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CHAPTER 29
29 November 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Sumitro means a good friend. Friendship is something immensely valuable. Love tends to be possessive; friendship is non-possessive love. Friendship is all that is good in love minus that which is not good. Friendship is the very essential core of love. To rise to friendship is really a great spiritual growth. People fall in love, and people rise in friendship. And whenever a love relationship becomes a friendship it is a rare, beautiful phenomenon, it is unique. It is very difficult.…
A love relationship is a love/hate relationship; either it is love or it is hate. It is immediately hate, the hate is very close by. Love simply moves between love and hate. It is like a pendulum going from left to right and from right to left, and lovers are continuously moving from love to hate, from hate to love. That is the misery of lovers.
Friendship is a more tranquil affair, as if the pendulum has stopped in the middle, it is moving no more. Real love becomes friendship, has to become. If it doesn’t, something unreal, pseudo, phony, is still there. Real love soars high; it becomes non-possessive. And unless it becomes non- possessive it has no spiritual quality in it; it is earthy. It is more or less a physical phenomenon, a physical attraction, nothing more than that... no spiritual communion. Friendship is spiritual communion.
So remember that all love has to be transformed into friendship. And friendship is very inclusive; it can include the whole. Love is narrow; friendship is a wide sky. You can have as many friends as you want. You cannot have as many lovers, unless your love has become friendship; unless love is also friendship it will be impossible.
Love becomes a bondage and friendship becomes a freedom. That’s the beauty of it and the benediction of it.…
Uttama means the highest, the best. Man is a ladder: from the lowest to the highest, all rungs are there. Man can be as low as a rock and can be as high as a Buddha. In fact, the statues of Buddha were made of stone just to symbolise this fact. The stone is the lowest. It has almost no consciousness or maybe just a possibility. It is the most unconscious state in existence, and Buddha, the highest consciousness, pure awareness.
Buddhist images were made of stone to symbolise this fact that man has both the possibilities: from the lowest to the highest all is available, and it is always available. To find it is really a great surprise. When you find the fact that you have a ladder from the lowest to the highest and that you can exist on any rung of it any moment, you have found a great key.
For example, when you are angry just imagine yourself like a ladder: anger is just at the lowest rung and you are rising higher on the ladder. Soon you will find that you are above the anger; the anger is still there, but somehow you are no more in it, you are no more identified. You are a watcher from above, from the beyond. You are looking at it – it is there in the valley, dark, dismal – but you are absolutely untroubled by it. Whether it is or it is not makes no difference at all; you are just a witness.
In this very moment anger starts disappearing because your support stops. Your energy has moved higher; it cannot support the lower any more. For a few moments it will exist there, throb there, because you had given it some energy. Out of that momentum it will remain there but soon it will be gone. And this can happen in every possible mood, in every possible state of mind.
There is great sexual excitement.Move on the higher rung of the ladder, watch it, look down at it,
and you will be surprised – it is already disappearing. It is like smoke which is disappearing; soon it is gone and a great tranquility established.
Try it on an kinds of moods. You are feeling very tired – just start moving on the ladder. Visualise the ladder and you are going higher and suddenly you will find that the tiredness is disappearing. You have contacted a higher level of energy in your being. And once this is understood you have a secret key in your hands. One becomes a master of oneself.
This is what sannyas is all about: a secret initiation into the mysteries of life. Life is not what it appears to be. It is infinitely more. The appearance is of the lowest, because the body can express only the lowest. It can express anger, it can express greed, it can express violence. The higher you move, the less and less expressive the body becomes. It cannot express Buddhahood, it cannot express samadhi.
That’s why if a Jesus moves side by side with you, you may not be able to recognise him, because it is not possible for that high state to be expressed by the lowest state; the lower is very inadequate. A Jesus can be felt only by people who are moving higher on their own ladders; only they can feel. So only disciples feel a master. The master may be Jesus or Buddha or anybody, but only disciples feel him; others can’t feel. Others exist on the lowest rung and the master exists on the highest, and there is such a gap, almost unbridgeable. There is no way to bridge it from the spectator to the master, unless the spectator becomes a disciple and starts moving on his own ladder. The higher he goes on his ladder, the more will he be able to see the higher reality of the master. And when he has reached to the highest, only then does he understand.
Unless one becomes a Christ, one cannot understand a Christ. So this I am giving you as a method. You have to use it as much as possible. Whenever you have an opportunity, use it, and within two, three months, you will be able to go so easily. It is almost like changing the gear in a car, and immediately the engine starts functioning in a different way.
[A sannyasin says that she has been feeling a sadness that groups and psychoanalysis had done nothing to alleviate.
Osho checks her energy.]
Things are perfectly good – you are unnecessarily worried. And the sadness that you feel is not really sadness; it is a misunderstanding.
It is just a silence in you that looks like sadness. And if you label it as sadness you will become sad, because the mind immediately starts living according to the interpretation, according to the label. The mind lives through labels. So if somebody comes and shouts ‘Fire, fire!’ people will start running. They will not enquire if there is really a fire.
One of the very important things to understand is not to label inner phenomena. Never label them, because the mind will never be able to label them rightly. It has no understanding of the inner, it understands only the superficial. It knows about sadness; it knows nothing about stillness, and the first experience of stillness will be interpreted by the mind as sadness. And once the interpretation is there, you are sad. The sadness is created by your interpretation, but then it is self-fulfilling: you become sad and then the mind says ‘Look, you are sad’; and it is a vicious circle. The more the mind says you are sad, the more you become hypnotised by your own label.
So whenever it is a question of the inner, ask me rather than labelling it. It is something beautiful growing in you, something that one should be happy about. One needs to be still, but the Western mind – and the Western mind is the modern mind, whether in the East or in the West it doesn’t matter – the contemporary mind, lives in excitement So whenever there is stillness it thinks that something has gone wrong. The modern mind is continuously hankering for more sensations, new sensations. This is the age of entertainment. From one entertainment to another, that’s how people are living. From the club to the movie, from the movie to the TV and so on and so forth.
So whenever there is a breakthrough, a gap opens inside you and you start feeling something new which you have not known before, you will label it according to your old experience, and that will be wrong. It is a perfectly beautiful space. Allow it, help it, nourish it and cherish it. Soon you will see what I am saying: once the label is not there you will be able to experience it as it is.
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