing people going to the church or the court to get married. It is so ugly, so inhuman. It simply shows they can't trust themselves, they trust the policeman more than they trust their own inner voice. It shows they can't trust their love, they trust the law.
Gandha, forget relationships and learn how to relate.
Once you are in a relationship you start taking each other for granted. That's what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows either. It is impossible to know the other, the other remains a mystery. And to take the other for granted is insulting, disrespectful.
To think that you know your wife is very very ungrateful. How can you know the woman? How can you know the man? They are processes, they are not things. The woman that you knew yesterday is not there today. So much water has gone down the Ganges; she is somebody else, totally different. Relate again, start again, don't take it for granted.
And the man that you slept with last night, look at his face again in the morning. He is no more the same person, so much has changed. So much, incalculably much, has changed. That is the difference between a thing and a person. The furniture in the room is the same, but the man and the woman, they are no more the same. Explore again, start again. That's what I mean by relating.
Relating means you are always starting, you are continuously trying to become acquainted. Again and again, you are introducing yourself to each other. You are trying to see the many facets of the other's personality. You are trying to penetrate deeper and deeper into his realm of inner feelings, into the deep recesses of his being. You are trying to unravel a mystery which cannot be unraveled.
That is the joy of love: the exploration of consciousness. And if you relate, and don't reduce it to a relationship, then the other will become a mirror to you. Exploring him, unawares you will be exploring yourself too. Getting deeper into the other, knowing his feelings, his thoughts, his deeper stirrings, you will be knowing your own deeper stirrings too. Lovers become mirrors to each other, and then love becomes a meditation. Relationship is ugly, relating is beautiful.
In relationship both persons become blind to each other. Just think, how long has it been since you saw your wife eye to eye? How long has it been since you looked at your husband? Maybe years. Who looks at one's own wife? You have already taken it for granted that you know her. What more is there to look at? You are more interested in strangers than in the people you know -- you know the whole topography of their bodies, you know how they respond, you know everything that has happened is going to happen again and again. It is a repetitive circle.
It is not so, it is not really so. Nothing ever repeats; everything is new every day. Just your eyes become old, your assumptions become old, your mirror gathers dust and you become incapable of reflecting the other.
Hence I say relate. By saying relate, I mean remain continuously on a honeymoon. Go on searching and seeking each other, finding new ways of loving each other, finding new ways of being with each other. And each person is such an infinite mystery, inexhaustible, unfathomable, that it is not possible that you can ever say, "I have known her," or, "I have known him." At the most you can say, "I have tried my best, but the mystery remains a mystery."
In fact the more you know, the more mysterious the other becomes. Then love is a constant adventure.
Question - Beloved Osho, Is Relationship there because Love is Not?
Osho - Mukti Gandha, yes. Love is not a relationship. Love relates, but it is not a relationship. A relationship is something finished. A relationship is a noun; the full stop has come, the honeymoon is over. Now there is no joy, no enthusiasm, now all is finished.
You can carry it on, just to keep your promises. You can carry it on because it is comfortable, convenient, cozy. You can carry it on because there is nothing else to do. You can carry it on because if you disrupt it, it is going to create much trouble for you.
Relationship means something complete, finished, closed. Love is never a relationship; love is relating. It is always a river, flowing, unending. Love knows no full stop; the honeymoon begins but never ends. It is not like a novel that starts at a certain point and ends at a certain point. It is an ongoing phenomenon. Lovers end, love continues. It is a continuum. It is a verb, not a noun.
And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? -- because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a security, relationship has a certainty. Relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say goodbye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid that we want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable. We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don't allow it freedom to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun.
You are in love with a woman or a man and immediately you start thinking of getting married. Make it a legal contract. Why? How does the law come into love? The law comes into love because love is not there. It is only a fantasy, and you know the fantasy will disappear. Before it disappears settle down, before it disappears do something so it becomes impossible to separate.
In a better world, with more meditative people, with a little more enlightenment spread over the earth, people will love, love immensely, but their love will remain a relating, not a relationship. And I am not saying that their love will be only momentary. There is every possibility their love may go deeper than your love, may have a higher quality of intimacy, may have something more of poetry and more of God in it. And there is every possibility their love may last longer than your so-called relationship ever lasts. But it will not be guaranteed by the law, by the court, by the policeman.
The guarantee will be inner. It will be a commitment from the heart, it will be a silent communion. If you enjoy being with somebody, you would like to enjoy it more and more. If you enjoy the intimacy, you would like to explore the intimacy more and more.
And there are a few flowers of love which bloom only after long intimacies. There are seasonal flowers too; within six weeks they are there in the sun, but within six weeks again they are gone forever. There are flowers which take years to come, and there are flowers which take many years to come. The longer it takes, the deeper it goes.
But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another heart. It has not even to be verbalized, because to verbalize it is to profane it. It has to be a silent commitment; eye to eye, heart to heart, being to being. It has to be understood, not said.
It is so ugly seeing people going to the church or the court to get married. It is so ugly, so inhuman. It simply shows they can't trust themselves, they trust the policeman more than they trust their own inner voice. It shows they can't trust their love, they trust the law.
Gandha, forget relationships and learn how to relate.
Once you are in a relationship you start taking each other for granted. That's what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows either. It is impossible to know the other, the other remains a mystery. And to take the other for granted is insulting, disrespectful.
To think that you know your wife is very very ungrateful. How can you know the woman? How can you know the man? They are processes, they are not things. The woman that you knew yesterday is not there today. So much water has gone down the Ganges; she is somebody else, totally different. Relate again, start again, don't take it for granted.
And the man that you slept with last night, look at his face again in the morning. He is no more the same person, so much has changed. So much, incalculably much, has changed. That is the difference between a thing and a person. The furniture in the room is the same, but the man and the woman, they are no more the same. Explore again, start again. That's what I mean by relating.
Relating means you are always starting, you are continuously trying to become acquainted. Again and again, you are introducing yourself to each other. You are trying to see the many facets of the other's personality. You are trying to penetrate deeper and deeper into his realm of inner feelings, into the deep recesses of his being. You are trying to unravel a mystery which cannot be unraveled.
That is the joy of love: the exploration of consciousness. And if you relate, and don't reduce it to a relationship, then the other will become a mirror to you. Exploring him, unawares you will be exploring yourself too. Getting deeper into the other, knowing his feelings, his thoughts, his deeper stirrings, you will be knowing your own deeper stirrings too. Lovers become mirrors to each other, and then love becomes a meditation. Relationship is ugly, relating is beautiful.
In relationship both persons become blind to each other. Just think, how long has it been since you saw your wife eye to eye? How long has it been since you looked at your husband? Maybe years. Who looks at one's own wife? You have already taken it for granted that you know her. What more is there to look at? You are more interested in strangers than in the people you know -- you know the whole topography of their bodies, you know how they respond, you know everything that has happened is going to happen again and again. It is a repetitive circle.
It is not so, it is not really so. Nothing ever repeats; everything is new every day. Just your eyes become old, your assumptions become old, your mirror gathers dust and you become incapable of reflecting the other.
Hence I say relate. By saying relate, I mean remain continuously on a honeymoon. Go on searching and seeking each other, finding new ways of loving each other, finding new ways of being with each other. And each person is such an infinite mystery, inexhaustible, unfathomable, that it is not possible that you can ever say, "I have known her," or, "I have known him." At the most you can say, "I have tried my best, but the mystery remains a mystery."
In fact the more you know, the more mysterious the other becomes. Then love is a constant adventure.
Osho Discourse on Jealousy
Osho Discourse on Jealousy
Question - What is Jealousy and why does it Hurt so much?
Osho - Jealousy is one of the most prevalent areas of psychological ignorance about yourself, about others and more particularly, about relationship. People think they know what love is -- they do not know. And their misunderstanding about love creates jealousy.
By `love' people mean a certain kind of monopoly, some possessiveness -- without understanding a simple fact of life: that the moment you possess a living being you have killed him.
Life cannot be possessed. You cannot have it in your fist. If you want to have it, you have to keep your hands open. But the thing has been going on a wrong path for centuries; it has become ingrained in us so much that we cannot separate love from jealousy. They have become almost one energy.
For example, you feel jealous if your lover goes to another woman. You are disturbed by it now, but I would like to tell you that if you don't feel jealous you will be in much more trouble -- then you will think you don't love him, because if you loved him you should have felt jealous.
Jealousy and love have become so mixed up. In fact, they are poles apart. A mind that can be jealous cannot be loving, and vice-versa: a mind that is loving cannot be jealous
Question - What is Jealousy and why does it Hurt so much?
Osho - Jealousy is one of the most prevalent areas of psychological ignorance about yourself, about others and more particularly, about relationship. People think they know what love is -- they do not know. And their misunderstanding about love creates jealousy.
By `love' people mean a certain kind of monopoly, some possessiveness -- without understanding a simple fact of life: that the moment you possess a living being you have killed him.
Life cannot be possessed. You cannot have it in your fist. If you want to have it, you have to keep your hands open. But the thing has been going on a wrong path for centuries; it has become ingrained in us so much that we cannot separate love from jealousy. They have become almost one energy.
For example, you feel jealous if your lover goes to another woman. You are disturbed by it now, but I would like to tell you that if you don't feel jealous you will be in much more trouble -- then you will think you don't love him, because if you loved him you should have felt jealous.
Jealousy and love have become so mixed up. In fact, they are poles apart. A mind that can be jealous cannot be loving, and vice-versa: a mind that is loving cannot be jealous
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