21

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‌CHAPTER 21

5 January 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A girl, not yet a sannyasin, had sent a letter to Osho about her relationship with a sannyasin with whom she had been having a relationship in England.]

I read your letter. I can understand your inner indecisiveness. Whenever there is something very important the mind always hesitates, because anything more important than the mind is always a danger to it.

The mind wants to manipulate and control everything, but there are a few things which it cannot control. The only way for the mind is not to move in these directions, so it stops.

Love is one of those things which is bigger than the mind, higher than the mind, beyond the grasp of the mind, beyond comprehension. Love is something absurd for the mind – it should not happen in a logical world. If people were rational then love would not happen at all. Because people still persist in being irrational, love happens. Whenever a person is absolutely rationalised his heart is gone and he becomes a shrunken phenomenon inside. He is like a dead rock. He lives – yet lives not.

So this is always a problem: love happens, and then the mind starts hesitating. It starts finding ways and means and rationalisations to avoid it – and it is a great rationaliser. It can even convince you that there is no love.

The same will happen with anything that is not rational – and life itself is irrational. Existence is absurd; in fact there is no reason why we are. Existence is given for no reason at all: suddenly we are and then suddenly we disappear. The whole thing is more like magic.

So my suggestion is – I call it a suggestion because you are not yet a sannyasin, otherwise I can order you...(great cheers and laughter from the group) – that you don’t listen to the mind. Love deeply.

As I see you both, you fit somehow. Very few people fit, but you do, so don’t miss this opportunity.

Abandon the mind completely. You are loving, but very grudgingly, mm? One step forwards, one step backwards. You go a little towards [your boyfriend] but you are always ready to withdraw.…

That withdrawing is not allowing you to experience what love is, because love needs you totally – either all or nothing. But part-love is never satisfied with the part, it asks for the whole.

If you go on hanging like this it becomes your habit, an unconscious mechanism; then you are puzzled as to whether you love or not. If you love half-heartedly or just in part, it looks more like liking than love. Liking is of not much value; it has no passion in it, no life.

So drop this now and move. It is dangerous I know, because you are moving into the area of another, you are losing your control. You will no longer be on your own and that ego, that self-sufficiency of the ego will not be there. But as you leave your control, simultaneously the other is leaving his. In fact when you live with another person, it is not a surrender from the woman to the man or from the man to the woman. In fact both surrender to love, to something in between. Both are enriched, nobody loses out.

You have been fooling around long enough. Now drop all this! One can miss the opportunity. There is a time, a right time, and there is a right person – but you can miss it. You may continue searching but nobody knows whether you will again be able to find the right person, in the right moment.

And [your boyfriend] loves you. There is no need to make any bondage, no need to make any legal institution around you. I am not in favour of marriage – there is no need for it. There is a higher union which is more than marriage...

[She asks: What about children?]

First move as deeply into love as possible. Till then avoid having children, because children should come out of a tremendous love, otherwise not. You can give birth to ordinary children, who are just by-products of a physiological and biological meeting of man and woman, but they are anonymous.

When two people move higher and higher in love, and a point comes where their personalities are no longer separate and boundaries dissolve, then they give birth to children. Then the children come from a higher plane. They have a personality of love – they are not only by-products of sex. They carry a deep harmony within them, and if you become aware, you can see whether the child is a by-product of a sexual meeting or a by-product of love. A different aura surrounds the child, a different vibration, because he has to carry that original quality of oneness.

When a child is born out of love you give something to the world. When a child is just from a sexual meeting, you simply over-populate the world; you don’t give anything. Remember also, that when you give birth to a child out of deep love? out of surrender and meditation, something is simultaneously born into you. You become a mother.

Every woman who gives birth to a child is not necessarily a mother; it is not enough just to give birth. To become a mother your own heart should have bloomed. There are many women who have given

birth to children, but there are very few mothers. To be a mother is a rare harmony and a unique experience. This is my observation: that if a woman can become really motherly – she may give birth to a child or not, that is not the point – if she can become motherly, that is her enlightenment and none other is needed. That is her buddhahood.

So love first and don’t be worried about children, because then sooner or later you will start thinking about marriage. (laughter from the group) First love each other, and give each other total freedom. Don’t be possessed and don’t possess. Give the other full space to flower. Mm? Share as much as you can, and the sharing itself becomes a very very subtle possession which has no possessiveness about it; you are so certain of the other, you can trust. Meditate, love, and one day when you feel that you are overflowing now, that you cannot contain it any longer and you would like a soul to carry your burden, your fulfillment, then give birth to a child, not before. One should wait till one has become perfectly grown up. The world would be so beautiful if people would wait for the right moment.

And it seems that you are dominated too much by your family... By and by one has to move away from the family.

Not that you should not love them; this is how you can love them. It is the only way. It is just as when a child is born and he moves away from the mother, then one day he moves away from the breast. Then he is ready one day to move to the neighbourhood to play, and then to school. One day he comes home and he is totally different from when he left; he has become grown up. When he falls in love with another woman, that is the furthest he will go from the mother. In fact the day the child chooses his or her partner, that day he is really born, he actually comes out of the womb. Before that, the womb surrounds him in a thousand and one ways.

Everybody has to come out of the family otherwise they will not become themselves; they will always remain immature. One has to understand that to come back one has to first go away. When you have become your own, an authentic being, then you can come back to the home. Then you can again love your father, your mother and your brothers. But now you are there to love them, and before you were not. How can you love when you are not?

This is the trouble – that the family dominates the child too much, and is always afraid that he will go too far away from them. So they force him, they try subtle ways to influence him, condition him. The child goes on resisting deep down, and because of that resistance he cannot love them, cannot really love them.

Only an independent person can love, and a family is fulfilled when a person has become grown up. So just listen to your heart. You are grown up, and whatsoever your heart says, risk.

[Your boyfriend] is a vagabond, that’s perfectly true, but a beautiful vagabond, mm? [A sannyasin says she has quarrelled with her boyfriend.]

Just remember always that as you have your insane moments, he also has his. These are his insane words, don’t be worried about them.

Everybody occasionally has to be allowed a little. insanity. When you are insane you understand, but when the other is insane you don’t understand.

He is saying these things because you have been hurting him, so he is sick of it all. Perfectly true – who is not sick of insanity? Mm? When you start becoming saner he will do the things you were doing; then his moment of negativity comes up. If you are in the day, he is in the night; if he is in the night, you are in the day.

Just look at the whole game of what goes on! Because he said he was not interested in sex, your ego was hurt. Very deep down, women are too identified with sex. They think that if somebody is interested in them, they must be interested in sex. If somebody says they are not interested in sex, the woman thinks he can’t be interested in her!

Look at the paradox of it. If somebody simply says that they are interested in sex, then the woman is hurt. She says that then they are not interested in her; she feels hurt. If somebody is only interested in you, then too you feel hurt. Deep down there is a confusion. The confusion is that you would like somebody to be interested in you and hence interested in sex; via you, he should be interested in sex.

People come to me every day: the man is interested in sex, the woman is not. The woman thinks she is being used, and then she starts thinking that the man is interested only in sex so she starts withdrawing. If this goes on to a peak by and by the man gets fed up; he starts not being interested in sex. Then the woman jumps, because this is the last chance – if the man escapes, he escapes. Get hold of him! So she starts becoming interested in sex – but now the man says he is not interested.

You have been hurting his ego, now there is a chance for him to hurt yours. You have been insane, throwing his things, and you must have said nasty things to him, so he is hurt. Now that you are coming back, he will take revenge. So give him a little rope to be insane and do things. By and by you will both become aware that you are wasting time.

So be open to each other and settle things. It is such a simple game, but you create so much out of it. That too is one of the parts of the human ego: that out of small things we create big problems. With small problems only a small ego can exist. So fighting and quarrelling, this and that, and creating big problems around you, you feel perfectly good. Great problems are happening – and nothing is happening; only [you and he] are fighting, nothing else.

So talk to him, take his things back; and you have said bad things, so take them back too. Allow him to be a little nasty so he feels good, and be finished! Become aware of what you are doing to yourself and why.

This is nothing but a negative tape in your mind. Once you get into the rut, it goes on repeating. So next time this negative tape starts functioning, close your room and sit there, and tell the negative tape that you will give it ten minutes, you will listen to it for ten minutes, then it is not to disturb you anymore; that you are fed up with it.

Rather than being fed up with [your boyfriend], be fed up with this negative habit, and when you are in a negative mood, avoid meeting [him]. Nobody is interested in anybody else’s negativity. Take a

pillow and talk to it, beat it, write nasty things on it, and be clear of them. When you have finished with your rubbish. then go laughing to [him]; call him and tell him the whole story of what has been happening all day – and he will enjoy it, he will understand.

Everybody is here in search of his own happiness – become partners in the search. Why create fighting? There is no point... and you are not crazy! You understand, and people who can understand that they can feel crazy sometimes are not mad. You cannot convince a madman that he is crazy. If you can, that means he is already recovering!

One grows out of these sufferings – you are growing, that’s all. And sometimes be crazy but don’t make so much fuss about it, mm? So many crazy people are here; all the crazy people of the world are coming here, (laughter from the group) so nobody can say that he is the craziest. Impossible!

Just talk to him, and when everything is okay and flowing, come together, mm? Good.

[A sannyasin who is a film-maker says: I’ve been feeling a sense of letting go of all of the things – my sense of self-image, of who I am, and my attachment to all these things. I don’t understand it all yet, but I don’t feel it means I won’t be making films, or that I wont be being an artist or... I don’t feel it’s the end of that, but rather the beginning of it in a different way.]

A beginning of a totally different way. And for the first time you will be able to do much creative work. Something better, something deeper will come, as if out of the blue.

In fact, all creative work can be done in two ways: either you do it through the mind, or through no-mind. You can do it through your thoughts, but all thoughts are borrowed. Howsoever you try to make it original and new, at the most it remains a modified form – nothing new is born.

If you start meditating, a moment comes when you don’t think about it. Out of a non-thinking emptiness something bubbles up, something from you takes shape. It surprises you as much as it surprises others. All great artists, whatever the medium of work, are surprised when a new thing comes to them; they cannot believe that it is out of them. It is something from the beyond.

All great artists have been aware that they become possessed by some unknown force. It is nothing but your own depth – but you are unaware of it. The whole effect of meditation is to throw you back to your original depth so that something new arises. Then for the first time you will feel happy and blissful – because there is no other bliss than to be creative. Uncreative people cannot be blissful; at the most they can feel pleasure, gratification. Only creative people can have a pure and uncorrupted bliss.

So don’t think about the past. It is good that it has gone, allow it. That is the whole meaning of sannyas – that the past be allowed and you can relax into something new.

Man is an infinity, but by and by we all become focused in a certain rut, a routine – then we function from that. It is as if you have many windows to your room, but you have opened only one, and you always look from it into the same direction. By and by you forget that there are other windows and other doors. The East is beautiful, the West too. The morning and the sunrise have a beauty, but the sunset has a beauty of its own – both are unique. You need to open all the windows and all other avenues of vision.

So dropping the past simply means creating a new window. The past will be available to you, you can still use it, but it will not be the only window. You will become more and more flexible, liquid, flowing. When one becomes multi-dimensional, whatsoever you do carries many layers of meaning in it. If you are fixed in one dimension, in one habit form, you go on repeating yourself.

I was just reading about a man who was purchasing a Picasso painting. He was a little afraid as to whether it was a fake or a true one. So he asked a critic who said it was absolutely authentic, and that he could vouch for it, because when Picasso was painting it the critic had been a guest in his house.

So the man who was going to purchase the painting went to Picasso and asked if it were true. Picasso said it was true that the critic had been a guest, but that the painting was a fake.

The man couldn’t believe it! He asked Picasso whether he had painted it or not. ‘I painted it,’ Picasso replied, ‘but sometimes I paint fake Picassos. It is fake because I simply repeated myself, it is not authentic. It did not come from the beyond, it was just a technical repetition – so it is a fake!’

So you just float and leave the old structure, and many more avenues will become available. The old will be incorporated, because nothing that you have learnt can be lost – but there is no need to get fixed in it. In a subtle way whatsoever you have learnt remains a part of you, but it will not be your whole being. You will always be able to move away from it, beyond it, even opposite to it. Then you have an inner freedom. Good!

[Members of the Encounter Group were present.]

[A group participant says: I think I have to either trade my sex problems in for a new set of problems, or just lay them aside... ]

Mm good... just relax. Don’t make them problems, just relax. They solve of their own accord.

If you are too worried about a problem, you go on poking your finger in the wound and it doesn’t allow it to heal. There is no problem in fact. Man is a problem-creator. One can live without problems but the ego cannot, so it goes on creating something or other.

Leave them, just enjoy yourself, and they will disappear. The very enjoyment solves all problems. The very delight in life, in small things – eating, walking talking, taking a bath, meeting with friends, falling in love, or just sitting looking at the sky – small things, but if you can enjoy them there is no energy available to bother about problems. You understand me? The whole energy moves into these delights and there is no problem left.

The problem arises because you are not using your energy in a creative way. Man needs a release and a continuity of sharing, so just delight. Be here and delight!

[A sannyasin ma says she is afraid of men.]

In fact no woman is really afraid of man, only men are afraid of women.…

There is a certain point in man’s fear, because he is the active partner and he can fail. He has to prove something, that he is potent. The woman is passive, she has nothing to prove. She is always a success.

For man, every woman is a crisis: he may come a success or a failure from her. He may not show the fear, he may show just the opposite, but every man deep down is afraid of women.

It depends much on the woman to give him a certainty, a security that everything is okay, and he is a beautiful man.

So you need not be worried about such notions, mm?

[A group member says: In the group I got in touch with some of my anger, and a part of my reality I hadn’t contacted before. I began to see things differently... just walking down the road, the trees... and everything seemed to look different.]

Mm... whenever it happens that any accumulated negativity is released, it is as if a curtain disappears from the eyes and every sense becomes more sensitive.

You see the same colours but they have a different glow, a luminosity. Green is not just green; there are a thousand and one greens and you can see the difference. Each sound has a musical note to it; even the traffic noise becomes part of a harmony. The more your negativity is dropped, the more you become aware of a tremendously beautiful world around you. You have been living in it and you have missed it!

So make it a point now. There are many curtains, and they have to be dropped. Just like anger, there is jealousy, possessiveness, hatred. Drop them by and by, and just see how life becomes infinitely enriched.

We are poor because of ourselves; nobody is forcing any poverty on us. We can be emperors but we have decided to be beggars.

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