Osho - Weekly Meditation For The Here And Now
Weekly Meditation - Week 18. Joy
April 29
Joy
Joy is the antidote to all fear. Fear comes if you don't enjoy life. If you enjoy life, fear disappears.
Be positive and enjoy more, laugh more, dance more, sing more. Become more and more cheerful, enthusiastic about small things, even very small things. Life consists of small things, but if you can bring the quality of cheerfulness to small things, the total will be tremendous.
So don't wait for anything great to happen. Great things do happen it is not that they don't-but don't wait for the something great to happen. It happens only when you start living small, ordinary, day-to-day things with a new mind, with new freshness, with new vitality, with new enthusiasm. Then by and by you accumulate, and that accumulation one day explodes into sheer joy.
But one never knows when it will happen. One has just to go on collecting pebbles on the shore. The totality becomes the great happening. When you collect one pebble, it is a pebble. When all the pebbles are together, suddenly they are diamonds. That's the miracle of life.
There are many people in the world who miss because they are always waiting for something great. It can't happen. It happens only through small things: eating your breakfast, walking, taking a bath, talking to a friend, just sitting alone looking at the sky or lying on your bed doing nothing. These small things are what life is made of. They are the very stuff of life.
April 30
Darkness
Never be bothered by negatives.
You burn the candle, and the darkness goes on its own. Don't try to fight with the darkness. There is no way, because the darkness does not exist-how can you fight with it? Just light a candle, and the darkness is gone. So forget about the darkness, forget about the fear. Forget about all those negative things that ordinarily haunt the human mind. Just burn a small candle of enthusiasm.
First thing in the morning, get up with a great enthusiasm, with a decision that today you are really going to live with great delight - and then start living with great delight. Have your breakfast, but eat it as if you are eating God. Then it becomes a sacrament. Take your bath, but remember that God is within you; you are giving a bath to God. Then your small bathroom becomes a temple, and the water showering on you is a baptism.
Get up every morning with great decisiveness, with certainty, with clarity, a promise to yourself that today is going to be tremendously beautiful and you are going to live it tremendously. And each night when you go to bed, remember again how many beautiful things have happened today. Just the remembrance helps them to come back again tomorrow. Just remember, and then fall asleep remembering those beautiful moments that happened today.
Your dreams will be more beautiful. They will carry your enthusiasm, and you will also start living in dreams with a new energy. Make every moment sacred.
May 1
Between Pleasure And Pain
The only state in which one can become a permanent dweller is the space that is neither this nor that.
In this space is a quality of silence and tranquility. Of course, in the beginning it feels very tasteless, because there is no pain and no pleasure. But all pain and all pleasure is just excitement. The excitement that you like, you call pleasure. The excitement that you don't like, you call pain. Sometimes it happens that you can start liking a certain excitement and it may become pleasure, and you can start liking another excitement and it may turn into pain. So the same experience can become pain or pleasure; it depends on your likes and dislikes.
Relax in the space between pleasure and pain. That's the most natural state of relaxation. Once you start being in it, feeling it, you will learn the taste of it. That is what I call the taste of Tao. It is just like wine. In the beginning it will be very bitter. One has to learn. And it is the deepest wine there is, the greatest alcoholic beverage of silence, of tranquility. One becomes drunk with it. By and by you will understand the taste of it. In the beginning it is tasteless, because your tongue is too full of pain and pleasure.
May 2
Peace
Whenever you remember, be deeply relaxed and feel peaceful, as many times in the day as possible. After a few days you will feel, without any doing on your part, that peace has been established.
It will follow you like a shadow. There are many levels of peacefulness. There is one that you can produce just by feeling it, just by giving yourself the deep suggestion that you are peaceful; that is the first layer. The second layer is that of which you suddenly become aware. You don't create it. But the second happens only if the first is present.
The second is the real thing, but the first helps to create the way for it to come. Peace comes-but before it comes, as a prerequisite, you have to create a mental peace around you. The first peace will just be mental; it will be like an autohypnosis; it is created by you. Then one day you will suddenly see that the second peace has surfaced. It has nothing to do with your doing, or with you. In fact, it is deeper than you. It comes from the very source of your being, the unidentified being, the undivided being, the unknown being.
We know ourselves only on the surface. A small place is identified as you. A small wave is named, labeled, as you. Just within that wave, deep down, is the great ocean. So whatever you are doing, always remember to create peace around it. This is not the goal; it is just the means. Once you have created peace, something of the beyond will fill it. It will not come out of your effort.
May 3
Faith And Trust
Faith is a dead trust. In fact, you don’t crust but you still believe, that's what faith is. But trust is something alive. It is just like love.
All faiths have lost what you call prayer, they have lost what you call meditation. They have forgotten the whole language of ecstasy. They have all become intellectuals: creeds, dogmas, systems. There are many words, but the meaning is missing, the significance is lost. And that is natural. It has to be so.
When a Jesus is alive, religion walks on the earth, and those Few who are fortunate enough to recognize him, to walk a few steps with Jesus, will be transformed. It is not that you become a Christian that's superficial-but something of Christ enters you. Something transpires between you and Christ. You become prayerful. You have different eyes to see with, a different heart beating. Everything remains the same, but you change.
The trees are green but now in a different way. The greenery has become alive. You can almost touch the life surrounding you. But once Jesus is gone, whatever he has said becomes formulated, systematized. Then people become Christian intellectually, but the living God is no longer present.
Faith is a dead trust. In fact, you don't trust but you still believe, that's what faith is. But trust is something alive. It is just like love.
May 4
Doubt And Negativity
Doubt means that you don't have any position; you are ready to inquire with an open mind. Doubt is the best point from where to begin.
Doubt is not bad. Negativity is a totally different thing. Negativity means you have already taken a position-against. Doubt means you don't have any position; you are ready to inquire, with open mind. Doubt is the best point from where to begin. Doubt simply means a quest, a question; negativity means you already have a prejudice, you are bigoted. You have already decided. Now all that you have to do is somehow to prove your prejudice right. Doubt is immensely spiritual. But negativity is something sick.
May 5
Ego
Do you worry that if you accept yourself, you will become egoistic? Forget about the ego! Accept yourself.
We will see about the ego later; first accept yourself totally. Let the ego come; the ego is not such a big problem, and the bigger it is, the easier it is burst. It is like a balloon - it becomes big, then with just a prick it is gone! Let the ego be there, that is allowed, but accept yourself, and things will start changing. In fact total acceptance means acceptance of the ego too. Start by accepting. The world needs a few great egoists too. We need all kinds of people.
