Osho - Weekly Meditation For The Here And Now
Weekly Meditation - Week 46. Seeking
November 11
Seeking
Lao Tzu has said, "Seek and you will miss. Do not seek and you will find." Now, this is one of the most significant statements ever made. In the very seeking you have missed.
If you seek, you have taken a wrong standpoint. In the very seeking you have accepted one thing - that you don't have that which you seek. That is where the fault lies. You have it; you already have it. The moment you start searching for something, you will become neurotic, because you cannot find it-there is nowhere to look, because it is already there.
It is like a man who is searching for his glasses. His glasses are already on his eyes, on his nose, and he is looking through those glasses and searching! Now he will never find them, unless he remembers that all search is futile, unless he remembers, "If I can see, then my glasses must be already there in front of my eyes, otherwise how could I see?"
In our very seeing, the truth is hidden. In our very search, the treasure is hidden. The seeker is the sought-that is the problem, the only problem that human beings have been trying to solve and about which they have been growing more and more puzzled.
The sanest attitude is that of Lao Tzu. He says, "Stop searching and be." Just be, and you will be surprised: You will find it!
November 12
Fundamental Aloneness
We cannot run away from ourselves. There is no way - you are you.
And the aloneness is so fundamental that there is no way to escape it. The more you try to escape from aloneness, the lonelier you will feel. If you start accepting aloneness, if you start being in love with it, if you start enjoying it, then all loneliness will disappear. And then aloneness has beauty, tremendous beauty.
We are made alone. That aloneness is our freedom. And it is not against love. In fact, only a person who is alone and knows how to be alone will be able to love. This is the paradox of love: That only the person who is alone can love, and only the person who loves becomes alone. They come together. So if you are not capable of being alone, you will not be capable of being in love either. Then all your so - called love will be just an escape from yourself. It will not be real love, it will not be real relating.
Who will relate with whom? You have not even related with yourself; how can you relate with the other? You are not there - who is going to relate with others? So a false kind of love exists in the world: You are trying to escape from yourself, the other is trying to escape from herself or himself, and you are both seeking shelter in each other. It is a mutual deception. The first thing is to know one's celibacy, one's fundamental celibacy - to know that our aloneness is our very individuality. Function from that aloneness. Even your love has to function from that base. Then you will be able to love.
November 13
Children's Liberation
Children's liberation is needed. It is the 8reatest need in the world, because no other slavery is so deep and so dangerous and so destructive. Children are not allowed to know themselves.
Society creates false selves, says that children are this or that, that they should behave this way or that. The society gives ideals, ideas, and very soon the child becomes accustomed to the fact that he is a Christian, that he is a man and he has to behave in a manly way, that he should not cry because that is sissy. The girl starts behaving in a feminine way - she learns that she should not climb trees, that that is boyish. Slowly, there are more and more boundaries, and they go on becoming narrower; then everyone feels suffocated. That is the situation: Everybody is suffocated, and deep down everybody hankers to be free. But how?
It seems that the walls that surround one are really very powerful and strong. And people live in this kind of imprisonment their whole lives. They live in prison and they die in prison, never having known what life was, what life was meant to be, never knowing the glory and the grandeur of existence.
This is the conditioned state of mind. The whole process of meditation is to uncondition it, to withdraw those walls. What the parents and the society and the priests and the politicians have done has to be undone by meditation.
November 14
Absurdity
Society has been suppressing three things: sex, death, and the absurd. And the absurd is the most suppressed .
There are Freuds against the suppression of sex, and they have created a little atmosphere so that people can be freed of that. More than sex, death is the taboo. Death still needs a Freud to fight against its suppression so that people can allow their feelings about death, so that they can think about and meditate on it, and he fact that death exists so it is no longer a taboo. But even deeper than the taboo against death is that against the absurd. My whole fight is against this taboo.
I would like you to be absurd, because that's how existence is. It is meaninglessly meaningful, illogically logical. All the contradictions, all the paradoxes, are in an inner coherence. Are you yourself not absurd? How can you prove that you are needed here in any way?
Does existence need you? Existence would do fine without you, perfectly fine. You were not, existence was; you will not be, and existence will, so what is the point of your being here? If you allow laughter and you feel that it is absurd, just hidden behind it is the real absurdity - not the laughter, but the one who is laughing. Allow it, and soon you will see that it releases you to the infinite sky. Even the confinement of logic is dropped. Then you simply live; you don't ask for meaning. Then each moment is intrinsically meaningful - or meaningless; they are the same.
November 15
Delight
Fun is not the right word. Delight goes a little deeper. Rejoice in life; celebrate it.
You go to a circus - that is fun, silly, in a way. It never touches your depths, never touches your heart; it is clownish. People seek fun just to pass time; it is superficial. So delight more, rejoice more, celebrate it. Move gracefully through it. Fun is a little profane, and delight is sacred - so move on holy ground.
If you laugh, your laughter should come out of your rejoicing, not out of a ridiculing mind that says that these people are ridiculous and what foolish things they are doing. If there is even a slight notion lingering in your unconscious that the whole thing is ridiculous, then you will feel a little sad, a little empty.
But if you have delighted in it, then you will feel very very silent, not sad; very very silent, but not empty. That silence will have a quality of fullness in it.
November 16
Guilt
Guilt is part if the egoistic mind; it is not spiritual. Religions have been exploiting it, but it has nothing to do with spirituality. Guilt simply tells you that you could have done otherwise. It is an ego feeling; as if you were not helpless, as if everything were in your hands.
Nothing is in your hands. You yourself are not in your hands. Things are happening; nothing is being done. Once you understand this, guilt disappears. Sometimes you can cry and weep for something, but deep down you know it had to happen, because you are helpless, a part of such a great totality-and you are such a tiny part. It is like when there is a leaf on a tree and a strong wind comes and the leaf is separated from the tree. Now the leaf thinks a thousand and one things - that it could have been that way and not this way; that this separation could have been avoided. What could the leaf do? The wind was too strong.
Guilt goes on giving you the wrong notion that you are powerful, that you are capable of doing everything. Guilt is the shadow of the ego: You could not change the situation, and now you are feeling guilty about it. If you look deep into it, you will see that you were helpless, and the whole experience will help you become less egoistic.
If you go on watching the shape things take, the forms that arise, and the happenings that happen, by and by you drop your ego. Love happens-separation too. We cannot do anything about it. This is what call a spiritual attitude: when you understand that nothing can be done; when you understand that you are just a tiny part of such a tremendous vastness.
November 17
Mastery
To conquer the world is not real bravery; to conquer oneself is. To be a fighter in the world, to be a warrior, is nothing extraordinary.
Everybody is a warrior, more or less, because the whole world is fighting. It is a continuous war, sometimes hot, sometimes cold. Every individual is fighting, because everyone is brought up in ambition, everybody is poisoned with it. And wherever there is ambition, there is fight, there is competition. Everyone is too ambitious, because all societies that have existed up to now have lived on ambition. All the educational systems do nothing but condition children to be ambitious and to be successful.
The real bravery, the real fight, is not outside. The real fight is inside, it is an inner conquest. Although Alexander may have been a great warrior, but as far as his own instincts were concerned, he was a slave. Napoleon may have been a great soldier, but as far as his own anger, lust, and possessiveness were concerned, he was just as ordinary as anybody else.
The really brave ones are Jesus, Buddha, Patanjali - these types of people. They have overcome themselves. Now no desire can pull them here and there; now no unconscious instinct can have any power over them. They are masters of their own lives.
