Darshan 6 August 1976

[A sannyasin reports back on a meditation Osho had given him to stare at a light. (see 'a rose is a rose is a rose', friday july 23rd). The sannyasin said he found it hard to sit still; he itched and wanted to scratch.]

Allow it - don't be worried about it. Scratch and just scratch very consciously. Move slowly. Don't do it like this (Osho demonstrates a rapid rubbing movement). Go very slowly, very consciously. Then the meditation will not be disturbed at all. It is disturbed always by mechanical acts.

Meditation is never disturbed by activity. It is disturbed by mechanical activity. For example there is something in scratching that you can do mechanically, not paying any attention to it. But pay total attention to it. If the body wants to sway a little, sway, but very consciously. Bring all consciousness to it and then do it. Then there is no distraction. It itself becomes a meditation. To do it mechanically will be a distraction So don't resist and don't fight with it, otherwise you will be concerned with it. A very ordinary itch can become something very big, out of all proportion. And the more you want to avoid it, the more it attracts you. Then it becomes almost impossible to avoid it and you feel a defeat. You are distracted already because your mind is resist-ing fighting, and you have become divided in two. One part is trying to pull you to the itch, another part is pulling you away. Meditation is already lost.

So when an itch is there, take note that your hand wants a little attention. Take note and then very slowly go to it - and you will be surprised. Sometimes even by the time you have reached, it has disappeared - because it was just a trick of the body to attract your attention. There was nothing.

The body works like a small child. It constantly attracts you: Where are you going? What are you doing? Meditating? That feels like competition for the body and the body starts feeling jealous. You

have been wed to the body for so long that when you start having a little affair with meditation or something, the body starts feeling jealous. It is a woman. It says, 'I won't allow you this easily. Come here! You have always been listening to me. Now what are you doing? Trying to escape from my domination, from my possessiveness? I will show you.'

So it creates troubles - and those are stupid troubles, but they can become very very irritating. And the work is done - if you are fighting, you have been attracted already. Your attention has been distracted. So don't fight with the body. There is no need. When the body wants your attention, give it total attention but go very slowly, and meditatively.

And the meditation is helping you, so continue it.

[A sannyasin asks about his relationship. He feels calm and quiet except with his girlfriend: But the problem is that for so long I've isolated myself and I have so many defenses. I don't give her enough energy.

Osho gives him a come-close darshan.]

Good... Two things for you.... One is: to be calm and quiet is your way. Don't force any activity on yourself; that will be an enforcement and will be a violation of your nature. One has always to listen to one's own being, to one's own heart. You can become very active, but it will always be a strain on you, it will never be fulfilling.

You don't have a male-type mind. You have a very feminine energy. God is to come to you through passivity, not through activ-ity. Any activity will become feverish for you, will be destructive. So only the essential is to be done. You have to remain calm, collected and centred. The less of the periphery, the better it will be for you.

[The sannyasin answers: And yet at the centre of me there are very strong emotions - of anger and of love.]

Mm, there are, but they are all feminine. They are all passive emotions.

Emotions have two types: active emotions which can only be fulfilled through great activity, and passive emotions which cannot be fulfilled through activity, which can only be fulfilled through happenings. You cannot be a great lover - you can only be a great receiver of love. It will be a gift to you. You cannot create it, you cannot do it. You can only allow it to happen. The only activity that is possible for you is that of allowing. But you cannot approach life in an active way. You have to wait. Wait tin life comes and knocks at your door.

Your life is going to be that of awaiting - not of search, not of an active search, of an intense desire, of an intense thirst, but that of waiting, just like a woman. A woman never takes initiative in love. She waits for her man to take the initiative. She does not even say, 'I love you'; she waits for the man to say it. Then she accepts or rejects, but she never takes the initiative. And whenever a woman takes the initiative something is wrong with her. She is more of the male type and she will need a feminine type of man.

And always remember, when I talk about male and female I don't just mean the physiological difference; that is very superficial. People differ in their innermost core. Many men are feminine and many women are male, and because we don't understand it much complexity arises.

For example, if you meet a real woman - and by 'real woman' I mean one who is physiologically woman and intrinsically also a woman - you will not be satisfied by her because it will be almost homosexual. You need a very active woman, almost male. Only then will you feel a certain deep love for her. That's what [your girlfriend is doing to you. That's why you feel that she brings much life to you, because she brings the neglected part of you. She becomes your activity which you cannot become; she complements you.

So the first thing, you are not to think about active approaches to truth or life. You have to remain passive - passive, yet alert. I'm not saying passive and drugged. I'm not saying passive and asleep.

No, I'm saying passive and alert... not going anywhere, not doing anything; just watching whatsoever happens - allowing it and watching it. So be in a deep let-go but fully aware. That awareness has to be your only activity.

And the second thing even when you are in love, don't try in any way, because that is the natural tendency in the man's mind - that when he is in love he wants to prove before the woman that he is very very active, very aggressive, very male. If you do that you will be going against your nature and you will be deceiving the woman; she will never be happy with it. You have to be yourself. Only then, some deep relationship and intimacy is possible.

[Osho said that he should be true to himself and never pretend to be someone he wasn't.]

Only truth satisfies. So it is for [your girlfriend] to decide. She has fallen in love with a bonzae, so what to do? With a monk... what to do?

(to the girlfriend) He is a monk. He should have really been in a monastery - and he is in the world and you have caught hold of him!

- (to the boyfriend) Simply remain whatsoever you are. All falsifies one day or other are exposed.

Simply relax and be yourself, because people love the truth, never postures. Don't make empty postures. It will be good for your health, it will be good for your inner peace. It will be good for your growth. And it will be good for the other person to understand you and to settle this way or that.

So these two things, remember. And everything is going well....

[The girlfriend said she felt dead, with not enthusiasm for anything.]

But my feeling is that you have always been that way You may not have been aware of it but....

... Many people are not aware of their real situation so they go on pretending things, and they believe in their own pretensions - not only that they deceive others, they have become capable of deceiving themselves. They laugh and they think they are happy, and they never look at the back. Is there really laughter? They get involved in a love-affair and they think, they believe, that they are happy.

They act as if they are happy, but it is all 'as if'. If you look behind the 'as if', suddenly you become

aware that there is nothing. That's why people never look inside. They are just rushing from one activity to another. from one man to another, from one woman to another, from one movie house to another movie house, from this hotel to another hotel, from this guru to another guru. They are rushing from one group to another, continuously occupied, because if they get a gap between two occupations, they will have to see their reality - and that is too dismal, dark and gloomy. They are afraid of themselves, so they never leave themselves alone. They are always engaged in something or other. They can read the same newspaper thrice. They can go and see the same movie many times.

People don't allow themselves an interval because they are afraid. They don't allow themselves to be alone because they are afraid. They know a deeper layer of their being is subtly aware that here is nothing; all this laughter is bogus. All this love and emotion and feeling is just tohu-bohu... just beautiful deceptions, beautiful illusions.

When you start meditating, you start seeing within yourself. Then illusions start falling. One starts feeling dead because all life was false; now it has fallen. But this is a good moment. Now there is a possibility to become really alive. The falsity has fallen. The mask has drop-ped, suddenly slipped out of your hands, and you are standing naked before a mirror. Now there is no way to deceive.

It is hard. I know. It is very sad, I know. It is like a dark night of the soul, but one has to pass through it. Now remember only one thing - don't laugh falsely, otherwise again you can get into the same old trap. If you are dead, then be dead. What can one do? One is dead, so one is dead - so be really dead. Sometimes just stand in the corner and be dead. Just sit in the middle of the room and be dead. What is wrong in being dead? One day everybody has to die. So [your girlfriend died a little early. Nothing wrong in it.

Don't force anything upon yourself. Be dead. Accept in total helplessness and humility that this is how you have lived up to now - a false life. Those falsities have fallen. You have encountered your own self and you feel you are dead. Don't do anything contrary to it, otherwise you can again create the same deception. Sooner or later you will see that the deadness is by and by melting itself, because you are alive... because everything is alive. Even a rock is alive... what to say about [you]?

The whole existence is full of life. Nothing is dead here... nothing can be dead here. Death does not happen - death is impossible. It is not in the nature of things. Everything is simply alive. To exist is to be alive.

So that much is certain - that you are alive - but deep in the centre you have forgotten that. Now relax. Accept this death and be dead, and you will see one day suddenly a new life glowing in you, and the dead matter that was surrounding you is dropping. As the mask has dropped, the dead matter will also drop. This is just an old skin. It will be shed off.

So accept this, and for one month just be dead. Don't be in a hurry, because dead people are never in a hurry! Mm? Good.

[A visitor says he used to do TM meditation, but dropped it and started dynamic meditation. He works as a primal therapist.]

With primal my methods will suit very well because both are complementary to each other. Tm was just out of the way. A person who is functioning as a primal therapist will not be benefited by it because your approach is not of tranquillising the mind but expanding it, to make it more alert and aware, to know it more, to go beyond it.

Transcendental meditation is a sort of drug. If it works at all, it gives you good sleep, that's all. It calms you down, but even that calming down is not very positive; it is more like dullness, lethargy. It will help you to be less tense, but then you will become less intelligent also and less alive, because it slows down the whole process of your being. It is a tranquiliser - tranquillisation through sound, mantra.

If you constantly repeat a certain word, it creates a certain chemical effect in the mind. The constant repetition creates a constant vibration; the same vibration - 'rama, rama, rama' - creates a chain of the same vibration. And the mind feels bored by and by, dulled. It goes into a sort of sleep. It is refreshing as all sleep is, but it has nothing to do with meditation.

To call it meditation is a misnomer. It is a drug. Somebody is agitated too much, on the edge of his nerves, so we give him a tranquilliser. He sleeps well, he sleeps it off. By the morning he is a little better, calmed down, quieted down, but this is not meditation.

In fact, meditation is just the opposite. It is not dropping tensions but using them. One should remain very very vibrant and alive and yet not tense. Then it is beautiful. If you lose your intelligence, if you lose your aliveness, the cost is too much. Then you are falling into a sort of stupor and you will become more stupid than you were before.

Stupid people always like tm. In the east, many methods of that sort have existed for centuries and they have made the whole east stupid. It is nothing new. For centuries the east has been using that trick to tranquillise the mind, but then the mind becomes non-intelligent. That's why the east has not been able to create any scientific society. The very scientific mind has disappeared from the east, because to be scientific you need to be very intelligent, very alert. Now the problem is that when you are very intelligent you become tense. When you are tense, you start feeling worried; the very stress of it starts killing you. An intelligent mind is followed by tensions.

So there are two ways: either you drop intelligence and the tensions drop, or - and the second is more difficult to work out - you become so aware and alert, become such a watcher on the hills, that you remain alive even more than before, and you allow all sorts of tensions because they are challenges of life and they give you tone; they give you shape.

A life without tensions is almost death. One should be alive - tense, yet not stressed, tense, yet not worried, tense, yet not tense... making all the effort that is needed and yet remaining effortless...

doing an sorts of things and yet remaining a witness and remembering continuously, 'I am not the doer. Somebody is singing a song - at the most, I allow it.'

Your life is not yours. It is of the whole. Call it god's. If the word 'god' creates trouble in the mind, call it of the existence. Existence exists in you and through you. You are just a form.

Once you start understanding this then nothing is lost and everything is gained. You remain intelligent. You remain in life, fully vib-rant, streaming, and yet, in a certain way, calm and collected.

At the centre you remain empty - on the periphery you are full of activity. The peripheral activity does not affect the tranquillity at the centre.

Now, it is very easy to drop the peripheral activity of the mind and feel tranquil; it is easy. The opposite is also easy: to let the activity enter into the centre, and to become worried. Just in the middle is the greatest peak of humanity - becoming the centre of the cyclone. At the centre everything is quiet, unaffected. On the periphery one is in the marketplace and one works hard with the mind but the mind is no more the master now.

And all my chaotic methods are basically to give you this balance. It is a meeting of the east and west. It is the meeting of the religious mind and the scientific mind. To be religious is cheap, to be scientific is also not difficult - but to be both is really a great challenge. And it is a great adventure, full of hazards; but worth all those hazards.