” If you are really vulnerable, nothing is negative for you – because the negative is your interpretation. Nothing is harmful to you – because harmful is your interpretation. If you are really open, then nothing can harm you, nothing can be felt as harmful. You feel something negative and something is harmful because you resist, because you are against it, because there is no acceptance of it. This has to be deeply understood.”

Osho

Why Love hurts


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

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

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

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

Love is fire.

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lover remains a virgin. All lovers are virgin. The people who don’t love cannot remain virgin’ they become dormant, stagnant’ they start stinking sooner or later — and sooner than later — because they have nowhere to go. Their life is dead.
That’s where modern man finds himself, and because of this, all kinds of neuroses, all kinds of madnesses, have become rampant. Psychological illness has taken epidemic proportions. It is no more that a few individuals are psychologically ill’ the reality is the whole earth has become a madhouse. The whole of humanity is suffering from a kind of neurosis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Single-Pointedness

Saraha and the arrowsmith woman

Mind is so cunning that it can hide in the garments of its very opposite. From indulgence it can become asceticism, from being a materialist it can become a spiritualist, from being worldly it can become otherworldly. But mind is mind--whether you are for the world or against the world you remain encaged in the mind.

For or against, both are parts of the mind. When mind disappears, mind disappears in a choiceless awareness. When you stop choosing, when you are neither for nor against--that is stopping in the middle. One choice leads to the left, one extreme; another choice leads to the right, the other extreme. If you don't choose, you are exactly in the middle. That is relaxation, that is rest. You become choiceless, unobsessed, and in that state of unobsessed, choiceless consciousness, intelligence arises which has been lying deep, dormant in your being. You become a light unto yourself.

Saraha, the founder of Tantra, was the son of a very learned Brahmin who was in the court of King Mahapala. The king was willing to give his own daughter to Saraha, but Saraha wanted to renounce all--he wanted to become a sannyasin.

The king tried to persuade him--Saraha was so beautiful and he was so intelligent and he was such a handsome young man. But he persisted and the permission had to be given--Saraha became a disciple of Sri Kirti. The first thing Sri Kirti told him was: "Forget all your Vedas and all your learning and all that nonsense." It was difficult but he was ready to stake anything. Years passed and, by and by, he erased all that he had known. He became a great meditator.


One day while Saraha was meditating, suddenly he saw a vision--that there was a woman in the marketplace who was going to be his real teacher. He went to the marketplace. He saw this woman, young woman, very alive, radiant with life, cutting an arrow-shaft, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but wholly absorbed in making the arrow. He immediately felt something extraordinary in her presence, something that he had never come across. Something so fresh and something from the very source. The arrow ready, the woman closing one eye and opening the other, assumed the posture of aiming at an invisible target... And something happened, something like a communion.

Saraha had never felt like that before. In that moment, the spiritual significance of what she was doing dawned upon him. Neither looking to the left, nor looking to the right--just looking in the middle. For the first time he understood what Buddha means by being in the middle: avoid the axis. You can move from the left to the right, from the right to the left, but you will be like a pendulum moving. To be in the middle means the pendulum just hangs there, neither to the right nor to the left. Then the clock stops, then the world stops. Then there is no more time... then the state of no-time. He had heard it said so many times by Sri Kirti; he had read about it, he had pondered, contemplated over it; he had argued with others about it, that to be in the middle is the right thing. For the first time he had seen it in an action: the woman was not looking to the right and not looking to the left... she was just looking in the middle, focussed in the middle.

The middle is the point from where the transcendence happens. Think about it, contemplate about it, watch it in life.

Zen asks you to come out of the head and go to the basic source.... It is not that Zen is not aware of the uses of energy in the head, but if all the energy is used in the head, you will never become aware of your eternity.... You will never know as an experience what it is to be one with the whole. When the energy is just at the center, pulsating, when it is not moving anywhere, neither in the head nor in the heart, but it is at the very source from where the heart takes it, the head takes it, pulsating at the very source--that is the very meaning of Zazen. Zazen means just sitting at the very source, not moving anywhere, a tremendous force arises, a transformation of energy into light and love, into greater life, into compassion, into creativity. It can take many forms. But first you have to learn how to be at the source. Then the source will decide where your potential is. You can relax at the source, and it will take you to your very potential.

When we speak of being "grounded" or "centered" it is this Source we are talking about. When we begin a creative project, it is this Source that we tune in to. There is a vast reservoir of energy available to us. And we tap into it not by thinking and planning but by getting grounded, centered, and silent enough to be in contact with the Source. It is within each of us, like a personal, individual sun giving us life and nourishment. Pure energy, pulsating, available, it is ready to give us anything we need to accomplish something, and ready to welcome us back home when we want to rest. So whether you are beginning something new and need inspiration right now, or you've just finished something and want to rest, go to the Source. It's always waiting for you, and you don't even have to step out of your house to find it.

“Man lives in illusion. Man lives through illusion. Man lives for illusion. In short, man lives because of illusion. Hence the fear of truth. Nobody wants truth, although everybody goes on seeking for it. That seeking is a deception, that seeking is an avoidance. To seek truth means to avoid truth.
It has to be understood – how the seeker goes on avoiding truth. To seek means to look far away, to seek means to look somewhere else, to seek means to postpone- to seek means it will happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, it is not happening right now. It is not here, it is there. It is not this, it is that.”

Celebrate Misery!
    
Even about misery you can take an attitude of celebration. For example: you are sad — don’t get identified with sadness. Become a witness and enjoy the moment of sadness, because sadness has its own beauties. You have never watched. You get so identified that you never penetrate the beauties of a sad moment. If you watch, you will be surprised at what treasures you have been missing.
Look — when you are happy you are never so deep as when you are sad.
Sadness has a depth to it; happiness has shallowness about it. Go and watch happy people. The so-called happy people, the playboys and playgirls — in clubs, in hotels you will find them, in theatres — are always smiling and bubbling with happiness. You will always find them shallow, superficial. They don’t have any depth. Happiness is like waves just on the surface; you live a shallow life. But sadness has a depth to it. When you are sad it is not like waves on the surface, it is like the very depth of the Pacific Ocean: miles and miles to it.
Move into the depth, watch it. Happiness is noisy; sadness has a silence to it. Happiness may be like the day, sadness is like the night. Happiness may be like the light, sadness is like darkness. Light comes and goes; darkness remains — it is eternal. Light happens sometimes; darkness is always there. If you move into sadness all these things will be felt. Suddenly you will become aware that sadness is there like an object, you are watching and witnessing, and suddenly you start feeling happy.
Such a beautiful sadness! — A flower of darkness, a flower of eternal depth.
Like an abyss without any bottom, so silent, so musical; there is no noise at all, no disturbance. One can go on falling and falling into it endlessly, and one can come out of it absolutely rejuvenated. It is a rest.
It depends on the attitude. When you become sad you think that something bad has happened to you. It is an interpretation that something bad has happened to you, and then you start trying to escape from it. You never meditate on it. Then you want to go to somebody: to a party, to the club, or put the T.V. on or the radio, or start reading the newspaper — something so that you can forget. This is a wrong attitude that has been given to you — that sadness is wrong. Nothing is wrong with it. It is another polarity in life.
Happiness is one pole, sadness is another. Blissfulness is one pole, misery is another. Life consists of both, and life is a ritual because of both. A life only of blissfulness will have extension, but will not have depth. A life of only sadness will have depth, but will not have extension. A life of both sadness and blissfulness is multi dimensional; it moves in all dimensions together. Watch the statue of Buddha or sometimes look into my eyes and you will find both together — a blissfulness, a peace, a sadness also. You will find a blissfulness which contains in it sadness also, because that sadness gives it depth. Watch Buddha’s statue — blissful, but still sad. The very word ‘sad’ gives you wrong connotations — that something is wrong. This is your interpretation.
To me, life in its totality is good. And when you understand life in its totality, only then can you celebrate; otherwise not. Celebration means: whatsoever happens is irrelevant — I will celebrate. Celebration is not conditional on certain things: “When I am happy then I will celebrate,” or, “When I am unhappy I will not celebrate.”
Celebration is unconditional; I celebrate life.
It brings unhappiness — good, I celebrate it. It brings happiness — good, I celebrate it. Celebration is my attitude, unconditional to what life brings.
But a problem arises because whenever I use words, those words have connotations in your mind. When I say ‘Celebrate’, you think one has to be happy. How can one celebrate when one is sad? I am not saying that one has to be happy to celebrate. Celebration is gratefulness for whatsoever life gives to you. Whatsoever existence gives to you, celebration is a gratitude; it is a gratefulness.


Osho, The Alchemy of Yoga

YOUR CHIEF CHARACTERISTIC
    
I am concerned about my friend’s drinking habits.
“Don’t think about anything that concerns others.
“And that’s what you go on thinking. Ninety-nine percent of the things that you think about concern others. Drop them — drop them immediately!
“Your life is short, and your life is slipping out of your fingers. Each moment you are less, each day you are less, and each day you are less alive and more dead! Each birthday is a death day; one more year is gone from your hands. Be a little more intelligent.
“Do not think about anything that concerns others. Train first against the defilement that is greatest.
“Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples — the first thing, the very very first thing, “Find out what your greatest characteristic is, your greatest undoing, your central characteristic of unconsciousness.” Each one’s is different. Somebody is sex-obsessed. In a country like India, where for centuries sex has been repressed, that has become almost a universal characteristic; everybody is obsessed with sex. Somebody is obsessed with anger, and somebody else is obsessed with greed. You have to watch which is your basic obsession.
“So first find the main characteristic upon which your whole ego edifice rests. And then be constantly aware of it, because it can exist only if you are unaware. It is burnt in the fire of awareness automatically.
“And remember, remember always, that you are not to cultivate the opposite of it. Otherwise, what happens is a person becomes aware that, ‘My obsession is anger, so what should I do? I should cultivate compassion.’ ‘My obsession is sex, so what should I do? I should practice brahmacharya, celibacy.’
“People move from one thing to the opposite. That is not the way of transformation. It is the same pendulum, moving from left to right, from right to left. And that’s how your life has been moving for centuries; it is the same pendulum.
“The pendulum has to be stopped in the middle. And that’s the miracle of awareness. Just be aware that, ‘This is my chief pitfall, this is the place where I stumble again and again, this is the root of my unconsciousness.’
“Don’t try to cultivate the opposite of it, but pour your whole awareness into it. Create a great bonfire of awareness, and it will be burned. And then the pendulum stops in the middle.
“And with the stopping of the pendulum, time stops. You suddenly enter into the world of timelessness, deathlessness, eternity.”

Osho, The Book of Wisdom

Health, Meditation, and Dreams
    
How is it that the body begins to feel light after the deep and fast breathing in dynamic meditation?
It is true that the body will feel light after this meditation. It will be so because our consciousness of body is one of heaviness. What we call heaviness is nothing more than our awareness of the body. The body weighs heavy on a sick person even if he is skinny and wiry. But a healthy person, even if he is a heavyweight, carries his body very lightly. So it is really our body-consciousness that feels like a weight on us.
And we become conscious of our body only when it is in pain, when it is suffering. We become conscious of our feet when they are hurting. We become aware of our head when it is aching. If there is no body pain, we are never aware of our body. This consciousness is the measure of our suffering.
We define a healthy person as one who feels as if he is bodiless.
He who does not feel that he is a body, who has a feeling of bodilessness, is really a healthy person. And if he is identified with a particular part of his body it can be said that this part of his body is sick.
As the amount of oxygen increases and as the kundalini awakens, you will begin to have experiences that are not of the body; they belong to the soul or the atman. And on account of these subtle experiences you will simultaneously feel lightness, an extraordinary kind of weightlessness. Many people will feel as if they are levitating. Not that they really levitate — an event of actual levitation takes place only once in a long while. But because of the feeling of utter weightlessness, you feel that you are levitating. If you open your eyes and see, you will find that you are sitting on the ground. But why this feeling of levitation?
The fact is that our mind, in its inmost depths, does not know any language as we know. It only knows the language of pictures, symbols. So when you experience weightlessness, utter weightlessness, your mind expresses it in the language of pictures. It does not say verbally that it is weightlessness, it pictures it as an act of levitation, it feels levitation.
Our deeper mind, our unconscious mind does not think in words, it thinks in pictures, in symbols.
That is why our dreams in the night have only pictures and hardly any words. The dreaming mind has to transform everything — including experiences and thoughts — into pictures. For this reason when we wake up in the morning we find it so difficult to understand our own dreams. The language we know and use in the waking hours is utterly different from the pictorial language of dreams. The two are total strangers to each other, and therefore great interpreters in the form of pundits, psychologists and psychiatrists are needed to interpret them for us. We just cannot do without them.
Now someone is ambitious. How will he express his ambition when he is dreaming? He will turn into a bird on the wing soaring high in the sky. Then he will be at the top of everything, leaving the whole world behind him. Ambition in dreams takes the form of flights — one dreams that he is flying and flying. All ambitious men have dreams of flying. But the word ambition will never find a place in dreams. So after waking up in the morning the person wonders why he was flying in his dreams. It is his ambition turned into a flying bird in dreams.
The same way when we enter the depths of meditation, weightlessness feels like levitation.
Really weightlessness can be pictured only as levitation, there is no other way. And once in a great while the body actually levitates in a state of extreme weightlessness.

Osho, In Search of the Miraculous

Don’t insist for more, just friendship is perfectly good. There are two possibilities for every human being. One is that you fall in love, and by and by friendship grows out of that. Lovers always become friends in the end – and if they cannot, then somewhere they have missed and something has gone wrong – because by and by the passion settles.

Passion is a very very excited state of mind which ...you cannot live in for very long. By the time the honeymoon is over, so is the passion. Then friendship arises. So this is one possibility – that two people fall in love. There is tremendous passion; they are almost in a cyclone, lost. They move at the peaks, they have completely forgotten the valleys for a few days.

But nobody can live at the peak; at the most you can be there for a holiday. One settles in the valley. So by and by a love relationship settles and becomes calm and tranquil and harmonious – then friendship arises. Husband and wife become like brother and sister. But there are problems, because once the fever has gone, the woman starts thinking that the man doesn’t love her enough now, and the man thinks the same of the woman.

But the other possibility is that you start as friends, without any passion. The trouble will be that the mind will be asking for passion in the beginning. If you can drop that and not be worried about it, you can grow in friendship, so that by and by without any passion or peak you will come to the valley and settle in it.

And my feeling is that if love starts by friendship, though it may be difficult in the beginning, in the end it is very very beautiful, because you never miss anything. If from the beginning a friendship can remain a friendship, it will go deeper; it will not go higher, but it will go deeper and will settle. This type of relationship is difficult in the beginning, and the other type is easy to begin with, but difficult in the end. In fact if you look at the whole, both are the same. So don’t make it a problem, or [your boyfriend] will start escaping!

YOU ARE WISE
Through silence you become wise, not through learning, not by becoming more informed but by becoming absolutely silent. YOU ARE WISE... otherwise you will know only words -- hollow words, meaningless words. Yes, you can accumulate much knowledge. You can know the Vedas and the Koran and the Bible and the Gita and you can repeat them, but you will not understand anything. More is the possibility that you will misunderstand. From where will you get the right perspective to understand them? With all your passions and desires and all your confusion and clouded mind, how are you going to understand the Upanishads, the Koran? Impossible. They come from people who had gone beyond the body. Unless YOU go beyond the body you will not understand them. You can understand only that which you have experienced.
But the knowledgeable people not only deceive others, they start deceiving themselves -- maybe not knowingly, not deliberately. If you go on deceiving others your whole life, pretending that you know, slowly slowly you start believing in your own pretensions. You forget that you don't know; you don't want to remember it. Who wants to know that "I am ignorant"? Everybody wants to feel that he knows.
Ask anybody about God and it is very rare to find a person who will say to you, "I don't know." Very rare... almost impossible. Many will say, "Yes, God is, God exists." And they are ready to fight, to argue, to kill you or be killed, for something that they know not, not at all. And there are a few who will say, "No, there is no God." But it is very rare to find a person who will say, "I don't know" -- and that is the real religious person.
The agnostic is the real religious person -- neither the theist nor the atheist. One believes without knowing, one disbelieves without knowing; both are deceiving. But I am not doubting their sincerity. They may be thinking... they may be absolutely convinced that they know. And then you ask other questions about God and then they have to invent answers, because basically they have accepted that they know.
Ask them how many heads God has, and they will tell you three or four, and they will make much out of nonsense. They will say that God has four heads because there are four directions and he has to look in all directions, or three because there are three dimensions and he has to look into all dimensions. How many hands has he? And some say he has one thousand hands because he has to work so much and he is so alone, and he has to create the world and manage the whole show all alone. One thousand hands... two hands are not enough. Do you think one thousand hands will be enough to manage this vast universe? Do you think four heads will be enough to see everywhere?
But people go on inventing answers. You ask the question and they invent -- they have to invent because they cannot accept one thing, that they don't know.
A blonde took her dog to the vet who advised her to buy some Nair to remove the excess hair around the Schnauzer's eyes and ears.
The blonde entered a pharmacy and asked for the hair remover.
"Use it full strength for leg hair," said the druggist, "but dilute it one half for the underarms."
"Ah," said the girl, "but I want to use it on my Schnauzer."
"In that case," said the pharmacist, "you better use one quarter strength and I wouldn't ride a Honda for a couple of weeks."
The knowledgeable person cannot ask, "What is this Schnauzer?" That shows his ignorance and he cannot show that. Sometimes knowledgeable people commit such stupidities that no ignorant person can ever commit, because the ignorant person can always ask what it is -- "I don't know." But the knowledgeable person finds it impossible. He cannot say these three words: "I don't know." If you can say, "I don't know," you have taken one of the greatest steps towards real knowing, towards wisdom.
Buddha says: When mind is empty, silent, you are wise. By wisdom he does not mean knowledgeability; by wisdom he means innocence. Knowledge comes from the outside, wisdom arises within. Knowledge creates noise, wisdom brings more and more silence. The wise person slowly slowly becomes utterly silent. Even if he speaks, his words carry the flavor of silence, the music of silence.
By wisdom he means spontaneity, childlike spontaneity, eyes full of wonder. When your eyes are full of wonder you can see the beauty that surrounds you. When your eyes are full of knowledge you can't see the beauty because you have explanations for everything -- and explanations help you only to explain things away, nothing else.
But knowledgeable people have been doing good business. They have dominated humanity too long; that is their joy.

In Zen you are coming from nowhere and you are going to nowhere. You are just now, here, neither coming nor going. Everything passes by you; your consciousness reflects it but it does not get identified. When a lion roars in front of a mirror, do you think the mirror roars? Or when the lion is gone and a child comes dancing, the mirror completely forgets about the lion and starts dancing with the child--do you think the mirror dances with the child? The mirror does nothing, it simply reflects. Your consciousness is only a mirror. Neither do you come, nor do you go. Things come and go. You become young, you become old; you are alive, you are dead. All these states are simply reflections in an eternal pool of consciousness.

Commentary:
This card depicts the evolution of consciousness as it is described by Friedrich Nietzsche in his book, Thus Spake Zarathustra. He speaks of the three levels of Camel, Lion and Child. The camel is sleepy, dull, self-satisfied. He lives in delusion, thinking he's a mountain peak, but really he is so concerned with others' opinions that he hardly has any energy of his own. Emerging from the camel is the lion. When we realize we've been missing life, we start saying no to the demands of others. We move out of the crowd, alone and proud, roaring our truth. But this is not the end. Finally the child emerges, neither acquiescent nor rebellious, but innocent and spontaneous and true to his own being. Whatever the space you're in right now--sleepy and depressed, or roaring and rebellious--be aware that it will evolve into something new if you allow it. It is a time of growth and change.

People are living... not really living, just mechanically moving, victims of blind forces. When sex takes possession of you, you are not your own master. Or when greed takes possession, or anger, or jealousy, you are not your own master. You are being dragged. And it is very strange that you allow it to happen -- you don't feel insulted or humiliated! Each of your instincts makes you a slave. You not only tolerate this slavery; on the contrary, you enjoy it. On the contrary, you think this is what life is supposed to be. This is not life that you are living. It is biology, it is physiology, it is chemistry, but it is not life. To live under the influence of instincts is not to live at all.
Life begins only when you rise above your instincts. And the way to rise is: REFLECT, WATCH, and you will immediately know: NOTHING BINDS YOU. YOU ARE FREE. You are a master. In your watchfulness, slowly slowly, passions disappear, because a watchful person cannot be hot.
Desires are always leading you into the future. Desire means future; it can only happen tomorrow. So you go on looking at the tomorrow, and meanwhile the time is passing. And the tomorrow never comes; it can't come, in the very nature of things. So your whole life is just a waiting for nothing -- waiting for Godot! And Godot never comes. In fact, nobody knows who this Godot is.
But we go on waiting for something to happen some day, and we know that it has not happened to anybody. It didn't happen to your father, to your father's father. It has not happened to your neighbors. You can look around people's faces: it has not happened. You don't see the glow, you don't see in their eyes contentment, you don't see joy. You see only a desperate effort to achieve something which they are not really aware of, what exactly it is and whether it is possible or not. But they go on running in hot pursuit -- and they go on destroying their life.
"Grandma, how long have you and grandpa been married?" asked the romantic young granddaughter.
"Forty-nine years," replied the old lady.
"Ah, what a beautiful life you must have had," sighed the girl. "And I will bet you never even thought of a divorce."
"Well," said grandma, "divorce, no -- murder, yes!"
Just ask the old people what they have attained, what they have been doing. And if they are true and authentic, if they are sincere, they will tell you nothing but that "Life has been a tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise, signifying nothing. And now comes death, and all is finished." But to a meditator, death is not the end but the beginning of a new life.
Buddha says: THIS IS YOUR LAST BODY. If you have quietened the mind, if you have become free from desire and passion: THIS IS YOUR LAST BODY. Now you will be born into a bodiless existence. Now you will be part of the invisible life, the eternal life which knows no birth, no death.
The body is a limitation, the body confines you. You are unlimited consciousness, but your body forces you into a small, dark hole. You live in a dark hole, in a dark cave. Of course, it is going to be miserable. You are vast and somehow you have been forced to live in a small space. Nobody has done it to you; you yourself go on doing it. Each time you die, you die with desires. Those desires bring you back into new wombs. Those desires give you another body.
If you can die without desires, then there is no longer any birth. When there is no birth there is no old age, no death. And when there is no birth there is no time. You go beyond time. You live in eternity, you become divine. That's what Buddha means by godliness -- BHAGAVATA.

A psychiatrist was going around a mental hospital. He saw one man beating himself, pulling his hair, looking very suicidal. He was kept in a cell -- he was dangerous. He asked the superintendent, "What happened to this man?"
The superintendent said, "He loved a woman, he loved her very much, but he could not get her. She married somebody else. Since then he has been in this state. He wants to commit suicide, he does not want to live. He says there is no meaning in life: 'My meaning was in that woman. If I could not get that woman, that means my life is finished!'"
Feeling sorry for the man -- he was young and beautiful -- they moved ahead. They saw another cell and another man was inside it, and he was even more ferocious, very murderous.
The psychiatrist asked, "What has happened to this man?"
The superintendent said, "This is the man who married that same woman! Since he has married her he wants to kill her, and if he cannot kill her then he wants to kill anybody instead, but he wants to kill and destroy. He wants to kill the whole world! That woman drove him mad."
One is mad because he could not get her, the other is mad because he COULD get her. This is the whole history of every human being, more or less. It may not be so extreme, so you don't see it, but the differences are only in degrees. The man in the grip of desire is bound to become insane.
And Buddha says: PLEASURE.... Pleasure means that you think the body is the only source of happiness. That is sheer stupidity. The body's pleasures are very momentary; they are not real pleasures. But everybody is caught in the net of the body. We are born as bodies, but we need not die as bodies. If we die as bodies, our whole life was a sheer wastage. You have to grow up.
And remember: growing old is not growing up. Everybody grows old, but very few people, very rare people grow up. One who really grows up becomes a buddha. Growing up means you start becoming alert about bodily pleasures -- that they are momentary and they can change into their opposite very easily.
For example, you love eating and you can go on eating too much. Then it becomes a pain. It was pleasure in the beginning, but there is a limit to that pleasure. It is said of Nero that he used to have four physicians always with him. Even when he was going into war those four physicians used to accompany him. When Nero would eat, their whole work was to help him to vomit so that he could eat again. He used to love eating so much that he would eat twenty times, twenty-five times per day. You will call him mad -- and he was mad.
Now, what is the pleasure of eating? Maybe just a little pleasure of taste.... On your tongue there are little buds which experience taste. They can be operated on very easily and then you will not feel anything at all. Then the whole pleasure of eating disappears. That's what happens when you are in fever: your buds become dull, insensitive, so you eat but you don't feel any taste. People are living for eating; there are very few people who eat to live. Millions are living only to eat.
Humanity can be divided into two types of mad people: one type is obsessed with food, another type is obsessed with sex. And there is a deep relation between the two. The person who is obsessed with sex will not bother much about food and the person who is repressive of sex will become obsessed with food.
Whenever a country is repressive of sex it becomes very obsessed with food. That's what has happened in this country: for centuries it has been repressive of sex. That's why Indians have been very inventive about food -- new sweets, thousands of sweets. The world is completely unaware of all those sweets! And their food is so spicy.... When a foreigner comes he cannot eat it; he cannot see how people can eat it. It is burning hot! Why so much spicy food? It is repression of sex! If your sex is not repressed you will not eat such spicy food.

You are out of jail, out of the cage; you can open your wings and the whole sky is yours. All the stars and the moon and the sun belong to you. You can disappear into the blueness of the beyond. Just drop clinging to this cage, move out of the cage and the whole sky is yours. Open your wings and fly across the sun like an eagle. In the inner sky, in the inner world, freedom is the highest value - everything else is secondary, even blissfulness, ecstasy. There are thousands of flowers, uncountable, but they all become possible in the climate of freedom.

Zen wants you living, living in abundance, living in totality, living intensely - not at the minimum as Christianity wants you, but at the maximum, overflowing.
Your life should reach to others. Your blissfulness, your benediction, your ecstasy should not be contained within you like a seed. It should open like a flower and spread its fragrance to all and sundry - not only to the friends but to the strangers too. This is real compassion, this is real love: sharing your enlightenment, sharing your dance of the beyond.

Commentary:
The Queen of Rainbows is like a fantastic plant that has reached the apex of its flowering and its colors. She is very sexual, very alive, and full of possibilities. She snaps her fingers to the music of love, and her zodiac necklace is placed in a way that Venus lies over her heart. The sleeves of her garment contain an abundance of seeds, and as the wind blows the seeds will be scattered to take root where they may. She is not concerned whether they land on the soil or on the rocks - she is just spreading them everywhere in sheer celebration of life and love. Flowers fall on her from above, in harmony with her own flowering, and the waters of emotion swirl playfully beneath the flower on which she sits.
You might feel like a garden of flowers right now, showered with blessings from everywhere. Welcome the bees, invite the birds to drink your nectar. Spread your joy around for all to share.

Remember this, that whenever happiness comes to you, it comes for no reason at all. Suffering has a cause, happiness none. Suffering is caused by something. It is part of cause and effect: the mechanical world. Happiness is not caused by anything. Whenever you are available, it happens, as if happiness is your nature; whenever you settle into it, it happens. Unhappiness is not your nature. It has ...to be caused, it has to be created.

Remember, others can cause suffering for you, but they cannot cause happiness. Once you understand this, they cannot even cause suffering. You can cause suffering for others, you cannot cause happiness. Once you understand this, you stop causing suffering also. Suffering is part of the cause-and-effect chain. Happiness is a spontaneous arousal of life. Where there is no cause for suffering, suddenly it is there. It has always been there, but you have been too focused on suffering.

That’s why Buddha says,’Don’t be worried about happiness, about bliss. Don’t talk about SATCHITANAND, don’t talk about ultimate bliss — there is no need. Just know how not to cause suffering.’ If suffering is not there, the very absence of suffering is bliss, because bliss is your intrinsic nature. It is not something that comes from the outside.

Watch: whenever suffering is felt, you will always feel as if it is coming from the outside, and whenever you feel happy, you simply feel that happiness is arising from within you. Happiness is a flower of your own consciousness. Suffering is a thorn which has entered into you: alien, foreign, not of you. So whenever you suffer you start thinking that somebody, somewhere, must be responsible for it; known, not known, but somebody must be responsible for it.

Whenever you are happy you never think that somebody is responsible for it. Whenever you suffer, you enquire as to the cause. Whenever you are happy, you never even ask. If somebody is happy and he asks,’Why am I happy?’ it will look absurd, it will look foolish, it will look mad. You are happy — that’s all. There is no ‘why’ to it. But if somebody in suffering asks,’Why am I in suffering?’ nobody can say that he is asking irrelevant things.’Why’ with suffering is relevant, with bliss it is irrelevant.

 

 

 

To be contented means: don’t expect anything from life, just live it moment to moment, and whatsoever it gives is just fantastic. Life goes on pouring infinite treasures on us. And because of this mind asking for more, we remain blind to those treasures. Once this constant noise for more stops, then this chirping of the bird is enough. There is nothing in it and all in it….

It is enough to turn ...one on; nothing else is needed. Just listening to this chirping of the bird one can fall into infinite meditation, one can disappear from the circumference, can become centered. One can simply forget the whole existence in this small music. And this moment can become so precious that the past becomes irrelevant, the future becomes irrelevant; they simply disappear. One is now and one is here. The lost paradise is regained and Adam is back home.

Contentment is a key: it opens the door of paradise. And paradise is not there – paradise is here, and paradise is not there above in the sky; it is just underneath your feet. You are standing on it, you are standing in it, you have never left it; your mind has just started wandering, dreaming.

And once you have tasted a few moments of such blissfulness the whole life is a celebration, nothing but celebration. There is no birth, no death – only celebration that goes on and on forever. But only those who know the art of being contented are capable of entering into that eternal life.

Initiation into sannyas is nothing but initiation into this art. I have no techniques to teach but only a few devices to impart. I have no philosophy, I have no belief system to give to you, but I can give you a little bit of experience of the present. All that goes on here in this commune is different aspects of the same strategy, so that somehow you are pulled out of your dreams – even if only for a few moments – and existence explodes on you in all of its presentness. Once you have tasted those few moments you will know how to enter into them on your own. I persuade people, seduce people, to live the present moment, because that is God.

 

Strange ...! If poverty is so spiritual, so the most spiritual thing will make every rich man poor - helping the rich man to be poor ... so he can become spiritual. Why help the poor? You want to destroy their spirituality?

Certainly I am bound to conflict with the old, because the entire human past was praising poverty and making it equal to spirituality, which is absolute nonsense.

Spirituality is the greatest wealth that can happen to a man, and it contains all the other riches. It is not contrary to any other wealth, it is simply contrary to all kinds of poverty.

Wisdom does not come from knowledge, it comes from love. Wisdom has nothing to do with logic but it has everything to do with love. Knowledge depends on logic and knowledge can give you a false notion of being, because knowledge is imitative. You can repeat beautiful saying of Jesus, the beatitude, and if you go on repeating them long enough you will start believing, you will auto-hypnotise yourself by constant repetition. You will start thinking, as if you know, and you don’t know at all.

Jesus is talking from the heart and you are learning from the head — and the difference is vast. The difference is almost unbridgeable, it is so vast. Knowledge is cheap, easily available. One can just go on sitting in a library and go on collecting knowledge. Man has so great a memory that it is said a single man’s memory system can contain all the libraries of the world. No computer has been yet evolved which can really compete with man’s memory system. It is almost unlimited and it can create such a great illusion of being wise.

Wisdom is a totally different phenomenon. It comes through love, it grows in the heart, it is a heart flower. And the ways of the heart are totally different from the ways of the head.

Sannyas is a search for wisdom. I am not interested in imparting knowledge to you here. I am not a teacher. A teacher imparts knowledge, a master imparts being. A master does not each you, on the contrary, he helps you unlearn, he helps you to unburden, he helps you to come from the head to the heart. And once you are centred in the heart your life pulsates with a totally new energy. That energy is love. it is not that you become more loving, you become love itself. It is not a question of being in a love relationship, it is a question of being in a state of love. One is constantly in a state of love — waking, sleeping, with people or alone, with people or with rocks — it makes no difference, one goes on pulsating, radiating love energy. It becomes one’s natural perfume. That perfume is the first proof of god and then more and more proofs go on coming.

There is no other proof for god except love. Logic is impotent, it cannot prove, it cannot disprove. It has nothing to do with love, hence theology is the most stupid idea. It means logic about god, theology. There is no logic about god. There have been lovers of god; but logicians are just befooling themselves and others. If a logician is honest and sincere he is bound to be an atheist. He has to be an atheist, that is inevitable. If a logician says that he is a theist he is dishonest; hence all theologicians are dishonest. Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan — it doesn’t matter to what sect and cult they belong.

Jesus is not a theologian, he is a lover of god. Jalaluddin is not a logician, he is a lover of god. and these lovers have really proved the existence of god, not by giving an argument but by their presence, by their very being, by their transformed existence, by their luminous life, by their radiant love.

The heart is always pure; there is no way to make it impure. And the head is always impure; there is no way to make it pure.

And these are the alternative ways to live: one either can live in the head or one can live in the heart. If you live in the head you may be successful in life, you may become very rich, powerful socially, politically, you may become very respectable, world-famous. But dee...p down you will be all tears and nothing else because you will see the futility of all that you have attained; you have wasted such a precious life for rubbish. Death takes everything away.

This is the criterion: anything that can be taken away by death is not worth bothering about much. Anything that cannot be taken away by death — that is something to create, to discover. One can sacrifice everything for it, it is worth sacrificing for.

The heart cannot give you any outward success but it can give you a deep inner peace, a great joy, a blissfulness, a blessedness, a benediction, and it can slowly slowly lead you towards the other shore, towards god.

When you are absolutely pure the ego disappears. You are, and yet you are not. In one sense you are not, not as you have always been; in another sense you are and for the first time you are. But you are no more an ego, confined in the body-mind complex.

You are infinite.
You are as vast as god.
You are one with god.
Only the door of the heart can become the door of god’s temple.
Move from the head to the heart

According to Lao Tzu, even a king can turn the gigantic task of ruling a kingdom into a play. But we find that even a beggar who is penniless is incapable of looking upon life as a play. We are afraid that if we do not have vision and ambition we shall lag behind and become useless, because then, what is left to be done? We have always worked for a purpose so it seems strange and impossible to wor...k without an aim. If, however. we have ever done anything without an eye on the result, we keep remembering it again and again.

You see a man drowning in a river and you at once jump into the river and bring him ashore. Not a thought passes your mind whether you should save him because it is your duty. Whether he is a Hindu or a Muslim, whether he is known to you or unknown – no such thought crosses your mind. You see a man drowning and you jump in the river to save him. Then it is possible that you will get a glimpse of the bliss of the act itself.

But whenever such an opportunity comes our way, we destroy it immediately. As soon as the man is saved the mind starts working. ”Will this man be grateful? Will the news come in the papers? Have people witnessed my performance?” If only we could drown ourselves even for a moment into an act for the sake of the act without any reward I Then the act becomes meditation.

But, we even meditate for a purpose. People come to me and ask, ”Will meditation help us to become successful in life? Meditation, and success in the mundane world? They say, ”Our financial condition is bad. By meditating shall we attain the ’grace of God?’” Meditation also becomes an investment, a part of their business. It is impossible for us to conceive that meditation has no connection whatsoever with anything purposive. It is wrong even to say that meditation leads to bliss, because one who meditates to achieve bliss cannot meditate at all.

However, one who meditates for the sake of meditation invariably attains bliss. One who plunges into the act for the sake of the act and completes each act fully at that very moment when it is required, one who engrosses himself so completely that the sense of being. the doer is lost such a man’s entire life is meditation. Lao Tzu says that even a king, if he so wishes, can organise the working. of his kingdom and demonstrate his love towards his subjects and yet act as if in a play – without a purpose.

 

 

Moving towards reality you will have to accept your whole being. You are man-woman together. Nobody is just man and nobody is just woman.
And this is beautiful that you are both because that gives richness to your life, to your being. It gives you many colors. You are the whole spectrum, the whole rainbow, you are not a single color. All colors are yours.

 

 

Spiritual heart - music from the world of Osho

http://youtu.be/6R_yLKWa4-o

One birth has been given to you by your parents, the other birth is waiting. It has to be given to you by yourself. You have to father and mother yourself... Again your father and mother can love inside you. Then your reality will be born.

The body is the greatest mystery in the whole of existence. This mystery needs to be loved. Its mysteries, its functioning are to be intimately inquired into.

Make it a point, a burning desire in you, that before death comes you will have arrived home. Before death takes possession of you, truth has to happen! Make it such an intense longing that every fibre of your being starts pulsating with it, that even while you are asleep, the longing goes on moving as an undercurrent. Let that be your passionate love affair.

Even if you have broken your vow a thousand times…

Sorrow and suffering and misery--everything has to be taken nonseriously, because the more seriously you take them, the more difficult it is to get out of them. The more nonserious you are... you can pass through the suffering, through the dark night, singing a song. And if one can pass through the dark night singing a song and dancing, then why unnecessarily torture yourself? Make this whole journey from here to here just a beautiful laughing matter.

There is a beautiful statement of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, one of the greatest Sufi masters ever. He says: Come, come, whoever you are; Wanderer, worshipper, lover of learning... It does not matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow A thousand times. Come, come, yet again come.

Remember this beautiful statement: "Ours is not a caravan of despair." I can also say this. Ours is not a caravan of despair, it is a celebration--it is the celebration of life. People become religious out of misery, and the person who becomes religious out of misery becomes religious for the wrong reasons. And if the very beginning is wrong, the end cannot be right.

Become religious out of joy, out of the experience of beauty that surrounds you, out of the immense gift of life that God has given to you. Become religious out of gratitude, thankfulness. Your temples, your churches, your mosques and gurudwaras are full of miserable people. They have turned your temples also into hells. They are there because they are in agony. They don't know God, they have no interest in God; they are not concerned with truth; there is no inquiry. They are just there to be consoled, comforted. Hence they seek anybody who can give them cheap beliefs to patch up their lives, to hide their wounds, to cover up their misery. They are there in search of some false satisfaction.

Ours is not a caravan of despair. It is a temple of joy, of song, of dance, of music, of creativity, of love and life. It does not matter. You may have broken all the rules--the rules of conduct, the rules of morality. In fact, anybody who has any guts is bound to break those rules. I agree with Jalaluddin Rumi: he says, Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Intelligent people are bound to break all their vows many times, because life goes on changing, situations go on changing. And the vow is taken under pressure--maybe the fear of hell, the greed for heaven, respectability in society.... It is not coming from your innermost core.

When something comes from your own inner being, it is never broken. But then it is never a vow, it is a simple phenomenon like breathing. Come, come, yet again come! Everybody is welcome, without any conditions. You do not have to fulfill any requirements.

The time has come when a great rebellion is needed against all established religions. Religiousness is needed in the world but no more religions--no more Hindus, no more Christians, no more Mohammedans--just pure religious people, people who have great respect for themselves.

 

 

Health Is Only a Problem If You’re Sick

  
A healthy man does not feel continuously that he is healthy, only sick people become interested in health. The moment that you have become healthy...coming out of your sickness, you will feel health but when it becomes your natural experience of every day, every moment, you don’t have any contrast of sickness to compare it with.
You don’t know your head unless you have a headache — have you observed it? Do you become aware of your head? You become aware of your head only when you have a headache. A headache gives you the idea — people who have not experienced headaches, don’t know what it is to have a healthy head without any headaches.
All our experiences depend on their opposites. If you cannot taste the bitter, you cannot taste anything sweet either — they go together. If you cannot see darkness, you cannot see light. And if you are continuously in one state, you start forgetting about it.
That’s what I call going beyond enlightenment — the day you start forgetting that you are enlightened, the day it becomes just the natural course of your life, ordinary, nothing special. The way you breathe, the way your heart beats, the way your blood runs in the body, enlightenment also becomes part of your being. You forget all about it.
When you ask about enlightenment, I am reminded that yes, there is an experience called enlightenment. But when I am sitting alone I never remember that I am enlightened, that would be crazy! It has become such a natural, ordinary experience.
First go beyond mind. Then go beyond enlightenment too. Don’t get stuck anywhere until you are simply an ordinary part of the existence, with the trees, with the birds, with the animals, with the rivers, with the mountains. You feel a deep harmony — no superiority, no inferiority.
Gautam Buddha had some glimpses of going beyond enlightenment. He mentioned it, that there is a possibility of going beyond enlightenment. He did not say that he had gone beyond it, but he recognizes the fact that there should be a state when you forget all about enlightenment. You have been so healthy, you have forgotten all about health; only then have you come home. Finally even enlightenment is a barrier — the last barrier.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, show me why I always fall
    
 
My partner acts jealous and it feels as if he makes me more important than I am.

“Not jealous — I think he feels that he is inferior. You are using the wrong word. He thinks that you are a goddess and he is worthless. Is that what it is? (she nods) Then it is not jealousy!

“That too is a way of manipulating people — to make them very important. That’s a kind of strategy, a very parasitical trip. When you make somebody very high, you have power over the person because it is in your power now to keep him high or throw him down. If anybody — for example, [your partner] — puts you very high on a pedestal, you think he is making you powerful. But he is also becoming powerful, because only he can keep you on that pedestal, nobody else. And he knows that — that you will have to depend on him otherwise you will not be on the pedestal; you will be an ordinary woman. He has made a goddess of you! So it is a very very subtle strategy to keep control over you.
“By being dependent on you, he makes you dependent on him. And you enjoy the trip — that he is making you so high. When you enjoy the trip, you have to fulfill a few conditions. This is the trick; this is very ancient. [He] has not invented it; it is very ancient.
“Man has always put woman on a pedestal so that she cannot come down. Man has either worshipped woman or condemned her. Either she is a worm crawling on the earth or she is a goddess, but he never makes her equal to himself; that is dangerous. Both are okay — either she is very high in the sky, untouchable, or she is very low, again untouchable, but she is never equal. When a woman is very low she can be repressed, punished for anything that the man feels is wrong. Or she is a goddess; then she can be thrown from the pedestal — that too is a kind of punishment.
“But woman needs to be equal to man — neither low nor high — and for that man is not ready, because to make the other equal means you cannot control her any more. You cannot control an equal. Low and high can both be controlled but the equal person is free; the equal is equal.
“So get down from the pedestal. Just tell him that you are a human being, not a goddess. Now what are you doing? — you must be pretending to be a goddess, so you are cooperating with him. Don’t cooperate! You simply tell him, ‘I am an ordinary woman as you are an ordinary man. I don’t want to be worshipped like a goddess. I have all kinds of desires as any woman will have. I am just plain ordinary.’ Get down from the pedestal rather than him throwing you; simply get down. You will feel good and you will unburden him also.
“If he cannot love you, then he will find some other woman whom he can put on a pedestal and worship. He may be in need of a mother and not in need of a beloved; then that is his business. But you get down from the pedestal. Never allow anybody to put you on high, otherwise he will manipulate you. He will say, ‘I have made you so high — now you have to follow me. Don’t do this; that doesn’t suit you. Don’t do that; that is below you. Keep your status.’
“So you enjoy the status but then you feel petrified. You would like to be an alive human being. So you are trying to do two contradictory things. If you want to be a fully warm-blooded woman, a real woman, then get down from the pedestal. All pedestals are a kind of disease I call ‘pedestalitis’.
“Get down and tell him that you are not going to become a goddess. Be natural and true and whatsoever happens has to be accepted. If he leaves you, that’s his business. If he remains with you, you will be more free; he will be more free. And this will be helping him too...because he is also wrong. He will never be happy. First you put a woman on a pedestal; then you cannot make love to her. How can you make love to a goddess? — it looks ugly. You cannot make love to your mother and you have put her up as a mother, a mother superior. Then you cannot make love to her, or even if you do, you feel guilt. He will not be happy, because he will continuously suffer from inferiority; he has made you superior.
“Tell him ‘I am just an ordinary woman. I don’t want any other respect.’ That is the greatest respect we can pay to each other as human beings! That will help.”

On Overwhelm?
    
Often a feeling that I can’t describe fills my heart and my whole being. It is there in deep love — but a similar feeling also comes up in fear, anguish, pain, helplessness and frustration.

There is certainly something very similar in very different emotions: the overwhelmingness. It may be love, it may be hate, it may be anger — it can be anything. If it is too much then it gives you a sense of being overwhelmed by something. Even pain and suffering can create the same experience, but overwhelmingness has no value in itself. It simply shows you are an emotional being.
This is typically the indication of an emotional personality. When it is anger, it is all anger. And when it is love, it is all love. It almost becomes drunk with the emotion, blind. And whatever action comes out of it is wrong. Even if it is overwhelming love, the action that will come out of it is not going to be right.
Reduced to its base, whenever you are overwhelmed by any emotion you lose all reason, you lose all sensitivity, you lose your heart in it.
It becomes almost like a dark cloud in which you are lost. Then whatever you do is going to be wrong.
Love is not to be a part of your emotions. Ordinarily that’s what people think and experience, but anything overwhelming is very unstable. It comes like a wind and passes by, leaving you behind, empty, shattered, in sadness and in sorrow.
According to those who know man’s whole being — his mind, his heart and his being — love has to be an expression of your being, not an emotion.
Emotion is very fragile, very changing. One moment it seems that is all. Another moment you are simply empty.
So the first thing to do is to take love out of this crowd of overwhelming emotions. Love is not overwhelming. On the contrary, love is a tremendous insight, clarity, sensitivity, awareness.  But that kind of love rarely exists, because very few people ever reach to their being.
There are people who love their cars.... That love is of the mind. And then you love your wife, your husband and your children — that love is of the heart. But because it needs change to remain alive, and you cannot allow it its changeability, it becomes stale. The same husband every day — it is such a boring experience. It dulls your sensitivity, it dulls every possibility of joy. You slowly start forgetting the language of laughter. Life becomes simply work without any joy. And one has to work because one has a wife and one has children.
You have to take your love out from the emotional grip where it has been since your birth, and you have to find a route to your being. Unless your love becomes part of your being, it is not much different from pain, suffering, sadness.

Experience life in all possible ways
good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light,
summer-winter. Experience all the dualities.
Don't be afraid of experience, because
the more experience you have, the more
mature you become.

‎'TRUTH is simple. Very simple-so simple that a child can understand it. In fact, so simple that only a child can understand it. Unless you become a child again you will not be able to understand it. It is an experience, not speculation.

I would like to make you more insecure, more uncertain -- because that's how life is... When there is more insecurity and more danger, the only way to respond to it is by awareness. ... In your unintelligence you feel secure -- all idiots feel secure. In fact, only idiots feel secure. A really alive [person] will always feel insecure. What security can there be? Life is not a mechanical process;... it cannot be certain, it is an unpredictable mystery. Nobody knows what is going to happen the next moment. ... a secure life will be worse than death. ... Life is full of uncertainties, full of surprises -- that is beauty! ... When you say you are certain, you simply declare your death; you have committed suicide ... an intelligent [person] always remains uncertain.

Consciousness without thinking: that’s what awareness is. Being alert and with no thought. Try it! Whenever you see thinking gathering, disperse it! pull yourself out of it! Look at the trees with no screens of thinking between you and the trees. Listen to the chirping of the birds with no chirping of the mind inside. Look at the sun rising and feel that inside you also a sun of consciousness is... rising… but don’t think about it, don’t assert, don’t state, don’t say. Simply be. And, by and by, you will start feeling glimpses of awareness, sudden glimpses of awareness — as if a fresh breeze has entered into your room which was getting stale and dead; as if a ray of light has entered into the dark night of your soul; as if, suddenly, life has called you back.

Ice-olation

We are miserable because we are too much in the self. What does it mean when I say we are too much in the self? And what exactly happens when we are too much in the self? Either you can be in existence or you can be in the self--both are not possible together. To be in the self means to be apart, to be separate. To be in the self means to become an island. To be in the self means to draw a boundary line around you. To be in the self means to make a distinction between 'this I am' and 'that I am not'. The definition, the boundary, between "I" and "not I" is what the self is--the self isolates. And it makes you frozen--you are no longer flowing. If you are flowing the self cannot exist. Hence people have become almost like ice-cubes. They don't have any warmth, they don't have any love--love is warmth and they are afraid of love. If warmth comes to them they will start melting and the boundaries will disappear. In love the boundaries disappear; in joy also the boundaries disappear, because joy is not cold.

Commentary:
In our society, men in particular have been taught not to cry, to put a brave face on things when they get hurt and not show that they are in pain. But women can fall into this trap too, and all of us at one time or another might feel that the only way to survive is to close off our feelings and emotions so we can't be hurt again. If our pain is particularly deep, we might even try to hide it from ourselves. This can make us frozen, rigid, because deep down we know that one small break in the ice will free the hurt to start circulating through us again. The rainbow-colored tears on this person's face hold the key to breaking out of this 'ice-olation'. The tears, and only the tears, have the power to melt the ice. It's okay to cry, and there is no reason to feel ashamed of your tears. Crying helps us to let go of pain, allows us to be gentle with ourselves, and finally helps us to heal.