Temple of gladness

When my beloved returns to the house, I shall make my body into a Temple of gladness Offering this body as an altar of joy. My let-down hair will sweep it clean. Then my beloved will consecrate this temple.

Song of the Baul Mystics

You are Woman

You are she 

who walks in Beauty,

who dances 

with Isis, Paravati and Kali

Who knows

unconditional love

and deepest passion.

You are she

who knows ecstatic reunion

of earth and sky

And who holds the fate

of human kind in her hands.

You are woman.

Sarita

Osho on commitment and non-attachment in love - A commitment is eternal

Question - You seem to advocate Commitment and Non-Attachment in Love, Whether with master or lover. I don't understand how one can be committed and unattached at the same time.

Osho - In fact, they always happen together, they cannot happen separately. It is impossible to separate them, because they are two aspects of the same coin: commitment and unattachment. If you are attached, then it is not a commitment. Then you are using the other for yourself because it is an attachment.

You love a person and you say, 'I am committed and attached.' What does attachment mean? It means that you are using the other person for yourself, you are using the other person as a means. How can one be committed to a means?

Commitment is possible only towards an end, not towards a means. You cannot be committed to a car, you cannot be committed to a house. They are means; they have to be used. You can only Be committed to an alive person, because each person is the goal.

Love is not using the person for your own pleasure. Much pleasure comes through it, but that is a by-product. You love the person as an end; you are committed. You can give your very life to the person, but there is no attachment, because attachment means that you are using the person for yourself.

Commitment with nonattachment means that now the other has become the goal, the end, the very end. They always happen together, and if they cannot happen together then you are missing something. If commitment is with attachment, then you are just deceiving yourself that it is a commitment. Sooner or later, if the person dies, you will find another person -- because you were using the person. Now that he is not available, you will find another person.

A commitment is eternal. Your wife dies: on that day, all women disappear from the world for you. You loved her as a goal. Now it is even impossible to conceive that you can love another. It was so total that nothing is left behind. And it was so total that only the body can die, not the soul of that being. Death cannot part two lovers. If they really loved, they had conquered death already. Love is immortal.

But if there was only an attachment, then after a few weeks or a few days the wound is healed. You loved the person because of you, for your own pleasure. Now you will find another person. In fact, you love your husband, you say that you love, and he's dying -- or your wife -- and when the wife is dying, on the deathbed, if somebody could open a window in your head and look, you are already planning and trying to find a new woman.

The mind, at the most, exploits. It can never become a deep commitment. Deep commitment is of being. It knows no time, it knows no death. I am not saying that it is permanent, because permanence is part of time. It is eternal. It has the fragrance of divineness.

Let me tell you one anecdote: A politician named Strange lay dying. A friend asked him what he would like inscribed on his tombstone,'Just put,' said the politician: Here lies an honest politician.

'But,' said the friend,'that doesn't tell who it is.'

'Oh yes, replied the politician,'the passer-by will say,'That is strange -- a politician, and honest?' -- no need to say the name. Passers-by will by themselves say,'That is strange.'

Attachment and love never go together; commitment and attachment never go together. Love goes with unattachment. Then love has a purity of the other world. Then love is absolute essence, absolute pureness, innocence. And then there is a commitment. That commitment is eternal.

Source - Osho Book "Come Follow to You

Awakening

Awakening is where there is

No birth, no extinction;

It is seeing into the

State of Suchness, 

Absolutely transcending

All categories constructed by mind. 

 - Lankavatara Sutra

Enlightenment is a Gamble

Time to cash in your chips

put your ideas and beliefs on the table.

See who has the bigger hand

you or the Mystery that pervades you.

Time to scrape the mind's shit

off your shoes

undo the laces

that hold your prison together

and dangle your toes into emptiness.

Once you've put everything

on the table

once all of your currency is gone

and your pockets are full of air

all you've got left to gamble with

is yourself.

Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top

of the highest stakes table.

Place yourself as the bet.

Look God in the eyes

and finally

for once in your life

lose.

Adyashanti

When you start to see the light that you really are

When you start to see the light that you really are,

the light waking up in you, the radiance,

you realize it has no intention to change you.

It has no intention to harmonize.

It has no agenda.

It just happens.

The Truth is the only thing you'll ever run into that has no agenda. Everything

else will have an agenda.

Everything.

That is why the Truth is so powerful.

Give up your agendas and continue to expose yourself (to the Truth), and

harmonization will naturally occur.

Freedom is the realization

that this deep, deep peace

and this unknown

are what you are.

Everything else is just an extension of that unknown.

Bodies are just an extension of that unknown.

The trees outside are just an extension of the unknown

in time, in form.

Thought and feeling are also extensions of the unknown in time.

The whole visible universe, in fact,

is just an extension in time of this unknown,

this mountain of quiet.

So it's really important to get to the point of maturity

where you are willing to look at what is fundamental.

There is a difference between pulling the weeds of confusion out

and getting to the root of Truth.

Did, you ever pull weeds from a lawn, grabbing only their tops,

and discover they were back again so quickly

that it was as if the lawn was never weeded at all?

Clearing out identification is like this.

Adyashanti

Today I Awoke

Today I awoke, finally I see the Self has re-turned to the Self.

The Self is none other than the Self.

I am deathless. I am endless. I am free.

The birds outside sing...

The birds outside sing and there am I.

The seeing of leaves on the trees, that seeing am I.

The body breathes, breathing am I.

I am awake and I know that I am awake.

Seen from the old eyes, everything is asleep, a game, a delusion.

But now I am awake. I am the play. I am the game. I am the delusion.

I am the enlightenment I sought, looking everywhere.

Nothing is separate, nothing is alone.

I am all that I see. All that I smell, taste, touch, feel, think and know.

I am awake and this awakeness is the same as Shyakyamuni Buddha's.

Today the leaf has returned to the root.

I am all name and form and beyond all name and form.

I am Spirit, no longer trapped in a body.

I am free. I am free because I am awake.

So ordinary. Who would have thought ? Who could have guessed?

I am home. I am really home. Ten thousand life times.

Ten thousand life times but today I am home.

Ten thousand life times but today I am home.

This is not an experience. This is me.

I am awake. Finally, I am awake.

Nothing has changed, but I am awake.

Before I tasted the root many times and felt, how delicious.

Today I became the root. How ordinary.

Adyashanti

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EMPTYING ONESELF AND EFFACING ONESELF

BELOVED OSHO,

CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO US THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EMPTYING ONESELF AND EFFACING ONESELF? AND WHAT IS THE ROLE OF INDIVIDUALITY IN DISSOLUTION?

Divya, the process of emptying oneself and the process of effacing oneself have nothing in common. Not only are they different, they are diametrically opposite.

Emptying oneself brings individuality, more and more individuality. Emptying oneself means emptying oneself of all that is implied in personality.

Personality is a farce, personality is pseudo, personality is that which is given to you by the society. Personality is imposed on you from the outside; it is a mask. Individuality is your very being. Individuality is that which you bring into the world, individuality is God's gift.

Personality is ugly because it is pseudo. And the more personality you have, the less is the possibility for individuality to grow. The personality starts occupying the whole of your space. It is like a cancerous growth. It goes on growing, it possesses you totally. It leaves no space for individuality to have even its own corner. The personality has to be dropped, so that the individuality can be.

Individuality is a non-egoistic phenomenon; it is pure am-ness, it has no 'I' in it. Personality is nothing but 'I': it has no am-ness in it. Personality is aggressive, violent, dominating, political. Individuality is silent, loving, compassionate; it is religious.

Emptying oneself means emptying of all content -- just as you empty a room of all the junk that has gathered there, down the years. When you have emptied the room of all the furniture and all the things, you have not destroyed the room, not at all; you have given it more roominess, more space. When all the furniture is gone, the room asserts itself, the room is.

Effacing oneself means destroying the room itself -- destroying the very space of your being, destroying the very uniqueness of your existence, destroying the gift of God. Effacing yourself means becoming a slave.

Individuality gives you mastery; it makes you very authentic, grounded, rooted. It gives you substance; you are no longer dream stuff. It gives you solidity, it gives you clarity, transparency, vision. It makes you aware of the beauty of existence, it makes you aware of the beauty of all. Effacing yourself destroys you, it is suicidal. You are not dropping your personality, you are dropping your very uniqueness. You are becoming more and more shadowy, rather than becoming more substantial. You are becoming a slave.

And the ironical thing is that if you efface yourself, the ego will remain. Now it will become a very subtle ego, so subtle that it will be almost impossible to detect it. Now it will claim humbleness, nobodiness, humility. But the claim will persist. It will say, "Look, I have effaced myself. I am no more."

But when you say, "I am no more" you are -- otherwise who is saying, "I am no more?"

A so-called saint was once asked, "Are you God?"

He said, "No" -- but immediately he added, "The sun rises in the morning, but it does not declare 'I am the sun.'"

In a vicarious way he is saying, "I am God. But I am like the sun which rises every morning but does not declare 'I am God.'"

I told the man who had related the incident to me, "Go back to that so-called saint, and tell him that the sun does not say, 'I am not the sun' either." The sun does not say, "I am the sun" or "I am not the sun" -- not because the sun is enlightened, but simply because it cannot speak! If it could speak, it would have declared it in a thousand and one ways. In fact it is declaring in a thousand and one ways: "I am here!" It is declaring it in the flowers, in the birds; it is declaring all over: "I am here!"

Once Krishnamurti was asked, "Why do you go on talking?"

He said, "This is simply my nature, to talk." He said, "I talk in the same way as the flower releases its fragrance."

The flower cannot talk, it has its own language; the fragrance is its language. The sun cannot talk, but the light that radiates from it is its way of communicating the fact: "I am here, I have arrived."

In Japan there is a saying: "Flowers don't talk." That saying is utterly wrong -- they talk. Of course they speak their own language. The Tibetan speaks his language; will you say that he does not talk? The Chinese speaks his own language; will you say he does not talk? Just because you cannot understand, will you say he is not talking? The Chinese has his own language, so does the sun, so do the flowers, so do the animals, the birds, the rocks. In millions of languages the whole world asserts itself.

But the humble person starts saying, "I am not. I am not an ego, I have effaced myself." But who is saying these things? The person who has emptied himself will not say such things. He will say, "I am, and I am for the first time. But now in my I-am-ness 'I' is only linguistic, a way of saying it. Existentially, there is only am-ness."

And let this be the criterion for whether you are emptying yourself or effacing yourself. If you are emptying yourself you will become more and more blissful, because you will become more and more spacious. You will become more and more available to God and to God's celebration. You will become open to existence and all its joys and all its blessings.

But if you are effacing yourself you will become more and more sad and heavy, you will become more and more dull and dead -- because effacing oneself is nothing but a slow suicide. Beware of it. And you have to be aware, very aware, because they both look alike.

The real danger in spiritual growth is from things which are diametrically opposite but look very alike. The real problem does not arise from things which are apparently opposite; the real problem arises with things which are not so apparently opposite, and yet they are opposite.

The real opposite of hate is not love, the real opposite of love is not hate -- it is so apparent, who can be deceived by it? The real opposite of love is pseudo-love: love that pretends to be love, and is not. One has to be watchful there.

The real opposite of compassion is not anger. The real opposite of compassion is cultivated compassion: compassion that is not within you but is only in your character, compassion that you have painted on your circumference.

The real opposite of your smiles are not tears, but smiles which are painted, smiles which don't go any deeper than the lips, which are nothing but exercises of the lips. No heart collaborates with them, no feeling stands behind them. There is nobody behind the smile, the smile is just a learned trick. Tears are not opposite to smiles, they are only complementaries. But the false smile is the real opposite.

Remember it always, the false is the enemy of the true. If your smile is true and your tears are true, they are friends, they will help each other because they both will strengthen the truth of your being. If your tears are false and your smiles are false, then too, they are friends; they will strengthen your falsity, your personality, your mask.

The conflict is between the real and the unreal or pretended. Emptying oneself is of tremendous value, but effacing yourself is dangerous. Effacing yourself is a subtle way of the ego -- the ego coming from the back door.

And naturally it will make you more and more serious. That's why your so-called saints look so serious. Their seriousness has a reason in it. The reason is, they are maintaining humbleness which is not really there. And to maintain something which is not really there is arduous, hard. One has to be continuously on guard. Just a little slip here and there, and the reality will assert, and it will destroy all that you have maintained for so long. It will destroy your respectability.

Anything that has to be maintained will keep you serious and sad, deep down afraid of being caught red-handed, of being caught in your falsity. You will escape from people if you are carrying something false in you. You will not allow anybody to be friendly, to be intimate with you, because in intimacy the danger is that the other may be able to see something which strangers cannot see. You will keep people at a distance; you will run and rush away from people. You will have only formal relationships, but you will not really relate, because to really relate means to expose yourself.

Hence your so-called saints escaped into the monasteries. It was out of fear. If they were in the marketplace they would be caught; it would be discovered that they are cheating, that they are deceiving, that they are hypocrites. In the monasteries they can maintain their hypocrisy and nobody will ever be able to detect it. And moreover, there are other hypocrites there; they can all maintain their conspiracy together more easily than each single hypocrite can maintain his alone.

Monasteries came into existence for escapists. But you can live even in the world in a monastic way, keeping people always at a distance, never allowing anybody access to your inner being, never opening up, never allowing anybody to have a peek into you to see who you are, never looking into people's eyes, avoiding people's eyes, looking sideways. And always in a hurry, so that everybody knows you are so occupied, you don't have any time to say hello, to hold somebody's hand, to sit with somebody informally. You are so busy, you are always on the go.

You will not even allow intimacy with those who are close to you -- husbands, wives, children -- with them also you will have a formal relationship, an institutional relationship.

Hence marriage has become an institution. It is really ugly to see something so tremendously beautiful becoming an institution. And if people look so miserable it is natural. If you live in institutions you will be miserable.

Divya, you ask me: "Can you explain to us the difference between emptying oneself and effacing oneself?"

Effacing oneself is the way of the ego, emptying oneself is the way of understanding. In emptying yourself you simply understand the ways of the ego -- and in that understanding, the ego disappears of its own accord. You don't drop it, you don't have to drop it. You don't fight with it. It is not found.

When you look within with attention, with the light of awareness, you cannot find any ego there. So the question does not arise of why or how one should efface oneself. There is nothing to efface! That which is, is, and cannot be effaced. And that which is not, is not, and there is no need to efface it.

Emptying oneself simply means seeing oneself. And then many things start dropping, because you were unnecessarily carrying them. In the first place, they don't exist. They are ghosts, nightmares; they disperse themselves when the light is brought in. Emptying oneself is a meditative process. Just looking in, deeply, with no prejudice, with no prefabricated ideology, neither for nor against, just looking in, and emptying starts happening.

And when you have emptied all content -- thoughts, desires, memories, projections, hopes -- when all is gone, for the first time you find yourself, because you are nothing but that pure space, that virgin space within you. Unburdened by anything, that contentless consciousness, that's what you are! Seeing it, realizing it, one is free. One is freedom, one is joy, one is bliss.

But effacing oneself is dangerous. It means you have accepted already that the ego is there and it has to be effaced. You have accepted an illusion, and now you want to destroy it. You have missed the first point. You have accepted that the rope is a snake, and now you are trying to kill the snake. You will be in great trouble. You will never be able to kill the snake, because in the first place there is none. You can go on beating the rope, but what about the snake? The snake will remain there.

The snake exists in your illusion; the snake does not exist outside, otherwise you could have killed it. But how can you kill a snake which is not? You are fighting with a shadow, and you are bound to be defeated.

Let this fundamental be remembered always: if you fight with anything false, you will be defeated. The false cannot be defeated, because it is false. How can you defeat something which is nonexistential? There is no way. The only way is, bring light and see.

Ihi passiko, come and see! In that very seeing, the snake is not found. The rope is there, the snake has disappeared. Now there is no need to efface yourself, no need to fight.

There are millions of people who try to become humble, but their whole effort is nonsense, sheer stupidity.

Once a man asked me, "Are you an egoist or a humble person?"

I said. "Neither. neti neti, neither this nor that. I cannot be either."

He said, "What are you talking about? One has to be either an egoist or a humble person."

I said, "You don't understand. You know nothing; you have never gone within yourself. If you are humble, you are an egoist standing on his head. Humbleness is an expression of the ego. I am neither. I am simply whatsoever I am, neither humble nor egoistic, because I have seen that there is no ego. How can there be humbleness then?"

Humbleness is diluted ego. But if there is no ego, how can you dilute it? If there is no snake, how can you take the poisonous teeth of the snake away? That's what humbleness is. The poisonous teeth have been removed from the snake; now the snake cannot hurt, now the snake cannot bite, now the snake cannot do any harm -- but the snake is there.

Those teeth were false, because the snake itself is false.

Buddha is neither egoistic nor humble. Both are impossible for the man of understanding. The ignorant person can be egoistic, can be humble -- both are aspects of ignorance. And the ignorant person can try to efface the ego, because it is so respectable not to have the ego. One becomes a saint by effacing the ego, one attains great prestige and power by effacing the ego. But it is the same game; the game has not changed.

My message to you is, please don't efface yourself. Be yourself, look within yourself, and in that very seeing, the ego disappears. Even to say "disappears" is not right: the ego is not found, it has never been there. Its existence depended on your not looking within yourself. Seen, it is no longer there -- it has never been there.

And then you are individuality, uniqueness, a unique expression of the divine. And then there is great rejoicing. You start blooming, the spring has come. You start dancing, you start singing. Great gratitude arises in you that God has made you a unique individual.

There has never been a person like you before, there is nobody else like you right now in the whole world, and there will never be anybody like you. Just see how much respect God has paid to you. You are a masterpiece -- unrepeatable, incomparable, utterly unique. Even the hardest heart, the rocklike heart, will start melting in gratitude. Tears will start flowing, tears of bliss and joy, tears which laugh.

But please remember, empty yourself, don't efface yourself.

Osho, The Book Of Wisdom

Relationship

Osho on Relationship and problems of Love

Question: In my relationship I often lose my self and start feeling Closed in. What can I do?

Osho : This is one of the fundamental problems of love. Every lover has to learn it, nobody knows it by birth. It only comes slowly slowly and through much pain, but the sooner it comes, the better -- that each person needs his or her own space, that we should not interfere in that space. To interfere is very natural for lovers, because they start taking the other for granted. They start thinking that they are no more separate. They don't think of 'I' and 'thou'; they start thinking of 'we'. You are that too, but only once in a while.

'We' is a rare phenomenon. Once, for a few moments, lovers come to that point where the word is meaningful, where you can say 'we', when 'I' and 'thou' disappear into each other, where boundaries overlap. But these are rare moments; they should not be taken for granted. You cannot remain 'we' twenty-four hours a day, but that's what every lover demands -- and that creates unnecessary misery. When you come close once in a while you become one, but those are rare moments, precious, to be cherished, and you cannot make them a twenty-four-hour thing.

If you try, you will destroy them; then the whole beauty will be lost. When that moment is gone, it is gone; you are again 'I' and 'thou'. You have your space, she has her space. And one has to be respectful now, that the other's space should not be in any way interfered with; it should not be trespassed. If you trespass it, you hurt the other; you start destroying the other's individuality. And because the other loves you, she or he will go on tolerating it.

But toleration is one thing; it is not something very beautiful. If the other is only tolerating it, then sooner or later the other will take revenge. The other cannot forgive you and it goes on accumulating -- one day, another day, another day.... You have interfered with a thousand and one things, then they all pile up, and then one day they explode. That's why lovers go on fighting. That fight is because of this constant interference. And when you interfere in her being, she tries to interfere in your being, and nobody feels good about it.

For example, she is feeling happy and you will feel left alone because you are not feeling happy. You will feel as if you have been cheated. 'Why is she feeling happy?' You should both feel happy -- that is your idea. That happens once in a while. But sometimes it happens that she is happy, you are not happy or you are happy and she is not happy. We have to understand it, that the other has every right to be happy without one... even though it hurts. You would like to participate but you are not in the mood. 

If you insist, all that you can do is: you can destroy her happiness... and you are both losers in that way, because if you destroy her happiness, when you are happy alone she will destroy your happiness. Slowly slowly, rather than becoming friends, we turn into enemies. The basic requirement is: the other has to be given absolute freedom to be herself. If she is happy, feel good -- she is happy; if you can be happy and participate in her happiness, good.

If you cannot, leave her alone. If she is sad, if you can participate in her sadness, good. If you cannot participate and you want to sing a song and you are feeling happy, leave her alone. Don't drag her according to you; leave her to herself. Then slowly slowly a great respect arises for each other. That respect becomes the foundation of the temple of love.

Meditation for headache

Osho – Next time you have a headache try a small meditative technique, just experimentally – then you can go on to bigger diseases and bigger symptoms. When you have a headache just try a small experiment. Sit silently and watch it, look into it – not as if you are looking at an enemy, no. If you are looking at it as your enemy, you will not be able to look rightly. You will avoid – nobody looks at the enemy directly; one avoids, one tends to avoid.

Look at it as your friend. It is your friend; it is in your service. It is saying, “Something is wrong – look into it.”

Just sit silently and look into the headache with no idea of stopping it, with no desire that it should disappear, no conflict, no fight, no antagonism. Just look into it, into what it is. Watch, so if there is some inner message, the headache can give it to you. It has a coded message. And if you look silently you will be surprised. If you look silently three things will happen.

First: the more you look into it, the more severe it will become. And then you will be a little puzzled: “How is it going to help if it is becoming more severe?” It is becoming more severe because you have been avoiding it. It was there but you were avoiding it; you were already repressing – even without the aspro you were repressing it. When you look into it, repression disappears. The headache will come to its natural severity. Then you are hearing it with unplugged ears, no wool around your ears.

First thing: it will become severe. If it is becoming severe, you can be satisfied that you are looking rightly. If it does not become severe, then you are not looking yet; you are still avoiding. Look into it – it becomes severe. That is the first indication that, yes, it is in your vision.

The second thing will be that it will become more pin-pointed; it will not be spread over a bigger space. First you were thinking, “It is my whole head aching.” Now you will see it is not the whole head, it is just a small spot. That is also an indication that you are gazing more deeply into it. The spread feeling of the ache is a trick – that is a way to avoid it. If it is in one point then it will be more severe. So you create an illusion that it is the whole head which is aching. Spread all over the head, then it is not so intense at any point. These are tricks that we go on playing.

Look into it and the second step will be that it comes to be smaller and smaller and smaller. And a moment comes when it is just the very point of a needle – very sharp, immensely sharp, very painful.

You have never seen such pain in the head. But very much confined to a small spot. Go on looking into it. And then the third and the most important thing happens. If you go on looking at this point when it is very severe and confined and concentrated at one point, you will see many times that it disappears.

When your gaze is perfect it will disappear. And when it disappears you will have the glimpse of where it is coming from – what the cause is. When the effect disappears you will see the cause. It will happen many times. Again it will be there. Your gaze is no more that alert, that concentrated, that attentive – it will come back. Whenever your gaze is really there, it will disappear; and when it disappears, hidden behind it is the cause. And you will be surprised: your mind is ready to reveal what the cause is.

And there can be a thousand and one causes. The same alarm is given because the alarm system is simple. There are not many alarm systems in your body. For different causes the same alarm is given. You may have been angry lately and you have not expressed it. Suddenly, like a revelation, it will be standing there. You will see all your anger that you have been carrying, carrying … like pus inside you. Now this is too much, and that anger wants to be released. It needs a catharsis. Cathart! – and immediately you will see the headache has disappeared. And there was no need for the aspro, no need for any treatment.

Source – Osho: Orange book of meditation