Love is always an emperor

Question 1:

Mukto, there is a difference between flowering, awakening, self-realization, and enlightenment. Enlightenment is the ultimate truth -- the seeker disappears but the truth is found. The pilgrim disappears but God is found. It is important to understand the differences...

From enlightenment there is no possibility of falling back, because you are no longer there to fall back. As long as you are, there is a possibility.

Only your absence is the guarantee that you cannot fall back.

Flowering is just the beginning of entering within yourself -- just as you enter into a garden. It is immensely important, because without entering you are never going to reach to the center. But in flowering, for the first time you recognize your potential, your possibility. In flowering is the transition period, from human to divine. But one can fall back, because the flowering is so new and so fragile and your past is so old and so strong -- it can pull you back; it is still there.

Awakening is getting very close to your center. And as you get closer to the center, falling back becomes more and more difficult because your new experience is gathering power, strength, experience, and the old is losing. But the old is still there; it has not disappeared.

Ordinarily people don't fall from awakening, but the possibility remains: one can fall.

Self-realization is reaching to your center. Many religions have believed that self-realization is the end -- for example, Jainism -- you have come to your ultimate truth. It is not true. Self-realization is only a dewdrop which has become aware, alert, contented, fulfilled. It is almost impossible to fall back from self-realization -- but I am saying almost impossible, not absolutely impossible, because the self can deceive you; it can bring your ego back.

The self and the ego are very similar. The self is the natural thing and the ego is the synthetic, so it happens sometimes that a self-realized man becomes a pious egoist. His egoism is not going to harm anyone, but it certainly prevents him from dropping into the ocean and disappearing completely.

Love is always an emperor Enlightenment is the dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the vast, infinite ocean.

Once the dewdrop has fallen into the ocean, now there is no way even to find it. The question of turning back does not arise.

Enlightenment, hence, is the ultimate truth. What begins as flowering moves on the path of awakening, reaches to self-realization. Then one quantum leap more -- disappearing into the eternal, into the infinite.

You are no more, only existence is.

I have told you about Kabir, India's greatest mystic. When he was young, he became self-realized and he wrote a small couplet:

HERAT, HERAT HE SAKHI RAHYA, KABIR, HERAI "Searching and searching and searching, oh my friend, the searcher is lost. Seeking and seeking and seeking, the seeker is lost."

BUND SAMANI SAMUND MEIN SOKAT HERIJAI "The dewdrop has slipped into the ocean; now there is no way to get it back."

But it was too early to say that. The dewdrop was still there, slipping towards the ocean, but it had not yet fallen into the ocean.

When Kabir was dying, he became enlightened. He called his son Kamaal and told him, "I have written something wrong. At that moment, that was my feeling -- that I had come to the ultimate. Before I die, you write this down, and change it."

The change is very small in words, but in experience it is tremendous. He has used again the same words:

HERAT, HERAT HE SAKHI "Oh beloved, seeking and searching, the seeker is lost."

SAMUND SAMUND BUND MEIN SOKAT HERIJAI "And the ocean has fallen into the dewdrop; now it is impossible to find it."

Just a little difference in the words... "The dewdrop has fallen into the ocean" -- something of the self has remained in it. But "the ocean has fallen into the dewdrop"... that is the tremendous experience and explosion of enlightenment. The first statement was about self-realization; the second statement is about enlightenment.

From enlightenment, falling is simply impossible. You are gone -- and gone forever; not even a shadow or a trace of you is left behind.

Love is always an emperor Up to self-realization the possibility remains -- it becomes less and less, but it remains.

You can start being egoistic about your self-realization: "I have known, I am a realized person.

I am a saint, I have encountered God" -- but that "I" is there, howsoever pious. Even its shadow is dangerous; it can pull you back.

I have heard a very beautiful story about Jesus...

Jesus was walking through Jerusalem when he saw an angry crowd shouting and screaming at a woman. He came closer and heard the mob accusing the woman of adultery.

Jesus strode to the front of the mob, held up his arms and said, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."

The crowd fell silent, but one little old lady pushed to the front, picked up a huge rock, and hurled it at the sobbing woman. Jesus gently took the old lady by the arm and said quietly, "Mother, why do you always embarrass me?"

Jesus' mother! She is a virtuous woman -- so virtuous that she has given birth to Jesus without any contact with another human being. She stands alone in the whole of history with the claim -- even after the birth of the son, of being the VIRGIN Mary. That idea must have got into the old woman's mind too much. Her virtue, her piousness -- God has chosen her to be the mother of His only begotten son -- has become a subtle ego in her. The others were not pious. The moment Jesus said, "The first stone has to be hurled by one who is virtuous," the mob stopped. They were all in the same boat.

And you can see it in your saints... a strange but very subtle ego. Spirituality has become their achievement. Somebody has all the riches of the world, somebody is the most beautiful person, somebody is the strongest, and somebody is the most pious. The question is not what it is by which the ego can get nourished -- any idea can make you fall.

One has not to stop until he has reached the point when he is not: when there is no claimer, when one has moved the full circle and has come back to the world, just nobody. Perhaps people may not recognize him as a great saint... and this is my understanding, that the greatest of saints have remained unrecognized, because you understand only the language of the ego.

You don't understand the language of egolessness.

The greatest sage will appear to you just an ordinary man, nothing special, with no claim for any talent, for any possession, for any power, for any genius, for any knowledge -- no claim at all. He has become absolutely a zero. But the zero is not negative, it is full of godliness, overflowing with godliness.

Question 2:

Devaprem, the question is meaningful, but very complex to understand. You are asking, "Though your emphasis has been for us, as individuals, to go within to save ourselves, I guess

Love is always an emperor I am still naive enough to feel that our love, our dancing, our joy, could still save this beautiful planet."

It may save the beautiful planet, but you should not carry the idea within you; otherwise it will destroy your love and your dance and your joy. If deep down you are guessing that "my love, my dancing, my joy can save the whole planet," it is the strategy of the ego. You are becoming a savior. You are becoming so great that you can save the whole planet, just by your love and just by your dancing, just by your joy.

Try to understand the complexity. It is possible, if individuals are full of love, full of joy, and their life is not a drag, but a dance... as a by-product it is possible the planet may be saved.

But as a by-product -- you cannot take the credit for saving the world.

This is the trouble: if you start thinking that you are dancing to save the world, your dance is destroyed. Then you are not dancing totally, then you are not dancing here and now; then your dancing has become a means to save the world. Then your love is not pure love -- it is just another means, but the end is to save the world. It will be easy for you to understand if I tell you a Sufi story...

One Sufi mystic was so full of love, and so full of joy -- his whole life was laughter, music, dancing. And the story says God became very interested in him because he never asked anything, he never prayed. His whole life was a prayer, there was no need to pray.

He never went to the mosque, he never even uttered the name of God; his whole existence was the argument for the presence of God. If anybody asked him whether God exists or not he simply laughed -- but his laughter was neither yes nor no.

God himself became intrigued with that strange mystic and he came to the mystic and said, "I am immensely happy because that's how I want people to be -- not that they should pray for one hour and do everything against it for twenty-three hours. Not that they should become very pious when they enter the mosque, and when they go out they leave their piousness in the mosque and they are just their old selves: angry, jealous, full of anxiety, full of violence.

"I have watched you and I have loved you. This is the way: you have become the prayer.

You are, right now, my only argument in the world that something more than man exists -- although you have never argued, you have not even uttered my name. Those are superfluous things... but you live, you love, you are so full of joy that there is no need for any language; your very presence becomes the argument for my existence. I want to give you a blessing. You can ask for anything."

The sage said, "But I don't need anything. I am so joyous, and I cannot conceive there can be anything more. Forgive me, I cannot ask because I really don't need anything. You are generous, you are loving, you are compassionate; but I am so over-full, there is no space within me for anything else. You will have to forgive me, I cannot ask."

God said, "I had thought that you would not ask, so don't ask for yourself -- but you can ask for others, because there are millions of people who are miserable, sick, have never known anything for which they can be grateful. I can give you powers to do miracles, and you can change the lives of all these people."

The sage said, "If you are insistent, then with a condition I can accept your gifts."

God said, "With a condition? You really are strange. What is the condition?"

Love is always an emperor He said, "My condition is that I should not become aware of what is happening through me, by you. It should happen behind my back; it should happen through my shadow, not through me. I may be passing and my shadow may fall on a dead tree, and the tree may become alive again -- again lush green, again heavy with flowers and fruits -- but I should not know it, because I don't want to fall back.

"If I know it -- that I have done it, or even that God has chosen me as the instrument to do it -- it is dangerous. So my condition is: a blind man may start seeing, but neither should he know that it is because of me, nor should I know that it is because of me. My shadow behind my back will do all the miracles.

"If you can accept my condition, and remember that I should not know at all... because I am so full of joy, so blissful. Don't drag me back into the miserable world. Don't drag me back to become again an 'I.'" And it is said that God said to him, "You are not only strange, you are unique and rare.

And this will be so: you will never know what things are happening around you. Miracles will be happening around you -- wherever you will go, miracles will happen. Neither those people will know that you have done those miracles, nor you will know that you have done those miracles. I will remember the condition."

Devaprem, there is a possibility: the individual coming to enlightenment and celebration is bound to affect the whole destiny of humanity. But it is going to be a by-product. It is going to happen behind your back, through your shadow -- not by you. Even guessing is dangerous, because that guessing can give you the ego and can destroy your joy, can destroy your dance.

And if your joy and your love and your dance are destroyed, then there is not going to be any by-product to save the planet.

None of my sannyasins are to become saviors. The world has known many saviors, and the world is not saved. And the reason is that they were not as alert as the Sufi mystic; they started bragging about their miracles, they started nursing their egos through their miracles. Then their miracles became only magic, just tricks practiced well. There is nothing like a miraculous in it.

The greatest miracle in the world is that you should dance and disappear in the dance -- then let the dance do whatever it can do. That you should love and disappear in the love -- then let the love do whatever it can do. You cannot claim that you are doing it -- you have already disappeared.

In your disappearance is the whole possibility of some miracle happening. So please don't guess; otherwise deep inside your love will remain half-hearted -- you are doing it for some purpose. And when love becomes a purpose it is no longer love. Your joy will become phony, because if you are joyful so something can happen in the world, you are not really joyful -- you are using joy. And if your dance is a means towards an end, it cannot be total. Unless your dance is an end in itself, there is no possibility of its being total.

And only a total dance, an authentic love, a whole-hearted joy, perhaps may create some miracles around you. But you will not be the one who has done them; you will not be the one who can brag about them. They will happen only when you are not.

God happens only when you have moved out of the way and left yourself totally empty, spacious. It is a very strange phenomenon: The guest only comes inside the house when the host disappears.

Love is always an emperor

Question 3:

Devam Kranti, I can say something, but those feelings of violence and jealousy and furiousness will still be waiting by the corner. Just by my saying something, they are not going to disappear -- because without knowing, you are nourishing them; without knowing, your desire to get free of them is very superficial.

You are not doing exactly what I have been emphasizing continually; you are doing just the opposite. You are fighting with the darkness, and you are not bringing the light in. You can go on fighting with the darkness as long as you want -- you are not going to be victorious.

That does not mean that you are weaker than darkness, it simply means that what you are doing is irrelevant to darkness.

Darkness is only an absence.

You cannot do anything directly to it -- just bring light in.

And it is not that when you bring light in, darkness will rush outside through all the doors.

Darkness is an absence -- light comes... there is no question of absence anymore. Darkness does not go anywhere, it has no existence of its own.

I will read your question: "Sometimes after moments of clarity and lightness, it seems old intimates like violent feelings, jealousy, feeling furious, etcetera etcetera, come back even stronger than before, as if they were just waiting around the corner to have their chance again."

Your clarity and your lightness are only momentary. If you bring in the light for a moment and then blow out the candle, the darkness will be back again -- not that it was waiting by the corner; you have again created the absence of light.

Your torch of consciousness should be burning continuously; then there will not be any darkness.

These feelings that you think are very dangerous are almost impotent. Violence is there because you have not grown your potential for love -- it is the absence of love. And people go on doing stupid things. They try to be nonviolent: they repress the violence, they make tremendous efforts to be nonviolent.

But there is no need for anybody to be nonviolent because you are moving in a wrong direction. Violence is a negative thing, and you are trying to destroy violence and become nonviolent. I would say, forget about violence. It is the absence of love -- be more loving. All the energy that you are putting into repressing violence and becoming nonviolent -- pour it into being love.

Love is always an emperor It was unfortunate that Mahavira and Gautam Buddha both used the word nonviolence. I can understand their difficulty. Their difficulty was that by "love" people understand biological love; to avoid that misunderstanding they used a negative term: nonviolence. It gives the appearance that violence is the positive thing and nonviolence is the negative thing.

In fact, violence is the negative thing and love is the positive thing, but they were all afraid of using the word love.

And because of their fear that "love" may create in people's minds the idea of ordinary love, they used an unfortunate word -- nonviolence -- and for twenty -- five centuries, that nonviolence has been practiced. But have you seen in any follower of Gautam Buddha or Mahavira, the quality of love, the presence of love around him? -- he is practicing nonviolence, and there is where he has gone wrong. You will find them shrunken and dead:

their intelligence does not seem to have blossomed, their consciousness does not seem to have blossomed. Just the mistake of using a wrong word has created twenty-five centuries of immense torture, in thousands of people.

I want you to know that love is the positive thing, and love does not mean only biological love. And you also understand it: you love your mother, you love your brother, you love your friend, you love your master; there is no biology involved. These are ordinarily available experiences of non-biological love. You love a roseflower -- is there any biology involved?

You love a beautiful moon you love music, you love poetry, you love sculpture -- is there any biology involved? And I am taking these examples from ordinary life, just to show you that love has many, many dimensions.

There is a love which is between two bodies; then it is biological. There is a love between two minds; then it is the love of two friends. There is a love between two hearts -- then it is the love between the disciple and the master. And then there is the love between two beings.

Then it is the love between the devotee and the master.

Love has these four dimensions, and each dimension has many, many possibilities.

So rather than having just moments of clarity and lightness, be more loving -- loving to the trees, loving to the flowers, loving to music, loving to people. Let all kinds of love enrich your life, and violence will disappear. A man of love cannot hurt anybody. There have been even very rare and unique examples... One of the Sufi mystics, Sarmad, had in his chest a wound -- the orthodox Mohammedans had tried to kill him. They could not kill him, but they wounded him very badly, and the wound became so dangerous... there were small but visible parasites in the wound, who were sucking his blood.

Mohammedans, when they do their nimaj, their prayer, bow down to the earth, get up, and then bow down again many times. So those parasites would fall from Sarmad's wound, and he would take them up and put them back in the wound. People said, "Are you mad or something?"

He said, "My body is going to die anyway, the poison has spread all over the body. These poor parasites, why should they die as long as I can help them to live? And anyway they are parasites of my wound -- I am not the body. It is going to be the food of animals. So while I am alive, it hurts me that some parasite is going to die. At least as long as I am alive I will continue to put them back. "And finally he stopped praying. He said, "Prayer I can do without the ritual, but I cannot hurt these creatures."

But strangely enough, he did not die from the poison that was spreading through his body -- perhaps his tremendous love became an antidote -- and the Mohammedans had to cut off his

Love is always an emperor head on the steps of Jamma Masjid in New Delhi. And his only crime was... Mohammedans have a prayer which consists of a simple sentence: "One God; one holy book, KORAN; one messenger of God, Hazrat Mohammed." These three names come into that prayer.

But Sufis simply repeat the part which talks about one God. They don't bring "one holy KORAN" and "one messenger of God" into their prayer. They say that there have been other messengers, it is not a monopoly; and there are other holy statements, the KORAN cannot be the only one. And in the future there will be other messengers and there will be other holy statements. All that we can say is: Existence is one God.

That was their crime, and the orthodox Mohammedans forced Sarmad: "You have to say the whole prayer; this is sacrilegious to pray only half the prayer."

He said, "You cannot force me. As far as prayer is concerned it is my freedom, it is my individual concern with God. If I am answerable, I am answerable to God, not to you. I am not praying to you, I am praying to God, and if I am praying wrongly, it is a matter to be settled between me and God. Who are you?" But they were powerful -- the king was Mohammedan -- and they were all angry, and they cut off his head.

There are many steps in the mosque in New Delhi... and when they cut his head he laughed, and his head rolled down the steps. And a strange phenomenon was witnessed by thousands of people, because thousands of people had gathered to see: the head was coming down the steps... the blood was flowing from the head, and the body was standing on top of the steps -- and the head was still repeating the half-prayer.

That does not seem to be historical; it seems to be a mythology, but there are so many contemporary reports about it -- from people who were not Mohammedans -- that they have seen it and they have heard it...

Perhaps love can speak even without the body. Perhaps love does not need the body as a necessary medium. Whether it is historical or not is insignificant to me; to me, what is significant is that although he was killed by cutting off his head, there was no anger, no complaint, no ill-will, no curse.

And he was absolutely innocent; to pray is absolutely an individual affair. But even while his head is rolling down the steps, there is only prayer, the half-prayer.

Love knows how to forgive.

Love cannot hurt and cannot be violent.

Devam Kranti, these violent feelings will not disappear unless their energy is transformed into love. And the true love knows nothing of jealousy. Any love that is followed by jealousy is certainly not the true love, it is biological instinct.

The higher you move -- from body to mind, from heart to being -- all these crude feelings disappear. Love from being to being knows no jealousy.

And how are you going to find such love?

It is a radiation of your silence, of your peace, of your inner well-being, of your blissfulness. You are so blissful that you want to share it -- that sharing is love.

Love is not a beggar.

It never asks, "give me love."

Love is always an emperor Love is always an emperor.

It only knows to give. It never even imagines, expects, anything in return.

Be more meditative, become more conscious of your being. Let your inner world become more silent, and love will be flowing through you. People have all these problems. The problems are different -- violence, jealousy, misery, anxiety -- but the medicine for all these illnesses is only one, and it is meditation.

And I would like you to be reminded that the word medicine and the word meditation come from the same root. Medicine means something that can cure your body, and meditation means something that can cure your soul.

Meditation is meditation only because it is a medicine for your innermost illnesses.

A man selling Vaseline Petroleum Jelly had gone around a number of houses in town a week before and had left some samples, asking people to see if they could find an ingenious use for it. Now he went around to the same houses, asking people what uses they had found for Vaseline.

The man in the first house, a wealthy city gent, said, "I used it for medicinal purposes.

Whenever my children scraped their elbows or knees, I would rub it on."

The man in the second house said, "I used it for mechanical purposes, such as greasing the bearings of my bicycle and lawnmower."

The man in the third house, a scruffy, unshaven, working-class fellow, said, "I used it for sexual purposes."

In a shocked voice the salesman asked, "What do you mean?"

"Well," said the scruffy man, "I put a whole lot of it on the handle of my bedroom door to keep the kids out!"

You can give the same thing to different people and they will come out with different uses, according to their own unconsciousness. But if they are conscious, they will find only one use.

A man, an archbishop in Japan, went to one very great master, Nan In, with the New Testament. He was certain that by listening to the beautiful statements of Jesus, particularly on the sermon on the mountain, Nan In would be converted to Christianity.

The archbishop was received with great love and he said, "I have come with my holy book, and I want to read a few sentences... perhaps they will change your whole life."

Nan In said, "You have come a little late, because I am changed completely, the transformation has happened. But still, you have come a long way -- you can at least read a few sentences."

So he read a few sentences, and just after two, or three sentences, Nan In said, "That's enough. Whoever has written these sentences will become a buddha in some future life ."

The archbishop was very much shocked -- he is saying, "In some future life -- this man shows a potentiality -- he will become a buddha." He said, "But he is the only son of God!"

Nan In laughed. He said, "That is the trouble. That's what is preventing him from becoming a buddha. Unless he drops such nonsense ideas, he will not blossom to his whole potentiality.

Love is always an emperor "He has beautiful ideas but side by side, he has some stupid ideas too. There is no God, so the question of being the only begotten son does not arise. In some future life -- you don't be worried -- he will drop them; he seems to be a man of intelligence, and he has suffered enough for his stupid ideas. He got crucified; that was enough punishment. But you should not cling to the stupid part of his statements."

The archbishop said, "But they are our basis, the foundation of our religion, that Jesus is the only begotten son of God, that there is a God who created the world, that Jesus was born of a virgin girl."

Nan In laughed and he said, "This poor fellow, if he could drop these small fictitious things, he would have already become a buddha. If you find him somewhere, bring him here, and I will put him right. There was no need to crucify him -- all that he needed was a right master, someone who could have introduced him into the mysteries of meditation."

Meditation is perhaps the master key for all our problems. So rather than fighting with problems separately... which will take lives and still you will not be out of their grip. They will stand by the corner, waiting for their chance -- and naturally, if they had to wait too long, they will take as much revenge as possible.

Meditation is not doing anything directly to your violence, not doing anything to your jealousy, to your hate. It is simply brining light into your house, and the darkness disappears.

(A DUCK APPEARS IN THE GARDEN OUTSIDE THE HALL, AND QUACKS LONG AND LOUDLY.) It is just the reincarnation of the Japanese archbishop. And it is natural that he is protesting -- this is what happens to archbishops; I have again provoked him...

Should I provoke him again?

Okay, Vimal?

Yes, Osho.