Is it possible to experience love and meditation at the same time?
Love and meditation are not two things; hence, the question itself does not arise. Love is a meditation and meditation blossoms in love. Of course, when I use the word ‘love’ I don’t mean the love that ordinarily is understood by the word, I don’t mean the biological infatuation — anyway it is not love. It is simply your chemistry, not you which feels attracted, and under the chemistry’s illusion you think you are in love. But that kind of love every animal, every bird knows perfectly well.
Only man seems to be deluded and deluded so much that all the animals in the world except man have a certain season when they are infatuated — their season of reproduction, a very limited period in the year when biology overtakes them, makes them completely blind; forces them almost against their will. Have you seen two animals making love? And have you ever seen them smiling? They look so bored that how to get out of it seems to be the only problem that is troubling them.
The whole year they look more relaxed, more at ease, more in tune with nature and with themselves, but when the reproduction season comes they all start looking sad, serious, saintly. They forget their playfulness; they forget their freedom. Suddenly they feel themselves under a kind of hypnotic trance; in fact, it is a chemical trance. […]
You are asking, “Is it possible to experience love and meditation at the same time?” Lust and meditation you cannot experience at the same time.
Lust is against meditation. It is desire, an ugly desire. It takes you towards unconsciousness.
Meditation is the greatest longing, the only longing which cannot be called a desire. And it takes you upwards towards more consciousness.
Now both things you cannot do — going upwards towards more conscious being and going downward towards more unconscious being; you cannot do them both at the same time.
But love and meditation are both reaching towards higher states of being. Meditation is a state of thoughtlessness, a state of silence, serenity, tranquility — a state of blissfulness. There is no reason why love should be against it. Out of blissfulness love will flow. In fact, only a meditative person can be a loving person, and only a loving person can be meditative, because both are going beyond the unconscious mind, the dark mind, the blind mind, and opening the doors of light and the beyond.
They are different names and their different names have a certain meaning and significance. Meditation is possible even if you are alone. In fact, it is possible only when you are alone, in your aloneness, utter purity… no crowd of thoughts or emotions or feelings, just a flame of being conscious.
Meditation is the discovery of your own self.
But once you have discovered the treasure a tremendous need arises in you to share it. That sharing is love. Meditation is like the sun and love is like the radiation reaching to faraway flowers to open, for birds to sing, to make the whole living world alive, fresh, rejuvenated. Exactly what the sun is doing to the whole solar system, meditation does to the whole human world: it radiates love.
And if meditation does not radiate love then one is in some fallacy. What he is thinking is meditation is not meditation. It may be concentration, it may be contemplation, but it is not meditation.
Concentration is of the mind, one pointedness of the mind. Contemplation is also of the mind, not one pointedness but one subject matter. If you are thinking about light you go on thinking about light, higher and deeper and more possibilities and implications of light; but you keep track of one dimension. So we can define contemplation as thinking in one single dimension, not going astray, not going here and there; not allowing many different sorts of thoughts but one singular path, moving in the same direction.
Science depends on concentration and philosophy depends on contemplation. Religion depends on meditation.
Meditation is when mind is not functioning at all, when mind is absolutely silent and still, as if absent. In this absentness of mind your authentic being surfaces. Your mask disappears and your original face is encountered for the first time.
For the first time you know who you are.
And this experience of oneself is the experience of one’s divineness. Out of this divineness radiates love. It is not addressed to anyone in particular; it simply radiates to friend and to foe, to the familiar and to the stranger; it does not know any discrimination. When the sun rises it does not rise only for roses and not for marigolds. It does not rise only for rich people and not for the poor. It does not rise only for the strong and not for the weak. It rises unaddressed. It radiates in all directions. Whoever has eyes will be able to see it. Having eyes simply means whoever is receptive, whoever is sensitive will be able to see it. The sun does not rise only for the blind. Only a blind man can pass a man of meditation without feeling his love. I mean spiritually blind, one who does not have any idea of who is within his being, who knows himself according to others, what they say. His knowledge of himself is nothing but a collection of opinions of other people. He does not know himself directly, immediately; and because he does not know himself, he remains closed; otherwise it was not possible to crucify Jesus.
Those who crucified Jesus must have been spiritually blind. The man was absolutely innocent, and he was full of love. He had not harmed anyone; in fact, he was trying to help everyone. But it is a strange world. Here there are more blind people than those who have eyes. And because the people who have eyes and receptivity are in a minority they remain silent. It is very unfortunate that the blind are very articulate and those who have eyes, seeing that the majority are blind, remain silent. They go on seeing that Socrates is being poisoned by the blind and they don’t protest. In my eyes the people who poisoned Socrates or crucified Jesus or murdered Mansoor or assassinated Sarmad, they were less responsible than those who knew that what was happening was absolutely wrong but remained silent out of fear.
There is a beautiful incident . . .
When Al-Hillaj Mansoor, a Mohammedan mystic, was being very primitively assassinated… Jesus’ crucifixion is far more sophisticated; Socrates’ poisoning is even more sophisticated, but nobody has suffered as much as Al-Hillaj Mansoor. First they cut his legs — they killed him piece by piece, just to torture him as much as possible, to the optimum — then they cut his hands. Then they destroyed his eyes with hot iron rods — they went on piece by piece. Thousands of people had gathered to watch. Al-Hillaj Mansoor’s master, Junnaid, a famous teacher, was also present.
Of course he was absolutely against what was happening, but the weakness of the good . . . Seeing the majority he remained silent. He knew that Mansoor was born after thousands of years; he was one of the rarest flowers. Junnaid had been a teacher of thousands, but none of his students, none of his disciples had reached to the same heights as Mansoor — all this he understood.
People were throwing stones before the assassination began. He did not want people to know that he was not throwing stones, so instead of throwing a stone he threw a rose flower, just to show that he had thrown. Now in thousands of stones, who can find out what he had thrown? People saw that he had thrown something.
But Mansoor could see. When thousands of stones were falling on him, hitting him, and blood was flowing all over his body, he could see that a roseflower also fell on his face. And he knew that this roseflower could only be thrown by his master Junnaid. He shouted from his cross, “Junnaid, these thousands of stones are not hurting me so much as your roseflower; it has created a wound in my very soul.”
This statement is tremendous: “Thousands of stones have not hurt me. These are people who don’t know me — but you know me; I had grown under your shadow. Still, instead of protesting, you are so cowardly that you are afraid that if you don’t throw something people may start suspecting that you may be a friend . . .” And tears came to his eyes.
And Mansoor said, “These tears are not for these stones; these stones are not worth my tears. These tears are for the man who has thrown the rose flower to me.”
And still Junnaid remained silent . . .
The good man is responsible. The silent man, the man who has understood is responsible for all that has happened in the history of man against the people who were just pure love, pure silence, pure godliness. But perhaps nothing can be said to those good people either, because if they had come out there would have been another assassination and nothing else. That’s what Junnaid said afterwards, and he was right.
Other disciples asked him, “It was very shameful when he called out your name. You behaved as if you were not Junnaid. It is shameful that you did not protest when your greatest disciple was being tortured — tortured brutally.” No, even animals don’t torture in that way. If you want to kill someone, kill. But to cut him piece by piece is so condemnable. The other disciples said, “You should have protested.”
Junnaid said, “Do you think it would have saved him? I have also thought about it. It is not that I have not felt the tragedy, I have felt as much hurt as Mansoor. I loved him, but I knew that if I had come out and protested, then instead of one man, two men would have been assassinated. Nothing would have been achieved by it.”
But still I feel it would have been better that two men were assassinated instead of one. I differ from Junnaid, because there may have been a third man who would have come out, and three men may have provoked courage in many more. It is not that in that vast crowd there was only Junnaid who saw that it was absolutely inhuman and ugly — and there was no crime. The crime was simply that Al-Hillaj Mansoor had said, “I am God,” ana’l haq, and simultaneously he said, “It is not that only I am God — you are also. I know it; you still have to know it. That’s the only difference.”
So he was not speaking because of his ego, he was speaking because of his experience. He was not denying godhood to anyone. He was simply saying, “Your God seems to be asleep; my God is awake. One day it was also asleep and I was as ignorant as you are. One day you will be also as awake as I am. It is only a difference of time.”
Such a compassionate man. Why has humanity behaved so badly with these people? One of the reasons, fundamental reasons, is that their height hurts people’s egos. Their silence, their love, their beauty, their grace, their blissfulness . . . Everything hurts people, because they are living in dark holes, in misery, in suffering, in anguish, and somebody is standing on the hilltop, sunlit, surrounded by fragrant flowers. They cannot forgive such a man. […]
A man of love is really the only man who is cultured, who is civilized. And such a love arises only as a fragrance of meditation; hence my insistence on meditation. Unless we turn people towards meditation on a vaster scale — as it has never been done before — there is not much hope for the future, for future humanity.
But I am not a pessimist, not a single inch. I am an absolute optimist. I will believe to the very last moment when the world is committing suicide in a world war, to the last moment I will trust that man will wake up. Seeing such a tremendous tragedy ahead, how can people remain asleep?
Now there are only two alternatives: either suicide or meditation. Life has brought us to such a point where there are not many roads; just two roads, two possibilities, simple choice. Either humanity chooses to commit suicide under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, or humanity chooses to meditate, to be silent, to be peaceful, to be human, to be loving. […]
The religious person searches for power over himself, and the politician searches for power over others. The politician is bound to be violent, destructive, ugly, barbarous.
Only a man who wants to be the power over himself, who wants to know where the source of his life is, from where he is getting his energy, where the life and energy source within him are . . .
The search for it is meditation.
Finding it is enlightenment.
And once you have found it you have so much, in such abundance, that you cannot help sharing it. You become a rain cloud which wants to shower on the thirsty earth. And you must have smelled the sweet fragrance that comes from the thirsty earth, from the first rain cloud’s shower on it, in gratitude, in thankfulness.
A man of meditation like Gautam Buddha showers his love — he is a rain cloud, or better to call him a love cloud, who showers his love to all those who are thirsty, to all those who are aware that love is showering.
But the majority are so foolish, they immediately open their umbrellas. They protect themselves from love, they protect themselves from Gautam Buddhas, they protect themselves from Socrates . . . Strange people. Something is basically wrong, and that is, they don’t know themselves and they don’t know their thirst and they don’t know what nourishment they need.
Love is the nourishment that is missing in the world.
Yussel Moscowitz had lost all interest in life, so he went to see his psychiatrist. The usually patient shrink decided to use shock tactics this time and said sharply, “What would happen if I cut off your left ear?”
“I could not hear,” replied Yussel with a sigh.
“Then what would happen if I cut off your right ear?” barked the shrink.
“I could not see,” said Yussel, beginning to show signs of boredom.
The psychiatrist became alarmed. “This is serious. Why do you say you could not see if I cut off your right ear?”
“Because,” said Yussel with a yawn, “my hat would fall over my eyes. Both the ears gone, how can I see?”
The people you think are psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, the people who are helping humanity to become more sane, are the most insane people in the world. The statistics are very clear. From no other profession do so many people go mad as from the profession of psychiatry. The proportion is double that from any other profession.
In the past the professors used to be champions of going mad; now they are number two. Number one is the psychologists. They commit suicide four times more than any other profession — and these are the people who are helping humanity to be sane, normal, healthy, intelligent. These are the people supposed to teach you how to live and how to live joyously. These are the people who claim that their function is to teach the art of living.
But if these people are going to teach the art of living it is going to be a really dangerous art of living. It will not be the art of living, it will be the art of at the most vegetating.
The professor asked the young girl in his psychology class, “Which part of the body expands to ten times its natural size under an emotional impact?”
Blushing, the girl replied, “I would rather not answer that.”
The professor called on the boy sitting next to her who promptly replied, “The pupil of the eye.” The professor turned back to the girl and said, “Your confusion shows three things. One, that you did not do your homework; two, that you have a dirty mind; and three, that one day you will be sadly disappointed.”
-Osho
From The Invitation, Discourse #28, Q2
Copyright © OSHO International Foundation
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