17

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‌CHAPTER 17

18 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love. And only love brings victory; everything else brings defeat. Money brings defeat, power brings defeat, success brings defeat. Only love brings victory; that is one of the most fundamental laws of life.

We try everything but we never try love. That’s why there is so much depression, despair in the world. Everybody wants to be victorious, but nobody succeeds or very few people succeed. Those people, those few people, are the people of love.

Prem means love, islamo means surrender, total surrender. Love is possible only through total surrender, and unless love happens, life does not happen. People are not really alive: they are existing only as potential possibilities. Those possibilities have not yet been realised, actualised.

Only love makes life a reality. Love gives it spirit, a centre, a rootedness. But love seems difficult because it requires surrender, so people only pretend to love. And by pretension I mean that they try to love without surrender; that is their pretension. It is not possible to love without surrender, and whenever you pretend love without surrender it is a plastic phenomenon, manufactured by the mind. It never goes to the heart, it never stirs the heart, it never transforms it, it never brings a new birth, a new life. It is stale.

Surrender is the key to love and ultimately to god, because god is love. And surrender means not to behave in an egoistic way, to function without the ego. That’s what surrender is all about: to function without the feeling of I, to function spontaneously, without bringing your past in; because your I consists only of the past. If the whole past disappears your I will disappear immediately. The I means past, the ego means past. You are present and the ego is past, so by dropping the ego you don’t disappear, in fact by dropping the ego, for the first time you appear in total radiance.

That is life! Love gives life, and when love starts happening and goes on bringing more and more life to you, you are moving towards god, because god is the ultimate life and ultimate love.

Anand means bliss, wali is a Sufi word; it means a sage – a blissful sage. It is very easy to find saints; it is very difficult to find a sage. A saint is one who has cultivated holiness around himself, with great effort, with practice; he has created a character. But if you go deep inside him, he is not transformed; he is only wearing a beautiful mask. The sage is one who has not cultivated character, who has not practised virtue, but who has become enlightened within, who has come to know the innermost core of his being. There awareness has happened, and out of that awareness, out of that light, his character has changed on its own accord, with no effort, with no practice. The insight is first and then the character has followed it; it is bound to follow.

When you can see, you cannot behave against your vision. When you cannot see, only then can you stumble into things, bump into the wall. A blind man has to search for the door; he has to enquire about it. The man with eyes, when he wants to go out, simply goes out. He does not ask ‘Where is the door?’ He does not even raise the question in his mind ‘Where is the door?’ He sees it; there is no question: he simply gets out of it. Even while getting out of the door he never thinks of the door; there is no point in it.

When inner awareness is born, your outer character changes simply, with no effort. And when there is no effort, there is beauty.

A sage has tremendous beauty, grace. His whole existence is very ordinary in a sense, because there is nothing cultivated; and yet he is extraordinary. He moves, walks on the earth, but his feet do not touch the earth. He lives in the world, yet he is like a lotus flower: the water cannot touch the lotus leaf, cannot touch the lotus petal; yet the lotus is in the water.

The saint is always afraid: he may forget and he may misbehave, he may do something which is not right to do. He is always on guard, frightened, cautious, watching each step. How can he be blissful? With such guardedness bliss is impossible. Bliss happens only to a spontaneous person. That’s why saints look so sad. They carry long faces, they are serious. Sages are playful, non-serious: the saint cannot laugh. The sage is pure laughter, his whole being is a laughter. That is the meaning of wali: a sage.

Prem means love, madiro means drunk – drunk with love, intoxicated with love. Love intoxicates, and its intoxication is no ordinary intoxication: it intoxicates you with god. God has no other proof except love. Those who love, they start feeling the existence of god. No other argument is capable of proving god, only the experience of love. The moment you have known love you cannot believe that life and existence are meaningless. It is impossible, because you have seen the meaning. The first ray of meaning has entered in your being, and when the ray is there it proves that there must be a sun.

You may not be able to see the sun yet, but the ray is enough proof that there must be a source.

God is the source of love, love is just a ray, but once love penetrates your life you start feeling, becoming slowly slowly aware, that life is full of something unknown, invisible. You start hearing a melody which cannot be heard without love and you start seeing colours which cannot be seen

without love. Love is the true psychedelic. All other psychedelics are just imitations, chemical imitations of love.

In the modern world psychedelics are becoming more and more important because love is disappearing more and more; it is bound to happen. Either love has to be brought back to the world or the whole world is going to be on the drug-trip. Governments cannot prevent it, nobody can prevent it. It is not a question of a few individuals; it is now a collective, universal question. If love is not there, then what is the purpose of living?

With love, life is a poem, a song, a subtle humming, and everything seems to be significant. Love brings all things together, gives them a context, creates a space in which they become meaningful. When love is not there, one starts falling apart; then something is needed as a substitute. That’s what drugs are doing, but they are dangerous substitutes. For a moment they may give you a glimpse but at a very high cost: they destroy you.

Love creates you: drugs destroy you. But these are the two alternatives: either the world will have to learn the ways of love again – that’s what I am doing here, my whole message is that of love – or, if love does not happen, if we cannot revive love, if the heart has really gone asleep and there is no way to shock it into awakening, then drugs are going to spread more and more.

Love is the only real intoxicant, and blessed are those people who can be intoxicated with it. It has a very paradoxical quality: it makes you intoxicated, yet it makes you more and more aware. On one hand you start becoming more and more unconscious of the ego and on the other hand you start becoming more and more conscious of the self. On one hand it destroys the false; on the other hand it provokes the real, triggers the whole process, so that all that is asleep in you becomes awakened.

Love is a miracle.…

[Osho asks a sannyasin: Something to say to me? The sannyasin replies: So many things.]

You can tell me only one! Because there is always only one thing but it may have many faces. I have not seen a single person who has many problems: only a single problem, with many faces, facets...

[The sannyasin begins to cry.]

Tell me one thing. If it is difficult to say it then just raise your hands and close your eyes. Say it with your energy. Close your eyes and if something starts happening, allow it.

Good. Start doing one thing every night before you go to sleep: become a small child, as if you are just a few months old. You are crying and weeping and you cannot find where your mother is. That’s your problem!

Every night, before you go to sleep, for five to ten minutes become a small child, crying, weeping, sucking your thumb, and fall asleep in that space. All your problems will disappear slowly slowly.

Next time, when you come, you will not have anything to say! [Osho gives him an ‘energy darshan’]

The fear is there, but it is part of the mind, of everybody’s mind. It is just that you have become aware of it, and it is good to be aware of it.

It has no particular reason: that’s why it is more frightening. If one can find a certain reason for why one is afraid, at least there is a consolation, an explanation. And if there is a cause one can hope some day to change the situation. If the cause can be changed, then the fear will disappear; the fear is an effect. But this is not an effect, hence you are trembling very much deep down. This is a totally different kind of fear. It has nothing to do with any particular reason; it is just part of the human situation. Death is there: that is part of the human situation. We don’t know from where we come, we don’t know to where we are going, we don’t know who we are. This is the fear, and this fear has to be lived; it has not to be repressed.

You have to go deep into it. You have to feel it, you have to become totally it. So every day make it a meditation: at least for twenty minutes just sit silently and let the feat possess you.

And whatsoever happens in that moment – you cry, you weep, you sway – whatsoever happens, you have to allow it, you have to be in a state of uncontrol. And soon you will see a great change happening: you will start becoming a witness of this fear.

But I am not saying to become a witness; that will be a consequence: I am saying to you become the fear. Don’t try to become an observer of it; if you observe you will repress it. All observation is a subtle repression. Become it so that it comes to a full flowering, and in that very flowering, one day suddenly you will see: you are in it and yet not in it. One day you will suddenly see this paradox: you are inside it and you are outside it. You are it and you are also the watcher of it. And that day you have found the key: after that day you become the witness.

Mm? it will take at least a few months to disappear, but no effort has to be made to make it disappear. You are not to help it disappear. You are not to help it disappear, you are to live it in totality. As a consequence the witness will be born and as a consequence fear will disappear. The moment it disappears you will feel much calmness, much coolness, as you have never felt before. The whole energy that is involved in the fear will be released. You will feel full of light and love.

There is nothing to be worried about: this fear is not pathological either; this is just part of the human situation. Everybody has to pass through it and fortunate are those who become aware. Meditating here, doing groups, you have become aware of it. It is beautiful to be aware of it: now start a twenty-minute meditation on it.

[A sannyasin says: It started two or three years ago after a very strong experience I had, that I had the feeling all my thoughts could be heard by everyone around me. And it’s not just my feeling: many times I think something and people talk about the same thing or react immediately.

Sometimes I suppress my thoughts, sometimes I say ‘Okay, let’s tolerate it’ but sometimes it makes me angry.]

I understand... I understand. In fact it is always happening, and not only to you: to everybody in the whole world...

Whenever you are thinking something, you are broadcasting it in a subtle way. The moment a thought becomes formulated in you, it starts being broadcasted. Immediately ripples arise around you, vibrations start spreading. It is like throwing a pebble into a silent lake: immediately ripples arise and ripples go on and on. The pebble may have settled at the bottom long ago but the ripples will go on continuing.

This is actually the case; it is not something abnormal.

You have just become aware of it and that is creating difficulty. Everybody is doing that. That’s why all the great masters of the world have been saying to you ‘Don’t think bad thoughts’ mm? because they go on affecting people. Not only do your actions reach people: your thoughts, your feelings, everything reaches people. And it is not only that people are hearing: trees are hearing, birds and animals are hearing and rocks are hearing.

Now there are scientific experiments which prove that if you come to the side of the tree in anger, the tree immediately feels your anger. Now there are methods to detect whether the tree has felt it or not. When you come with love the tree immediately feels it and goes into a joyous expression. And when somebody comes to cut the tree, he has not said anything – he has just come with the idea – the tree starts trembling, great fear arises in the tree. It has been simply broadcasted without being said, without doing anything to the tree.

A scientist working on trees was very puzzled one day.… He was going to kill an insect to see whether the tree was affected or not. The tree was affected! He was not doing anything to the tree, not even thinking to. He killed the insect, but the tree responded with great fear and anxiety, with sadness.

Life is interconnected. We are not separate: we are part of one spider’s web, we are part of one harmony.

This is good; don’t be worried. Of course if you become aware of such things it creates a disturbance, but if you understand, there is no problem: this is how it is. So just be more and more alert. Have beautiful thoughts of compassion, of love, of prayer. And drop those thoughts that can create some trouble in somebody’s life. This is a good situation, a good challenge; it can transform your whole being. It is not a problem, it is an opportunity, a god-given opportunity: use it!

And just go on watching. Immediately you see something meaningless, cut it then and there. Disidentify yourself with it. And soon you will be able to do it. Instead of ugly thoughts, think of beautiful things. Somebody passes by you, a stranger: why not silently give a hug to him, just in your thoughts? Why not say deep down ‘I love you’? And you will see that the person will look at you ‘What has happened?’ You can do it. I can see: you have the talent, and in a very very developed form. Use it to create beautiful vibes around you.

That’s how a person can change the whole world just sitting in his own room, not even going outside the room. Just sitting in his own room he can create such vital waves, such tidal waves of joy, bliss, love, that people may never know about him but they will be affected by them.

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