A man who loves himself takes the first step towards real love. A man who loves himself finds that there is no ego in him. It is by loving others without loving yourself, trying to love others, that the ego arises.

Osho

You cannot frustrate real love, because there is no expectation in the first place. And you cannot fulfill unreal love because it is so rooted in expectation that whatsoever is done always falls short. Its expectation is too great, nobody can fulfill it. So the unreal love always brings frustration, and the real love always brings fulfillment.

Osho

Meditation is not a solution of any problem in particular; it solves nothing. 

It simply helps you to get rid of the mind, the problem-creator. 

It simply helps you to slip out of the mind like a snake slips out of the old skin.

Once you know you are not the mind the great transcendence has happened.

Suddenly all problems become insignificant; slowly, slowly they evaporate.

You are left with a profound peace; a great silence prevails. 

This silence is the solution. This peace is the answer, the answer of all answers.

Osho

Man is already where he needs to be, where he is meant to be. Man is in paradise. The garden of Eden has never been left, nobody can expel you from it. But you can fall asleep, you can start dreaming a thousand and one things. Then those dreams become your reality, and the reality fades far away, becomes unreal.

Osho

Boredom and Restlessness

Boredom is the consciousness of repetition. Whenever you feel bored, you feel restless, a by-product of boredom.

Try to understand the mechanism. Whenever you feel bored you want to move away from that situation. If somebody is saying something and you are getting bored, you start becoming fidgety. This is a subtle indication that you want to move from this place, from this man, from this nonsense-talk. Your body starts moving. Of course, because of politeness, you suppress it, but the body is already on the move – because, the body is more authentic than the mind, the body is more honest and sincere than the mind. The mind is trying to be polite, smiling. You say, “How beautiful,” but inside you are saying, “How horrible! I have listened to this story so many times and he is telling it again!”

Whenever you feel bored you will feel restless. Restlessness is an indication of the body; the body is saying, “Move away from here. Go anywhere, but don’t be here.” But, the mind goes on smiling and the eyes go on sparkling, and you go on saying that you are listening and you have never heard such a beautiful thing. The mind is civilised; the body is still wild. The mind is human; the body is still animal. The mind is false; the body is true. The mind knows the rules and regulations – how to behave and how to behave rightly – so even if you meet a bore you say, “I am so happy, so glad to see you!” And, deep down, if you were allowed, you would kill this man. He tempts you to murder. Then you become fidgety; then you feel restlessness.

Listen to your body

If you listen to the body and run away, the restlessness will disappear. Try it. Try it. If somebody is boring you simply start jumping and running around. See. Restlessness will disappear because restlessness simply shows that the energy does not want to be here. The energy is already on the move; the energy has already left this place. Now, you follow energy.

So, the real thing is to understand boredom, not restlessness. Boredom is a very, very significant phenomenon. Only man feels bored, no other animal. You cannot make a buffalo bored. Impossible. Only man gets bored because only man is conscious. Consciousness is the cause. The more sensitive you are, the more alert you are, the more conscious you are, the more you will feel bored. In more situations you will feel bored. A mediocre mind does not feel so bored. He goes on; he accepts, whatsoever is okay; he is not so alert. The more alert you become, the more fresh, the more you will feel as if some situation is just a repetition, as if some situation is just getting hard on you, as if some situation is just stale. The more sensitive you are, the more bored you will become.

Boredom is an indication of sensitivity. Trees are not bored, animals are not bored, rocks are not bored – because, they are not sensitive enough. This has to be one of the basic understandings about your boredom – that you are sensitive.

But Buddhas also are not bored. You cannot bore a Buddha. Animals are not bored and Buddhas are not bored, so boredom exists as a middle phenomenon between the animal and the Buddha. For boredom a little more sensitivity is needed than is given to the animal. And, if you want to get beyond it then you have to become totally sensitive. Then, again the boredom disappears. But, in the middle the boredom is there. If you become animal-like, then boredom disappears. So, you will find that people who live a very animalistic life are less bored. Eating, drinking, marrying – they are not very bored, but they are not sensitive. They live at the minimum. They live only with that much consciousness as is needed for a day-to-day routine life.

Bored rigid

You will find that intellectuals, people who think too much, are more bored, because they think. And, because of their thinking they can see that something is just repetition. Your life is repetition. Every morning you get up almost the same way as you have been getting up all your life. You take your breakfast almost the same way. Then you go to the office – the same office, the same people, the same work. Then you come home – the same wife. If you get bored it is natural. It is very difficult for you to see any newness here; everything seems to be old, dust-covered.

Watch people walking on the street and you will see them completely bored. Everybody is bored, bored to death. Look at their faces – no aura of delight. Look at their eyes — dust-covered, no glimmer of inner happiness. By and by, the whole life becomes a mechanical routine, a constant repetition. And, one day they die… almost always people die without ever having been alive.

Bertrand Russell is reported to have said, “When I remember, I cannot find more than a few moments in my life when I was really alive, aflame.” Can you remember? How many moments in your life were you really aflame? Rarely it happens. One dreams about those moments, one imagines those moments, one hopes for those moments – but, they never happen. Even if they happen, sooner or later, they also become repetitive.

Repetition syndrome

When you fall in love with a woman, or a man, you feel a miracle, but by and by the miracle disappears and everything settles into a routine. Boredom is the consciousness of repetition.

Hence, people try to change. They move into a new house, they bring a new car home, they divorce the old husband, they find a new love affair, but again that thing is going to become repetitive, sooner or later. Changing places, changing persons, changing partners, changing houses, is not going to do anything. And, whenever a society becomes very bored, people start moving from one town to another: from one job to another, from one wife to another, but sooner or later they realise that this is all nonsense because the same thing is going to happen again and again with every woman, with every man, with every house, with every car.

What to do then? Become more conscious. It is not a question of changing situations; transform your being, become more conscious. If you become more conscious you will be able to see that each moment is new; but for that, tremendous energy of consciousness is needed.

Existence is available for those who are available to existence. And, then I tell you, there is no boredom. Life is infinite delight.

****

Get Aware

Boredom is one of the most important things in human life. Boredom is the first indication that a great understanding is arising in you about the futility, meaninglessness of life and its ways. A man becomes human when he starts feeling bored. You can see it: the most intelligent child will be the most bored child, because nothing can keep his interest for long. Sooner or later, he stumbles upon the fact and asks, “Now what? What next? This is finished. I have seen this toy, I have looked into it, I have opened it, and I have analysed it, what is next?” By the time he becomes young, he’s already bored.

Buddha was utterly bored. He left his kingdom when he was only 29, at the peak of his youth. He was utterly bored, with wine, wealth, kingdom, with everything. He had seen all; he had seen through and through. Traditionally, it is said he renounced the world because the world is bad; that is absolutely nonsense. He renounced the world because he became so bored with it. And, what was he doing then for six years sitting in those forests? He was getting more and more bored. What can you do, sitting in a forest? Watching your breath, day-in, day-out, year in, year out. He created that boredom to its ultimate peak, and one night it disappeared. It disappears of its own accord.

Osho

Happiness

What are you seeking? Happiness, bliss, joy – that’s what you are seeking. You have been seeking for millennia, and you have not yet found it. It is time, the right time to think again, to meditate again. You have been seeking so hard, you have been trying so hard – perhaps you are missing just because you are trying? Maybe it is trying that keeps you away from happiness? Let us think over it, brood over it. Give a little pause to your search – recapitulate.

You have been searching for many lives. You don’t remember other lives, no need – but in this life you have been searching, that will do. And you have not found it: nobody has ever found by searching, something is wrong in the very search. In the search naturally you forget yourself; you start looking everywhere, everywhere else. You look to the north and to the east and to the west and to the south, and in the sky and underneath the seas, and go on searching everywhere. The search becomes more and more desperate, because the more you search and don’t find, great anxiety arises – “Am I going to make it this time, or am I again going to miss it?”

More and more desperation, more and more misery, more and more madness – you go nuts. And happiness remains as far away as ever, in fact it recedes farther away from you. The more you search the less is the possibility to get it, because it is inside you.

Happiness is the function of your consciousness when it is awake, unhappiness is the function of your consciousness when it is asleep. Unconsciousness is your mirror burdened with much dust and luggage and the past. 

Happiness is when the burden has been dropped and the mirror is found again; your mirror can again reflect the trees and the sun and the sand and the sea and the stars. When you have again become innocent, when you again have the eyes of a child – in that clarity you are happy.

I was reading a few beautiful lines of Michael Adam:

“Perhaps trying even makes for unhappiness. Perhaps all the din of my desiring has kept the strange bird from my shoulder. I have tried so long and so loud after happiness. I have looked so far and wide. I have always imagined that happiness is an island in the river. Perhaps it is the river. I have thought happiness to be the name of an inn at the end of the road. Perhaps it is the road. I have believed that happiness was always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Perhaps it is here. Perhaps it is now. I have looked everywhere else.

“So: here and now.

“But here and now is clearly unhappiness. Perhaps then, no such thing as happiness. Perhaps happiness exists not, it is just a dream created by an unhappy mind. Certainly it cannot be as I unhappily imagine it. Here and now there is not happiness. So happiness is not. I need not therefore waste myself on what is not. I can forget about happiness then; I can cease to care and instead concern myself with something that I do know, can feel and fully experience. Happiness is an idle dream: now it is morning. I can awaken and stay with unhappiness, with what is real under the sun this moment. And now I see how much of my unhappiness came from trying to be happy; even I can see that trying is unhappiness. Happiness does not try….

“At last I am here and now. At last I am what I am. I am unpretending, at ease. I am unhappy – so what? But is this what I ran from? Is this really unhappiness?”

Think over it, meditate over it.

“And when I cease to try to be happy or anything else, when I do not seek anymore, when I do not care to go anywhere, get anything, then it seems I am already arrived in a strange place: I am here and now. When I see that I can do nothing, that all my doing is the same dream, in the moment that I see this, my mind the old dreamer and wanderer is for the moment still and present.”

Naturally. If you are not searching, not seeking, not desiring, not dreaming, for a moment the mind falls into a silence, is still. There is nothing to hanker about, nothing to make a fuss about, nothing to expect and nothing to be frustrated about. For a moment the mind stops its constant chasing. In that moment of stillness you are in a strange place, you are in a strange unknown space, never known before. A new door has opened and for the moment the mind is still and present.

“For the moment, here and now, the real world shows, and see: here and now is already and always all that I had sought and striven after elsewhere and apart. More than that: I have hunted after shadows; the reality is here in this sunlit place, in this birdcall now. It was my seeking after reality that took me from it; desire deafened me. The bird was singing here all the while.

“If I am still and careless to find happiness, then happiness it seems is able to find me. It is, if I am truly still, as still as death – if I am thoroughly dead, here and now.”

Happiness suddenly jumps upon you. When desire disappears, happiness appears. When the striving is no more, for the first time you see who you are. That knowing is what Buddha means: Come and see: Ihi passika. Where is he calling you: Come and see? He is calling you from your desires. You have gone far away from your home, you have lost your home base and are not where you appear to be. Your dream has taken you to faraway worlds: imaginary, illusory, your own creation.

Osho, This Very Body the Buddha

Forget the past, forget the future, this moment is all.

This moment has to become your prayer, your love, your life, your death, your everything. This is it. And live courageously, don't be cowards. Don't think of consequences; only cowards think of consequences.

Osho