World Beyond

Inspiration

Through the years, I have learned there's no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.  -- Steve Martin

Four Little Words

The following thought struck me pretty hard this morning while I was lying on the floor, so I thought I'd share: 

Never presume to know.

In a world where you can't seem to swing a cat without hitting a know-it-all, I think we could all use a little less certainty in our lives.

I googled the phrase and found this interesting photo, by Jonathan Kane.  Hope you enjoy it. 

Osho: True Intimacy

The following Osho quotations come from the book Being in Love: 

If your intimacy is helping you to grow and become mature then it is positive and good and healthy, wholesome. 

Intimacy means that there is no privacy.  You don’t carry anything private now, at least with the person you are intimate with, you drop your privacy.  You are nude and naked--good, bad, whatsoever you are, you open your heart.  And whatever the cost you pay for it; whatever the trouble you go through with it.  That brings growth.

If you are growing more and becoming an individual, if life is happening more to you, if you are becoming more open, if more beauty is felt in existence, if more poetry is arising in your heart, if more love flows through you, more compassion, if you are becoming more aware, then the relationship is good.  Carry on. Then it is not a marriage.  Then it is intimacy.

Relating means you are always starting, you are always trying to become acquainted.  Again and again, you are introducing yourself to each other.  You are trying to see the many facets of the other’s personality.  You are trying to penetrate deeper and deeper into his realm of inner feelings, into the deep recesses of her being.  You are trying to unravel a mystery which cannot be unraveled.  That is the joy of love:  the exploration of consciousness.  And if you relate and don’t reduce it to a relationship, then the other will become a mirror to you.  Exploring the other, unawares you will be exploring yourself too.  Getting deeper into the other, knowing his feelings, his thoughts, his deeper stirrings, you will be knowing your own deeper stirrings too.  Lovers become mirrors to each other, and then love becomes a meditation.

Let your woman be your mirror; let your man be your mirror.  Look into your partner’s eyes and see your face; move into your partner to know yourself. Then one day the mirror will not be needed….then, transcendence happens.

In fact, the more you know, the more mysterious the other becomes.  Then love is a constant adventure.

Osho: Love and Friendliness

It is something to be understood:  the girlfriend you get or the boyfriend you get, you deserve.  You don’t get any boyfriend or girlfriend whom you don’t deserve; those kinds of relationships only last for one or two days.

 

The other person has to be different, distant, a mystery that invites you to explore.  With two mysteries meeting together, once they drop the idea that they have to agree on everything, there is no question of any fight.  The fight arises because you want agreement.

 

Harmony is not something very great, it is boring.  Once in a while, even if you fight, once in a while even if you get really hot, that does not mean that love disappears; that simply means love is capable of absorbing even disagreements, fights, overcoming all these hindrances.

 

Love has to be a friendly affair in which nobody is superior, in which nobody is going to decide about things, in which both are fully aware that they are different, that there approach towards life is different, that they think differently, and still, with all these differences, they love each other.

 

Be human, accept the other person’s humanity with all the frailty humanity is prone to.  Your partner will commit mistakes just as you commit mistakes, and you have to learn.  To be together is a great learning: of forgiving, forgetting, understanding that the other is as human as you are.  Just a little forgiveness.

 

Out of freedom meet with each other, and the moment you feel that you have explored the whole topography of the woman and the woman knows that she has experienced whatever is possible to experience in the man, then it is time to say good-bye to each other in deep friendliness.  There is no need to hang around each other’s neck.  A world completely free from any contracts between man and woman will be immensely lovely, beautiful, unboring, interesting.

 

If you are just friendly and don’t make your friendliness a legal affair of husband and wife, things will be far better because then you are not a burden to anybody, not a bondage.  There will be no question of having to fit with each other.  You can have your individuality totally free from each other, and yet be in love.  And really to be totally different in your individuality creates the best possibility of love.

Osho: Boredom and Jealousy

Boredom is an indication of sensitivity.  Boredom is the consciousness of repetition.

Either have no consciousness, then you cannot feel the repetition, or, have so much consciousness that in each repetition you can see something new.  These are the two ways to get out of boredom.

 

Be more watchful of your jealousy.  When it arises next time, rather than getting angry, close your doors, sit silently, sit in meditation and watch your jealousy.  And I’m not saying repress it, because tat is again doing something.  People are either expressive or repressive, and both ways are wrong.  I’m not saying you can just drop it right now.  You will have to meditate over it.  Whenever it possesses you, meditate over it.  Slowly, the meditation will create the distance between you and the jealousy. 

 

To be a monk or a nun is very easy, but to love and not to be jealous, to love and not to be possessive, to love and let the other have all their freedom, is really a great achievement.  Only then will you experience love and its fragrance.

Osho: Love and Meditation

A woman and a man in love can move into meditation very easily.  Meditation and love are such close phenomena that if you move into meditation, your love energies start overflowing.  If you really fall in love with someone who loves you, your meditative energies start growing; they are very deeply joined experiences.

 

Remember, only one thing is going to help you, and that is awareness—nothing else.  Growth will remain painful if you don’t accept life and love in all its ups and downs.  The summer has to be accepted and the winter too. 

 

Work or sit or walk, but one thing has to be a continuous thread: make more and more moments of your life luminous with awareness.  Let the candle of awareness burn in each moment, in each act.  The cumulative effect is what enlightenment is.

 

Love alone is not enough.  Love alone is blind; meditation gives it eyes.  Meditation gives it understanding.  And once your love is both love and meditation, you become fellow travelers.  Then it is no longer an ordinary relationship.  Then it becomes a friendliness on the path thowards discoering the msyteries of life…without meditation, love is destined to fail…meditation gives you the qualities of silence, awareness, a patient listening, a capacity to put yourself in the other’s position.

 

Just as man and woman are halves of one whole, so are love and meditation.  Meditation is man; love is woman.  In the meeting of meditation and love is the meeting of man and woman.  And in that meeting, we create the transcendental human being, which is neither man nor woman.

 

If you meditate deeply, sooner or later you will start feeling a tremendous love arising in you that you have never known before: a new quality to your being, a new door opening.  You have become a new flame and you want to share now.  If you love deeply, by and by you will become aware that your love is becoming more and more meditative. 

 

Meditation is just a courage to be silent and alone.  Slowly, you start feeling anew quality to yourself, a new aliveness, a new beauty, a new intelligence, which is not borrowed from anybody, which is growing within you.  It has roots in your existence.  And if you are not a coward, it will come to fruition, to flowering. 

 

If you want great things--things that are beyond the small reach of human hands, human mind, human abilities--then you will have to learn the art of non-doing.  I call it meditation.

 

Meditation simply means the process of unconditioning the mind.  Whatever the society has done to you has to be undone.  When you are unconditioned you will be able to see the beauty of love and freedom together; if you really love the person you will give him or her absolute freedom--that’s the gift of love. 

Osho: Love and Aloneness

The following Osho quotations come from the book Being in Love: 

 

When you are separated from your lover, look at it as a great opportunity to be alone.  Then the vision changes.  Look at it as an opportunity to have your own space.  So in these days when you are alone, be a narcissist; love yourself, enjoy yourself! Delight in your body, in your mind, in your soul.  And enjoy the space that is empty around you and fill it with love.  Enjoy this space, aloneness.  Don’t fill it with past memories and don’t fill it with future imagination and fantasy.  Let it be as it is--pure, simple, silent.  Delight in it; sway, sing, dance.  A sheer joy of being alone. If you are not happy when you are alone, how can you be happy when you are together?

What is needed is not something in which you can forget your loneliness.  What is needed is that you become aware of your aloneness, which is a reality…Look for your aloneness…the method is the same: just watch your mind, be aware.  Become more and more conscious, so finally you are only conscious of yourself.  That is the point where you become aware of aloneness.

Human growth requires that one moves from one polarity to another.  Sometimes being alone is perfectly good: one needs one’s own space, one needs to forget the whole world, and to be oneself.  One needs sometimes to be perfectly alone so that all boundaries disappear, as if the other does not exist at all, and the whole universe and the whole sky exists only for you.  In that moment of aloneness one realizes for the first time what infinity is.  But then if you live in it too much, by and by the infinity bores you, it becomes tasteless.  There is purity and silence, but there is no ecstasy in it.  Ecstasy always comes through the other.  One then starts feeling hungry for love, and wants to escape for this aloneness, this vast expanse of space.  One wants a cozy place surrounded by others, so that one can forget oneself.

Never make anywhere your home, neither relationships nor aloneness.  Remain flowing and homeless, and don’t abide at any polarity.  Enjoy it, delight in it, but when it is finished move to the other:  make it a rhythm.

Lovers are alone, and a real lover never destroys your aloneness.  He will always be totally respectful toward your individuality, toward your aloneness.  It is sacred.  He will not interfere in it, he will not try to intrude on that space…Aloneness means the feeling that you are complete…Lovers become alone.  Through love you touch your inner completeness.  Love makes you complete.  Lovers share each other, but that is not their need, that is their overflowing energy.

Osho: Love and Freedom

Love can be sacrificed for freedom, but freedom cannot be sacrificed for love. 

 

Love should be an absolute act of freedom.

 

For a lighter life, for a more playful life, you heed to be flexible.  You have to remember that freedom is the highest value and if love is not giving you freedom then it is not love.

 

Love allows freedom; not only allows, but strengthens freedom…both are essential needs. 

 

It as if we are trying to fly in the sky with one wing.  A few people have the wing of love and a few people have the wing of freedom, but both are incapable of flying.  Both the wings are needed.

 

If you love there is no need to destroy your freedom.  They both can exist together; there is no antagonism between them.    

 

Love the person, but give the person total freedom.  Love the person, but from the very beginning make it clear that you are not selling your freedom.

 

Love is a basic need, as basic as freedom, so both have to be fulfilled.  And a person who is full of love and free is the most beautiful phenomenon in the world.  And when two persons of such beauty meet, their relationship is nota a relationship at all.  It is a relating.  It is a constant, riverlike flow.  It is continuously growing towards greater heights.

 

If love cannot give freedom, then it is not love.  Love as much as you can.  Never think of the next moment; and if your lover goes somewhere else, you are also free.  Keep freedom as a higher value than love itself.  And if it is possible--and it is possible because it is natural--your life will not be a misery.  Love each other totally, and occasionally allow each other freedom.  But it has to be on both sides.  Don’t have any secret, be absolutely open, and allow the other person also to be absolutely open, and respect openness.  Never, even by your gestures, make the other person feel guilty.

 

When you fell in love with the woman, she was free; you fell in love with freedom.  When you bring her home you destroy all possibilities of being free, but in that very destruction you are destroying the beauty. 

 

Love means to give all that is beautiful to the beloved.  Freedom is the most beautiful, the most cherished goal of human consciousness; how can you take it away? If you love a woman really, or a man, the first present, the first gift, will be the gift of freedom. 

Osho: Love and Fear

Fear is never love, and love is never afraid.

 

People ordinarily think hate is the opposite of love.  That is wrong, absolutely wrong.  Fear is the opposite of love.

 

Love is outgoing, fearlessly reaching to the other, tremendously trusting that it will be received—and it is always received.  Fear is shrinking within yourself, closing yourself, closing all the doors, all the windows so that no sun, no wind, no rain can reach you, you are so afraid.  You are entering into your grave alive.

 

Be afraid of your ego, be afraid of your lust, be afraid of your greed, be afraid of your possessiveness; be afraid of your jealousy—but there is no question of being afraid of love.  Love is divine!  Love is like light.  When there is light, darkness cannot exist.  When there is love, fear cannot exist.

 

I don’t see that anything in life has the quality of being permanent.  Love cannot be an exception.  So don’t expect that love has to be permanent.  It will make your love life more beautiful, because you know today you are together, tomorrow perhaps you will have to depart.

 

No relationship can truly grow if you go on holding back.  If you remain clever and go on safeguarding and protecting yourself, only personalities meet, and the essential centers remain alone.  Then just your mask is related, not you.  Whenever such a thing happens, there are four persons in the relationship, not two.  Two false persons go on meeting, and the two real persons remain worlds apart.

 

When change disturbs you, all your inner disturbances are stirred up.  When you are both feeling disturbed and both are trying to throw the responsibility on the other, just try to see it.  Inside yourself, try to see it; the other is never responsible.  Remember that as a mantra: The other is never responsible. 

 

Osho: Living The Truth

At least don’t corrupt love.  It is not corrupted by hatred, remember; it is corrupted by falsity.  It is not destroyed by anger, never, but it is destroyed by an inauthentic persona, a false face.  Love is possible only when there is freedom to be oneself without any guarding, without any reserve. 

 

Live more authentically.  Drop the masks; they are a weight on your heart.  Drop all falsities.  Be exposed. 

 

Once you are true, everything else becomes possible.

 

Risk is there.  If you become true, nobody know whether this relationship will be capable of understanding truth, authenticity; whether this relationship will be strong enough to stand in the storm. 

 

At the most, the relationship can break, at the most.  But it is better to be separate and to be real rather than being unreal and together because then it is never going to be satisfying. 

 

Remember, being never happens comfortably; otherwise it would have happened to all.  It cannot happen conveniently; otherwise everybody would have their own, authentic being without any problem.  Being happens only when you take risk, when you move into danger.  And love is the greatest danger there is.  It demands you totally.  So don’t be afraid, go into it.  If the relationship survives truth, it will be beautiful.