Darshan 29 July 1976

Prem means love and divya means divine, divine love. Remember it. It should not be just a name.

It should become a remembrance - that love is divine and that only love is divine, and there is no other door to the divine than love. The more you love, the closer you are to god. And if one can dissolve completely into love, one becomes one with god.

[Osho said one should be loving and respectful to everything - even inanimate things - because what one loved was not the question, but the attitude of love.... ]

That love gives you depth and by and by it transforms you. All other temples are false. Unless you knock at the door of love, you knock in vain. And whatsoever a person does to you, never allow anybody to destroy your love. Even if somebody cheats you, don't hate. Let him cheat - that is his problem - but your love continues undisturbed. Somebody is not good towards you; it doesn't matter. He will reap his own actions. You need not be worried about it. Go on loving.

So love should be unconditional. It should not make any conditions. One should not say, 'I will love you only if you do this, if you are good to me, or if you are beautiful, or if you are this and that.' That will destroy love. A conditional love is not love at all. So make love more and more unconditional.

And at this age if you can understand it, your whole life will be transformed, transfigured. This is the right age to start something, because once you move on a wrong path, it is very difficult to change it because much becomes invested in it. Right now you are just beginning to enter the world. You will move into relationships, you will find friends and lovers, and things will start growing now. You are on the threshold.

So let this be your constant meditation: that love is divine, and all that is divine is bound to be based somewhere in love. Love functions as earth functions for trees.

Everything divine is rooted in love.

[A sannyasin who works in the canteen says: I have a lot of energy, but I can't just be myself.]

I was expecting this. Basically you are a doer, so if you have something to do you will feel good. But that something also has to be something difficult, otherwise there is no challenge. That something has to be arduous; that something has to be such that your ego can feel that you are really doing something great. But this problem has to be understood - because this is a sort of disease.

Because of this disease many people waste their life in doing - doing this, doing that - for no purpose at all. They just want to put themselves in difficult situations so that they can enhance their egos. They want to struggle. Their whole interest is in the struggle, in the fighting. So if they can find something to fight, good. But even that happiness is not real happiness, because sooner or later you will become efficient in doing that thing, then it is finished. Then you want some new peak, another mountain to climb. And by this time, meanwhile, life is slipping by. You are losing time each moment, and death is approaching closer and closer. So you have to understand this.

If he doesn't have anything to do, then the doer's mind always plans. That means he is doing in fantasy. If he cannot do really, he will dream, but that too is futile.

... You have to do two things. One is, start taking interest in small things, very small things, because in your being a doer there are two things involved - your ego and your energy. The energy is perfectly right. You have active energy, a male energy, a positive energy, and you are a high-energy person. The other thing is your ego. If you try to drop both you will never be able to, because one is real and one is unreal, and both are tied together. So you have to untie them inside. The energy has to be saved.

You have to do many things but you have not to be a doer. You have to be active, otherwise you will become very sad and depressed because it will not be natural to you. It is natural to you to be active - and the difference has to be understood. When you become a doer, the ego enters. If you are simply active, then there is no problem.

That's why I say that the first thing is to take interest in small things which are not a challenge. The canteen is perfectly good. Cleaning the floor is perfectly good. It has no challenge in it. In fact the ego feels humiliated: ...'what are you doing cleaning the floor? What are you doing cleaning the bathroom? Are you meant to do this? You are meant to do great things! Your destiny is to be an alexander or an adolf hitler or some other madman.' So when you are cleaning the floor just enjoy it.

The enjoyment should come through activity, not through ego-enhancement. So this type of small thing is very very good.

[Osho recounted the story of a muslim emperor, abrahim, who left his throne and went to be initiated by a master. The master told him to immediately shed his clothes and run naked in the streets of his own town, beating his head with a shoe.

One of the mystic's disciples protested on behalf of the king, saying this was being very hard on the poor man - after all he was emperor and this was his very own capital. The mystic replied that when you take off your clothes you take off your defenses too, you become a nobody.... ]

Have you observed this - that when you are naked, you are nobody? When you are dressed in your particular dress, you are somebody. Can you make any distinction between a criminal and a high court judge if they are standing naked between the murderer and the president of a country if they are standing naked? Impossible to judge. But if they are in their regalia - the king with the crown and the judge with his wig and black suit - then of course one knows who one is. We know people through their clothes. Naked, a person simply becomes undefended.

The mystic said, 'It is not hard. He has been a king. He has too many defenses that ordinarily people don't have; that's why I have to be hard on him.' The disciple asked, 'Why are you asking him to run around the town? You never asked us. And why this nonsense that he should beat his head with a shoe?!' The mystic said, 'I wanted him to feel humiliated. If it is not accepted, if it is not welcomed, then he will not be able to do it. He will simply refuse it. So it is a kind of a test.'

If you accept something, even humiliation, it becomes humbleness and it is a beautiful quality.

But if you resist, if you don't want it, then only does it look like humiliation. Humiliation is just an interpretation of the ego.

So the first thing I would like to tell you is to take an interest in very small things which are not projects of the ego. Even if you do them well, nobody is going to award you a nobel prize. Howsoever clean you make the bathroom or the floor, and howsoever well you work in the canteen, you are not going to get any victoria cross. Nobody will ever know anything about you. Nobody will say, 'Heeren the great.' Nobody will ever hear your name.

So, activity has to be allowed, and be as active as you can so that no energy remains pent up. Don't dam up the energy; let it flow. If you have nothing to do, go and run around koregaon park (the area in which the ashram resides). I will not be hard on you, and I will not say to be naked. But if it is needed, one day I will say it to you. And I am not going to give you a shoe right now, but one day, if you don't follow, you will have to do that too. You are a high-energy person. If the energy remains there it will create many troubles for you. It becomes sore, it becomes like a wound, it starts hurting.

It recoils on yourself and becomes self-destructive.

Start working and be completely involved. You are not going to make history, and people who are here with me are here only to know how to drop out of history, how to become nobodies. So don't preserve energy, because there is nothing else to do but these small things.

This ordinary life is the only life there is. And this ordinary life needs no planning - it is so simple.

Only cunning things need planning because they are so complex. You have to rehearse many times, you have to think about this and that, and you have to manipulate many strings. And then too nobody can ever be certain that you will succeed because things are so complex, and for those complex things there are many competitors.

If you want to be great in the eyes of the world, if you are seeking the good opinion of others, then you are in a very competitive madhouse. Many are doing the same. Whatsoever you do, you can never rely on it succeeding, and even if it succeeds, it brings nothing. It brings only more projects, more plans. If you earn money, by the time you have earned it the desire has arisen for more money, so you invest that money to earn more money and again you invest and go on investing. By the time death arrives you have much money and an unlived life.

And the second thing: happiness is not something that happens to you. It is already happening - you have just to be receptive. It is not that it happens sometimes and it doesn't happen sometimes.

It is a decision on your part. Every morning when you get up, decide whether you want to be happy or unhappy today, and then insist for that the whole day.

Just today I was reading about a man who received a bill from the plumber. The plumber said.

'Within three weeks, pay forty dollars for the work I have done for you. If it is not paid within three weeks you will have to pay five dollars more - forty-five dollars.'

The man was very angry, annoyed, and he showed that letter to a friend. The friend said, 'My plumber is very clever. He also writes the same thing but in a different way. If it were a letter from my plumber he would have written: "Pay me forty-five dollars - that is the charge for my services - but if you pay within three weeks, you can pay five dollars less."' Then one feels very happy because the choice is positive.

One sufi mystic relates in his autobiography that when he was studying with his master, he and a colleague were both walking in the garden of the master. They were smoking and they felt guilty.

The friend said, 'It would be good if we asked the master.' These few hours were given to them for a walking meditation; they had to walk in the garden and meditate as in vipassana. So they said, 'Yes, it is better to ask rather than feeling guilty.'

So one went to the master and asked, 'Can I smoke while meditating?' The master said, 'Certainly not!' Next day when he came to the garden, the other was smoking. He said, 'Have you not been to the master?' The second replied, 'I have been and he said. "Yes, you can smoke."' The first said, 'This seems to be unjust. He denied me absolutely, in no uncertain terms. He said, "No, certainly not!" How is it that he allowed you?'

The second said, 'I think we must have asked differently. I asked him "Can I meditate while smoking?" He said, "Certainly, of course!"'

It is the same thing. Life brings the same thing to everybody, but if you have a wrong attitude, a negative attitude, or are asking a wrong question or knocking at the wrong spot, you go on missing.

So as I see it, it is not that unhappiness happens to people - they have decided to remain unhappy.

Maybe it is not conscious, maybe it is unconscious and they have forgotten.

So try this for three weeks, and stick with the decision. And once you know the knack, it is so simple... It is the simplest thing in the world to be happy or to be unhappy. And one is always the master. You may not know it, but one is always the master.

[See 'the cypress in the courtyard', friday june 4th, where Osho talks about mastery of emotions and recounts an incident in the life of bennett, one of gurdjieff's disciples.]

[A sannyasin says she gets an empty feeling in her stomach which she has always associated with fear. It happens after meditation.

Osho checks her energy.]

Mm... it has nothing to do with fear. You may be afraid of it but it has nothing to do with fear. It is the emptiness that comes when you start meditating. Allow this emptiness to be there more and more and don't try to fill it with anything.

Love the very feeling of emptiness, and out of this emptiness something will arise, something will descend into it. You are becoming a womb ready to receive something, hence the emptiness. So don't be worried about it. Feel happy and grateful about it.

Keep this box with you and whenever you feel emptiness in the stomach, put it on the stomach. It will make you more empty. Things are going very well. Your energy is streaming, getting ready.

But emptiness always makes people afraid, frightened, because we don't know the positivity of emptiness. We know only the negativity of it. The word 'empty' gives a sense of negativity, as if something is missing.

[See 'be realistic: plan for a miracle', monday, march 29th, where bhagwan expands on the nature of emptiness, saying how we tend to label it negatively as it is an experience totally unlike anything we have experienced before but that it is the aim of all meditation.]

Allow the feeling so that the whole body becomes empty and the emptiness becomes bigger than you, so you are just a tiny thing in that great emptiness. Right now you are surrounding the emptiness, your circle is bigger. Emptiness is just a small circle within the bigger circle. It should be completely turned upside down. The emptiness becomes a bigger circle and you become a small circle inside.

When emptiness is bigger than you, immediately you will see its positivity. Then you will see its austere beauty. Suddenly it is no more emptiness. It is fulfillment. But before anything can descend in you, you have to be empty.

All that is useful, all that is creative, comes out of emptiness. God is the perfect emptiness, the ultimate zero. And you are coming to the first experience of what mystics have called the zero experience. But the zero has to be bigger than you. Allow it.