Osho - Weekly Meditation For The Here And Now
Weekly Meditation - Week 4. Love's Fragility
January 22
Love's Fragility
Don't think that love is eternal. It is very fragile, as fragile as a rose. In the morning it is there-by the evening it is gone. Any small thing can destroy it.
The higher a thing is, the more fragile it is. It has to be protected. A rock will remain, but the flower will be gone. If you, throw a rock at the flower, the rock is not going to be hurt, but the flower will be destroyed. Love is very fragile, very delicate. One has to be very careful and cautious about it. You can do such harm that the other becomes closed, becomes defensive. If you are fighting too much, your partner will start escaping; he will become more and more cold, more and more closed, so that he is no longer vulnerable to your attack. Then you will attack him some more, because you will resist that coldness. This can become a vicious circle. And that's how lovers fall apart, by and by.
They drift away from each other, and they think that the other was responsible, that the other betrayed them. In fact, as I see it, no lover has ever betrayed anybody. It is only ignorance that kills love. Both wanted to be together, but somehow both were ignorant. Their ignorance played tricks on them and became multiplied.
January 23
Essentials
Meditation means to be oneself, and love means to share one's being with somebody else. Meditation gives you the treasure, and love helps you to share it.
These are the two most basic things, and all else is nonessential. There is an old anecdote about three travelers who go to Rome. They visit the pope, who asks of the first, "How long are you going to be here?" The man says, "For three months." The pope says, "Then you will be able to see much of Rome." In answer to how long he was going to stay, the second traveler replies that he can only stay for six weeks. The pope says, "Then you will be able to see more than the first."The third traveler says he will only be in Rome for two weeks, to which the pope replies, "You are fortunate, because you will be able to see everything there is to see!"
The travelers were puzzled, because they didn't understand the mechanism of the mind. Just think, if you had a lifespan of a thousand years, you would miss many things, because you would go on postponing things. But because life is so short, one cannot afford to postpone. Yet people do postpone-and at their own cost. Imagine if somebody were to tell you that you have only one day left to live. What will you do? Will you go on thinking about unnecessary things? No, you will forget all that. You will love and pray and meditate, because only twenty-four hours are left. The real things, the essential things, you will not postpone.
January 24
Authority
Never ask anybody what is right and what is wrong. Life is an experiment to find out.
Each individual has to be conscious, alert, and watchful, and experiment with life and find out what is good for him. Whatever gives you peace, whatever makes you blissful, whatever gives you serenity, whatever brings you closer to existence and its immense harmony is good. And whatever creates conflict, misery, pain in you is wrong.
Nobody else can decide it for you, because every individual has' his own world, his own sensitivity. We are unique. So formulas are not going to work. The whole world is a proof of this. Never ask anybody what is right and what is wrong. Life is an experiment to find out what is right, what is wrong. Sometimes you may do what is wrong, but that will give you the experience of it, that will make you aware of what has to be avoided. Sometimes you may do something good, and you will be immensely benefited. The rewards are not beyond this life, in heaven and hell. They are here and now.
Each action brings its result immediately. Just be alert and watch. Mature people are those who have watched and found for themselves what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad. And by finding it for themselves, they have a tremendous authority. The whole world may say something else, and it makes no difference to them. They have their own experience to go by, and tha1 is enough.
January 25
Happiness
There are no outside causes if happiness or unhappiness; these things are just excuses. By and by we come to realize that it is something inside us that goes on changing, that has nothing to do with outside circumstances.
How you feel is something inside you, a wheel that keeps on moving. Just watch it-and it is very beautiful, because in being aware of it, something has been attained. Now you understand that you are free from outside excuses, because nothing has happened on the outside and yet your mood has changed within a few minutes from happiness to unhappiness, or the other way around.
This means that happiness and unhappiness are your moods and don't depend on the outside. This is one of the most basic things to be realized, because then much can be done. The second thing to understand is that your moods depend on your unawareness. So just watch and become aware. If happiness is there, just watch it and don't become identified with it. When unhappiness is there, again just watch. It is just like morning and evening. In the morning you watch and enjoy the rising sun. When the sun sets and darkness descends, that too you watch and enjoy.
January 26
Playing A Role
Play, but play knowingly. Play your Barnes, whatever they are; don’t repress them. Play them as perfectly as possible, but stay fully alert. Enjoy it, and others will also enjoy it.
When a person plays a role there is some reason in it. That role has some significance to the person. If the game is played perfectly, something from the unconscious will disappear, evaporate, and you will be freed from a burden. For example, if you want to play like a child, that means that in your childhood something has remained incomplete.
You could not be a child as you wanted to be; somebody stopped you. People made you more serious, forced you to appear more adult and mature than you were. Something has remained incomplete. That incompletion demands to be completed and it will continue to haunt you. So finish it. Nothing is wrong in it. You could not be a child that time, back in the past; now you can be. Once you can be totally in it, you will see that it has disappeared and will never come again.
January 27
Labels
Don't use the words happiness and unhappiness, because these words carry judgments. Simply watch without judging-just say, "This is mood ‘A’ and this is mood ‘B’"
"A" mood has gone, now "B" mood is here, and you are simply a watcher. Suddenly you will realize that when you call happiness "A," it is not so happy; and when you call unhappiness "B," it is not so unhappy. Just by calling the moods "A" and "B" a distance is created.
When you say happiness, much is implied in the word. You are saying you want to cling to it, that you don't want it to go. When you say unhappy, you are not just using a word; much is implied in it. You are saying that you don't want it, that it should not be there. All these things are said unconsciously. So use these new terms for your moods for seven days. Just be a watcher-as if you are sitting on top of the hill, and in the valley clouds and sunrises and sunsets come, and sometimes it is day and sometimes night. Just be a watcher on the hill, far away.
January 28
New Moon Love
Let a new-moon love happen. Hold each other, be loving to each other, care, and don't: hanker for the heat-because that heat was a madness, it was a frenzy; it is good that it is gone. You should think yourselves fortunate.
If love goes deeper, husbands and wives become brothers and sisters. If love goes deeper, the sun energy becomes moon energy: The heat is gone, it is very cool. And when love goes deeper, a misunderstanding can happen, because we have become accustomed to the fever, the passion, the excitement, and now it all looks foolish. It is foolish!
Now when you make love, it looks silly; if you don't make love, you feel as if something is missing because of the old habit. When a husband and wife start feeling like this, a fear arises - have you started taking the other for granted? Has he become a brother or a sister, no longer your choice, no longer your ego trip? All these fears arise. Sometimes one starts feeling that one is missing something- a sort of emptiness. But don't look at it through the past. Look at it from the future. Much is going to happen in this emptiness, much is going to happen in this intimacy-you will both disappear. Your love will become absolutely nonsexual, all the heat will be gone, and then you will know a totally different quality of love.
