SILVIA, HERE FOREVER, WITH HIS THREE CHILDREN -- CAPUCINE, NINE, AND HER TWIN SONS, THIBAULT AND JEREMY, SEVEN. CAPUCINE: LOVE FLOWER.
OSHO: Love is a flower, and the most beautiful of all. It is invisible because it grows in the heart, but its fragrance is felt even from the outside. It opens in the heart but its fragrance goes on spreading; it reaches to other people too. And it has so much fragrance that it can fill the whole of existence. Whenever there is a man like Jesus or Buddha whose heart has become a flower of love, the whole existence is blessed.
(TO THIBAULT): Cowards cannot love; only the courageous can love, because love needs surrender, love needs the dropping of the ego. When you can forget yourself totally, then only does love arise. The coward lives in fear, in constant fear of death, and the basic requirement of love is death of the ego. Hence love needs courage. The flower of love can open up only in the soil of courage.
(TO JEREMY): We can forget him, we can keep him behind us, but he is bound to possess us sooner or later. One can escape from God for the time being but he is bound to take over because it is not only that we are searching for God, God is also searching for us.
We are lost children of God, and just as the mother will go in search of the child who has been lost in the marketplace, God goes on coming into the world. Just as the shepherd goes to search for the sheep which is lost, God goes on coming into the world, sometimes as Jesus, sometimes as Buddha.
Love is the base if you want to be sought by God, if you want to be possessed by him. If you want him to become a guest in your heart then you have to create the space called love. Love is the greatest space -- it is the whole sky. In love you become vast, unbounded, and God can enter you only when you are vast and unbounded.
OSHO (TO FRANK): Bliss cannot exist without freedom, neither can freedom exist without bliss. They support each other, they nourish each other.
A sannyasin has to be aware of this because there are people who seek bliss without seeking freedom. They will never find bliss; they will find more and more misery because in their search for bliss they will create many bondages, many prisons for themselves. There are also people who seek freedom without seeking bliss. They will not find freedom. Their freedom will be empty, kind of negative; it will not have anything in it. Without bliss it is just an empty well without any water. It looks like a well but it cannot quench your thirst. In seeking freedom without becoming aware and alert about bliss people go on missing all the possibilities where bliss could have been found; hence they become more and more miserable.
A sannyasin has to be alert that both things are not separate, that if you want to be blissful you have to be free; if you want to be free, you have to be blissful. Let them become one single goal. Search for them together -- that is the only possibility of ever arriving.
OSHO (TO CORDULA): A man without love is dead, is ice cold; his energies are frozen, not flowing. He is not really born yet.
Unless one becomes part of a loving experience, unless one becomes love itself, one is not really born, one remains cold and dead. With love comes warmth and with love life starts moving in you, that's why you become warm. Energies start flowing; you are no longer frozen, the ice starts melting.
Love makes you less and less material and more and more spiritual. Ultimately love brings you to a point where you are no longer a body but only a soul, just pure energy, vibrating, pulsating, in rhythm with the whole. That's the experience that religions have been searching for down the ages. You can call it God, enlightenment, nirvana, or whatsoever you like, but the experience is of pulsating with the whole; not lagging behind, not pulsating with your own personal rhythm but becoming part of the total so totally that you cannot say "I"; the word "I" becomes irrelevant. You are just a dewdrop falling into the ocean. In that moment bliss arises because you are at peace with the whole, in tune with the whole. This harmony is bliss, this accord is bliss. And then you are no longer just a small heart beating in your body; you become part of the great heart, the heart of the whole universe. You beat with it; its beat is your beat, its life is your life. You become oceanic: the dewdrop disappears in the ocean and becomes the ocean.
The warmth that arises in love is the beginning of the melting. The ego can exist only when you are frozen and cold. As you become warmer, the ego starts evaporating.
Let love happen, because that is true birth; and a sannyasin has to become pure love -- love for love's sake.
OSHO (TO BETH): It is only by becoming blissful that we become ready to receive the ultimate guest in our being. We can become God's houses, his temples, only through great bliss, not through small fragments and the momentary joys which come and go. The great bliss is when one remains, abides in it forever, when it becomes just like breathing: it is with you all the time with no effort. If effort is needed it is a small bliss, a momentary phenomenon. You are bound to lose it because you cannot remain in a strain twenty-four hours a day. It will become a tension on you.
Hence I don't teach that one should try to cultivate bliss; bliss cultivated is a false thing and takes too much toll, and unnecessary tension is created.
Bliss has to be a spontaneous happening. You cannot create it, you can only allow it to happen. So all the work that goes on here is not to create bliss but just to remove the obstacles in its path. The whole work consists in [text missing?] and in creating bridges. Once the walls are gone and the bridges have been made bliss comes dancing to you. And it does not come from the outside; the paradox is that it arises from your innermost core.
Ordinarily we are not bridged with ourselves. That's the whole problem of alienation: we have become outsiders to ourselves, strangers to ourselves. A gap has arisen between our real being and our so-called personality. The personality has to be dissolved, because the personality consists of walls and barriers and rocks. Once the personality is gone you explode in bliss.
That bliss is the great bliss, the real bliss -- anand. Then it remains, then it is simply your flavor, then it is simply your life, your being. That is the moment that God enters. Bliss makes you a house of God, a temple of God. Bliss makes you sacred, holy.
But down the ages people have been taught to be very serious, to be sad. Sadness, seriousness have been thought to be somehow religious, spiritual. It was not true, that's why humanity has not been transformed. Only the pathological people became attracted to such ideas -- ill people, somehow unhealthy, unwholesome -- because they could find an excuse for their sadness, a beautiful excuse: that they were religious. They could find a beautiful rationalization for their seriousness. Their disease became decorated with diamonds.
In the past, ninety-nine point nine percent of religious people have been pathological people, really psychotic, neurotic, schizophrenic. I am teaching a totally different kind of spirituality, a healthy spirituality; a spirituality which accepts the world in its totality; a spirituality which does not deny the body; a spirituality which knows no denial, which accepts everything. Of course everything has to be transformed but it can be transformed only through acceptance, not through rejection, not through repression.
And I teach you to be playful, to be cheerful, to be joyous for no reason at all. To me laughter is as valuable as prayer -- or even more valuable because a man who can love and who can laugh and can rejoice is closest to God. He knows really how to pray without praying.
OSHO (TO HELMWARD): God is the protector. Drop all anxieties, because God is the protector. Don't be afraid of anything, because God is the protector. Live in joy because it is our world, it belongs to us; it has been given to us by God. Live your life intensely, passionately, totally, because that is the only way to thank God. If we use his gift joyously, that is gratitude.
The modern man is the most afraid man we have ever known in history, the most anxious, anxiety-ridden. The modern man has one thing very specific about him: his anguish. And the reason is that we have denied God, we have declared that God is dead. It is not only Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration; Friedrich Nietzsche only represents the whole of the modern mind.
If we say there is no God then naturally there is anxiety because we are left unprotected. The ancient man lived in tremendous joy because he was absolutely certain that God was there looking after him. He was not alone in a cold world: there was some universal energy, consciousness helping, supporting, nourishing him. He was not uprooted. We are uprooted; hence the foliage has disappeared, the greenness has disappeared, flowers no longer happen to us. There is no fruition, no fulfillment.
This has to be your meditation: that God is there, constantly protecting you. Then whatsoever happens is good because it happens through him. Let this be your trust and your faith and you will be surprised: this trust will become your transformation.
ERNST BECOMES DEVA GITAM
OSHO: Life is not a problem, it is a mystery. A problem can be solved, a mystery is insolvable. A problem has to be tackled through logic and the mind, a mystery has to be encountered through love and the heart. When you solve a problem you feel you have conquered a part of existence. It makes you more egoistic; hence the modern ego. It is too much, it has become a heavy rock. Everybody is carrying it and it is becoming more and more heavy every day because science goes on giving you solutions to problems and indirectly goes on suggesting to you that sooner or later we will have solved all the problems. Then there is no God; if there is no mystery, there is no God. God is another name for the mysterious and the miraculous.
But to approach life through logic means reducing every mystery to a problem. Logic reduces every mystery to a problem because it can only tackle problems, that is its expertise. But life is not a problem at all. It is a mystery to be loved, to be lived, to be sung, to be celebrated.
Hence sannyas is not of the head, it is of the heart. It is not science, it is religion, it is mysticism, pure mysticism. Science demystifies life, sannyas re-mystifies it. I will take all solutions away from you and I will make you aware of many more mysteries that you are unaware of, mysteries which are going to remain mysteries forever. But once your heart has known how to dance with mysteries without creating problems your life becomes a continuous joy, a tremendous ecstasy. That's the meaning of your name: become a divine song, a divine celebration.
OSHO (TO PRITO): One has to be two things: at the center, bliss, at the circumference, love; inside, bliss, outside, love. Love is the outside of bliss; bliss is the inside of love. Hence bliss can happen when you are alone, but love needs sharing, love needs togetherness.
The whole past history of humanity is the history of a long failure, an exercise in utter futility, and this has been the reason, because we tried to do the impossible. Either we wanted to save the outside, so people tried to be loving.... But how can you be loving if you are not blissful? And how can you be unloving if you are blissful? They both happen simultaneously.
And that's my effort: to introduce both together to my sannyasins. So in meditation be alone and enjoy your aloneness, but don't become shut up within yourself. Don't become an introvert; that is pathological. Keep your doors and windows open so that the sun can come in and the rain and the wind. And don't become a prisoner of your aloneness; come out of it sometimes, dancing, singing. Love people, relate with people. Both are not opposites but complementaries, and both help each other. The more you love, the more blissful you become; the more blissful you are, the more you can love.
So my sannyasins are not monks. My sannyasins are neither worldly not otherworldly because we don't divide: it is one universe, one solid universe. And we don't divide it into the material and the spiritual, into the lower and the higher, the mundane and the sacred; we simply don't divide. We accept the totality as it is and we try to live it in totality.
If this experiment succeeds, this experiment of living life in its totality, then humanity can be saved; otherwise there is no hope. By becoming a sannyasin you are not only doing something good to yourself; you are doing something immensely valuable to the whole of humanity's future.
Osho's Commentary
CAPUCINE: LOVE FLOWER.
OSHO: Love is a flower, and the most beautiful of all. It is invisible because it grows in the heart, but its fragrance is felt even from the outside. It opens in the heart but its fragrance goes on spreading; it reaches to other people too. And it has so much fragrance that it can fill the whole of existence. Whenever there is a man like Jesus or Buddha whose heart has become a flower of love, the whole existence is blessed.
(TO THIBAULT): Cowards cannot love; only the courageous can love, because love needs surrender, love needs the dropping of the ego. When you can forget yourself totally, then only does love arise. The coward lives in fear, in constant fear of death, and the basic requirement of love is death of the ego. Hence love needs courage. The flower of love can open up only in the soil of courage.
(TO JEREMY): We can forget him, we can keep him behind us, but he is bound to possess us sooner or later. One can escape from God for the time being but he is bound to take over because it is not only that we are searching for God, God is also searching for us.
We are lost children of God, and just as the mother will go in search of the child who has been lost in the marketplace, God goes on coming into the world. Just as the shepherd goes to search for the sheep which is lost, God goes on coming into the world, sometimes as Jesus, sometimes as Buddha.
Love is the base if you want to be sought by God, if you want to be possessed by him. If you want him to become a guest in your heart then you have to create the space called love. Love is the greatest space -- it is the whole sky. In love you become vast, unbounded, and God can enter you only when you are vast and unbounded.
OSHO (TO FRANK): Bliss cannot exist without freedom, neither can freedom exist without bliss. They support each other, they nourish each other.
A sannyasin has to be aware of this because there are people who seek bliss without seeking freedom. They will never find bliss; they will find more and more misery because in their search for bliss they will create many bondages, many prisons for themselves. There are also people who seek freedom without seeking bliss. They will not find freedom. Their freedom will be empty, kind of negative; it will not have anything in it. Without bliss it is just an empty well without any water. It looks like a well but it cannot quench your thirst. In seeking freedom without becoming aware and alert about bliss people go on missing all the possibilities where bliss could have been found; hence they become more and more miserable.
A sannyasin has to be alert that both things are not separate, that if you want to be blissful you have to be free; if you want to be free, you have to be blissful. Let them become one single goal. Search for them together -- that is the only possibility of ever arriving.
OSHO (TO CORDULA): A man without love is dead, is ice cold; his energies are frozen, not flowing. He is not really born yet.
Unless one becomes part of a loving experience, unless one becomes love itself, one is not really born, one remains cold and dead. With love comes warmth and with love life starts moving in you, that's why you become warm. Energies start flowing; you are no longer frozen, the ice starts melting.
Love makes you less and less material and more and more spiritual. Ultimately love brings you to a point where you are no longer a body but only a soul, just pure energy, vibrating, pulsating, in rhythm with the whole. That's the experience that religions have been searching for down the ages. You can call it God, enlightenment, nirvana, or whatsoever you like, but the experience is of pulsating with the whole; not lagging behind, not pulsating with your own personal rhythm but becoming part of the total so totally that you cannot say "I"; the word "I" becomes irrelevant. You are just a dewdrop falling into the ocean. In that moment bliss arises because you are at peace with the whole, in tune with the whole. This harmony is bliss, this accord is bliss. And then you are no longer just a small heart beating in your body; you become part of the great heart, the heart of the whole universe. You beat with it; its beat is your beat, its life is your life. You become oceanic: the dewdrop disappears in the ocean and becomes the ocean.
The warmth that arises in love is the beginning of the melting. The ego can exist only when you are frozen and cold. As you become warmer, the ego starts evaporating.
Let love happen, because that is true birth; and a sannyasin has to become pure love -- love for love's sake.
OSHO (TO BETH): It is only by becoming blissful that we become ready to receive the ultimate guest in our being. We can become God's houses, his temples, only through great bliss, not through small fragments and the momentary joys which come and go. The great bliss is when one remains, abides in it forever, when it becomes just like breathing: it is with you all the time with no effort. If effort is needed it is a small bliss, a momentary phenomenon. You are bound to lose it because you cannot remain in a strain twenty-four hours a day. It will become a tension on you.
Hence I don't teach that one should try to cultivate bliss; bliss cultivated is a false thing and takes too much toll, and unnecessary tension is created.
Bliss has to be a spontaneous happening. You cannot create it, you can only allow it to happen. So all the work that goes on here is not to create bliss but just to remove the obstacles in its path. The whole work consists in [text missing?] and in creating bridges. Once the walls are gone and the bridges have been made bliss comes dancing to you. And it does not come from the outside; the paradox is that it arises from your innermost core.
Ordinarily we are not bridged with ourselves. That's the whole problem of alienation: we have become outsiders to ourselves, strangers to ourselves. A gap has arisen between our real being and our so-called personality. The personality has to be dissolved, because the personality consists of walls and barriers and rocks. Once the personality is gone you explode in bliss.
That bliss is the great bliss, the real bliss -- anand. Then it remains, then it is simply your flavor, then it is simply your life, your being. That is the moment that God enters. Bliss makes you a house of God, a temple of God. Bliss makes you sacred, holy.
But down the ages people have been taught to be very serious, to be sad. Sadness, seriousness have been thought to be somehow religious, spiritual. It was not true, that's why humanity has not been transformed. Only the pathological people became attracted to such ideas -- ill people, somehow unhealthy, unwholesome -- because they could find an excuse for their sadness, a beautiful excuse: that they were religious. They could find a beautiful rationalization for their seriousness. Their disease became decorated with diamonds.
In the past, ninety-nine point nine percent of religious people have been pathological people, really psychotic, neurotic, schizophrenic. I am teaching a totally different kind of spirituality, a healthy spirituality; a spirituality which accepts the world in its totality; a spirituality which does not deny the body; a spirituality which knows no denial, which accepts everything. Of course everything has to be transformed but it can be transformed only through acceptance, not through rejection, not through repression.
And I teach you to be playful, to be cheerful, to be joyous for no reason at all. To me laughter is as valuable as prayer -- or even more valuable because a man who can love and who can laugh and can rejoice is closest to God. He knows really how to pray without praying.
OSHO (TO HELMWARD): God is the protector. Drop all anxieties, because God is the protector. Don't be afraid of anything, because God is the protector. Live in joy because it is our world, it belongs to us; it has been given to us by God. Live your life intensely, passionately, totally, because that is the only way to thank God. If we use his gift joyously, that is gratitude.
The modern man is the most afraid man we have ever known in history, the most anxious, anxiety-ridden. The modern man has one thing very specific about him: his anguish. And the reason is that we have denied God, we have declared that God is dead. It is not only Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration; Friedrich Nietzsche only represents the whole of the modern mind.
If we say there is no God then naturally there is anxiety because we are left unprotected. The ancient man lived in tremendous joy because he was absolutely certain that God was there looking after him. He was not alone in a cold world: there was some universal energy, consciousness helping, supporting, nourishing him. He was not uprooted. We are uprooted; hence the foliage has disappeared, the greenness has disappeared, flowers no longer happen to us. There is no fruition, no fulfillment.
This has to be your meditation: that God is there, constantly protecting you. Then whatsoever happens is good because it happens through him. Let this be your trust and your faith and you will be surprised: this trust will become your transformation.
ERNST BECOMES DEVA GITAM
OSHO: Life is not a problem, it is a mystery. A problem can be solved, a mystery is insolvable. A problem has to be tackled through logic and the mind, a mystery has to be encountered through love and the heart. When you solve a problem you feel you have conquered a part of existence. It makes you more egoistic; hence the modern ego. It is too much, it has become a heavy rock. Everybody is carrying it and it is becoming more and more heavy every day because science goes on giving you solutions to problems and indirectly goes on suggesting to you that sooner or later we will have solved all the problems. Then there is no God; if there is no mystery, there is no God. God is another name for the mysterious and the miraculous.
But to approach life through logic means reducing every mystery to a problem. Logic reduces every mystery to a problem because it can only tackle problems, that is its expertise. But life is not a problem at all. It is a mystery to be loved, to be lived, to be sung, to be celebrated.
Hence sannyas is not of the head, it is of the heart. It is not science, it is religion, it is mysticism, pure mysticism. Science demystifies life, sannyas re-mystifies it. I will take all solutions away from you and I will make you aware of many more mysteries that you are unaware of, mysteries which are going to remain mysteries forever. But once your heart has known how to dance with mysteries without creating problems your life becomes a continuous joy, a tremendous ecstasy.
That's the meaning of your name: become a divine song, a divine celebration.
OSHO (TO PRITO): One has to be two things: at the center, bliss, at the circumference, love; inside, bliss, outside, love. Love is the outside of bliss; bliss is the inside of love. Hence bliss can happen when you are alone, but love needs sharing, love needs togetherness.
The whole past history of humanity is the history of a long failure, an exercise in utter futility, and this has been the reason, because we tried to do the impossible. Either we wanted to save the outside, so people tried to be loving.... But how can you be loving if you are not blissful? And how can you be unloving if you are blissful? They both happen simultaneously.
And that's my effort: to introduce both together to my sannyasins. So in meditation be alone and enjoy your aloneness, but don't become shut up within yourself. Don't become an introvert; that is pathological. Keep your doors and windows open so that the sun can come in and the rain and the wind. And don't become a prisoner of your aloneness; come out of it sometimes, dancing, singing. Love people, relate with people. Both are not opposites but complementaries, and both help each other. The more you love, the more blissful you become; the more blissful you are, the more you can love.
So my sannyasins are not monks. My sannyasins are neither worldly not otherworldly because we don't divide: it is one universe, one solid universe. And we don't divide it into the material and the spiritual, into the lower and the higher, the mundane and the sacred; we simply don't divide. We accept the totality as it is and we try to live it in totality.
If this experiment succeeds, this experiment of living life in its totality, then humanity can be saved; otherwise there is no hope. By becoming a sannyasin you are not only doing something good to yourself; you are doing something immensely valuable to the whole of humanity's future.