Osho - Weekly Meditation For The Here And Now
Weekly Meditation - Week 17. Bravery
April 23
Bravery
You have been taught very egoistical ideals: Be brave. What nonsense! How can an intelligent person avoid fear?
Everybody is afraid - they have to be. Life is such that one has to be. And people who become fearless become fearless not by becoming brave-because brave people have only repressed their fear; they are not really fearless.
A person becomes fearless by accepting his or her fears. It is not a question of bravery. It is simply seeing into the facts of life and realizing that fears are natural. One accepts them! The problem arises when you want to reject them. You have been taught very egoistical ideals: Be brave. What nonsense! How can an intelligent person avoid fear? The bus driver goes on honking, and you stand in the middle of the road unafraid, or a bull comes charging at you, and you stand there unafraid-this would be stupid! An intelligent person has to jump out of the way. Or if there is nobody on the road, and then too you are afraid and start running, there is a problem; otherwise, fear is natural.
It is not that there will be no fears in life. You will come to know that ninety percent of your fears are just imagination. About ten percent are real, so one has to accept them. Become more responsive, sensitive, and alert, and this will be enough. You will become aware that you can use your fears as stepping stones.
April 24
Change
This is my observation, that one should never make an effort to change anything, because that effort is going to make things difficult rather than easy.
Your mind is attached to something, and now the same mind tries to detach itself. At the most it can repress, but it can never become a real detachment. For the real detachment to happen, the mind has to understand why the attachment is there. There is no need to be in a hurry to drop it; rather, see why it is there. Just look into the mechanism, how it works, how it has come in: what circumstances, what unawareness has helped it to be there. Just understand everything around it. Don't be in a hurry to drop it, because people who are in a hurry to drop things don't give themselves enough time to understand them.
Once you understand, suddenly you see that it is slipping out of your hands; so there is no need to drop it. Nothing is there for any reason other than a misunderstanding. Something has been misunderstood; hence it is there. Understand it rightly and it disappears. All that is creating trouble is just like darkness. Bring light to it and simply light because with the very presence of light, darkness no longer exists.
April 25
Understanding
The basic problem of why you are here will disappear only when you have reached to the very core of your being, never before.
Unless you meditate deeply, understanding will not arise. nobody else can give it to you; you have to earn it. Through arduous effort, struggle, sacrifice, you have to earn it, only then problems will disappear.
The basic problem of why you are here will disappear only when you have reached to the very core of your being, never before. At the core you will know that you have always been here. It is not a question of why you are here. You have always been here in different forms. The form has been changing, but you have always been here. The form will go on changing but you will always remain here. You are part of this whole. The river falls into the ocean, and again the ocean rises and becomes clouds. Again it becomes a river and falls into the ocean, then becomes clouds again. It goes on... it is a wheel. You have been here many times. You will be here many times. In fact you have been here for eternity, and you will be here for eternity. There is no beginning and no end to existence: It is eternal.
I can say that to you, but it will not bring understanding. When you go deep within yourself and you open the innermost shrine of your being, when you enter into that shrine, suddenly you will realize that you have always been here.
April 26
Beyond Language
All that is great is beyond language.
When there is so much to say, it is always difficult to say it. Only small things can be said, only trivia can be said, only the mundane can be said. Whenever you feel something overwhelming, it is impossible to say it, because words are too narrow to contain anything essential.
Words are utilitarian. They are good for day-to-day, mundane activities. They start falling short as you move beyond ordinary life. In love they are not useful; in prayer they become utterly inadequate. All that is great is beyond language, and when you find that nothing can be expressed, then you have arrived. Then life is full of great beauty, great love, great joy, great celebration.
April 27
A Real Marriage
The whole process of tantra is joining opposites together, helping polarities dissolve into one being. And when one is whole, one is holy.
The man and the woman cannot meet eternally; their meeting can only be momentary. That is the misery of love, and the joy too. The joy, the ecstasy, is because of the momentary meeting. At least for a moment one feels whole; nothing is missing; everything falls into one harmony. There is great joy, but soon it is lost.
Tantra says, use this as a key-that the meeting with the outer can only be momentary. But there is an inner woman, an inner man; the meeting with the inner can be permanent, eternal. So learn the secret from the outside and apply it inside. No man is just man and no woman is just woman. This is one of the greatest insights of tantra... because a man is born out of man and woman, out of the meeting of these two polarities. He carries something from the father and something from the mother. It is also the case with the woman. So deep down each of us is the opposite, too; if the conscious mind is man, then the unconscious is woman, and vice versa.
Unless you learn the art of meeting with the other inside, love will remain a misery, and joy a vicious circle, and you will be torn apart. That inner meeting is possible just as the outer meeting is possible. But the inner meeting has one thing special about it: It need not end; it can be a real marriage.
April 28
Friendship
The first friendship has to be with oneself, but very rarely will you find a person who is friendly toward himself or herself. We are enemies to ourselves, while hoping in vain that we can be friends to someone else.
We have been taught to condemn ourselves. Self-love has been thought of as a sin. It is not. It is the foundation of all other loves. It is only through self-love that altruistic love is possible. Because self-love has been condemned, all other possibilities of love have disappeared from the earth. This has been a very cunning strategy to destroy love. It is as if you were to say to a tree, "Don't nourish yourself through the earth; that is sin. Don't nourish yourself from the moon and the sun and the stars; that is selfishness. Be altruistic serve other trees." It looks logical, and that is the danger. It looks logical: If you want to serve others, then sacrifice; service means sacrifice. But if a tree sacrifices, it will die, it will not be able to serve any other tree; it will not be able to exist at all.
You have been taught, "Don't love yourself."That almost has been the universal message of the so-called organized religions. Not of Jesus, but certainly of Christianity; not of Buddha but of Buddhism - of all organized religions, that has been the teaching: Condemn yourself, you are a sinner, you are worthless.
And because of this condemnation the tree of the human being has shrunk, has lost luster, can no longer rejoice. People are dragging themselves along somehow. People don't have any roots in existence they are uprooted. They are trying to be of service to others and they cannot, because they have not even been friendly to themselves.
April 29
Shrunken Heart
Whenever you allow any doubt, you will become tense in the heart - because the heart relaxes with trust and shrinks with doubt.
Ordinarily people are not aware of this dynamic. In fact, they continuously remain shrunken and contracted at the heart, so they have forgotten how it feels to be relaxed there. Knowing no opposite, they think that everything is okay, but out of one hundred people, ninety-nine live with a contracted heart.
The more you are in the head, the more the heart contracts. When you are not in the head, the heart opens like a lotus flower... and it is tremendously beautiful when it opens. Then you are really alive, and the heart is relaxed. But the heart can only be relaxed in trust, in love. With suspicion, with doubt, the mind enters. Doubt is the door of the mind; doubt is the bait for the mind.
Once you are caught in doubt, you are caught with the mind. So when doubt comes, it is not worth it. I'm not saying that your doubt is always wrong. Your doubt may be perfectly right, but then too it is wrong, because it destroys your heart. It is not worth it.
