Love Freedom & Aloneness - OSHO

LOVE, FREEDOM AND ALONENESS BY OSHO

This ego is not a very intelligent thing … all egos are idiotic (239)

MEDITATION

Only love can be courageous … aloneness is your truth, your divinity (175)

The function of a master is to help you stand alone. Meditation is just a strategy to take away your personality, your thoughts, your mind, your identity with the body, and leave you absolutely alone inside, just a living fire. And once you have found your living fire, you will know all the joys and all the ecstasies that human consciousness is capable of (175).

To be a disciple means to learn the discipline of being yourself, of being your true self … Only those people who have stood alone in their being, in their clarity, in their light, in their flowering, who have found their own space they can call their eternal home --- those few people are the emperors. This whole universe is their empire. They don’t need to conquer it; it is already conquered. By knowing yourself, you have conquered it (177). Through meditation, you get to know yourself.

Aloneness is your temple where God lives … There is nothing more beautiful, more peaceful and more joyful than being alone (178-179).

You cannot make a solitary man unhappy because he has learned to live with himself and be happy with himself. Alone he is sufficient unto himself … All children are self sufficient –that is their beauty; they are a light unto themselves; they do not bother about your opinion of them (191).

The solitary is the elect because he has chosen his own being and by doing so you have chose the being of the whole universe because there is no separation. When you choose yourself, you have chosen God, and when you choose God, god has chosen you (194).

In finding oneself, one finds the meaning of life, its significance, joy and splendor. You can only find this alone in an empty consciousness … In the nothingness, a miracle happens because when there is nothing else for your consciousness to be conscious of, the consciousness turns upon itself. It becomes a circle (195).

Unless you know yourself as eternal beings, part of the whole, you will remain afraid of death. The fear of death is simply because you are not aware of your eternal source of life. Once the eternity of your being is realized, death becomes a lie (196).

Forgetfulness of yourself is the only sin there really is and to remember yourself is the only virtue (196). We re-remember who we are through meditation.

Buddha said that “the master’s function is to help you remember who you are.” You are not part of the mundane world; your home is the home of the divine. You are lost in forgetfulness (197).

To be alone is a great opportunity, a blessing, because in your aloneness you are bound to stumble upon yourself and for the first time remember who you are. To know you are part of the divine existence is to be free from death, free from misery, free from anxiety; free from all that has been a nightmare to you for many, many lives.

Become more centered in your deep aloneness. That’s what meditation is: becoming centered in one’s own aloneness. That aloneness has to be so pure that not even a thought, not even a feeling disturbs it. The moment your aloneness is complete, your experience of it will become your enlightenment which grows from within (198).

To be an insider in this world is to get lost … to be an outsider, never feeling as if you are a part of anywhere, is a great experience of transcendence … Let your aloneness be a dance … Whatsoever existence has given you must be a subtle necessity for your soul, otherwise it would not have given it (201, 203).

Sadness is sacred because it is your own. It comes because you are alone and it is giving you a change to go into your aloneness (205). Whenever you are sad, sit by a tree, the river, or a rock and relax into the sadness without fear and your sadness will transform into joy (209).

Whatsoever you are with yourself, you will be with others …

Meditation is not concentration nor contemplation. It is not thinking … Meditation is just being delighted in your own presence, in your own being, in a totally relaxed state of consciousness and not doing anything … no action, no thought, no emotion … you just are and that is a sheer delight … this joy comes from nowhere and everywhere because existence is made up of the stuff called joy (215).

The East took care of a person who dedicated his life to meditation because the East came to know that if even one man became enlightened, his energy is shared by all (225).

SEEKING HAPPINESS: THE ART OF SELFISHNESS

The more you seek your happiness the more you will help others to be happy (17). A person who is deeply interested in his happiness is always interested in others’ happiness also… but not for them. Deep down he is interested in himself; that is why he helps … a happy person is so happy he wants to be left alone to be happy … why should he bother to go to wars to be killed and to kill others? (18)

An unselfish person is frustrated because he is “trying to be unselfish. He cannot be unselfish because only a selfish person [one who is interested in his own happiness] is able to be unselfish … An unselfish person is always in anguish. He has missed his own life and when you miss your own life you become murderous, suicidal. Whenever a person lives in misery he would like to destroy … You would like to create some situation in which you can become destructive”(18-19).

A happy person belongs to himself … an unhappy person does not feel he belongs so he creates a substitute belonging by joining an organization or group (19).

You are here for a short time to enjoy, delight, to be happy, dance and love; and out of your love and dancing, our of your deep selfishness will start an overflowing of energy. You will be able to share it with others. Love, I say, is one of the most selfish things (20).

Love is the only freedom from attachment. When you love everything you are attached to nothing. Mikhail Naimy The Book of Mirdad.

Love melts the frozen self. The self if like an ice cube; love is like the morning sun (29). Whenever there is love, the lover and the beloved both disappear into the love (32) … Love yourself immensely and in that love your ego and pride will disappears (32).

A person who has not learned to love himself falls in love with his reflection like Narcissus … He has become his own object of love … this reflection is the other, the separate self filled with egoistic pride … the ego lives though comparison to others (31) … Narcissism is the greatest obsession of the modern mind (35).

Love knows no comparison … In real love there is no separation, no other. The lovers melt into each other (31).

WHY IS LOVE SO PAINFUL?

Love is painful because it creates the way for bliss. The mind can function only with the old; with the new, the mind is utterly useless … because the transformation is going to be from the self toward a state of no-self, the agony is very deep. You cannot have ecstasy without agony. If the gold wants to be purified, it has to pass through the fire. Love is fire.

To suffer in love is not to suffer in vain because love takes you to higher levels of consciousness. To suffer without love is utterly a waste. The man who is without love is narcissistic; he is closed … The higher love needs you to be open and vulnerable. You have to drop your armor … the calculating mind … You have to take risks and live dangerously … The other might reject you …hurt you … show you your ugliness … By avoiding the mirror, you are not going to grow beautiful … you are not going to grow either. The challenge has to be taken … One has to go into love … Those who try to bypass the step of love will never reach God … You become aware of your totality only when you are provoked by the presence of the other (34).

When love knocks on the door, all that is needed to fall in love is to put aside the ego (34). Love gives you the first experience of being in tune with something that is not your ego. Love gives you the lesson that you can fall into harmony with someone who has never been part of your ego (34)

You will not know yourself without knowing the other because the other functions as a mirror to show you who you really are and the areas in which you need to grow (34).

Love is the only real thing worth doing … All else is just a means; love is the end. So whatsoever the pain, go into love (35).

The whole earth has become a mad house … Everyone is stuck with their own illusion of having a separate self; then people go mad. And this madness is meaningless, unproductive, uncreative … This is no way to live … the fundamental reason for this madness is that people have forgotten the language of love … Love needs intimacy. Only when you are intimate does the other person become a mirror. When you only have sex with someone you have avoided the soul of that person. You used the body and escaped… You never became intimate enough to reveal each other’s original face … Suffer love because through the suffering comes great ecstasy. Yes, there is agony … you will have to dies as an ego, but if you dies as an ego, you with be born as a Buddha (36).

LOVE WILL GIVE YOU THE FIRST PROOF THAT LIFE IS NOT MEANINGLESS.

The people who say life is meaningless are the people who have not known love. All they are saying is that their life has missed love ... Let there be pain … let there be suffering. Go through the dark night, and you will reach a beautiful sunrise. It is only in the womb of the dark night that the sun evolves (37).

Love is the natural prayer, not imposed by anybody. You are born with it. Love is the true God … Love is a device, a method to kill you as a separate individual and to help you become the infinite. Disappear as a dewdrop and become the ocean … but you will have to pass through the door of love (37) … You will think you are dying, but only the illusion is dying. You have become indentified with the illusion, true, but the illusion is still an illusion. And only when the illusion is gone will you be able to see you are. And that revelation brings you to the ultimate peak of joy, bliss and celebration (37).

THE MISERY OF THE WORLD

You cannot get love from someone who has not attained blissfulness … that is the misery of the whole world. Everybody is asking to be loved and pretending to love. You cannot love because you don’t know what consciousness is. You don’t know truth … the experience of the divine … or the fragrance of beauty. What have you got to give? You are so empty, so hollow. Nothing grows in your being … Your spring has not come yet … You don’t know what love is because you have not gone deep enough into consciousness. You have not experienced yourself; you know nothing of who you are. Love does not grow in blindness, ignorance and unconsciousness. In the desert of darkness in which you are living, there is no possibility of love blooming (44-45).

First you have to be so full of light and delight that you are overflowing. That overflowing energy is love (47).

Become more and more alert and aware and love will come on its own accord … First BE thyself and know thyself, then love will come as a reward (47). Love is God (48).

GIVE UP GUILT AND FEELING UNWORTHY OF LOVE

I trust that God’s love is great enough; I cannot commit a sin that can be greater than his love … how can we commit sins which God’s love cannot forgive? –Omar Khayyam.

AUTHENTIC LOVE

Real, authentic love feels obliged to the person who has accepted his love. He could have rejected it. When you start giving love with a sense of deep gratitude to all those who accept it, you will be surprised that you have become an emperor –no longer a beggar asking for love with a begging bowl … love belongs to the world of emperors, not beggars. And a man is an emperor when he is so full of love that he can give it without any conditions (51). The more love you give, the more love you get (52).

I do not use the word “friendship” because that ship has drowned too many people (54).

FORGET RELATIONSHIPS AND LEARN HOW TO RELATE

Love relates but is not a relationship … Relationship means something complete, finished, closed … forget relationships and learn how to relate (55-56).

Once you are in a relationship you start taking each other for granted … that is insulting and disrespectful … In relationships, both person become blind to each other (56-57).

In ordinary relationships most people love a person because the person is not available … both are attracted to each other because they are unknown to each other … true love happens only when you have a very integrated being (60-61) … love is an affinity with the inner most being of the person.

A great paradox of life is that what ever you get you will become bored with and whatever you do not get you will long for it ... Most people are in search of a fish named attachment and love is the bait (150-151).

THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF LOVE:

1. Animal like: lustful, physical, possessive, seeks bondage, exploitative,

2. Man like: Non possessive, egalitarian, grants freedom

3. Godlike: transcends duality; no object to love; no relationship; a state of being loving; full of love for the beloved.

· The first uses the other as a means.

· In the second, the other is no longer a means

· In the third, the other has disappeared.

THE PROBLEM WITH THE EGO AND LOVE

It is the bondage of marriage and relationships that make couples look so sad.

Love never suspects, is never jealous, never interferes in the other’s freedom; never imposes on the other. Love gives freedom which is only possible when there are “spaces in your togetherness” as Gibran says (65).

The other in the relationship provides a mirror in which you can see who you really are, your own confusion and chaos (71).

The possibility of love can only exist when you don’t need anybody. It’s like the bank who will only loan money when the person does not need it (73).

You worry about whether the other loves you because you are not certain about your own love or your own worth (75) …If somebody loves you, you accept it because you love yourself … when you enjoy yourself, others find you enjoyable (76).

When all possessiveness, jealousies and expectations disappear, love does not disappear –you disappear –the ego disappears. These are shadows of the ego … Just as the sun as never known anything of darkness, love has never known anything of jealousy. It is the ego that is jealous, competitive, feels hurt and is in constant struggle … The more you possess, the more the ego is strengthened; without possessions the ego cannot exist … Jealousy pretends to be love; possessiveness creates a mask of love … excitement, fever, and passion are insane, blind and unconscious. They give you the feeling as if they are love (78-80).

Until you know how to be utterly alone and blissful, you will never know what love is; everything else is co-dependency, neediness, slavery (80).

Learn the art of removing all that hinders love … Love is the undercurrent of your being (81).

Love is commitment, involvement, risk, responsibility (82) … Love penetrates to the very core of the person, touches the very soul of that person (83).

TRANSFORMING LUST INTO LOVE

Love is the lotus; lust is the mud the lotus arises out of … without love, nobody can transcend lust; you can only repress it. Repressed, it becomes more poisonous. It spreads into your whole system; it becomes toxic; it destroys you. Lust transformed into live, however, gives you a glow, a radiance. You start feeling light, as if you can fly. You start growing winds. With lust repressed, on the other hand, you become heavy, as if you are carrying a weight, as if a big rock is hanging around your neck. With lust repressed, you lose all opportunities to fly in the sky. With lust transformed into love, you have passed the test of existence (87).

Repressed sexual energy moves you toward lover states of being; whereas, if love arises out of lust, you start rising toward higher being … if you want to become a Buddha (an awakened one), then don’t be afraid of sex … become more aware and more alert about it. Be careful; it is tremendously valuable energy. Make it a meditation and transform it, by and by, into love (88).

Sex is the beginning, not the end.

THREE TYPES OF SEXUAL BEINGS:

1. Those who think sex is the end and lie a life of indulgence

2. Those who are against indulgences; the opposite extreme. Destroying sex, they destroy themselves and wither away. Both are foolish attitudes.

3. Those who are wise: They have no theories to impose. They just seek to understand. They see sex as an opportunity to grow beyond it, but one has to pass through it (89).

WITH SEX, BE TRUE TO LOVE:

If you live with a man or woman and you don’t love him, you live in sin. If you are married to somebody and you don’t’ love that person and you still go on living with him/her, making love to him or her, you are committing a sin against love. When you are deciding against love in favor of social comforts, conveniences and formalities, it is as wrong as if you go and rape a woman. When you rape a woman it is a crime because you don’t love the woman and the woman does not love you. But the same happens if you are with a woman and you don’t love her. Then it is a rape –socially accepted, of course, but it is a rape and you are going against love (90).

If you don’t love your wife, don’t touch her, because that is trespassing. If you don’t love a woman, don’t sleep with her; that is going against the law of love, and that is the ultimate law. Only when you love is everything permitted (92).

GROWING ROOTS IN LOVE

It is possible if you love a person and live the whole life with him or her that a great intimacy will grow and love will have deeper and deeper revelations to make to you. It is not possible if you go on changing partners very often … To grow roots, a tree needs to remain in one place. Then it goes deeper and becomes stronger (90). If you go on changing your woman or your man, you will become neurotic (94).

In the East, love is killed because people are afraid to change relationships. In the West, love is killed because people are changing relationships too often. Either way, love is killed (91). In the East, they cling to security, comfort and formality; in the West they cling to their ego’s freedom and non-commitment, but love suffers both ways (91).

In each woman, all women are represented, and in each man all men are represented … deep down the question is of female and male energy.

Intimacy is good, and to remain in one commitment is beautiful, but the basis necessity is love (90). When you make contact, make it truthfully. Don’t hide from your beloved or your lover –be true. Drop all masks. Reveal your whole heart, be nude. Between two lovers there should not be secrets or politics … Whatsoever arises in the heart should be transparent to the lover … Through each other you should be growing to a higher unity (93).

The real orgasm happens inside when your real woman and real man meet ... Each man is half man and half woman because half of your being came from your mother and father. Thus, to reach that inner union, you will have to find a woman outside who responds to your inner being. Then your inner woman [in the man] will awaken … The outer woman is just a way to the inner woman, and vice versa (93).

It is good that love fails, because the failure of love is bound to take you on a new pilgrimage … It is not love that is creating the trouble, it is the ego … Just keep your longing burning, aflame and don’t lose heart. Your longing is the seed of your spirituality. Your longing is the beginning of the ultimate union with existence. Your lover is just an excuse to get there (97).

Your longing to be one is your spiritual desire, your very essential, religious nature. It is just that you are focusing yourself on the wrong spot. Your lover is only an excuse. Let your lover be just an experience of an even greater love –the love for the whole of existence. Let your longing be a search for your inner being.

The longing is perfect right; only the object of longing is not right. That is creating the suffering and the hell. Just change the object and life become a paradise (99).

FREEDOM

You are born absolutely free; you simply avoid the responsibility of freedom (104).

The only prayer should be to be creative … that is how you participate in the whole … you have to be a participant, not an observer. Create yourself, your consciousness, your being (105).

Freedom involves risks, choice, responsibility for making the wrong choice. Wrong is always easier because it is downhill; right is arduous and uphill. The higher you go, there is the danger of falling … Freedom is a ladder … on one end you fall below the animals; on the other end, you ascend to heaven and rise above the angels (106).

Out of the chaos of freedom, stars are born …. Every discipline is a subtle kind of slavery (107)

Man is a bridge between the animals and God … between the conscious and unconscious (108).

THE FUNDAMENTAL SLAVERY

Where there is guilt, you cannot move into love (116).

FIVE TRICKS TO CONTROL MANKIND

1. Keep him weak so you can dominate him. The best way is to imprison love.

2. Ignorance and delusion = easily deceived and idiocy. Keep them from love and they become dull. In love mankind performs at his peak. The most sexual people are the most intelligent; love energy is intelligent.

3. Fear. Keep man away from love and he is fearful … love destroys fear. When you are in love, you are not afraid. When man is afraid, he is always bowing and on his knees.

4. Misery. A miserable man has no self worth, is self condemnatory and is a ready victim.

5. Alienation from others. Do not allow intimacy and keep people separate so they cannot band together.

All five tricks are managed through a taboo against love, touch and intimacy.