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CHAPTER 10
13 June 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
[To a newly initiated sannyasin, who said he was a Primal therapist, Osho spoke about the difference between groups here and in the West, adding that it would be helpful for to be a participant rather than a leader for a little while]
... and the milieu here is totally different. In the West it is a therapy and the relationship is between a doctor and a patient, the healer and the healed. But here it is not really a therapy. The relationship is not between a doctor and a patient. The relationship is more integral, more intimate. And the question is not that a person has to be healed. The question is that he has to attain to something more than health. That ‘more’ is the basic thing in the East.
The West stops at health. The East says that health is necessary but is not the goal. Even if you have health, what will you do? You will be at a loss. You will not know what to do now. In fact to become healthy is to take a very great risk, because before you were occupied with your illnesses. While you are ill, worried, anxious, nervous, and a thousand other things, you are preoccupied, well occupied.
Once everything is healed and there is nothing left to do, then the basic problem arises: the meaning of life. Up to now there was a certain meaning. You were working hard, fighting hard and struggling against the odds, and now you have achieved.
Camus has written that the only and the most fundamental problem of philosophy is suicide. It is. If you are really healthy and you don’t know what to do now, life loses all meaning. When a society is poor, it is happy. When a society becomes rich, it becomes sad.
You fight with poverty and with poverty you can hope that someday, somewhere in the future, the dream will be fulfilled and you will enjoy it. But with richness the hope is gone. You can enjoy right
now but you don’t know how to enjoy. You do4’t really know what enjoyment is. It was a sheer dream. It was good as a dream, but when every opportunity is there, suddenly you are at a loss. And the same happens with an ill mind and a healthy mind.
An ill mind has something to do: to go to this therapist, to that therapist, to follow this guru, to follow that guru. He has something to do; he has a problem to solve. But when the problem is solved, immediately all meaning disappears because the meaning was somewhere between the problem and the solution. Now it is no more there.
So the West is facing affluence and sooner or later the West is going to face health. By the time you have helped people to be healthy the people will start committing suicide. They have started already. Suddenly there is nothing to do. In the East the emphasis is health plus something – and on the ‘something’ everything depends.
That is the difference between religion and therapy. Religion is the plus. Therapy is a risk. It is good if there is a religion waiting for you and you are healthy and now you know how to enjoy the moment of health. For centuries the mind has learned how to live in unhappiness. Happiness is absolutely alien. Health is absolutely alien.
There is a parable in Jesus’ life, not told by Christians, but reported by other sources, particularly mohammedan sufi sources.
[Osho recounted how it is said that Jesus came across a man lying drunk in the middle of the road. When he rebuked him, the man reminded Jesus that it was he who had brought him back to health when he was ill, years ago, and that now he did not know what else to do with himself.
Jesus, somewhat disturbed, made his way into the town where he saw a man running after a prostitute. Having bidden him stop, Jesus asked him what he was doing. The man reminded Jesus that it was he who had given him his eyesight when he was blind. Now he had eyes, what was he supposed to do with them?
Much perturbed, Jesus moves away from the town. On the outskirts he encounters a man trying to hang himself and begs him to stop and look at what he is doing with his life. The man says that he had died once before but Jesus brought him back to life – to a life that he did not know how to enjoy.]
Christians have completely left the parable but it seems to be the most meaningful parable of all about Jesus. But it must have been a little difficult to absorb, to swallow, so they left it. But this is the problem.…
So the meaning here is totally different. These groups are here but they are not the end. They are just basic necessities. They help you to unburden. But unburdening in itself is nothing unless you have to go further, unless you have to reach to the peak, and then unburdening is very helpful. You will feel light and movement will become easier and you can move on a higher and higher altitude.
So do a few groups. And forget all that you know, because your knowledge will be a hindrance. Simply move as an ignorant person, a layman, and it will give you a new perspective. It is good sometimes to again and again become ignorant. One gets a fresh outlook on life. It is very good
sometimes to look in ways you have never looked before and to sometimes mix with the mob, in the crowd; to sometimes lose your identity and your degrees and whatsoever you know. Otherwise that knowledge always functions as a censor and it does not allow you to relax and be open.
So forget yourself as a therapist and simply do it as a layman. It will help tremendously.
[A sannyasin said: The other day you said that a man can only love one woman, and I got very angry because women are expected to – they just do – love their children and their husband. They just loveBut a man – why can’t he love more?]
There is a difference. To love a child and to love a woman is different. There is no conflict in that. [She answers: And Mohammed says to take four wives and to love them equally.]
He says that because there were reasons. There were four times as many women as men because those foolish people were continously fighting and the whole country was almost full of widows. It was just an arbitrary thing, just an emergency method to avoid corruption because the whole country was going corrupt. If there were four women to one man, you can think what would happen. It was just an emergency measure.
Emergencies should not become laws; they are not. But Mohammedans have made that a law. It is foolish and now there is no problem. Women and men are almost equal in number in the world and nature always keeps balance. It is only because of man’s foolish wars that sometimes the balance is lost. Then too immediately nature tries to keep the balance. Immediately after the war, more boys are born than girls.
Ordinarily the ratio is one hundred girls to one hundred and fifteen boys, because girls are more stubborn in trying to exist than boys. So by the time of marriage, fifteen boys are dead and the number becomes equal. Boys are weaker than girls. Girls live longer, are more resistant to illness, more capable of persisting. And that’s how it should be because they have great work to do in the world – to give birth to children. Man is dispensable, woman is not.
After the first and second world wars, psychologists everywhere were simply surprised about what was happening. Immediately the ratio of boys was doubled. Then again it settled back to the norm.
In the times of Mohammed, in the countries that he was working in they were all quarrelling people, fighting, violent people, killing each other for no reason, so there were many widows. He himself married nine women. But that should not be the law.
You can love, and you can love many people, but love has many dimensions. One loves one’s mother, one loves one’s father, but there is no competition in it. You cannot love two fathers. If you have two mothers, you will start choosing. Even a mother starts choosing between children. It is impossible to love all the children equally. One becomes the pet.
You cannot love two women or two men simultaneously. If you do, that simply shows that you are split, that you have two personalities, that you are not one. So half of your personality loves one person and half of your personality loves another.
And it is happening in the West that people who are loving two or three women, two or three men, become split. It is bound to be so. You love your wife and you have a mistress. You come home and you have to manage this affair. Then you run to your mistress and you have to manage that affair then. The conflict, the hide-and-seek, the lies and everything goes on and then by and by you become split. You have two faces: one for your wife and one for
By and by those two faces will go far away from each other and there will be a rift; a man can go crazy. Love is not a small thing, it is not a trifle. It is very essential. If you love one person totally you will become integrated. Your very love to one person will make your life focused; the division will disappear. But only very rare people are able to become one, so the conflict continues.
But always remember that if it is possible, if it is at all possible, then pour your love in one direction, to one person.
It has nothing to do with the other person; it has something to do with you. You will become integrated by pouring your love into one person, in one direction, because love is your deepest core of being. So don’t fool around with it !
Deva means divine and yamini means a very silent, peaceful night; a divine night. In India we don’t have the idea about night that you have in the West. We don’t have any wrong associations with darkness. We accept darkness and light as two polarities of the divine. Light is beautiful, darkness also. Light has its benefits – darkness has its own benefits.
And in a deeper way, darkness is more substantial than light. So in India we call woman the night, the dark night, because woman is more substantial than man. Man comes out of the woman. The day is born out of the night.
Light has to be created. Darkness simply exists; there is no need to create it. So light comes and goes; darkness remains. Light always has a limitation. Darkness is unlimited.
So get in tune with the night. Whenever there is a dark night, look into the darkness and just feel as if you are melting into it. Let the night penetrate you, and you penetrate the night. Get more in tune with night and much will happen to you.
[Another visitor from America, said he had been a therapist for fifteen years and had himself taken part in numerous groups – Arica, Gestalt therapy and Encounter therapy.
Osho said that everything he had done would be useful, and that everything one does becomes pan of one’s future growth so nothing is lost. He recommended that David try the meditations and do a few groups here]
... right now the weather is cloudy. You have many things inside but not integrated – like islands, separate; many things but not synthesised. Once they fall into line, come together, once they are glued together, you will feel tremendous energy arising. You have done many things but they are not integrated.
It happens to many Arica people because Arica itself is not yet an integrated science. It is just on the way. From many schools, techniques have been chosen but those techniques have not yet become
part of one whole; they have not melted into each other. So there are many beautiful techniques but it is still technology; still not a science of the self. But this is how it happens in the beginning.
By and by, when many more people work in it, many more experiences and things will be added and one day it will become a science. Right now people working in it work hard in many directions and many things happen. But it is as if you are going in many directions together and then suddenly you don’t find where you are going. Up to a certain point things seem to happen and then everything seems to stop. You come to a plateau.
But whatsoever you have done is valuable. It is just waiting for a right synthesis. Once the right synthesis happens, you can become one of the most happy persons on earth.
Prem means love, and purantana means ancient, beginningless – beginningless love.
And we are ancient people. Nobody is new here. From the very beginning, we are. And this is the whole search: to find out your love. So remember it.. .this name will become a help in remembering.
The whole effort is to find out where our love is, where we are holding our love energy and how to use it so it becomes a flowering.
[In a previous darshan Osho suggested to a sannyasin who had relationship problems to meditate on whether he really loved his woman or not. (see June 7) Tonight the sannyasin says:... there’s something very vast, and I even hesitate to all it love but it’s larger than anything I’ve ever experienced. It was a great device. It turned me into myself.]
Good. In fact love is almost impossible in the ordinary state of the human mind. Love is possible only when one has attained to being, not before. Before that it is always something else. We go on calling it love but sometimes it is almost stupid to call it love.
A person falls in love with a woman because he likes the way she walks or her voice, or the way she says ‘hello’ or her eyes. Just the other day I was reading that a friend of Jerry Brown’s of California said, ‘He has the most beautiful eyebrows in the world.’ Nothing is wrong in it – eyebrows can be beautiful – but if you fall in love with eyebrows then sooner or later you will be deceived, because eyebrows are a very non-essential part of the person.
And for such non-essential things people fall in love: the shape the eyes. These are non-essential things, because when you live with a person, you are not living with a proportion of the body. You are not living with the eyebrows or the colour of the hair. When you live with a person, a person is a very great and vast thing... almost indefinable, and these small things on the periphery. sooner or later become meaningless. But then suddenly one is surprised. What to do?
Every love starts in a romantic way. By the time the honeymoon is finished, it is finished, because one cannot live with romance. One has to live with reality – and the reality is totally different. When you see a person, you don’t see the person’s totality; you just see the surface. It is as if you have fallen in love with a car because of its colour. You have not even looked under the bonnet; there may be no engine at all or maybe something is defective. The colour is not going to help finally.
When two persons come together, their realities, their inside realities clash, and the outer things become meaningless. What to do with eyebrows and with hair and the hair style? You almost start forgetting them. They no more attract you because they are there. And the more you know the person, the more you become afraid because then you come to know the madness of the person, and the other person comes to know your madness. Then both feel cheated and both become angry. Both start taking revenge on the other as if the other has been deceiving or cheating. Nobody is cheating anybody, although everybody is cheated.
One of the most basic things to realise is that when you love a person, you love because the person is not available. Now the person is available, so how can the love exist?
You wanted to become rich because you were poor. The whole desire to become rich was because of your poverty. Now you are rich you don’t care. Or think of it in another way. You are hungry so you are obsessed with food. But when you are feeling well and your stomach is full, who bothers, who thinks about food?
The same happens with your so-called love. You are chasing a woman and the woman goes on withdrawing herself, escaping from you. You become more and more heated up and then you chase her more. And that’s part of the game. Every woman knows intrinsically that she has to escape so the chase is continued for longer. Of course she is not to escape so much that you forget all about her. She has to remain in view, alluring, fascinating, calling, inviting – and yet escaping.
So first the man runs after the woman and the woman tries to escape. Once the man has caught the woman, immediately the whole tide turns. Then the man starts escaping and the woman starts chasing – ’Where are you going? With whom were you talking? Why are you late? With whom have you been?
And the whole problem is that both were attracted towards each other because both were unknown to each other. The unknown was the attraction, the unfamiliar was the attraction. Now both know each other well. Both know each other’s topography – the body, the mind. They have made love to each other many times and now it has become almost a repetition. At the most it is a habit, a relaxation, but the romance is gone.
Then they feel bored. The man becomes a habit, the woman becomes a habit. They cannot live without each other because of the habit, and they cannot live together because there is no romance.
This is the real point where one has to understand whether it was love or not. And one should not deceive oneself; one should be clear. If it was love, or if even a fragment of it was love, these things will pass. Then one should understand that these are natural things. There is nothing to be angry about. And you still love the person. Even if you know the person, you still love him or her.
In fact if love is there, you love the person more because you know. If love is there, it survives. If it is not there it disappears. Both are good. To an ordinary state of mind, what I call love is not possible. It happens only when you have a very integrated being. Love is a function of the integrated being. It is not romance. It has nothing to do with these foolish things. It goes directly to the person and looks into the soul.
Love then is a sort of affinity with the innermost being of the Other person – but then It is totally different. Every love can grow into it, should grow into it, but ninety-nine loves never grow to that point. These turmoils and troubles are so much that they can destroy everything.
But I am not saying that one has to cling. One has to be alert and aware. If it were just these foolish things, it will disappear. It is not worth bothering about. But if it is real, then through all turmoils it will survive. So just watch .…
Love is not the question. Your awareness is the question. This may be just a situation in which your awareness will grow and you will become more alert about yourself. Maybe this love disappears but the next love will be better; you will choose with a better consciousness. Or maybe this love, with a better consciousness, will change its quality. So whatsoever happens, one should remain open.
So just watch. Everything is going well.
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