Letter: A Weak Link in The Work? (part 2) Part 1: https://facebook/groups/tarot.osho.byron/permalink/572146136255161/ P.S. I asked Stephen to go through Loving What Is and see if, in the book, I suggest that people be gentle with themselves. Here are some passages he found: “There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. You are listening for your answers now, not other people’s, and not anything you have been taught. This can be very unsettling, because you’re entering the unknown. As you continue to dive deeper, allow the truth within you to rise and meet the question. Be gentle as you give yourself to inquiry. Let this experience have you completely.” “The Work does not condone any harmful action. To hear it as justifying anything that is less than kind is to misinterpret it. If you find anything in the following pages that sounds cold, uncaring, unloving, or unkind, I invite you to be gentle with it. Breathe through it. Feel and experience what arises in you. “I suggest that you always use the four questions before applying the turnaround. You may be tempted to take a shortcut and skip to the turnaround without putting your statement up against inquiry first. This is not an effective way of using the turnaround. Without the questions first, the turnaround can feel harsh and shameful; the feeling of judgment turned back onto yourself can be brutal if it occurs prior to thorough self-education, and the four questions give you this education. They end the ignorance of what you believe to be true, and the turnaround in the last position feels gentle and makes sense. By asking the four questions first and going inside for the answers, you will make it possible to experience the turnarounds as revelations rather than mental gymnastics. “The Work is not about shame and blame. It’s not about proving that you are the one in the wrong or forcing yourself to believe that someone else is in the right. The power of the turnaround lies in the discovery that everything you think you see on the outside is really a projection of your own mind. Everything is a mirror image of your own thinking. Once you have learned to go in for your own answers and opened yourself up to the turnarounds, you’ll experience this for yourself. In discovering the innocence of the person you judged, you’ll come to recognize your own innocence.” “This Work has the gentleness of a flower opening to itself. Be gentle with your beautiful self. This Work is about the end of your suffering.” “I invite those of you who have had a similar experience to be gentle with yourselves as you read this dialogue and as you consider the answers that can free you from your pain.” “If any of you have had a similar experience, go inside now, if you can, and answer the question. ‘What was your part? What is your part?’ This is not about blame. Be gentle with yourself. This is about your freedom.” “Q: There are thoughts that I feel I shouldn’t be thinking—nasty, perverted, and even violent thoughts. Can The Work help me to stop having these thoughts? A: How do you react when you believe that you shouldn’t think certain thoughts, and you do? Ashamed? Depressed? Now turn it around—you should think them! Doesn’t that feel a bit lighter, a bit more honest? Mind wants its freedom, not a straitjacket. When the thoughts come, they aren’t meeting an enemy who is opposing them, like a child who comes to her father, hoping that he’ll listen, and instead the father screams at her, ‘Don’t say that! Don’t do that! You’re wrong, you’re bad!’ and punishes her when she approaches. What kind of father is that? This is the internal violence that keeps you from understanding. “I can’t meet you as an enemy and not feel separate, from you and from myself. So how could I meet a thought within me as an enemy and not feel separate? When I learned to meet my thinking as a friend, I noticed that I could meet every human as a friend. What could you say that hasn’t already appeared within me as a thought? The end of the war with myself and my thinking is the end of the war with you. It’s so simple.” “When you ask yourself question 1, your mind begins to open. Even to consider that a thought may not be true will let a little light into your mind. If you answer, ‘Yes, it’s true,’ then you may want to ask yourself question 2, ‘Can you absolutely know that it’s true?’ Some people get very agitated, even angry, when they say, ‘No, I can’t absolutely know that!’ And then I might ask them to be gentle with themselves and just experience that understanding for a moment. If they sit with their answer, then it does become gentle, and it opens to infinite possibilities, to freedom. It’s like stepping out of a narrow, smoky room into open space.”
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 01:41:48 +0000
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