Imitation will make you very stupid, unintelligent. ~OSHO~

Question - Can not people learn by Imitating others?

OSHO- THAT'S HOW PEOPLE LEARN, but that s how people remain stupid. too. The only way practiced hitherto is that of imitating others. That makes you knowledgeable but it does not make you intelligent. It makes you more informed but it does not release your wisdom. It will make you efficient as far as outer world is concerned -- you will become a better mechanic, a better technician -- but as far as the inner dimension is concerned you will become more and more stupid if you imitate.
There are things which are learned by imitation: for example, language you have to learn by imitation, otherwise you won't know any language. Science has to be learned through others. But the inner world is totally different; it follows a totally different law. There imitation is a barrier not a bridge, a wall not a bridge. There you have to learn on your own. But people go on doing the same kind of imitation in the inner world too, so they start imitating Buddha, they start imitating Jesus, they start imitating Mahavira, and they end up by being only carbon copies. They become more and more stupid. They cannot find their original face.
 You can sit like a Buddha, you can close your eyes like a Buddha, you can use the same posture, you can sit under the same kind of tree, you can eat the same kind of food in the same quantity, you can sleep the way Buddha used to sleep, get up at the time Buddha used to get up -- you can do everything in the minutest detail exactly like a Buddha, but it will be all acting; it won't make you an awakened one.
 A little rabbit is ready to become an adult, so his daddy says, "Today I will show you how to behave with the ladies!" So they go and find in the garden six beautiful female rabbits.
"Look at me," says daddy rabbit. "Watch! Be aware!"
"Hello, madam," says daddy as he jumps on the first female. And then some time after his jerking is over he says, "Goodbye, madam!"
Then he jumps on the second one with a very polite, "Hello. madam," then "Goodbye madam!"
 And so on and so forth, very very slowly...
When he is finished he goes to his son. The little rabbit seems very feverish. "Did you get it?" asks his father.
"Oh yes, yes, yes!" says the young one. And running at full speed without a single stop he goes on jumping, "Hello madam, goodbye madam, hello madam, goodbye madam, hello madam, goodbye madam, hello madam, goodbye madam... hello daddy, goodbye daddy!"
 Imitation will make you very stupid, unintelligent. It is the way of the mediocre. Beware of it. In the inner world -- and that is the world I am concerned with and that is the world you are here for -- imitation won't help not at all. You have to drop imitating completely, totally entirely, because each individual is unique, so unique that if he imitates anybody else he will miss his uniqueness, and in that uniqueness is his spirit, is his very being. In his uniqueness is hidden his god.
 Cannot you observe that Jesus happened only once? And for two thousand years, how many people have tried to imitate him? Millions. And how many have become Jesus Christ? Not a single one. The same is true about Zarathustra, about Lao Tzu, about Buddha, about Mahavira, about Krishna. Not even a single person has been able to repeat, and it is not that people have not tried; people have tried in every possible way. Millions of people have tried to be like Buddha -- who would not like to be like a Buddha? -- but they have all failed, utterly failed. Is it not a great lesson to be learned? Just open your eyes and see that God never creates two persons exactly similar; he does not repeat. He is really a creator.
 It happened once: A man purchased a Picasso painting. It was very costly, one million dollars, but he knew perfectly well that it is authentic -- he knew it because he was an eye witness when Picasso was doing it. When he had purchased he was so happy -- he was a friend to Picasso -- he went to show him the painting and to tell him that, "I have purchased your painting. Of course it has cost me a fortune, but I am immensely happy that I have got one of your original paintings with me."
 Picasso looked at the painting and said, "This is not original -- this is a copy."
The man was shocked. Then he has been robbed of one million dollars! He said, "But what are you saying? -- because I have seen with my own eyes! I was staying with you in those days when you were painting this!"
And the woman who used to live in those days with Picasso also said that, "You must be joking because I also remember. You have done this painting yourself and your friend was staying with us."
 Picasso said, "I know perfectly well that I have painted it, but it is still not an original because I have painted the same painting before too. Whether I have made the copy or somebody else had made the copy, it makes no difference; it is a copy, it is not original. Yes, I have painted it, but it is a repetition. I will not call it original."
 God is not repetitive; he is always original. Rejoice in the fact, Ramakrishna, that he has created you an original being. You are not supposed to be anybody else but yourself It is disrespectful towards God, it is ungrateful towards God -- even the effort, even the desire to be somebody else. Feel thankful and grateful that he has never created anybody like you and he will never create anybody like you. Don't miss this opportunity by imitating.
 And why people imitate? -- because they don't trust their own intelligence. They are afraid that if they move on their own they may commit some mistake, so it is better to follow somebody who knows. That is the greatest mistake in life, to follow somebody who knows, because then you will never mature. One grows by committing many mistakes.
 Commit as many mistakes as possible. Commit new mistakes every day -- be inventive, be creative about mistakes. Just remember one thing: don't create the same mistake again; that is not intelligent. But if you commit the mistake for the first time it is beautiful, it is great, because that will help you to grow; that will help you to find out who you are. Just following somebody, even if you reach heaven it will not be worth reaching. You will reach like a child; you will not be able to enjoy, and you will remain foolish even there, and you will go on doing your foolish things even in heaven. It is better to fall into hell but remain unique, remain yourself; then even hell can be transformed into a heaven.
 After thirty years of happy marriage, Sadie was on her deathbed. The doctor had given up all hope. Her loving husband, Saul, cried out tearfully, "Oh Sadie, oh Sadie, just tell me if there is anything I can do!"
From her deathbed Sadie whispered, "Oh Saul, oh Saul, I want you to do something for me you have never done in all these years."
"Oh yes, Sadie!" cried Saul. "I will do anything for you, my Sadie!"
"Saul, I want you to kiss me here between my legs."
"Oh Sadie, I can't do that!"
"Oh, but Saul, you said you would do anything!"
 So bravely Saul said okay and proceeded to kiss her between her legs.
All of a sudden a great rosy glow came over Sadie. She became completely well and jumped up out of bed crying, "Oh wonderful Saul!"
But Saul slumped back on the floor crying and beating his breast. Sadie asked, "What is wrong, Saul?"
Saul said through his tears, "Oh, but I could have saved my mother and my sister too!"
 Ramakrishna, be a little more intelligent. In the outer world, imitate, or whatsoever you want to, do. But in the inner remain original, remain authentically your own self.
I would like to see each of my sannyasin a unique peak, incomparable to anybody else. That's why I don't give you any discipline: I want you to discover it. I will help you to become more conscious, but I will not tell you what to do; that has to come out of your own consciousness. I will not give you ten commandments, I will not make rules and regulations for you. You all hanker for rules and regulations because that is easy: I tell you, "Do this, don't do that," you need not use your own intelligence. It is perfectly good: you trust me and you go on doing whatsoever I say, but that will be only control, repression; it will not be freedom, it will not be consciousness.
 And in the world of freedom the first step is the last step too. You have to begin from the first step. If the first step is taken in slavery, the last step will also be part of it. The first step has to be taken in tremendous freedom. If you are here you are here on your own accord. If you are sannyasins it is your surrender, it is your own decision, it is your own commitment. I don't make any conditions on you and I don't want you to make any conditions on me from your side.
 Just the other day I received a letter.. . The person asked for sannyas in such an aggressive way, as if he is doing some favor to me. And the way he writes the letter is not at all that of a man who wants to surrender, it is that of demand -- each word is violent. He says, "Give me sannyas today. I cannot wait. Either say yes or no. I don't want to follow Arup's suggestions; I don't want to do anything told by somebody else. You simply tell me whether you are going to give me sannyas today or not. This afternoon I want the answer!"
 Now is this a way to be a sannyasin? This is for the first time in my life I have said no to any person -- first time! I have given sannyas to one hundred fifty thousand people; for the first time I had to say no. Sadly I had to say no, because this is not the way. If you make conditions, if you demand... today it is sannyas, after sannyas there will be other things, that "Today I want enlightenment, this very afternoon!"
 I don't make any demands on you; please remember not to make any demands on me. I am here just out of my joy; you are here out of your joy. We have met for no other reason. You are not here because of me, I am not here because of you. You are here because of you, I am here because of me. And it is beautiful that we have met -- it is a coincidence that we have met.
 We can share. I can share whatsoever I have, but it is not an imposition on you. You are not to follow it, you have only to understand it. And if out of your understanding something starts happening in you, then you are the source of that happening, I am not the source of that happening. You need not even be grateful to me.
OSHO

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All that you need is just to be Watchful. ~OSHO~

Question:  Beloved Osho,  What does it mean when you say, "Just be yourself"? How can I be myself when I don't know who I am? I know many of my preferences, likings, dislikings and tendencies, which seem to be the outcome of a programmed biocomputer called the mind. Does just being oneself mean that one totally lives out the whole content of the mind as watchfully as possible?
Osho: Yes, it exactly means that - to live as an awareness: awareness of all the programs the mind has been conditioned for, awareness of all the impulses, desires, memories, imaginations... all that the mind can do. One has to be not part of it, but separate - seeing it but not being it - watching it.
And this is one of the most essential things to remember, that you cannot watch your watchfulness. If you watch your watchfulness, then the watcher is you, not the watched. So you cannot go beyond watchfulness. The point that you cannot transcend is your being. The point that you cannot go beyond is you.
You can watch very easily any thought, any emotion, any sentiment. Just one thing you cannot watch - and that is your watchfulness. And if you manage to watch it, that means you have shifted: the first watchfulness has become just a thought; now you are the second watcher.
You can go on shifting back, but you cannot get out of watchfulness because it is you: you cannot be otherwise.  So when I say, "Just be yourself," I am saying to you, "Just be unprogrammed, unconditioned awareness." That's how you had come into the world, and that's how the enlightened person leaves the world. He lives in the world but remains totally separate.
One of the great mystics, Kabir, has a beautiful poem about it. All his poems are just perfect - nothing can be better. One of his poems says, "I will give back the soul that was given to me at the time of my birth as pure, as clean, as it was given to me. I will give it back that way when I die." He is talking about awareness, that it has remained unpolluted. The whole world was there to pollute it, but he has remained watchful.
All that you need is just to be watchful, and nothing will affect you. This unaffectedness will keep your purity, and this purity has certainly the freshness of life, the joy of existence - all the treasures that you have been endowed with. But you become attached to the small things surrounding you and forget the one that you are.
It is the greatest discovery in life and the most ecstatic pilgrimage to truth. And you need not be an ascetic, you need not be anti-life - you need not renounce the world and go to the mountains. You can be where you are, you can continue to do what you are doing. Just a new thing has to be evolved: whatever you do, you do with awareness - even the smallest act of the body or the mind - and with each act of awareness you will become aware of the beauty and the treasure and the glory and the eternity of your being. 
OSHO

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We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone... ~OSHO~

Question:You said the other day that we are born alone, we live Alone and we die alone. Yet it seems as if from the day we Are born, whatever we are doing, whoever we are, we Seek to relate to others; in addition, we are usually Attracted to being intimate with one person in Particular. Would you please comment?

Osho: The question that you have asked is the question of every human being. We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Aloneness is our very nature, but we are not aware of it. Because we are not aware of it, we remain strangers to ourselves, and instead of seeing our aloneness as a tremendous beauty and bliss, silence and peace, at-easeness with existence, we misunderstand it as loneliness. Loneliness is a misunderstood aloneness. Once you misunderstand your aloneness as loneliness, the whole context changes.

Aloneness has a beauty and grandeur, a positivity; loneliness is poor, negative, dark, dismal. Everybody is running away from loneliness. It is like a wound; it hurts. To escape from it, the only way is to be in a crowd, to become part of a society, to have friends, to create a family, to have husbands and wives, to have children. In this crowd, the basic effort is that you will be able to forget your loneliness. But nobody has ever succeeded in forgetting it. That which is natural to you, you can try to ignore -- but you cannot forget it; it will assert again and again.
And the problem becomes more complex because you have never seen it as it is; you have taken it for granted that you are born lonely. The dictionary meaning is the same; that shows the mind of the people who create dictionaries. They don't understand at all the vast difference between loneliness and aloneness. Loneliness is a gap. Something is missing, something is needed to fill it, and nothing can ever fill it because it is a misunderstanding in the first place. As you grow older, the gap also grows bigger.
People are so afraid to be by themselves that they do any kind of stupid thing. I have seen people playing cards alone; the other party is not there. They have invented games in which the same person plays cards from both sides. Somehow one wants to remain engaged. That engagement may be with people, may be with work.... There are workaholics; they are afraid when the weekend comes close -- what are they going to do? And if they don't do anything, they are left to themselves, and that is the most painful experience.
You will be surprised to know that it is on the weekends that most of the accidents in the world happen. People are rushing in their cars to resort places, to sea beaches, to hill stations, bumper to bumper. It may take eight hours, ten hours to reach, and there is nothing for them to do because the whole crowd has come with them. Now their house, their neighborhood, their city is more peaceful than this sea resort. Everybody has come. But some engagement....
People are playing cards, chess; people are watching television for hours. The average American watches television five hours a day; people are listening to the radio... just to avoid themselves. For all these activities, the only reason is -- not to be left alone; it is very fearful. And this idea is taken from others. Who has told you that to be alone is a fearful state?
Those who have known aloneness say something absolutely different. They say there is nothing more beautiful,more peaceful, more joyful than being alone. But you listen to the crowd. The people who live in misunderstanding are in such a majority, that who bothers about a Zarathustra, or a Gautam Buddha? These single individuals can be wrong, can be hallucinating, can be deceiving themselves or deceiving you, but millions of people cannot be wrong. And millions of people agree that to be left to oneself is the worst experience in life; it is hell.
But any relationship that is created because of the fear, because of the inner hell of being left alone, cannot be satisfying. Its very root is poisoned. You don't love your woman, you are simply using her not to be lonely; neither does she love you. She is also in the same paranoia; she is using you not to be left alone. Naturally, in the name of love anything may happen -- except love. Fights may happen, arguments may happen, but even they are preferred to being lonely: at least somebody is there and you are engaged, you can forget your loneliness.
But love is not possible, because there is no basic foundation for love. Love never grows out of fear. You are asking, "You said the other day that we are born alone, we live alone and we die alone. Yet it seems as if from the day we are born, whatever we are doing, whoever we are, we seek to relate to others."
This seeking to relate to others is nothing but escapism. Even the smallest baby tries to find something to do; if nothing else, then he will suck his own big toes on his feet. It is an absolutely futile activity, nothing can come out of it, but it is engagement. He is doing something. You will see in the stations, in the airports, small boys and girls carrying their teddy bears; they cannot sleep without them. Darkness makes their loneliness even more dangerous. The teddy bear is a great protection; somebody is with them.
And your God is nothing but a teddy bear for grown-ups. You cannot live as you are. Your relationships are not relationships. They are ugly. You are using the other person, and you know perfectly well the other person is using you. And to use anybody is to reduce him into a thing, into a commodity. You don't have any respect for the person.
"In addition," you are asking, "we are usually attracted to being intimate with one person in particular."
It has a psychological reason. You are brought up by a mother, by a father; if you are a boy, you start loving your mother and you start being jealous of your father because he is a competitor; if you are a girl, you start loving your father and you hate your mother because she is a competitor. These are now established facts, not hypotheses, and the result of it turns your whole life into a misery.
The boy carries the image of his mother as the model of a woman. He becomes conditioned continuously; he knows only one woman so closely, so intimately. Her face, her hair, her warmth -- everything becomes an imprint. That's exactly the scientific word used: it becomes an imprint in his psychology. And the same happens to the girl about the father. When you grow up, you fall in love with some woman or with some man and you think, "Perhaps we are made for each other." Nobody is made for anyone.
But why do you feel attracted towards one certain person? It is because of your imprint. He must resemble your father in some way; she must resemble your mother in some way. Of course no other woman can be exactly a replica of your mother, and anyway you are not in search of a mother, you are in search of a wife. But the imprint inside you decides who is the right woman for you. The moment you see that woman, there is no question of reasoning. You immediately feel attraction; your imprint immediately starts functioning - - this is the woman for you, or this is the man for you.
It is good as far as meeting once in a while on the sea beach, in the movie hall, in the garden is concerned, because you don't come to know each other totally. But you are both hankering to live together; you want to be married, and that is one of the most dangerous steps that lovers can take. The moment you are married, you start becoming aware of the totality of the other person, and you are surprised on every single aspect -- "Something went wrong; this is not the woman, this is not the man" -- because they don't fit with the ideal that you are carrying within you.
And the trouble is multiplied because the woman is carrying an ideal of her father -- you don't fit with it. You are carrying the ideal of your mother -- she does not fit with it. That's why all marriages are failures. Only very rare marriages are not failures -- and I hope God should save you from those marriages which are not failures, because they are psychologically sick. There are people who are sadists, who enjoy torturing others, and there are people who are masochists, who enjoy torturing themselves.
If a husband and wife belong to these two categories, that marriage will be a successful marriage. One is a masochist and one is a sadist -- it is a perfect marriage, because one enjoys being tortured and one enjoys torturing. But ordinarily it is very difficult to find out in the first place whether you are a masochist or a sadist, and then to look for your other polarity.... If you are wise enough you should go to the psychologist and enquire who you are, a masochist or a sadist? and ask if he can give you some references which can fit with you.
Sometimes, just by accident, it happens that a sadist and masochist become married. They are the happiest people in the world; they are fulfilling each other's needs. But what kind of need is this? -- they are both psychopaths, and they are living a life of torture. But otherwise, every marriage is going to fail, for one simple reason: the imprint is the problem. Even in marriage, the basic reason for which you wanted to have the relationship is not fulfilled. You are more alone when you are with your wife than when you are alone.
To leave husband and wife in a room by themselves is to make them both utterly miserable. his whole effort -- whether of relationships or remaining busy in a thousand and one things -- is just to escape from the idea that you are lonely. And I want it to be emphatically clear to you that this is where the meditator and the ordinary man part. The ordinary man goes on trying to forget his loneliness, and the meditator starts getting more and more acquainted with his aloneness.
He has left the world; he has gone to the caves, to the mountains, to the forest, just for the sake of being alone. He wants to know who he is. In the crowd, it is difficult; there are so many disturbances. And those who have known their aloneness have known the greatest blissfulness possible to human beings -- because your very being is blissful. After being in tune with your aloneness, you can relate; then your relationship will bring great joys to you, because it is not out of fear.
Finding your aloneness you can create, you can be involved in as many things as you want, because this involvement will not anymore be running away from yourself. Now it will be your expression; now it will be the manifestation of all that is your potential. Only such a man -- whether he lives alone or lives in the society, whether he marries or lives unmarried makes no difference -- is always blissful, peaceful, silent. His life is a dance, is a song, is a flowering, is a fragrance. Whatever he does, he brings his fragrance to it.
But the first basic thing is to know your aloneness absolutely. This escape from yourself you have learned from the crowd. Because everybody is escaping, you start escaping. Every child is born in a crowd and starts imitating people; what others are doing, he starts doing. He falls into the same miserable situations as others are in, and he starts thinking that this is what life is all about. And he has missed life completely.
So I remind you, don't misunderstand aloneness as loneliness. Loneliness is certainly sick; aloneness is perfect health. Ginsberg visits Doctor Goldberg. "Ja, you are sick." "Not good enough. I want another opinion." "Okay," said Doctor Goldberg, "you are ugly too." We are all committing the same kinds of misunderstandings continually.
I would like my people to know that your first and most primary step towards finding the meaning and significance of life is to enter into your aloneness. It is your temple; it is where your God lives, and you cannot find this temple anywhere else. You can go on to the moon, to Mars....
Once you have entered your innermost core of being, you cannot believe your own eyes: you were carrying so much joy, so many blessings, so much love... and you were escaping from your own treasures. Knowing these treasures and their inexhaustibility, you can move now into relationships, into creativity. You will help people by sharing your love, not by using them. You will give dignity to people by your love; you will not destroy their respect. And you will, without any effort, become a source for them to find their own treasures too.
Whatever you make, whatever you do, you will spread your silence, your peace, your blessings into everything possible. But this basic thing is not taught by any family, by any society, by any university. People go on living in misery, and it is taken for granted. Everybody is miserable, so it is nothing much if you are miserable; you cannot be an exception. But I say unto you: You can be an exception. You just have not made the right effort.
OSHO

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WHY IS LOVE SO PAINFUL? ~OSHO~

Love is painful because it creates the way for bliss. Love is painful because it transforms; love is mutation. Each transformation is going to be painful because the old has to be left for the new. The old is familiar, secure, safe, the new is absolutely unknown. You will be moving in an uncharted ocean. You cannot use your mind with the new; with the old, the mind is skillful. The mind can function only with the old; with the new, the mind is utterly useless.
Hence, fear arises, and leaving the old, comfortable, safe world, the world of convenience, pain arises. It is the same pain that the child feels when he comes out of the womb of the mother. It is the same pain that the bird feels when he comes out of the egg. It is the same pain that the bird will feel when he will try for the first time to be on the wing.
The fear of the unknown, and the security of the known, the insecurity of the unknown, the unpredictability of the unknown, makes one very much frightened. And because the transformation is going to be from the self towards a state of no-self, agony is very deep. But you Cannot have ecstasy without going through agony. If the gold wants to be purified, it has to pass through fire.
Love is fire.
 It is because of the pain of love, millions of people live a loveless life. They too suffer, and their suffering is futile. To suffer in love is not to suffer in vain. To suffer in love is creative; it takes you to higher levels of consciousness. To suffer without love is utterly a waste; it leads you nowhere, it keeps you moving in the same vicious circle.
The man who is without love is narcissistic, he is closed. He knows only himself. And how much can he know himself if he has not known the other, because only the other can function as a mirror? You will never know yourself without knowing the other. Love is very fundamental for self-knowledge too. The person who has not known the other in deep love, in intense passion, in utter ecstasy, will not be able to know who he is, because he will not have the mirror to see his own reflection.
Relationship is a mirror, and the purer the love is, the higher the love is, the better the mirror, the cleaner the mirror. But the higher love needs that you should be open. The higher love needs you to be vulnerable. You have to drop your armor; that is painful. You have not to be constantly on guard. You have to drop the calculating mind. You have to risk. You have to live dangerously. The other can hurt you; that is the fear in being vulnerable. The other can reject you; that is the fear in being in love.
The reflection that you will find in the other of your own self may be ugly; that is the anxiety. Avoid the mirror. But by avoiding the mirror you are not going to become beautiful. By avoiding the situation you are not going to grow either. The challenge has to be taken.
One has to go into love. That is the first step towards God, and it cannot be bypassed. Those who try to bypass the step of love will never reach God. That is absolutely necessary because you become aware of your totality only when you are provoked by the presence of the other, when your presence is enhanced by the presence of the other, when you are brought out of your narcissistic, closed world under the open sky.
Love is an open sky. To be in love is to be on the wing. But certainly, the unbounded sky creates fear.
And to drop the ego is very painful because we have been taught to cultivate the ego. We think the ego is our only treasure. We have been proteCting it, we have been decorating it, we have been continuously polishing it, and when love knocks on the door, all that is needed to fall in love is to put aside the ego; certainly it is painful. It is your whole life's work, it is all that you have created -- this ugly ego, this idea that "I am separate from existence. "
This idea is ugly because it is untrue. This idea is illusory, but our society exists, is based on this idea that each person is a person, not a presence.
The truth is that there is no person at all in the world; there is only presence. You are not -- not as an ego, separate from the whole. You are part of the whole. The whole penetrates you, the whole breathes in you, pulsates in you, the whole is your life.
Love gives you the first experience of being in tune with something that is not your ego. Love gives you the first lesson that you can fall into harmony with someone who has never been part of your ego. If you can be in harmony with a woman, if you can be in harmony with a friend, with a man, if you can be in harmony with your child or with your mother, why can't you be in harmony with all human beings?
And if to be in harmony with a single person gives such joy, what will be the outcome if you are in harmony with all human beings? And if you can be in harmony with all human beings, why can't you be in harmony with animals and birds and trees? Then one step leads to another.
Love is a ladder. It starts with one person, it ends with the totality. Love is the beginning, God is the end. To be afraid of love, to be afraid of the growing pains of love, is to remain enclosed in a dark cell.
Modern man is living in a dark cell; it is narcissistic. Narcissism is the greatest obsession of the modern mind.
And then there are problems, problems which are meaningless. There are problems which are creative because they lead you to higher awareness. There are problems which lead you nowhere; they simply keep you tethered, they simply keep you in your old mess.
Love creates problems. You can avoid those problems by avoiding love. But those are very essential problems! They have to be faced, encountered; they have to be lived and gone through and gone beyond. And to go beyond, the way is through. Love is the only real thing worth doing. All else is secondary. If it helps love, it is good. All else is just a means, love is the end. So whatsoever the pain, go into love.
If you don't go into love, as many people have decided, then you are stuck with yourself. Then your life is not a pilgrimage, then your life is not a river going to the ocean; your life is a stagnant pool, dirty, and soon there will be nothing but dirt and mud. To keep clean, one needs to keep flowing. A river remains clean because it goes on flowing. Flow is the process of remaining continuously virgin.
A lover remains a virgin. All lovers are virgin. The people who don't love cannot remain virgin; they become dormant, stagnant; they start stinking sooner or later -- and sooner than later -- because they have nowhere to go. Their life is dead.
That's where modern man finds himself, and because of this, all kinds of neuroses, all kinds of madnesses, have become rampant. Psychological illness has taken epidemic proportions. It is no more that a few individuals are psychologically ill; the reality is the whole earth has become a madhouse. The whole of humanity is suffering from a kind of neurosis.
And that neurosis is coming from your narcissistic stagnancy. Everyone is stuck with one's own illusion of having a separate self; then people go mad. And this madness is meaningless, unproductive, uncreative. Or people start committing suicide. Those suicides are also unproductive, uncreative.
You may not commit suicide by taking poison or jumping from a cliff or by shooting yourself, but you can commit a suicide which is a very slow process, and that's what happens. Very few people commit suicide suddenly. Others have decided for a slow suicide; gradually, slowly, slowly they die. But almost, the tendency to be suicidal has become universal.
This is no way to live, and the reason, the fundamental reason, is we have forgotten the language of love. We are no more courageous enough to go into that adventure called love.
Hence people are interested in sex, because sex is not risky. It is momentary, you don't get involved. Love is involvement; it is commitment. It is not momentary. Once it takes roots, it can be forever. It can be a lifelong involvement. Love needs intimacy, and only when you are intimate does the other become a mirror. When you meet sexually with a woman or a man, you have not met at all; in fact, you avoided the soul of the other person. You just used the body and escaped, and the other used your body and escaped. You never became intimate enough to reveal each other's original faces. Love is the greatest Zen koan.
It is painful, but don't avoid it. If you avoid it you have avoided the greatest opportunity to grow. Go into it, suffer love, because through the suffering comes great ecstasy. Yes, there is agony, but out of the agony, ecstasy is born. Yes, you will have to die as an ego, but if you can die as an ego, you will be born as God, as a Buddha. And love will give you the first tongue-tip-taste of Tao, of Sufism, of Zen. Love will give you the first proof that God is, that life is not meaningless.
The people who say life is meaningless are the people who have not known love. All that 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 to a beautiful sunrise. It is only in the womb of the dark night that the sun evolves. It is only through the dark night that the morning comes.
My whole approach here is that of love. I teach only love and only love and nothing else. You can forget about God; that is just an empty word. You can forget about prayers because they are only rituals imposed by others on you. Love is the natural prayer, not imposed by anybody. You are born with it. Love is the true God -- not the God of theologians, but the God of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, the God of the Sufis. Love is a tariqa, 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.
And certainly when one starts disappearing like a dewdrop, and one has lived long as a dewdrop, it hurts, because one has been thinking, "I am this, and now this is going. I am dying. " You are not dying, but only an illusion is dying. You have become identified with the illusion, true, but the illusion is still an illusion. And only when the illusion is gone will you be able to see who you are. And that revelation brings you to the ultimate peak of joy, bliss, celebration.

 OSHO

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Why do I feel self-conscious? ~OSHO~

Freedom is the goal of life. Without freedom, life has no meaning at all. By freedom is not meant any political, social, or economic freedom. By freedom it is meant freedom from time, freedom from mind, freedom from desire. The moment the mind is no more, you are one with the universe; you are as vast as the universe itself.
It is the mind that is the barrier between you and the reality, and because of this barrier, you remain confined in a dark cell where no light ever reaches and where no joy can ever penetrate. You live in misery because you are not meant to live in such a small, confined space. Your being wants to expand to the very ultimate source of existence. Your being longs to be oceanic, and you have become a dewdrop. How can you be happy? How can you be blissful? Man lives in misery because man lives imprisoned.
And Gautama the Buddha says that tanha—desire—is the root cause of all our misery because desire creates the mind. Desire means creating future, projecting yourself in the future, bringing tomorrow in. Bring the tomorrow in, and the today disappears, you cannot see it any longer, your eyes are clouded by the tomorrow. Bring the tomorrow in, and you will have to carry the load of all your yesterdays because the tomorrow can only be there if the yesterdays go on nourishing it.
Each desire is born out of the past, and each desire is projected in the future. The past and the future, they constitute your whole mind. Analyze the mind, dissect it, and you will find only two things: the past and the future. You will not find even an iota of the present, not even a single atom. And the present is the only reality, the only existence, the only dance there is.
The present can be found only when mind has ceased utterly— when the past no longer overpowers you and the future no more possesses you, when you are disconnected from the memories and the imaginations. In that moment where are you? Who are you? In that moment you are a nobody And nobody can hurt you when you are a nobody. You cannot be wounded because the ego is very ready to receive wounds. The ego is almost seeking and searching to be wounded; it exists through wounds. Its whole existence depends on misery, pain.
When you are a nobody, anguish is impossible, anxiety is simply unbelievable. When you are a nobody, there is great silence, stillness, no noise inside. Past gone, future disappeared—what is there to create noise? And the silence that is heard is celestial, sacred. For the first time, in those spaces of no-mind, you become aware of the eternal celebration that goes on and on. That's what the existence is made of.
Except man, the whole existence is blissful. Only man has fallen out of it, has gone astray. Only man can do it because only man has consciousness.
Now, consciousness has two possibilities: It can become a bright light in you, so bright that even the sun will look pale compared to it-—Buddha says if a thousand suns have risen suddenly, when you look within with no mind it is all light, eternal light. It is all joy, pure, uncontaminated, unpolluted. It is simple bliss, innocent. It is wonder. Its majesty is indescribable, its beauty inexpressible, and its benediction inexhaustible. Aes dhammo sanantano—"so is the ultimate law."
If you can only put your mind aside, you will become aware of the cosmic play. Then you are only energy, and the energy is always here now, it never leaves the "herenow." That is one possibility; you can become pure consciousness.
The other possibility is you can become self-consciousness. Then you fall. Then you become a separate entity from the world. Then you become an island, defined, well-defined. Then you are confined because all definitions confine. Then you are in a prison cell, and the prison cell is dark, utterly dark. There is no light, no possibility of light. And the prison cell cripples you, paralyzes you.
Self-consciousness becomes a bondage; the self is the bondage. And consciousness becomes freedom.
Drop the self and be conscious! That is the whole message, the message of all the buddhas of all the ages, past, present, future.
The essential core of the message is very simple: Drop the self, the ego, the mind, and be.
Just this moment when this silence pervades, who are you? A nobody, a nonentity. You don't have a name, you don't have a form. You are neither man nor woman, neither Hindu nor Mohammedan. You don't belong to any country, to any nation, to any race. You are not the body, and you are not the mind.
Then what are you? In this silence, what is your taste? How does it taste to be? Just a peace, just a silence . . . and out of that peace and silence a great joy starts surfacing, welling up, for no reason at all. It is your spontaneous nature.
The art of putting the mind aside is the whole secret of religiousness because as you put the mind aside, your being explodes into a thousand and one colors. You become a rainbow, a lotus, a one-thousand-petaled lotus. Suddenly you open up, and then the whole beauty of existence—which is infinite—is yours. Then all the stars in the sky are within you. Then even the sky is not your limit; you no longer have any limits.
Silence gives you a chance to melt, merge, disappear, evaporate. And when you are not, you are; for the first time you are. When you are not, God is, nirvana is, enlightenment is. When you are not, all is found. When you are, all is lost.
Man has become a self-consciousness; that is his going astray, that is the original fall. All the religions talk about the original fall in some way or other, but the best story is contained in Christianity. The original fall is because man eats from the tree of knowledge. When you eat of the tree of knowledge, the fruits of knowledge, it creates self-consciousness.
The more knowledgeable you are, the more egoistic you are . . . hence the ego of the scholars, pundits, maulvis.
The ego becomes decorated  with great knowledge, scriptures, systems of thought. But they don't make you innocent; they don't bring you the childlike quality of openness, of trust, of love, of playfulness. Trust, love, playfulness, wonder all disappear when you become very knowledgeable.
 And we are being taught to become knowledgeable. We are not taught to be innocent, we are not taught how to feel the wonder of existence. We are told the names of the flowers, but we are not taught how to dance around the flowers. We are told the names of the moun-tains, but we are not taught how to commune with the mountains, how to commune with the stars, how to commune with the trees, how to be in tune with existence.
Out of tune, how can you be happy?
Out of tune, you are bound to remain in anguish, in great misery, in pain. You can be happy only when you are dancing with the dance of the whole, when you are just a part of the dance, when you are just a part of this great orchestra, when you are not singing your song separately Only then, in that melting, is man free.

OSHO

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