Chapter 11
[A sannyasin had previously told Osho he had powerful experiences of death in his meditation. Osho had suggested he do the humming meditation. Tonight he says he is having problems with it: I feel morose. I don't feel happy. I used to feel happy before, but now I'm just going into my shell. I don't feel like doing anything.]
It happens.... If you have ordinarily been happy and outgoing and enjoying things, it simply means that you have been repressing the other side.
People who laugh go on repressing tears. In fact they laugh so that nobody should become aware of their tears - their laughter is a defence. They are afraid of the tears. So they go on laughing and enjoying, but they remain on the surface. Then they meditate, and whatsoever has been repressed, bubbles up, surfaces. Then one starts feeling morose, sad. But it is a good sign; it simply shows that the other side of your being has been entered.
One has to understand that life is both. The person who is really free and alive, is free to move from one polarity to another. He is not fixed in one pattern; he is neither happy nor unhappy. If he becomes happy, he is happy; if he becomes unhappy, he is really unhappy. If he is loving, he is really loving; if he becomes angry, he is really angry - he lives both the polarities. You can rely on his anger and on his love and on his sadness. He is not inauthentic, he is true.
Your happiness was not true - you were managing it, manipulating it. If it were true, meditation would deepen it, because meditation deepens whatsoever is true. Your real situation inside was morose - but you had been wearing a face, a mask. We all learn how to be happy and to go on laughing and joking . . . that's how the whole society goes on, a merry-go-round. But everybody is carrying a deep dark night within them, and nobody is even aware of it.
When you enter a meditative state you will first enter this dark night of the soul. If you can pass through it - and there is no difficulty in passing through it - then for the first time you will become aware that your happiness was not true. False happiness will go and real sadness will come, and only after real sadness will real happiness surface. Then you will know that the false happiness was even worse than the real sadness, because at least in that sadness there is a reality. If you are sad - but truly and sincerely sad - that sadness will enrich you.
It gives you a depth, an insight. It makes you aware of life and its infinite possibilities and the limitedness of the human mind, the smallness of human consciousness encountering the infinity all around; the fragile life always surrounded by death. When you are really sad you become aware of all these things. You become aware that life is not just life... it is death too.
In a true insight one has to go through both. I know that this sadness is good, so don't be afraid.
If you really want to be happy, just don't go on pretending, playing the game of being happy. As unhappiness comes, soon you will see that it will darken, it will become intense. But when the night is dark, the morning is very close. The night becomes darkest when the morning is really close.
So don't lose courage, and don't try to escape into the old ways. Nothing is wrong in being sad, but our whole conditioning is wrong. You have been taught, everybody has been taught, not to be sad.
But I teach you to be truly sad, because sadness has something tremendously beautiful to give to you.
Happiness gives you the feeling of vastness, and sadness gives you the feeling of depth - and both are needed. For a really rich consciousness, both are needed. People who have lived superficially happy are always shallow. They cannot give birth to stars... they don't have that much chaos in them. They are mediocre. People who have touched deep sadness have become aware of many things which ordinarily no one becomes aware of. Everybody has to pass through the school of sadness, so accept it.
And the uneasiness is coming because you are fighting it; the discomfort is felt because you are fighting it. Accept it, relax into it. Whatsoever life gives, accept in deep gratitude. Don't poke your nose in. Simply allow life to take you over, to possess you. Relax into it and then the discomfort will go. Then you will start enjoying sadness - and I tell you, it is beautiful. Once you stop fighting, once you accept it, there is nothing but to enjoy. It will give you a silence, a deep humming. Of course it is sad, but beautiful. Even the night has its own beauty, and those who cannot see the beauty of the night will miss much.
Once you allow the discomfort that you feel coming, the strain on the body and the tensions will disappear. Just relax, and as you go deeper a totally different quality of happiness will arise - that's what we call bliss, anand.
It is not of that happiness that you have known; it is not shallow and it is not against sadness. It is great enough to comprehend sadness, it is vast enough. The sadness can live in it as a guest, and the blissful state of consciousness does not lose anything because of the sadness; it gains much - it gives colour, it gives contrast.
So just wait amd don't be in a hurry. Things are going as they should. But I can understand your trouble ....
[The sannyasin answers: It's very uncomfortable when I'm working It starts with the heat at the navel, and then I feel all kinds of currents.]
Mm, they are there. So do one thing: when it becomes too much, too unbearable, just close the room and dance a wild dance; just for five minutes so the energy can move easily. Just close your eyes, relax the body, and say to the infinite energy, 'Take possession and move me, howsoever you want.' Your hands will come up and you will start moving; cooperate with that movement. Suddenly you will feel you are in the grip of something greater than you... you will be possessed. You will see that you are not doing it. It is as if you are a puppet, and some unknown energy is dancing through you.
In Indonesia they call it latihan, and it is one of the most beautiful methods of meditation. Just allow yourself to be possessed and the movements come by themselves. Nobody knows what shape they will take, and you are not to manipulate anything on your own. Just for five, ten minutes, and then you will feel the energy has settled, the heat has gone, and you are feeling completely relaxed.
So whenever you feel, you do this. Soon you will really laugh, and then you will know what laughter is.
Your wife has come?
[The sannyasin's wife, not yet a sannyasin, came forward and asked Osho if meditation disturbed family life.]
Not at all. You cannot have a real family life without meditation, you cannot really love without meditation... but in the old days it did disturb - because all those conceptions were wrong.
I am not life negating. I am absolutely affirmative. Whatsoever one is, one is not to escape from anywhere - family, responsibility, work - from nowhere; rather one has to go deeper into it. So don't be worried about that, mm? About my sannyasins there is no problem at all.
But in India the old conception is that if somebody becomes a sannyasin then the family life is going to be disturbed. In fact there is no family life ordinarily, just pretensions. People go on managing somehow, dragging. Once one starts feeling really blissful there is a possibility to share that bliss with somebody else - with the wife, the husband, the children. Then love takes on a totally different quality. Then it is not a duty... it is an overflowing of energy, a sharing. It is a simple gift, unconditional, with no strings attached - and there is a great difference.
[He] can love you because he married you, because you are his wife, it is his duty to love you. That's one thing, and very superficial. Duty is a dirty word. He is fulfilling a social obligation - one has to do it, so one does it. But when he really becomes silent and happy inside then he wants to share.
Then he does not love you because you are his wife. He simply loves you - it is not of any because.
He simply loves you because he has so much to give, and he will be grateful to you because you have accepted. He is not obliging you. In fact whosoever accepts his gift of love is obliging him.
Then love is almost like prayer. It is not a question of husband and wife but of two beings, pure beings, in deep communion. I am not against anything, I am for everything, but things have to be transformed.
So don't be afraid. Help him. and you also start meditating a little - follow him.
[Another sannyasin says: Why can't I stop eating?... But it's not the question. But behind that, something else. It sounds ridiculous.... ]
No, don't judge. If you say ridiculous, you have already condemned it - and that may be part of the problem. That is not the way to get out of any problem. Don't call things names - try to understand.
If a person is eating more it is a symptom of a certain undercurrent. Food is always a substitute for love. People who don't love, who somehow miss a life of love, start eating more - it is a love- substitute.
When a child is born, his first love and his first food are the same thing - the mother. So there is a deep association between food and love; in fact food comes first and then love follows. First the child eats the mother, then by and by he becomes aware that the mother is not just food - she loves him too. But of course for that a certain Growth is necessary. The first day the child cannot understand love. He understands the language of food, the natural primitive language of all animals. The child is born with hunger; food is needed immediately. Love will not be needed until long after - it is not so much of an emergency. One can live without love one's whole life, but one cannot live without food - that's the trouble.
So the child becomes aware of the association of food and love. By and by he feels too, that whenever the mother is very loving, she gives her breast in a different way. When she is not loving, but angry, sad, she gives the breast very reluctantly, or does not give it at all. So the child becomes aware that whenever the mother is loving, whenever food is available, love is available. Whenever food is not available, the child feels love is not available, and vice versa. This is in the unconscious.
Somewhere you are missing a life of love so you eat more - that's a substitute. You go on filling yourself with food and leave no space inside. So there is no question of love, because there is no space left. And with food things are simple because food is dead. You can go on eating as much as you want - food cannot say no. If you stop eating, the food cannot say that you are offending it. One remains a master with food.
But in love you are no longer the master. Another being enters into your life, a dependency enters into your life. You are no longer independent, and that's the fear. Ego wants to be independent and ego won't allow you to love; it will only allow you to eat more. If you want to love then the ego has to be dropped.
It is not a question of food - food is simply symptomatic. So I will not say anything about food, about dieting or doing anything. Because that won't help you, you won't succeed. You can try a thousand and one ways; that won't help. Rather, I will say forget about food, go on eating as much as you want.
Start a life of love, fall in love, find somebody who you can love, and immediately you will see you are not eating so much. Have you watched? - if you are happy you don't eat too much. If you are sad you eat too much. People think that when they are happy they eat too much, but that is absolute nonsense. A happy person feels so fulfilled that he feels no space inside. An unhappy man goes on throwing food into himself.
So I won't touch on food at all... and you continue as you are, but find a lover.
[The sannyasin answers: But I have a lover... And I still eat. It started when I left here two years ago. I went back to Canada, and I started to feel I wanted to eat things that I didn't eat in India... ]
The lover is a man...
[The sannyasin answers: Yes.]
... that won't help much. Your Montreal is almost all homosexual, the whole city.
That won't help much, that cannot become the real thing, because both the energies are the same.
It cannot give you a deep fulfillment - at the most it remains masturbatory. A woman is needed. It is as if you are trying to be reborn from a man. I think sooner or later in Montreal people will try that - to be finished with women completely.
But you are born out of a woman, and deep inside the unconscious you carry an image of a woman, not a man. And unless you find a woman with whom you can be in the same deep love as you were with your mother, into whom you can again enter as you were in the womb of your mother, you will not be fulfilled. You are deceived - homosexuality will not help. It can give you a certain comfort - but it is false.
To fit perfectly a man needs a woman, a woman needs a man. They are polar opposites, and that polarity is needed. It is just as if you are trying to create electricity without polar opposites, without positive and negative. Sex is a deep function of bio-electricity. You are an electrical phenomenon, a woman is an electrical phenomenon. She is negative, you are positive; she is passive, you are active. When the active energy meets with the passive energy in deep communion, there is a fulfillment, there is orgasm. A cosmic experience happens which leaves no emptiness in you, at least for the time being.
But your making love to a man, or a woman making love to a woman, is not going to help. I am not against homosexuality: I am simply stating a fact. T have no condemnation for it, but it will not be fulfilling - that much I have to say.
... Find a woman. If you cannot find one, tell me.
[The sannyasin answers: I feel very great friendship towards women.... I feel love, but I don't feel like I want to make love.]
You will have to. It has become a habit and you have to get out of it. It has become a dead routine.
Make a friendship with a man - and that you are doing with women. Make love to a woman - and that you are doing with men. You are topsy-turvy.
[He replies: But I was also married.]
You remained homosexual. You have made love to a woman but you were never in it.
So try it again, and try here. Just open your eyes and look again. I know how difficult it is, because once homosexuality settles in the mind you are attracted only towards men. Suddenly women don't exist; they are no longer attractive.
But this is dangerous. Then this food problem will remain with you your whole life - and this is not the only problem. Others will remain and it will be difficult to solve them. You just have a look. Find a woman, and even if you just feel friendship, bring her to me, because I will have to talk to the woman to force you out of your habit. You will need a very very wise woman to bring you out of your rut. I will make her wise. You just find one! And if you cannot, I will find a woman and force her to seduce you!
But first you try - because the very effort will be very very good. So from tomorrow morning you start looking. There are many beautiful women around here, don't be worried. Somebody will take pity!
Once you enter into a relationship, the right relationship in which things flow, your food problem will disappear. It has to disappear; it is not a problem, it is just symptomatic.
Try, and then we will see. Make it a real search, sincerely try to find a woman, mm? Because it is time... if you delay, then every day it will be later and later, and things will become more difficult.
[Another sannyasin says: I want to come closer to you, but it feels that the more I'm here, the more afraid I feel.
For hours after the lecture I feel this fear inside... and yet I love it too.]
It is natural, fear is natural... because coming closer to me means, in a certain way, dying. You can come closer to me only in one way, and that is if you lose your ego. So fear is bound to be there, mm? - the fear of death, the fear of losing your ego. But don't be afraid. Let the fear be there, don't be afraid of the fear; let it be there, accept it.
You are becoming closer every day, and the closer you will come, the more the fear will become an almost alive, throbbing thing in you. But there is a climax to it. Let it come to the climax, and then it will simply disappear, and with it you also disappear.
So I am a cross... fear is natural, mm? In India we have a saying that a master is death. He is. I cannot give you a new life if I cannot give you a death. Only if I become your death can I become a resurrection. Your birth is possible only through death.
Accept that there is fear, but go on becoming closer and closer.
[A sannyasin says: My father has been very very ill, and I have been told that he will die in a matter of weeks. Communication has always been only on one level. and it's always been difficult to get beneath that. I feel this may be a time in which it is possible.]
It will be possible... I will help. You go, mm?
Communication with parents is always difficult, very difficult. But if you understand just a little, then things can become very easy. Go back,. take my books, my tapes, and talk more about me, about meditation. That will be something new, and it will not bring back the old pattern.
In fact whenever the son is with the father, the problem is about what to talk. The father has lived a different life, in a different time - and the times are changing so fast; the gap between generations is really tremendous. It has never been so great. The son lives in a totally different world, centuries apart. Now the rift is so big that even if you shout, it never reaches to the other shore. So the first thing to find is a bridge about which you can talk.
Now there is something new - go as a sannyasin, in orange, and he will not be able to categorise you immediately as his son, and that will be the whole change. It has happened to many sannyasins.
Once they go home in orange there is a shock. Parents don't know what has happened - suddenly you are unrecognisable. Somebody else has come back - he looks like their son, but something has changed. And that change will make it possible to communicate.
And these may be his last days, so tell him about the Nadabrahma - the humming meditation, mm?
If he can do that and can move into death in a meditative state, that is the greatest gift you can give him. Then his whole future will be different, because death decides the next birth. If you die meditating, prayerful, in deep silence and tranquility, you are born in a totally different way. This life is gone, but this life is not all - the other life is coming. One door is being closed... another door is being opened. Forget about this door. Now something can be done about the new door that is going to be open. It has still to be, it is still a potentiality. Everything can be done about it.
In the East, death has been used as much as life, and we have many techniques of how to help a dying person to choose a better life next time. You can read something about Bardo; it is a tibetan method for a dying person, and one of the best in the world. When a person is dying, that meditation has to be done. But it will be a little complicated, so if you can do the humming meditation that will relax him very much. Just show him, do it with him, and do it as forcefully as you can, and then he will respond very deeply. He will enjoy it, lying on the bed, waiting for death.
In the West, people are doing absolute nonsense things about dying. Firstly, they won't say to a person that he is dying....
... that is absolutely foolish, because then he remains continually worried about this life, because he thinks he is going to live, and everybody is pretending that he is going to live.
So just find a silent moment when nobody is there, and release the news to him. It may be shocking but it is good, because once a person knows he is going to die, immediately his interest in this world is lost - immediately. Just think of it. Once you know that you are going to die within days, immediately this world - the money, the bank, the business, this and that - is useless. Now everything is no more than a dream, and you are already awakening. Once you say to a man that he is going to die within a certain limit, and it is certain, the man is already dead in a way, and he starts thinking about the future - then meditation is possible.
If you tell him that he is going to live and that everything is okay, and doctors and the hospitals and relatives are pretending and smiling, you are deceiving the man, and he will go on clinging to things
that are useless, futile, rubbish. Once he knows he is going to die, he will drop that rubbish of his own accord. Immediately his whole vision is transformed. He is no longer here, he has started to look to the future, because when one is going on a journey, one starts preparation.
If you have to leave tomorrow, you start packing your suits, and you are no longer worried about this room in the hotel. In fact you are no longer here; you are managing your suitcases and things, and you are thinking about the journey. The same happens to a person when you tell a person that he is going to die, that death is certain and cannot be avoided and he should not go on fooling around; now the decisive moment has come and he has already wasted enough life.... Immediately the man turns his back on the world and starts peeking into the darkness of the future.
At that moment, if you tell him about meditation he will be willing to do it - and that can be one of the greatest gifts....
[A couple ask about their relationship. The swami says it has deteriorated. The ma says he is making a fuss because the relationship is round and round anyway. The swami says: She slapped me today!]
She did well!...
Ordinarily, whatsoever you call love comes to this point sooner or later, because you don't know what love is. Just the novelty of a relationship is not love. Just the novelty of a relationship is not beauty, mm? That is just infatuation, and sooner or later that is finished, and then reality starts working.
Then it is much ado about nothing; it is a fuss, and meaningless.
But this is good - to understand how a beautiful relationship comes to such a sour end always. You bring it to that end. Mind cannot remain in any permanent state. If it is happy it is getting ready to be unhappy. It goes on like a wheel. If you continue to be together, again after a few days things will settle, then again this will come up. This is a vicious circle - and one has to understand and become aware of why this is so.
Once you start depending on the other, once you start feeling that your happiness depends on the other, the misery has settled. Share moments, but don't depend. So it has been good.
(to the swami) Go home, and don't do anything about it. Leave it as it is. (to the ma) And when he comes back then we will see - but don't do anything about it now, otherwise things will go wrong more and more. And this is a better situation to depart. If things were really going well, it would have been difficult, but now you both will feel relieved, happy.
Every man has to pass through many experiences; only then maturity arises and there is a ripeness... these are all helpful.
In the beginning when two persons meet there are no expectations; everything is unexpected, everything is beautiful. By and by expectations come in and then misery, because your expectations can never be fulfilled. When they are not fulfilled you start being angry, fighting, throwing responsibility onto the other. Then the whole business becomes ridiculous.
Leave each other completely cleanly. It was a dream passed - now don't make it a nightmare.
[A sannyasin said he was very surprised about what Osho had said about homosexuality earlier in this darshan.]
Mm mm, think about it. It is simply a fact. I have nothing against homosexuality, I have no condemnation about anything, but this is a fact.
A child is born auto-sexual, masturbatory. In the second stage he moves towards homosexuality. A boy is interested in boys, a girl is interested in girls. Then m the third stage, one becomes interested in the opposite. But one can remain stuck in the first stage. Then a man or a woman remains masturbatory. But that is childish, and you are losing much for nothing, because the same energy could have been used for a great transformation. and a great experience. Masturbation is the lowest possibility of sex. It may be helpful as a relief, but it won't give you fulfillment.
One can be stuck in the homosexual stage. This is better than masturbation - at least one moves to somebody else, at least a relationship is created, at least one goes out and makes contact - but it is not enough. It is more satisfying than masturbation, but not enough.
When you love the opposite you have moved to the highest peak of sex energy. Then polarities are like peaks - energies moving opposite and creating a great tension, and then coming together. The further apart you are, the deeper is going to be the orgasm; the meeting is going to be a tremendous phenomenon.
These are the three stages of human sexuality. If you pass from these three, only then the fourth is possible - which is beyond sex, which Indians have called brahmacharya. But that is possible only when you have passed from all these natural stages. It is very difficult to become brahmacharya from homosexuality; it is even more difficult to come from masturbation.
I know there are a few profits in the homosexual stage, and the greatest is that because you are not opposites, the conflict is not so much - hence homosexuals are gay. Heterosexuals are always fighting because of that oppositeness - so that fight is worth it.
And in that tension, some harmony is possible which is not possible in homosexuality because there is no tension. In masturbation there is no problem, not at all. It is the least problematic because there is no other. In homosexuality there is a little problem, and in heterosexuality, much. People become afraid of the problems, and that's what's happening in the West.
Many people have become afraid of the man/woman relationship. It has become so ugly, with conflict, possessiveness, this and that - it is better to settle for less, and avoid this conflict.
But when you avoid conflict, you avoid some beautiful things too which were possible in it, and only m it. So you think about it!
[An elderly visitor says: I have come to India now because I want to make a pilgrimage of gratitude for the spiritual gifts which I have received for twenty or thirty years from indian saints - from Ramkrishna, Vivekananda and so on.
I feel so grateful and I have so much gratitude - it becomes love and happiness. Only since one month I have read your books, and it seems in my heart that I recognise many things before I know them.
Now here I try to make the meditations. I used to always do it alone, and in silence, so in these groups I feel a little bit bad because I don't know... I would like to ask if they are the only way or... ]
Silent meditation is as good too, but it is my understanding that if you can do a few of these meditations and then you do silent meditation, it will go very very deep.
You have been doing silent meditation for so long, so for a few days do these meditations. It will be difficult because you have. been doing meditation silently, and these are just the opposite. Do these for a few days, and then again do the silent one, and you will see what has happened. Your silent meditation will go deeper than it has ever gone before - because these are cathartic methods.
In the old meditations you simply sit silently doing nothing, just trying to watch, not even thinking.
That's good, but whatsoever you have accumulated remains in the substratum; it remains like a barrier inside. These methods are to throw out all that is accumulated there, and for many lives we have been accumulating. That has to be thrown out.
It is as if your house has not been cleaned for years and much dust has settled. If you sit in a corner the dust is settled and everything looks okay. But if you start cleaning the house much dirt will arise, and you will feel the difference very much. It was better to sit silently!
But once the house is cleaned, then when you sit silently there will be a totally different quality in it.