Self-condemnation: it seems to be against the ego but in fact is just another facet of it.

That is a way to remain the same…that is a trick of the mind. Rather than understanding, the energy starts moving into condemnation…and the change comes through understanding, not through condemnation. So the mind is very cunning: the moment you start seeing some fact, the mind jumps upon it and starts condemning it. Now the whole energy becomes condemnation, so understanding is forgotten, put aside, and your energy is moving into condemnation…and condemnation cannot help.

It can make you depressed, it can make you angry, but depressed and angry, you never change. You remain the same and you move in the same vicious circle again and again.

Understanding is liberating, so when you see a certain fact there is no need to condemn, there is no need to be worried about it. The only need is to look into it deeply and to understand it.

If I say something and it hits you — and that’s my whole purpose: that it should hit you somewhere — then you have to look at why it hits and where it hits and what is the problem; you have to look into it. Looking into it, trying to move around it, looking at it from every angle…If you condemn, you cannot look, you cannot approach it from all the angles. You have already decided that it is bad; without giving it a chance you have already judged.

Listen to the fact, go into it, contemplate on it, sleep over it, and the more you are able to observe it, the more you will become capable of getting out of it. The ability to understand and the ability to get out of it, are just two names for the same phenomenon.

If I understand a certain thing, I am capable of getting out of it, going beyond it. If I don’t understand a certain thing, I cannot get out of it. So the mind goes on doing that to everybody; it is not only with you. Immediately you jump and you say, ‘This is wrong, this should not be in me. I am not worthy, my relationship is wrong and this is wrong and that is wrong,’ and you become guilty. Now the whole energy is moving into guilt, and my work here is to make you as unguilty as possible.

So whatsoever you see, don’t take it in a personal way. It has nothing to do with you particularly; it is just the way the mind functions. If there is jealousy, if there is possessiveness, if there is anger, this is how the mind works…everybody’s mind more or less; the differences are only of degrees.

The mind has another mechanism: either it wants to praise or it wants to condemn. It is never in the middle Through praise you become special and the ego is fulfilled; through condemnation also you become special. Look at the trick: both ways you become special! [She] is special: either she is a saint, a great saint, or she is the greatest sinner, but in every way the ego is fulfilled. Every way you say one thing — that you are special. The mind does not want to hear that it is just ordinary. The jealousy, this anger, these problems of relationship and being. They are ordinary, everyone is in them. They are as ordinary as hair. Maybe somebody has a few more, somebody has a few less, somebody has black and somebody has red, but that doesn’t matter much — they are ordinary, all problems are ordinary. All sins are ordinary and all virtues are ordinary, but the ego wants to feel special. It either says that you are the greatest or you are the worst.

So just look…these are all ordinary problems. What problems are there, tell me? What problems do you feel? Just name them.

I’ve got pain here, in my forehead.

It is paining because you are not trying to understand it — then it pains. You are condemning it; you are saying [to yourself] ‘You should not be depressed. This is not you this is not right for your image, this goes against your image, this becomes a blemish on you, and you are such a beautiful girl! Why are you depressed?’ — rather than understanding why you are depressed.

Depression means that somehow anger is in you in a negative state: depression is a negative state of anger. The very word is meaningful — it says something is being pressed; that is the meaning of depressed. You are pressing something inside, and when anger is pressed too much it becomes sadness. Sadness is a negative way of being angry, the feminine way of being angry.

If you remove the pressure on it, it will become anger. You must have been angry about certain things from your childhood but you have not expressed them, hence the depression. Try to understand it! And the problem is that depression cannot be solved, because it is not the real problem. The real problem is anger — and you go on condemning depression, so you are fighting with shadows.

First look at why you are depressed…look deep into it and you will find anger. Great anger is in you…maybe towards your mother, towards your father, towards the world, towards yourself, that is not the point. You are very angry inside, and from the very childhood you have tried to be smiling, not to be angry. That is not good. You have been taught and you have learned it well. So on the surface you look happy, on the surface you go on smiling, and all those smiles are false. Deep down you are holding great rage. Now, you cannot express it so you are sitting upon it — that is what depression is; then you feel depressed.

Let it flow, let anger come. Once anger comes up your depression will go. Have you not watched and observed it? — that sometimes after real anger one feels so good, alive? Start doing something at home. Mm? do an anger meditation every day…twenty minutes will do. After the third day you will enjoy the exercise so much that it will be difficult for you to wait for it. It will give you such great release and you will see that your depression is disappearing. For the first time you will really smile…because with this depression you cannot smile, you pretend.

One cannot live without smiles so one has to pretend, but a pretended smile hurts very much… It does not make you happy; it simply reminds you of how unhappy you are.

But you have become aware of it — it is good. Whenever something hurts, it helps. Man is so ill that whenever something is helpful, it hurts, it touches some wound somewhere. But it has been good….

This Is It!

Source: OSHO

You thought tears were a sign of weakness?

Never be afraid of tears. The so-called civilization has made you very afraid of tears. It has created a kind of guilt in you. When tears come you start feeling embarrassed. You start feeling, “What will others think? I am a man and I am crying! It looks so feminine and childish. It should not be so.” You stop those tears…and you kill something that was growing in you.

Tears are far more beautiful than anything that you have with you, because tears come from the overflow of your being. Tears are not necessarily of sadness; sometimes they come out of great joy and sometimes they come out of great peace and sometimes they come out of ecstasy and love. In fact they have nothing to do with sadness or happiness. Anything that stirs your heart too much, anything that takes possession of you, anything that is too much, that you cannot contain and it starts overflowing — that brings tears.

Accept them with great joy, relish them, nourish them, welcome them, and through tears you will know how to pray.

Through tears you will know how to see. Tear-filled eyes are capable of seeing truth. Tear-filled eyes are capable of seeing the beauty of life and the benediction of it.

Source: The Diamond Sutra, OSHO

We’re meant to be having a good time! The real sin is in perpetuating seriousness.

Start with meditation, and things will go on growing in you — silence, serenity, blissfulness, sensitivity. And whatever comes out of meditation, try to bring it out in life. Share it, because everything shared grows fast. And when you have reached the point of death, you will know there is no death. You can say goodbye, there is no need for any tears of sadness — maybe tears of joy, but not of sadness. But you have to begin from being innocent.

So first, throw out all crap that you are carrying. Everybody is carrying so much crap, and one wonders, for what? Just because people have been telling you that these are great ideas, principles…. You have not been intelligent with yourself. Be intelligent with yourself.

Life is very simple; it is a joyful dance. The whole earth can be full of joy and dance, but there are people who are seriously vested in their interest that nobody should enjoy life, that nobody should smile, that nobody should laugh, that life is a sin, that it is a punishment. How can you enjoy when the climate is such that you have been told continuously that it is a punishment? — that you are suffering because you have done wrong things and it is a kind of jail where you have been thrown to suffer?

I say to you life is not a jail, it is not a punishment. It is a reward, and it is given only to those who have earned it, who deserve it. Now it is your right to enjoy; it will be a sin if you don’t enjoy.

It will be against existence if you don’t beautify it, if you leave it just as you have found it. No, leave it a little happier, a little more beautiful, a little more fragrant.

Source: Beyond Enlightenment, OSHO

I feel I don’t allow my heart to open. When I was very young I rejected my parents. I felt good about being a bad little boy. Now I feel that everything that I thought was love was nothing.

This is a good insight. To understand that whatsoever you have called love up to now was not love, is one of the most meaningful insights. When it happens much becomes possible.

People go on thinking that they love, and that becomes their greatest illusion — and the sooner they are disillusioned the better. Love is such a rare thing that it cannot be so easily available to all. It is not; it is as rare as buddhahood, not less than that.

This insight is good but it will make you sad, very morose, and give you a certain gloom. But don’t be worried, because out of a dark night the morning is born. When the night is darkest the morning is closest. You will be very very morose and sad because whatsoever you were thinking was love was not, and you have lived in dreams and have been missing reality. When this insight dawns on you, you become very sad, almost dead.

Don’t try to escape from this state. Relax into it, let yourself be drowned in this sadness, and soon you will come out of it completely new. I can see even in your voice, in your eyes, in your very body, that a tremendous sadness is settling, allow it. The human tendency is not to allow it, to escape from it — to go to a hotel, to a cinema, to friends to talk nonsense, to do something to be occupied so that you can escape from this state. But if you escape you again miss something that was going to happen. Relax into it.

Source: OSHO,  Above All, Don’t Wobble

Talks on Fragments from Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

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There is not only a difference, there is a vast difference: discipline and control are polar oppositeswords really mean?

Control is from the ego, discipline is from the non-ego; control is manipulating yourself, discipline is to understand yourself; discipline is a natural phenomenon, control is unnatural; discipline is spontaneous, control is a sort of suppression. Discipline needs only understanding — you understand and you act according to your understanding. Discipline has no ideal to follow, discipline has no dogma to follow, discipline is not perfectionistic — discipline leads you by and by towards a wholeness.

Control is perfectionistic, it has an ideal to be achieved; you have an idea in the mind about how you should be. Control has many shoulds and many should-nots, discipline has none. Discipline is a natural understanding, a flowering.

The very word ‘discipline’ comes from a root which means ‘to learn’; it comes from the same root as the word ‘disciple’. A disciple is one who is ready to learn — and discipline is that capacity of openness which helps you to learn.

Discipline has nothing to do with control. In fact, a disciplined mind is never a mind which thinks in terms of control, there is no need for it. A disciplined mind needs no control, a disciplined mind is absolutely free.

An undisciplined mind needs control because an undisciplined mind feels that without control there is danger. An undisciplined mind cannot trust itself, hence the control. For example: If you don’t control yourself you may kill somebody — in anger, in rage you can be a murderer. You need control, because you are afraid of yourselves.

A man of understanding, a man who understands himself and others, always feels compassion. Even if somebody is an enemy, a man of understanding has compassion towards him because a man of understanding can understand the viewpoint of the other also. He knows why the other feels as he feels, he knows why the other is angry, because he knows his own self, and in knowing that, he has known all others. He has compassion, he understands, and he follows understanding. When I say this don’t misunderstand me — understanding in fact need not be followed. The very word ‘following’ gives the idea of having to do something: you understand, then you have to do something — follow. No — understand, and everything settles by itself. You need not follow. It starts happening.

So the first thing to understand is the difference between control and discipline. Control is a false coin, invented by society as a substitute for discipline. It looks exactly like discipline: every false coin looks that way, otherwise you could not make it current, it could not circulate in the market. There are many false coins about inner life. For example, control is a false coin for the real coin of discipline, and for the real coin of understanding, knowledge is a false coin.

For religion, sect is a false coin. To fulfil your need of being religious many false sects are offered to you — Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism. All ‘-isms’ are false. Religion has no ‘-ism’ about it, it is not a dogma. It is something that flowers within you, not something which is enforced from without. Always be aware of the false coins because they are in circulation, and they have been in circulation for so long that people have almost forgotten about the real coins. Religion is neither Christian, nor Hindu, nor Mohammedan; religion is simply religion. It is an attitude which one has to grow into, one cannot be born into it.

Nobody can be religious by birth; it comes through creative effort, it comes through suffering and experience, it comes through wandering and coming home, it comes through going astray and coming back to the right path. Through much suffering and experience, by and by a certain quality of being starts crystallizing within you: that crystalized being is religious and the fragrance that surrounds that crystalized being is religion. It is indefinable.

The same is true about control and discipline. Beware of control. Never try to control yourself. Who will control really? If you understand, there is no need to control; if you don’t understand, then who will control? This is the crux of the whole problem.

If you understand, what is the need to control? You understand, so you do whatsoever is right. Not that you have to do it, you simply do it because how can you do the wrong? If you are hungry, you don’t start eating stones — you understand that stones cannot be eaten, finished! There is no need to give you a commandment: ‘Never eat stones when you are hungry.’ It will be foolish, simply foolish to say it. When you are thirsty you drink water. What is the need to make any should or should-not about it?

Life is simple when you understand. There are no regulations or rules around it, there is no need, because your very understanding is the rule of all rules. There is only one golden rule and that is understanding; all other rules are useless, they can be thrown away. If you understand, you can drop all controls, you can be free because whatsoever you do, you will do through understanding.

If you ask me the definition of what is right, I will say: That which is done through understanding. Right and wrong have no objective values; there is nothing like a right action and a wrong action, there are only actions done through understanding and actions done through non-understanding. So sometimes it is possible that one action may be wrong this moment and right the next moment because the situation has changed and now the understanding says something else. Understanding is to live moment to moment, with a sensitive response to life.

You don’t have a fixed dogma of how to act; you look around, you feel, you see, and then you act out of that feeling, seeing, knowing — the action comes.

A man of control has no vision of life, he has no sensitivity to life. When the road is right in front of him, open, he consults a map; when the door is just in front of him he asks others: Where is the door? He is blind. Then he has to control himself because the door is changing every moment. Life is not a dead, static thing — it is not. It is dynamic.

So the same rule that was good for yesterday will not be good for today and cannot be good for tomorrow. But a man who lives through control has a fixed ideology, he follows his map. Roads go on being changed every day, life goes on moving into new dimensions, but he goes on carrying his old rubbishy ideology. He looks at his idea, then he follows it, and then he is always in the wrong situation.

That’s why you feel that you have missed many joys in life. You have to miss, because the only joy that life can give is a response of understanding. Then you feel many joys, but then you don’t have any rules, any ideas, any ideals, then you are not here to follow certain codes — you are here to live and discover your own code of life.

When you become aware of your own code of life, you will see that it is not a fixed thing. It is as dynamic as life itself.

If you try to control, it is the ego; it is the ego manipulating you in many ways. Through the ego, society manipulates you, and through society, the dead, all those who are dead now, manipulate you. Every living being, if he follows a dead ideology, is following dead people.

Zarathustra is beautiful, Buddha is beautiful, Lao Tzu is beautiful, Jesus is beautiful — but they are no longer applicable. They lived their lives, they flowered beautifully: learn through them — but don’t be a stupid follower. Be a disciple, but don’t be a student.

Source: OSHO

Tao: The Three Treasures, Vol 2
Chapter 6 – Discipline And Control (26 June 1975 am in Buddha Hall