7

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‌CHAPTER 7

19 February 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, and siddhanta means principle – principle of love. And that’s the principle of life also.

Love is life, and there is no life except love, mm? So become more and more loving, trusting – without any conditions. If one loses everything in love, nothing is lost. And if one can save everything and love is lost, then everything is lost.

[A new sannyasin said he did not know how to let go. He has been practicing Vipassana. Osho said that this might be the cause of his not being in touch with his feelings; that all eastern methods were in a way repressive... ]

... they tell you to become more unmoving, more controlled. Vipassana is good if first you do some cathartic methods, so that all that is boiling inside in the unconscious is thrown away. Then a settling happens of its own accord, and there is no need to control anything.

[Osho said it is just as when a small child who is very restless is told to run around the house several times. Then he has used up his excess energy and can sit perfectly still with no tension. Otherwise he will force his energy to be still, and a gap will arise between him and his energy... ]

... that is what has happened. There is just a small interval, a gap between your energy and you. You cannot feel. You can think – but you cannot feel. The body-sense is lost – and it has to be regained, because the body is your earth, and if you lose your sense of your body, it is as if a tree loses its roots in the earth.

No tree can exist just in the sky. The sky is needed to grow, but the tree needs the support of the earth to stand. Both are needed – the earth and the sky, the sun and the darkness.

It will be good if you do a few groups here, so they can bring you back to your feeling. When it comes you will simply be surprised that you had completely lost the feeling of the body. The energy is not moving in your body. Once it is, it is a beautiful inner dance. One can feel it, almost touch it. It is a sheer delight. But it will come .…

Arihanta means one who has arrived. It is a buddhist term, one of the most beautiful, and means one who has attained. And anand means bliss... one who has attained bliss.

[A sannyasin involved in the indian film industry asked Osho what kind of films he should make. Osho replied he should start working for him, and that... ]

... if you really make a good film, it is going to fail. Anything good cannot succeed, because the world is such that only the bad succeeds and the good fails. So you have to be a little more alert about it.

If you make five films, make four to succeed and one to fail. Make four just ordinary films for the audience. Don’t be worried about them – just make whatsoever they want; their demand has .to be supplied. And one film you make for yourself, for me, in which you proceed with the idea that it is going to fail. Then you don’t think that it is going to succeed. If you try to make it a success it will be a mistake and a compromise.

So let this be the proportion. If you earn money in one, put it into the other, and let it be a failure. And when you are making that film, be conscious that it is going to be a failure. You understand me? Advertise that it is going to be a failure, and that it is only for chosen people. (laughter) Say that you have not made it as a commodity, and then if nobody comes, if the house is empty, that will be its success.

You will enjoy it tremendously, and it will not be a compromise. You will succeed in your failures too, because they are not failures if you have made them consciously. So work it out this way: one for me, four for the market. (laughter) I am going to work in the fifth with you. In the other four you can succeed alone. In the fifth, to fail you will need me!

[A Vipassana group participant asked if he should continue Vipassana or take on the challenge of every-day life.]

No, take the challenge to stay with the every-day activity. Vipassana should not become a style of life. These are just techniques to be learned and immediately forgotten, so only the quality is carried with you. The flavour, the fragrance, not the flower, has to be carried into day-to-day activity. so by and by you don’t know what is meditation and what is ordinary activity – they become one.

Learn the technique – and for learning, of course, one needs to be in a particular place. Once you have known the technique, then unlearn it. Then just move into ordinary life – eat, drink, sleep. Just be ordinary, and carry the sense of silence that has come to you. Again and again remember it, again and again remind yourself. Again and again move into that feeling and catch hold of it in ordinary life.

Just suddenly in the marketplace catch hold of the thread, and enjoy it there just for a moment. That is more valuable than one month’s Vipassana. For just a moment the marketplace disappears,

becomes a dream with only phantoms moving. You are detached, aloof, far far away in a totally different space. Just eating – remember it; cleaning the house – remember it. And the moment you remember it, you are not... you simply disappear.

In deep self-remembering the self disappears. A self-remembrance is a no-self remembrance. The deepest moment of being is a moment of no-being, non-being, of anatta. So just remember it. Suddenly there is a flash, an upsurge of energy, a lightning, and you continue the same activity – but you are not the same. Just for a moment everything has changed. A different energy, a different quality of energy has entered. Then again move into your day-to-day activity.

And don’t make this remembrance a strain too. There iS no need to remember it too much – just a few times on and off is good. If in twenty-four hours you remember four or five times, four or five seconds of self-remembering are enough, because again and again you move to the centre. You touch it or rejuvenate it, and then are thrown back to the periphery, and you start working again.

Whenever you feel tired and exhausted again, just take a dip inside, and again you are fresh and moving on the periphery. Life is on the periphery. One should not try to become an escapist.

So I will not suggest that you continue Vipassana any more, because if you do it longer you start clinging to the technique. It is beautiful and very peace-giving – and that’s how many thousands of monks in buddhist monasteries are almost rotten. They have got into a a very pleasant technique, and now they are not capable of leaving it. It has become a gratification, a greed.

Any experience, even a spiritual experience, can become a desire, a greed. One can start clinging to it, can become miserly about it. You would like to eat more and more of it, but then by and by you break away from life. Sooner or later you will become paralysed, you can live only that way – and that’s not good.

Life should be all ways, of every way possible – it should move in all directions. It should be an overflow. So you have learned something; now let it become a part of your ordinary life.

[Another indian sannyasin who is involved in film-making, said that he always felt like escaping from whatsoever he was doing to meditate, and when he was meditating he wanted to lie down instead.

Osho said that this urge should be resisted, and that the resistance itself could become a meditation. Osho said it was natural to want to escape into meditation as one began to experience more and more silence and peace, but that the way was to bring a meditative quality to one’s work; to work passionately and lovingly.]

When you really do your work it will help you meditate more deeply, because ordinarily the mind goes on overlapping. When you are meditating it will feel guilty about work, and when you are working it will think to go and meditate, and so it goes on. This overlapping has to be stopped. When you meditate, meditate. When you work, work.

Don’t try to escape in any way from anything – work or family. One is to escape from nowhere – because the escapist mind can become peaceful, but it cannot become blissful; that’s the trouble. An escapist mind can become peaceful, because if you don’t work, if you avoid every situation

where trouble can arise, where there is challenge, conflict, competition, then of course, naturally you become peaceful. But that peace is bogus and not worth having. The slightest disturbance, and it will be disturbed.

I would like a peace that is attained amidst flames, a peace which is attained in the marketplace; a peace that is attained where there is no possibility of attaining it. Then you attain to an integration; a crystallisation comes to you. Of course the way is long and hard, but the short-cut is just an escape.

Sol would like you to remain wherever you are. Go on working as you are working. Fix a time for meditation, and then the remaining time is for work; work and meditate. Enjoy it, be more meditative, and soon – it will take at least three months – soon you will become settled, and then you will see that a harmony has risen between work and meditation.

[A sannyasin says: I’m sometimes doubting... I’m always changing in my attitude towards you. Sometimes I doubt, sometimes I feel a lot of love... ]

Allow it, both are good. There is nothing to worry about. Just remain aloof from both.

The trust that is with doubt is not trust. It is simply anti-doubt. Sometimes you feel tired of doubting, and so you start trusting. It is not trust. Sometimes you feel tired of trusting so you start doubting. This is the duality of the mind. You work hard, you need rest. After you have rested long, you need work.

This is doubt and anti-doubt – don’t call it trust. Then both disappear, trust will arise. Trust has no opposite to it. But this is natural, and it is so with everybody, more or less; only degrees differ.

So remain aloof, watching both. Neither think that you are doubtful or trusting. Just be a witness, mm? Then report to me after ten or twelve days, and for these days simply witness.

You get disturbed by doubt, and that is only possible if you get identified with your no-doubt, your anti-doubt. Don’t get identified with anything. They are two aspects of the same coin, and both are the same. One is not more valuable than another. You are valuable. The one who is watching is valuable. If you don’t get identified they are bound to drop, and then trust will arise.

Then you will love me and trust me, and in that trust there will be no doubt. In that trust there will be no opposite. It will be simply trust – and that has its own beauty.

[A sannyasin, who has been preparing food for sannyasins in the ashram’s canteen, said that she seemed to be angry all the time, and that she didn’t seem able to laugh.]

There are two ways to laugh. One way is to get a little fatter. (She is quite plump) If you really get fat you start laughing – but that is not a good laugh; that is a defence.

All fat people smile and laugh and look jolly, because that is their way of defending themselves. They cannot run if there is some fight, so they go on creating an atmosphere of friendliness around them so no enmity arises. Their laughter is false. And whenever a fat person reduces his weight, his laughter disappears.

There is another laughter that is not a defence measure, but comes from the very centre of your being. That laughter is possible only if you reduce your weight, so reduce your weight, otherwise sooner or later you will get into trouble.

Somehow you hate yourself... because this is destructive, it is a way of committing suicide. So get your weight reduced, mm? Run, walk, swim, meditate, and get into a love relationship. You do get into them, but you get out very quickly. A love relationship is very very needful, otherwise you will go on getting fatter and fatter.

[Osho went on to say that eating is a substitute for love and that a happy person does not eat much because he is so full of love that he has no room left for much food. (See ’Above All, Don’t Wobble, where Osho talks about this in detail)

The sannyasin replied that she had been and still was in a relationship where everything seemed perfect, but she still remained unhappy.]

Then you must be having some ideas about happiness, some wrong conceptions. If everything is perfect, is going well and smoothly, that is happiness. You must be thinking it is something miraculous, magical, dramatic. It never happens. It only happens in stories, in these peoples (indicating the sannyasins from the film world) films. (much laughter)

In real life nothing is dramatic. One just sleeps well, eats well, loves well. One goes for a morning walk, watches the rising sun, listens to the birds, enjoys being. That’s what happiness is. You must be having some very dramatic concept – that angels will come and dance around you or something. They used to come in the past, but they don’t come now.

So you just become more realistic, mm? If you have a wrong notion, then whatsoever happens you will always be missing, because you will have the idea that this is not happiness.

If you are not feeling misery, it is happiness. Happiness is nothing but your being functioning in perfect order. When your body and your mind are humming perfectly well, in harmony, you are happy. Happiness is harmony. So you just have another look, mm?

And feeling good is good – don’t expect too much.

[A sannyasin says. I’m always very nervous when I come to you... On full moon night it’s very heavy... I have a lot of energy and I don’t know what to do with it.]

It is not nervousness – you are really too full, overflowing...

A few women become very very full of energy on the full moon, and almost crazy. That’s why mad people are called moonstruck, lunatics. Lunatic comes from lunar – the moon. A madman is a lunatic – influenced too much by the moon.

The moon has certain vibrations. It affects the whole earth and particularly the water element. That’s why the ocean moves with the moon. The human body is ninety percent water, and not just ordinary water. It is exactly the same as seawater, with the same saltiness and the same chemicals. Scientists say that man started his life from the sea as a fish, and then by and by he grew.

So though it has been a long long affair with the moon, a few people still feel very very sensitive to it. During the full moon they feel much energy. That has to be used, and if it can be, you will feel very very happy.

Just do one thing: the next time the full moon is due, start this three days before. Go outside in the open sky, look at the moon and start swaying. Just feel as if you have left everything to the moon – become possessed. Look at the moon, relax and say to it that you are available, and ask the moon to do whatsoever it wants. Then whatsoever happens, allow it.

If you feel like swaying, sway, or if you feel like dancing or singing, do that. But the whole thing should be as if you are possessed – you are not the doer – it is just happening You are just an instrument being played upon.

Do this for the three days before the full moon, and as the moon becomes fuller and fuller you will start feeling more and more energy. You will feel more and more possessed. By the full moon night vou will be completely mad. With just one hour’s dancing and madness, you will feel relaxed as you have never been before, mm?

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