Belonging

Teenagers have a strong desire to belong to a group, to anything. What does this need reflect?

It is just because they don't belong to the family any more, and they are too young and too afraid to be alone in the world. If there was not this gap between them and their parents, there would have been no need of any such groups. You can see in the East, you don't see this kind of thing happening -- hippies or punks or skinheads. You don't see such a thing happening at all for the simple reason that children belong to the family. They have roots in the family, they are not alone; there is not such a gap as exists in the West. This gap in the West is creating the whole problem. Then they want to belong to any group because they feel afraid to be alone. They are too young, too vulnerable, so they start belonging to any group that is available in the…

Beloved master, sometimes there is such a feeling of not belonging anywhere that even my orange and my mala are no consolation. Are we really so alone, or am I just being negative and closed when I feel that?

You cannot escape. If you are going to die in Samarra, you will reach there somehow. You cannot escape death and you cannot escape aloneness. Try as you will -- try, but all efforts fail. Nobody has ever succeeded in avoiding aloneness, because aloneness is your being. When you are avoiding aloneness you are avoiding yourself -- how can you avoid yourself? How can you escape from yourself? In trying to escape, you miss -- you miss the beauty of being alone. In fact, you start thinking of yourself as lonely because you have missed the beauty of aloneness. Aloneness is tremendously beautiful, loneliness is ugly. They don't mean the same, notwithstanding what the dictionaries say. Aloneness is such a beautiful experience. You ARE -- pure, uncontaminated by anybody else's presence; no shadow falling on you -- a clarity, unclouded... your being pure, virgin -- nobody has ever travelled in…

My deepest pain is that of being an outsider, that I don't belong here in this life, that I am essentially wrong, and death is just waiting to claim me unmercifully. That sense of belonging here, valuing myself and being valued by existence, and thus letting myself live and celebrate fully eludes me. Is this feeling the result of god-oriented religions?

God was preventing you because he was outside. Your prayer was towards the God who was not there. You are here, there is no need of any evidence that you are here. There is no need for any argument to prove that you are here. So why not explore this "hereness", this presence that you are, this consciousness that you are. Why not explore it? Those who have explored it have never come back saying they are outsiders. They have not even said that they are insiders, because even an insider is separate. They have come out and declared, "Aham brahmasmi!" -- I am the whole, "Ana'l haq!" -- I am the truth, I am existence itself. There is no question of outsider or insider. Those are two sides of the same coin. The whole coin is dropped, suddenly you find yourself one with the cosmic dance, a tremendous rhythm…

Question: OSHO, NEVER BELONGED, NEVER BEEN ON THE 'INSIDE', NEVER FELT 'AT ONE' WITH ANOTHER, WHY SUCH A LONER ALL MY LIFE? LIFE is a mystery, but you can reduce it to a problem. And once you make a mystery a problem you will be in difficulty, because there can be no solution to it. A mystery remains a mystery; it is insoluble -- that's why it is called a mystery. Life is not a problem. And that is one of the most basic mistakes we all go on committing: we immediately put a question mark. And if you put a question mark on a mystery, you will be searching for the answer your whole life and you will not find it, and naturally it brings great frustration. My observation of you, Madhura, is that you are a born meditator. Rather than making it a problem, rejoice!