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‌CHAPTER 17

6 September 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A visitor who had done the Tathata group said he found it easy. Osho suggested he do the Enlightenment Intensive, saying that that would be more intense.]

When you take the challenge of a certain difficult method, you grow. Something easy is not necessarily good. Something may look easy but it does not force any change in you. It allows you as you are, but then it is pointless. The whole point is to create something in you higher than you are, something in you deeper than you are. The whole effort is to help you to go a little beyond yourself.

A thing is easy if it fits you. A thing is difficult if you have to fit with it. So always remember that the way is hard. There is no short cut; short cuts exist not. Everybody comes by the hard way. When something becomes too easy, find something hard again. Otherwise you will live conveniently, you will die conveniently, but nothing will have happened. Go on searching for some new challenge. Go on looking higher. Even if it feels impossible to reach, it will help you to grow. Even the very vision of something great immediately starts transforming you. Even with a dream of something great, you start becoming great.

So never settle with the easy. People tend to settle too easily, and of course then growth stops. As psychologists say, if you look at people’s mental age, the average mental age never goes beyond thirteen. A man may be seventy; his average mental age remains near twelve, thirteen, at the most, fourteen. Physically he is seventy, mentally he remains hanging somewhere near thirteen – and that too, on an average. In that average, geniuses are included, very talented people are included. So if you find an actual person and forget the average, you will find him hanging somewhere near seven to nine. Since that age they have never taken any challenge: they are stuck there. Everybody is retarded in that sense.

So never miss any challenge, and if there is no challenge, create one. Even create hurdles and obstacles; they will help you. They will make you stronger.

[A sannyasin says: I see my craving and trying to fill up my spaces with other people. The love between Somendra and me is so beautiful. The pain is not the love.]

It is a sad situation but can be of tremendous import. Happiness makes people shallow, sadness gives depth – and sometimes it is needed. In fact you never get anything which is not needed. Remember it is a very fundamental law. You may not get something that you want, but you always get that which you need. Somehow the universe goes on fulfilling your needs; you may understand, you may not understand. The more aware you become, the more you see that in that moment, sadness was needed. It is a necessary ingredient in growth.

Love is good. To be together is good, but to be alone is also needed – to be so alone that one feels absolutely hopeless and there seems to be no possibility that one will be able to be together again; the darkness seems to be infinite. One seems to be absolutely lost, with no hope. One shouts and shouts ... no response. One screams and cries, and there is nobody to even listen to you.

In these moments, the mind tends to fill itself up with anything, whatever it is – sometimes eating too much, sometimes meeting and mixing with people, sometimes even pretending to fall in love, because the loneliness is so terrible. But if you really want to be benefited by it, blessed by it, then don’t fill this gap – live it.

Go the whole way in it. If it is lonely, be lonely. That is a part of life to be learned, and a very basic lesson – that one is alone. Then everything else is a game. You can hide your loneliness from yourself in a thousand and one ways, but it never goes; it is always there. Layer upon layer of.deception you can create – we call it maya, illusion – but deep down, wherever you go, you will again find that emptiness, the loneliness there.

Somehow one has to stop fighting with it. Somehow one has to accept it. It is painful, terribly painful to accept, but what to do? That’s how life is. So my suggestion is, don’t escape this time. Somendra has put you in a real growth situation. It is your own fault – you found a groupleader, so what to do! And this is more real a situation than any group can create.

A group situation is always artificial, arbitrary. It has nothing to compare with a life situation. This is a life situation. Be alone. Let it hurt... Let it hurt the whole way. Go with it; cry and weep but don’t try to escape. There comes a moment when you have touched the very extreme and suddenly you swing back – but that happens only when you have touched the other extreme. It is just like the pendulum of a clock. It goes to the left, to the very extreme, then it turns. The same happens in the mind.

If you can be really sad to the very end of it and you are not resisting it, in fact you are riding on it and are going into itYou want to see exactly what it is and how far it can go. You are not in any

way against it. You are simply going with it. You are really in a very deep enquiry to know how much sadness is possible, how lonely one can be and how much it can hurt.

Nobody has ever been killed by sadness. Nobody has ever been killed by loneliness, otherwise the world would have disappeared long ago. If you can go to the very end of it, all the way, rushing

towards the very peak of it, suddenly one moment will come when you can see the swing happening. And that is a tremendously beautiful moment – to see energies changing. It is the same energy that becomes sadness, that becomes happiness, that becomes joy, that becomes pain. It is the same energy.

We don’t have many energies – we have only one. That same energy becomes anger, that same energy becomes compassion. That same energy becomes love, that same energy becomes hatred. It has multi-potentialities. It is multi-dimensional. And one has to know all its ways because it is us! We have to know ourselves. That’s what self-knowledge is.

When Socrates says ‘Know thyself,’ what does he mean? He simply means know all the possibilities of your being. Sadness is a possibility. If you don’t know it, you will never become aware of yourself. Self-knowledge will never happen because a part of you will remain in ignorance. So never lose any opportunity. These are God-given opportunities.

Go into sadness so deeply that you know the whole path, you know the whole pain. And pain transforms. Pain is like fire. It melts the gold but it purifies it. Whatsoever is accidental will be burned in it, but whatsoever is essential will come out of it purer. Out of each sadness – if one goes to the very end – one will come out stronger, more grounded, centred. You will not be able to recognise your own face. You will have such a grace if you can go to the very end of it. And when it changes, you see that moment when suddenly you are on the threshold of change – the night turning into the morning. The stars disappear and the sun is rising on the horizon. The very darkness becomes light and dawn. It is one of the most beautiful experiences that man can ever have.

But we miss because we never go to the very end. We fight. We somehow manage and manipulate ourselves to be with somebody, to create some sort of happiness, just to avoid it. Of course then that happiness is also bogus. It is not true, it cannot be true, because your inner being was ready to go to the very end of sadness and you created a contradiction. You enforce some false happiness. The energy was going in one direction and you are forcing it into another. You can force it – it is your energy – but whatsoever the outcome is, it will be unnatural.

Happiness will be there but it will not be real. Real happiness comes out of real unhappiness, because only the real can be transformed into the real. This is the base of all alchemical work. The real can be changed only into the real. Even the baser metal can be changed into gold, but it should be real.

So go with it. Have a real trip to hell. Visit hell – and go deliberately. The faster you go and the more whole-heartedly you go, the sooner will you reach to the end. It can be reached in a single moment. It depends on the intensity and how fast you go into it. If you don’t fight, the energy will take you. In a single moment you can reach to the very boundary of sadness and you can see the dawn, the sun rising, and the energy changing of its own accord. And you are not making any effort to change.

[Osho said that as one became capable of witnessing this phenomenon, by and by there was no need to suffer the anguish and confusion. Everything is leading towards ‘satchitanand’ – truth, consciousness, bliss.

Once one has experienced aloneness, love has a totally different quality. It is not a need but just a sharing, a luxury.]

And I am here, don’t be worried. I am there in your loneliness, waiting and watching for you, so be courageous and don’t escape this time, mm? Good!

[The Primal therapy group were present. Osho asked one of the leaders, how he felt about the new method in which the three therapists worked with three or four participants each, and then all met and worked as a group.

The leader replies: It took a long time for the group to gel, to become a group and to work.

[A group member said: A lot of good things happened in the group, but I feel really strange. I don’t feel happy right now, and sometimes I feel frightened.

Osho checked her energy and said that he could see a block was there.]

Just do one thing in the night before you go to sleep. You can sit in a chair or in your bed, but be comfortable. Close your eyes and relax the whole body. Be limp and loose. If you body starts to slump forwards, allow it. Allow it any posture it takes. My feeling is that it will slump forwards and take a womb posture – just as the child remains in the mother’s womb. So keep a pillow in front of you and relax in that way. But let the body move as it wants; I’m not saying to do it.

When you feel that the body has settled, enter into your being and go to your stomach as if you have become very small and are going into your own stomach. It is not difficult; you will be able to do it.

In the stomach you will feel very empty and dark. Accept that emptiness and darkness. If sometimes you forget about it, go in again. For ten minutes you have to make all efforts to go there and just to be there. Within seven days your block will disappear. You just have to bring your conscious again and again to that block.

Consciousness functions like heat, and any block can be dissolved through consciousness; you just have to take the consciousness to it. It is just like a torch you take inside yourself. In the beginning you will feel dark and empty. By the time seven days are complete, you will start feeling very cosy – not cold, warm, and not dark... a very small, soothing light, as if it is early morning and the sun has not risen, a full moon night.

If you feel that you enjoy it and it is going well, you can continue it after seven days. But if you feel that the block has disappeared and there is no need, you can stop it. There is nothing to be worried about.

[A group member said: I dry-sobbed my way through all the events I was going through, and I wonder now why I couldn’t cryI used to cry a lot.]

Then there will be nothing to cry – that’s the trouble. If you have cried a lot, there is nothing left!

... nothing to be worried about. If a child is allowed to cry and he enjoys it, there is no problem. If you do the same group with Indians, nobody will cry because they were all allowed to cry and scream. Nobody forces them not to cry or anything. It is taken for granted that children do that. So the primal scream will not come to them. They have screamed a lot already. The primal scream comes only

because children have not been allowed to scream. So it is repressed there, waiting, struggling to come up.

That’s why you went so easily through the whole thing and there was no crying. I don’t see that there is any cry within you. If someday anything comes, it will be like laughter, not like crying. So pay more attention to laughter!

[A group member says: I didn’t like being pushed and often I wished to leave, but I didn’t. I had a lot of difficulty in getting in touch with deep feelings through these exercises.]

No, the problem was with you, not with the group. If you don’t like being pushed, then the whole group is missed; there was no point in it. You should have left. Always remember that there is no point in doing a thing which you don’t want to do. There is no point because nothing will come out of it, only frustration. You will never really do it. You will be just playing around, thinking maybe something will happen; let us see. But you resent it. You don’t like being told to do this, you don’t like being disciplined. Then nothing can happen, because a group has a discipline.

[The sannyasin asks: Yes, but how to get out of my stupid resistance?]

I will give you a few stupid things to do, and you will get out by and by. Many people have this attitude – particularly the new generation all over the world – that there is something wrong in being disciplined, in being told to do something. They think their freedom is denied. But only a disciplined man can have freedom; nobody else can have freedom. You can have licence but that is a totally different thing – not freedom. Freedom is a very responsible thing. It needs great alertness and alertness needs great discipline. They depend on each other.

It is a hierarchy. If you discipline your life in a certain way, you become more centred. With a more centred being, you have more light inside, more awareness. Otherwise, everything becomes diffused. Everything becomes topsy-turvy and you become a mess, a chaos. Then you don’t have any inner order.

So there is no need to become a slave. Discipline is not slavery. If some discipline is forced on you against yourself, then it is a slavery. But if you choose it, it is not. For example, somebody comes and starts operating on your stomach; then he is trespassing. But if you go to a surgeon and you pay him a fee and he operates on you, it is freedom. It is out of your own voluntary will that you have come to him. It is you who has decided to be operated on. So he is not a butcher or a murderer or anything. You can say any moment, ‘Stop! I don’t want it. I am finished with it,’ and he has to stop.

When you go into a group, it is on your own will that you have decided to participate in it; nobody is forcing you. You decided to play the game, so you have to follow the rules. That’s what I am suggesting. If you were feeling that it was not for you, that you don’t want to be disciplined, then leave immediately. What is the point of being there? Being there will just be futile.

You participate in another two groups after the camp. First, in the camp, try to do what I am saying. It is according to your will. If you don’t want to participate, then follow the rules of the game. In the camp do an the meditations as hard as possible, as totally as possible. Particularly the Dynamic meditation will be helpful to break this, because getting up early in the morning, the mind starts

thinking ‘Why bother? Why force anything upon yourself? Why not be spontaneous? Why not sleep a little more?’

To enter into some discipline is so beautiful, and it gives so many new visions and insights, that once you know itPeople have wrong associations about discipline – parents saying to them, ’Do this,

don’t do that’; their orders are almost foolish. The child sees the foolishness of it, but he has to yield to it because the parents are powerful. Then teachers and all sorts of stupid people teach and force things on the child which the child knows are meaningless, but still he knows he has to do them. Then the whole society does the same. It is a stupid society and it goes on forcing stupid things on people, so wrong associations arise. But that wrong association is dangerous. You will miss a few beautiful things.

It is bad to follow a stupid man and his discipline, but if you can find somebody who is more alert than you, follow him. Follow blindly, because he will introduce you to something new. If you can find somebody who knows better than you, who knows more than you, who loves more than you, listen to him. His discipline is going to help you.

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