CHAPTER 31
15 January 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
[A sannyasin said that since his girlfriend, also a sannyasin, had been involved in a serious car accident some months ago, she had changed quite dramatically, and seemed no longer to be the woman he had known before.
Osho said he felt that she was in a very deep crisis, and in need of much tolerance and care.]
Sometimes it happens after such severe accidents that the whole personality changes, and may become split. Your left hand may not know what your right hand is doing. I feel this is part of her situation.
So have a little more care, and be alert. When the body suffers such a collapse, the mind is also affected, because the mind is part of the body and they are deeply related. Take care, because she may try to destroy the relationship. Don’t be a party to that. If she goes on being angry and saying negative things to you, you may start drifting away.
But she needs you. She may not know it, but she needs you. You have a responsibility, now more than ever. So be loving, and don’t pay too much attention to anything she says. This will be a deep meditation, and a great experience for you, because when somebody is loving, it is easy to love them, but if they are angry and continuously trying to destroy the relationship, then to be loving is something exceptional. It gives you a new integration of being.
Whenever you do something that is, in a way, supernatural, it gives you a height of being.
Only your love will be able to bridge the gap that has come to her mind, mm? If you listen to her, she may try to force you away. This may be just an effort to see if you really love her. This sort of problem arises in such situations.
There may be a deep fear of whether she will still be loved or not, of whether she will be rejected by you because now she is no longer beautiful, she is crippled, and this and that. These ideas come to a woman’s mind more naturally, because for a woman, the body consciousness is very very deep.
A man never thinks about the body much, but a woman thinks about the body continuously. Woman is the body. So, because she has been in such an accident, she will be afraid that you don’t love her anymore. Before you can reject her, she will play the game of rejecting you. Then she can feel happy and good, because she can tell herself that she rejected you, she was not rejected by you.
So be careful, and love her as much as you can and soon she will relax. Once she knows that you still love her, and that this accident doesn’t matter, then she will withdraw all these things that she has been saying. Once she becomes certain that there is no rejection from your side, then her rejection will disappear, and you will find a completely new person arising. For the first time you will see her real self.
Whenever a woman comes to know that she is accepted as she is, that there is no condition for her acceptance, she becomes beautiful for the first time; a grace of a different world arises in her. Then the beauty is no longer of the body, it is something from the depth, and you can see and feel the glow of it. When she carries an aura of grace, even an ugly woman can become beautiful. Ordinarily even beautiful women are not graceful, because that aura has not come yet.
In the East we have been in deep search for that grace, but in the West, people have still not touched upon it. The eastern and western beauty, and particularly that of a woman, is totally different. In the East we call a woman beautiful if she is graceful. When something beyond the body goes on overflowing and surrounds the body, only then is she beautiful. In the West the physiological is more important than the spiritual.
She is in a deep crisis, and only you can help her to come out of it – so there is a great responsibility on you. It will be very enriching for you both. The whole accident can become a transformation.…
[A sannyasin said that he felt he had regressed lately, because he was less happy now then he had been months ago when he had first taken sannyas. Then too he had felt clearer in his feelings, his love, for Osho. Now the love fluctuated; sometimes it was present, sometimes it seemed to disappear.]
It happens, mm? because the mind cannot remain in one state. It changes from positive to negative, and from negative to positive. But wait, and just watch it, because soon the positive will come again, and this time it will be greater than the first time.
But always remember that the negative turn will come again. It is just like day and night following each other. Unless you transcend both, unless you become such a pure witness that you are not bothered by either and become indifferent and unconcerned, these states come and go. And unless that state comes, things will always change – from bad to good, from good to bad. Sometimes you will be flowing and happy, and other times you will feel unhappy and frozen.
This is natural, because mind is a wheel that goes on moving. One spoke comes up, then goes down; another comes up, and then goes down – it goes on moving like a wheel. In India, we
represent the word ‘world’ by the symbol of a wheel. The Indian word for world, ‘sansar’, means the wheel. Success is followed by failure, hope by hopelessness, happiness by misery.
One has to understand that this is the natural state of the mind and cannot be changed. The thing is to accept it, and not to get identified with it. When happiness comes, don’t say,‘I am happy.’ Say,‘Happiness has come, I am the watcher.’ Remain separate and distant. When unhappiness comes, again do the same. Watch, and note the fact:‘Unhappiness has come.’ Don’t make any judgements, don’t cling or push it away; rather, just watch.
You will see, by and by, that moods come and go and you remain undisturbed, undistracted. That’s what we call awareness. All else is identification and unawareness. So try this, mm?... and it is natural, whatsoever is happening is natural...
[The sannyasin said that in the down moments, even doubts about sannyas came up.]
Mm, that’s natural, and it will happen many times, because when the negative moment comes, everything becomes negative. You will doubt sannyas, you will doubt me, you will doubt yourself. You will even start doubting the previous moments of happiness; you may start thinking that it was just imagination. When one is in the dark night of negativity, one even doubts that the day that has preceded it was there; maybe it was your delusion. When doubt grips your soul, it grips from all directions. One becomes simply doubtful, it is not a question of about what.
When the moment of trust comes, you simply trust – not only me, you trust everybody. In that moment of moving higher and higher, who bothers to doubt?
Just remain a witness to it. That is the work to be done. Be unconcerned, and remember that everything passes. Nothing can be stable and permanent in this world, because the very nature of the world is change. Except for change, everything changes.
If you watch, suddenly you become the eternal, and you are no longer part of the changing world. The changes may be all around you, you may be surrounded by a thousand and one changes, but you remain the centre of the cyclone.
[Another sannyasin says: When I go through those dark moments, it’s like, I don’t feel I’ve got the strength to go through it. It’s like a fear of madness. There is this incredible feeling of insecurity, of everything shaking.
In those moments I just don’t have any conviction of my own strength to carry on. It’s like I’m looking for protection. I’ve felt this desire recently just for somebody, somewhere, to protect me, to save me from something I know not what.
I mean, that moment passes but at the time it is so intense that I almost feel suicidal and very weak. In response to Osho’s queries she says the tension is mainly in her back and head.]
So do one thing. Whenever it comes, lie down. If it drops from the head to the back, it is very good. Whenever you feel it, do this in three steps.
Bring the feeling of fear completely into the head, as if you are accumulating it there, concentrating it there. Imagine the fear and the anguish, death and suicide, are coming from all over the body and being collected in the head. Make your head as heavy as possible.
Then imagine that the fear is leaving your head and flowing down into the spine. Lie down on your back and let the feeling move into your backbone.