[Osho tells a sannyasin there are some things about his energy that it will be helpful for him to know. You haven't allowed yourself to ever be wild, you've always had a subtle control inside you -- and that can be a hindrance to spiritual growth... ]
There is a subtle difference between repression and control. Repression is not having understanding of what you are doing; you simply repress something. Control is a little more intellectual; you feel convinced that this is the right thing to do, so you control.
You are not repressed but you are controlled. Intellectually you understand what is the right thing to do and what is not, and you try to do the right thing. By and by that has become a habit, the very style of your life. That's why you are not streaming, not flowing, not dancing. And unless you dance, unless you go wholeheartedly with your energy -- even if it takes a wild form, even if it becomes almost maddening -- you will not grow. One has to go with it totally, and one day a different kind of discipline arises. There are three different things: one is repression without even intellectual understanding; another is control with intellectual understanding; the third is discipline with spiritual awareness... and that is what is needed. We substitute it by control or many more people substitute it by simply repressing.
You are in the second category, the controlled category. It is better than people who live with repression but one step more is needed: you have to drop control and you have to come to an inner discipline -- which is not a kind of control at all. It is simply your awareness: you know and your act follows your knowing. The act is spontaneous like your shadow follows you; it follows your knowing.
So while you are here, relax control; that is the first thing. The second thing: whenever you feel that you can go a little more, try. For example, you are dancing and you feel that if you try a little more you can go a little wilder. Then try it -- because we never know how much we can go unless we try.
Slowly, slowly, you take one step, two steps, three steps, and you become more confident and a great trust arises in energy -- that wherever it leads it is good. The day that trust arises the transformation starts.
We have been taught not to trust the energy, not to trust life. We have been taught just to trust reason which is a very small fragment and which is in the service of the society. All that is vital, alive, has been denied, and dead reason has been given full rein.
So when you are doing the dynamic meditation or the kundalini or some other meditation and you feel that you can go a step more, then go. That one step will make it possible to go one step more, then go. That one step will make it possible to go one step more and so on and so forth: one step leads to another. Soon you will be going far away from your self-drawn boundaries.
Once you start going beyond the boundaries you start expanding. That's what expansion of consciousness is, and that's what man is always hankering for.
There is no need to be small; you can be the whole! Even the sky is not the limit: you can be as big as the whole existence, but for that great courage is needed.
We live in a very very shrunken state with small boundaries which we hide behind. Come out! Those caves will not give you light; in those caves light never reaches. Come out in the open!
So first, relax control; second, whenever you feel a boundary try to go at least one step beyond it; and third, don't be afraid of the wild and the mad.
If a person remains afraid of the wild and the mad he cannot expand. And the fear is unnecessary... in fact the fear is very dangerous. If a person remains afraid of the wild and the animal and the mad, then all madness goes on accumulating. Layer upon layer you are piling it up: one day it will be too much. One day it will be so much that you will not be able to control it. It will explode and then you will be nowhere. That's how madness happens.
Madness happens because of the control. These people in the madhouses are very very controlled people: their madness is the conclusion of their whole life's effort.
A man who allows madness, allows wildness, never accumulates any madness and is out of danger. Rather than having it wholesale it is better to have it retail. It is very good to be angry sometimes rather than not being angry for ten years and then one day murdering a man. In those small homeopathic doses anger is good; nothing is wrong. If you don't use it in small doses, one day it will be so much that your system will not be able to bear it. These three things, remember.
[Osho explains that prem means love, abhinivesh means devotion... and that's what his path is going to be. Start looking at life through the eyes of devotion, and there are different ways of regarding life.... ]
When a scientist looks at a certain thing he looks with a rational eye; he wants to know what it is. When a poet looks at the same thing he looks with the aesthetic eye; he wants to enjoy it. When a devotee looks at the same thing he looks with the eye of devotion; he wants to worship it.
It may be a rose flower.... A scientist looking at it, thinks of the chemicals, elements, composition, colour, of how it is made, of what it is made. He starts analysing, dissecting in his mind, categorising, labelling things, thinking of what species it belongs to, from what country it comes.
When a poet looks at the same rose flower he is not worried about what country it comes from; he is not worried about the composition, about the chemistry of the rose. He is simply interested in the alchemy of the rose, mm! -- the beauty of it, the joy of it. In the scientist's mind the rose becomes an analysis; in the poet's mind the rose becomes a song... and it is the same rose!
It can be looked at with the eyes of devotion too. A devotee looks at the rose as if it is god manifest; for a devotee everything is god manifest. God is green in the trees, red in the rose... god is a cloud in the clouds and light in the sun rays... god is a child in a child and very very old in an old man. Everything is divine; that is the vision of the devotee.
So for a devotee the rose comes as an incarnation of god. He wants to worship it. He would like to bow down to it. He would like to surrender to it: he would like to dance and surrender around it. For the scientist the rose becomes analysis, chemistry; for the poet it becomes a song or a painting. For the devotee it becomes god himself!
The devotee's vision is the greatest vision. All other visions are partial; the devotee's vision is the total vision.
That is the meaning of abhinivesh. Attain to this vision, start looking at life with worshipping eyes -- and you will be surprised that that capacity exists in you. You have not used it yet; nobody has told you to use it.
It happens many times that we have a certain thing there already, but if nobody tells you you will not become aware of it. By becoming a sannyasin you are simply saying to me, 'Now if you tell me something, I am going to follow it'. That's the meaning of sannyas.
This is what I see -- that you can become a devotee. You may not have ever thought about it, it may not have even dawned in your dreams -- but start, and you will see it growing. And once it starts growing it is such a joy that nothing else is comparable to it.
A devotee forgets about everything else. He says, 'Everything is so divine, nothing else is needed'. He is moving from one temple to another, from one god to another god. His whole life is worship, his work is worship... he lives in the atmosphere of worship. Create it!
[A sannyasin says: I just want you to see my heart.]
This is right. The real thing cannot be said. The real thing is not a thought; that's why it cannot be said. The real thing is inexpressible by its very nature. And you are right: it is there in the heart. Only the heart counts, only the heart has any value.
[A sannyasin says she's always hard on herself, always fighting with herself, and she's sick of it. She has a certain discipline -- that she shouldn't smoke, shouldn't eat certain things, and when she goes against it she gets angry with herself, tries to rationalise away what she does. Really tired of it? chuckles Osho, Then drop it!]
... It will not become a discipline. If you drop it through understanding that it is meaningless, it does not create another discipline. If you force it, if you force it out by creating another discipline, then the other becomes the discipline. If through seeing its stupidity you simply drop it, it does not create another discipline. The difference between these two is tremendous.
If you see that the patterns you have lived in up to now are simply confining -- they are not liberating and they have made you hard towards yourself.... If you are hard towards yourself you will be hard towards other people too. That's the natural consequence of being hard towards oneself. You will be harder towards others than you are towards yourself; it is the natural corollary.
If you are soft towards yourself, only then are you soft towards others. If you love yourself tremendously, only then do you love others tremendously. If you are too much of a disciplinarian, too much of a perfectionist, then you will always be expecting others also to be perfectionists: they should do this and should not do that.
Whatsoever your expectation is of yourself it is bound to be your expectation of others also, and if they fall below it a deep condemnation and judgement will be there. You will not be able to love human beings -- you can only love saints... and they are not available. Then you cannot love anybody and you start living in a loveless world.
You cannot love yourself and you cannot love anybody else: you become more and more hard, you start becoming more and more steel-like.
Seeing this -- that this is death, seeing this -- that it is harmful to you, you can drop it. I'm not saying to practise dropping. If you practise, then the other thing becomes a discipline. I'm not saying to practise dropping; I'm saying to drop it suddenly. Be finished with it this very moment.
It will haunt you for a few days, it will come again and again in the mind, but say that you are finished. Don't create the new discipline; just go on saying to the old that you are finished, good-bye! You have nothing to do with it. And start relaxing, start loosening up.
Life is only when you are relaxed, when there is no should and no should-not, when the 'ought' disappears, the prison disappears, when you start floating with things, when you accept limitations, when you accept imperfections, when you accept that life is like that.
There is only one golden rule -- that there are no golden rules. Once this becomes your understanding.,. I'm not saying to create another pattern, a new structure around you; start living without a structure. Now you will have to watch because the mind is such that it can easily move to the other extreme.
For example: if you have been dieting, eating this, not eating that or not eating much, then one day seeing the futility of it you drop it, you will start eating too much. If you start eating too much, sooner or later you will fall back to the old pattern again, because when you eat too much you will start feeling fat; you will start feeling a stomach trouble and this and that. Then you will say that the first discipline was far better.
So in fact if you start eating too much that means that the old discipline is creating this to bring you back home. It is a trap.
Mm? -- if you have lived without smoking, with a very strict rule to never smoke, and then the next day thinking that now you have dropped it you start smoking the whole day, you become a chain smoker. You start coughing, the heart feels it and the lungs feel it. After two, three days, you feel tired of smoking and you say, 'It was better not to smoke'. This smoking too much is just a trick of the old mind. The mind says, 'So you want to drop the discipline? Now go and do the other and see what happens, and then you will choose me again.'
So if you really understand that the discipline is meaningless, don't go to the other extreme; otherwise sooner or later you will be in the trap. There is nothing very much wrong; occasionally one smokes -- there is nothing very much wrong. It is just innocent stupidity; that much I allow! It is just foolish, but one should not be wise twenty-four hours, mm? -- that becomes heavy. Yes, once in a while it is okay.
And you are not harming anybody, just doing a innocent thing: taking smoke in and throwing it out, taking it in and throwing out. It is like a transcendental meditation. You are doing a japa with the smoke: in/out, in/out, in/out. Once in a while it is nothing to be worried about. One should be so relaxed in life.
If one day you eat too much, nothing wrong. The body is so adjustable that it can always allow a few holidays. Mm? -- you go for a picnic and you eat too much: it is perfectly okay, but don't make it a daily thing; then there is trouble.
One should live in such a relaxed freedom that occasionally everything is allowed -- but nothing is made into a habit. This man I call a free man. A free man has no character; character is always binding. The good man's character binds him and the bad man's character also binds him. The really free man has no character -- he is simple freedom: he lives moment to moment. He is responsible but he carries no rules and regulations; he depends on his consciousness.
So if your consciousness allows you some day -- friends have come and the ice-cream is really so tasty -- one can eat a little more; nothing is wrong. But this should not become a habit, then there is no need for dieting. But the mind is always happy moving from dieting to over-eating, then from over-eating to dieting; this way it goes on like a pendulum.
What I am suggesting is to let the pendulum hang just in the middle so the clock stops. Don't go to the extreme; remain in the middle. Try it! It will be a great experience.
There are two types of people who miss life: one is the person who goes into indulgence too much and one is the person who goes into discipline too much. These are the two persons in this life. One misses by going to the left too much, one by going to the right too much.
The rich man, the really rich man -- rich in the sense of being more conscious, more free, more alive -- is the man who always remains in the middle.
Have you ever seen how a tightrope walker walks? He keeps balance by continuously balancing himself. Sometimes he leans towards the right, just for a single moment, and then he leans towards the left immediately; then again to the right, then again to the left he goes on. He keeps a pole in his hand to keep balance. But he never leans too much to the right, otherwise he will fall, and never too much to the left, otherwise again he will fall.
The man of understanding is a tightrope walker. Great joy is there, great dance is there, but one should be in the middle, just in the middle. Just to keep in the middle sometimes you can lean left, right; that's perfectly okay.
Try it, and from tomorrow you start living. Mm? but don't go to the other extreme. Good.
Osho's Commentary
There is a subtle difference between repression and control. Repression is not having understanding of what you are doing; you simply repress something. Control is a little more intellectual; you feel convinced that this is the right thing to do, so you control.
You are not repressed but you are controlled. Intellectually you understand what is the right thing to do and what is not, and you try to do the right thing. By and by that has become a habit, the very style of your life. That's why you are not streaming, not flowing, not dancing. And unless you dance, unless you go wholeheartedly with your energy -- even if it takes a wild form, even if it becomes almost maddening -- you will not grow. One has to go with it totally, and one day a different kind of discipline arises. There are three different things: one is repression without even intellectual understanding; another is control with intellectual understanding; the third is discipline with spiritual awareness... and that is what is needed. We substitute it by control or many more people substitute it by simply repressing.
You are in the second category, the controlled category. It is better than people who live with repression but one step more is needed: you have to drop control and you have to come to an inner discipline -- which is not a kind of control at all. It is simply your awareness: you know and your act follows your knowing. The act is spontaneous like your shadow follows you; it follows your knowing.
So while you are here, relax control; that is the first thing. The second thing: whenever you feel that you can go a little more, try. For example, you are dancing and you feel that if you try a little more you can go a little wilder. Then try it -- because we never know how much we can go unless we try.
Slowly, slowly, you take one step, two steps, three steps, and you become more confident and a great trust arises in energy -- that wherever it leads it is good. The day that trust arises the transformation starts.
We have been taught not to trust the energy, not to trust life. We have been taught just to trust reason which is a very small fragment and which is in the service of the society. All that is vital, alive, has been denied, and dead reason has been given full rein.
So when you are doing the dynamic meditation or the kundalini or some other meditation and you feel that you can go a step more, then go. That one step will make it possible to go one step more, then go. That one step will make it possible to go one step more and so on and so forth: one step leads to another. Soon you will be going far away from your self-drawn boundaries.
Once you start going beyond the boundaries you start expanding. That's what expansion of consciousness is, and that's what man is always hankering for.
There is no need to be small; you can be the whole! Even the sky is not the limit: you can be as big as the whole existence, but for that great courage is needed.
We live in a very very shrunken state with small boundaries which we hide behind. Come out! Those caves will not give you light; in those caves light never reaches. Come out in the open!
So first, relax control; second, whenever you feel a boundary try to go at least one step beyond it; and third, don't be afraid of the wild and the mad.
If a person remains afraid of the wild and the mad he cannot expand. And the fear is unnecessary... in fact the fear is very dangerous. If a person remains afraid of the wild and the animal and the mad, then all madness goes on accumulating. Layer upon layer you are piling it up: one day it will be too much. One day it will be so much that you will not be able to control it. It will explode and then you will be nowhere. That's how madness happens.
Madness happens because of the control. These people in the madhouses are very very controlled people: their madness is the conclusion of their whole life's effort.
A man who allows madness, allows wildness, never accumulates any madness and is out of danger. Rather than having it wholesale it is better to have it retail. It is very good to be angry sometimes rather than not being angry for ten years and then one day murdering a man. In those small homeopathic doses anger is good; nothing is wrong. If you don't use it in small doses, one day it will be so much that your system will not be able to bear it. These three things, remember.
[Osho explains that prem means love, abhinivesh means devotion... and that's what his path is going to be. Start looking at life through the eyes of devotion, and there are different ways of regarding life.... ]
When a scientist looks at a certain thing he looks with a rational eye; he wants to know what it is. When a poet looks at the same thing he looks with the aesthetic eye; he wants to enjoy it. When a devotee looks at the same thing he looks with the eye of devotion; he wants to worship it.
It may be a rose flower.... A scientist looking at it, thinks of the chemicals, elements, composition, colour, of how it is made, of what it is made. He starts analysing, dissecting in his mind, categorising, labelling things, thinking of what species it belongs to, from what country it comes.
When a poet looks at the same rose flower he is not worried about what country it comes from; he is not worried about the composition, about the chemistry of the rose. He is simply interested in the alchemy of the rose, mm! -- the beauty of it, the joy of it. In the scientist's mind the rose becomes an analysis; in the poet's mind the rose becomes a song... and it is the same rose!
It can be looked at with the eyes of devotion too. A devotee looks at the rose as if it is god manifest; for a devotee everything is god manifest. God is green in the trees, red in the rose... god is a cloud in the clouds and light in the sun rays... god is a child in a child and very very old in an old man. Everything is divine; that is the vision of the devotee.
So for a devotee the rose comes as an incarnation of god. He wants to worship it. He would like to bow down to it. He would like to surrender to it: he would like to dance and surrender around it. For the scientist the rose becomes analysis, chemistry; for the poet it becomes a song or a painting. For the devotee it becomes god himself!
The devotee's vision is the greatest vision. All other visions are partial; the devotee's vision is the total vision.
That is the meaning of abhinivesh. Attain to this vision, start looking at life with worshipping eyes -- and you will be surprised that that capacity exists in you. You have not used it yet; nobody has told you to use it.
It happens many times that we have a certain thing there already, but if nobody tells you you will not become aware of it. By becoming a sannyasin you are simply saying to me, 'Now if you tell me something, I am going to follow it'. That's the meaning of sannyas.
This is what I see -- that you can become a devotee. You may not have ever thought about it, it may not have even dawned in your dreams -- but start, and you will see it growing. And once it starts growing it is such a joy that nothing else is comparable to it.
A devotee forgets about everything else. He says, 'Everything is so divine, nothing else is needed'. He is moving from one temple to another, from one god to another god. His whole life is worship, his work is worship... he lives in the atmosphere of worship. Create it!
[A sannyasin says: I just want you to see my heart.]
This is right. The real thing cannot be said. The real thing is not a thought; that's why it cannot be said. The real thing is inexpressible by its very nature. And you are right: it is there in the heart. Only the heart counts, only the heart has any value.
[A sannyasin says she's always hard on herself, always fighting with herself, and she's sick of it. She has a certain discipline -- that she shouldn't smoke, shouldn't eat certain things, and when she goes against it she gets angry with herself, tries to rationalise away what she does. Really tired of it? chuckles Osho, Then drop it!]
... It will not become a discipline. If you drop it through understanding that it is meaningless, it does not create another discipline. If you force it, if you force it out by creating another discipline, then the other becomes the discipline. If through seeing its stupidity you simply drop it, it does not create another discipline. The difference between these two is tremendous.
If you see that the patterns you have lived in up to now are simply confining -- they are not liberating and they have made you hard towards yourself.... If you are hard towards yourself you will be hard towards other people too. That's the natural consequence of being hard towards oneself. You will be harder towards others than you are towards yourself; it is the natural corollary.
If you are soft towards yourself, only then are you soft towards others. If you love yourself tremendously, only then do you love others tremendously. If you are too much of a disciplinarian, too much of a perfectionist, then you will always be expecting others also to be perfectionists: they should do this and should not do that.
Whatsoever your expectation is of yourself it is bound to be your expectation of others also, and if they fall below it a deep condemnation and judgement will be there. You will not be able to love human beings -- you can only love saints... and they are not available. Then you cannot love anybody and you start living in a loveless world.
You cannot love yourself and you cannot love anybody else: you become more and more hard, you start becoming more and more steel-like.
Seeing this -- that this is death, seeing this -- that it is harmful to you, you can drop it. I'm not saying to practise dropping. If you practise, then the other thing becomes a discipline. I'm not saying to practise dropping; I'm saying to drop it suddenly. Be finished with it this very moment.
It will haunt you for a few days, it will come again and again in the mind, but say that you are finished. Don't create the new discipline; just go on saying to the old that you are finished, good-bye! You have nothing to do with it. And start relaxing, start loosening up.
Life is only when you are relaxed, when there is no should and no should-not, when the 'ought' disappears, the prison disappears, when you start floating with things, when you accept limitations, when you accept imperfections, when you accept that life is like that.
There is only one golden rule -- that there are no golden rules. Once this becomes your understanding.,. I'm not saying to create another pattern, a new structure around you; start living without a structure. Now you will have to watch because the mind is such that it can easily move to the other extreme.
For example: if you have been dieting, eating this, not eating that or not eating much, then one day seeing the futility of it you drop it, you will start eating too much. If you start eating too much, sooner or later you will fall back to the old pattern again, because when you eat too much you will start feeling fat; you will start feeling a stomach trouble and this and that. Then you will say that the first discipline was far better.
So in fact if you start eating too much that means that the old discipline is creating this to bring you back home. It is a trap.
Mm? -- if you have lived without smoking, with a very strict rule to never smoke, and then the next day thinking that now you have dropped it you start smoking the whole day, you become a chain smoker. You start coughing, the heart feels it and the lungs feel it. After two, three days, you feel tired of smoking and you say, 'It was better not to smoke'. This smoking too much is just a trick of the old mind. The mind says, 'So you want to drop the discipline? Now go and do the other and see what happens, and then you will choose me again.'
So if you really understand that the discipline is meaningless, don't go to the other extreme; otherwise sooner or later you will be in the trap. There is nothing very much wrong; occasionally one smokes -- there is nothing very much wrong. It is just innocent stupidity; that much I allow! It is just foolish, but one should not be wise twenty-four hours, mm? -- that becomes heavy. Yes, once in a while it is okay.
And you are not harming anybody, just doing a innocent thing: taking smoke in and throwing it out, taking it in and throwing out. It is like a transcendental meditation. You are doing a japa with the smoke: in/out, in/out, in/out. Once in a while it is nothing to be worried about. One should be so relaxed in life.
If one day you eat too much, nothing wrong. The body is so adjustable that it can always allow a few holidays. Mm? -- you go for a picnic and you eat too much: it is perfectly okay, but don't make it a daily thing; then there is trouble.
One should live in such a relaxed freedom that occasionally everything is allowed -- but nothing is made into a habit. This man I call a free man. A free man has no character; character is always binding. The good man's character binds him and the bad man's character also binds him. The really free man has no character -- he is simple freedom: he lives moment to moment. He is responsible but he carries no rules and regulations; he depends on his consciousness.
So if your consciousness allows you some day -- friends have come and the ice-cream is really so tasty -- one can eat a little more; nothing is wrong. But this should not become a habit, then there is no need for dieting. But the mind is always happy moving from dieting to over-eating, then from over-eating to dieting; this way it goes on like a pendulum.
What I am suggesting is to let the pendulum hang just in the middle so the clock stops. Don't go to the extreme; remain in the middle. Try it! It will be a great experience.
There are two types of people who miss life: one is the person who goes into indulgence too much and one is the person who goes into discipline too much. These are the two persons in this life. One misses by going to the left too much, one by going to the right too much.
The rich man, the really rich man -- rich in the sense of being more conscious, more free, more alive -- is the man who always remains in the middle.
Have you ever seen how a tightrope walker walks? He keeps balance by continuously balancing himself. Sometimes he leans towards the right, just for a single moment, and then he leans towards the left immediately; then again to the right, then again to the left he goes on. He keeps a pole in his hand to keep balance. But he never leans too much to the right, otherwise he will fall, and never too much to the left, otherwise again he will fall.
The man of understanding is a tightrope walker. Great joy is there, great dance is there, but one should be in the middle, just in the middle. Just to keep in the middle sometimes you can lean left, right; that's perfectly okay.
Try it, and from tomorrow you start living. Mm? but don't go to the other extreme. Good.