Osho - Weekly Meditation For The Here And Now
Weekly Meditation - Week 3. The Special Fear
January 15
The Special Fear
It's a good kind of fear when you don't know what exactly it is.
It simply means that you are on the verge of something unknown. When your fear has some object, it is an ordinary fear. One is afraid of death-it is a very ordinary fear instinctive; there's nothing special about it. Being afraid of old age or disease, illness-these are ordinary fears, common, garden variety. The special fear is when you cannot find an object for it, when it is there for no reason at all. That makes one really scared! If you can find a reason, the mind is satisfied. If you can answer why, the mind has some explanation to cling to. All explanations help things to be explained away, they don't do anything else, but once you have a rational explanation, YOU feel satisfied.
It is better to see the thing as it is without asking why. Something unknown is hovering around you, as it is going to hover around every seeker. This is the fear every seeker has to pass through. I am not here to give you explanations but to push you into it. I am not a psychoanalyst-I am an existentialist. My effort is to make you capable of experiencing as many things as possible-love, fear, anger, greed, violence, compassion, meditation, beauty, and so forth. The more you experience these things, the richer you become.
January 16
The Divided Body
In a primitive society the whole body is accepted.
There is no condemnation. Nothing is lower and nothing is higher. Everything simply is.
In accepting the body, yoga does not go far enough. It makes you very controlled, and every sort of control is a sort of repression. So you repress and then you forget all about the repression. It moves into the stomach, and near the diaphragm all those repressed things collect. The stomach is the only space where you can go on throwing things; nowhere else is there any space.
The day your control explodes, you will feel so free, so alive. You will feel reborn, because it will connect your divided body. The diaphragm is the place where the body is divided between the upper and lower. In all the old religious teachings, the lower is condemned and the upper is made to be something high, something superior, something holier. It is not. The body is one, and this bifurcation is dangerous; it makes you split. By and by you deny many things in life. Whatever you exclude from your life will take its revenge some day. It will come as a disease.
Now some medical researchers say that cancer is nothing but too much stress inside. Cancer only exists in very repressed societies. The more civilized and cultured a society, the more cancer is possible. It cannot exist in a primitive society, because in a primitive society the whole body is accepted. There is no condemnation. Nothing is lower and nothing is higher. Everything simply is.
January 17
Ignorance
When I use the word ignorance, I don't use it in any negative sense - I don't mean absence if knowledge. I mean something very fundamental; very present, very positive. It is how we are. It is the very nature of existence to remain mysterious, and that's why it is so beautiful.
All knowledge is superfluous. Knowledge as such is superfluous. And all knowledge only creates an illusion that we know. But we don't know. You can live someone your whole life and think that you know the person-and you don't know. You can give birth to a child and you can think you know the child-and you don't know.
Whatever we think we know is very illusory. Somebody asks, "What is water?" and you say, "H20." You are simply playing a game. It is not known what water is, or what "H" is or "0." You are just labeling. Somebody asks what this "H" is, this hydrogen, and you go to the molecules, to the atoms, to the electrons-but you are again just giving names. The mystery is not finished-the mystery is only postponed, and at the end, there is still tremendous ignorance. In the beginning we did not know what the water was; now we don't know what the electron is, so we have not come to any knowledge.
We have played a game of naming things, categorizing, but life remains a mystery. Ignorance is so profound and so ultimate that it cannot be destroyed. And once you understand it, you can rest in it. It is so beautiful, it is so relaxing... because then there is nowhere to go. There is nothing to be known, because nothing can be known. Ignorance is ultimate. It is tremendous and vast.
January 18
Behind Anger
Shift from anger to creativity, and immediately you will see a great change arising in you. Tomorrow the same things will not feel like excuses for being angry.
Out of one hundred people suffering from anger, about 50 percent suffer from too much creative energy that they have not been able to put into use. Their problem is not anger, but they will go on thinking their whole life that it is. Once a problem is diagnosed rightly, half of it is already solved.
Put your energies into creativity. Forget about anger as a problem; ignore it. Channel your energy towards more creativity. Pour yourself into something that you love. Rather than making anger your problem, let creativity be your object of meditation. Shift from anger to creativity and immediately you will see a great change arising in you. And tomorrow the same things will not feel like excuses for being angry because now energy is moving, it is enjoying itself, its own dance. Who cares about small things?
January 19
Spontaneity
Whatever you do, just do it as totally as possible. if you enjoy walking, good! if suddenly "you realize that you no longer have the urge or desire to move, then sit down immediately; not even a single step should be taken against your will.
Whatever happens, accept and enjoy it; and don't force anything. If you feel like talking, talk. If you feel like being silent, be silent just move with the feeling. Don't force in any way, not even for a single moment, because once you force anything you are divided in two and that creates the problem, then your whole life becomes split.
The whole of humanity has become almost schizophrenic, because we have been taught to force, things. The part that wants to laugh and the part that doesn't allow you to laugh become separate, and then you are divided. You create a top dog and an underdog, so there is conflict. The rift that the conflict creates can become bigger and bigger and bigger. So the problem is how to bridge that rift, and how not to create it anymore. In Zen they have a very beautiful saying: Sitting, just sit. Walking, just walk. Above all, don't wobble.
January 20
Holding Back
Why do we hold back? There is some fear that if we don't hold back, if we give all, then we have nothing else to give. So we give only in parts, we keep the carrot dangling. We want to remain mysterious.
When you don't allow the other to enter into your whole being and know it totally, it is because of the fear that once the other knows you totally he or she may become disinterested. You keep a few corners of yourself aloof so that the other goes on wondering, "What are those corners? What more do you have give?" And the other goes on searching and seeking and persuading and seducing... And in the same way, the other is also holding back.
There is some animal understanding behind it that once the mystery is known, the thing is finished. We love the mystery, we love the unknown. When it is known, mapped, and measured, it is finished! Then what else is there? The adventuring mind will start thinking of other women, other men. This has happened to millions of husbands and wives: They have looked into each other totally finished! Now the other has no soul because the mystery is no longer here-and the soul exists in mystery. This is the logic in it. But when you are truly independent, and you are surrendered to the god of love, then you can open yourself totally. And in that very opening you become one.
When two people are open, they are no longer two. When the walls disappear, the room is one. And that is where the fulfillment is. That's what every lover is seeking for, searching for, hankering after, dreaming about, desiring. But not understanding rightly, you can go on seeking and searching in a wrong direction.
January 21
Be Like A Child
We are separate only on the surface; deep down we are not separate.
Only the visible part is separate; the invisible part is still one. The Upanishads say, "Those who think they know, know not." because the very idea that you know does not allow you to know. The very idea that one is ignorant makes you vulnerable, open. Like a child, your eyes are full of wonder. Then it is difficult to decide whether the thoughts are yours or whether they are entering you from the outside, because one has lost all moorings. But there is no need to worry, because basically the mind is one, it is the universal mind.
Call it God, or, in Jungian terms, call it the "collective unconscious." We are separate only on the surface; deep down we are not separate. Only the visible part is separate, the invisible part is still one. So when you relax and become silent, and you become more humble, more childlike, more innocent, then it will be difficult in the beginning to see whether these thoughts are yours, are coming out of the blue, or somebody else is sending his messages and you are just on the receiving end! But they are coming from nowhere. They are coming from the deepest core of your being and that is the core of everybody else, also.
So a really original thought carries nobody's signature. It is simply there, out of the collective, out of the universal, out of the one mind- mind with a capital M. And when the individual mind, the ego mind, relaxes, the universal mind starts overflooding you.
