The art of loving and living through the insights, words and work of a beautiful enlightened being named; Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and known simply as OSHO. The source of the posts are taken from his works that i have personally come across.
The post on this blog offers readers choices for living fully "here and now,in the present moment," challenging you to embrace a new way of experiencing loving and living that integrates body, mind and the spirit.
Satchitanand... truth, counciousness,bliss
A woman came; the woman was the queen of Ethiopia. She wanted to love Solomon, she wanted to become his beloved. She was very beautiful, but she wanted to love the wisest man in the world. So she tried a few tests on Solomon, whether he was really a wisest man in the world as he was said to be. She did many experiments; one of the experiments was this…She brought one false flower made of paper, but made so beautifully that it was almost impossible to detect that it was false. She went into the court of Solomon, she stood far away from Solomon, and she said, “I have a flower in my hand. Can you say from that far away whether it is real or unreal?”
Solomon said, “Light is not enough, and I’m an old man, and I cannot see rightly. Please open the windows.” The windows were opened. He waited for two minutes and said, “No, it’s false.”
Then the woman brought another flower from her bag and she said, “What about this?” It was exactly like the first but real.
Solomon pretended to look at it and then he said, “Yes, this is a real flower.”
The woman was astounded. The whole court was astounded:
“What has happened?” They asked him, “How could you find it?”
He said, “Easy—I opened the windows for the bees to come in. They decided. For the first flower, no bee came in; for the second they immediately rushed in.”
When you love something, you have a supra-sense about where it is. Your love monitors you, it leads you, it becomes your guide.
A bee can smell from miles far away where the flowers are. Much experiment and research has been done with bees about how they find their way. The flowers have bloomed miles away, and bees will come rushing. Almost a supra-sense exits in them; that supra sense is nothing but love.
You will find your way to the object of your love, so be very cautious about your object of love because that is going to decide your destiny. Your love is your destiny. Love something superb, love something of the supra-existence, love something of the divine, and you will find your way.
…The moment you were created, the very same moment the treasure was handed over to you – because who has ever known somebody to live without love? Have you known anybody to live without breathing? Love is the very breath of the soul.
Baul says, “as the body cannot exist without breathing, the soul cannot exist without love.” So you may know it, you may not know it, but continuously love is happening inside. It is throbbing there, it is your very beat. You just have to find a way to reach there, because you have gone out in search of the treasures that don’t belong to you, in search of other treasures that can never belong to you.
The Baul sing:
Forget not, that your body contains
the whole of existence.
I am fulfilled,
being a blow of your own breath on your flute.
What more can I wish for me
Than to be blown away with such melody?
…Whatsoever you love you become,
and whatsoever your love you will find.
So be alert about your love: Don’t love a car, don’t love a house, don’t love a bank balance – because you will become that. You ill become a dung beetle. Don’t love dung.
If you are to love, then love something…something that transcends things, something that transcends forms, something you will have to raise your eyes to the sky. Love Gourishhankar, love the Himalayan peaks. If you love something like dung, you will move into dung, because we always find a way. Whenever our love moves, we move behind it. The bee loves the lotus; it finds it. The very love is the path. Howsoever the lotus is hiding, the bee will find it.
Love has many flavors… love has many dimensions, many nuances. Love is not a single thing. It is very rich, tremendously rich. It has many aspects to it, it is multi-faceted. It is like a diamond: it has many facets and every facet gives it richness.
“Only a connoisseur” – one who has loved in many ways, one who has loved, lived courageously, dangerously, one who knows all the flavors of love…
Have you watched? – ‘love’ does not express all. It is a single word. All the ancient languages have many words for love, because there are so many loves. The English language is so poor in that way, hmm? – because you also love your car and love your woman and love your house and you love your country and you love your child and you love your mother. Only one word! You love a particular brand of cigarettes. It is very poor, because love has so many facets.
When you love a child, you love differently. It is not the same love as when you love a woman. It has no passion. It has compassion, but it has no passion. When you love your mother, it is totally different: it has reverence, it has deep gratitude. But when you love a woman it is totally different. It has great intensity, almost maddening – but it is not the way you love your mother. You love your friend: totally different. It is affection, but not in the same way
…Only a connoisseur of the flavors of love
can comprehend the language of a lover’s heart,
others have no clue.
Yes it is a language. A single word will not do, it is a complete language. And once you know, you will be simply surprised: you can touch somebody’s hand like a friend and then the touch has a different flavor. And you can touch somebody’s hand like a lover then the touch has again a different flavor.
…On the path of love, trust is the most essential thing. On the path of meditation, you can move without trust. On the path of meditation you can move without surrender, but on the path of love, without surrender, without trust, there is no go because it is the very first door. Love demand so much, it demands almost the impossible – and on the first step. Love is easy but very demanding. That’s why even though the path is easy, very few people travel it. The path of meditation is very difficult but not so demanding. That’s why the path is difficult and arduous, yet still many people travel it.
…But love? – there seems to be no way. Many people are trying to learn about love. Many people are trying pornographic literature to know about love. Many people go on reading novels and poetry and others’ love letters in order to know about love. Yes, there is a danger that you may come to know many things about love. In fact, the more you know about love, the less the possibility to know love. You will be lost in your knowledge. You will start thinking that you know.
Have you observed the fact that movie actors who are in the business of love are almost always failures in their own love lives? They never succeed. Even a Marilyn Monroe commits suicide. She was at the top; even President Kennedy was in love with her. But somehow, her whole life was empty. She committed suicide at the very peak of her career, of her fame – such a beautiful woman.
What happened? Why are actors and actresses always failures in their real love lives? They have learned so much about love that they cannot be real about love. They go acting the same roles, they go on playing the same games. As they are playing on stage, they go on playing in life. On stage it is okay because nothing is involved. But in real life, it is empty. So they go on making empty gestures.
Remember, you can know much about love, but that cannot help to know love. Love can be known only by loving. It means you have to move into love without knowing anything about it. That is why it needs courage. You have to move in the dark, with no map, nobody to guide, not even a torch. You have to move in the dark without knowing where you are moving, not knowing whether you are on the right track or not, not knowing whether you will find the path or you will fall in a ditch and be lost forever. This is courage.
The first thing is that love can be known only by loving. It is not something that can be made comprehensible by intellectual discussion about it. Love is not a theory. If you make a theory out of it, it remains incomprehensible. That is the first Baul stand point: there are things which you can know only by doing them, by being them.
...But all that is real has to be lived, and all that is existential has to be penetrated, and the risk has to be taken. one has to be courageous, one has to be daring, because when you love somebody you start losing yourself. To love somebody is to lose the ego, to love somebody is to be lost, to love somebody is to give power to somebody over you, to love somebody is to be possessed. to love somebody means surrendering...Submission is the secret of knowledge.
And what is the secret of transforming life into eternal life, time into eternity?
the secret is love. Between sex and samadhi (higher state of consciousness), the bridge is love. Love is participated in by both: on the one hand sex, on the other hand samadhi. it is the bridge. one bank is sex, on the other hand samadhi. Love includes both, comprehends both. "Through love," The Bauls say, "one reaches to the eternal home." So that is the only provision for the path: love. Love is their worship, love is their prayer, love is their meditation. the path of the Baul is the path of love. He loves tremendously.
The post will be from the spontaneous talks given by Osho in chuang tzu auditorium, Pune, India. The title is The Beloved (volume One)
The Bauls are called Bauls Because they are mad people. The word Baul comes from the Sanskrit root vatul. It means mad, affected by the wind. The Bauls belong to no religion. He is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian nor Buddhist. He is a simple being. His rebellion is total. He does not belong to anybody; he belongs to himself.
The bee know knows it
Beloved Osho,
Only the connoisseur of the flavors of love
can comprehend the language of the lover’s heart,
others have no clue.
The taste of lime rests in the core of the fruit,
and even experts know of no easy way to reach it.
Honey is hidden in the lotus bloom
but the bee knows it.
Dung beetles nestle in dung,
Discounting honey.
…Bauls have nothing – no scriptures, not even to burn; no church, no temple, no mosque – nothing whatsoever. A Baul is always a man on the road. He has no house, no abode. God is his only abode, and the whole sky is his shelter. He possesses nothing except a poor man’s quilt, a small, handmade one-stringed instrument called ektara, and a small drum, a kettle drum. That’s all that he possesses. He prepossesses only a musical instrument and a drum. He plays with one hand on the instrument and he goes on beating the drum with the other the drum hangs by the side of his body and he dances. That is all of his religion.
Dance is his religion, singing is his worship. He does not even use the word ‘god’. The Baul word for God is adhar manush, the essential man. He worships man. He says, inside you and me, inside everybody, there is an adhar manush. The essential being is all. To find the adhar manush, the essential man, is the whole search.
So there is no God somewhere outside you, and there is no need to create any temple because you are his temple already.. the whole search is whithinwards. And o the waves of the song and on the waves of dancing, he moves withinwards. He goes on moving like a beggar, singing songs. He has nothing to preach. His whole preaching is his poetry. And his poetry is not ordinary poetry, not mere poetry. He is not consciously a poet, he sings because his heart is singing. Poetry follows him like a shadow, hence it is tremendously beautiful. He’s not calculating, he’s not making it. He lives his poetry. That is his passion and his very life. His dance is almost insane. He has never been trained to dance, he does not know anything about the art of dancing. He dances like a mad man, like a whirlwind, and he lives very spontaneously, because the Baul says, “if you want to reach to the adhar manush, the essential man, then the ways, the ways goes trhough the sahaj manush, spontaneous man.”
To reach the essential man, you have to go through the essential man. Spontaneity is the only way to reach to the essence…so he cries when he feels like crying. You can find him standing in a village street crying, for nothing. If you ask, “Why are you crying?” he will laugh. He will say, “There is no why. I felt like…I felt like crying, so I cried.” If he feels like laughing, he laughs; if he feels like singing, he sings – but everything has to come out of deep feeling. He’s not mind oriented, not in any way controlled and disciplined. He knows no rituals. He’s absolutely against rituals because he says, “A ritualized person is a dead person. He cannot be spontaneous.” And a person who follows rituals and formalities too much creates so many habits around him that there is no need to be alert. Alertness is lost, habits are formed. Then the man of rituals lives through habits. If he goes to the temple he bows down, not in anyway conscious and alert of what he is doing, but just because he has been taught to do so, he has learned to do so. It has become a conditioning.
So they don’t follow any ritual, they don’t have any technique, they don’t have any habit. So you cannot find two Bauls that are similar, they are individuals. Their rebellion leads them to become authentic individuals.
This has to be understood: the more you become part of the society, the less and less you become an individual, the less and less you are spontaneous – because the very membership of the society will not allow you to be spontaneous. You have to follow the rules of the game. If you enter a society, you accept to follow those rules that society is playing or has decided to play. That’s what membership means: you enter into a certain organization. You have to play the game. Bauls have no organization, so each baul is individual.
And that’s and religion really is: it is an individual approach towards truth. One has to go alone, one has to go in his own way; one has to find one’s own way. You cannot follow another, you cannot move on a ready-made track. The more you search your own way, the closer you will be to God, or to truth, or to reality. In fact, the way is created by walking, you create it as you walk. It is not ready there for you, waiting to be walked on. You walk and you create it.
