Thursday 31 January 2013

That’s why you find lovers always thinking in terms of the other cheating them

Then what to do? Let your sadness in love become a pilgrimage into prayer. Let this experience of sadness become a great meditation in depth. First you have to dissolve the ego in your own inner being; you cannot dissolve it in anybody else, it will come back. Only for a moment can you create a state of forgetfulness.
So sex functions like alcohol, a natural alcohol. It is provided in the chemistry of the body, but it is an intoxicant, it is a drug. It depends on chemistry. It is as chemical as LSD, marijuana – the difference is only that it is bio-chemical, it is already provided by nature in the body. But it is a chemical phenomenon. Through chemistry you attain a glimpse. That’s what happens when you take LSD – through chemistry you attain a glimpse. That’s what happens through all kinds of intoxicants – for a moment you forget yourself. Even that momentary forgetfulness opens a window.
But forgetfulness is not a dissolution. You are not dissolved. You are there, waiting. Once the drug has worn off the ego will grab you again. The ego has to be dissolved, not forgotten. That’s the sadness of love: the ego is only forgotten, and that too for a moment. Then it comes back, and comes back with vengeance. Hence you will find lovers fighting continuously. The ego becomes even more solid, crystallized.
That’s why you find lovers always thinking in terms of the other cheating them. Nobody is cheating. But you desired, you hoped, you fantasized a state of unity, and you were thinking that great ecstasy was going to happen and it didn’t happen – somebody has cheated you. Of course, naturally, the other becomes the object. And the other also thinks in the same way – that you have cheated him or her. Nobody is cheating; love has cheated you both, chemistry has cheated you both. Unconsciousness has cheated you both. Ego has cheated you both. If you understand you will not fight with each other.
This revelation of sadness through love will become a revolution, a radical change in your life. You will start moving towards a new direction where the ego can be dissolved.
That’s all that Sufism is about – how to dissolve the ego.
And love gives great insight, hence I am all for love. But remember well, you have to go beyond it. I am all for it only so that you can go beyond it. It has to become a stepping stone. I am not against it, because people who are against it will remain below it, they will never go beyond it. People who have not known the ecstatic moment of love will not know the sadness of it – how can they know?
A monk living in a Catholic monastery or a Jaina muni living the life of an ascetic – how are they going to know the sadness of love? They have renounced love. In that very renunciation they have renounced sadness also.
Without knowing the sadness of love you cannot take off into the world of prayer or meditation. That experience is a must.

From Osho, Sufis: The People of the Path, Vol. 1, Chapter 4




Why is there so much frustration in the world...

Question - Why is there so much Frustration in the World?

Osho - Because there is so much expectation. Expect, and there will be frustration. Don’t expect, and there will be no frustration. Frustration is a byproduct: the more you expect, the more you create your own frustration. So frustration is not really the problem, it is the result. Expectation is the problem.

Frustration is just a shadow which follows expectation. If you don’t expect even for a single moment, if you are in a state of mind where there is no expectation, then it is simple. You ask a question and the answer comes; there is a fulfillment. But if you ask with any expectations you will be frustrated by the answer.

Everything we do, we do with expectations. If I love someone, an expectation enters without my even knowing it. I begin to expect love in return. I have not yet loved, I have not grown into love yet, but the expectation has come and now it will destroy the whole thing. Love creates more frustration than anything else in the world because, with love, you are in a utopia of expectation. You have not even been on the journey yet and already you have begun to think of the return home.

The more you expect love, the more difficult it will be for love to flow back to you. If you expect love from someone the other will feel it as bondage; it will be a duty for him, something which he has to do. And when love is a duty it cannot fulfill anyone because love as a duty is dead.

Love can only be play, not a duty. Love is freedom and duty is bondage, a heavy burden that one has to carry. And when you have to carry something, the beauty of it is lost. The freshness, the poetry, everything is lost, and the other will immediately feel that it is only something dead which has been given. Love with expectation and you have killed love. It is abortive – your love will be a dead child. Then there will be frustration.

Love as play not as bargain, not because there is something you want to get out of it. Rather, love the other as an end in itself. Thank God that you have loved and forget about whether it is returned or not.

Don’t make a bargain out of it and you will never be frustrated; your life will become filled with love. Once love has flowered in its totality there will be bliss, there will be ecstasy.

I use love only as an example. The same law applies to everything. There is so much frustration in the world that it is difficult to find someone who is not frustrated. Even your so-called saints are frustrated: frustrated because of their disciples, frustrated because they begin to have expectations about them that they should do this and not do that; they should be like this and not be like that. Then frustration is bound to come, it has come.

Your so-called workers are all frustrated because they have expectations. Whatever their ideal is, society must conform to it; whatever their utopia is, everyone must follow it. They expect too much. They think that the whole world must be transformed immediately according to their ideals. But the world goes on in its own way, so they are frustrated.

It is very difficult to find a person who is not frustrated. And if you find such a person, know that he is a religious person. It makes no difference what the object, the cause, the source of frustration may be. One can be frustrated because of power, because of prestige, because of wealth. One can be frustrated because of love. One can even be frustrated because of God.

You want God to come to you. You begin to meditate and expectation comes in. I have seen people who meditate for fifteen minutes each day for seven days, and then they come to me and say, ”I am meditating and I have still not realized the divine. The whole effort seems to be useless.” They have devoted fifteen minutes to meditation for seven days and still God is nowhere to be seen. ”I am still no nearer to God, so what should I do now?” Even in the search for the divine we have expectations.

Expectation is the poison. That’s why there is frustration; it has to be so. Realize the falsity, the poisonousness of the expecting mind. By and by, if you can become aware of it, the expectations will drop and there will be no frustration.

So don’t ask the question, ”Why is there so much frustration in the world?” Ask ”Why am I so frustrated?” Then the whole dimension changes. When someone wonders why the world is so frustrated, there is again an expectation that the world could be less frustrated. But whether the world is frustrated or not, you will remain frustrated.

The world is frustrated – that is a fact. Then you go and try to find out why you are frustrated. You will find that it is because of your expectations. That is the seed, the root cause. Throw it out!

Don’t think about the world, think about yourself. You are the world and if you begin to be different the world begins to be different. A part of it, an intrinsic part, has begun to be different: the world has begun to change.

We are always concerned with changing the world. That is just an escape. I have always felt that people who are concerned with others’ changing are really escaping from their own frustrations, their own conflicts, their own anxieties, their own anguish. They are focusing their minds on something else, they are occupying their minds with something else, because they cannot change themselves. It is easier to try to change the world than to change oneself.

Remember to find out the cause of your own frustrations. And the sooner you do so, the better. Situations differ, but the source of frustration is always the same: expectation.

Source - Osho Book "The Great Challenge"


YOU HAVE SAID THAT TANTRA TEACHES MAN TO TRANSCEND BOTH HIS CRAVING FOR HIS ANIMALISTIC PAST, AND ALSO HIS CRAVING FOR THE DIVINE.

TANTRA TEACHES MAN TO TRANSCEND BOTH HIS CRAVING FOR HIS ANIMALISTIC PAST, AND ALSO HIS CRAVING FOR THE DIVINE


YOU HAVE SAID THAT TANTRA TEACHES MAN TO TRANSCEND BOTH HIS CRAVING FOR HIS ANIMALISTIC PAST, AND ALSO HIS CRAVING FOR THE DIVINE.
DOES IT MEAN THAT DIVINITY IS PART OF THE WORLD, AND THAT TOO HAS TO BE TRANSCENDED? AND WHAT IS IT THAT GOES BEYOND BOTH?

You will have to understand many things. First: the nature of desire. Divinity is not what you call it. The god that you talk about is not the god of reality; it is the god of your desire. So it is not a question of whether the divine is part of the world. That is not the question. The real question is, can you desire the divine without making him part of the world?
Look at it in this way. It has been said again and again that unless you leave desiring, you cannot attain to him, the ultimate. You cannot attain to the divine if you don't leave desiring. Leave desiring and you can attain to him. You have heard it many times, but I wonder whether you understand it or not. More or less, you will be misunderstanding it. Hearing this, you start desiring the divine - and that is to miss the whole point.
If you leave desiring, the divine will happen to you. Then you start desiring the divine, so your divine will be part of the world. That which can be desired is the world. This is how I define it: that which can be desired is the world. So the divine cannot be desired, and if you desire it, it has become part of the world.
When desiring stops, the divine happens. When you are not desiring anything, the divine is there - then the whole world is divine. You will not find the divine somewhere in contradiction, in opposition to the world - contrary to the world. When you are not desiring, everything is divine; when you are desiring, everything is the world. Your desiring creates the world: whatsoever you desire becomes the world. This is not the world that you see - the trees, and the sky, and the sea, and the rivers, and the earth, and the stars. This is not the world - that which you desire is the world.
A flower is there in the garden. The moment you pass the tree, and you look at the flower, and the smell of the flower comes to you, look within. If you are not desiring that flower, if there is not even a slight urge to possess it, not even a slight ripple of desire to have it, that flower becomes divine.
You will have the divine face through it. But if the desire is there to possess it, or a jealousy arises about the owner of the tree, you have created a world; the divine has disappeared. It is your desire that changes the quality of existence; your desire makes it the world. When you are non-desiring, the whole world becomes divine.
Now I will read this question again. YOU HAVE SAID THAT TANTRA TEACHES MAN TO TRANSCEND BOTH HIS CRAVING FOR HIS ANIMALISTIC PAST, AND ALSO HIS CRAVING FOR THE DIVINE.
Tantra teaches only to transcend craving. It is irrelevant what you crave - that you crave is the point.
You can go on changing the objects. You crave money, you crave power, you crave prestige - you crave for the world. Then you change. You get fed up with it, you are bored. Or, you have attained whatsoever you craved, and now you are not fulfilled; you feel frustrated. You start a new craving.
Now you crave the divine. You crave moksha, nirvana, liberation - now you crave for the god. The object has changed; you have not changed - your craving remains the same. It was running after prestige and power and money. Now it is running after divine power. It is running after the ultimate, moksha, the absolute freedom, but the craving is there.
Ordinarily, religious people go on changing their objects of desire. Desire remains the same, unchanged. And it is not the objects which create the problem; it is the desire, the craving, which creates the problem. Tantra says it is futile to go on changing objects. It is wasting time and life and energy. Changing objects won't help - drop craving. Don't crave. Don't crave for freedom, because craving is bondage. Don't crave for the divine, because craving is the world. Don't crave for the inner, because craving is the outer. So it is not a question of transcending this craving or that - simply drop craving. Don't crave, don't desire. Just be yourself.
When you don't desire, what happens? When you don't crave, what happens? You are non-moving; all movement ceases. You are not in a hurry to reach anywhere. You are not serious. There is no hope and there is no frustration. You don't expect anything; nothing can frustrate you. There is no desire; you cannot be a failure. Of course, there is not going to be any success either.
When you are not craving, not desiring, what happen? You are simply left alone, moving nowhere.
There is no goal, because craving creates the goal. There is no future, because craving creates the future. There is no time, because craving needs time to move. Time stops. Future drops. And when there is no craving, mind drops, because mind is nothing but craving, and because of that craving you have to plan and think and dream and project.
When there is no craving, everything drops. You are simply in your purity. You exist without moving anywhere; inside, all ripples disappear. The ocean remains, but the waves are not there. This is what divineness is for tantra.
So look at it in this way: craving is the barrier. Don't think of the object, otherwise you will be deceived by yourself. You will change one object for another, and then time will be wasted. Again you will get frustrated, and then you will again change the object. You can go on changing objects infinitely, unless you realize that it is not the object which creates the problem, it is your craving. But craving is subtle and the object is gross. The object can be seen, and craving can be seen only when you go deep down and meditate upon it; otherwise, craving is not seen.
You can marry a woman or a man with great dreams and hope, and the greater the dreams, the greater the hope, the greater will be the frustration. An ordinary arranged marriage cannot be such a failure as a love-marriage is bound to be, because with an ordinary arranged marriage there is not much hope, there is not much dreaming. It is business-like; there is no romance, no poetry. There is no peak to it; you are travelling on plain ground. So arranged marriages never fail. They cannot fail, because there is no point. How can you fail in an arranged marriage? You were never on a height, so you cannot fall. Love-marriages fail. Only love-marriages can fail, because with a great poetry, with a great dreaming force, they come up. They touch heights, on the waves you rise high, and then you will have to fall down.
So old countries, those who have knowledge, experience, they have come to settle for arranged marriages. They don't talk about love-marriages. In India they never talk about love-marriages.
They have also tried in the past, and then they felt that a love-marriage is going to be a failure.
Because you expect too much, you will be frustrated, and the proportion of frustration will be the same. Whatsoever you desire and dream gives you expectations - they cannot be fulfilled.
You marry a woman; if it is a love-marriage, you expect much. Then you get frustrated. The moment you get frustrated, immediately you start thinking about another woman. So if you say to your wife, 'I am not interested in any other woman,' and she feels you have become indifferent to her, you cannot convince her - it is impossible, it is unnatural. The moment you become indifferent to your wife, the wife knows instinctively that you have become interested in someone else.
This is how mind functions. You become aware of the woman that you have married, and you feel the frustration is coming because of her - 'This was not a right choice.' This is ordinary logic. 'This was not a right choice. This woman is not for me. I have chosen a wrong partner, so the conflict has arisen.' Now you will try to find another partner.
You can go on that way ad infinitum. You may marry all the women on the earth, and still you will be thinking in the same way - that 'This woman is not right for me'. And the subtle craving which is creating all trouble is not seen. It is subtle. The woman is seen; the craving is not seen. It is not the woman or the man who is frustrating you; it is your craving, your desire, which is frustrating you.
If you can come to understand this, you have become wise. If you go on changing objects, you are ignorant. If you can come to feel yourself and the craving which is creating the whole thing, you have become wise. Then you don't go on changing one object for another; you simply drop the very effort to possess, to desire, to crave.
The moment this craving is not there, the whole world becomes divine. It has always been so, only your eyes were not open to see. Your eyes were filled with craving. Eyes filled with craving, the divine appears as the world. Open eyes, unfilled, unclouded by craving, the world appears as the divine.
The world and the divine are not two things, not two existences, but two ways of looking at the same thing, two approaches to the same thing, two outlooks, two types of perception. One perception clouded with craving, another perception unclouded with craving. If you can look unclouded, and your eyes are not filled with tears of frustration and dreams of hope, there is nothing like the world; only the divine exists - existence is divine. This is what tantra means. And when tantra says transcend both, tantra is not concerned with either this or that - tantra is concerned only with transcendence, so there is no craving.
AND WHAT IS IT THAT GOES BEYOND BOTH? That cannot be said, because the moment anything is said about it, it comes within the two. Whatsoever can be said about God will be false, just because it is said.
Language is dualistic. There is no non-dual language; cannot be. Language is meaningful only because of dualism. I say 'light'; immediately in your mind bubbles up the word 'darkness' or 'black'.
I say 'day', and immediately in your mind comes 'night'. I say 'love', and just behind it is hidden 'hate'. If I say light and there is no darkness, how will you define it?j We can only define words because of their opposite terms. I say light, and if you ask me what light is, I say that which is not darkness. If someone asks you what mind is, you say that which is not body. If someone asks what body is, you have to say that which is not mind. All terms are circular, so, basically meaningless, because neither you know anything about the mind, nor do you know anything about the body. When I ask about the mind, you define it with the body, and the body is undefined. When I ask you about the body, you define it with the mind, which is itself undefined.
This is good as a game. Language is good as a game - language is a game. But we never feel that the whole thing is absurd, circular; and nothing is defined, so how can you define anything? When I ask about the mind, you bring in the body - and the body is undefined. With an indefined term, you define mind. And then when I ask, 'What do you mean by body?' you have to define it with the mind. This is absurd - but there is no other way.
Language exists through the opposite, so language is dualistic. It cannot be otherwise. So nothing can be said about the non-dual experience. Whatsoever is said will be wrong. It can be indicated, symbols can be used for it, but silence is the best. That which can be said about it is silence.
Everything else can be defined, talked about - not the ultimate. You can know it, taste it, you can be it, but nothing can be said about it. Only negatively we can say something, but only negatively. We cannot say what that is; we can only say what that is not.
The whole mystic tradition is simply using negative terms for it. If you ask what that ultimate is, they will say, 'That ultimate is not this, not that. It is neither life nor death. It is neither light nor darkness.
It is neither near nor far. It is neither I nor you.' They will say in this way, but this makes no sense.
Drop craving and you come to know it face to face. And the experience is so deep and individual, non-verbal, non-linguistic, that even when you come to know it, you cannot say anything about it.
You will become silent. Or, at the most, you can say this that I am saying. You can say, 'Nothing can be said about it.'
Then what is the point of talking so much? Then why do I go on saying something to you if nothing can be said? Just to bring you to that point where nothing can be said. Just to push you to that abyss where you can take a jump out of language. Up to that point, language can be helpful. Up to the point when you take the jump, language can be helpful, but the moment you have taken the jump, it is silence, it is beyond language.
So I can push you to the very end of the world through language - to the very end of the world - but not a single inch into the divine through language. But this pushing you up to the very end will be helpful, because then you can see with your own eyes that there is this blissful abyss beyond. And then that beyond will call you by itself; then the beyond will attract you; then the beyond will become a magnet, a pull. It is impossible then for you to come back, to retreat. The abyss is so enchanting - the abyss of silence - that before you know, you will have taken a jump.
That's why I go on talking, knowing well that all that I am saying will not help you to know it. But it will help you to take a jump. It is methodological. It will look contradictory, paradoxical, if I say that all language that I am using, or that the mystics have ever used, is to bring you to the temple of silence; to force you into silence, to call you unto silence. It looks paradoxical. Then why use language? I can use silence also, but then you will not understand.
When I have to talk to madmen. I have to use a mad language. It is because of you I am using language. It is not that anything can be expressed by it; only your inner chattering can be destroyed by it. It is just as if you have a thorn in your foot - another thorn can pull it out. The other one is also a thorn. Your mind is filled with words, with thorns. What I am trying to do is to pull those words out of you. What I am using are also words. You are filled with poison. What I am giving you is again a dose of poison, just an antidote. It is also a poison. But a thorn can pull out another thorn - then they both can be thrown.
When I have talked to you to the point where you are ready to be silent, throw all that I have said to you; it is useless, it is even dangerous to carry it. When you have come to realize that language is useless, dangerous, that inner verbalization is the only barrier, and when you are ready to be silent, then remember well - don't carry whatsoever I have said to you. Because the truth cannot be said, and all that can be said cannot be true. Be unburdened of it.
The last thing Zarathustra said to his disciples is very beautiful. He had taught them. He had given them glimpses. He had stirred their souls. He had challenged them to the ultimate adventure. The last thing he said to them was, 'Now I am leaving you. Now beware of Zarathustra.'
So they asked, 'What are you saying? Beware of Zarathustra? You are our teacher, our master, our only hope.'
And Zarathustra said, 'All that I have said to you, now beware of it. Don't cling to me, otherwise I will become a bondage to you.'
When one thorn has pulled out your thorn, throw the other one also with it. When I have prepared you to move into silence, then beware of me. Then whatsoever I have said has to be thrown; it is rubbish, of no use. It has utility only up to the point before you are ready to take a jump into silence.
Nothing can be said about that which transcends both. Only this much can be said - and this is too much really. If you can understand, this is enough to indicate towards it.
I am saying this - that if your mind becomes totally vacant of words, you will know it. When you are not burdened with thoughts, you will realize it, because it is already there. It is not something which is going to happen; it has already happened within you. You are just an expression of it. But you are so much engrossed, involved, with thoughts, with clouds, that you miss the key. You are too concentrated on the clouds; you have forgotten the sky. Allow the clouds to disperse, and the sky has always been there just waiting for you. The beyond is waiting for you. Just drop the duality and it is there.






Wednesday 30 January 2013

THE LANGUAGE OF A LOVER’S HEART, OTHERS HAVE NO CLUE

You will have to move into the world of love; and don't ask how. You will have to move into the dark; And don't ask for a map — because that very asking is against love. That's why trust is needed, SHRADDHA. If you trust a person, you say, "Okay. If you send me in the dark, I will go. If you send me into death, I will go."
On the path of love, trust is the most essential thing. On the path of meditation, you can move without trust. On the path of meditation you can move without surrender, but on the path of love, without surrender, without trust, there is no go because it is the very first door. Love demands so much. It demands almost the impossible, and on the first step.
Love is easy but very demanding. That's why even though the path is so easy, very few people travel it. The path of meditation is very difficult but not so demanding. That's why the path is difficult and arduous, yet still, many people travel it.
When you hear about love it seems very simple and easy; but look at the demands. On the path of meditation, that which will be demanded on the last step, is demanded on the first step on the path of love.
The meditator will be asked to surrender his ego only at the last step: when he moves from SAVIKALPA SAMADHI to NIRVIKALPA SAMADHI, when he moves from the mind to no mind; only at the last step. First he goes on purifying his mind, he goes on purifying his ego. He goes on making it more and more subtle, more and more subtle, refined, cultured. Then just a trace remains. On the last step, he has to drop that trace.
Love demands the impossible. It says: on the first step you have to drop the ego. There is no need to refine it and there is no need to work on it. Because one has to drop it, so why bother carrying it? Drop it here, now.
Trust arises on the path of meditation at the last stage. Trust arises only when you are arriving home. When the arrival is so close and when you are almost approaching, and you can see the door and you can see the house and you can see that you have reached, then trust arises — you say, "Yes."
But on the path of love, trust is asked on the first step. The first step of love is the same as the last step of meditation. The path is very easy if you are daring, if you are almost a dare-devil. If you are almost mad and ready to risk all without any condition, the path is very easy — because it completes on the first step. The first step becomes the last step. Here you surrender, and not even a split second is lost and you have arrived.
…THE LANGUAGE OF A LOVER'S HEART, OTHERS HAVE NO CLUE.

People who are very learned in the ways of meditation, in the ways of intellectual comprehension, contemplation, concentration, have no clue about love. They simply don't know that language.

OSHO







“Be a light unto yourself. Don’t live on borrowed light….OSHO

“Be a light unto yourself. Don’t live on borrowed light….“




A man of enlightenment is so full of love, so full of joy, that he shares it. Sharing comes to him without any effort — it is not an effort, it is not an action. That's why people like Lao Tzu say "actionless action," and "effortless effort."
But people like Ta Hui cannot understand that. To them, "effortless effort" and "actionless action" will look like illogical, absurd statements. How can there be an actionless action? How can there be effort without any effort? But I know that once you are awakened, you don't do anything — everything starts happening. It is just a spontaneous outpouring, just as roses come on rose bushes, without any effort.

Love and compassion, good and beauty, grace and blessings, simply go on and on coming out of the overfullness. Just as a raincloud showers without any effort, an awakened man showers also without any effort. And the beauty of no-effort — and yet tremendous happenings — is so majestic. It is the ultimate splendor in existence.
Gautam Buddha has said… For forty-two years continuously he was speaking, and at the end he says, "I have not spoken a single word." And he is right, because he has not made any effort to speak. It was just a raincloud showering, it was a rose bush bringing roses with no effort, with no action. Buddha had to speak because he was so overfull. All that poetry, all that music, all that came out of him was simply spontaneous.
A moralist makes efforts; he tries to do good, he avoids doing bad. His whole life is continuously "Do this," or "Don't do that." He is always split, and he is always worried about whether what he is doing is right… is it really right? Or, who knows? — it may not be right. The moralist acts out of confusion. He depends on others who themselves may have been confused.
The last words of Gautam Buddha on the earth were, "Be a light unto yourself. Don't be bothered about what others say, don't be bothered about traditions, orthodoxies, religions, moralities. Just be a light unto yourself."
Just a small light is enough, and you can go on with that small light for ten thousand miles without any difficulty. Your light may be falling only four feet ahead of you — just go on moving. As you move, the light will be moving ahead, and if you can see four feet ahead, that's enough. You can go as far as you want. You can go on an eternal pilgrimage with just a small light of your own.
Don't live on borrowed light.
Don't live on borrowed eyes.
Don't live on borrowed concepts.
Live according to your own light, and your life will be, each and every moment, a greater joy, a greater blissfulness, a greater ecstasy.

OSHO





STRESS

Osho - Just go on watching your Breathing

Osho - People go on doing things almost in a sleep. Just become a little more alert. Do whatsoever you are doing, but bring the quality of consciousness to your actions -- there is no other method. And you can bring that quality to small things and that is helpful. Sitting, just watch your breathing. The breath goes in, watch; the breath goes out, watch. Just go on watching your breathing. And it is of great help because if you watch your breathing, thinking stops.


This is something to be understood. Either you can think or you can watch your breathing. You can't do both together. Breathing and thinking are such processes that only one can exist in you -- in awareness. In unawareness, both can continue: you can go on breathing and you can go on thinking.
But if you become aware, either you can think or you can breathe; and when you breathe with awareness, thinking disappears. Your whole consciousness becomes focused on breathing. And breathing is such a simple process: you need not do it, it is already happening. You can just bring your consciousness to it.
Buddha became enlightened through this simple method. He calls it vipassana, insight. Breathing brings great insight and when you are aware of breathing, the whole thought process simply comes to a stop -- and great stillness arises. After watching your breathing, it will be easy to watch your thinking directly, because breathing is a little gross.
Thinking is more subtle. Thoughts have no weight, they are weightless; they can't be measured, they are immeasurable. That's why the materialists cannot accept them. Matter means measure -- that which can be measured is matter. So thought is not matter because it cannot be measured. It is, and yet it cannot be measured; hence it is an epiphenomenon.
The materialist says, "It is only a by-product, a side effect, a shadow phenomenon" -- just as you walk in the sun, a shadow follows you. But the shadow is nothing. You walk in life and thinking arises, but it is only a shadow. If you watch this shadow, this epiphenomenon, these thoughts and the processes of thought... it is going to be a more subtle phenomenon because it is not as gross as breathing.
But first, learn the process of awareness through breathing and then move to thinking. And you will be surprised: the more you watch your thinking... again, either you can watch or you can think. Both cannot be done simultaneously. If you watch, thinking disappears.
If thinking appears, watching disappears. When you have become alert enough to watch your thoughts and let them disappear through watching, then move to feeling -- which is even more subtle. And these are the three steps of vipassana. First breathing, second thinking, third feeling. And when all these three have disappeared, what is left is your being. To know it is to know all. To conquer it is to conquer all.

Source: from Osho Book "Dhammapada Vol 6"




Osho - Vulnerability of a meditator from the harmful negative vibrations

Osho - Vulnerability of a meditator from the harmful negative vibrations


Question - A meditator who is vulnerable, passive, open and receptive, feels that With these characteristics he suffers due to the influence of the nonmeditative, Negative and tense vibrations around him. Please explain how he Can preserve his vulnerable psyche from the harmful vibrations.

Osho - If you are really vulnerable, nothing is negative for you – because the negative is your interpretation. Nothing is harmful to you – because the harmful is your interpretation. If you are really open, then nothing can harm you, nothing can be felt as harmful. You feel something is negative and something is harmful because you resist, because you are against it, because there is no acceptance of it. This has to be deeply understood.

The enemy exists there because you are protecting yourself against him. The enemy is there because you are not open. If you are open, then the whole existence is friendly; it cannot be otherwise. Really, you will not even feel it as friendly – it is simply friendly. There is no feeling even that it is friendly, because that feeling can exist only with the contrary feeling of enmity.



Let me put it in this way: if you are vulnerable, it means you are ready to live in insecurity. Deep down it means you are ready even to die. You will not resist, you will not oppose, you will not stand in the way. If death comes, there will be no resistance. You will simply allow it to happen. You accept existence in its totality. Then how can you feel it as death?

If you deny, then you can feel it as the enemy. If you don’t deny, how can you feel it as the enemy? The enemy is created by your denial. The death cannot harm you, because the harm is your interpretation. Now no one can harm you; it has become impossible. This is the secret of Taoist teaching. Lao Tzu’s basic teaching is this: if you accept, the whole existence is with you. It cannot be otherwise. If you deny, you create the enemy. The more you deny, the more you defend, the more you protect, the more enemies are created. The enemies are your creation. They are not there outside; they exist in your interpretation.

Once you can understand this, then this question can never arise. You cannot say, ‘I am meditative, I am vulnerable, open. So now how am I to defend myself against negative vibrations around me?’ Nothing can be negative now. What does the negative mean? The negative means that which you want to deny, that which you don’t want to accept, that which you think is harmful. Then you are not open, then you are not in a meditative state.

This question arises only intellectually, this is not a felt question. You have not tasted meditation, you have not known it. You are simply thinking, and that thinking is just a supposition. You suppose, ‘If I meditate and become open, then I will be in insecurity. The negative vibrations will enter in me and they will be harmful. Then how am I to defend myself? This is a supposed question. Don’t bring supposed questions to me. They are futile, irrelevant.

Meditate, become open, and then you will never bring this question to me, because in the very opening, the negative will have disappeared. Then nothing is negative. And if you think that something is negative, you cannot become open. The very fear of the negative will create the closure. You will be closed; you cannot open. The very fear that something can harm you... how can you become vulnerable? That’s why I emphasize the fact that unless the fear of death disappears from you, you cannot become vulnerable, you cannot be open. You will remain closed in your own mind, in your own imprisonment.

But you can go on supposing things, and whatsoever you suppose will be wrong, because the mind cannot know anything about meditation, it cannot penetrate that realm. When it ceases completely, meditation happens. So you cannot suppose anything, you cannot think about it. Either you know it, or you don’t know it – you cannot think about it.

Be open – and in the very opening of yourself, all that is negative in existence disappears. Even death is not negative then. Nothing is negative. Your fear creates the negativity. Deep down you are afraid; because of that fear you create safety measures. Against those safety measures the enemy exists. Look at this fact – that you create the enemy. Existence is not inimical to you. How can it be? You belong to it, you are just a part of it, an organic part. How can existence be inimical to you? You are existence. You are not separate; there is no gap between you and the existence.

Whenever you feel that the negative, the death, the enemy, the hate, is there, and if you are open, unguarded, existence will destroy you, you feel that you have to defend yourself. And not only defend – because the best way to defend is to be aggressive, to offend. You cannot be simply defensive. When you feel that you have to defend yourself, you become offensive, because to offend, to be aggressive, is the best way to defend yourself.

The fear creates the enemy, and then the enemy creates defence, and then defence creates offence. You become violent. You are constantly on guard. You are against everybody. This point has to be understood: that if you are in fear, you are against everybody. Degrees may differ, but then your enemy and your friend are both your enemy. The friend is a little less, that’s all. Then your husband or your wife is also your enemy. You have made an arrangement, that’s all. You have become adjusted. Or it may be that you both have a common and a greater enemy, and against that common and greater enemy you both have become joined, you both have become one party, but the enmity is there.

If you are closed, the whole existence is inimical to you. Not that it is so. It appears to you that it is inimical. When you are open, the whole existence has become your friend. Now, when you are closed, even the friend is the enemy. It cannot be otherwise. Deep down you are afraid of your friend also. Somewhere, Henry Thoreau or someone else has written that he prayed to God, ‘I will take care of my enemies, but you take care of me from my friends. I will fight with my enemies, but protect me from my friends.’

Just on the surface is friendship; deep down is enmity. Your friendship may be just a facade to hide the enemy. If you are closed you can create only the enemy, because when you are open only then is the friend revealed. When you are open totally to someone, the friendship has happened. It cannot happen in any other way. How can you love when you are closed? You live in your prison, I live in my prison, and whenever we meet, only the prison walls touch each other and we are hiding behind. We move in our capsules: the capsules touch each other, the bodies touch each other, but deep down we remain isolated.

Even while making love, when your bodies have entered into each other, you have not entered. Only bodies are meeting; you remain still in your capsule, in your cell. You are just deceiving yourselves that there is communion. Even in sex, which is the deepest relationship, communion is not. It cannot happen because you are closed. Love has become an impossibility. And this is the reason – you are afraid.

So don’t ask such questions; don’t bring false questions. If you have known openness, you cannot feel that something can be harmful to you. Now nothing is harmful. That’s why I say even death is a blessing. Your approach has become different. Now wherever you look, you look with an open heart – that open heartedness changes the quality of everything. And you cannot feel that something is going to be harmful; you cannot ask how to defend – there is no need. The need arises because you are closed.

But you can go on supposing questions. People come to me and they say, ‘Okay, if we have realized God, then what?’ They start with the question – if? There are no ‘ifs’. In existence you cannot raise such questions. They are absurd, stupid, because you don’t know what you are saying. ‘If I have realized God, then what?’

That ‘then what?’ never arises, because with the realization, you are no more, only the God is. And with the realization, there is no future, only the present is. And with the realization, there is no worry, because you have become one with existence. So the question ‘then what?’ never arises. This question arises because of the mind which is in constant worry, constant struggle, constantly thinking for the future.

Source - Osho Book "Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 2"



Tuesday 29 January 2013

Osho – Sexual orgasm is very momentary, and whatsoever is momentary brings frustration

Osho – Sexual orgasm is very momentary, and whatsoever is momentary brings frustration 

Osho – Unless you know something which cannot be sold and cannot be purchased, unless you know something which is beyond money, you have not known real life. Sex is not beyond money — love is. Transform your sex into love, and transform your love into prayer — so one day even kings like Bimbisara may feel jealous of you. Become a Mahavira, a Buddha, become a Christ, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu. Only then have you lived, only then have you known the mysteries of life!
Money and sex are the lowest, and people are living only in the world of money and sex — and they think they are living. They are not living, they are only vegetating, they are only dying. This is not life. Life has many more kingdoms to be revealed, an infinite treasure which is not of this world. Neither sex can give it to you, nor money. But you can attain to it.
You can use your sex energy to attain it, and you can use your money power to attain it. Of course, it cannot be attained by money or by sex, but you can use your sex energy, your money power, in such an artful way that you can create a space in which the beyond can descend.
I am not against sex, and I am not against money, remember it. Always remember! But I am certainly for helping you go beyond them — I am certainly for going beyond.
Use everything as a step. Don’t deny anything. If you have money, you can meditate more easily than the poor person. You can have more time to yourself. You can have a small temple in your house; you can have a garden, rosebushes, where meditation will be easier. You can allow yourself a few holidays in the mountains, you can go into isolation and live without worry. If you have money, use it for something which money cannot purchase, but for which money can create a space.
Sexual energy is a wastage if it only remains confined to sex, but it becomes a great blessing if it starts transforming its quality: sex not for sex’ sake — use sex as a communion of love. Use sex as a meeting of two souls, not only of two bodies. Use sex as a meditative dance of two persons’ energies. And the dance is far richer when man and woman are dancing together — and sex is the ultimate in dance: two energies meeting, merging, dancing, rejoicing.
But use it as a stepping-stone, as a jumping-board. And when you reach the climax of your sex orgasm, become aware of what is happening, and you will be surprised — time has disappeared, mind has disappeared, ego has disappeared. For a moment there is utter silence. This silence is the real thing!
This silence can be attained through other means, too, and with less wastage of energy. This silence, this mindlessness, this timelessness, can be attained through meditation. In fact, if a person consciously goes into his sex experience, he is bound to become a meditator sooner or later. His consciousness of the sex experience is bound to make him aware that the same can happen without any sexuality involved in it. The same can happen just sitting silently by yourself, doing nothing. The mind can be dropped, time can be dropped, and the moment you drop mind and time and the ego, you are orgasmic.
The sexual orgasm is very momentary, and whatsoever is momentary brings frustration in its wake, brings misery and unhappiness and sadness and repentance. But the quality of being orgasmic can become a continuity in you, a continuum — it can become your very flavor. But it is possible only through meditation, not through sex alone. Use sex, use money, use the body, use the world, but we have to reach God. Let God remain always the goal.


ORGASM


Orgasm

The experience of orgasm itself is always nonsexual. Even though you have achieved it through sex, it itself has no sexuality in it. You can reach to orgasm through sex. It is a merger of the negative and the positive polarities — ...such a deep merger that the man is no longer man, the woman is no longer woman. They are not two; there is only one energy surrounding them both. They have melted into that energy.

It may be for a moment — that does not matter — but the experience itself has nothing to do with sex. The first orgasm is bound to be attained through sex. And my own understanding is that meditation has grown out of the experience of orgasm, because the original founders — particularly Shiva who, in his VIGYAN BHAIRVA TANTRA, has written, just like a scientific formula, about one hundred and twelve meditations; each meditation just in one line or two lines…. The man is tremendously aphoristic. Those one hundred and twelve sutras are just like seeds. He has condensed everything about the method in them.

He is also known as a great lover. Perhaps he was the first man to discover meditation. And it can be very scientifically assumed that whoever experienced orgasm, if he had a little intelligence, would have seen that although it has come through sex, it itself is a nonsexual experience. That gives the insight that there may be possibilities of reaching it through nonsexual means, because it is not sexual itself, so sexuality is not necessarily the only way.

It does not need much intelligence if you experience it and see clearly that it does not have any impact of sexuality. Perhaps sexuality created the background, the groundwork in which it happened. But the experience of orgasm itself does not remind you of sex; it is purely spiritual.

Whoever experienced this must have concluded then that there can be other ways to reach it — because sex is not necessarily a part of it. There is no color, nor any impression of sex left in it. Then he must have watched how it happens. And then things are very clear: the moment the orgasm happens, time stops, you forget about time. Your mind stops, you do not think anymore. There is tremendous calmness, and a great awareness.

You are not asleep. You have not fallen into any hypnotic sleep. Everything is crystal-clear. The mind is no more functioning the way it functions continuously: the thought process has stopped. The sense of time is not there; it seems timeless. Afterwards you will think it lasted only a few seconds, but that is afterwards; in the experience itself, it seems it is eternity. And you are fully aware, as aware as you have ever been: wide-awake.

Any observer going through the experience will naturally think, “If these things can be managed without sex — awareness, thoughtlessness, timelessness — you will reach to the orgasmic state, bypassing sexuality.”

And this is my understanding: this is how man must have first discovered meditation; otherwise meditation is not something biological or natural, so that in the course of time you have to discover it. But biology has given you an experience; if you try to understand it, you are bound to search for other methods to make it possible. You know it has happened — that there was no thought, no time, and only pure awareness — so it is possible.

You are not groping in the dark, you are not just guessing: you know it is possible. You have known it through the biological route. Then if these three things can be maintained without sex, the orgasm happens. And the difference is that the sexual orgasm is very momentary. Although while it is there, it looks almost eternal, that feeling is just because of its depth. But through meditation you can have it as long as you want, because meditation is not dependent on anybody else — the woman or the man or a certain state of two minds, a certain rhythm of two energies. The sexual orgasm depends on many things, and particularly on the other person being there.

Meditation is independent of any other person; only you are to create the situation. And naturally the conclusion will be to start with awareness, because you don’t know how else to stop thoughts. It is not in your hands to stop thoughts or to stop time. Only one thing remains, and that is awareness — that you can be more aware or less aware.

You know it. If this house is suddenly on fire, you will be more aware. You know that your awareness goes up and down. At certain moments you are more aware; at certain moments, less aware. So it is possible to create the situation of being more aware.

That’s why awareness became the basis of meditation. And with awareness came the surprise that as you become aware, thoughts disappear. When you are fully aware, there are no thoughts, and suddenly time has stopped. Time can be there inside only with the movement of thoughts.

In fact time can be measured only with some movement. For example, with a watch, how are you measuring time? By the movement of the hands; otherwise, there is no way.

If everything is unmoving, you will not be able to think that anything like time exists. But you know that a car has passed, then a train is passing — there has been a gap. In the gap… it means time. Then you hear the sound of an airplane…. This is movement — you are finding movement around you.

Inside there is only one movement, and that is of thoughts. When thoughts stop, suddenly time disappears, because time can be measured only through some kind of movement. That’s why, if in the night you had many dreams, in the morning you will find that it was a long, long night, because so much movement happened. But if you had no dream at all, you will feel as if you have just fallen asleep, and now you are awake. The night has passed so quickly.

When you are in anxiety, in misery, in pain, time passes slowly because of your pain. You would like the pain to pass quickly, but with your expectation that the pain is not going, time is passing very slowly. But when you are meeting a friend after years, you find hours have passed, and it seems just minutes since you met. When you are joyful, when you are miserable, it makes a difference in the speed of time immediately. But when you are neither — just silent — time has no way to move.

So as one becomes aware, first one finds thoughts becoming less, and finally stopping. Then he finds time is not there — and he has found the key to the basic meditation. Then all other meditations are differentiations of the same method, different combinations of the same method. Different combinations, but essentially they are awareness or witnessing.

And it seems there is no other way to find it except through sexual orgasm, because that is the only experience in life given by nature that comes close to meditation. And the misery is that millions of people have no experience of orgasm, and all the religions have been preventing them from having that experience.

This is so ridiculous, because if they don’t have any orgasmic experience, meditation remains just a fiction; or maybe some giants can do it. “But we are human beings — it is not possible for us to be more aware. How can one be more aware? We are aware as much as we can be. How to stop thoughts?”

And the responsibility for keeping humanity away from meditation goes to all the religions because they are against sex. They have prevented people — not from sex but from orgasm, because they have poisoned people’s sex with guilt. They could not prevent sex, but they did not allow people to be playful about it, they did not allow people to be respectful about it, they did not allow people to go deeper into it.

On the contrary, because sex is sin, it makes people feel guilty. The man is in a hurry to finish as quickly as possible, because you should not continue any sin too long. Knowing that you are doing something wrong, you want to do it quickly and be finished with it.

And if the man is in a hurry he cannot attain to orgasm, only to ejaculation; which proves all the religious teachers right — that you are wasting your energy. Because the man feels he gains nothing, it is a waste, he feels tired. The next day he may have a headache, feels dull, is not so sharp. Perhaps the religious people are right — he is already punished.

So it is a very strange thing. They have created the idea of guilt, and the idea of guilt on its own has given proofs that you really are doing something wrong.

The woman has remained unmoving while making love, because she has been told that to enjoy herself while making love — or to move, or to be playful — is only for prostitutes, not for ladies. Ladies simply lie down almost dead, thinking, “Let him do what he wants to do and let him be finished soon” — because they don’t gain anything out of it. The man at least finds a certain release of the energy with which he was becoming burdened, but the woman does not get even that release. So naturally women are more against sex than men. And every woman thinks in her mind that all men are nothing but animals: their only desire is sex.

This is the by-product of all the religious teachings. In this way… they have not been able to prevent sex; otherwise humanity would have disappeared. And orgasm is not necessary for reproduction, so biology has no problem: it can continue its work without orgasm.

Orgasm was not something necessary for reproduction, it was something to open a window for the higher evolution of consciousness. But the idiots who have been religious leaders and priests prevented that window. They have been teaching continuously: “Meditate!” And when people fail, when they cannot attain to meditation, then the priests say, “You are sinners — how can you attain? First be celibate, fast, do penance.”

And all these things will prevent people from having orgasm — which is the only natural way to have a first glimpse of meditation. So you can understand my difficulty. If I say to people, “You have been prevented by your religious people from becoming religious,” they cannot understand what I am saying. But what I am saying is absolutely scientific.

There must be something in man’s nature that opens a window towards higher evolution; otherwise how can you convince the man that there are things like higher experiences? And how did the first man come to know? Why did he meditate in the first place, and how did he find the way to meditate?

Somebody, somewhere in the past, must have found some similarity with his nature, and must have seen that, although he passes through sex, he reaches to a point where sex has nothing to do with it: sex simply opens a door into a new reality. And that door can be opened without sex far more easily, without dependence.

It is one of the great misfortunes that has befallen humanity, that sex became taboo, prohibited, rejected, condemned. They did not succeed in preventing it, but they certainly succeeded in poisoning man’s spiritual growth. So it is not only the orgasm that you experience in meditation which is nonsexual, even the orgasm that you experience through sex is nonsexual. Orgasm itself is a nonsexual experience.

The natural way, the easier way, the primary way is through sex — and it is perfectly good; it is in accordance with nature’s intentions. And then you know that such an experience is possible for you. Then you can play with the experience, and you can find many ways to reach it.

All those ways have become meditations. And that does not prohibit you from using the sexual way, because it is sex that has given you the first experience of orgasm, has given you the first insight into meditation, has taken you far away from biology and nature. So one should be grateful to one’s sexuality.

There should be no question of guilt. If religions had taught people to be grateful to sex, we would have produced a totally different kind of man — not this miserable and suffering creature that you see all around the world. We could have produced really joyful, blissful people; people who would have forgotten how to be miserable, how to suffer, who would have forgotten completely the anguish in which they are living now.

Source – from Osho Book “Light on the Path’


REJECTION BRINGS THE POSSIBILITY OF ACCEPTANCE

If fear is felt, then love is the problem -- become more loving. TAKE FEW STEPS TOWARDS THE OTHER -- BECAUSE EVERYBODY IS IN FEAR, not only you.

You want somebody should come to you and love you. YOU CAN WAIT FOREVER BECAUSE THE OTHER IS ALSO AFRAID. And people who are afraid they become afraid of one thing absolutely, and that is the fear of being rejected. IF I GO AND KNOCK AT YOUR DOOR, THE POSSIBILITY IS YOU MAY REJECT. That rejection will become a wound, so it is better not to go. It is better to remain alone. It is better to move on your own, not to get involved with the other -- because the other can reject.

The moment you approach and take initiative towards love, the first fear comes whether the other will accept you or reject. The possibility is there he may reject, or she may reject. THAT'S WHY WOMEN NEVER TAKE A STEP, THEY ARE MORE FEARFUL. They always wait for the man -- he should come. They always keep the possibility of rejecting or accepting with themselves. They never give the possibility to the other -- because they are more afraid than men.

THEN MANY WOMEN SIMPLY WAIT FOR THEIR WHOLE LIFE. Nobody comes to knock at their door -- because a person who is afraid becomes, in a certain way, so closed that he puts people off. Just reaching nearer, and the afraid person throws such vibrations all around that anybody who is coming closer is put off. The fearful person starts moving; even in the movements...

You talk to a woman -- if you are in a certain way feeling love and affection for her, you would like to be closer and closer. YOU WOULD LIKE TO STAND CLOSER AND TALK. But see the body, because BODY HAS ITS OWN LANGUAGE: the woman will be leaning backwards, not knowingly, or she may simply back off. You are closing, you are coming closer and she is backing off. Or if there is no possibility, there is a wall, she will lean against the wall. Not leaning forward, she is showing, "Go away." She is saying, "Don't come near me."

People sitting, people walking -- you watch: THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO SIMPLY PUT OFF ANYBODY; anybody who comes closer, they become afraid. And fear is energy just like love, a negative energy. A man who is feeling love bubbles up with a positive energy. When you come closer, as if a magnet is attracting you -- you would like to be with this person.

If fear is your problem, then think about your personality, watch it. You must have closed your doors for love, that's all. OPEN THOSE DOORS!

OF COURSE THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF BEING REJECTED. But why be afraid? The other can only say no. FIFTY PERCENT POSSIBILITY OF NO IS THERE, but just because of fifty percent possibility of no, you choose a hundred percent life of no love.

The possibility is there, but why worry? There are so many people. IF ONE SAYS NO, DON'T TAKE IT AS A HURT, don't take it as a wound. Simply take it -- it didn't happen. Simply take it -- the other person didn't feel like moving with you. YOU DIDN'T SUIT TO EACH OTHER. You are different types. HE HAS OR SHE HAS NOT SAID NO TO YOU REALLY; IT IS NOT PERSONAL. You didn't fit; move ahead!

AND IT IS GOOD BECAUSE THE PERSON HAS SAID NO, because if you don't fit with a person and the person says yes, then you will be in real trouble. You don't know: the other has saved you a whole life of trouble! Thank him or her and move ahead -- because ALL CANNOT SUIT TO ALL.

Every individual is so unique that, in fact, IT IS SO DIFFICULT TO FIND THE RIGHT PERSON TO FIT WITH YOU. In a better world, sometime in the future, people will have more movability, so people can go and find the right woman and the right man for themselves.

Don't be afraid of making errors, because if you are afraid of making errors you will not move at all, and you will miss the whole life. IT IS BETTER TO ERR THAN NOT TO DO. It is better to be rejected than simply remaining with yourself, afraid, and not taking any initiative -- BECAUSE THE REJECTION BRINGS THE POSSIBILITY OF ACCEPTANCE; it is the other side of acceptance.

IF SOMEBODY REJECTS, SOMEBODY WILL ACCEPT -- ONE HAS TO GO ON MOVING AND FINDING THE RIGHT PERSON. When right persons meet, something clicks. They are made for each other. They fit together.

Not that there will not be conflicts, not that there will not be moments of anger and fight, no. IF LOVE IS ALIVE, THERE WILL BE CONFLICT ALSO. Sometimes there will be moments of anger also. That simply shows that love is an alive phenomenon. Sometimes sadness... because wherever happiness exists, sadness is bound to be there.

ONLY IN A MARRIAGE THERE IS NO SADNESS, BECAUSE THERE IS NO HAPPINESS. One simply tolerates. It is an arrangement, it is a managed phenomenon.

When you really move into life, then anger is also there. But when you love a person, you accept the anger. When you love a person, you accept his or her sadness also. Sometimes you go away just to come closer again. In fact, there is a deep mechanism: LOVERS FIGHT TO FALL IN LOVE AGAIN AND AGAIN, so they can have small honeymoons again and again and again.

DON'T BE AFRAID OF LOVE. There is only one thing one should be afraid of, and that is fear. Be afraid of fear and never be afraid of anything else, because FEAR CRIPPLES. It is poisonous, it is suicidal. Move! Jump out of it! Do whatsoever you would like, but don't get settled with the fear because that is a negative situation....

So please don't get obsessed with fear. JUST JUMP OUT OF IT AND TAKE A MOVE TOWARDS LOVE. And don't wait because nobody is interested in you; if you are waiting, you can go on waiting.

This is my observation: YOU CANNOT BYPASS LOVE, OTHERWISE, YOU WILL BE COMMITTING SUICIDE. But the love can bypass you if you are simply waiting. Move!

LOVE SHOULD BE A PASSION: IT SHOULD BE PASSIONATE, ALIVE, VITAL. Only then you attract somebody to fall towards you. Dead, who bothers with you? Dead, people would like to get rid of you. Dead, you become a boring phenomenon, a boredom. All around you, you carry such dirt of boredom, that anybody who comes across you will feel that it is a misfortune.

BE LOVING, VITAL, UNAFRAID... AND MOVE! Life has much to give to you if you are unafraid. And love has to give you more than life can give -- because love is the very center of this life, and from that very center you can pass to the other shore.

OSHO

Yoga, The Alpha & The Omega



Monday 28 January 2013

Osho - Why am I forcing situations according to my Will

Osho - Why am I forcing situations according to my Will


Question - Beloved Osho, Why am I forcing situations according to my will, instead of accepting them and letting them just happen? I have a feeling that my body makes me aware of it, reacting with high fever. ?

Osho - Devam Navyo, the upbringing of man is so poisonous, so crippling, that it destroys all that is significant and valuable in you and replaces it with cruelty, violence, a desire to dominate. The whole of society from all sides supports this destruction of your innocence; it is favorable to them.

Forcing anything simply means you are forcing against yourself. This creates the schizophrenia, the split personality which is fighting with itself. This is the most ugly and destructive device which has been used by the vested interests for thousands of years. They found a simple clue for how to destroy the individual. The individual is a danger -- a danger against exploitation, a danger against slavery, a danger against any kind of enforcement. An individual would die rather than submit.

Individuality has a dignity.... But man has been taken away from his individuality by a simple device. Put the individual in conflict -- and you know the ancient proverb: a house divided cannot stand for long. You are continuously fighting with yourself because you have been given such stupid ideas about yourself: you have to choose between either your nature, your relaxedness with nature, or thousands of years of conditioning -- and conditionings go deeper and deeper every day. Pleasure has been condemned, non-seriousness has been condemned, playfulness has been condemned. The whole of humanity has been turned into utter seriousness, and seriousness is a psychological sickness. It can seep deeper and can make even your soul sick.
There is nothing to be serious about in the world.



There are only three things that happen in your life. One has already happened, and you could not do anything about it -- your birth. Another is death; again, although it has not happened yet, you cannot do anything about it. So drop these two things completely, they are beyond your grasp. Between these two remains life, love, rejoicing.

A man who is alive cannot be suppressed so easily. A man who loves has a clarity of vision and cannot be befooled by any politicians. And a man who knows how to be playful will not be found in any church, any temple, any mosque, any synagogue. Those are the places where people go who have died before their death -- those who have taken a standpoint against life, love, against playfulness, against joy, against the whole universe.

But if you become blinded by these conditions, then you will start repressing within yourself any possibility that can make you more lively, more loving, more blissful, more ecstatic. It is a struggle between you and your whole past. The past is long; it has gone to your very roots. But if you are alert enough there is still time to get out of the net, out of the chains of the past.

A man who is free from the past is the only man who is free to live in the present. And a strange thing to be remembered: the man who is free from past, as if he is absolutely new and fresh on this beautiful planet, will also be automatically free from future.
Future is a projection of the past. The past exists no more the future does not exist yet -- but the past gives you ambitions and desires and all kinds of stupid ideas of greed and desire. Automatically you start looking at the future as a refuge.

And the reality consists only of now, the present. It has nothing to do with the past and nothing to do with the future. It is so concentrated in this moment that if you can be in this moment, all that you are seeking and searching will be fulfilled. This moment is the door to the divine. My whole effort here is to pull all my people away from the past and from the future and just make them available to the intense beauty of the present.

Live moment to moment, dropping the past continuously, as dust gathered on the mirror. A man who is contented in the present will never bother about the future. You think about the future because your present is misery; you are in utter agony. To avoid it, not to look at it, you focus on faraway goals. Those goals are never to be fulfilled. You will become addicted with ambitions and goals; but remember, wherever you will be, it will always be present, never future.

Once you have forgotten to live the present you have already died. It is another matter that it may take sixty, seventy or eighty years for you to be buried or burned on a funeral pyre -- but you have died long before. The moment you have lost contact with the present your death has happened. But if you can regain the contact again, resurrection is possible.

Only the present can give you the space to relax and not to force anything. It is the past that gives you ideals, moralities, against nature. You cannot win against nature; it is so big and so huge and you are simply a small dewdrop in the ocean of nature. The dewdrop cannot fight with the ocean. It has just to relax and become one with the ocean. According to me, an authentic sannyasin, a seeker of truth, is a seeker of the present.

You are asking, Navyo, "Why am I forcing situations according to my will?" These are stupid ideas that have been given to you. You don't have any will; the very idea of willpower is absolutely a fallacy. The will belongs to existence. You can participate in that will if you drop your personality, your separation; you will have the universal will within you. You don't have individual wills, but it is ego-satisfying when people tell you that you are a man of great will. What is man? Just a fistful of dust... Yes, something is also present within that dust, but that does not belong to you. That belongs to the total.

Secondly, why are you forcing situations? Have you not seen a river coming from the mountains? It comes from high peaks where the snow has never melted, passing through valleys, passing through unknown territory. Where is the river going? It is utterly relaxed, with no goal to be tense about, nowhere to reach. Each moment it is enjoying the trees it is passing by, the mountains it is descending. And one day, every river without exception reaches the ocean.

But every man is not so fortunate. Most of them get lost in a desert and evaporate on a funeral pyre. Only a few fortunate ones, the blessed ones, reach the ocean. The secret is so simple and so obvious; that's why it misses you. Who are you to force situations? What power have you got to force situations? Situations are coming from existence itself. The wiser course will be to be in accord with them, not in discord. In accord you can ride on those situations; but the moment you start fighting... you are so tiny and the universe is so vast, there is no possibility of any victory. Then frustration sets in. Then misery, agony, suffering follow.

Be just like a white cloud passing in the sky without any desire to reach anywhere. There is no need; you are already there. What more do you want? And if the winds are blowing towards the south, the white cloud goes towards the south. Each moment of floating high above, on the air, in the sky, is such an ecstasy that who cares whether the direction is south or north or east or west? And if suddenly the winds change and they start moving again towards the north, the cloud does not complain; it does not say that this is illogical, "we were going towards the south and suddenly for no reason at all you started moving towards the north again." Without any resistance the cloud simply starts moving with the winds wherever they are going. There is no conflict between the cloud and the wind.

And that should be the right standpoint of all seekers of truth: no conflict with nature, no conflict with existence, and all your misery, all your tension, all your anguish and angst will disappear on their own accord. They are your creation. Of course you are not totally responsible; they are the heritage of a long, ugly, unnatural past.

What kind of situations do you try to change? Love arises in your heart, but the society says that love is blind, beware of it. It is infatuation; it is a kind of slavery and you will repent for it, so it is better from the very beginning not to allow such things. And the head is full of all this kind of morality, puritanism, and you start fighting with your heart.

Your head and your heart are not together, that is the problem. Your head is full of all kinds of nonsense, and that nonsense does not belong to you. It has been given to you by your parents, by your society, by your teachers, by your professors, by your priests, by your politicians. You have a head full of all kinds of bullshit, and this head tries to dominate over the heart, which is still beyond the capacity of anybody to distort, to contaminate.

That is the only hope for man -- to listen to the heart and go along with it. Then your life will become a blissful pilgrimage. All the methods of meditation I teach you... in short, it can be said they are nothing but bringing you from the head to the heart, from logic to love, from ego to egolessness, from your separation to a deep merging and melting with the whole.

The whole knows better -- and the whole knows nothing of your ideals, the whole knows nothing about your moralities and conceptions of right and wrong. But the miracle is, the moment you merge with the whole, everything is right and everything is good and everything is beautiful.

Satyam, shivam, sundram.
It is true, it is divine, and it has a beauty that is not of this earth.

Navyo, you are also stating... What I said just yesterday to Shantideva, "Don't ask so many questions, otherwise you will have dengue fever..." You have got dengue fever. You are saying, "I have a feeling that my body makes me aware of it reacting with high fever." It is not high fever, it is simply dengue fever. It will go within two days, so don't be worried. It is bound to happen in this city of Poona, where the mosquitoes must be at least twenty times more than the people -- and not small mosquitoes, Maharashtrian mosquitoes, very stubborn!

I am reminded... I was staying with one of the Buddhist monks, one of the most learned in India, Bikkshu Jagdish Kashyap, in Sarnath. There were so many mosquitoes that even in the daytime we were sitting inside the mosquito net. He would sit in his mosquito net; I would sit in my mosquito net. I asked him, "Jagdish Kashyap, do you know why Buddha never came again to Sarnath? It is a strange thing that Sarnath is the only place where Buddha visited only once and stayed only one day...."

He visited Vaishali twenty times, and hundreds of towns he visited dozens of times. In forty-two years of continuous preaching he was always on the move, but no one has ever wondered in the whole of history, why he did not come to Sarnath again.
Jagdish Kashyap told me, "I am a great scholar of Buddhist scriptures, but I cannot answer your question. How can you find such strange questions?"

I said, "Write down in your scriptures that Buddha never came back to Sarnath because he had no mosquito net!"
And when I came to Poona, I realized the mosquito net is far more necessary in this religious, cultured city. You can see all around -- even in such a hall you have to put up the mosquito netting. I have looked at the mosquitoes; they are bigger than the mosquitoes of Sarnath. Don't be worried about the dengue fever, it will go.

Source - Osho Book "Satyam Shivam Sundram"




A friend has asked: what is the relation between meditation and jati-smaran, past life remembering?

Question - A friend has asked: what is the relation between meditation and jati-smaran, past life remembering?

Osho - Jati-smaran means: a method of recalling past lives. It is a way to remember our previous existences. It is a form of meditation. It is a specific application of meditation. For example, one might ask, "What is a river, and what is a canal? Our answer would be that the canal is a specific application of the river itself -- well planned, but controlled and systematic. The river is chaotic, unrestrained; it too will reach somewhere, but its destination is not certain. The destination of the canal is assured.

Meditation is like a big river -- it will reach to the ocean; it is sure to reach. Meditation will surely bring you to God. There are, however, other intermediary applications of meditation also. Like small tributaries these can be directed into canals of meditation. Jati-smaran is one such auxiliary method of meditation. We can channelize the power of meditation towards our past lives also; meditation simply means the focusing of attention. There can be applications where one's attention is focused on a given object, and one such application is jati-smaran -- focusing on the dormant memories of past lives.

Remember, memories are never erased; a memory either remains latent or it arises. But the latent memory appears to be erased. If I ask you what you did on January 1, 1950, you will not be able to answer -- which does not mean that you might not have done anything on that day. But suddenly the day of January 1, 1950 feels like a total blank. It could not have been blank; as it passed, it was filled with activity. But today it feels like a blank. Similarly, today will become blank tomorrow as well. Ten years from now there will be no trace left of today.

So it is not that January 1, 1950 did not exist, or that you did not exist on that day -- what is implied is that since you are unable to recall that day, how can you believe it ever existed? But it did exist and there is a way to know about it. Meditation can be focused in that direction as well. As soon as the light of meditation falls on that day, to your surprise you will see that it looks more alive than it ever was before.

For example, a person enters a dark room and moves around with a flashlight. When he turns the light to the left, the right side becomes dark -- but nothing disappears on the right side. When he moves the light to the right, the right side becomes alive again, but the left side remains hidden in the dark.

Meditation has a focus, and if one wants to channel it in a particular direction then it has to be used like a flashlight. If, however, one wants to turn it towards the divine, then meditation has to be applied like a lamp. Please understand this carefully. The lamp has no focus of its own; it is unfocused. A lamp merely burns and its light spreads all around. A lamp has no interest in lighting up one direction or the other; whatsoever falls within the radius of light is lit up. But the form of a flashlight is like a focused lamp.

In a flashlight we keep all the light and shine it in one direction. So it is possible that under a burning lamp things may become visible, but hazy, and in order to see them clearly we concentrate the light on one place -- it becomes a flashlight; then the thing becomes clearly visible. However, the remaining objects are lost to view. In fact, if a man wants to see an object clearly he will have to focus his total meditation in one direction only and turn the rest of the area into darkness.

One who wants to know the truth of life directly will develop his meditation like a lamp -- that will be his sole purpose. And, in fact, the lamp's only objective is to see itself; if it can shine this much it is enough -- that's the end of it. But if some special application of the lamp has to be made -- such as remembering past lives -- then meditation will have to be channeled in one direction.

I will share with you two or three clues as to how meditation can be channelized in that direction. I won't give you all the clues because, most likely, hardly any of you have any intention of using them, and those who have can see me personally. So I will mention two or three clues which, of course, won't really enable you to experiment with remembering past lives, but will give you just an idea. I won't discuss the whole thing because it's not advisable for everyone to experiment with this idea. Also, this experiment can often put you in danger.

Osho on Jati Samaran

Let me tell you of an incident so that what I am saying becomes clear to you. For about two or three years, in respect to meditation, a lady professor stayed in touch with me. She was very insistent on experimenting with jati-smaran, on learning about her past life. I helped her with the experiment; however, I also advised her that it would be better if she didn't do the experiment until her meditation was fully developed, otherwise it could be dangerous.

As it is, a single life's memories are difficult to bear -- should the memories of the past three or four lives break the barrier and flood in, a person can go mad. That's why nature has planned it so we go on forgetting the past. Nature has given us a greater ability to forget more than you can remember, so that your mind does not have a greater burden than it can carry. A heavy burden can be borne only after the capacity of your mind has increased, and trouble begins when the weight of these memories falls on you before this capacity has been raised. But she remained persistent. She paid no heed to my advice and went into the experiment.

When the flood of her past life's memory finally burst upon her, she came running to me around two o'clock in the morning. She was a real mess; she was in great distress. She said, "Somehow this has got to stop. I don't ever want to look at that side of things." But it is not so easy to stop the tide of memory once it has broken loose. It is very difficult to shut the door once it crashes down -- the door does not simply open, it breaks open. It took about fifteen days -- only then did the wave of memories stop. What was the problem?

This lady used to claim that she was very pious, a woman of impeccable character. When she encountered the memory of her past life, when she was a prostitute, and the scenes of her prostitution began to emerge, her whole being was shaken. Her whole morality of this life was disturbed.

In this sort of revelation, it is not as if the visions belong to someone else -- the same woman who claimed to be chaste now saw herself as a prostitute. It often happens that someone who was a prostitute in a past life becomes deeply virtuous in the next; it is a reaction to the suffering of the past life. It is the memory of the pain and the hurt of the previous life that turns her into a chaste woman.

It often happens that people who were sinners in past lives become saints in this life. Hence there is quite a deep relationship between sinners and saints. Such a reaction often takes place, and the reason is, what we come to know hurts us and so we swing to the opposite extreme.

The pendulum of our minds keeps moving in the opposite direction. No sooner does the pendulum reach the left than it moves back to the right. It barely touches the right when it swings back to the left. When you see the pendulum of a clock moving towards the left, be assured it is gathering energy to move back to the right -- it will go as far to the right as it has gone to the left. Hence, in life it often happens that a virtuous person becomes a sinner, and a sinner becomes virtuous.

This is very common; this sort of oscillation occurs in everyone's life. Do not think, therefore, that it is a general rule that one who has become a holy man in this life must have been a holy man in his past life also. It is not necessarily so. What is necessarily so is the exact reverse of it -- he is laden with the pain of what he went through in his past life and has turned to the opposite.


I have heard.... A holy man and a prostitute once lived opposite each other. Both died on the same day. The soul of the prostitute was to be taken to heaven, and that of the holy man, however, to hell. The envoys who had come to take them away were very puzzled. They kept asking each other, "What went wrong? Is this a mistake? Why are we to take the holy man to hell? Wasn't he a holy man?"

The wisest among them said, "He was a holy man all right, but he envied the prostitute. He always brooded over the parties at her place and the pleasures that went on there. The notes of music which came drifting to his house would jolt him to his very core. No admirer of the prostitute, sitting in front of her, was ever moved as much as he -- listening to the sounds coming from her residence, the sounds of the small dancing bells she wore on her ankles. His whole attention always remained focused on her place. Even while worshipping God, his ears were tuned to the sounds which came from her house.

"And the prostitute? While she languished in the pit of misery, she always wondered what unknown bliss the holy man was in. Whenever she saw him carrying flowers for morning worship, she wondered, 'When will I be worthy to take flowers of worship to the temple? I am so impure that I can hardly even gather enough courage to enter the temple.' The holy man was never as lost in the incense smoke, in the shining lamps, in the sounds of worship as the prostitute was. The prostitute always longed for the life of the holy man, and the holy man always craved for the pleasures of the prostitute."

Their interests and attitudes, so totally opposite each other's, so totally different from each other's, had completely changed. This often happens -- and there are laws at work behind these happenings. So when the memory of her past life came back to this lady professor, she was very hurt. She felt hurt because her ego was shattered. What she learned about her past life shook her, and now she wanted to forget it. I had warned her in the first place not to recall her past life without sufficient preparation.

Since you have asked, I shall tell you a few basic things so that you can understand the meaning of jati-smaran. But they won't help you to experiment with it. Those who wish to experiment will have to look into it separately.

The first thing is that if the purpose of jati-smaran is simply to know one's past life, then one needs to turn one's mind away from the future. Our mind is future-oriented, not past-oriented. Ordinarily, our mind is centered in the future; it moves toward the future. The stream of our thoughts is future-oriented, and it is in life's interests that the mind be future-oriented, not past-oriented. Why be concerned with the past? It is gone, it is finished -- so we are interested in that which is about to come. That's why we keep asking astrologers what is in store for us in the future. We are interested in finding out what is going to happen in the future. One who wants to remember the past has to give up, absolutely, any interest in the future. Because once the flashlight of the mind is focused on the future; once the stream of thoughts has begun to move towards the future, then it cannot be turned back towards the past.

So the first thing one needs to do is to break oneself completely away from the future for a few months, for a certain specific period of time. One should decide that he will not think of the future for the next six months. If a thought of the future does occur, he will simply salute it and let it go; he will not become identified with and carried away by any feeling of future. So the first thing is that, for six months, he will allow that there is no future and will flow towards the past. And so, as soon as future is dropped, the current of thoughts turns towards the past.

First you will have to go back in this life; it is not possible to return to a past life all at once. And there are techniques for going back in this life. For example, as I said earlier, you don't remember now what you did on January 1, 1950.

There is a technique to find out. If you go into the meditation which I have suggested, after ten minutes -- when the meditation has gone deeper, the body is relaxed, the breathing is relaxed, the mind has become quiet -- then let only one thing remain in your mind: "What took place on January 1, 1950?" Let your entire mind focus on it. If that remains the only note echoing in your mind, in a few days you will all of a sudden find a curtain is raised: the first of January appears and you begin to relive each and every event of that day from dawn to dusk. And you will see the first of January in far more detail than you may have seen it, in actuality, on that very day -- because on that day, you may not have been this aware. So, first, you will need to experiment by regressing in this life.

It is very easy to regress to the age of five; it becomes very difficult to go beyond that age. And so, ordinarily, we cannot recall what happened before the age of five; that is the farthest back we can go. A few people might remember up to the third year, but beyond that it becomes extremely difficult -- as if a barrier comes across the entrance and everything becomes blocked. A person who becomes capable of recalling will be able to fully awaken the memory of any day up to the age of five. The memory starts to be completely revived.

Then one should test it. For example, note down the events of today on a piece of paper and lock it away. Two years later recall this day: open the note and compare your memory with it. You will be amazed to find that you have been able to recall more than what was noted on the paper. The events are certain to return to your memory.

Osho on past life remembering

Buddha has called this alaya-vigyan. There exists a corner in our minds which Buddha has named alaya-vigyan. Alaya-vigyan means the storehouse of consciousness. As we store all our junk in the basement of a house, similarly, there is a storehouse of consciousness that collects memories. Birth after birth, everything is stored in it. Nothing is ever removed from there, because a man never knows when he might need those things. The physical body changes, but, in our ongoing existence, that storehouse continues, remains with us. One never knows when it might be needed. And whatsoever we have done in our lives, whatsoever we have experienced, known, lived -- everything is stored there.

One who can remember to the age of five can go beyond that age -- it is not very difficult. The nature of the experiment will be the same. Beyond the age of five there is yet another door which will lead you to the point of your birth, to when you appeared on earth. Then one comes across another difficulty, because the memories of one's stay in the mother's womb never disappear either. One can penetrate these memories too, reaching to the point of conception, to the moment when the genes of the mother and father unite and the soul enters. A man can enter into his past lives only after having reached this point; he cannot move into them directly. One has to undertake this much of the return journey, only then is it possible to move into one's past life as well.

After having entered the past life, the first memory to come up will be of the last event that took place in that life. Remember, however, that this will cause some difficulty and will make little sense. It is as if we run a film from the end or read a novel backwards -- we feel lost. And so, entering into one's past life for the first time will be quite confusing because the sequence of events will be in the reverse order.

As you go back into your past life, you will come across death first, then old age, youth, childhood, and then birth. It will be in reverse order, and in that order it will be very difficult to figure out what is what. So when the memory surfaces for the first time, you feel tremendously restless and troubled, because it is difficult to make sense; it is as if you are looking at a film or reading a novel from the end. Perhaps you will only make heads or tails of an event after rearranging the order several times. So the greatest effort involved in going back to the memories of one's past life is seeing, in reverse order, events which ordinarily take place in the right order. But, after all, what is the right or reverse order? It is just a question of how we entered the world and how we departed from it.

We sow a seed in the beginning, and the flower appears in the end. However, if one were to take a reverse look at this phenomenon, the flower would come first, followed in sequence by the bud, the plant, the leaves, the saplings and in the end the seed. Since we have no previous knowledge of this reverse order, it takes a lot of time to rearrange memories coherently and to figure out the nature of events clearly. The strangest thing is that death will come first, followed by old age, illness, and then youth; things will occur in the reverse order. Or, if you were married and then divorced, while going down memory lane the divorce will come first, followed by the love and then the marriage.

It will be extremely difficult to follow events in this regressive fashion, because normally we understand things in a one-dimensional way. Our minds are one-dimensional. To look at things in opposite order is very difficult -- we are not used to such an experience; we are accustomed to moving in a linear direction. With effort, however, one can understand the events of a past life by following, in sequence, the reverse order. Surely, it will be an incredible experience.

Going through memories in this reverse order will be a very amazing experience, because seeing the divorce first and then the love and then the marriage, will make it instantly clear that the divorce was inevitable -- the divorce was inherent in the kind of love that happened; the divorce was the only ultimate possible outcome of the kind of marriage that took place. But at the time of that past life marriage we hadn't the faintest idea it would eventually end in divorce. And indeed, the divorce was the result of that marriage. If we could see this whole thing in its entirety, then falling in love today would become a totally different thing -- because now we could see the divorce in it beforehand, now we could see the enmity around the corner even before making the friendship.

The memory of the past life will completely turn this life upside-down, because now you won't be able to live the way you lived in your past life. In your previous life you felt -- and the same feeling exists even now -- that success and great happiness were to be found by making a fortune. What you will see first in your previous life is your state of unhappiness before seeing how you made the fortune. This will clearly show that instead of being a source of happiness, making the fortune led, in fact, to unhappiness -- and friendship led to enmity, what was thought to be love turned into hatred, and what was considered a union resulted in separation. Then, for the first time, you will see things in their right perspective, with their total import. And this implication will change your life, will change the way you are living now completely -- it will be an entirely different situation.

I have heard that a man went to a monk and said, "I would be much obliged if you would accept me as your disciple." The monk refused. The man asked why he would not make him his disciple.

The monk replied, "In my previous birth I had disciples who later turned into enemies. I have seen the whole thing and now I know that to make disciples means to make enemies, to make friends means to sow the seeds of enmity. Now I don't want to make any enemies, so I don't make any friends. I have known that to be alone is enough. Drawing someone close to you is, in a way, pushing the person away from you."

Buddha has said that the meeting with the beloved brings joy and the parting of the unbeloved also brings joy, that the parting of the beloved brings sorrow and the meeting with the unbeloved brings sorrow as well. This is how it was perceived; this is how it was understood. However, later we come to understand that the one we feel is our beloved can become the unbeloved, and the one we considered the unbeloved can become a beloved. And so, with the recollection of past memories, the existing situations will change radically; they will be seen in an entirely different perspective.

Such recollections are possible, though neither necessary nor inevitable, and sometimes, in meditation, these memories may strike unexpectedly as well. If the memories of past lives ever do come all of a sudden -- without being involved in any experiment, but simply keeping on with one's meditation -- don't take much interest in them. Just look at them; be a witness to them -- because ordinarily the mind is incapable of bearing such vast turbulence all at once. Attempting to cope with it, there is a distinct possibility of going mad.

Once a girl was brought to me. She was about eleven years old. Unexpectedly, she had remembered three of her past lives. She had not experimented with anything; but often, for some reason mistakes do happen all of a sudden. This was an error on the part of nature, not its grace upon her; in some way nature had erred in her case. It is the same as if someone had three eyes, or four arms -- this is an error. Four arms would be much weaker than two arms; four arms couldn't work as effectively as two arms could -- four arms would make the body weaker, not stronger.

So the girl, eleven years old, remembered three past lives, and many inquiries were made into this case. In her previous life she had lived about eighty miles from my present residence, and in that life she died at the age of sixty. The people she lived with then are now the residents of my hometown, and she could recognize all of them. Even in a crowd of thousands, she could recognize her past relatives -- her own brother, her daughters, and her grandchildren -- from the daughters, from the sons-in-law. She could recognize her distant relatives and tell many things about them even they had forgotten.

Her elder brother is still alive. On his head there is a scar from a small injury. I asked the girl if she knew anything about that scar. The girl laughed and said, "Even my brother doesn't know about it. Let him tell you how and when he got that injury." The brother could not recall when the injury occurred; he had no idea at all, he said.

The girl said, "On the day of his wedding, my brother fell while he was mounting the marriage horse. He was ten years old then." The elderly people in the town supported her story, admitting that the brother had, indeed, fallen from the horse. And the man himself had no recollection of this event. Then, as well, the girl displayed a treasure she had buried in the house she had lived in during her previous life.

In her last birth she died at the age of sixty, and previous to that birth she had been born in a village somewhere in Assam. Then she had died at the age of seven. She could not give the village name, nor her address, but she could speak as much of the Assamese language as a seven-year-old child could. Also, she could dance and sing like a seven-year-old girl could. Many inquiries were made, but her family from that life could not be traced.

The girl has a past-life experience of sixty-seven years plus eleven years of this life. You can see in her eyes the resemblance to a seventy-five to seventy-eight-year-old woman, although she is actually eleven years old. She cannot play with children of her own age because she feels too old. Within her she carries the memory of seventy-eight years; she sees herself as a seventy-eight-year-old woman. She cannot go to school because, although she is eleven, she can easily look upon her teacher as her son. So even though her body is eleven years old, her mind and personality are those of a seventy-eight-year-old woman. She cannot play and frolic like a child; she is only interested in the kinds of serious things old women talk about. She is in agony; she is filled with tension. Her body and mind are not in harmony. She is in a very sad and painful state.

I advised her parents to bring the girl to me, and to let me help her forget the memories of her past lives. Just as there is a method to revive memories, there is also a way to forget them. But her parents were enjoying the whole affair! Crowds of people came to see the girl; they began to worship her. The parents were not interested in having her forget the past. I warned them the girl would go mad, but they turned a deaf ear. Today she is on the verge of insanity, because she cannot bear the weight of so many memories. Another problem is, how to get her married? She finds it difficult to conceive of marriage when, in fact, she feels like an old woman of seventy-eight. There is no harmony of any kind within her; her body is young but the mind is old. It is a very difficult situation.

But this was an accident. You can also break open the passage with an experiment. But it is not necessary to go in that direction; however, those who still wish to pursue it, can experiment. But before moving into the experiment it is essential they go through deep meditation so their minds can become so silent and strong that when the flood of memories breaks upon them, they can accept it as a witnessing. When a man grows into being a witness, past lives appear to be no more than dreams to him. Then he is not tormented by the memories; now they mean nothing more than dreams.

When one succeeds in recalling past lives and they begin to appear like dreams, immediately one's present life begins to look like a dream too. Those who have called this world maya have not done so just to propound a doctrine of philosophy. Jati-smaran -- recalling past lives -- is at the base of it. Whosoever has remembered his past lives, for him the whole affair has suddenly turned into a dream, an illusion. Where are his friends of past lives? Where are his relatives, his wife and children, the houses he lived in? Where is that world? Where is everything he took to be so real? Where are those worries that gave him sleepless nights? Where are those pains and sufferings that seemed so insurmountable, that he carried like a dead weight on his back? And what became of the happiness he longed for? What happened to everything he so toiled and suffered for? If you ever remember your past life, and if you lived for seventy years, then whatever you might have seen in those seventy years, would that look like a dream or a reality? Indeed, it would look like a dream which had come and withered away.
I have heard....

Once a king's only son lay on his deathbed. For eight days he was in a coma -- he couldn't be saved nor would death claim him. On the one hand the king prayed for his life, while on the other hand, aware of so much pain and suffering all around, he felt the futility of life at the same time. The king could not sleep for eight nights, but then, around four o'clock one morning, sleep overtook him and he began to dream.

We generally dream of those things which we have not fulfilled in life, and so the king, sitting by his only son, his dying son, dreamed that he had twelve strong and handsome sons. He saw himself as the emperor of a large kingdom, as the ruler of the whole earth, with large and beautiful palaces. And he saw himself as extremely happy. As he was dreaming all this....

Time runs faster in a dream; in a dream timing is totally different from our day-to-day time. In a moment a dream can cover a span of many years, and after waking up you will find it difficult to figure out how so many years were covered in a dream that lasted just a few moments! Time actually moves very fast in a dream; many years can be spanned in one moment.

So, just as the king was dreaming about his twelve sons and their beautiful wives, about his palaces and the great kingdom, the ill, twelve-year-old prince died. The queen screamed, and the king's sleep came to an abrupt end. He awoke with a shock. Worriedly, the queen asked, "Why do you look so frightened? Why are there no tears in your eyes? Why don't you say something?

The king said, "No, I am not frightened, I am confused. I am in a great quandary. I am wondering who I should cry for? Should I cry for the twelve sons I had a moment ago, or should I cry for this son I have just lost? The thing that's bothering me is, who has died? And the strange thing is that when I was with those twelve sons, I had no knowledge of this son. He was nowhere at all; there was no trace of him, or of you. Now that I am out of the dream, this palace is here, you are here, my son is here -- but those palaces and those sons have disappeared. Which is true? Is this true, or was that true? I cannot figure it out."

Once you remember your past lives, you will find it difficult to figure out whether what you are seeing in this life is true or not. You will realize you have seen the same stuff many times before and none of it has endured forever -- everything is lost. Then the question will arise: "Is what I am seeing now just as true as what I saw before? ... Because this will run its course too and fade away like all other previous dreams.

When we watch a movie it appears to be real. After the film has ended, it takes us a few moments to come back to our reality, to acknowledge that what we saw in the theater was merely an illusion. In fact, many people who ordinarily are incapable of giving vent to their feelings are moved to tears in a movie. They feel greatly relieved, because otherwise they would have had to find some other pretext for releasing their feelings. They let themselves cry or laugh in the theater. When we come out of the movie, the first thing that occurs to us is how deeply we let ourselves become identified with the happenings on the screen. If the same movie is seen every day the illusion gradually begins to clear. But then we also forget what happened to us during the last movie, and once again, when we go to a new film, we start believing in its events.

If we could regain the memories of our past lives, our present birth would also begin to look like a dream. How many times before have these winds blown! How many times before have these clouds moved in the sky! They all appeared and then they vanished, and so will the ones here now -- they are already in the process of disappearing! If we can come to realize this, we will experience what is known as maya. Along with this we will also experience that a}l happenings, all events are quite unreal -- they are never identical, but they are transient. One dream comes, is followed by another dream, and is followed by yet another dream. The pilgrim starts from one moment and enters into the next one. Moment after moment, the moments keep disappearing, but the pilgrim continues moving on.

So two experiences occur simultaneously: one, the objective world is an illusion, maya -- only the observer is real; second, what appears is false -- only the seer, only the witness of it is true. Appearances change every day -- they have always changed -- only the witness, the observer is the same as before, changeless. And remember, as long as appearances seem real, your attention will not focus on the onlooker, on the witness. Only when appearances turn out to be unreal does one become aware of the witness.

Hence, I say, remembering past lives is useful, but only after you have gone deeper into meditation. Go deep into meditation so you may attain the ability to see life as a dream. Becoming a mahatma, a holy man, is as much of a dream as becoming a thief -- you can have good dreams and you can have bad dreams. And the interesting thing is that the dream of being a thief is likely to dissolve soon, whereas the dream of being a mahatma takes a little longer to disappear because it seems so very enjoyable. And so the dream of being a mahatma is more dangerous than the dream of being a thief. We want to prolong our enjoyable dreams, while the painful ones dissolve by themselves. That's why it so often happens that a sinner succeeds in attaining to God while a holy man does not.

I have told you a few things about remembering your past lives, but you will have to go into meditation for this. Let us start to move within from this very day onward; only then can we be prepared for what follows next. Without this preparation, it is difficult to enter into past lives.

For example, there is a big house with underground cellars. If a man, standing outside the house, wants to enter the cellars, he will first have to step inside the house, because the way to the cellar is from inside the house. Our past lives are like cellars. Once upon a time we lived there, and then we abandoned them -- now we are living somewhere else. Nevertheless, we are standing outside the house at this point. In order to uncover the memories of past lives, we shall have to enter the house. There is nothing difficult, bothersome or dangerous about it.

Source - Osho Book "And Now, And Here"