I want to give up smoking. What do you say about it?

Question: Beloved Master, I want to give up smoking. What do you say about it?

Osho : Mahendra, why? Why in the first place do you want to give up smoking? What is wrong in smoking? Yes, it is a little stupid, silly -- just poisoning your breath, taking smoke in and out, wasting money, life. But it is not a sin, it is not a crime either. You should not feel guilty about it. Maybe you will live a little less, two or three years less than you would have lived. But what is the point of living three years more? What will you do by living three years more? You will create a little more trouble in the world -- so better you go a little earlier. And the world is too much populated.

Nobody had thought about birth control before. Now we are thinking constantly everywhere how to reduce the population, how to prevent new children from being born. Sooner or later we will have to think about the other end: how to help the old people to go faster, because that is absolutely logical, part of it. If we prevent children from coming in just to keep the world a little less populated -- it is already too much populated -- sooner or later we have to think about ways and means how to help old people to go quicker, faster. We will have to make it a birthright.

If somebody decides to die, it should not be a crime. In fact, he should be supported, respected, because he is creating space for new people to come. He is helping the world -- he is a great servant of humanity.

You say, Mahendra, "I want to give up smoking."
Why in the first place? -- because you have been reading that it is bad for your health? But what will you DO with your health? 

There is a beautiful story about Jesus, not related in the Christian gospels. My feeling has always been that it has been deleted somewhere down the centuries because it is a dangerous story. But Sufis have kept it intact, recorded. There are a few Jesus stories which Sufis have guarded, and they should be thanked for it because they are the most beautiful stories out of all the stories that the gospels contain. This one is a beauty.

Jesus came to a village. He saw a man lying in the gutter, shouting, talking incoherently, making noise. It was difficult to understand what he wanted to say; he was completely drunk. Jesus came close just to understand what he wanted to say -- maybe he needed some help. When he came close he recognized the face. He shook the man. The man opened his eyes, and Jesus said, "Don't you recognize me? I recognize you."

The man said, "I also recognize you, but please leave me alone."
Jesus said, "As far as I remember you were ill, very ill, almost on the verge of death, and I cured you. I have done a miracle -- and I don't see any gratitude in your eyes."

The man said, "Gratitude? I was going to die and that would have been a rest from this ugly life. You made me healthy again and now I am suffering again. Who is responsible? Why did you make me healthy again? Who gave you the right?"

Jesus was shocked -- he had never thought about it. Jesus said, "But you are healthy -- you can USE your health." And the man said, "That's what I am doing. When one is healthy one drinks, eats, enjoys the things of life. What else can I do with my health?"

It is really a very pertinent question: What will you do with your health? Eat, drink, be merry! And the man seems to be almost angry at Jesus. Jesus walked away very puzzled, and he saw another man who was running after a prostitute. He stopped the man and said, "Young man, I know you perfectly well. You were blind and I gave you eyes."

And the man said, "What else should I do with the eyes? The eyes are meant to look and search for beauty. And that woman -- have you not seen how beautiful she is? Leave me alone! I have no more time for you."

Jesus was very sad because he was thinking he had helped these people. He came out of the village and a man was preparing to kill himself. He asked the man, "Life is so valuable! Why are you killing yourself?" 

The man looked at Jesus and he said, "Don't you recognize me? I had died and you are the man who disturbed my death and you brought me back from my death. It is too much! I cannot bear this life any longer. Enough is enough! And please, you have come again... and I have made every preparation to kill myself. Don't do your miracle again -- I don't want any of your miracles!" 

This is a strange story, but of great significance. Man is such, so blind, that he will do something wrong if he is healthy, he will do something wrong if he is alive, he will do something wrong if he has eyes -- he will see something wrong. Unless you are conscious you are going to do wrong.

That's why in the East, Buddha, Mahavira, Lao Tzu and people like them have never done any miracles -- or they have done only one miracle, and that miracle is the transformation of unconsciousness into consciousness -- because unless that happens everything is going to be wrong. It is giving a sword into a child's hand: either he will cut himself or somebody else. You don't give poison to a child to play with; it is dangerous. Man is unconscious, almost in a state of drunkenness.

So what will you gain out of it if you stop smoking? 

O'Leary walked into a bar and ordered a beer and a whisky. He drank the beer and poured the whisky into his vest pocket. O'Leary repeated this routine several times, and finally the puzzled bartender asked, "What is the idea?"

"None of your business!" said the Irishman. "And what is more, you are so nosy I have a good mind to punch you in the eye!"

Just then a mouse stuck his head out of O'Leary's vest pocket and said, "And that goes for your damned cat too!" 

Man is unconscious. He only APPEARS conscious, he is not conscious at all. So rather than asking me what I have to say about it, you should watch. The most important thing is not stopping smoking; the most important thing is to watch why you smoke in the first place. If you don't understand the cause of it and if the cause is not removed, you can stop smoking -- then you will start chewing gum, because the basic cause is there and you will have to do something. If you don't start chewing gum, then you may start talking too much. I don't smoke. If any day I have to stop talking I may have to start smoking! You will do something.... 

This amorous playboy cornered the girl in the back seat of his sedan and was eagerly trying his hand at her. She kept resisting and pushing him away, but he kept coming with more hands than an octopus. She finally slapped him away and hollered, "I don't know what has come over you. You have always been so restrained and gentlemanly."
He said, "Yes, I know, but I just can't help it. I am trying to give up smoking." 

Smoking is keeping many people from many things which will be far more dangerous. Your hand is engaged, your mouth is engaged, your mind is engaged. And you are not harming anybody in particular, only harming yourself. That is your birthright, that is your freedom. Otherwise you will do something else.

Have you watched? Whenever you feel nervous, tense, you start smoking. It helps you to cool down, to relax a little bit; otherwise life will become too much. When you are not feeling nervous, when you are enjoying, when you are relaxed, you don't remember smoking. Hours may pass and you may not smoke for the simple reason that there is no cause. Otherwise you become afraid you may do something wrong. Better to keep yourself engaged.

Mahendra, my suggestion is: first go deep down into your smoking habit. Meditate over it, why in the first place you smoke. It may take a few months for you to go into it, and the deeper you go the more you will be freed of it. Don't stop smoking. If it disappears on your understanding, through your understanding, that is totally a different matter. If it disappears because you went to the root cause of it and you saw the point....

For example, it may be that your mother's breast was taken away from you earlier than you wanted and it is just a substitute.

To many people I have suggested -- and it has been of help to smokers -- I say, "If you really want to stop smoking, then start sucking your thumb." They say, "But that will look very stupid!" That is true... smoking looks as if you are doing something great! You are doing the same thing, in fact a little more harmful. Just sucking on your thumb is not harmful at all, but smoking IS harmful. But because everybody is smoking and it is an accepted thing and it seems to be a very grown-up thing....

Small children want to grow up, if not for anything else than just for being allowed to smoke. Seeing grown-up people smoking they feel very inferior -- they are not allowed. They are told, "You are too small -- wait a little. This is something which only grown-up people can do." It symbolizes a grown-up person. And if you are really smoking costly cigarettes, costly cigars, rare, exotic, then it shows your success, it shows that you have arrived. It gives you dignity.

Go deep into it. It may be that your mother's breast was taken away too early. Then my suggestion is: in the night before you go to bed, Mahendra, have a bottle with a rubber nipple fixed to it and suck it. Every night before you go to sleep become a child again. Go on sucking on it. Fill the bottle with warm milk. That's what the smoking is doing. The warm smoke going in and out symbolizes the milk of the mother. You will have to go deep into the causes.

One of the great things in life is that if you understand the root cause of something you can overcome it without any trouble, without any willpower. If you use willpower to stop it you will find some substitute -- you will have to find some substitute. Maybe you are not allowed to speak; in the office the boss won't allow you, in the home the wife won't allow you. She goes on talking, she gives you no time to talk.

And you are also afraid if you talk you get into trouble; whatsoever you say is wrong. And the wife jumps upon it, takes the cue from that and starts nagging you. So in the home you have to hide behind a newspaper. Whether you read the newspaper or not is not the point, but you have to hide behind the newspaper. You have to look engaged, occupied, so you need not talk and you need not hear what the wife goes on saying.

Women all over the world, except for a few countries in the West, don't smoke, for the simple reason that they talk too much. Their lips have so much exercise, there is no need! In a few countries in the West they have started smoking and the reason is the Women's Lib movement. They have to compete with men in everything; whether it is sense or nonsense that doesn't matter. I am very much afraid they may start pissing standing any day, because they are equal to men! Howsoever stupid it is, they will do it.

Go into the cause of it, Mahendra, and if you can find the cause it will simply melt away. But don't stop by force -- let it go on its own accord, through watchfulness, through awareness.

So I will not say to stop smoking or stop anything, but I will suggest always: watch, meditate, be aware, go into the roots. This is a fundamental law of life: if you can understand the root of something it disappears, it evaporates. Unless you understand the root it will continue in one form or another. 

Osho – That’s the situation that almost all human beings are in. We are taught a very repressive attitude, we are taught to repress the negative. It looks very logical not to be angry, not to be hateful, not to be jealous, not to be greedy, it looks perfectly good that you should not be these things, but when you repress the negative automatically the positive is repressed.

You can be loving only if you also allow your hate to surface. They are together: if you repress hate, love will be repressed; you cannot separate them. That is one of the most significant things to understand, and man has suffered much because of that misunderstanding. We have been told that love and hate can be separated.

They cannot be separated, they are two sides of the same coin. Hidden behind love is hate,hidden behind compassion is anger, and so on, so forth. The polar opposite always exists with it so when you repress one, both are repressed; if you express one, both will have to be expressed. And down the ages the society has decided to repress the negative, hence the positive has disappeared. When the positive disappears life is meaningless; then there is no significance.

It is for the first time in human history that man is becoming aware of this phenomenon: that the hate part also needs to be accepted, that it has also to be welcomed, that we are not to reject it in any way. We have to understand that once the negative is allowed the positive will surface.

(To the man) She has repressed the negative. And women are more repressive about the negative because they have been told to have a better demeanour, a better, more graceful personality. Men are allowed a little bit: if they are angry and they shout, it’s okay; but the woman should not shout, she should not be angry, she should not use swear-words, mm? – that is not womanly. At the most she can cry. She can be sad but not angry; man is not allowed to cry but he is allowed to be angry.

So it happens almost always that the women become less loving. In fact they have the capacity to love more than men, but because of that capacity they have all the more capacity to hate too. Once a woman loves you her love is too much; if she hates you, her hate is too much. You can neither bear her love nor her hate. Man is very lukewarm, his love is lukewarm, his hate is lukewarm, because he has many more dimensions, he has many more things in life.

Love is the whole life of the woman. Certainly because of that it has too much intensity. Humanity must have become aware of the phenomenon that if woman is allowed to hate, there will be danger, it will be fire: Repress it. Hate has been repressed; now love is being repressed.

Both have disappeared into the unconscious, so at the most woman can show gestures of love. But this will happen, there is nothing to be worried about. Go through a few more groups. I will give you deeper groups, then I will give you one group for you both to do together, but only later on; first you should do a few groups separately. After two, three groups I will give you one or two groups to do together; by that time you will both be ready. But this problem will be settled – there is nothing to be worried about!

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIKING AND LOVING, TO LIKE AND TO LOVE? AND

ALSO, WHAT IS THE BETWEEN ORDINARY LOVE AND SPIRITUAL LOVE?

THERE is a great difference between liking and loving. Liking has no commitment in it, loving is commitment. That’s why people don’t talk much about love. In fact people have started talking about love in such contexts where no commitment is needed. For example. somebody says ’I love ice cream.’ Now how can you love ice cream? You can like, you cannot love. And somebody says ’I love my dog, I love my car, I love this and that.’ In fact people are very very afraid of saying to a person ’I love you.’

I have heard: A man was dating with a girl, for months together. And the girl was of course waiting, waiting – they were even making love but the man had not said to her ’I love you.’ Just see the difference. In the ancient days, the ancients used to fall in love. Now people make love.

You see the difference? Falling in love is being overwhelmed by love; it is passive. Making love is almost making it profane, almost destroying its beauty. It is active, as if you are doing something; you are manipulating and controlling. Now people have changed the language – rather than using’falling in love’ they use ’making love’.

And the man was making love to the woman but he had not said a single time ’I love you.’ And the woman was waiting and waiting and waiting.

One day he phoned and he said ’I have been thinking and thinking to say it to you. It seems now the time for it has come. I have to say it; now I cannot contain it any more.’ And the woman was thrilled and she became all ears – for this she was waiting. And she said ’Say it! Say it!’ And the man said ’I have to say it, now I cannot contain it any more: I really like you so much.’People are saying to each other ’I like you.’ Why don’t they say ’I love you’? Because love is commitment, involvement, risk, responsibility. Liking is just momentary – I can like you, and I may not like you tomorrow; there is no risk in it. When you say to a woman ’I love you’ you take a risk.

You are saying ’I love you: I will remain loving you, I will love you tomorrow too. You can depend on me, this is a promise. ’Love is a promise, liking has nothing to do with any promise. When you say to a man ’I like you’ you say something about you, not about the man. You say ’This is how I am, I like you. I like ice cream too, and I like my car too. In the same way, I like you.’ You are saying something about you. When you say to a person ’I love you’ you are saying something about the person, not about you. You are saying ’You are lovely.’ The arrow is pointing to the other person, and then there is danger – you are giving a promise. Love has the quality of promise in it and commitment and involvement.

And love has something of eternity in it. Liking is momentary; liking is non-risky, non-responsible.You ask me: WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIKING AND LOVING? AND ALSO, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ORDINARY LOVE AND SPIRITUAL LOVE?

Liking and loving are different, but there is no difference between ordinary love and spiritual love.Love is spiritual. I have never come across ordinary love; the ordinary thing is liking. Love is never ordinary – it can’t be, it is intrinsically extraordinary. It is not of this world. When you say to a woman or a man ’I love you’ you are simply saying ’I cannot be deceived by your body, I have seen you. Your body may become old but I have seen you, the bodiless you. I have seen your innermost core, the core that is divine.’ Liking is superficial. Love penetrates and goes to the very core of the person, touches the very soul of the person. No love is ordinary. Love cannot be ordinary, otherwise it is not love. To call love ordinary is to misunderstand the whole phenomenon of love. Love is never ordinary; love is always extraordinary, always spiritual. That is the difference between liking and love: liking is material, love is spiritual.

What exactly is Intelligence.....



What exactly is Intelligence, and what is the relation of the intelligence of the heart to the intelligence of the mind?

Osho – Punita, intelligence is the inborn capacity to see, to perceive. Every child is born intelligent, then made stupid by the society. We educate him in stupidity. Sooner or later he graduates in stupidity. Intelligence is a natural phenomenon – just as breathing is, just as seeing is. Intelligence is the inner seeing; it is intuitive. It has nothing to do with intellect, remember. Never confuse intellect with intelligence, they are polar opposites. Intellect is of the head; it is taught by others, it is imposed on you. You have to cultivate it. It is borrowed, it is something foreign, it is not inborn.

But intelligence is inborn. It is your very being, your very nature. All animals are intelligent. They are not intellectuals, true, but they are all intelligent. Trees are intelligent, the whole existence is intelligent, and each child born is born intelligent. Have you ever come across a child who is stupid? It is impossible! But to come across a grown-up person who is intelligent is very rare; something goes wrong in between.

I would like you to listen to this beautiful story. It may help. The story is called ’The Animal School’. The animals got together in the forest one day and decided to start a school. There was a rabbit, a bird, a squirrel, a fish and an eel, and they formed a Board of Directors. The rabbit insisted that running be in the curriculum. The bird insisted that flying be in the curriculum. The fish insisted that swimming had to be in the curriculum, and the squirrel said that perpendicular tree-climbing was absolutely necessary to the curriculum. They put all of these things together and wrote a curriculum guide. Then they insisted that ALL of the animals take ALL of the subjects.

Although the rabbit was getting an A in running, perpendicular tree-climbing was a real problem for him. He kept falling over backwards. Pretty soon he got to be sort of brain-damaged and he could not run anymore. He found that instead of making an A in running he was making a C, and of course he always made an F in perpendicular climbing. The bird was really beautiful at flying, but when it came to burrowing in the ground he could not do so well. He kept breaking his beak and wings. Pretty soon he was making a C in flying as well as an F in burrowing, and he had a hell of a time with perpendicular tree-climbing.

The moral of the story is that the person who was valedictorian of the class was a mentally-retarded eel who did everything in a half-way fashion. But the educators were all happy because everybody was taking all of the subjects, and it was called a ’broad-based education’. We laugh at this, but that’s what it is. It is what you did. We really are trying to make everybody the same as everybody else, hence destroying everybody’s potential for being himself.

Intelligence dies in imitating others. If you want to remain intelligent you will have to drop imitating. Intelligence commits suicide in copying, in becoming a carbon copy. The moment you start thinking how to be like that person you are falling from your intelligence, you are becoming stupid. The moment you compare yourself with somebody else you are losing your natural potential. Now you will never be happy, and you will never be clean, clear, transparent. You will lose your clarity, you will lose your vision. You will have borrowed eyes; but how can you see through somebody else’s eyes?

You need your own eyes, you need your own legs to walk, your own heart to beat. People are living a borrowed life, hence their life is paralyzed. This paralysis makes them look very stupid. A totally new kind of education is needed in the world. The person who is born to be a poet is proving himself stupid in mathematics and the person who could have been a great mathematician is just cramming history and feeling lost. Everything is topsy-turvy because education is not according to your nature. It does not pay any respect to the individual, it forces everybody into a certain pattern.

Maybe by accident the pattern fits a few people but the majority is lost and the majority lives in misery. The greatest misery in life is to feel oneself stupid, unworthy, unintelligent. And nobody is born unintelligent; nobody can be born unintelligent because we come from God. God is pure intelligence. We bring some flavor, some fragrance from God when we come into the world. But immediately the society jumps upon you, starts manipulating, teaching, changing, cutting, adding, and soon you have lost all shape, all form. The society wants you to be obedient, conformist, orthodox. This is how your intelligence is destroyed.

My whole approach is to take you out of this imposed pattern. This is a prison cell in which you are living. You can drop it. It will be difficult to drop because you have become so accustomed to it. It will be difficult to drop because it is not just like clothing; it has become almost your skin, you have lived with it so long. It will be difficult to drop because this is your whole identity – but it has to be dropped if you really want to claim your real being.

If you really want to be intelligent you have to be a rebel. Only the rebellious person is intelligent. What do I mean by rebellion? – I mean dropping all that has been enforced on you against your will. Search again for who you are, start from ABC again. Think that your time, up to now, has been a wastage because you have been following.

No person is similar to anybody else, each is unique – that is the nature of intelligence – and each is incomparable. Don’t compare yourself to anybody. How can you compare? You are you and the other is other. You are not similar, so comparison is not possible. But we have been taught to compare and we are continuously comparing. Directly, indirectly, consciously, unconsciously, we live in comparison. And if you compare you will never respect yourself: somebody is more beautiful than you, somebody is taller than you, somebody is healthier than you, and somebody is something else; somebody has such a musical voice… and you will be burdened and burdened if you go on comparing. Millions of people are there; you will be crushed by your comparisons.

And you had a beautiful soul, a beautiful being which wanted to bloom, which wanted to become a Golden Flower, but you never allowed it. Be unburdened. Put all aside. Regain, reclaim your innocence, your childhood. Jesus is right when he says, ”Unless you are born again, you shall not enter into my kingdom of God.”

I say the same to you: Unless you are born AGAIN…. Let your sannyas be a new birth! Drop all the garbage that has been put on you! Be fresh! Start from the very beginning, and you will be surprised – how much intelligence is immediately released.

Punita, you ask, ”What exactly is intelligence?”

It is capacity to see, capacity to understand, capacity to live your own life according to your own nature. That is what intelligence is. And what is stupidity? Following others, imitating others, obeying others, looking through their eyes, trying to imbibe their knowledge as your knowledge: that is stupidity. That’s why pundits are almost always stupid people. They are parrots, they repeat. They are gramophone records. They can repeat skillfully, but let a new situation arise, that which is not written in their books, and they are at a loss. They don’t have any intelligence.

Intelligence is the capacity to respond moment-to-moment to life as it happens, not according to a program. Only unintelligent people have a program. They are afraid; they know that they don’t have enough intelligence to encounter life as it is. They have to be ready, they rehearse. They prepare the answer before the question has been raised, and that’s how they prove themselves stupid – because the question is never the same. The question is always new. Each day brings its own problems, its own challenges and each moment brings its own questions. And if you have ready-made answers in your head you will not be able even to listen to the question. You will be so full of your answer, you will be incapable of listening. You will not be available. And whatsoever you will do you will do according to your ready-made answer – which is irrelevant, which has no relationship with the reality as it is.

Intelligence is: to relate with reality, unprepared. And the beauty of facing life unprepared is tremendous. Then life has a newness, a youth; then life has a flow and freshness. Then life has so many surprises. And when life has so many surprises boredom never settles in you. The stupid person is always bored. He is bored because of the answers that he has gathered from others and goes on repeating. He is bored because his eyes are so full of knowledge, he cannot see what is happening. He knows too much without knowing at all. He is not wise, he is only knowledgeable. When he looks at a roseflower, he does not look at THIS roseflower. All the roseflowers that he has read about, all the roseflowers that the poets have talked about, all the roseflowers that painters have painted and philosophers have discussed, and all the roseflowers that he had heard about, they are standing in his eyes – a great queue of memories, information.

THIS roseflower that is there is lost in that queue, in that crowd. He cannot see it. He simply repeats; he says, ”This roseflower is beautiful.” Those words are also not his own, not authentic, not sincere, not true. Somebody else’s voice… he is just playing a tape.

Stupidity is repetition, repeating others. It is cheap, cheap because you need not learn. Learning is arduous. It needs guts to learn. Learning means one has to be humble. Learning means one has to be ready to drop the old, one has to be constantly ready to accept the new. Learning means a non-egoistic state.

And one never knows where learning will lead you. One cannot predict about the learner; his life will remain unpredictable. He himself cannot predict what is going to happen tomorrow, where he will be tomorrow. He moves in a state of no-knowledge. Only when you live in a state of no-knowledge, a CONSTANT state of no-knowledge, do you learn.

That’s why children learn beautifully. As they grow old they stop learning, because knowledge gathers and it is cheap to repeat it. Why bother? It is cheap, simple, to follow the pattern, to move in a circle. But then boredom settles. Stupidity and boredom go together. The intelligent person is as fresh as dewdrops in the morning sun, as fresh as the stars in the night. You can feel his newness, so new, like a breeze.

Intelligence is the capacity to be reborn again and again. To die to the past is intelligence, and to live in the present is intelligence. And, Punita, you also ask, ”What is the relationship of intelligence of the heart to the intelligence of the mind?”

They are diametrically opposite. The intelligence of the head is not intelligence at all; it is knowledgeability. The intelligence of the heart is the intelligence, the only intelligence there is. The head is simply an accumulator. It is always old, it is never new, it is never original. It is good for certain purposes: for filing it is perfectly good. And in life one needs this – many things have to be remembered. The mind, the head, is a biocomputer. You can go on accumulating knowledge in it and whenever you need you can take it out. It is good for mathematics, good for calculation, good for the day-to-day life, the marketplace; but if you think this is your whole life then you will remain stupid. You will never know the beauty of feeling and you will never know the blessing of the heart.

And you will never know the grace that descends only through the heart, the God that enters only through the heart. You will never know prayer, you will never know poetry, you will never know love. The intelligence of the heart creates poetry in your life, gives dance to your steps, makes your life a joy, a celebration, a festivity, a laughter. It gives you a sense of humor. It makes you capable of love, of sharing. That is true life. The life that is lived from the head is a mechanical life. You become a robot – maybe very efficient; robots are very efficient, machines are more efficient than man. You can earn much through the head, but you will not live much. You may have a better standard of living but you won’t have any life.

Life is of the heart. Life can only grow through the heart. It is the soil of the heart where love grows, life grows, God grows. All that is beautiful, all that is really valuable, all that is meaningful, significant, comes through the heart. The heart is your very center, the head is just your periphery. To live in the head is to live on the circumference without ever becoming aware of the beauties and the treasures of the center. To live on the periphery is stupidity. You ask, ”What is stupidity?”

To live in the head is stupidity. To live in the heart and USE the head whenever needed is intelligence. But the center, the Master, is at the very core of your being. The Master is the heart, and the head is just a servant: this is intelligence. When the head becomes the Master and forgets all about the heart, that is stupidity.

It is up to you to choose. Remember, the head as a slave is a beautiful slave, of much utility, but as a master is a dangerous master and will destroy your whole life, will poison your whole life. Look around! People’s lives are absolutely poisoned, poisoned by the head. They cannot feel, they are no more sensitive, nothing thrills them. The sun rises but nothing rises in them; they look at the sun empty-eyed. The sky becomes full of the stars – the marvel, the mystery! – but nothing stirs in their hearts, no song arises. Birds sing, man has forgotten to sing. Clouds come in the sky and the peacocks dance, and man does not know how to dance. He has become a cripple. Trees bloom…. Man thinks, never feels, and without feeling there is no flowering possible.

The Golden Flower that we have been talking about this whole month is there in you, waiting – waiting for centuries, for lives. When are you going to give attention to it so that it can bloom? And unless a man becomes a Golden Flower what the yogis have called the ’one-thousand-petalled lotus’, sahasrar – unless your life becomes an opening, one thousand petals open and the fragrance is released, you will have lived in vain, ”a tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise, signifying nothing”.

Watch, scrutinize, observe, have another look at your life. Nobody else is going to help you. You have depended on others so long; that’s why you have become stupid. Now, take care; it is your own responsibility. You OWE it to yourself to have a deep penetrating look at what you are doing with your life. Is there any poetry in your heart? If it is not there, then don’t waste time. Help your heart to weave and spin poetry. Is there any romance in your life or not? If there is not, then you are dead, then you are already in your grave.

Come OUT of it! Let life have something of the romantic in it, something like adventure. Explore! Millions of beauties and splendors are waiting for you. You go on moving around and around, never entering into the temple of life. The door is the heart. So I say: the real intelligence is of the heart. It is not intellectual, it is emotional. It is not like thinking, it is like feeling. It is not logic, it is love.

source – osho book “The Secret of Secrets, Vol 2″

Murphy sutras (Law)



Beloved Osho, Please tell us a few more murphy sutras and a few murphy anecdotes too.

Osho – Gandharva, the Murphy sutras are really beautiful!

The first sutra: If wives were good, God would have one.

Second: Some people are born silly, some people acquire silliness, and some fall in love.

Third: After man came woman, and she has been after him ever since.

Fourth: Be thrifty when you are young, and when you are old you will be able to afford the things that only the young can enjoy.

Fifth: Never miss an opportunity to make others happy, even if you have to leave them alone.

Sixth: Heredity is something people believe in if they have bright children.

Seventh: When in Rome, do as the Romans do — eat spaghetti.

Eighth: Some men have no solution for any difficulty, but will find a difficulty for any solution.

If you don’t believe in this eighth sutra you can ask Asheesh. He is the perfect personification of this sutra! He has no solution for any difficulty, but you give him any solution and he will find the difficulty!

Ninth: There is no time like the present for postponing what you don’t want to do.

Tenth: Teamwork is essential — it allows you to blame someone else.

Eleventh: You can make it foolproof, but you can’t make it damn foolproof.

Twelfth: The height of futility is to tell a hair-raising story to a bald man.

Thirteenth: What is dumber than a dumb Italian? A dumb Indian.

Fourteenth: Adam was the happiest man on earth. Eve’s mother never told her that nice girls did not do it that way.

Fifteenth: You can’t get there from here, and besides there is no place else to go.

And a few anecdotes about Murphy….

The first: “I am getting more and more absent minded,” said Murphy to a few of his cronies. “Sometimes in the middle of a sentence I….”

“That fellow Bobo is so rude: this morning he was snoring in church!”

“Yes, I know,” said Murphy. “He woke me up!”

Murphy had recently become the father of triplets, and the priest stopped him on the street to congratulate him.

“Well, Murphy,” he said, “so the stork smiled on you.”

“Smiled on me!” exclaimed Murphy. “He laughed out loud!”

One friend met Murphy at the station. “Where are you going?” the friend asked.

“To Paris, for my honeymoon,” said Murphy.

“Without your wife?”

“Listen, when you go to Munich, do you take beer with you?”

One Sunday morning the preacher was ill and could not come to the church to perform his duties, so Murphy was doing his work. He was urging his congregation to sing.

“Now is the opportunity for all of you gifted with wonderful voices to show your gratitude towards the Lord. And for all of you without good voices, this is the time to get even with him!”

Murphy came home an hour earlier than usual and found his wife stark naked in bed. When he asked why, she explained, “I am protesting because I don’t have anything to wear.”

Murphy pulled open the closet door. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “Look in here. There is a yellow dress, a red dress, a print dress, a pant suit…Hi Chris!…a green dress….”

And the last: The son was sitting at the bedside of the elderly gentleman, Murphy, who was dying. “Where do you want to be buried,” the kid asked, “in Forest Lawn or Hillside Memorial Park?”

The old man creaked up on his elbow and answered, “Surprise me!”

Source – Osho Book “Come, Come, Yet Again Come”

If you are really into a relationship it will shatter you

A relationship is always a problem because the other becomes the mirror and the presence of the other help you to see your own face in many ways. And the same happens to the other – you become the mirror. Nobody wants to know his real face. That’s why down the centuries people have been escaping to the monastery. These are the cowards! They are avoiding relationship, because in a relationship they are reflected as they are. Alone, they can think of themselves whatsoever they want to think; they can create any image about themselves. So the first problem with relationship is that relationship reflects you and you reflect the other person. And your totality comes up – you are not just the surface.

The deeper you get involved in your relationship, the deeper feelings it will bring up. If you are really into a relationship it will shatter you. All your images will be shattered. All your faces will be tom. All your masks will start dropping. And whenever this happens the person starts to take revenge on the other. That’s why [your girlfriend] goes on saying no. Behind her no there is yes. In fact, she wants to say yes – that’s why she says no – but she is afraid of her own totality.

People have cleared a little ground of their being and they try to live comfortably there. Mm? – the whole is like a vast canvas. They don’t even want to remember. And whenever you are in love your deepest feeling is stirred. With that feeling all other feelings are stirred. Love is almost like a backbone to the feeling body. If your backbone is taken out you will be spineless . . . just a heap, a blob. Your spine holds you together. Exactly in the same way the feeling body is held together by the spine of love. If you are not in love you can control your anger very easily. In fact, if you are not in love at all there will not be any opportunities to be angry. You can control your sadness very easily if you are not in love. You can manage your life very conveniently; that’s what is being done in monasteries.

The so-called saints are nothing but people who have come to know one thing about themselves: that if they love, all chaos comes into being. If they don’t love the whole chaos disappears. It is a very cheap way to become peaceful. But this peace I don’t teach because this peace is the peace of death. I teach you living peace. I would like you to pass through the chaos and transcend it – rather than escaping from it. Escaping is not going to really change you. You have to pass through these situations.

Source – Osho Book “God Is Not For Sale”

Your Questions on Emotions

The Human Condition–ing          

                               

You spoke on the no-problem, the non-existence of our problems. I was brought up in a repressive Catholic family and spent twenty-one years in an equally crazy education system. Are you saying that all the coats of armor, all the conditionings and repressions do not exist and can be dropped immediately? What about the imprints left on the brain and on the musculature of the body?

                               

This is a very significant question. The question is significant because it shows two different approaches concerning the inner reality of man.

The Western approach is to think about the problem, to find the causes of the problem, to go into the history of the problem, into the past of the problem, to uproot the problem from the very beginning, to uncondition the mind, or to recondition the mind, to recondition the body, to take out all those imprints that have been left on the brain. This is the Western approach. Psychoanalysis goes into the memory; it works there. It goes into your childhood, into your past; it moves backwards. It finds out from where the problem has arisen. Maybe fifty years ago, when you were a child, the problem arose in your relationship with your mother; then psychoanalysis will go back.

Fifty years of history! It is a very long, dragging affair. And even then it doesn’t help much because there are millions of problems. It is not only a question of one problem. You can go into one problem’s history; you can look into your autobiography and find the causes and maybe you can eliminate one problem, but there are millions of problems. If you start going into each problem to solve one life’s problems you will need millions of lives. This is absurd!

Now, the same psychoanalytical approach has gone into the body: Rolfing, bio-energetics, and other methods are there which try to eliminate imprints on the body, in the musculature. Again, you have to go into the history of the body. But one thing is certain about both approaches, which are on the same logical pattern, that the problem comes from the past, so somehow it has to be tackled in the past.

The East has a totally different outlook. First, it says no problem is serious. The moment you say no problem is serious, the problem is almost ninety-nine percent dead. Your whole vision changes about it. The second thing the East says is: the problem is there because you are identified with it. It has nothing to do with the past, nothing to do with its history. You are identified with it; that is the real thing. And that is the key to solve all problems.

For example: you are an angry person. If you go to the psychoanalyst, he will say, “Go into the past: how did this anger arise? In what situations did it become more and more conditioned and imprinted on your mind? We will have to wash out all those imprints; we will have to wipe them off. We will have to clean your past completely.”

If you go to an Eastern mystic, he will say, “You think that you are anger, you feel identified with the anger. That is where things are going wrong. Next time anger happens, just be a watcher, just be a witness. Don’t get identified with the anger. Don’t say,’ I am anger.’ Don’t say,’ I am angry.’ Just see it happening as if it is happening on a TV screen. Look at yourself as if you are looking at somebody else.

“You are pure consciousness. When the cloud of anger comes around you just watch it and remain alert so that you don’t get identified. The whole thing is how not to become identified with the problem. Once you have learnt it...and then there is no question of ‘so many problems’ because the key, the same key will open all the locks. It is so with anger, it is so with greed, it is so with sex: it is so with everything else that the mind is capable of.

The questioner has asked: “You spoke in several recent discourses on the no-problem, the non-existence of our problems. Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family...”

You can, right now, become a non– Catholic. Now! I say. You will not have to go back and undo whatsoever your parents and your society and the priest and the church have done. That will be a sheer wastage of precious present time. In the first place it has destroyed many years; now, again, it will be destroying your present moments. You can simply drop out of it just as a snake slips out of the old skin.

“Are you saying that all the coats of armor, all the conditionings and repressions do not exist and can be dropped immediately?” No, they exist. But they exist either in the body or in the brain; they don’t exist in your consciousness, because the consciousness cannot be conditioned. Consciousness remains free. Freedom is its innermost quality, freedom is its nature. In fact, even asking it, you are showing that freedom.

When you say “twenty– one years in a crazy educational system”; when you say “I was brought up in a repressive Catholic family”.... In this moment you are not identified. You can look: so many years of Catholic repression, so many years of a certain education. In this moment when you are looking at it, this consciousness is no longer Catholic; otherwise, who would be aware? If you had really become Catholic, then who would be aware? Then there would be no possibility of becoming aware.

If you can say “twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system,” one thing is certain: you are not yet crazy. The system has failed; it didn’t work. You are not crazy, hence you can see the whole system as crazy. A madman cannot see that he is mad. Only a sane person can see that this is madness. To see madness as madness, sanity is needed. Those twenty-one years of crazy system have failed; all that repressive conditioning has failed. It cannot really succeed. It succeeds only in the proportion that you get identified with it. Any moment you can stand aloof...it is there, I am not saying it is not there: but it is no more part of your consciousness.

This is the beauty of consciousness: consciousness can slip out of anything. There is no barrier to it, no boundary to it. Just a moment before you were an Englishman; understanding the nonsense of nationalism, a second later you are no longer an Englishman. I am not saying that your white skin will change; it will remain white, but you are no longer identified with the whiteness; you are no longer against the black. You see the stupidity of it. I am not saying that just by seeing that you are no longer an Englishman you will forget the English language, no. It will still be there in your memory, but your consciousness has slipped out, your consciousness is standing on a hillock looking at the valley. Now, the Englishman is dead in the valley and you are standing on the hills, far away, unattached, untouched.

The whole Eastern methodology can be reduced to one word: witnessing. The whole Western methodology can be reduced to one thing: analyzing. Analyzing, you go round and round. Witnessing, you simply get out of the circle.

The Eastern approach is to become mindful of the sky. The Western approach makes you more and more alert to the clouds, and helps you a little, but it doesn’t make you aware of your innermost core. The circumference, yes; you become a little more aware of the circumference, but not aware of the center. And the circumference is a cyclone. You have to find the center of the cyclone. And that happens only through witnessing.

Witnessing will not change your conditioning. Witnessing will not change your body musculature. But witnessing will simply give you an experience that you are beyond all musculature, all conditioning. In that moment of beyondness, in that moment of transcendence, no problem exists — not for you. And now it is up to you. The body will still carry the musculature and the mind will still carry the conditioning. Now it is up to you: if sometimes you are hankering for the problem, you can get into the bodymind and have the problem and enjoy it. If you don’t want to have it, you can remain out. The problem will remain as an imprint in the bodymind phenomenon, but you will be aloof and away from it.

That’s how a Buddha functions. You also use memory; a Buddha also uses memory but he is not identified with it. He uses memory as a mechanism.

So your question is right: problems will exist, but they will exist only in the seed form in the body and the mind. How can you change your past? You have been a Catholic in the past; if for forty years you have been a Catholic, how can you change those forty years and not be a Catholic? No. Those forty years will remain as a period of being Catholic. But you can slip out of it. Now you know that that was just identification. Those forty years cannot be destroyed, and there is no need to destroy them. If you are the master of the house, there is no need. You can use even those forty years in a certain way, in a creative way. Even that crazy education can be used in a creative way.

“What about all the imprints left on the brain, on the musculature of the body?”

They will be there, but as a seed: potentially there. If you feel too lonely and you want problems, you can have them. If you feel too miserable without misery, you can have them. They will remain always available, but there is no need to have them, there is no necessity to have them. It will be your choice.