Osho - Weekly Meditation For The Here And Now
Weekly Meditation - Week 22. Love Something Bigger
May 27
Love Something Bigger
Love something higher, something bigger, something in which you will be lost. You can be possessed by it, but you cannot possess it.
Love can create great trouble and it can also create great joy. One has to be very, very alert, because love is our basic chemistry. If one is alert about one's love energy, then everything goes right. Always love something higher than yourself, and you will never be in trouble; always love something bigger than yourself.
People tend to love something lower than themselves, something smaller than themselves. You can control the smaller, you can dominate the smaller, and you can feel very good with the inferior, because it makes you look superior-then the ego is fulfilled. And once you start creating ego out of your love, then you are bound for hell.
Love something higher, something bigger, something in which you will be lost and that you cannot control; you can only be possessed by it, but you cannot possess it. Then the ego disappears, and when love is without ego, it is prayer.
May 28
Heart As Method
If you want to come down from the head, you will have to pass through the heart - that is the crossroads. You cannot go to the being directly; you will have to pass through the heart. The heart has to be used as a method.
Thinking, feeling, being - these are the three centers. But certainly feeling is closer to being than thinking, and feeling functions as a method. Feel more, and then you will think less. Don't fight with thinking, because fighting with thinking is again creating other thoughts of fighting. Never fight with thoughts; it is futile.
Rather than fighting with the thoughts, move your energy into feeling. Sing rather than think, love rather than philosophize, read poetry rather than prose. Dance, look at nature, and whatever you do, do it through the heart. The heart is the neglected center: Once you start paying attention to it, it starts functioning. When it starts functioning, the energy that was moving in the mind automatically starts moving through the heart. And the heart is closer to the energy center. The energy center is in the navel - so to pump energy to the head is hard work, in fact.
That's why all the education systems exist: to teach you how to pump the energy from the center straight to the head and how to bypass the heart. So no school, no college, no university, teaches how to feel. They destroy feeling, because they know that if you feel you cannot think. But it is easy to move from the head to the heart, and it is even easier to move from the heart to the navel. In the navel you are simply a being, a pure being - with no feeling, no thinking; you are not moving at all. That is the center of the cyclone.
May 29
No Opposite
In Sanskrit we have three terms: one for suffering, one for joy, and one that transcends both: anand or bliss.
Anand is neither suffering nor the so-called joy. It is a totally different kind of joy that has no memory of suffering at all, that is completely uncontaminated by the opposite. It is pure oneness, and there is no duality.
Ordinarily it is difficult even to conceive of this state. Unless you taste it, it is difficult even to understand it. Because all that we can understand needs at least two things; the opposite is a must. We can understand the figure only because of the background. We call this moment night because of the day, we call somebody good because of the bad, we call somebody beautiful because of the ugly.
The opposite is a must; the opposite defines it. But anand means the state in which there is no opposite, when you have come to the one, when there is no possibility of the other. The ocean of bliss has only one shore. It is very illogical - because how can there be only one shore? The state of bliss is illogical. Those who are too attached to logic can never achieve it. Only for crazy people does it open its door.
May 30
Criticism
Whenever you are ready to criticize something, first decide what you are going to give as a positive alternative to it.
If you can't think of an alternative to your criticism, wait. Don't make the criticism, because it is futile. If you say that this medicine is not right, maybe you are right, but then where is the right medicine?
Criticism never brings revolution. Criticism is good as part of a positive program. So first decide about the positive program and then, keeping an eye on the positive program, criticize. Then your criticism will be very valuable, appreciated even, by those whom you are criticizing. Nobody will feel offended by it, because while you are criticizing, you are continuously keeping some positive alternative in mind and then proposing something.
May 31
Sleep
Sleep is divine, more divine than any other time. And if one falls asleep meditating, the meditation keeps resounding down into the layers of one’s unconscious.
Have you ever noticed? Whatever is your last thought in the night will be your first thought in the morning. Watch it - the last, the very last, when you enter into sleep. You are standing just on the threshold - the last thought will always be the first thought when you again stand on the threshold and you are coming out of sleep.
That's why all the religions have insisted on praying before one goes to sleep, so the last thought remains of prayer, and it sinks into one's heart. The whole night it remains like an aroma around you-it fills your inner space, and in the morning when you awake, again it is there. Eight hours of sleep can be used as meditation. Nowadays people don't have much time, but these eight hours of sleep can be used as meditation time. My whole approach is that everything can be used and should be used - even sleep!
June 1
Nightmares
Whenever your mind is doing something that goes against your nature, the unconscious gives you the message-first politely, but if you don't: listen, nightmarishly.
A nightmare is nothing but the shouting of the unconscious, a cry of desperation that you are going too far away from yourself and you will miss your whole being. Come back home! It is as if a child is lost in the woods and the mother screams and shouts the name of the child.
That is exactly what a nightmare is. So start befriending your dreams. By and by you will see that you and your unconscious are coming closer and closer together. The closer you come, the fewer dreams you will have, because then there is no need for the dream. The unconscious can deliver its message even when you are awake. There is no need for it to wait for when you are asleep; it can give you its message any time.
The closer and closer you come, the more the conscious and unconscious start overlapping. That's a great experience. You feel, for the first time, one. No part of your being is denied. You have accepted your wholeness. You start becoming whole.
June 2
Judging
Judging has to be dropped. It is an illness that will never allow you any peace.
When you judge, you can never be in the present - you are always comparing, always moving backward or forward, but never here and now. Because the here and now is simply there; it is neither good nor bad. And there is no way to tell whether it is better, because there is nothing with which to compare. It is simply there in all its beauty.
But the very idea to evaluate it has something of the ego in it. The ego is a great improver; it lives on improvement. It keeps torturing you: "Improve, improve!" And there is nothing to improve. Whenever a judgment comes, drop it then and there. Drop it. It is a habit. Don't torture yourself unnecessarily.
