Concern!

Q:I am concerned about my friend’s drinking habits.

Osho: “Don’t think about anything that concerns others.

“And that’s what you go on thinking. Ninety-nine percent of the things that you think about concern others. Drop them — drop them immediately!

“Your life is short, and your life is slipping out of your fingers. Each moment you are less, each day you are less, and each day you are less alive and more dead! Each birthday is a death day; one more year is gone from your hands. Be a little more intelligent.

“Do not think about anything that concerns others. Train first against the defilement that is greatest.

“Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples — the first thing, the very very first thing, “Find out what your greatest characteristic is, your greatest undoing, your central characteristic of unconsciousness.” Each one’s is different. Somebody is sex-obsessed. In a country like India, where for centuries sex has been repressed, that has become almost a universal characteristic; everybody is obsessed with sex. Somebody is obsessed with anger, and somebody else is obsessed with greed. You have to watch which is your basic obsession.

“So first find the main characteristic upon which your whole ego edifice rests. And then be constantly aware of it, because it can exist only if you are unaware. It is burnt in the fire of awareness automatically.

“And remember, remember always, that you are not to cultivate the opposite of it. Otherwise, what happens is a person becomes aware that, ‘My obsession is anger, so what should I do? I should cultivate compassion.’ ‘My obsession is sex, so what should I do? I should practice brahmacharya, celibacy.’

“People move from one thing to the opposite. That is not the way of transformation. It is the same pendulum, moving from left to right, from right to left. And that’s how your life has been moving for centuries; it is the same pendulum.

“The pendulum has to be stopped in the middle. And that’s the miracle of awareness. Just be aware that, ‘This is my chief pitfall, this is the place where I stumble again and again, this is the root of my unconsciousness.’

“Don’t try to cultivate the opposite of it, but pour your whole awareness into it. Create a great bonfire of awareness, and it will be burned. And then the pendulum stops in the middle.

“And with the stopping of the pendulum, time stops. You suddenly enter into the world of timelessness, deathlessness, eternity.”

Have a Heart

I have been experiencing pain of varying degrees in my chest for some years. It disappears when I love, when I melt....

Osho Speaks: It is not physical; it is certainly concerned with relaxation, total melting, forgetting oneself completely. In those moments it disappears, so certainly it is not physical. You have to learn to give more love. This is not only your problem; in varying degrees it is the problem of everybody.

Everybody wants to be loved; that is a wrong beginning.

It starts because the child, the small child, cannot love, cannot say anything, cannot do anything, cannot give anything; he can only get. A small child’s experience of love is of getting: getting from the mother, getting from the father, getting from brothers, sisters, getting from guests, strangers — but always getting. So the first experience that settles deep in his unconscious is that he has to get love.But the trouble arises because everybody has been a child, and everybody has the same urge to get love; nobody is born in any other way. So all are asking, “Give us love,” and there is nobody to give because the other person was also brought up in the same way.One has to be alert and aware that just an incident of birth should not remain a constant prevailing state of your mind.

Rather than asking, “Give me love,” start giving love. Forget about getting, simply give — and I guarantee you, you will get much.

But you are not to think about getting. You are not even indirectly, by the side, to watch whether you are getting it or not. That much will be enough disturbance. You simply give, because to give love is so beautiful that getting love is not so great. This is one of the secrets.Giving love is the really beautiful experience, because then you are an emperor. Getting love is very small experience, and it is the experience of a beggar. Don’t be a beggar. At least as far as love is concerned, be an emperor, because it is an inexhaustible quality in you. You can go on giving as much as you like. Don’t be worried that it will be exhausted, that one day you will suddenly find, “My God! I don’t have any love to give anymore.”

Love is not a quantity; it is a quality, and a quality of a certain category that grows by giving and dies if you hold it. If you are miserly about it, it dies. So be really spendthrift. Don’t bother to whom — that is really the idea of a miserly mind: I will give love to certain persons with certain qualities. You don’t understand that you have so much...you are a raincloud.

The raincloud does not bother where it rains — on the rocks, in the gardens, in the ocean — it doesn’t matter. It wants to unburden itself. And that unburdening is a tremendous relief.So the first secret is: Don’t ask for it, and don’t wait, thinking that you will give if somebody asks you. Give it!Just give your love to anybody — a stranger. It is not a question that you have to give something very valuable, just a helping hand and that will be enough. In twenty-four hours, whatever you do should be done with love, and the pain in your heart will disappear. And because you will be so loving, people will love you. It is a natural law. You get what you give. In fact you get more than you give.Learn giving, and you will find so many people being loving towards you who had never looked at you, who had never bothered about you. Your problem is that you have a heart full of love but you have been a miser; that love has become a burden on the heart. Rather than making the heart blossom you have been hoarding it, so once in a while when you are in a moment of love you feel it disappearing. But why one moment? Why not every moment?

It is not even a question of a living being. You can touch this chair with a loving hand. The thing depends on you, not on the object.

Then you will find a great relaxation and a great disappearance of your self — which is a burden — and a melting into the whole.This is certainly a disease, in the literal meaning of the word: it is a dis-ease. It is not sickness, so no physician can help you. It is simply a tense state of your heart that just wants to give more and more. Perhaps you have more love than other people, perhaps you are more fortunate, and you are making out of your fortune a great misery for yourself. Share it, without bothering to whom you are giving.

Just give it, and you will find tremendous peace and silence. This will become your meditation.

One can come to meditation through many directions; perhaps this is going to be your direction.

Character or Consciousness?

How to develop a strong enough character that I don’t get disturbed by anything and don’t lose my cool?

Osho: Go to the sea, and watch the sea. Millions of waves are there, but deep in its depth the sea remains calm and quiet, deep in meditation. The turmoil is just on the surface, just on the surface where the sea meets the outside world, the winds. Otherwise, in itself, it always remains the same, not even a ripple; nothing changes.

It is the same with you. Just on the surface where you meet others there is turmoil, anxiety, anger, attachment, greed, lust...just on the surface where winds come and touch you. And if you remain on the surface you cannot change this changing phenomenon; it will remain there.

Many people try to change it there, on the circumference. They fight with it, they try not to let a wave arise. And through their fight even more waves arise, because when the sea fights with the wind there will be more turmoil: now not only will the wind help it, the sea will also help — there will be tremendous chaos on the surface.

All the moralists try to change man on the periphery. Your character is the periphery: you don’t bring any character into the world, you come absolutely characterless, a blank sheet, and all that you call your character is written by others. Your parents, society, teachers, teachings — all are conditionings. You come as a blank sheet, and whatsoever is written on you comes from others; so unless you become a blank sheet again you will not know what nature is, you will not know what Brahma is, you will not know what Tao is.

So the problem is not how to have a strong character, the problem is not how to attain no-anger, how not to be disturbed — no, that is not the problem. The problem is how to change your consciousness from the periphery to the center. Then suddenly you see that you have always been calm. Then you can look at the periphery from a distance, and the distance is so vast, infinite, that you can watch as if it is not happening to you. In fact, it never happens to you. Even when you are completely lost in it, it never happens to you: something in you remains undisturbed, something in you remains beyond, something in you remains a witness.

So the whole problem for the seeker is how to shift his attention from the periphery to the center; how to be merged with that which is unchanging, and not to be identified with that which is just a boundary. On the boundary others are very influential, because on the boundary change is natural. The periphery will go on changing — even a buddha’s periphery changes.

The difference between a buddha and you is not a difference of character — remember this; it is not a difference of morality, it is not a difference in virtue or nonvirtue, it is a difference in where you are grounded.

You are grounded on the periphery; a buddha is grounded in the center. He can look at his own periphery from a distance; when you hit him he can see it as if you have hit somebody else, because the center is so distant. It’s as if he is a watcher on the hills and something is happening in the valleys and he can see it. This is the first thing to be understood.

The second thing: it is very easy to control, it is very difficult to transform. It is very easy to control. You can control your anger, but what will you do? — you will suppress it. And what happens when you suppress a certain thing? The direction of its movement changes: it was going out, and if you suppress it, it starts going in — just its direction changes.

And for anger to go out was good, because the poison needs to be thrown out. It is bad for the anger to move within, because that means your whole body mind structure will be poisoned by it. And then if you go on doing this for a long time...as everybody has been doing, because the society teaches control, not transformation.

The society says, ‘Control yourself,’ and through controlling, all the negative things have been thrown deeper and deeper into the unconscious, and then they become a constant thing within you. Then it is not a question of your being angry sometimes and sometimes not — you are simply angry. Sometimes you explode, and sometimes you don’t explode because there is no excuse, or you have to find an excuse. And remember, you can find an excuse anywhere!

You are angry. Because you have suppressed so much anger, now there are no moments when you are not angry; at the most, sometimes you are less angry, sometimes more. Your whole being is poisoned by suppression. You eat with anger — and it has a different quality when a person eats without anger: it is beautiful to watch him, because he eats nonviolently. He may be eating meat, but he eats nonviolently; you may be eating just vegetables and fruits, but if anger is suppressed, you eat violently.

...Then this will move in every way, in every arena of your life: you will make love, but it will be more like violence than like love, it will have much aggression in it. Because you never observe one another making love, you don’t know what is happening, and you cannot know what is happening to you because you are almost always so much in aggression.

That’s why deep orgasm through love becomes impossible — because you are afraid deep down that if you move totally without control, you may kill your wife or kill your beloved, or the wife may kill the husband or the lover. You become so afraid of your own anger! Next time you make love, watch: you will be doing the same movements as are done when you are aggressive. Watch the face, have a mirror around so you can see what is happening to your face! All the distortions of anger and aggression will be there.

...Through suppression, mind becomes split. The part that you accept becomes the conscious, and the part that you deny becomes the unconscious. This division is not natural, the division happens because of repression. And into the unconscious you go on throwing all the rubbish that society rejects — but remember, whatsoever you throw in there becomes more and more part of you: it goes into your hands, into your bones, into your blood, into your heartbeat. Now psychologists say that almost eighty percent of diseases are caused by repressed emotions: so many heart failures means so much anger has been repressed in the heart, so much hatred that the heart is poisoned.

Why? Why does man suppress so much and become unhealthy? Because the society teaches you to control, not to transform, and the way of transformation is totally different. For one thing, it is not the way of control at all, it is just the opposite.

The first thing: in controlling you repress, in transformation you express. But there is no need to express on somebody else because the ‘somebody else’ is just irrelevant. Next time you feel angry go and run around the house seven times, and after it sit under a tree and watch where the anger has gone. You have not repressed it, you have not controlled it, you have not thrown it on somebody else — because if you throw it on somebody else a chain is created, because the other is as foolish as you, as unconscious as you. If you throw it on another, and if the other is an enlightened person, there will be no trouble; he will help you to throw and release it and go through a catharsis. But the other is as ignorant as you — if you throw anger on him he will react. He will throw more anger on you, he is repressed as much as you are. Then there comes a chain: you throw on him, he throws on you, and you both become enemies.

Don’t throw it on anybody. It is the same as when you feel like vomiting: you don’t go and vomit on somebody. Anger needs a vomit. You go to the bathroom and vomit! It cleanses the whole body — if you suppress the vomit it will be dangerous, and when you have vomited you will feel fresh, you will feel unburdened, unloaded, good, healthy. Something was wrong in the food that you took and the body rejects it. Don’t go on forcing it inside.

Anger is just a mental vomit. Something is wrong that you have taken in and your whole psychic being wants to throw it out, but there is no need to throw it out on somebody. Because people throw it on others, society tells them to control it.

There is no need to throw anger on anybody. You can go to your bathroom, you can go on a long walk; it means that something is inside that needs fast activity so that it is released. Just do a little jogging and you will feel it is released, or take a pillow and beat the pillow, fight with the pillow, and bite the pillow until your hands and teeth are relaxed. Within a five-minute catharsis you will feel unburdened, and once you know this you will never throw it on anybody, because that is absolutely foolish.

The first thing in transformation, then, is to express anger, but not on anybody, because if you express it on somebody you cannot express it totally. You may like to kill, but it is not possible; you may like to bite, but it is not possible. But that can be done to a pillow. A pillow means ‘already enlightened’; the pillow is enlightened, a buddha. The pillow will not react, and the pillow will not go to any court, and the pillow will not bring any enmity against you, and the pillow will not do anything. The pillow will be happy and the pillow will laugh at you!

The second thing to remember: be aware.

In controlling, no awareness is needed; you simply do it mechanically, like a robot. The anger comes and there is a mechanism; suddenly your whole being becomes narrow and closed. If you are watchful control may not be so easy.

Society never teaches you to be watchful, because when somebody is watchful, he is wide open. That is part of awareness. One is open, and if you want to suppress something and you are open, it is contradictory, it may come out. The society teaches you how to close yourself in, how to cave yourself in...don’t allow even a small window for anything to go out.

But remember: when nothing goes out, nothing comes in either. When the anger cannot go out, you are closed. If you touch a beautiful rock, nothing goes in; you look at a flower, nothing goes in: your eyes are dead and closed. You kiss a person; nothing goes in, because you are closed. You live an insensitive life.

Sensitivity grows with awareness. Through control you become dull and dead. That is part of the mechanism of control: if you are dull and dead then nothing will affect you, as if the body has become a citadel, a defense. Nothing will affect you, neither insult nor love.

But this control is at a very great cost, an unnecessary cost; then it becomes the whole effort in life: how to control yourself — and then die! The whole effort of control takes all your energy, and then you simply die. And the life becomes a dull and dead thing; you somehow carry it on.

The society teaches you control and condemnation, because a child will control only when he feels something is condemned. Anger is bad; sex is bad; everything that has to be controlled has to be made to look like a sin to the child, to look like evil.

A deep condemnation enters about all that is alive. And sex is the most alive thing — has to be! It is the source. Anger is also a most alive thing, because it is a protective force. If a child cannot be angry at all, he will not be able to survive. You have to be angry in certain moments. The child has to show his own being, the child has to stand in certain moments upon his own ground; otherwise he will have no backbone.

Anger is beautiful; sex is beautiful. But beautiful things can go ugly. That depends on you. If you condemn them, they become ugly; if you transform them, they become divine. Anger transformed becomes compassion...because the energy is the same. A buddha is compassionate: from where does his compassion come? This is the same energy that was moving in anger; now it is not moving in anger, the same energy is transformed into compassion. From where does love come? A Buddha is loving; a Jesus is love. The same energy that moves into sex becomes love.

So remember, if you condemn a natural phenomenon it becomes poisonous, it destroys you, it becomes destructive and suicidal. If you transform it, it becomes divine, it becomes a God-force, it becomes an elixir; you attain through it to immortality, to a deathless being. But transformation is needed.

In transformation you never control, you simply become more aware. Anger is happening: you have to be aware that anger is happening — watch it! It is a beautiful phenomenon...energy moving within you, becoming hot!

It is just like electricity in the clouds. People were always afraid of electricity; they thought in olden days, when they were ignorant, that this electricity was the god being angry, being threatening, trying to punish — creating fear so that people would become worshippers, so that people would feel that the god was there and he would punish them.

But now we have domesticated that god. Now that god runs through your fan, through your air conditioner, through the fridge: whatsoever you need, that god serves. That god has become a domestic force, it is no longer angry and no longer threatening. Through science an outer force has been transformed into a friend.

The same happens through religion for inner forces.

Anger is just like electricity in your body: you don’t know what to do with it. Either you kill somebody else or you kill yourself. The society says if you kill yourself it is okay, it is your concern, but don’t kill anybody else — and as far as society goes that is okay. So either you become aggressive or you become repressive.

Religion says both are wrong. The basic thing that is needed is to become aware and to know the secret of this energy, anger, this inner electricity. It is electricity because you become hot; when you are angry your temperature goes hot, and you cannot understand the coolness of a buddha, because when anger is transformed into compassion everything is cool. A deep coolness happens. Buddha is never hot; he is always cool, centered, because he now knows how to use the inner electricity. Electricity is hot; it becomes the source of air conditioning. Anger is hot — it becomes the source of compassion.

Compassion is an inner air conditioning. Suddenly everything is cool and beautiful, and nothing can disturb you, and the whole existence is transformed into a friend. Now there are no more enemies...because when you look through the eyes of anger, somebody becomes an enemy; when you look through the eyes of compassion, everybody is a friend, a neighbor. When you love, everywhere is God; when you hate, everywhere is the devil. It is your standpoint that is projected onto reality.

Awareness is needed, not condemnation — and through awareness transformation happens spontaneously. If you become aware of your anger, understanding penetrates. Just watching, with no judgment, not saying good, not saying bad, just watching in your inner sky. There is lightning, anger, you feel hot, the whole nervous system shaking and quaking, and you feel a tremor all over the body — a beautiful moment, because when energy functions you can watch it easily; when it is not functioning you cannot watch.

Close your eyes and meditate on it. Don’t fight, just look at what is happening — the whole sky filled with electricity, so much lightning, so much beauty — just lie down on the ground and look at the sky and watch. Then do the same inside.

Clouds are there, because without clouds there can be no lightning — dark clouds are there, thoughts. Somebody has insulted you, somebody has laughed at you, somebody has said this or that...many clouds, dark clouds in the inner sky and much lightning. Watch! It is a beautiful scene, terrible also, because you don’t understand. It is mysterious, and if mystery is not understood it becomes terrible, you are afraid of it. And whenever a mystery is understood, it becomes a grace, a gift, because now you have the keys — and with keys you are the master.

Source: Osho.com (Osho: And the Flowers Showered)

Osho about Misery...

Consciously, we all want to be happy. That eludes many people much of the time. Could it be that we have some investment in being miserable?

Osho Speaks: Misery has many things to give to you which happiness cannot give. In fact, happiness takes away many things from you. Happiness takes all that you have ever had, all that you have ever been; happiness destroys you.

Misery nourishes your ego, and happiness is basically a state of egolessness. That is the problem, the very crux of the problem. That’s why people find it very difficult to be happy.

That’s why millions of people in the world have to live in misery...have decided to live in misery. It gives you a very very crystallized ego. Miserable, you are Happy, you are not. In misery, crystallization; in happiness you become diffused.

If this is understood then things become very clear. Misery makes you special. Happiness is a universal phenomenon, there is nothing special about it. Trees are happy and animals are happy and birds are happy. The whole existence is happy, except man. Being miserable, man becomes very special, extraordinary.

Misery makes you capable of attracting people’s attention. Whenever you are miserable you are attended to, sympathized with, loved. Everybody starts taking care of you. Who wants to hurt a miserable person? Who is jealous of a miserable person? Who wants to be antagonistic to a miserable person? That would be too mean.

The miserable person is cared for, loved, attended to. There is great investment in misery. If the wife is not miserable the husband simply tends to forget her. If she is miserable the husband cannot afford to neglect her. If the husband is miserable the whole family, the wife, the children, are around him, worried about him; it gives great comfort. One feels one is not alone, one has a family, friends.

When you are ill, depressed, in misery, friends come to visit you, to solace you, to console you. When you are happy, the same friends become jealous of you. When you are really happy, you will find the whole world has turned against you.

Nobody likes a happy person, because the happy person hurts the egos of the others.

The others start feeling, “So you have become happy and we are still crawling in darkness, misery and hell. How dare you be happy when we all are in such misery!”

Of course the world consists of miserable people, and nobody is courageous enough to let the whole world go against him; it is too dangerous, too risky. It is better to cling to misery, it keeps you a part of the crowd. Happy, and you are an individual; miserable, you are part of a crowd — Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Indian, Arabian, Japanese.

Happy? Do you know what happiness is? Is it Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan?

Happiness is simply happiness. One is transported into another world. One is no longer part of the world the human mind has created, one is no longer part of the past, of the ugly history. One is no more part of time at all. When you are really happy, blissful, time disappears, space disappears.

Albert Einstein has said that in the past scientists used to think that there were two realities — space and time. But he said that these two realities are not two — they are two faces of the same single reality. Hence he coined the word spaciotime, a single word. Time is nothing else but the fourth dimension of space.

Einstein was not a mystic, otherwise he would have introduced the third reality also — the transcendental, neither space nor time. That too is there, I call it the witness. And once these three are there, you have the whole trinity. You have the whole concept of trimurti, three faces of the divine. Then you have all the four dimensions. The reality is four-dimensional: three dimensions of space, and the fourth dimension of time.

But there is something else, which cannot be called the fifth dimension, because it is not the fifth really, it is the whole, the transcendental.

When you are blissful you start moving into the transcendental.

It is not social, it is not traditional, it has nothing to do with human mind at all. (Source: osho.com)

Osho about love...

When love wears thin it lets in the emotional weather

I am in a beautiful relationship right now; everything is going so harmoniously between us.

Osho: Love is always beautiful in the beginning because you don’t bring your destructive energies into it. In the beginning you bring your positive energies into it — both pool their energies positively, the thing goes simply fantastically. But then by and by the negative energies will start overflowing; you cannot hold them back forever. And once you have finished with your positive energy, which is very small...and the negative is very big. The positive is just a small quantity, so within days the honeymoon is over and then comes the negative. Then hell opens its doors and one cannot understand what has happened — such a beautiful relationship, why is it on the rocks?

If one is alert from the very beginning, it can be saved. So pour your positive energies into it, but remember that sooner or later the negative will start coming in. When the negative starts coming in you have to release the negative alone. Go into a room, release the negative; there is no need to throw it on the other person.

If you want to scream and shout and be angry, go into a room, shout, be angry, beat the pillow. Because nobody should be so violent as to throw things on other people. They have not done anything wrong to you, so why should you throw things on them? It is better to throw all that is negative into the dustbin.

If you remain alert, you will be surprised to see that it can be done; and once the negative is released, again the positive is overflowing.

The negative can be released together only very late in a relationship — when the relationship has become very established — and then too it should be done as a therapeutic measure. When the two partners of a relationship have become very very alert, very positive, have become consolidated as one being and are able now to tolerate — and not only tolerate but use the other’s negativity — they have to come to an agreement that now they will be negative together also, as a therapeutic measure.

Then too my suggestion is to let it be very conscious, not unconscious; let it be very deliberate. Make it point that every night for one hour you will be negative with each other — let it be a game — rather than being negative anywhere, any time. Because people are not so alert — for twenty-four hours they are not alert — but for one hour you can both sit together and be negative. And then it will be a game, it will be like a group. After one hour you are finished with it and you don’t carry the hangover, you don’t bring it into your relationship.

The first step: the negative should be released alone. The second step: the negative should be released at a particular time with the agreement that you are both going to release the negative. At the third stage only should one become natural, and then there is no need to be afraid. Then you can be negative and positive and both are beautiful — but only at the third stage.

If in the first stage you start feeling that now anger comes no more — you sit before the pillow, anger does not come. It will come for months, but one day you will find that it is no more flowing, it has become meaningless, you cannot be angry alone. Then the first stage is over. But wait for the other person also to feel whether his first stage is over or not. If his is also over, the second stage starts. Then for one or two hours — whether morning or evening, you can decide — you become negative, deliberately. It is a psychodrama, it is very impersonal.

You don’t hit hard — you hit, but still you don’t hit the person. In fact you are simply throwing out your negativity. You are not accusing the other, you are not saying ‘You are bad’; you are simply saying ‘I am feeling that you are bad.’ You are not saying ‘You insulted me,’ you say ‘I feel insulted’ That is totally different, it is a deliberate game ‘I am feeling insulted, so I will throw out my anger. You are closest to me so please function as an excuse for me’...and the same is done by the other.

A moment will come when again you will find that this deliberate negativity does not function any more. You sit for one hour: nothing comes to you, nothing comes to him. Then that second stage is over.

Now the third stage — and the third stage is the whole of life. Now you are ready to be negative and positive; you can be spontaneous.

This is how love becomes a marriage. (source: osho.com)

Osho Speaks....

Q: What is jealousy and why does it hurt so much?

Jealousy is comparison. And we have been taught to compare, we have been conditioned to compare, always compare. Somebody else has a better house, somebody else has a more beautiful body, somebody else has more money, somebody else has a more charismatic personality. Compare, go on comparing yourself with everybody else you pass by, and great jealousy will be the outcome; it is the by-product of the conditioning for comparison.

Otherwise, if you drop comparing, jealousy disappears. Then you simply know you are you, and you are nobody else, and there is no need. It is good that you don’t compare yourself with trees, otherwise you will start feeling very jealous: why are you not green? And why has God been so hard on you — and no flowers? It is better that you don’t compare with birds, with rivers, with mountains; otherwise you will suffer. You only compare with human beings, because you have been conditioned to compare only with human beings; you don’t compare with peacocks and with parrots. Otherwise, your jealousy would be more and more: you would be so burdened by jealousy that you would not be able to live at all.

Comparison is a very foolish attitude, because each person is unique and incomparable. Once this understanding settles in you, jealousy disappears. Each is unique and incomparable. You are just yourself: nobody has ever been like you, and nobody will ever be like you. And you need not be like anybody else, either.

God creates only originals; he does not believe in carbon copies.

A bunch of chickens were in the yard when a football flew over the fence and landed in their midst. A rooster waddled over, studied it, then said, “I’m not complaining, girls, but look at the work they are turning out next door.”

Next door great things are happening: the grass is greener, the roses are rosier. Everybody seems to be so happy — except yourself. You are continuously comparing. And the same is the case with the others, they are comparing too. Maybe they think the grass in your lawn is greener — it always looks greener from the distance — that you have a more beautiful wife.... You are tired, you cannot believe why you allowed yourself to be trapped by this woman, you don’t know how to get rid of her — and the neighbor may be jealous of you, that you have such a beautiful wife! And you may be jealous of him....

Everybody is jealous of everybody else. And out of jealousy we create such hell, and out of jealousy we become very mean.

An elderly farmer was moodily regarding the ravages of the flood. “Hiram!” yelled a neighbor, “your pigs were all washed down the creek.”
“How about Thompson’s pigs?” asked the farmer.
“They’re gone too.”
“And Larsen’s?”
“Yes.”
“Humph!” ejaculated the farmer, cheering up. “It ain’t as bad as I thought.”

If everybody is in misery, it feels good; if everybody is losing, it feels good. If everybody is happy and succeeding, it tastes very bitter.

But why does the idea of the other enter in your head in the first place? Again let me remind you: because you have not allowed your own juices to flow; you have not allowed your own blissfulness to grow, you have not allowed your own being to bloom. Hence you feel empty inside, and you look at each and everybody’s outside because only the outside can be seen.

You know your inside, and you know the others’ outside: that creates jealousy. They know your outside, and they know their inside: that creates jealousy. Nobody else knows your inside. There you know you are nothing, worthless. And the others on the outside look so smiling. Their smiles may be phony, but how can you know that they are phony? Maybe their hearts are also smiling. You know your smile is phony, because your heart is not smiling at all, it may be crying and weeping.

You know your interiority, and only you know it, nobody else. And you know everybody’s exterior, and their exterior people have made beautiful. Exteriors are showpieces and they are very deceptive.

There is an ancient Sufi story:

A man was very much burdened by his suffering. He used to pray every day to God, “Why me? Everybody seems to be so happy, why am only I in such suffering?” One day, out of great desperation, he prayed to God, “You can give me anybody else’s suffering and I am ready to accept it. But take mine, I cannot bear it any more.”

That night he had a beautiful dream ÿ beautiful and very revealing. He had a dream that night that God appeared in the sky and he said to everybody, “Bring all your sufferings into the temple.” Everybody was tired of his suffering — in fact everybody has prayed some time or other, “I am ready to accept anybody else’s suffering, but take mine away; this is too much, it is unbearable.”

So everybody gathered his own sufferings into bags, and they reached the temple, and they were looking very happy; the day has come, their prayer has been heard. And this man also rushed to the temple.

And then God said, “Put your bags by the walls.” All the bags were put by the walls, and then God declared: “Now you can choose. Anybody can take any bag.”

And the most surprising thing was this: that this man who had been praying always, rushed towards his bag before anybody else could choose it! But he was in for a surprise, because everybody rushed to his own bag, and everybody was happy to choose it again. What was the matter? For the first time, everybody had seen others’ miseries, others’ sufferings — their bags were as big, or even bigger!

And the second problem was, one had become accustomed to one’s own sufferings. Now to choose somebody else’s — who knows what kind of sufferings will be inside the bag? Why bother? At least you are familiar with your own sufferings, and you have become accustomed to them, and they are tolerable. For so many years you have tolerated them — why choose the unknown?

And everybody went home happy. Nothing had changed, they were bringing the same suffering back, but everybody was happy and smiling and joyous that he could get his own bag back.

In the morning he prayed to God and he said, “Thank you for the dream; I will never ask again. Whatsoever you have given me is good for me, must be good for me; that’s why you have given it to me.”

Because of jealousy you are in constant suffering; you become mean to others. And because of jealousy you start becoming phony, because you start pretending. You start pretending things that you don’t have, you start pretending things which you can’t have, which are not natural to you. You become more and more artificial. Imitating others, competing with others, what else can you do? If somebody has something and you don’t have it, and you don’t have a natural possibility of having it, the only way is to have some cheap substitute for it.

I hear that Jim and Nancy Smith had a great time in Europe this summer. It’s so great when a couple finally gets a chance to really live it up. They went everywhere and did everything. Paris, Rome... you name it, they saw it and they did it.

But it was so embarrassing coming back home and going through customs. You know how custom officers pry into all your personal belongings. They opened up a bag and took out three wigs, silk underwear, perfume, hair coloring...really embarrassing. And that was just Jim’s bag!

Just look inside your bag and you will find so many artificial, phony, pseudo things — for what? Why can’t you be natural and spontaneous? — because of jealousy.

The jealous man lives in hell. Drop comparing and jealousy disappears, meanness disappears, phoniness disappears. But you can drop it only if you start growing your inner treasures; there is no other way.

Grow up, become a more and more authentic individual. Love yourself and respect yourself the way God has made you, and then immediately the doors of heaven open for you. They were always open, you had simply not looked at them.

(The Book of Wisdom, Chapter 27)

Osho Speaks....

Question: I suffer immensely from loneliness. What can I do about it?

The darkness of loneliness cannot be fought directly. It is something essential for everyone to understand, that there are a few fundamental things which cannot be changed. This is one of the fundamentals: you cannot fight with darkness directly, with loneliness directly, with the fear of isolation directly. The reason is that all these things do not exist; they are simply absences of something, just as darkness is the absence of light.

Now what do you do when you want the room not to be dark? You don’t do anything directly with darkness — or do you? You cannot push it out. There is no possible way to make any arrangement so that the darkness disappears. You have to do something with the light. Now that changes the whole situation; and that’s what I call one of the essentials, fundamentals. You don’t even touch the darkness; you don’t think about it. There is no point; it does not exist, it is simply an absence.

So just bring in light and you will not find darkness at all, because it was the absence of light, simply the absence of light — not something material, with its own being, not something that exists. But simply because light was not there, you got a false feeling of the existence of darkness.

You can go on fighting with this darkness your whole life and you will not succeed, but just a small candle is enough to dispel it. You have to work for the light because it is positive, existential; it exists on it own. And once light comes, anything that was its absence automatically disappears.

Loneliness is similar to darkness.

You don’t know your aloneness. You have not experienced your aloneness and its beauty, its tremendous power, its strength. Loneliness and aloneness in the dictionaries are synonymous, but existence does not follow your dictionaries. And nobody has yet tried to make an existential dictionary which will not be contradictory to existence.

Loneliness is absence.

Because you don’t know your aloneness, there is fear. You feel lonely so you want to cling to something, to somebody, to some relationship, just to keep the illusion that you are not lonely. But you know you are — hence the pain. On the one hand you are clinging to something which is not for real, which is just a temporary arrangement — a relationship, a friendship.

And while you are in the relationship you can create a little illusion to forget your loneliness. But this is the problem: although you can forget for a moment your loneliness, just the next moment you suddenly become aware that the relationship or the friendship is nothing permanent. Yesterday you did not know this man or this woman, you were strangers. Today you are friends — who knows about tomorrow? Tomorrow you may be strangers again — hence the pain.

The illusion gives a certain solace, but it cannot create the reality so that all fear disappears. It represses the fear, so on the surface you feel good — at least you try to feel good. You pretend to feel good to yourself: how wonderful is the relationship, how wonderful is the man or the woman. But behind the illusion — and the illusion is so thin that you can see behind it — there is pain in the heart, because the heart knows perfectly well that tomorrow things may not be the same...and they are not the same.

Your whole life’s experience supports that things go on changing. Nothing remains stable; you cannot cling to anything in a changing world. You wanted to make your friendship something permanent but your wanting is against the law of change, and that law is not going to make exceptions. It simply goes on doing its own thing. It will change — everything.

Perhaps in the long run you will understand one day that it was good that it did not listen to you, that existence did not bother about you and just went on doing whatever it wanted to do...not according to your desire.

It may take a little time for you to understand. You want this friend to be your friend forever, but tomorrow he turns into an enemy. Or simply — ”You get lost!” and he is no longer with you. Somebody else fills the gap who is a far superior being. Then suddenly you realize it was good that the other one got lost; otherwise you would have been stuck with him. But still the lesson never goes so deep that you stop asking for permanence.

You will start asking for permanence with this man, with this woman: now this should not change. You have not really learned the lesson that change is simply the very fabric of life. You have to understand it and go with it. Don’t create illusions; they are not going to help. And everybody is creating illusions of different kinds.

I used to know one man who said, “I trust only money. I trust nobody else.”

I said, “You are making a very significant statement.”

He said, “Everybody changes. You cannot rely on anybody. And as you get older, only your money is yours. Nobody cares — not even your son, not even your wife. If you have money they all care, they all respect you, because you have money. If you don’t have money you become a beggar.”

His saying that the only thing in the world to trust is money comes out of a long experience of life, of getting cheated again and again by the people he trusted — and he thought they loved him but they were all around him for the money.

“But,” I told him, “at the moment of death money is not going to be with you. You can have an illusion that at least money is with you, but as your breathing stops, money is no longer with you. You have earned something but it will be left on this side; you cannot carry it beyond death. You will fall into a deep loneliness which you have been hiding behind the facade of money.”

There are people who are after power, but the reason is the same: when they are in power so many people are with them, millions of people are under their domination. They are not alone. They are great political and religious leaders. But power changes. One day you have it, another day it is gone, and suddenly the whole illusion disappears. You are lonely as nobody else is, because others are accustomed to being lonely. You are not accustomed...your loneliness hurts you more.

Society has tried to make arrangements so you can forget loneliness. Arranged marriages are just an effort so that you know your wife is with you. All religions resist divorce for the simple reason that if divorce is allowed then the basic purpose marriage was invented for is destroyed. The basic purpose was to give you a companion, a lifelong companion.

But even though a wife will be with you or a husband will be with you for your whole life, that does not mean that love remains the same. In fact, rather than giving you a companion, they give you a burden to carry. You were lonely, already in trouble, and now you have to carry another person who is lonely. And in this life there is no hope, because once love disappears you both are lonely, and both have to tolerate each other. Now it is not a question of being enchanted by each other; at the most you can patiently tolerate each other. Your loneliness has not been changed by the social strategy of marriage.

Religions have tried to make you a member of an organized body of religion so you are always in a crowd. You know that there are six hundred million Catholics; you are not alone, six hundred million Catholics are with you. Jesus Christ is your savior. God is with you. Alone you may have been wrong — doubt may have arisen — but six hundred million people cannot be wrong. A little support...but even that is gone because there are millions who are not Catholics. There are the people who crucified Jesus. There are people who don’t believe in God — and their number is not less than Catholics, it is more than Catholics. And there are other religions with different concepts.

It is difficult for an intelligent person not to doubt. You may have millions of people following a certain belief system, but still you cannot be certain that they are with you, that you are not lonely.

God was a device, but all devices have failed. It was a device...when nothing is there, at least God is with you. He is always everywhere with you. In the dark night of the soul, he is with you — don’t be worried.

It was good for a childish humanity to be deceived by this concept, but you cannot be deceived by this concept. This God who is always everywhere — you don’t see him, you can’t talk to him, you can’t touch him. You don’t have any evidence for his existence — except your desire that he should be there. But your desire is not a proof of anything.

God is only a desire of the childish mind.

Man has come of age, and God has become meaningless. The hypothesis has lost its grip.

What I am trying to say is that every effort that has been directed towards avoiding loneliness has failed, and will fail, because it is against the fundamentals of life. What is needed is not something in which you can forget your loneliness. What is needed is that you become aware of your aloneness, which is a reality. And it is so beautiful to experience it, to feel it, because it is your freedom from the crowd, from the other. It is your freedom from the fear of being lonely.

Just the word “lonely” immediately reminds you that it is like a wound: something is needed to fill it. There is a gap and it hurts: something needs to be filled in. The very word “aloneness” does not have the same sense of a wound, of a gap which has to be filled. Aloneness simply means completeness. You are whole; there is no need of anybody else to complete you.

So try to find your innermost center, where you are always alone, have always been alone. In life, in death — wherever you are you will be alone. But it is so full — it is not empty, it is so full and so complete and so overflowing with all the juices of life, with all the beauties and benedictions of existence, that once you have tasted aloneness the pain in the heart will disappear. Instead, a new rhythm of tremendous sweetness, peace, joy, bliss, will be there.

It does not mean that a man who is centered in his aloneness, complete in himself, cannot make friends — in fact only he can make friends, because now it is no longer a need, it is just sharing. He has so much; he can share.

Friendship can be of two types. One is a friendship in which you are a beggar — you need something from the other to help your loneliness — and the other is also a beggar; he wants the same from you. And naturally two beggars cannot help each other. Soon they will see that their begging from a beggar has doubled or multiplied the need. Instead of one beggar, now there are two. And if, unfortunately, they have children, then there are a whole company of beggars who are asking — and nobody has anything to give.

So everybody is frustrated and angry, and everybody feels he is being cheated, deceived. And in fact nobody is cheating and nobody is deceiving, because what have you got?

The other kind of friendship, the other kind of love, has a totally different quality. It is not of need, it is out of having so much that you want to share. A new kind of joy has come into your being — that of sharing, which you were not ever aware of before. You have always been begging.

When you share, there is no question of clinging. You flow with existence, you flow with life’s change, because it doesn’t matter with whom you share. It can be the same person tomorrow — the same person for your whole life — or it can be different persons. It is not a contract, it is not a marriage; it is simply out of your fullness that you want to give. So whosoever happens to be near you, you give it. And giving is such a joy.

Begging is such a misery. Even if you get something through begging, you will remain miserable. It hurts. It hurts your pride, it hurts your integrity. But sharing makes you more centered, more integrated, more proud, but not more egoistic — more proud that existence has been compassionate to you. It is not ego; it is a totally different phenomenon...a recognition that existence has allowed you something for which millions of people are trying, but at the wrong door. You happen to be at the right door.

You are proud of your blissfulness and all that existence has given to you. Fear disappears, darkness disappears, the pain disappears, the desire for the other disappears.

You can love a person, and if the person loves somebody else there will not be any jealousy, because you loved out of so much joy. It was not a clinging. You were not holding the other person in prison. You were not worried that the other person may slip out of your hands, that somebody else may start having a love affair....

When you are sharing your joy, you don’t create a prison for anybody. You simply give. You don’t even expect gratitude or thankfulness because you are not giving to get anything, not even gratitude. You are giving because you are so full you have to give.

So if anybody is thankful, you are thankful to the person who has accepted your love, who has accepted your gift. He has unburdened you, he allowed you to shower on him. And the more you share, the more you give, the more you have. So it does not make you a miser, it does not create a new fear that “I may lose it.” In fact the more you lose it, the more fresh waters are flowing in from springs you have not been aware of before.

So I will not tell you to do anything about your loneliness.

Look for your aloneness.

Forget loneliness, forget darkness, forget pain. These are just the absence of aloneness. The experience of aloneness will dispel them instantly. And the method is the same: just watch your mind, be aware. Become more and more conscious, so finally you are only conscious of yourself. That is the point where you become aware of aloneness.

You will be surprised that different religions have given different names to the ultimate state of realization. The three religions born outside of India don’t have any name for it because they never went far in the search for oneself. They remained childish, immature, clinging to a God, clinging to prayer, clinging to a savior. You can see what I mean: they are always dependent — somebody else is to save them. They are not mature. Judaism, Christianity, Islam — they are not mature at all and perhaps that is the reason they have influenced the greatest majority in the world, because most of the people in the world are immature. They have a certain affinity.

But the three religions in India have three names for this ultimate state. And I remembered this because of the word aloneness. Jainism has chosen kaivalya, aloneness, as the ultimate state of being. Just as Buddhism chose nirvana, no-selfness, and Hinduism chose moksha, freedom, Jainism chose absolute aloneness. All three words are beautiful. They are three different aspects of the same reality. You can call it liberation, freedom; you can call it aloneness; you can call it selflessness, nothingness — just different indicators towards that ultimate experience for which no name is sufficient.

But always look to see if anything that you are facing as a problem is a negative thing or a positive thing. If it is a negative thing then don’t fight with it; don’t bother about it at all. Just look for the positive of it, and you will be at the right door.

Most of the people in the world miss because they start fighting directly with the negative door.

There is no door; there is only darkness, there is only absence. And the more they fight, the more they find failure, the more they become dejected, pessimistic...and ultimately they start finding that life has no meaning, that it is simply torture. But their mistake is they entered from the wrong door.

So before you face a problem, just look at the problem: is it an absence of something? And all your problems are the absence of something. And once you have found what they are the absence of, then go after the positive. And the moment you find the positive, the light — the darkness is finished.

(The Path of the Mystic, chapter 19)