Paradox

Why is zen called the path of paradox?

THE HANDLESS HOLD THE HOE. A PEDESTRIAN WALKS, RIDING ON A WATER BUFFALO. A MAN PASSES OVER THE BRIDGE; THE BRIDGE BUT NOT THE WATER FLOWS. And he went out of the palace and never came again. This is absurd, what he says -- THE HANDLESS HOLD THE HOE. How can the handless hold anything? But that is how it is happening. That which abides in you is handless, and is holding all kinds of things. God is handless, and is supporting the whole world. And you are handless in your innermost being -- you don't have hands or legs or a head, you are formless. But you are holding a thousand and one things. A PEDESTRIAN WALKS, RIDING ON A WATER BUFFALO. He says: A man is sitting on the water buffalo and still walking. He is saying: God is taking you, you are riding on him -- and…

Why is zen paradoxical?

You love a man and you hate the same man too. Now, our mind says this is not good, we should not do it. So you pretend that you don't do it. But it is not possible. If you really want to drop the hate part, you will have to drop the love part too -- but then both disappear and indifference arises. This paradoxicality is in the very nature itself -- day and night, summer and winter, God and Devil are together. Zen says that if you say that God is good then a problem arises: then from where does the bad come, from where does the evil come? That's what religions have done -- Christianity, Islam, Judaism, have separated God and Devil. The evil comes from Devil and all good comes from God. God means the good. But from where does this Devil come? Then they are in…

Beloved master, everything appears to be very paradoxical: having to be total and yet having to remain a witness, a watcher; having to be drowned in love and yet to be alone. It sounds very mysterious, and I feel utterly lost and confused. Am I getting conned?

But you have an idea of love; that idea is creating trouble -- not love itself, but the idea. The idea is that, in love, lovers disappear into each other, dissolve into each other. Yes, there are moments of dissolution -- but this is the beauty of life and all that is existential: that when lovers dissolve into each other, the same are the moments when they become very conscious, very alert. That dissolution is not a kind of drunkenness, that dissolution is not unconscious. It brings great consciousness, it releases great awareness. On the one hand they are dissolved -- on the other hand for the first time they see their utter beauty in being alone. The other defines them, their aloneness; they define the other. And they are grateful to each other. It is because of the other that they have been able to see their own selves;…

Osho, yesterday you said that when anger is watched consciously, it dissolves. But why is it that when sexual desire arises, even in awareness its intensity persists? Why is it so?

There is no entanglement in the breath. If you try to practice on anger… Anger is not happening every moment; it happens sometimes. And when it happens, it happens with such intensity that you are already going deep into it; so much is at stake in those moments that you may think, “We will look into awareness later; first let’s settle this now.” Lust is very deep, because existence has made it so deep; life depends on it. If lust were so easy that you decided and were freed, perhaps you would not even have been born—because many before you would have become free, and the possibility of your being would have been almost nil. But your parents, and their parents, did not become free; therefore you are. You too will not get free so easily, because your children are also to be—they are waiting: “Do not run away midway.”…