Chapter 21

Prem means love, satori means insight - insight into love. And the insight into love is the window into god. If one can understand what love is, one has started moving towards god. Love is the first glimpse, the first flower of spring. The coming of the first flower heralds the spring, announcing that it will be here soon. Love is the fragrance of god that announces he is very close by. Love is exactly the sound of his footsteps, and if you can follow the sound of his footsteps, you will find him!

Prem means love, ananda means bliss. Love is the master key; it opens all the doors of life, and not only of life but of death too. Without love a man lives in a closed world. That closed world is what religions call hell. It creates suffocation, claustrophobia, because without love you are left in a totally lonely state. Without love you are left uncommunicated with, unbridged, like an island in the vast sea, lost. Love is the bridge between one consciousness and the other, and ultimately the bridge between the individual and the universal.

It is the master key: it not only opens the locks of this life, it opens the locks of all possible lives; divine life is also available to it. That state of ultimate flowering, opening, is ananda, bliss. Love is the key, ananda is the palace in which you enter when you have opened all the doors.

Prem Nirguna - ineffable love.

You can feel it but you can never know it. You can experience it but you cannot express it. It is bigger than words, it is higher than language. Language is too much of the mundane and the trivia. It has been developed in the marketplace, it belongs to the marketplace. It is utilitarian. Love has no use, it is not a commodity. It is utterly useless, like a rose flower or like a full moon.

If there were no moon nothing would have been missed. If there were no rose flowers the world would have continued. But the world would have been very very poor; it would have been

unfortunate. Without love man can exist, but without love existence has no poetry in it. Love brings significance, love brings a grandeur. But that grandeur is of the beyond and is ineffable, inexpressible, indefinable. That is the meaning of nirguna. One cannot say, 'This is it!'... One becomes dumb.

[Osho speaks about the Enlightenment Intensive group:]

The group is hard, I know, but it helps immensely. It is worth taking the pain of it.

Sometimes pain is so cleansing that pleasure is nothing compared to it, to the value of it. Pleasure is sometimes just a wastage of time, an occupation. Pleasure is almost always superficial. It has never given anybody any depth, it keeps people shallow. That's why the rich people look so shallow:

they don't have any depth. They move from one sensation to another, they live on the surface.

Pain brings depth. It goes like an arrow into the heart, it pierces; its thrust is deep. It hurts, but once the arrow has penetrated your being, you will become aware of a different plane. You will feel that you were not that superficiality, that you have a certain depth; but each depth has to be attained through a death, and that death is painful.

Intensive Enlightenment is of immense value. So go through the pain and you will come out of it so fresh, young, as if you had taken a spiritual bath.

[Osho gives a new name to a swami who had by mistake received by post a sannyas name for a woman.]

Prem means love, anahata means soundless, silent. When love is deep it is unutterable. Only the shallow love speaks, can speak; the deep love remains silent. In the depths of being, words and thoughts disappear. And whenever one faces love, one is simply speechless: one feels simply helpless, possessed, mad, overwhelmed.

You have a very very loving heart; maybe that's why accidentally it happened that you received a ma name. There was no need to be angry about it, because you have a feminine heart. And it is beautiful to have a feminine heart; the male mind is always ugly. The world has suffered too much from the male mind. The female mind has to be brought in more and more, soft qualities have to be developed. Life has to be made more round, more graceful. All that is beautiful is feminine.

Even when a man is beautiful he has something of the feminine. When a woman is ugly she has something of the male. Beauty is feminine because it cannot be hard, it cannot be stonelike. It can only be like the petals of a rose or a lotus.

So never try to prevent your feminine heart from taking possession of you. We have been taught from the very childhood, 'Don't be a sissy, don't be a girl, don't be girlish. Be a man!' By man they have meant: be a chauvinist, be an egoist, be aggressive, because life is a competition, a struggle, a survival for the fittest, so be violent.

That stage of being violent and barbarian has passed! Now everybody can afford to be feminine.

The century of the feminine is just on the verge of beginning.

Veet means beyond, itihas means history. Man can live in two ways: one is in time, one is beyond time. History is the name of the life that we live in time; it leaves marks in the temporal. But there is also a life which we live beyond time - it leaves no marks anywhere. It is not just an accident that the existence of Jesus is doubtful, so is the existence of Krishna, Lao Tzu and Zarathustra.

Why is their existence doubtful? They have not really left any mark in time. They lived a life of interiority, they lived in themselves. Their life had no visible, tangible impact, but they transformed human consciousness. They lived in consciousness and they impressed human consciousness. But history takes no note of them. History takes note of Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Tamerlaine; history takes note of people who live in time and leave marks on the sands of time. But people like Buddha, Christ, almost pass from existence as if they have not passed at all. That's what I mean by going beyond history. Don't live in events: live in awareness.

Amitabh is one of the names of Gautam Buddha; it means infinite light. Get more and more in tune with Buddha - that will be of immense help to you. Just contemplating on Buddha, just thinking of his silenceS of his grace, of his tranquillity, his serenity, will help you Keep a small statue of Buddha in your room, and whenever you have time just look at the statue.

The Buddha statue was not created just as an image, it was created as an object for meditation. It does not represent the real Buddha; he was not like that. It is a metaphor. Rather than representing the Buddha's physical shape, it represents his inner grace. It is not that he was just of the same physical shape, the same face, the same nose and the same eyes. That is not at all the point. It is not realistic, it is surrealistic. It says something of the real that is beyond the so-called reality. So it is a yantra, mm? - just looking at it one can fall into meditation.

That's why thousands of Buddha statues were created; no other man had so many statues as Buddha. There are temples, single temples, which have ten thousand Buddha statues just to create an atmosphere of meditativeness. All around wherever you look you see Buddha, the Buddha shape, the Buddha being - that silence, that grace, those closed eyes, that still posture, that balance, that symmetry. Those Buddha statues are music in marble... sermons in stone.

Choose some Buddhist meditation which will be helpful to you - Zazen, Vipassana - and it will take you far away. It will help you evaporate, it will help you go beyond the desert....

[A sannyasin, returning to the west, had previously written to Osho about starting a centre there - she wants to share Osho without coming on as a missionary. Osho had told her no need to.]

No, I felt that you are too worried about it, that's why I said that; otherwise there is no problem. Make a centre! That will be easier, far easier.

And when I say don't be a missionary, I mean don't impose yourself upon others. Share, but don't impose. Sharing is totally different, it is very respectful towards the other person. Sharing is not violent, imposing is. You are not respectful towards the other person, you are simply using the other person as a means; you are only interested in converting him. That is wrong. Never use a person as a means to anything, because each person is an end unto himself.

The missionary is very disrespectful towards the person. His whole idea is how to convert him, how to make one more person part of his sect. He is not really interested in sharing. Sharing is totally

different: you share because you have experienced something, because you have seen something.

You share unconditionally. If the person becomes converted that is just a by-product but that is not the motive of it. If he does not become part of it, you are perfectly happy: happy, because you shared. Your work is finished. You are not looking for any result.

You meet a person and you share whatsoever you have seen, and there it is finished! Now, how the person responds to it is up to him. He may forget all about it; that's perfectly good, he has the right!

He is not obliged to remember it. If he does not even thank you, that's perfectly okay, because even to ask for a thank you is ugly. You shared out of your joy, not for anything else. Or he may jump into the boat with you. That too is okay. Sharing is not result-oriented; the missionary is result-oriented:

he shares only to convert. Sharing converts sometimes; that is an altogether different matter.

I saw in your letter that you are too worried that you may become a missionary. And it is good to be conscious about the possibility, otherwise one tends to become a missionary. Just share and forget about it. Sow the seeds and go on moving and don't look back to see what is happening to those seeds. In their time, when the spring comes, something will happen.

The founder of the Theosophical movement, Blavatsky, used to carry two bags on both her shoulders, big bags, full of seeds. Wherever she would travel... if she were travelling in a train, she would sit by the side of the window and go on throwing seeds. She might never come across that patch of land again. People were puzzled and they would ask, 'What are you doing?' She would say, 'These are beautiful seeds, and when the rains come they will bloom.' Those people were naturally puzzled. They would say, 'Will you be coming this way again?' She would say, 'I am a world traveller, I may never come again; but that doesn't matter! Somebody will pass, somebody will see the flowers, somebody will be happy - that is enough. Just to conceive of it, to contemplate on it, that next time after the rains and when this train goes by, thousands of passengers will be able to smell those flowers! To see those colours is more than enough! What more can one ask?'

This is what sharing is: you simply go on throwing the seeds. So you travel, mm? and throw the seeds! Good.