Osho - Weekly Meditation For The Here And Now
Weekly Meditation - Week 35. Workaholism
August 26
Workaholism
Work is good, but it should not become an addiction. Many people have turned their work into a drug so that they can forget themselves in it just like a drunkard forgetting himself in alcohol.
One should be as capable of non-doing as of doing - then one is free. One should be capable of sitting, not doing anything, as perfectly and beautifully and blissfully as when one is working hard and doing many things; then one is flexible.
There are two types of people: a few who are glued into their lethargy and at the other extreme, those who are glued into their occupation. Both are in prisons. One should be capable of moving from one to another with no effort, effortlessly. Then you have a certain freedom, a certain grace and a spontaneity to your being.
I am not against work, I am not against anything - but nothing should become an addiction. Otherwise, you are in a very very confused state. If work is an occupation and you are just hiding yourself in it, then it becomes a repetitive thing, a mechanical thing. Work becomes more like an obsession; you are possessed by a demon.
August 27
Love And Freedom
This is the whole problem if human beings - love and freedom.
These two words are the most important words in the human language. It is very easy to choose one-to choose love and to drop freedom - but then you will always be haunted by freedom, and it will destroy your love. Love will look as if it is against freedom, inimical to freedom, antagonistic to freedom. How can one leave freedom? It cannot be left, even for love. By and by you will become fed up with love, and you will start moving to the other extreme.
One day you will leave love and rush toward freedom. But just to be free and without loving, how can one live? Love is such a big need. To be loved and to love is almost spiritual breathing. The body cannot live without breath, and the spirit cannot live without love. This way one moves like a pendulum swings - from freedom to love, from love to freedom. This way the wheel can continue for many lives.
This is how it has continued. We call it the wheel of life. It goes on rotating: the same spokes coming up, going down. Liberation comes when one attains a synthesis between love and freedom. Choose the paradox. Don't choose the alternatives that the paradox has given to you. Choose the whole paradox. Don't choose one, choose both; choose together. Move in love and remain free. Remain free, but never make your freedom anti-love.
August 28
Childlike
You are bound to become more childlike if you meditate. A little meditation and you will start feeling fresher. And with that comes a sort of irresponsibility-irresponsibility in the sense that you don't consider other people's obsessions any more.
As I see it, becoming childlike is a great responsibility. You start becoming responsible to yourself, but you start dropping your masks, your false faces. Others may start feeling disturbed because they have always had expectations and you were fulfilling those demands. Now they will feel that you are becoming irresponsible. When they say that you are becoming irresponsible, they are simply saying that you are getting out from under their control. You are becoming freer. To condemn your behavior, they call it "childish" or "irresponsible."
In fact, freedom is growing, and you are becoming responsible - but responsibility means the ability to respond. It is not a duty that has to be fulfilled in the ordinary sense. It is responsiveness, it is sensitivity. But the more sensitive you become, the more you will find that many people think that you are becoming irresponsible - and you have to accept that - because their interests, their investments, will not be satisfied. Many times you will not fulfill their expectations. But nobody is here to fulfill anybody else's expectations.
August 29
Virgin Sex
There is a sort of sex that is not sexual at all. Sex can be beautiful, but sexuality never can.
The focus should be love. You love a person, you share his being, you share your being with him, you share the space. That is exactly what love is, to create a space between two people-a space that belongs to neither or belongs to both, a small space between two people where they both meet and mingle and merge. That space has nothing to do with physical space. It is simply spiritual. In that space you are not you, and the other is not the other. You both come into that space and you meet.
There is a sort of sex that is not sexual at all. Sex can be beautiful, but sexuality never can. Sexuality means cerebral sex - thinking about it, planning it, managing, manipulating it, but the basic thing that remains deep down in the mind is that one is approaching the other as a sex object.
When the mind has nothing to do with sex, then it is pure, innocent sex. It is virgin sex. That sex can sometimes be even purer than celibacy, because if a celibate continuously thinks of sex, then it is not celibacy.
August 30
Light
Feel more and more full of light. That's the way to come closer to the original source.
Feel more and more full of light. Whenever you close your eyes, just see light streaming all over your being. In the beginning it will be imagination, but imagination is very creative. So just imagine a flame near the heart and imagine that you are full of light. Keep increasing that light. It becomes almost dazzling! And not only you will start feeling it; others will start feeling it too. Whenever you are close to them, they will start feeling it, because it vibrates.
It is everybody's birthright, but one has to claim it. It is an unclaimed treasure. If you don't claim it, it remains dead, buried under the ground. Once you claim it, you have claimed your own inner being. So wherever you see light, feel deep reverence. Just something ordinary - a lamp is burning, and you feel a deep reverence, a certain awe. In the night there are stars - just watch them and feel connected to them. In the morning, the sun rises. Watch it and let the inner sun rise with it. Whenever you see light, immediately try to make contact with it-and soon you will be able to.
August 31
Virtue
People become do-gooders. That is not true virtue - is a camouflage.
Doing good things brings respectability, it gives you a good ego feeling. It makes you feel that you are somebody important, significant - not only in the eyes of the world but also in the eyes of God-that you can stand upright, even encountering God; you can show all the good deeds that you have done. It is egoistic, and religiousness cannot be egoistic.
Not that a religious person is immoral, but he is not moral - he is amoral. He has no fixed character. His character is liquid, alive, moving moment to moment. He responds to situations not according to a fixed attitude, idea, or ideology; he simply responds out of his consciousness. His consciousness is his only character, there is no other character.
September 1
Longing
A desire becomes a longing when you are ready to risk all for it.
A longing is higher than life - one can die for it. Desires are many - longing can only be one, because it needs your total energy, it needs you as you are, in your totality. You cannot withhold any part of yourself, you cannot move toward your longing cautiously, cleverly, calculatingly. It has to be a mad jump. People are very fragmentary: one desire takes you to the north, another to the south, and all desires are taking you in all directions and driving you mad. Hence people never reach anywhere - it is not possible - because one part moves in this direction, and one part moves in another direction, to the diametrically opposite. How can you arrive? To arrive, your totality will be needed. That's why you see people dragging. They don't have any intensity of life; it is not possible. They are leaking in many directions - they cannot have that energy.
But this longing has to be very blissful; one should not be doing it in a serious way, because the moment you become serious, you become tense. One's longing has to be intense but not tense at all. It has to be playful, it has to be cheerful, it has to be filled with laughter and dance and singing. It should not become a duty. You are not obliging God, or anybody - you are simply living the way you want to live; hence you are blissful. This is the way you have chosen to live, this is the way you want to become a flame... but it has to be a dancing flame.
