Gold nuggets from the OSHO library of His 400+ books. www.osho.com
Excerpts from thousands of His discourses. oshoworld.com/discourses/audio.asp Here’s a few to kick things off. ~PN & LP
What your parents have been doing, you are repeating. Although men and women have suffered together, creating all kinds of troubles for each other, there has not been in ten thousand years any revolution, any change in their relationships. What your parents have been doing, you are repeating. Your children will learn from you, and they will repeat it. You know that this is how life goes on … you remember your parents, or perhaps even your grandparents. And your children are learning everything from you, and they know this is the way life has to be lived.
So if you want consolation, go somewhere else — any priest will be helpful: Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Mohammedan, Jewish.
I am not here for consolation. Consolation to me is poison.
I want to help you to see clearly how you are creating your own world. To me, you are your own world, and you are your world’s creator. Neither your past life nor any God is deciding what is happening in your life; you are the decisive factor. Take responsibility for it. Be strong, have some stamina, and make an effort to change. ~Osho, The New Dawn #12Who is going to love? Love is one of the most precious experiences, but before you can love someone, you have to find yourself; otherwise, who is going to love? You don’t know anything about yourself. You are absolutely unconscious. In this unconsciousness, whatever you do is going to be wrong. ~Osho, The New Dawn #11
The original word ‘sin’ means ‘to miss’…not something ‘wrong’
…. The original word sin means to miss. It doesn’t mean to commit something wrong; it simply means to miss, to be absent. The Hebrew root for the word sin means to miss. That exists in a few English words: misconduct, misbehavior. To miss means not to be there, doing something without being present there — this is the only sin … And this is my definition, there is no other criterion. You cannot fall in love if you are aware; then falling in love is a sin. You can love but it will not be like a fall, it will be like a rise.
Why do we use the term falling in love? It is a falling; you are falling, you are not rising. When you are aware, falling is not possible — not even in love. It is not possible, it is simply not possible. With awareness, it is impossible; you rise in love. And rising in love is a totally different phenomenon from falling in love. Falling in love is a dream state. That’s why people who are in love, you can see it from their eyes: as if they are more asleep than others, intoxicated, dreaming. You can see from their eyes because their eyes have a sleepiness. People who rise in love are totally different. You can see they are no more in a dream, they are facing the reality and they are growing through it.
Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. And by and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Then it is not that you love this and you don’t love that, no — you are simply love. Whosoever comes near you, you share with them. Whatsoever is happening, you give your love to it. You touch a rock and you touch as if you are touching your beloved’s body. You look at the tree and you look as if you are looking at your beloved’s face. It becomes a state of being. Not that you are in love — now you ARE love. This is rising, this is not falling.
Love is beautiful when you rise through it, and love becomes dirty and ugly when you fall through it. And sooner or later you will find that it proves poisonous, it becomes a bondage. You have been caught in it, your freedom has been crushed, your wings have been cut; now you are free no more. Falling in love you become a possession: you possess and you allow somebody to possess you. You become a thing, and you try to convert the other person you have fallen in love with into a thing…
Possession… everybody goes on trying to possess: the beloved, the lover. This is no longer love. In fact when you possess a person, you hate, you destroy, you kill; you are a murderer. Love should give freedom; love IS freedom. Love will make the beloved more and more free, love will give wings, and love will open the vast sky. It cannot become a prison, an enclosure. But that love you don’t know because that happens only when you are aware; that quality of love comes only when there is awareness. You know a love which is a sin, because it comes out of sleep.
And this is so for everything you do. Even if you try to do something good, you harm. Look at the do-gooders: they always do harm, they are the most mischievous people in the world. Social reformers, so-called revolutionaries, they are the most mischievous people. But it is difficult to see where their mischief lies because they are very good people …. ~Osho, The Hidden Harmony #2
Women are certainly more courageous...
ARE WOMEN MORE COURAGEOUS THAN MEN?
They certainly are. These are men just feeling jealous… nothing courageous.
The woman is more loving because she does not live by logic, by reason, but by pure emotion and heart.
The way of the heart is beautiful but dangerous.
The way of the mind is ordinary but safe.
The man has chosen the safest and the most shortcut way of life. The woman has chosen the most beautiful, but the most mountainous, dangerous path of emotions, sentiments, moods. And because up to now the world has been ruled by man, woman has suffered immensely. She has not been able to fit with the society that man has created because the society is created according to reason and logic.
The woman wants a world of the heart.
In the society created by man there is no place for heart. Man has to learn to be more heartful because reason has led the whole humanity towards a global suicide. Reason has destroyed the harmony of nature, the ecology. Reason has given beautiful machines, but it has destroyed the beautiful humanity. A little more heart is needed in everything.
As far as I am concerned, the way to your innermost being is closer from the heart than from the mind. Mind is a shortcut if you are going outward, and heart is a very long way. If you are going inward, the whole thing changes into its opposite — heart is the shortcut to being, and mind is the longest way you can think of.
That’s why I am all for love, because from love it is very easy to take you to meditation, to take you to the eternity of your life, to take you to your godliness; it is very difficult from the head. First the man has to come to the heart, and then only he can move towards the being.
My emphasis on love has a basic spiritual reason. From the heart the woman can immediately move, and the man can move towards the heart without any difficulty. He has just been wrongly trained; it is only a conditioning. He has been told to be hard, to be strong, to be manly, and all this is nonsense. No man cries and lets his sadness or his joy flow through the tears because he has been told since he was a child that tears are for women, it is girlish. Men never cry and weep.
Looking to nature, the whole thing seems to be absurd. If it was so, if that was the intention of nature, then man’s eyes would have been made in a different way, they would not have tear glands. They have tear glands just as women have.
What is the purpose of those tears? They are needed; they are a tremendously significant language. There are moments when you cannot say, but your tears can show. You may be so full of joy, and tears come to your eyes. Tears are always the symbol of overflowing experience. You may be so sad that words cannot contain it; tears help you. It is one of the reasons why women go less mad than men, because they are ready to weep and cry and throw things any moment; temporarily they can go mad every day.
Man goes on accumulating, and then one day he explodes — wholesale. Women go mad retail, and that is a wiser way, to be finished every day. Why collect?
Men commit suicide more than women. This is very strange. Women talk of committing suicide more than men, but they never commit it. Men never talk about committing suicide but commit more suicide; the quantity is double. Man goes on and on repressing, goes on and on keeping a certain face which is fake. And there is a limit to everything: a point comes where he cannot hold it anymore and everything falls apart.
Man has to be taught to be more heartful because from the heart goes the way to being. You cannot bypass the heart. The woman is in a better position, she can go directly towards being from the heart. But instead of recognizing this immense quality in women, man has been condemning women. Perhaps there is a reason; perhaps he was aware of some superiority in woman — the superiority of love. No logic can be higher than love, and no mind can be higher than the heart. But the mind can be very murderous; the mind can be very violent, and that’s what the mind has done for centuries.
Man has been beating women, repressing women, condemning women. And not knowing that condemning women, repressing women is making them inferior, half of humanity is deprived of raising its consciousness. And you are deprived, because you could also have learned the art of moving upwards from half of the universe. You could also have moved on the same way, on the same path; hence I always say, the liberation of women is also the liberation of man. It is more the liberation of man than the liberation of women.
Yes, women have more love, but they should also be made aware of the other side of the coin. Man has logic. The other side can be illogical. It is not dangerous, it is just a mistake; it can be corrected. That’s why I said the way of the heart is beautiful but dangerous.
The other side of love is hate; the other side of love is jealousy. So if a woman gets caught into hate and jealousy, all the beauty of love dies and she is left only with poisons in her hands. She will poison herself and she will poison everybody who is around.
To be loving one has to be more alert because you can fall into the ditch of hate which is just very close by. Every peak of love is very close; the dark valley of hate is surrounding the peak from everywhere — you can slip very easily.
Perhaps that is the reason many women decide not to love. Perhaps that is the reason man has decided to live in the head and forget all about the heart… because it is so sensitive, it feels hurt very easily, its moods change just like the climate changing.
One who really wants to learn the art of love has to remember all of these things, and has to save his love from falling into all these ditches of hatred, jealously; otherwise, going to the being will become impossible — more impossible than it is from the head.
The woman has to drop jealousy, she has to drop hatred.
The man has to drop logic and be a little more loving.
Logic can be used; it is utilitarian. In scientific work it is useful, but not in human relationships. Man has to be careful that logic does not become his only way, that it remains just an instrument he uses and puts aside. The woman has to be aware that she does not fall into hatred, into jealousy, into anger, because they will destroy her most precious treasure of love. And both have to move deeper in love; the deeper they move in love, the closer they will reach to the being.
Being is not very far away; it is the deepest part of love, a love which is absolutely pure, unconditional. A love which is absolutely alert, aware, conscious, immediately turns into a tremendous revolution; it opens the doors of the innermost shrine of being.
To reach to your very center is to gain all that life can give to you — all the fragrance, all the beauty, all the joy, all the benedictions.
….Women are certainly more courageous. In all the cultures all over the world, it is the woman who leaves her family and goes to the family of the husband. She leaves her mother, her father, her friends, her town, everything that she has loved, she has grown up with; for love’s sake she sacrifices all that. The man will not be able to do that.
In fact, because the man has been pretending to be superior, he should have done it; he should have gone to the girl’s house rather than bringing the woman to his own house. But in no culture, in no society in the whole of history, has man taken that step — to drop out of his family, out of his grounding, out of his atmosphere, to sacrifice everything and to become part of a totally new atmosphere, a new land, to be replanted in a new garden, in a new soil, and to blossom there. The woman has done it, and done it gracefully.
She is certainly more courageous.
In love, and in different phases… She loves as a mother, which no father can do; she loves as a wife, which no husband can do. Even as a small child she loves as a daughter, which no boy can do.
A woman’s whole life is love.
For the man, life is a big thing; love is only a small part in it. He can sacrifice love for money, for power, for prestige — for anything he can sacrifice love. The woman cannot sacrifice love for anything; everything is below love. Everything can be sacrificed, but not love. Certainly she has courage, and man should learn much from women.
If we make our relationship a learning phenomenon of experiencing the other person — not just a superficial sexual relationship, but something deep, intimate, learning of each other’s mysteries — then each relationship becomes a spiritual phenomenon. Both will be enriched by it and, as a result, the whole of society.
Question 11
A WOMAN POET FROM AUSTRIA, MARIA VON ESCHENBACH, ONCE SAID, “ONE INTELLIGENT WOMAN HAS MILLIONS OF BORN ENEMIES — ALL STUPID MEN. CAN YOU PLEASE COMMENT?She is right. It does not need any more comment.
~ OSHO: Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries
Chapter 21: The fear of tomorrow destroys your today
