Your longing is the seed

Question 1:

Atit Parampara, we are part of a tremendously huge, organic unity of existence. Everything in us is related to the grass, to the trees, to the stars. Nothing is unrelated. The sunrise is not only something that happens outside -- something happens within you too. As the sun rises, there is a rhythmic awareness all over the planet: the trees wake up, the flowers blossom, the lotuses open their petals, the birds suddenly start singing. Something within you also starts awakening.

The night is over: a part of your consciousness which was asleep again becomes awake, fresh, rejuvenated, cleaner, younger, after the rest. Hence, it is easy in the morning to be open and to be available. It is a little more difficult in the evening. As the night deepens, it becomes more and more difficult. Most of the children are born in the morning, just before sunrise or just after sunrise.

But once you become capable of being open and available and receptive, it is not impossible to be receptive in the evening or even in the middle of the night.

It is because of this reason that Sufis have chosen the middle of the night as the time for meditation, because if you can meditate in the middle of the night then the whole day, any time, morning, afternoon, evening, will become very easy. They start from the hardest point. It takes a little longer but their arithmetic is correct: the person who can meditate in the middle of the night when the whole existence is falling deep into sleep... and he remains awake, just like an island in the ocean. In the beginning it may be difficult, but later on he will find it is immensely rewarding because then at any time, any hour, meditation is absolutely simple.

But most of the religions have chosen the morning -- just before the sunrise is the best time because the whole of nature is supporting you. You are not in any conflict with existence.

The whole of nature is awakening, and you can simply flow with its awakening energy.

Except the Sufis, all the religions have chosen the morning to begin with. That too is correct.

Why not begin from the simplest and then slowly, move towards the harder?

So you are right, that "it always happens in the morning that You touch me the most." I am touching you all the time. It is just that in the morning you feel me the most.

Your longing is the seed The sun may have risen but if you keep your doors closed, for you it is still night. It may be that the whole world is full of light... but you can keep your eyes closed and remain in darkness. So remember, everything depends on you. I am available twenty-four hours, exactly the same.

You are saying, "This morning again you came to me and I wonder: I know how the sun touches me, how your face enters my eyes, your voice my ears. I know those five doors to the world but I wonder what this sixth sense is that feels you. What door do you pass to reach me so deeply?"

In fact, in the East, we have always thought about the sixth sense. There are five senses to go out of yourself, to go to the world, to the objective reality around you. The sixth sense, which has been called in other words the third eye, is to go inwards. If you feel me deeply, it means your third eye receives me -- that is the door about which you are wondering. It is exactly between the two eyebrows and has been known for at least ten thousand years in the East.

You will be surprised... and the Indians will be shocked: we have used, for the women when they are married, a red mark on the third eye center -- nobody has ever bothered why -- and that red mark which is used for a married woman is removed if she becomes a widow.

That red mark is to prevent the woman from coming in contact with the divine. Her God is her husband. And if she comes in contact with the divine, then her husband is almost meaningless.

Man has used every kind of strategy against women. He has used even spiritual discoveries to enslave the woman.

The red color is significant. The psychology of color and the science of color is that whichever color you see -- if you see something red, then one thing is certain, that that thing is not red; it appears red. The sun rays have all the seven colors of the rainbow, and when the sun rays fall on anything, if all the rays are absorbed then you see the thing as black. If all the rays are reflected back and nothing is absorbed, then you see the thing as white. It is because of this reason that black has some connotation with the devil, with death, and white has become symbolic of renunciation, of simplicity, of purity.

If the red ray is reflected back, is not absorbed, if the other rays are absorbed and only the red is not absorbed, then you see the thing as red. If blue is not absorbed then you see the thing as blue because the returned ray falls on your eye and makes the thing appear of a particular color.

Why has the red mark been used for women? It is a simple science: the red ray is the most powerful in awakening that which is asleep. It is the most powerful ray; it hits deeply and wakes the dormant energy. It can open the third eye. Using a red mark on the third eye is preventing the red ray, so the woman remains unrelated to the divine. This door to the beyond is closed.

This is sheer male chauvinistic attitude. The moment a woman becomes a widow, immediately the first thing to be removed is her red mark because now the idea is that the woman should not come in contact with another man. And the best way to prevent her is to bring her in contact with godliness because then there will be no interest for the lower kinds of love relationship; she will know the higher quality of love, prayer, trust.

The widow in India is not allowed to use any other color of clothes -- only white, as a symbol that she has renounced the world. Although living, she is no longer part of life.

Your longing is the seed When the master initiates the disciple, he touches the disciple's third eye with his fingers.

The fingers are the most significant parts as far as energy is concerned. Energy cannot move from anything that is round -- for example, energy cannot move out of your head. In the whole body, energy can either move through the toes of the feet or through the fingers of the hand.

Energy needs finger-like, pointed instruments to move out.

The disciple touches the master's feet -- that is one of the places where the master's energy is available. And the master touches, with his hand, the disciple's head. In this way, the bioenergy of the master and the disciple becomes a circle. And this circle has a tremendous feeling of blissfulness, of sweetness; of love that is not biological, that is spiritual.

The West has missed it completely. Now it is recognized, at least by Western science, that human energy is also a special kind of electricity. It is bioelectricity; its specialty is that the electricity you see outside is material, and the electricity that moves in your body is spiritual.

It is alive, it is a living energy; hence they have given it a name: bioelectricity, living electricity.

It is your third eye... and the morning is the most potential time for it to be receptive. You should be more alert now when it happens. Close both your eyes so that no energy moves out, and the whole energy becomes available to the third eye. And when it is happening, allow it without any fear, because it cannot do any harm to you. It has never done any harm to anyone, ever.

If you give your whole support, the third eye can make you related with the whole existence. Your center of being will come, for the first time, in touch with the center of the universe. It is a great ecstatic experience.

At first it will happen only in the morning. Then slowly, slowly, as you become accustomed to it, it may happen at other times. But whenever it happens, allow it without any reluctance, without any resistance, because just a little fear and the door will be closed. Be loving and be trusting and the door will remain open.

And you have to bring this experience to the middle of the night. When you reach the same experience in the middle of the night, as it happens in the morning, you have conquered almost a new world, a new space. Now twenty-four hours a day, you will remain available to that which is beyond you.

A subtle current of freshness, of music, of dance, will go on moving within you. A joy will pervade your twenty-four hours. Even in sleep it will be there. You will go to sleep full of joy and you will wake up with the same fullness of joy.

A simple secret has to be remembered: your last thought in the night when you go to sleep is always your first thought in the morning when you wake up. You can watch it and you will be surprised -- why is it so? You have been asleep for six hours, seven hours or eight hours.

The last thought, whatever it was, the last mood, the last feeling is always going to be the first feeling in the morning. You may be asleep, but that which you have left while you fell asleep remains standing at your door. When you wake up, that visitor is still there; it has not gone.

It is because of this reason that many religions have chosen a time for prayer just before you are going to fall asleep. Because if you can fall asleep with a prayerful mood, peaceful, silent, that mood will pervade your night. Your whole night will become prayerful. If you fall asleep meditating, your whole night becomes a meditation.

Your longing is the seed People have been telling me that they don't have any time to meditate. And whenever anybody has told me that, I have suggested to him, "You can meditate at least eight hours every day." And he will look at me shocked: "What are you saying, eight hours? I don't even have eight minutes." And I have to explain to him, "I don't mean in the day: start your meditation while you go into your bed and, meditating, slowly slowly fall asleep. But meditation should be the last thing when you drown in sleep. Then in the morning, the first thing you will remember will be a deep meditative state." And to remain eight hours in meditation is of tremendous importance. It will transform your whole life.

The pope and a famous Jewish rabbi die and come to the Pearly Gates at the same time.

Saint Peter greets them, hands the pope a ticket, and sends him to stand in line for a motel room.

With the pope watching in astonishment, Saint Peter then escorts the Jewish rabbi to a waiting chauffeur-driven limousine which drives the man to an exclusive luxury villa.

After a few days, the pope can't take it anymore and goes to Saint Peter to complain. "Hey, Pete. I have been your faithful, celibate servant all my life. I finally get to heaven and you send me to a queue for a motel room which I end up having to share with Mother Teresa. But you send this crooked Jewish rabbi in a limousine, to a villa with air-conditioning, beautiful young girls serving him all day. How come?"

"Look, Polack," says Peter. "You don't understand. We have never had a Jewish rabbi here before. This is for the first time; that's why he's being given a special welcome."

Heaven is so close by that you can step into it right now. But very few people will ever be able to make it, for the simple reason that they don't know the door.

All the religions that have developed outside India have no idea of the third eye. In their scriptures there is not a single mention. And without the third eye opening, your doors to paradise are closed -- because the paradise is in your very being. You can be very learned, a great rabbi; you can be a pope, very respected. Millions follow you. But you don't know that exactly the paradise you have been seeking is not outside you.

It is something within you.

And my effort here is to knock on your third eye. It is just knocking on the right door, and once you become aware that this is the door from where you can get connected with the whole... or you can call it "God" but with the door closed, God may be standing at your door and still you will not be connected.

I have my own ways to go on knocking on your third eye; I have my own subtle ways. And it is a very accurate observation on your part, Atit Parampara -- what door am I using to enter in you? You say, "I know how the sun touches me, how your face enters my eyes, your voice, my ears. I know those five doors to the world but I wonder what this sixth sense is that feels you?"

It is just between your two eyebrows. Next time when you feel me touching you, watch carefully: you will feel something opening between your two eyes -- a sensation that goes on deepening inwards and finally reaches to your very being.

And once this door starts opening again and again, from the same door many other things will start entering you. You have seen the rose with your outer eyes but you have not seen it

Your longing is the seed from the door of your third eye. From your third eye, the rose is psychedelic; it has rays all around you, it radiates. It is so alive that you cannot think that you have ever seen it before.

The green of the trees becomes so much greener that one is simply surprised at everything, feels full of wonder all around. Ordinary colored stones on the sea beach look like diamonds and rubies and emeralds because they are all radiating; it is just that we have to see them from the right sense.

The sixth sense is the sense which has made man aware of the existence of godliness in the world. And that is the only sense which makes a disciple graduate into a devotee. That is the sense which allows the master to enter in the innermost core of the disciple; that is the center which makes the master and the devotee one soul between two bodies.

And that is the center which makes you finally aware that your being and the being of existence are not separate -- they are one. You have come back home.

Question 2:

Dhyan Amiyo, it is one of the great miseries that every lover has to face: there is no way for lovers to drop their strangeness, unfamiliarity, separation. In fact, the whole functioning of love is that lovers should be polar opposites. The farther away they are, the more attractive.

Their separation is their attraction. They come close, they come very close, but they never become one.

They come so close that it almost feels like just one step more and they will become one.

But that step has never been taken, cannot be taken out of sheer necessity, out of a natural law.

On the contrary, when they are very close, immediately they start becoming separate again, going farther away. Because when they are very close, their attraction is lost; they start fighting, nagging, being bitchy. These are ways to create the distance again. And as the distance is there, immediately they start feeling attracted. So this goes on like a rhythm:

coming closer, going away; coming closer, going away.

There is a longing to be one -- but on the level of biology, on the level of the body, becoming one is not possible. Even while making love you are not one; the separation on the physical level is inevitable.

You are saying "Lately, I have begun to realize how even my lover is a stranger to me."

This is good. This is part of a growing understanding. Only childish people think that they know each other. You don't know even yourself, how can you conceive that you know your lover?

Your longing is the seed Neither the lover knows himself nor you know yourself. Two unknown beings, two strangers who don't know anything about themselves are trying to know each other -- it is an exercise in futility. It is bound to be a frustration, a failure. And that's why all lovers are angry at each other. They think perhaps the other is not allowing an entry into his private world: "He is keeping me separate, he is keeping me a little far away." And both go on thinking in the same way. But it is not true, all complaints are false. It is simply that they don't understand the law of nature.

On the level of body, you can come close but you cannot become one. Only on the level of the heart, can you become one -- but only momentarily, not permanently.

At the level of being, you are one. There is no need to become one; it has only to be discovered.

Amiyo, you are saying, "Still there is an intense longing to overcome the separation between us." If you go on trying on the physical level, you will go on failing. The longing simply shows that love needs to go beyond the body, that love wants something higher than the body, something greater than the body, something deeper than the body.

Even the heart-to-heart meeting -- although sweet, although immensely joyful -- is still insufficient, because it happens only for a moment and then again strangers are strangers.

Unless you discover the world of being, you will not be able to fulfill your longing of becoming one. And the strange fact is: the day you become one with your lover, you will become one with the whole existence, too.

You are saying, "It almost feels as if we are lines running parallel to each other but destined never to meet." Perhaps, Amiyo, you don't know non-Euclidean geometry because it is still not taught in our educational institutes. We are still taught, in the universities, Euclidean geometry which is two thousand years old.

In Euclidian geometry, parallel lines never meet. But it has been found that if you go on and on and on they meet. The latest finding is that there are no parallel lines; that's why they meet. You cannot create two parallel lines.

New findings are very strange: you cannot even create a line, a straight line, because the earth is round -- if you create a straight line here, if you go on drawing it from both the ends and go on and go on, finally you will find it has become a circle. And if a straight line drawn to the ultimate becomes a circle, it was not a straight line in the first place; it was only part of a very big circle, and a part of a big circle is an arc, not a line. Lines have disappeared in the new, non-Euclidean geometry and when there are no lines, what to say about parallel lines?

There are no parallel lines, either.

So if it were a question of parallel lines, there is a chance that lovers could meet somewhere -- perhaps in old age when they cannot fight, they don't have any energy left; or they have become so accustomed... what is the point? The same arguments they have had, the same problems they have been having, the same conflicts; they both are bored of each other.

In the long run, lovers stop even speaking to each other. What is the point? Because to start speaking means to start an argument, and it is the same argument; it is not going to change. And they have argued it so many times and it comes to the same end. But even then, parallel lines as far as lovers are concerned... in geometry they may start meeting, but in love there is no hope; they cannot meet.

Your longing is the seed And it is good that they cannot meet because if lovers could satisfy their longing of becoming one at the level of physical body, they would never look upwards. They would never try to find that there was much more hidden in the physical body -- the consciousness, the soul, the god.

It is good that love fails, because the failure of love is bound to take you on a new pilgrimage. The longing will haunt you until it brings you to the temple where the meeting happens -- but the meeting always happens with the whole... in which your lover will be, but in which the trees will also be, and the rivers and the mountains and the stars.

In that meeting, only two things will not be there: your ego will not be there, and your lover's ego will not be there. Other than these two things, the whole existence will be there.

And these two egos were really the problem, were what was making them two parallel lines.

It is not love that is creating the trouble, it is the ego. But the longing will not be satisfied.

Birth after birth, life after life, the longing will remain there unless you discover the right door to go beyond the body and to enter the temple.

An old couple of ninety-three and ninety-five go to their lawyer and say that they want a divorce. "A divorce!" exclaims the lawyer. "At your age? But surely you need each other more than ever now, and anyway, you have been married so long, what is the point?"

"Well," says the husband, "We have been wanting a divorce for years now but we thought we would wait until the children are dead." They really waited! And all the children are dead; now there is no problem, they can have the divorce -- still no meeting, but divorce.

Just keep your longing burning, aflame; don't lose heart.

Your longing is the seed of your spirituality.

Your longing is the beginning of the ultimate union with existence. Your lover is just an excuse.

Dhyan Amiyo, don't be sad but be happy. Rejoice that there is no possibility of meeting on the physical level. Otherwise, lovers will not have any way of transformation. They will get stuck with each other, they will destroy each other. And there is no harm in loving a stranger.

In fact, it is more exciting to love a stranger.

When you were not together, there was great attraction. The more you have been together, the more the attraction has become dull. The more you have become known to each other, superficially, the less is the excitement. Life becomes very soon a routine.

People go on repeating the same thing, again and again. If you look at the faces of people in the world, you will be surprised: why do all these people look so sad? Why do their eyes look as if they have lost all hope? The reason is simple; the reason is repetition. Man is intelligent; repetition creates boredom. Boredom brings a sadness because one knows what is going to happen tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow... until one goes into the grave, it will be the same, the same story.

A Jewish man and a Polack are sitting in a bar watching the news on television. On the news, they are showing a woman standing on a ledge, threatening to jump. The Jewish man says to the Polack, "I will tell you what. I will make a bet with you: If she jumps, I get twenty dollars. If she does not, you get twenty dollars. Okay?"

"Fair enough," says the Polack.

Your longing is the seed A few minutes later the woman jumps off the ledge and kills herself. The Pole gets out his wallet and hands twenty dollars to the Jewish guy.

A few minutes later the Jewish guy turns to the Polack and says, "Look, here I can't take this twenty dollars from you. I have a confession to make: I saw this on the news earlier this afternoon. This was a repeat."

"No, no, "says the Polack," You keep the money, you won it fair and square. You see, I saw this on TV earlier in the day, too."

"You did?" says the Jewish guy. "Well, then why did you bet that the woman would not jump?"

"Well," says the Polack. "I didn't think she would be stupid enough to do it twice!"

But life is such...

This sadness in the world, this boredom and this misery can be changed if people know that they are asking for the impossible.

Don't ask for the impossible.

Find the law of existence and follow it.

Your longing to be one, is your spiritual desire, is your very essential religious nature. It is just that you are focusing yourself on the wrong spot.

Your lover is only an excuse. Let your lover be just an experience of a greater love -- the love for the whole existence.

Let your longing be a search of your own inner being; there, the meeting is already happening, there, we are already one.

There, nobody has ever separated.

The longing is perfectly right; only the object of longing is not right. That is creating the suffering and the hell. Just change the object and your life becomes a paradise.

Okay Vimal?

Yes, Osho.