9

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‌CHAPTER 9

9 April 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, Veeno means a musical instrument – a musical instrument of love. Man’s heart is a musical instrument, it contains great music. It is asleep but it is there, waiting for the right moment to be struck, to be expressed, to be sung, to be danced. And it is through love that that moment arrives. A man without love will never know what music he has been carrying within his heart. It is only through love that that music starts becoming alive, awakened, from the potential starts becoming an actuality.

Love triggers the process, love is a catalytic agent. And if love does not trigger the process of your inner music, then it must be something else masquerading as love, it is not love. It may be lust, it may be just sexuality, sensuality. Nothing is wrong in sexuality or sensuality, nothing is wrong in lust. I am not condemning them, they are good as they are, but they are not love. They can pretend to be love, they can befool one into thinking they are love. And the criterion by which to know is: if your inner music starts flowing, then there is love. Suddenly you feel yourself in a deep harmony. You are no more a discord, you become an accord. You are no more a chaos, you become a cosmos, and life starts taking on a new quality, the quality of jubiliation, the quality of hallelujah!

That is the only criterion: go on searching, go on getting deeper and deeper into love and one day you will stumble upon your inner music. And after that life is never the same. In fact, after that life starts. After that God starts.

Anand means bliss and Geetesha means goddess of sounds – goddess of the sounds of bliss; that will be the whole meaning of the name.

Life has to be lived as a song. To live it as less than that is to miss it. One has to introduce the quality of dance into one’s whole life. Dance should not be a thing apart, it should be the flavour of one’s being. And songs should not be something that one sings once in a while. It should be

one’s breathing, the very heartbeat. I call that life religious. That’s what praising God really is: when everything that one is doing has become song, one has become an offering to God. And the song should be of bliss because life is such a blessing. We are not worthy of it, yet we have taken it for granted. Not only that – we go on complaining. We go on complaining that it should be like this and like that and why is it like this ? We are immensely ungrateful.

This ungratefulness is the radical core of atheism. On the surface the man may not be denying God, but if he is complaining about life he is denying God. He may be a churchgoer but if he complains about life then he is not in love with God and he has not understood the word ‘God’ at all. God can be understood only in deep gratefulness. To me, through utter gratefulness something happens to human consciousness – that something is God. But It happens only when one is immensely grateful, tremendously grateful, utterly grateful.

We have to change our dull, routine, miserable patterns. We have become accustomed to misery; it is just a habit that goes on following us like a shadow. We have forgotten the language of bliss. That’s my purpose here: to teach you the language of bliss and the grammar of love.

[A sannyasin says that she still clings to her memory of an old lover, with whom she felt very flowing and ecstatic.]

These are all illusions which disappear by and by. The first love is always very ecstatic because that is the first illusion. Next time you are a little more mature, it can’t be the same. The third time you know all the inside and the outside. So one goes on thinking: maybe it was the person that was the reason. It is not.

If you move into relationship with him again you will be disillusioned. It will not bring that magic again. That magic cannot be brought again, there is no way. The first love has a magic which the second love cannot have. And even if you remain with the lover, then too that magic disappears. It has nothing to do with your changing your lover. Even if you become married to the person and you live with him your whole life, those days of the honeymoon will never come back. That’s why the honeymoon exists. The whole of one’s life will be just a remembrance, a nostalgia.

These are all illusions – beautiful illusions, sweet dreams, but dreams all the same. One has to become grown-up and one grows only by experiencing frustrations. One tie is broken, then another tie is broken. It hurts. One feels very angry, in a rage, but slowly, slowly one comes to understand that all toys will be taken away. This is the way of growth. A day comes, and that day is the most fortunate of days, when you can live without illusions, when you can live without magic, when you can live quietly, silently, with no hankering for any excitement. And then a totally different kind of life starts growing in you. That life has value and truth.

These affairs of love, relationships, are good but they have to go. I am not against them – when I call them illusions I am not saying that I am against them. I am all for them because you can grow only by going through those illusions. You can grow only through frustrations, there is no other way to growth. Each success and each failure contributes to growth. Failure contributes more than success because success can go on nurturing the illusion; failure simply opens your eyes to the reality. The mind does not want to see the reality so it goes on weaving new dreams. Now the mind is thinking ‘Maybe we are soulmates.’ Nobody is! But truth is very hurtful, that’s why people don’t like it. People like to live in illusions; they like their illusions to be enhanced, supported.

Just look deep down in your heart: you want your illusion to be supported, you want me to support it and feed it and nourish and mother it. But I cannot do that. And you don’t need it any more. When I see that somebody needs it, I support it. I support it and go on supporting it till I come to the point where I know that it can be shattered. Your time has come: it has to be shattered – no more illusions. And there is a kind of love that arises when all illusions have disappeared, and that I call true love. All except that love is just childish... what you call ‘puppy love’. You can grow now or you can get back into the vicious circle again. And that has been your effort: you have been moving with people, searching for that ecstasy. It is not going to come.

It is not just an accident that all the civilisations in the past have been insisting on virginity. It is for a certain reason: if the woman remains virgin then the marriage will start with great magic. If the woman is not virgin then the marriage will start without any illusions. And remember: man never feels that kind of ecstasy that a woman does because man lives more in the head than in the heart. He is more mathematical than magical, he calculates. So all the old civilisations have allowed man to lose his virginity. It was not much a problem because even his first love is not much, he is not going to lose much. It has nothing to do with inequality between a man and woman as ‘lib’ people would like to have it. It has nothing to do with that. Because man has no magical energy about love, his love remains one thing amongst many things. In fact, sometimes his magic is released more through other things than through love.

That illusion will never come back. And don’t think that it is something unfortunate, no. One has to go beyond it. There is other magic to know. Love is a very very biological magic, hormonal, chemical. Just by injecting chemicals that magic can be enhanced, induced; many things can be done to the magic. It is not very spiritual or very significant. Search: other magic is there. That’s what I am trying to make available to you here: other magic. And there is a magic that comes through truth. Only that is lasting, only that is eternal.

The magic that comes around a lie is bound to disappear sooner or later. The so-called love is a biological trick, nature has been deceiving people. Nature wants to persist, nature wants to live, it wants to continue life. It deludes people through love. Love is just a trick of nature to keep life flowing. You may die but your children will live, then their children. If love disappears, who bothers to reproduce children? That magic has a purpose in it.

But there is another kind of magic that comes as a fragrance of truth. Now search for it. And I am not saying stop relating with people. Relate, but knowing well that that’s okay – a game is a game. Play it, and play it beautifully and artistically and aesthetically. But it is time to become a little more mature. Search inwards now. Let meditation become your love now. All relationships should continue on the periphery, but don’t invest too much in them and don’t hanker for that lost paradise; it is never regained. If you want to regain it, you will have to be reborn again. Only again when it is like the first and you have forgotten the whole love affair completely, can you again be deluded by it, otherwise not. My feeling is that it is perfectly good.

[A sannyasin says he is going round and round and finding nothing... he’s scared.]

You have to accept it, scared or not. If you don’t accept it you will never get out of it. Drop all ideas of becoming spiritual. This is what you are; accept the suchness of it. What is wrong in going round in circles? Let it be a merry-go-round.

For one month forget all spirituality, religion. Just be a human being. And don’t condemn. For one month, love yourself. And see what happens; you will become radiant through that love. This will be a great holiday from saintlihood.

It is good to become a saint when one is dead. I like the the Christian Church: it makes people saints only when they are dead! So after one month, report to me, but for one month, an absolute holiday from spirituality!

[A therapist says that when she leads or participates in groups, she takes everyone’s energy into her belly and becomes very sick. Osho checks her energy.]

I think group work is not for you... not at all... leading groups and participating in groups, both. You have a very very sensitive heart, a very receptive heart. You are too vulnerable so you start absorbing people’s energy. And you don’t have any protection inside. A groupleader needs a very protective being; because so many things are released in the group and they are almost all negative. Unless the groupleader is protected in a kind of cell so that everything that comes towards him remains outside him and nothing reaches him inside, he will go mad.

This work is not for you. You need something else, more creative kind of work: pottery, painting, poetry, sculpture – something into which you can pour your energy. You have energy, more than average: if you don’t pour it into some creative work that energy will also accumulate m your belly amd will create trouble. It has to be poured out into creative activity. In these groups your energy remains inside and the outer energy starts penetrating you, so you feel suffocated, you can’t breathe. You are too full of energy and the energy is so much that you will almost feel as if you are pregnant and the belly will start becoming swollen like a balloon. It can disturb your digestive system, it can disturb your heart, it can disturb your blood circulation.

This work is not for you, you are too unprotected. That work is not a right choice. You have to change it, otherwise you will get into much more trouble. Sometimes a blessing can become a curse and rightly understood even a curse can become a blessing. Now this is a blessing, to be so receptive, but then you have to choose something in which this receptivity becomes a growth. For example, if somebody is very receptive it is good to be with the trees, rather than with people. If somebody is very receptive it is better to look at the stars and the sun and the moon and the sky and the ocean and the mountains than to go and work in a hospital.

You need to be with people who are immensely healthy inside; then you can absorb much. Satsang is for you. To be with a Master, just sitting silently, not doing anything, is enough for you; you can absorb so easily. But because you can absorb so easily the same thing can become dangerous. And that’s what you have chosen to do. A therapeutic group means that people are releasing their negativity. They have come there for that, that is the whole purpose of the group: to relieve them of their negative energies so they can become more healthy and wholesome. But you will absorb that energy.

You can’t become a healer – if you try to become a healer you will become so ill that you will have a thousand and one illnesses. If you feel somebody’s headache, you will have the headache immediately.

His headache will be gone but you will have the headache; it will be immediately transferred. You are so open. So you have to be very alert about it. It is good to be open – remember. Your heart can be closed but that is not good. It can be done! If you really desire to be a groupleader it can be done: your heart can be closed. I can give you a few methods and it can be closed. But that will be just destroying your great treasure of openness and it is not worth that, groupleadership is not worth that.

Find some more creative work which has more to do with nature than people, which has more to do with buddhas rather than mad people... which has more to do with your aloneness. You should not live in big cities; you should move into small villages in some mountain, in some forest, and be there and you will be immensely growing. You have nothing to release, no negativity is there, so don’t torture yourself. Relax into rivers, in a swimming pool, on the sea beach, and that will do!

[She says she is committed to leading a three-month group in the West, and then will return as soon as possible.]

Go, and if those groups can be dropped, drop them. Because if somebody comes to see the point there is no need to do them, mm? And nobody will be harmed from it because nobody is going to be helped by you; only you will be harmed by those groups. With such a tense state, how can you help people. They can harm you but you cannot help them.

You made those commitments because you were not aware; now you are aware. You can go and just apologise and tell them that it is finished. Wind up things, come back and just be here with me. And don’t feel any guilt about it. Because three months is a long time, and now you know so this feeling will be happening more. You will be continuously aware that you are doing it to yourself unnecessarily. Those three months will become a great torture. Just go and tell them that it is finished.…

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