7

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 7

10 June 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A visitor said that while he was very happy to be here, he was missing his girlfriend.

Osho said that it was good in a love relationship for lovers to sometimes be apart so an appetite arose to be together.]

In fact the very word ‘love’ simply means to desire. You may not be aware but the word ‘love’ comes from a sanskrit root; the word is not basically english. It comes from a sanskrit root ‘lobha’. It means to desire. Then it became loofa, and from loofa, love. But now the roots are forgotten. Lobha means to desire, to desire intensely. Love grows when you desire intensely. When you are together too much it starts dying.

Meditate while you are here, because I can give you something which is much higher than love, and without which no love can ever become real love. That’s what I call meditation.

Love is a relationship between you and somebody else. Meditation is a relationship between you and you. Love is out-going, meditation is in-going. Love is a sharing. But how can you share if you don’t have it in the first place? What will you share?

People have anger, people have jealousies, people have hatred, so in the name of love by and by they start sharing these things, because that’s what they have. Once the honeymoon is over and you put down your masks and the reality comes into being and you become actual, then what will you share? You will share that which you have. If anger, then anger, if possessiveness, then possessiveness. Then there is fighting and conflict and struggle, and each tries to dominate the other.

Meditation will give you something which can be shared. Meditation will give you the quality, the energy, that can become love if related to somebody. Ordinarily you don’t have that quality. Nobody

has it. You have to create it. Love is not something that you are born with. It is something that you have to create, it is something that you have to become. It is a struggle, an effort and a great art.

When you have overflowing love within you, then you can share. But that can happen only when you relate to yourself.

And meditation is nothing else but how to relate to yourself. If you cannot relate with yourself, how can you expect that you will be able to relate with somebody else? So the first love is to oneself. Then the second is possible. People rush into the second love without knowing anything about the first.

So don’t be worried. Remember her. Write beautiful letters, mm? And don’t be worried about whether they are true or untrue. They should be beautiful. Write poems to her. And give one hour to her every night. From ten o’clock to eleven o’clock, turn off the lights, sit on your bed and remember her, feel her. In your visualisation touch her body, kiss her, embrace her, and go berserk! She will never be as beautiful as in your fantasies. Real persons are never as beautiful, very rarely. Sooner or later they start stinking. But fantasy is simply wonderful. In fantasy the beloved never perspires, never argues, never nags, nothing.

But be here and meditate. Much is possible. And after the camp do a few groups.

... A few groups will be tremendously helpful. You will come to many insights about your growth, about the state you are in. Because one never knows oneself rightly, and that is the first thing to be done.

[A visitor said she gave up her job teaching art in a museum because it was dull, and she wanted to come hereI began to try to do your meditation with the breathing and I became a little frightened

so I stopped and waited till I cam out.]

Yes, it can be so. The mind makes you very much afraid of going into the unknown. The mind has cleared a small spot and it clings to it. It is familiar, known, so there is no fear. But just beyond the fence of the mind is the wild existence. My meditations are just devices to lead you to the wilderness, to the wild existence, so the mind starts feeling frightened. It is good that you have come here.

Much can be done.… And it is always good to break bridges with the past. In fact many times in life one should do that. Then one retains an aliveness, an innocence, and one never loses one’s childhood. Many times one needs to break all the bridges and to be clean and to start again from ABC. Again you are a child.

Whenever you begin a thing you are a child. The moment that you start thinking that you have arrived it is time to break the bridges again, because that now means that a deadness is settling. Now you are becoming just an entity, a commodity in the market.

And of course for an artist to break his bridges is needed more than for anybody else. Anyone who wants to be creative has to die every day to the past, in fact every moment, because creativity means a continuous rebirth. If you are not reborn, whatsoever you create will be a repetition. If you are reborn, only then can something new come out of you. Unless you are new, the new cannot come out of you.

So it happens that even great artists, poets and painters come to a point from where they go on repeating themselves again and again and again. Sometimes it has happened that their first work was their greatest.

Kahlil Gibran wrote ‘The Prophet’ when he was only twenty-one or twenty, and that was his last work also. Then he wrote many books, but nothing comes to that peak. In a subtle way, he goes on repeating ‘The Prophet’. He tries to say the same thing in many ways – and there is no improvement even. If all the books are lost and only ‘The Prophet’ is saved, it is enough. He has done his life’s work. He could not die to it. He could not forget that book. It remained continuously chattering inside. He enjoyed it because it brought world fame. It became a vested interest.

If he had disowned the book and said, ‘I am finished with this book and it does not belong to me and I don’t belong to it,’ if he had broken the bridgeHe was a rare genius and he would have given

many books to the world of the same calibre as ‘The Prophet’ – or even better, because that was his first book. He was very immature – just twenty; you can’t expect much. But by and by he settled with the book and started copying himself. Other books are just carbon copies, echoes of the first. He could never transcend that because he was caught up with it too much.

So an artist, a painter or a poet, a musician or a dancer, one who has to create something new every day, has a tremendous necessity to forget the yesterdays so completely that there is not even a remembrance of them. The slate is clean and out of that newness, creativity is born. It has nothing to do with your doing. If you are new, you are creative. It is a reflection of youth, of virginity, and it is in our hands to become virgin again and again. On the contrary, we go on hoarding the past. That corrupts.

So good. You dared – that’s very good ! Now become a sannyasin ! [she nods, smiling.]

... this will be your new name. Forget the old name; this is your rebirth. This is the name: Ma Deva Anupam. Deva means divine and anupam means unique – unique divineness. Each person has unique divineness, because God is not repetitive. He creates every person absolutely unique, incomparable. There has never been a person like you before and there never will be again. So there is a tremendous responsibility on your part of being unique.

Once a person understands this – that God has destined a unique career for him – then everything changes. You are not to become a robot and you are not to become like anybody else. You have to become yourself. And that is the greatest courage in the world – to become oneself – because the whole society tries to force you to become somebody else.

[A visitor said he had been interested in Subud prior to hearing of Osho.]

Subud only goes up to a certain extent, because it is not a device. It happened to Bapak and he was not searching or seeking for anything; he was not making any effort. It simply happened out of the blue like lightning and he could see clearly.

But when you are not prepared and suddenly it happens, you can never see the whole. You are taken aback. You are so full of awe, in fact terrified, because you are not waiting or expecting, and suddenly like a jolt, an electro-shock, your whole being turns one hundred and eighty degrees. It is so much that unless you are ready for it, waiting for it, you will never be able to see the whole of it.

So Bapak found a clue, but the clue is fragmentary. It doesn’t have a philosophy around it. It is not a whole. It is valuable, very valuable, but incomplete, fragmentary. So Bapak may help many people, but finally every Subud person has to go somewhere else. He will start many people on a path, but eventually everybody will have to leave that path. It is a great service to humanity because you start looking in some direction. Sooner or later you will become dissatisfied with Subud, but that is its purpose.

God has been working through history in many ways. Sometimes when it is needed He reveals many things to people who are not in any way ready for it. Those people are innocent, pure of heart, but they were not in any way concerned. They were not searching for God. Good people... Bapak is a good person, a very pure person, and hence it happened – but he has no way to comprehend the whole of it. He can just tell you in what situation it happened to him. So you stand in the same situation. Maybe it happens to you, but it remains a ‘perhaps’.

And if you relax and you surrender, something will start happening to you also, but sooner or later you will see that it remains superficial. It does not touch your heart. It does not transform you. But he has put you on the path. God has used him in a certain way. He has become a window. Even if it is just a fleeting glimpse, something is changed. You are here because of him, because of Subud.

So always remember that finally everything helps. Even Subud has helped. Even sometimes we go astray, and sometimes we choose wrong paths; they too help. When you attain to your own experience, you will be able to see that everything falls into line. Even those goings astray, even those things which you were thinking were a wastage of time, of energy, even those things where you were feeling stuck and nothing was happening, also helped in a certain way.

But to see that is only possible when you have arrived and you can look back and can see the whole of it. Then everything fits like a jigsaw puzzle and one is grateful for everything that has happened. A real saint is even grateful to the sins that happened in his life because they have also led him on.

[The visitor said that he had a weak heart so felt restricted in what meditations he did.]

I don’t think it is weak, but it is very soft. Any method, any hard method, will not be helpful, so keep that in mind. We will use your softness of the heart. Everything can be used. But once you call it weakness, you cannot use it.

I call it softness. Then it makes a great difference. It can be used. You can move on the path of love very easily, very easily.

[A sannyasin says: I would like to speak about the book that I started. I made it personal and alive, but then it changed from what I had planned in the beginning into almost a daily journal of events. The only thing is that I don’t know how to stop.]

No, I think it has taken the right shape. A journal is the right shape. And there is no need to stop it. It can go on – first volume, second volume. That is the beauty of a journal – it can continue. So there is no need to end it.

No book in fact has a natural end, cannot have, because life has no end. It goes on and on and on. It is always in the middle; there is no beginning and no end to it. Somehow we have to manage to

end it, but that end is abrupt, artificial and arbitrary. That’s the beauty of a journal – that it need not end. It can continue to the very last day of your life. It will become very very rich and very useful.

A book is like a child. You can give birth to a child but you never know what the child is going to turn into. Nobody knows – not the father, not the mother, nobody. Once you have given birth to the child, the child takes its own course. A book is always like a child.

You can start it but you have no power over it. By and by, it starts dictating its own terms. It happens sometimes when people are writing novels that a certain character will start dictating his own terms and the writer will have to write it down. The character will become very stubborn if you don’t take note So a writer can open a door, that’s all. What will come out of it, even the writer never knows. Then the book is alive; otherwise it is dead.

If you can manage everything that you want, the book will not have its own life. The child will be a dead child.

A journal is a good shape. I was going to say to you to let it be a journal but I was waiting for the day that it would take that shape. It is growing every day, and nothing is definitive. Things are growing, you are growing. And with me, nothing is certain. I go on changing, so I am not predictable.

You can go on moving with the river. Sometimes it flows to the south and sometimes it starts flowing to the north. You have just to keep track. You need not worry, because a journal is a personal thing. You are not in fact writing for somebody else. Write as if you are writing for yourself, so you can have more freedom.

When you are writing for somebody else then that other and the idea of the other is always heavy. Writing to yourself, the journal is more fluid, more personal, more of the heart. It is just like a letter you are writing to yourself. Then it is useful for others also, because it will not only say something about me, it will not only say something about you. In fact it will say something about the miracle that is transpiring between you and me.

We both will be just like two banks. The real thing will be the river that is flowing. It will say more about the love, not about the lovers – and that’s the real thing. So you have to talk about me and about you, but that is just to create the banks so that the river can flow. And there is no end to it.

When you have come to a manageable size – three, four hundred pages – then the first volume goes; then the next series, third series, fourth series – you can continue. And never think of any consistency. Let it be as it is, even sometimes with contradictions. Life has contradictions; it is very contradictory.

If you try to keep something very consistent, it becomes dead. Then it is only a concept. If it is alive, it is paradoxical. So with all the paradoxes and contradictions, with all the absurdities, you go on flowing with it.

[A German sannyasin with his Japanese girlfriend says: Never has a woman confused me like she! He asks if he should take her to Europe with him as he also felt a need for distance sometimes.]

Then for the first time you have come across a woman ! A woman is only a woman when she is capable of confusing a man.

... That will settle. It is always so. If you love a person, it is very difficult to be with him or with her. If you love a person, both things are difficult. Love is such a wild thing.

If you don’t love a person, then there is no problem. You can be with the person or without them. But some love has happened between you so it is going to be rough. Sailing will be rough, but enjoy it – it is a challenge.

[The Primal group are present. The leader says: There’s a lover inside me that’s been asleep and the lover is coming up. When it awakens, something very sad is joined with it at the same time.]

Mm, I understand. If love arises, you will also feel sad because love is deathlike. It is a death. When love arises, you will have to disappear – that is the sadness of it. Love will be there but you will not be. The ego feels sad because love is just a deathbed and now your ego cannot exist. The ego will try in every way to cling, resist, to remain.

Now it is for you to help love, and to help the ego to drop and disappear. Don’t strengthen the ego. And whenever you feel sad, remember me. You have not learned that yet and you are missing much. Just the other day I was reading a very small anecdote, and I love it.

A father is sitting in his garden and his small child is playing – trying to pull up a rock which is too big for him. It is almost impossible. He is trying hard, and in every way possible from this side and that. He is puffing and breathing hard but he is still trying and perspiring.

The child feels frustrated and tired and sits on the rock. The father says, ‘Have you tried all your strength?’ And the child says, ‘Yes certainly I have tried all my strength.’ The father says, ‘No, because you have not asked me.’

I loved it... because that is also part of the child’s strength.

So start asking me when you feel sad. Just don’t go on pulling on the rock. Sometimes it will be too heavy and you may not be able to pull it up.

It is part of your strength to ask me. That is my whole function in being here.

Just remember me. Whenever you feel sad, remember me. The very remembrance will clear the clouds. And just leave it to me. It is natural that whenever a love arises, sadness also arises. Now it is up to you. If you choose the ego, the sadness will disappear but love will also disappear. You will again be back in your rut. If you choose love, the ego will disappear and with the ego’s disappearance, the sadness will disappear. But then you will be reborn.

You will be reborn as love, as loveenergy. Remember me more. These are the moments you will need me.

[A group member said:... I felt that the only way to be with you, was to be total. And I felt this conflict with my wife and you... I decided to be with her. Something was telling me that in order to be with you I had to drop everything.]

No, no, not my sannyasins. You are not to drop her.

... If you could have allowed this idea that you can drop everything for me, even the woman, the very idea would have helped. Not that I am going to tell you to. I am not going to tell you to drop anything. It has nothing to do with dropping, but just the very idea that if I say to, you can drop everything, that you can even drop your beloved – that every idea would have done tremendous work within your soul. It would have given you an integration.

If you drop something which is worthless for you, it is not dropping anything at all. If you drop something which you cannot, which is almost like a death for you, then through that idea you become integrated, you become centred.

Not that I am going to tell you to; I would be the last person. But you missed the point. Now it will not be of any use because you know I am not going to tell you to drop anything. So we will have to wait for another opportunity.

But there is nothing to be worried about. It is natural. And I can see it has been hard.…

< Previous | Contents | Next >