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CHAPTER 30
14 January 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
[A sannyasin said that when she meditated, many pictures would emerge which she liked to draw and become involved with.]
If pictures come it is a good release, so paint them; you continue it. Just go wild in it, and don’t paint through reason.
Don’t be worried about what you are making, because it is not a performance. It is not going to be exhibited, and you are not going to show it to anybody. It is just an outpouring.
Paint just like small children. If you give them colour and crayons, they will paint, not even knowing what they are doing. It will be a natural thing: just as grass grows, and birds sing, children paint.
That is the beauty of modern painting. It is more child-like and more primitive than painting has ever been before. The classical painters were very much concerned with the form, with the geometry and mathematics of it, but the modern painter has forgotten everything and all technology has been dropped.
Modern painting is just like a child painting, and tremendously beautiful things have come up. They are meaningless, remember – beautiful, but meaningless. In fact aU beauty is meaningless. Wherever meaning enters, mean-ness enters. Wherever there is reason, things become limited.
So just paint, mm? And next time you come, bring some painting But don’t paint with the idea that you are going to show them to me Only bring those that you have painted without any idea, just irrationally.
Just the other day I was reading about a man, a very rich man, who asked Picasso to paint his portrait. So Picasso painted it.
When the man came to see it, he said that it was good except that he didn’t like the nose – so Picasso said he would change it, and the man should return in a few days time.
Picasso became very worried, and the woman who was living with him in those days asked him what he was worrying about. He said, ‘I am worried because I don’t know where I have painted the nose.’
So like that, mm? Good!
[A sannyasin says: I’ve got a real sense of self-disgust. I realise that a my life I’ve been trying to make myself respectable, and to give. myself some kind of esteem. I’ve been going after every substitute for love – and for me love just means manipulation. I can’t take it because I’ve got this tremendous fear of being manipulated]
To seek respectability is a substitute, and a worthless substitute, a counterfeit. Only if respect comes through love is it meaningful. If it comes through any other way, then not only is it meaningless, it is poisonous.
That is how a man becomes political. Politics is a substitute for love. When somebody loves you they care about you, they make you feel worthwhile and significant. Whatsoever you are, howsoever you are, you are accepted. But if people miss love they start playing tricks. The trick is to manipulate others’ respect by doing something, having something – character, morality – something that people have to give respect to. But it is never fulfilling, and one can go on and on till you need a whole crowd.…
You can become a president or a prime minister of a country where millions of people pay you attention. They have to because you are powerful, and you can manipulate and become dangerous.
But even then, the love of one person is more valuable than the whole country looking up to you. One person’s love is enough because that is real value.
If you are given respect, it is never for you but for something else. For example, if you are a very good man, moral, the respect is for morality, not for you. If you are very rich, you are respected for your house and your car, not for you. You know too, deep down, that if the car disappears and the house is no longer yous, if you are defeated in the elections and are no longer prime minister, all the respect will disappear, because it was never for you in the first place. So you become afraid.…
Respect is for something you have, not for you and what you are. Love is simply for you – whether you are rich or poor, capable of certain things or not, talented or not, it is simply for you. At least to one person you are not a stranger. Somebody has given you his or her total friendship and heart; that is fulfilling enough.
Respect is like when you are hungry and you go on reading a book on cooking. Your appetite will not be satisfied, because you need real food. You can have a thousand and one books on cooking, but that is not going to help. Love is food – and respect is a book on cooking.
Everybody has been conditioned, taught from the very childhood, to become respectable: to come first in the class, to win the gold medal in the university – to do something so that you become
precious. It has been taught that only by doing something can you become precious – while you simply are! Whether you do something or not is secondary, irrelevant.
So if you have become aware of it, drop it immediately. It is a dangerous poison, so don’t allow it to remain in you a single moment. Accept yourself; because whenever you want respect from others, it simply shows that you don’t respect yourself. Otherwise what is the need?
You hate and condemn yourself, so you go on creating masks to hide behind, to deceive others with. At least you can try to deceive others, even if you cannot deceive yourself. But nobody is deceived, because those people are trying the same trick themselves The whole world is in the same mess.
So the first thing is to respect yourself, and not to make any demands on yourself. There is no should to life. Life is as it ought to be; it already is. You just have to accept and enjoy yourself, and give yourself in love. If respect comes through love it is beautiful. And it always comes through love because there is no other way.
... and I don’t see any problem. You have simply created them. There are people who really do have problems, and people who don’t have any, but just to remain occupied they create them.
So drop them, they are simply rubbish, and start to enjoy from this very moment. Right? Give it a try
[Another sannyasin says: I don’t quite know what to do between now and when I go back to England in March... I feel like I ought to be doing more, working harder. I’m not doing very much in the way of actual work.]
Never go ahead, remain with the present. Today is enough unto itself, and March is far away, millions of miles away. There is no need to be worried about it. Why waste these moments?
Live now, and when March comes you will be there, so whatsoever life demands at that moment, you respond. If you plan something from here, you are creating a problem for yourself in two ways.
Firstly, you are wasting this moment which could have been lived: by planning you are wasting it. Secondly, whatsoever you plan is never going to be exactly as you plan, never, because there are millions of causes that go on working to create the future. So it will never fit with your plans, and that is going to make you frustrated.
Man thinks that he proposes and God disposes. God is not there to dispose anybody’s plans. The disposition is in the very proposition. In the very planning, you are creating a structure. The future is open, and it cannot follow anybody’s structure.
You waste this moment, and then you will waste those moments of the future in being frustrated. And out of frustration you will plan even harder; you will think that because you weren’t accurate in your planning you missed. Again you are missing the point.
Howsoever accurate the plan, it cannot be exactly that way because you are not alone here, mm? You can go out on the street and a drunken driver hits you – and it was never in your plans. You go
to Goa, and some germs enter you and give you hepatitis. It was not in your plan, but the germs were planning their life, and the drunken driver was going on his way.
Live this moment totally, and the next will come out of it. Live an unplanned life, because only then it is life.…
And I don’t see that you are not working hard, you are doing as much as you can. That too is greed – that one should do more. That greed can never be fulfilled, because whatever you do, you can always imagine that more can be done. Greed is never satisfied.
So drop it, and whatsoever you can do you are doing.
Enjoy it rather than expecting more. Bring a deeper quality to it, rather than a quantitative increase. And forget about the future!
[Osho asks a sannyasin about her relationship and she replies: Well, I feel good, and it’s the nicest thing that has happened to me for a very long time. But what’s happening is that he wants me to just be a friend – and I want more than that. He says that he cares about me, but he is not turned on by me]
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!
[A sannyasin asks about strong reactions and experiences in latihan and in the Gourishankar meditation.]
Stop the Gourishankar, but do the other meditations.
Everything is going well; it is just that this is how it happens in latihan. First there are the gross movements of the body, and then the subtle movements of the inner structure of the body, the contractions of the muscles. One day these movements will also disappear. Don’t try to force them though, allow them. As the body movements have disappeared, these will too. Then you will have a really flowing body, really alive.
Otherwise many parts of the body are dead. Those muscles which are not really relaxed are contracting, and through contracting they will become flexible. So it is going well. Continue it.
Sometimes when latihan is going deep, anything concerned with eyes can be a disturbance, so don’t do the Gourishankar.
[Osho went on to ask the sannyasin how she was feeling on the whole. She replied: I think I like to move really close to people, but then I become afraid that I will be rejected. But I’ve been able to come closer to people than ever before.]
No, you will be able to move even closer. You need first to see that when somebody rejects you, he is not in fact rejecting you; he is simply saying that he doesn’t fit with you. He may even like you, but somehow the energies don’t fit.
So no rejection is personal – nor is any acceptance personal; deep down they are energy phenomena. If somebody falls in love with you and accepts you deeply, it doesn’t mean that he has accepted you, or you, him. It simply means that these two energies are meeting on a deeper level, and you are just instrumental.
Sometimes energies don’t fit, and you can’t do anything about it, can’t force them to meet. But from childhood we are taught that every rejection is a personal thing, and that acceptance is personal too, but they are just energy phenomena.
So don’t be afraid of rejection. Otherwise how will you move closer? Move closer, because it is worth the risk of being rejected. It is good if a person can simply say that he does not want to move deeper with you, because if he moves with you, yet deep down there is a feeling of no affinity with you, then that is dangerous. Sooner or later you will be fighting and quarrelling and destroying each other.
So say if you don’t feel good about moving closer with someone, but don’t hurt him. Always be true, because some people who cannot say no, who are afraid of hurting the other, make their whole life a messBy and by they completely forget how to judge with whom they fit.
[A sannyasin told Osho that he had been being intimate with different women, and wondered if he should continue to do that.]
There is nothing wrong in it, but just don’t get too involved. That will be a distraction right now. Let the intimacy be more like friendship than like love, because right now that will be more helpful.
Once you change friendship into love, you are moving in troubled waters, so wait a little. When you have a really rooted and centred being, then move, and there will be no problem. But first one should
become so totally oneself that you can move into love and remain undistracted. Then you can go to any depth in relationship, but somewhere deep down you remain above and beyond it. You become like a lotus flower – in the water, but untouched by it.
I am not against love, I am all for it, but to move in a love relationship one should have a certain maturity, a certain integration. Then love is really beautiful and helps you to grow; otherwise it can become very crippling and destroy you completely.
Love is destroying millions of people. In the name of love, more people are destroyed than in the name of war. We never become aware of it because it is never reported in the newspapers, but in the name of love there is such ugliness, such jealousy, anger and continuous quarrelling. The war is nothing by comparison, it is a tiny affair.
But this has to be so because people who go into love are not yet worthy of it. Before you enter the shrine of love, you have to be worthy of it. That worthiness comes only when your flame is centred and has become silent.
What I mean by this is that when you are capable of being absolutely alone, and when there is no need to move in love, then love is beautiful. When there is no need, no obsession, then there is no dependence, so when you move into love it will be a sharing. You want to share because you have so much, and you want to share it with someone with whom you feel an attunement.
But if you go into love to seek happiness, then you are wrong. Then love will only give you misery. If you go into love to share happiness, then love is tremendously beautiful, the greatest experience there is. Can you see the distinction? If you go to find happiness you will find only misery, because you were already miserable. A miserable man moving into love is going into even deeper miseries – and the other is also in the same plight. The other is also seeking somebody in search of happiness. Both are miserable, and both meet together in search of happiness. You can just see the absurdity of it! The misery will not only be doubled, it will be multiplied.
So first become happy and blissful, then move into love. Love is a function of bliss. Bliss is not an outcome of love; rather, love is an outcome of bliss. That is what Jesus means when he says that God is love. You can change it completely, and say love is God – it is perfectly true too. You can even forget the name God, love is enough. Love is God, but then that love has a different quality, a different dimension, than what is ordinarily called love.
So first become ready, worthy, and full of bliss – then move. But right now just be friendly, no more than that! Good!
[Osho then asked the sannyasin how he was feeling after completing the Enlightenment Intensive. He replied: I was very blessed to experience myself as the silent one for some time.
Very good! You are getting more silent every day. Just enjoy it.
Silence has something in it that is very much like sadness. It is not sadness, but it is very much like it. So when you start becoming silent, you may also feel a certain type of sadness. Don’t be afraid of that, or you will start trying to get out of it.
It is not sadness, but just the feeling of silence, the depth, gives you a certain sadness. It is beautiful, mm? People who go into silence have to encounter this problem, and have to understand that there are different types of sadness. There is a sadness that comes out of frustration; a sadness that comes out of being empty, and inner poverty. And there is a sadness that comes out of silence, out of total fullness, but it is also alive.
That’s why, if you look at Buddha’s face, you will feel a little sad. Jesus’ face has been continuously misinterpreted. Christians started to think that he was a sad man, but he was simply silent. They say that he never laughed, and he may not have, because he had such a subtle smile that only very perceptive people could be able to understand it. He was so silent that a certain sadness surrounded him, but that is not the sadness we know. His sadness is totally different; its quality is different because it is not of this world. It has nothing to do with any negative emotion; it is absolute positivity.
So remember this, because soon you will start feeling silent and very alone. Don’t become afraid of that aloneness either, or your mind will start thinking to move into relationships, into society, to become occupied – and that is dangerous. When you start feeling aloneness, nourish it and help it to grow. Feed it with all that you have, so that it becomes a very deep experience.
Silence will give you sadness, and aloneness. You will need a little time to become familiar with those different shades and different flavours, mm?
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