ULTIMATE UNDERSTANDING OF BODY - INTO DEATH

I. You think about death and you become disturbed by small things: a headache, an ant crawling on your body. You become distracted by such small things, small discomforts -- and you talk about death. Maybe you don't know what death is; maybe you have only heard the name. And you have seen people dying, but you yourself have never seen death. In fact, when a person dies you see him Lying in repose -- silent, relaxed, with no discomfort. You think death is not a discomfort? You are seeing only a dead person; you have not seen his inner misery, you have not seen his inner conflict. You have not seen his inner struggle with death. You have not seen his inner anguish and turmoil. You just see the dead body -- painted, dressed well, washed, cleaned.

II. Only a person who has enjoyed his life becomes capable of enjoying his death. And if you are capable of enjoying your death, you have defeated death. Then there is no more birth for you and no more death for you -- you have learnt the lesson.

III. Live deeply, live totally, live wholly, so when death comes and knocks at your door you are ready -- ready like a ripe fruit to drop. Just a small breeze comes and the fruit drops; sometimes even without the breeze the fruit drops from its own weight and ripeness. Death should be like that. And the readiness has to come through living.

IV. The secret is, start living more fully, more totally. Be more alert so that you can find within yourself something that is unreachable by death. That is the only shelter, the only security, the only safety. And if you want to help your friends and family, let them become aware of this secret.

V. While you are alive, be so alive that even death when it comes cannot kill you. A really alive person transcends death. Death happens only to dead people. Let me repeat it: Death happens only to dead people; who are already dead, only to those people does death happen. A really alive person transcends death, goes beyond death. Death comes, but misses the target. How can you kill a person like Buddha? How can you kill a person like Jesus? How can you kill Krishna with his flute on his lips? -- impossible. Death itself will start dancing around him! His life is so abundant that death itself will fall in love with him.

VI. Because of our mind we always divide everything into opposite polarities. Delusion and enlightenment, night and day, birth and death, they are all one process but the mind cannot conceive it. It is intrinsically incapable of conceiving of the oneness of life and death, of light and darkness.

VII. When death knocks at your door, all your certainties will be simply riddles and foolish. Don't cling to any certainty. Life is uncertain -- its very nature is uncertain. And an intelligent man always remains uncertain.

VIII. A man of realization knows there is no death. Death is a fiction, you have never died. Yes, you have changed your form many times. You have changed your house many times, many times. But you have never died. Have you ever seen yourself dying? It is always somebody else who dies.

IX. The whole function of the master is to create such energy, such a magnetic force that you are pulled in and slowly, slowly start disappearing. And a point comes when you have become one with existence. This I call real death.

X. Birth and death are simply devices, because neither birth is true nor death is true. We have been before birth, so how can birth be true? And we will be after death, so how can death be true? Only one thing is true: the consciousness that comes with you through birth and goes with you through death — perhaps birth is a door, and death too! Perhaps they are the same door, just your direction is different.

XI. At the moment of death all your knowledge of the world will be lost into thin air. Only one thing will go with you, and that one thing is being constantly ignored — that is your self-knowledge, your self-realization. In fact, this is the only ignorance — ignoring yourself.

XII. It is always death that comes before your desires are fulfilled. Even if you live for a thousand years your desires are not going to be fulfilled.

XIII. Life is spread out over a long time -- seventy years, one hundred years. Death is intense because it is not spread out -- it is in a single moment. Life has to pass one hundred years or seventy years, it cannot be so intense. Death comes in a single moment; it comes whole, not fragmentary. It will be so intense you cannot know anything more intense. But if you are afraid, if before death comes you have escaped, if you have become unconscious because of the fear, you have missed one of the golden opportunities, the golden gate. If your whole life you have been accepting things, when death comes, patiently, passively you will accept and enter into it without any effort to escape. If you can enter death passively, silently, without any effort, death disappears. When Krishna, Christ, Buddha, Mahavir say you are deathless, they are not talking about a doctrine, they are talking about their own experience.

This can happen here in this camp also, because samadhi is death, dhyan is death, meditation is death. Many times there will be moments when you will suddenly feel you are dying. Don't escape, allow it to happen. If you allow it to happen, death has gone, death is there no more, and the inner flame, beginningless, endless, has come into being. It has always been there, now you can feel it. So this should be the sutra. With fear, hate, jealousy, anything whatsoever, don't create a problem out of it. Accept it, allow it, pass through it, and you will defeat all suffering, all death. And you will become a Jaina- a victorious one.

XIV. You die in misery. Only a few people die blissfully. And when death becomes a bliss, it is a samadhi. When death is a relaxation...real relaxation. Deep inside you surrender, you welcome. You have known life, now you want to know death also. You have lived life, you have enjoyed it. A great trust has arisen in you about life -- and you know death is the culmination of life, the crescendo. It must be beautiful! When the whole journey has been beautiful, why not the goal? There is no reason to be afraid. When the whole journey has been such a tremendous joy, why not the end? It is the culmination. You have come home. You welcome, you are ready to embrace death. You relax, you simply slip into death.

And that's the moment! If you can die without any fight, you don't die -- and you are never born again. You have simply slipped out of the body confinements -- of the world. You live! -- you live eternally. But then you live as an unembodied existence, with no limitations, with no boundaries. Body gives you a boundary. Death takes away all boundaries from you. Body gives you a definition, makes you a man or a woman, makes you ugly or beautiful, makes you intelligent or unintelligent, makes you this and that -- body gives you definition. Death takes all definitions away. It simply leaves life undefined.

Life undefined is what God is. But to know this death you will have to know life well. So if you can accept my suggestion: next time when a beautiful moment passes by, think in terms of life -- "What a beautiful moment to live and dance and be alive!" Then one day when death comes, you will say the same to death: "What a beautiful moment to die!"

OSHO

BE A LITTLE AWARE BEFORE YOU ARE TRAPPED

I. Love marriages came into existence but is not going to survive, for the simple reason that love comes, happens, and one day suddenly goes. It was not in your hands to bring it; neither is it in your hands to keep it. The old marriage failed because the insistence was that you should love your wife, you should love your husband. It was a 'should'. And you could not even conceive how you could love; at the most you could pretend, you could act. But love is not a pretension, is not an acting. You cannot do anything. You are absolutely powerless as far as love is concerned. The old marriage failed.

The new marriage is failing because the new marriage is simply a reaction to the old marriage. It is not out of understanding, but only out of reaction, revolt -- 'love marriage.' You don't know what love is. You simply see some beautiful face, you see some beautiful body and you think, "My God, I am in love!" This love is not going to last, because after two days, seeing the same face for twenty-four hours a day, you will get bored. The same body... you have explored the whole topography; now there is nothing to explore. Exploring the same geography again and again, you feel like an idiot. What is the point? This love affair, this love marriage is failing, it has already failed. The reason is that you don't know how to wait so that love can happen.

II. Your marriage is a subtle politics of domination. Your fatherhood, motherhood, is a subtle politics.

III. Marriage has made love disappear badly, marriage has made love disappear from the earth. Because for other considerations marriage is arranged — money, finance, family, prestige, astrology — all absurd. They have nothing to do with the heart of the two persons who are going to be married. So marriage is almost always a failure; only in rare accidents it is not so — but they are accidents, exceptions. They cannot be counted. Marriage is always on the rocks, because it is for wrong reasons. Only love can become the foundation of a real marriage, there is no other way. Because there is no other way to find that your wave length is exactly the same as the other’s, that you vibrate in the same way as the other. There is no other way to find it out.

IV. One should marry only when one is wise enough. Marriage is not for young people. For young people is to fool around. Marriage is for those who have experienced life in many ways, who have seen all the colors, the whole spectrum of it, and are now ready to settle.

V. I am not against marriage -- I am for love. If love becomes your marriage, good; but don't hope that marriage can bring love. That is not possible. Love can become a marriage. You have to work very consciously to transform your love into a marriage. Ordinarily, people destroy their love. They do EVERYTHING to destroy it and then they suffer. And they go on saying, "What went wrong?" They destroy -- they do everything to destroy it.

There is a tremendous desire and longing for love, but love needs great awareness. Only then can it reach its highest climax -- and that highest climax IS marriage. It has nothing to do with law. It is a merging of two hearts into totality. It is the functioning of two persons in synchronicity -- that is marriage.

But people try love and because they are unconscious...their longing is good, but their love is full of jealousy, full of possessiveness, full of anger, full of nastiness. Soon they destroy it. Hence for centuries they have depended on marriage. Better to start by marriage so that the law can protect you from destroying it. The society, the government, the court, the policeman, the priest, they will all force you to live in the institution of marriage, and you will be just a slave. If marriage is an institution, you are going to be a slave in it. Only slaves want to live in institutions.

Marriage is a totally different phenomenon: it is the climax of love. Then it is good. I am not against marriage -- I am for the REAL marriage. I am against the false, the pseudo, that exists. But it is an arrangement. It gives you a certain security, safety, occupation. It keeps you engaged. Otherwise, it gives you no enrichment, it gives you no nourishment.

VI. I have never said that love is destroyed by marriage. How can marriage destroy love? Yes, it is destroyed in marriage, but it is destroyed by you, not by marriage. It is destroyed by the partners. How can marriage destroy love? It is you who destroy it, because you don’t know what love is. You simply pretend to know, you simply hope that you know, you dream that you know, but you don’t know what love is. Love has to be learned; it is the greatest art there is.

VII. India missed with arranged marriage; the West is missing with free love.

India missed love because parents were too calculating and cunning. They would not allow falling in love: that is dangerous, nobody knows where it will lead. They were too clever, and through cleverness India missed all possibility of love. In the West they are too rebellious, too young; not clever -- too young, too childish. They have made sex a free thing, available everywhere: no need to go so deep to discover love, enjoy sex and be finished.

Through sex, the West is missing: through marriage, the East has missed. But if you are alert you need not be Eastern, you need not be Western. Love is neither Eastern nor Western. Go on discovering love within you. And if you love, sooner or later the person will happen to you, because a loving heart, sooner or later, comes to a loving heart -- it always happens. You will find the right person. But if you are jealous you will not find, if you are simply for sex you will not find, if you live only for security you will not find.

VIII. Be a little aware before you are trapped!

Marriage is a trap: you will be trapped by the woman and the woman will be trapped by you. It is a mutual trap. And then legally you are allowed to torture each other forever.

IX. Love, and love as deeply as possible. And if love itself becomes the marriage, that is another thing, altogether different. If love itself becomes such an intimacy that it is unbreakable, that is another thing, that is not a legal sanction. Legal sanctions are needed only because you are afraid. You know that your love is not enough; you need the legal support for it. You know perfectly well that you can escape or the woman can escape, hence you need the policeman to keep you together. But this is ugly, to need a policeman to keep you together. That's what marriage is!

X. Marriage exists as an institution of exploitation, it is not togetherness. That is why no happiness comes out of it as a flowering. It cannot. Out of the roots of exploitation how can ecstasy be born?

XI. I have never heard about any perfect marriage. They say perfect marriages are made in heaven. Nobody comes back from there so maybe it is true, but what kind of marriage will those perfect marriages be? There will be no tension, there will be no individuality in the man or in the woman. They will never collide, they will never fight. They will be too sweet to each other. And too much sweetness brings diabetes!

XII. Marriage is an institution that teaches a man regularity, frugality, temperance, forbearance and many other splendid virtues he would not need had he stayed single.

XIII. As I see it, out of a hundred marriages ninety-nine marriages are just licensed prostitution. They are not marriages. A marriage is only a real marriage when it grows out of love. Legal, illegal, does not matter. The real thing that matters is love. If love exists between two persons, it is blessed. If love does not exist between two persons, then all your laws put together cannot bridge them. Then they exist separate, then they exist apart, then they exist in conflict, then they exist always in war. And they create all kinds of trouble for each other. They are nasty to each other, nagging to each other, possessive of each other, violent, oppressive, dominating, dictatorial. In a better world, with a better humanity, things will be different. In a better world, the child born out of love will not be called bastard; the child only born out of license, law, will be called bastard.

XIV. Love affairs have been failing, and parents feel very happy. People come to me and they say, "Look, in the West love affairs have been failing. Then why are you against marriage?" they ask me. Love affairs are failing because first the marriage was arranged by the astrologer, then it was arranged by the parents, and now it is being arranged by biology, by instinct. You suddenly feel that you like a woman, but you don't know how long this is going to last and you are not even aware why you like her. You are not even alert to what it is in you that likes her. Maybe it is just her hairstyle. Now, are you going to get married to a hairstyle? You can get married, but tomorrow morning when you see her hair disheveled you will be at a loss: "Is this the same woman I fell in love with?" How long can you be interested in the hairstyle? Soon you will get fed up. The same hairstyle again and again -- the whole day, twenty-four hours a day...!

People are falling in love because a certain man has a certain type of nose. People are falling in love with fragments! Nobody is bothered about the totality of the person -- and it is a vast thing. The nose does not count for much -- after two days you won't look at it at all. Or the color, or the shape, or the proportion of the body -- all these things are very minor. The real thing is the total functioning of the person, and that can be experienced only when you live together.

OSHO

DEPTH OF HEART

I. I love, because my love is not dependent on the object of love. My love is dependent on my state of being. So whether the other person changes, becomes different, friend turns into a foe, does not matter, because my love was never dependent on the other person. My love is my state of being. I simply love.

II. How can love impose ideals on anyone? Love simply accepts you as you are; there is no need to be somebody else. I call a place holy only where love is unconditional, shared without asking anything in return, not even in a subtle way.

III. Everybody goes on thinking that he loves people and nobody returns the love, but it has never happened that way. It is against the law; it is against dharma, against the ultimate law of life. If you love, love comes in return. If it is not coming, go deeper; somewhere in the name of love you have done something else.

IV. Love will give you the secret key, the golden key, the master key.Love unconditionally, and flowers will be showering on you from all the directions. And once you have known the generosity of existence you will never feel miserable.

V. Love is death of the ego, the personality, the false. There is no way to have both, love and ego. Either you can have the ego or you can have love -- but make it a conscious thing.

VI. All growth needs love -- but unconditional love. If love has conditions then growth cannot be total, because those conditions will come in the way. Love unconditionally. Don't ask anything in return. Much comes on its own -- that's another thing. Don't be a beggar. In love be an emperor. Just give it and see what happens... a thousandfold it comes back. But one has to learn it. Otherwise one remains a miser; one gives a little and waits for much to come back, and your waiting, your expectation, destroys the whole beauty of it.

VII. If you cannot love yourself, you don't know even the taste of love or what love means.

VIII. Love yourself, so that all your loving sources become open, all blocks are removed. And if you can love yourself -- with all your frailties, with all your weaknesses, with all your errors -- you can love anybody in the world. You will have tremendous compassion and understanding, because you commit the same mistakes; the same are your errors, the same are your frailties.

IX. If you are not in love, you are lonely. If you are in love, really in love, you become alone. Loneliness is sadness; aloneness is not sadness. Loneliness is a feeling of incompleteness. You need someone and the needed one is not available. Loneliness is darkness, with no light in it. A dark house, waiting and waiting for someone to come and kindle the light. Aloneness is not loneliness. Aloneness means the feeling that you are complete. Nobody is needed, you are enough. And this happens in love. 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.
 

X. Love allows freedom; not only allows, but strengthens freedom. And anything that destroys freedom is not love. It must be something else. Love and freedom go together, they are two wings of the same bird. Whenever you see that your love is going against your freedom, then you are doing something else in the name of love. Let this be your criterion: freedom is the criterion; love gives you freedom, makes you free, liberates you. And once you are totally yourself, you feel grateful to the person who has helped you. That gratefulness is almost religious. You feel in the other person something divine. He has made you free, or she has made you free, and love has not become a possessiveness.

XI. As sex disappears you will find authentic love growing in you. Sex is not love; it is just a fallacy, a blindness. You are tricked by biology into believing that this is love. But once sex has disappeared your whole life energy is redeemed from its animal past. And just as sex was reproducing more and more children, sex-freed energy starts giving you every moment a new birth. Your whole life becomes fresh, growing in a new direction. Sex is horizontal; love is vertical, it takes you upwards to higher realms of being. And the higher you are in your love, the closer you are to the ultimate truth. The day your love has reached to its climax, you will experience what I have been defining as satyam, shivam, sundram -- the truth, the godliness and the beauty.

XII. If you love deeply, by and by you will become aware that your love is becoming more and more meditative. A subtle quality of silence is entering in you. Thoughts are disappearing, gaps appearing -- silences. You are touching your own depth. Love makes you meditative if it is on the right lines. Meditation makes you loving if it is on the right lines.

XIII. Love is not surrender. Love does not ask you to surrender. Love does not ask for anything. Love simply gives. And the miracle is, that when you give out of love the whole existence returns it a thousandfold, as if, from all over around you, roses start showering on you. You cannot imagine, cannot conceive of it, unless you experience it. But give it a try. You will not be losing anything.

Love is not something like a commodity, that if you give it you will have less of it. It is not money, that you had ten dollars and five you have given; now you have only five dollars left. Love is not a commodity. It is not a quantity; it is a quality. Give it, and you will be surprised that from unknown sources, from everywhere, love is flowing towards you. Give it unconditionally, and once you have known the taste and the joy of giving unconditionally, you will also know that the existence is very generous.

XIV. Love, but not as a need -- as a sharing. Love, but don't expect -- give. Love, but remember your love should not become an imprisonment for the other. Love, but be very careful; you are moving on sacred ground. You are going into the highest, the purest and holiest temple. Be alert! Drop all impurities outside the temple. When you love a person, love the person as if the person is a god, not less than that. Never love a woman as a woman and never love a man as a man, because if you love a man as a man your love is going to be very, very ordinary. Your love is not going to be more than lust. If you love a woman as a woman, your love is not going to soar very high. Love a woman as a goddess, then love becomes worship.

OSHO