Love is the natural meditation

[A sannyasin says: If I run a group and the group goes well I feel good, and if not, I feel bad. I wanted to ask you how to avoid this... how can I avoid this dependence?]

Rather than avoiding it... Because it can be avoided but then you will miss something; then the quality of the work will suffer. You can do it in a very detached way; then you will not feel good or glad about it: you simply do your duty, indifferent. You have no involvement in it, you don't really become a participant. You remain an outsider, a spectator: whatsoever happens is not your business.

This can be done, many people have done this in their life, but then joy disappears. Sadness will disappear, when you fail with somebody there will be no sadness, but together with sadness will go the joy too... and that is not my choice Rather than avoiding it... We have done that in the east too much; the whole of the east for at least five thousand years has been doing it. It is a very simple trick to avoid pain, but once you avoid pain, unwittingly you have closed the door to pleasure too. So the east is not miserable and is not happy either. This is a very deadly state of affairs.

It is better to be sometimes in pain and sometimes to be in tremendous joy than to become so indifferent and dull and dead. That creates a kind of crust around you and you become indifferent to everything; whatsoever happens is okay. You withdraw into yourself.

That is very disrespectful to people, disrespectful to the work, very destructive to the creative possibilities. It immediately closes all potential for growth and you will become a zombie! Nothing will affect you: if something goes well, it is okay; if something goes bad, that too is okay.

I am not for it - my whole approach is to make you great participants! So the first thing to be understood is: don't try to avoid it, rather get more involved. When pain comes feel it, when pleasure comes feel it. You will become more sensitive through that. Pain too is good! That has to be evolved, that is what real religion should be or is.

Joy is good... so is the state of sadness: both are aspects of the same energy and both go together like two wheels of a bullock cart. You take one wheel off - the bullock cart stops, falls down; they go together, they help each other. When something goes really deep, when somebody is helped and you see some person flowering into health, into well-being, you feel joy. That is very natural... it is how it should be!

Then you are not only helping the patient, the therapist is also being helped: both grow through it, both attain something. Of course when the patient attains nothing you feel that you have failed.

Nothing is wrong in it. Feel pain because that pain will help you not to commit the same mistake again. That pain will help you to grow more understanding, to find new techniques, new ways to help the person. That will become a creative process.

When you fail you have to see why you have failed. Don't try to dull that pain of failure.... And don't call it dependence; it has nothing to do with dependence. When a painter succeeds he feels joy!

When he fails he feels sad; this is how it should be. It has nothing to do with dependence: you are simply in love with your work.

So the first thing is: not to avoid involvement. Get involved, really involved, and the more you get involved, the less will be the possibilities of failure. Because are really involved therapist is bound to transform the energy of the patient; there is no way the patient can avoid or escape. If he escapes from one door you attack him from another door, you corner him somewhere.

And basically he is with you. Superficially he may defend and he may try to prove that you have failed. Superficially he will cling to his illness. Everybody clings to his misery; that's why he will do all that he can do superficially so that you don't succeed. Every patient protects and defends, but that's how you learn the art of his defensiveness and how you find ways and means to destroy that defensiveness.... But deep down he is with you because he wants to be healthy, he wants to be whole; he wants to attain a well-being otherwise he would not have come in the first place!

He is split, that is true; he has two layers. Deep down he wants to become healthy; he is tired of the way he is but up to now he has lived that way. That way has become his very style, that has become part of his ego, so he will not be easily available... although he wants to be, mm?

See the dichotomy of the human mind: although he wants to be cured, he wants well-being, he wants a new way of life, he wants to tackle his problems in a new light and with a new consciousness - all that he wants, that's why he has come to you - the moment you start hammering on his armour he starts shrinking and protecting because that armour is also his. His deep consciousness is ready to move into the future; his superficial consciousness is clinging with the past. So watch it... and you have to be really involved!

If you are indifferent you will not be helpful at all - then you will fail more and more. If the failure does not bring pain to you why should you bother to succeed? Then it is his business! If he wants your help he will take it, if he does not want, he will not. But people are not so simple and so uncomplicated.

They want your help and yet they will destroy your help; that's how things are. They desire to be helped and they will create all kinds of hindrances. This split is so deep that just by saying, it cannot be dropped; you will have to work on it... so get involved in it.

The patient is your painting, the patient Is your poem, the patient is your music. If the instrument is not cooperating with you, you fix it: you tie the wires or loosen the wires. You do everything... you are involved in it! You are not dependent on the instrument. You don't say, 'I don't care; if the wires of this guitar are loose it is okay. I don't bother, I am not dependent on this instrument'... but then the music will be destroyed.

You have to be involved in it! When you have taken the responsibility of helping a man, then it is your business too as much as his. And sometimes there are moments when it is more your business than his, because your responsibility is greater than his.

He is in a mess, he goes on destroying his own well-being; he is neurotic. You are not in that mess, you can see the whole point more clearly than he can. He is too close to it; you have a little perspective, a distance - you can see it. Your responsibility is great so don't become indifferent and don't withdraw into yourself.

If the patient is trying to defend himself and trying to make you fail, let it be a challenge. That will create a real therapist in you. Give him a good fight! Now it is not only a question of him, it is your problem also. If you don't give him a good fight you are failing. When therapy fails it is not only that the patient has failed to cooperate - on a deeper level it is the therapist who has failed to participate.

And remember: the responsibility of the therapist is more always because he is in a better position.

In Soviet Russia, when a student fails the teacher is thought to be responsible - that's right, absolutely right - and he has to answer for it. That should be the case all over the world.

When a student fails the teacher has a responsibility. What was he doing for the whole year? The student has come from a lower class, he has passed the lower examination so he was capable of understanding whatsoever was being taught. Somehow the teacher has been missing his responsibilities, avoiding. That is the only country - in that way I appreciate the soviet system - where the teacher has to be responsible: he will have to answer if a student fails.

One of my friends was there, he was a professor in Leningrad university in Russia. He was a professor of sanskrit and he had only seven students. As things go in India - he was a professor here before he went there - you can't pass all the students. That is a tacit understanding - that all cannot be passed, a few have to fail, otherwise people will think that you are biased; you have passed all the students.

So when he checked the papers he found that they were all passable, but thinking that people would think he had been too biased.... He was their professor and the examiner too, because in the soviet system they say that the person who has been with the students for the whole year knows the students far better than anybody else. In india it is not so: the teacher cannot be the examiner because he will be partial. A new examiner has to come who does not know the students at all so he can remain impartial.

He was the teacher and he was the examiner, it was on his recommendation they were to be passed, so he was very much afraid because they were all passable. He told me that he failed two and passed five. He was immediately called up by the head of the department who said, 'You will be in trouble! Why did these two students fail? What were you doing the whole year? Your salary will be reduced!'

My friend could not understand it... what was this? If two students failed that was their responsibility - how was he concerned? But the attitude was: what had he been doing for two years with these two students? If they were not up to the standard he should have worked more on them rather than on the other five: the weaker should have got more attention.

I understand - this approach is far better: the teacher should be responsible for the taught, the healer should be responsible for the healees and the doctor should be responsible for the patient.

So don't try to avoid and don't try to withdraw yourself. Get more involved, and the more you are involved, the less is the possibility of failure. And each failure when it brings pain, has to be accepted.

That is part of life, part of the game - you can't always succeed. And that will not be much joy either, if you always succeed. Sometimes failure is a good change... so pain is good, pain is as good as pleasure.

This is my approach: accept pain and pleasure both, and when pain comes start finding ways to do better next time; that will help you to grow. Otherwise you will become an Indian, and I don't want to make you an Indian at all, mm?

Your work is good - work with greater involvement, with greater commitment, mm Good!

[The therapist who gives individual primal sessions was present with her client. She says that it could have gone on longer, and she used some esoteric group techniques as well.]

One thing: no process is ever complete and cannot be by its very nature, so do the utmost you can - bring it as close to completion as possible - but no process can ever be complete because life goes on.

The process has a limitation with those seven days or seventy days or seven years - that doesn't matter - but life will go on beyond the process. So all processes have a limitation. They help, they give you a new insight, you can change your life through that insight, but no process can give you the real thing so that you can feel 'Now it is complete'. And it is good that it is so, because if the process can give you the real thing what will you do in life?

The process can give you only a taste of it, a very tiny taste of it; then you have to develop that taste in your life, you have to make your whole climate according to it. And then too it will never be complete until you die, because even if it is complete the day before you die, then what will you do about that one day? So each process has a certain limitation, but we should try to bring it to its utmost, to its maximum, to its optimum.

But you will always feel that; in fact the more you succeed with a person, the more you will feel it.

Because things were going so well and the person was succeeding and cooperating and things were happening; then suddenly you see that it is not complete. If the person were not going anywhere you wouldn't bother - you wouldn't expect it to ever be complete: you would know from the very beginning that it would not be complete.

But when a person is really going into it and still you come to a point where you feel 'Now, the process is finished'.... It is not a question of just extending time. Again after two days you will feel the same, after years the same will be felt, because life goes on and the process ends somewhere; life will go beyond it.

So all that has to be understood, and you have to make it clear to every person who passes through primal therapy that this is just to give him a glimpse, a faraway glimpse of the Himalayas; then he has to travel. It is just that the window opens for a second; then he has to come out of the house, to travel... and the journey is long.

The therapist has succeeded if he opened the window for a single moment. That is enough, more than enough... even that seems impossible. If the therapist has created the desire that the process should continue more, enough! Then he has succeeded: the patient has felt something is happening.

Now, that something that is happening has to be taken care of by the patient - the therapist cannot go on too long. And sometimes to go on too long with a patient can be dangerous, can be harmful:

the patient may start depending on the therapist. The therapist has not to become a substitute for the therapy.

It happens - a psychoanalyst becomes a substitute. Whenever you are going to be analysed it is good, you feel good; when you stop the analysis you again start feeling bad so you have to go again.

It can be prolonged for years, and it will always remain the same. Then you have become addicted to the therapy, to the therapist, to a particular process: it has not been of help, it has become a crutch.

So sometimes if you feel to and it is possible, it can be extended for one day or two days; but always remember the process is never going to end. You will never feel that now your work is finished with this person; it cannot be so. Nothing ever ends in life - this is something to be understood.

We say 'a child is born'. We should not say that - language creates the trouble: the birth continues.

The child is not just born at a certain moment, at seven o'clock in the morning, and then starts living, no. He will continue to be born till he dies, so it is a continuous birth process for seventy years.

The first day is not the birthday, it is just the beginning of the process of birth, and then he will be born and born and born and born. Again and again in a thousand and one ways he will go on growing. The process ends only at death, and that too, only apparently.

Those who have known deeply, they say it never ends: beyond this life it will continue into another life. It ends only when a person has attained enlightenment; then the life wheel stops. Then there is no birth and no more birthing.

So all these techniques are helpful, are of tremendous help, but to just give a glimpse. And when that glimpse comes the person naturally feels something more is possible. The person is thrilled:

something is stirring. He can feel it, he can feel the kick inside. It is almost like when a woman feels the kick of the baby in the womb for the first time. Now she becomes alert: life is there. Something exactly like that clicks sometimes - with that click, more desire arises to have more of it.

Make the person very, very alert about it, that this has to be followed in life. Mm? whatsoever you have understood, experienced, whatsoever has become clear to you, whatsoever clarity has come, transform that clarity into your day-to-day life rather than thinking that it can be completed; it cannot be completed.

But if you have time you can give... one or two days more - it is perfectly okay, mm?

[The client then says: The reason I felt to ask to continue a couple of days is that I feel as if I'm using my energy against myself.]

Mm mm, everybody is doing that, everybody is doing that... otherwise we would not be in misery at all! On one hand we go in this direction, on another we pull ourselves into another direction, so we never go anywhere: we are stuck. You are moving for the whole of your life and yet are stuck, going here and there but never really going anywhere because we go on destroying whatsoever we create; our energy is against ourselves.

We are self-destructive, we are suicidal people. Man is the only animal who commits suicide... and that suicide is not only for those who really commit suicide. Mm? - slowly, in a very homeopathic dose, everybody does it. On one plane of your being you love a person - on another plane you hate; you go on destroying your love.

And that happens in therapy very much. You have gone into the therapy to cooperate, but your whole past is there, it cannot be just dropped like that. It is there... it will put up great resistance.

The therapy is against it: the therapy is trying to take you out of your past, to bring you out of your attachments in the past.

Even if the therapy takes you to the past it is only to take you out of it. If it makes you travel backwards it is just to see where you are clinging, where you are still hooked, so that you can unhook from that point and your energy can start flowing.

So therapy is against the past, primal therapy particularly is against the past; it makes you free of the past - hence it takes you into the past so that once you have gone into it thoroughly, intelligently, deliberately, you can destroy all the places where your energy is caught. Once those spaces are destroyed your energy is fully available to grow, to move into the future - you are free of the past. To be free of the past is to be free.

So the past will give all kinds of resistance. It is your ego! The whole past, whatsoever you have done, whatsoever you have thought, whatsoever you have been, that is all your ego. You will not relax easily. It is as if relaxing against yourself, but by and by one understands that the past is not you.

You are always the potential, never the actual. That which has become actual is no more you; it is finished. It is as if you travelled on a path for two miles... now it is finished. Yes, your footprints are left on the path but that is not you - you are here. And if you look deeply into yourself you are only the potentiality to go on moving.

You are the present and the future - you are the future through the present. The past is no more and you are not it, but we are identified with the past so whenever there is a conflict between past and future this will be so. One part of you, your real being, will go with the future and your unreal being will go with the past, and there will be great tension in you.

But to understand it is to go beyond it. You have done well - you can have one or two days more, mm? It will be good.

[A sannyasin was in the massage group and feels that still, after the groups he has done here, he has much anger and hate inside: I hate everything - the people and everything.]

Very good - something is happening! There are people to whom even hate doesn't happen. You are alive! If hate is happening, soon love will be coming.

Just let me see your energy - raise your hands....

These are the three states.... People can be very cold, then nothing comes: no hate, no love - they are just frozen. That's how you are - frozen deep down, very frozen.

There is some reason why you are frozen: you must have controlled yourself too much, you must have disciplined yourself in some way; you have never allowed yourself any foolish thing. And the only way not to allow oneself is to become just like an ice block, then you are in control. And the society also likes such people, who are ice blocks, because they are predictable, not dangerous.

They will not become saints but they will not become sinners either. They are very good people, respectable people. They never go to the extremes: they are never hot so extremes are not possible.

Millions of people live in this cold -'fridge'. That's why when you start moving into encounter or groups like that which stir you, which try to melt you, hate first will come - anger, aggression, violence - and then you will become afraid and will shrink again because that will create fear.

You want love, you want compassion, you want good things; everybody is searching for good things, and in the search you find these things! You shrink back; you say 'Something is going wrong'... but that is the way one can move towards love. First will come hate - if you can pass through the hate courageously, hate itself turns into love. First you will pass through anger, violence, aggression, and the same energy turns into compassion. Nobody can become a saint without becoming a sinner, otherwise adam would not have been expelled. There is no way to become a saint before you go into the world of sin.

So you are just living in a cold space... but it is good that something has stirred. Right now you controlled again - nothing was coming: no anger, no hatred, nothing. Mm? you are afraid of that.

You have to drop that fear, otherwise you will never come to love... and not to love is to miss the whole of life.

[Osho suggests he do individual primal therapy and turns to the primal therapist.... ]

Go deeply. He has great potentiality because he is a land which has not been used for any crop, so he is cold but has great potential. If once he accepts seeds he is going to yield a great crop.

(to the sannyasin) So in a way you are in a bad shape and in a way in a very good shape! Mm? the potential is there ready to explode. If you help it a little you will flower.

Do primal, mm? Nothing to be worried about - I am here! You are going to melt!