Osho, You have said that to be together one must know how to be alone. But I can be alone: the problem comes with being together, because then comes the wanting and the expectation. Is it that one must know how to be alone together? It seems the path of love must be taken with tremendous awareness.Yes, I have been telling you again and again that you can be together only when you know how to be alone, but by “alone” I don’t mean “lonely.” You must have misunderstood me. Everybody can be lonely, but to be alone is a tremendous achievement, it is a great realization. Loneliness is very ordinary. People suffer from loneliness. You can manage not to suffer: you can put up a face, a facade, you can cultivate certain things so that you don’t feel the pain of loneliness, but that is not the art of being alone. It is not just a question of avoiding suffering while you are lonely. Aloneness means positively enjoying it, being positively ecstatic about it, being positively blissful about it, so much so that if you are never together with anybody again no question arises, no problem arises, not even the desire, not even a lurking desire somewhere in the unconscious. When you are so contented – not just satisfied, remember…these words are totally different. One can create satisfaction without being contented. Satisfaction is a kind of “accepting the inevitable”. What else can one do? If one is lonely one is lonely; one has to live with it. And man is capable of adjusting to any situation. Even if you are thrown alone somewhere in a desert or on an island you will adjust to the life there; you will still survive. You may even create certain satisfactions there. I have heard about a man, a Christian priest. His ship was drowned; somehow he survived. He reached a small island – there was nobody on the island. After twenty years another ship passed by. He waved, shouted – the captain heard. The captain saw the man; he stopped the ship and made arrangements to bring the man on board. He himself came in a small boat to take him to the ship. The lonely priest told the captain, “Before we leave this island I would like to show you my work of twenty years.” He was also an architect; before he had become a priest he had been an architect. He had planned almost a small city, a miniature city. The captain was delighted. He said, “Wait! Let all the passengers of my ship come and see. This is a miracle! You have done something beautiful. Small houses, just like playthings, but beautifully designed. How did you manage this?” He said, “I had to do something to keep myself engaged, occupied, to remain satisfied. And I was really satisfied. After a few years I completely forgot about the world. Even the desire to reach the world again left me – at least I thought it had left me. Seeing your ship, suddenly I realized that no, it had not left me; otherwise I was very satisfied. This island has everything that I needed to create these small houses.” All kinds of houses… And then he said, “The most beautiful thing is…I will show you.” He took him to a church, he showed him the church, the Catholic church. He had made it a little bigger – you could enter it – because he used to worship there. Of course, he was alone, but the old habit… When they came out the captain was puzzled and all other passengers were also puzzled, because just in front of the church there was another church, a Protestant church.They asked the priest, “Isn’t one church enough for one man? Why did you make another church?” He said, “That is the church I don’t go to, and this is the church I go to!” Old habits…but he was perfectly satisfied. He said, “Nobody goes there; it is always deserted. I have never seen anybody go there.” There was nobody there in the first place except him and he was going to the Catholic church because he was a Catholic priest, but he was very happy and satisfied that the Protestant church was almost deserted. He had made it very ugly too, but he had made it – he himself had made it. One can be satisfied with any situation. Man is immensely adaptable; that is one of the great qualities of man. That’s why man can survive any kind of climate, any kind of temperature: extreme cold, extreme hot, too much rain, no rain. Man can survive everywhere, anywhere. Why? – because man is capable of it; he is liquid. So you can be lonely and you can think yourself satisfied, but when you are together that is the test whether you were really contented. If you were contented in your loneliness it was not loneliness, it was aloneness. If being together brings no disturbance, no wanting, no desiring, no expectation, no jealousy, no possessiveness, no unconscious hankering to dominate the other, then it was aloneness. Otherwise it was only loneliness covered, disguised by a certain false sense of satisfaction. You have not yet been able to be alone, because if you are alone then this question will not arise at all. Then whether you are alone or together you are alone, and your aloneness is so immensely beautiful that who bothers to dominate? Why? For what? You are so full of joy that there is no need to possess anybody; it will be so ugly. You will be able to see the ugliness of it. But if when you are together all these ugly desires start moving again, rising again, raising their heads again, if all these snakes and these scorpions start crawling upwards towards the conscious from the unconscious, that simply means they were waiting for the right opportunity. Now the opportunity is there. Only the opportunity proves where you are. That’s why I don’t tell my sannyasins to leave the world and go to the mountains, because there you will simply be leaving the opportunities behind. You will start living in a cave, and you can deceive yourself your whole life thinking that you have known what aloneness is, what solitude is. You will only be lonely and solitary and you will start thinking that you are contented and blissful. And you will only be satisfied and not miserable, but not blisPrint Print Not being ill is not equivalent to being healthy and whole. Health has something more to it than just not being ill: it has a certain well-being. There are many people who are not ill, but they are not healthy. Sometimes it can happen that a person may be ill and yet healthy because health has a totally different connotation. Health is not only a medical concept, it is something far bigger, far more comprehensive than medical science. For example, Prem Chinmaya was utterly ill. What more illness can you have? He was suffering from cancer. The cancer was spreading every day, but he was healthy; he had a certain well-being. His illness was only in the body, it was not reaching to his consciousness; he remained floating above it. His nurse, Puja, wrote just the other day: “Osho, I am immensely blessed that I served Chinmaya. I have watched many people die in my life, but this death was totally different, qualitatively different. I have never seen any man die with such beauty, with such silence, with such meditativeness.” At the last moment, when he was hearing my last discourse…Puja has written to me – she was there: “He was in deep pain as far as the body was concerned. The pain was so great that even injections of morphia were not of any help. Even double, treble doses of morphia were not helping at all. The pain was so great that nothing seemed to help him. But when he heard the joke about Jesus and the cancer patient,” Puja writes to me, “he smiled.” And she writes also: “I could see that that smile was not only of the body, because the body was not in a state at all to smile; it was coming from somewhere deep. And I could see and feel that deep down he was laughing. That smile was just a little bit of that laughter which had come up to the body.” He was healthy in a totally different sense, in a non-medical sense. There are many people who are healthy in a medical sense, perfectly fit medically, but utterly unhealthy. Deep down there is nothing but turmoil, emptiness, anguish. One can hide it, one can repress it, and one cannot only deceive others, man is so capable of cunningness that he can deceive himself. You say: “You have said that to be together one must know how to be alone.” I repeat it again: yes, unless you know how to be alone your togetherness will become troublesome, your togetherness will create misery, because your togetherness will bring out everything that remains asleep in you while you are lonely. When you are together the other provokes it, the other becomes a challenge. You become a challenge for the other, the other becomes a challenge for you. A man/woman relationship brings their unconscious to the surface; they come into their true colors. Of course, in the beginning it is not so. In the beginning it cannot be so because in the beginning you keep the facade. When you meet only for a few hours on the sea beach or in the full-moon night you keep the facade because you still are not certain, the other is also not yet certain whether he can expose his reality to you. But once the honeymoon is over everything is over.sful. Just being not miserable is not equivalent to being blissful.Print Print In fact, almost every marriage ends with the end of the honeymoon; then the reality starts. Then the mirage of marriage is over. Now both can take it for granted that the other cannot escape easily. Now you need not be afraid; now you can come into your true colors. And both start exploding. They have been repressive for so long that all their repressions start coming up and togetherness becomes ugly. That’s why for centuries people have escaped into the forests, into the monasteries, into the mountains, just to escape from togetherness. But that is not the true way of spirituality, that is not the true way of growth. That is escapist, that is out of fear, that is cowardly. I would like you to be in the world. I insist: Be in the world and yet remain alert, aware, watchful. Don’t be repressive. If you are not repressive in your aloneness, your aloneness will become a blissful, beautiful experience. Meet with the other person out of your bliss, not out of your misery. And then togetherness does not only double your bliss, it multiplies it. Togetherness always multiplies whatsoever you bring to it. If you bring misery to it, it multiplies misery. Two miserable persons together is not only a double misery, it is multiplied. Two persons blissfully together, the bliss not only doubles, it multiplies. Then togetherness is beautiful, but one should learn to be alone first. And if you know how to be alone you will know how to be alone together, because it is not a question of learning it again in a different way; it is the same phenomenon. If you know how to be alone you will know it everywhere, whether in relationship or not in relationship. To be alone…Then togetherness helps spiritual growth, integrity, tremendously, because it gives you an opportunity, a great challenge. It exposes you to the full light and you can see yourself. The other becomes the mirror. Relationship is a mirror. You cannot see your face without a mirror. You cannot see your reality without the other. The other becomes a mirror – mirrors are good. I have heard about an ugly woman who was against mirrors – naturally – because her idea was that mirrors made her look ugly, that mirrors were in a conspiracy against her. Because this was her logic: “Whenever there is no mirror I don’t feel any ugliness, I am perfectly, okay. It is only when there is a mirror that I immediately become ugly. The mirror must be doing something. “ She was so against the mirrors that she used to break mirrors. Wherever she would come across a mirror she would immediately destroy it because mirrors were enemies. Her logic is not different from your monks and nuns; they are doing the same. Going into a monastery means escaping from the mirrors – condemning relationship, condemning love, condemning the world. All your saints are afraid of mirrors, that’s all. But to be afraid of mirrors simply shows you are afraid of your own ugliness; you don’t want to see it. And without mirrors of course you will not see it, but that does not mean that it has disappeared – it is there. Any time, anything…if not a mirror then maybe just a silent lake, and you will see it. And whether you see it or not, others will see it.You can see your saints’ faces, your so-called mahatmas. They are all sad, they don’t seem to be blissful. They don’t seem to be like lotus flowers, they look like rocks – almost dead, utterly dull, mediocre. There seems to be no sharpness of intelligence, because they have escaped from where they could sharpen their intelligence. Their intelligence goes on gathering dust, but they think they have achieved satisfaction, they have achieved what God meant them to achieve. They have simply missed the opportunity. God will ask them, “I had given you life and you escaped from life. You rejected my life, you rejected my gift. You were against me.” George Gurdjieff used to make a very strange statement – but only a man like Gurdjieff can tell the utterly naked truth – he used to say that “All your saints are against God.” When you come across such a statement for the first time you cannot believe it. saints, and against God? But Gurdjieff is right. He really means it, he is not joking! Your saints are against God because they are against life. I am not against life. I am in tremendous love with life. Learn to be alone – and that will happen only through meditation – and then allow mirrors into your life so that you can see where you are, what you are, how much you have grown. In this commune we are doing something new which has never happened ever before. There are growth centers in the world, particularly in the West, where therapy groups are run. There are meditation centers, particularly in the East, where people meditate. This is the only place where people meditate and go through groups, go through groups and meditate – together. On the surface it will look contradictory because meditation means learning how to be alone and group therapies mean learning how to be together. But this is my fundamental approach; you have to learn both. And you are right that: “The path of love must be taken with tremendous awareness.” And the same is true about the path of awareness: it must be taken with tremendous love. In fact, love and awareness are two aspects of the same coin.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 13:14:13 +0000
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