Tuesday, February 15, 2011

"Life, Career and your Genius"- OSHO Talks

Osho – It is always good to find something that you like – because it is your life; it should not be wasted in any way. And if you have the feeling that you don’t like any job and that you have to do it, it becomes destructive. Then you are pushing somehow, dragging yourself… and any kind of dragging is destructive. When there is no joy, there cannot be any creation.
When you are simply doing it for the sake of doing and your heart is not in it, then so much time is wasted. One should not do a job only for a living. A living is a consideration, but is only secondary; life is the most primary consideration. And a job should be such that it gives you a living and life too.
One should not sell one’s life for a living. Otherwise one day or other One is bound to be in deep misery about it, and then nothing can be done when the time is lost. Change your work! There was no need to remain in it so long if you were not liking it. It is not too late yet change it.
It always happens: the mind clings to the known, to the familiar, to the secure. Now that your job is secured, changing a job means moving into new difficulties, new situations. One never knows whether one will be able to cope with them or not. Maybe the new job will not pay so much – but these things should never be considered. A little less pay will do, a little more inconvenience will do, but if you are happy doing it then everything should be sacrificed for happiness.
And the work that you do is a major part of your life. It is not only that you do it; by and by it shapes you into a certain pattern. You do it and at the same time it is creating you. So people who are in certain jobs which they don’t like – in fact which they hate – by and by become full of hatred towards life itself. So get out of it. There is no need to be in it any more!

[A sannyasin who is a photographer said she was feeling low energy and disinterested in photography.]

Osho – This comes again and again in everybody’s life: whatsoever you are doing you get tired of, you get fed up, you get bored with it. It is very easy to be interested in a new thing – it needs great guts to remain interested in an old thing. That’s what makes a person a genius. Otherwise everybody will become a genius. The only difference between a genius and an ordinary person is that the genius has the guts to stick at something even when he is feeling bored, fed up.
These are plateaus that come. Mm? you work with great joy because something is new – there is a great exploration, new territory and you are enchanted… it is like a romance, a honeymoon. But by and by you become acquainted with the territory; you have looked into all the corners of it and there seems to be nothing new. Now you know all about it so the sensation is no more there, the thrill is no more there.
Now, it is at this point that if you can stick at it and make efforts to find something new in it, you will break through one plane, and on another plane the exploration starts again. If you simply listen to this boredom and you drop out, then those seven years will have gone down the drain.
That’s how many people lose their life energy: they don’t stick at things. It really needs courage to remain with the old, because when the plateau comes and everything seems to be just a repetition, doing the same thing again and again and again, one feels to change – change the wife, change the husband, change the job, change the friend, change the town, go somewhere else, do something new. But with the new again after seven years the same will happen!
You can change ten times in your life and after each seven years the same will happen, so the whole life will be a wastage. If you go on digging on the same spot for seventy years you will reach to some depth – and it can be reached from anywhere.
Now photography is such a creative thing and it is going to be more and more creative in the future because more sophisticated instruments will be available – they are available. You can do a thousand and one things with photography now; just a few years ago they were just impossible to do. One has to be creative, inventive… one has to look for new ways, new visions, new dreams. And sometimes this is natural, this is part of nature: one feels stuck.
Those who drop out are the rolling stones: they don’t gather any moss. And it has nothing to do with the work itself – it is just the tendency of the mind. Photography or painting or music, or dancing – anything – will come to the same point, and once you have made a pattern it will be repeated. This is really a sheer wastage of energies.

Go on working in it. If you are feeling stuck, that simply means that you have to explore new ways, new directions, new dimensions in it; and they are always there! Life is so mysterious that it is never finished. A man can go on working with a small thing and can devote his whole life to it and still there will be much to be explored after he has died.
This is the whole art of being a genius. The genius is just a little more stubborn than ordinary people, that’s all. He does not listen to the mind – he goes on hammering: he digs a hole. A sufi master – Jalaluddin Rumi – once took his disciples to a field. There were eight holes in the field and no hole had any water; the whole field was wasted. The disciples asked, ’Master, why have you brought us here?’
He said, ’To teach you something. This farmer wants to dig a well. He digs eight feet, ten feet, then he gets fed up with it and he thinks that this place is not right; he is bored so he starts digging at some other place. He has done this work the whole year round – he has destroyed the whole field and not a single hole has become a well. Now if he had dug at the same spot that well would have been one hundred feet deep.’ Jalaluddin said to his disciples, ’Remember this – the same applies to the inner world too.’
Just gather yourself together and don’t try to find excuses – simply start working with your total energy. From tomorrow morning start without thinking about it! Just go ahead, and within a few days it will be broken… and when it is broken, you will feel so thrilled. Whenever any plateau is broken, life takes on such a beauty and the work becomes such a joy. Then it is a second honeymoon and on a deeper level. And I am saying this to you to be remembered as a golden rule – it is so in every way, in every direction of life.
If you love a man, one day you will feel finished; that is the right moment to go on loving, to gather your energies and to explore the man again. If you can break that plateau you will see a new man arising before you… fresher than ever, younger than ever, more beautiful than ever. In fact you had never known such beauty and such depth. You have broken one more screen – the man is more available to you… again one day you will feel stuck! And remember: those who lose heart and escape, are great losers. Be a little more stubborn, stick to it. For three months do all that you can do with effort and then you tell me, mm?"

OSHO
Source: from Osho Book “This Is It”

Thursday, February 10, 2011

"Marriage" - OSHO Talks

Question - Why do you appear to put down Marriage and yet tell people to get Married?

Osho - This is from Anurag. To me, marriage is a dead thing. It is an institution, and you cannot live in an institution; only mad people live in institutions. It is a substitute for love. Love is dangerous: to be in love is to be in a storm, constantly. You need courage and you need awareness, and you are to be ready for anything. There is no security in love; love is insecure. Marriage is a security: the registry office, the police, the court are behind it. The state, the society, the religion -- they are all behind it. Marriage is a social phenomenon. Love is individual, personal, intimate.

Because love is dangerous, insecure.... And nobody knows where love will lead. It is just like a cloud -- moving with no destination. Love is a hidden cloud, whereabouts unknown. Nobody knows where it is at any moment of time. Unpredictable -- no astrologer can predict anything about love. About marriage? -- astrologers are very, very helpful; they can predict.

Man has to create marriage because man is afraid of the unknown. On all levels of life and existence, man has created substitutes: for love there is marriage; for real religion there are sects -- they are like marriages. Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, Jainism -- they are not real religion. Real religion has no name; it is like love. But because love is dangerous and you are so afraid of the future, you would like to have some security. You believe more in insurance companies than in life. That's why you have created marriage.

Marriage is more permanent than love. Love may be eternal, but it is not permanent. It may continue forever and forever, but there is no inner necessity for it to continue. It is like a flower: bloomed in the morning, by the evening gone. It is not like the rock. Marriage is more permanent; you can rely on it. In old age it will be helpful.

It is a way to avoid difficulties, but whenever you avoid difficulties and challenges you have avoided growth also. Married people never grow. Lovers grow, because they have to meet the challenge every moment -- and with no security. They have to create an inner phenomenon. With security you need not bother to create anything; the society helps. Marriage is a formality, a legal bondage. Love is of the heart; marriage is of the mind. That's why I am never in favor of marriage.

But the question is pertinent, relevant, because sometimes I tell people to get married. Marriage is a hell, but sometimes people need it. What to do? So I have to tell them to get into marriage. They need to pass through the hell of it, and they cannot understand the hell of it unless they pass through it. I am not saying that in marriage love cannot grow; it can grow, but there is no necessity for it. I am not saying that in love marriage cannot grow; it can grow, but there is no necessity, no logical necessity in it.

Love can become marriage, but then it is a totally different kind of marriage: it is not a social formality, it is not an institution, it is not a bondage. When love becomes marriage it means two individuals decide to live together -- but in absolute freedom, nonpossessive of each other. Love is nonpossessive; it gives freedom.

When love grows into marriage, marriage is not an ordinary thing. It is absolutely extraordinary. It has nothing to do with the registry office. You may need the registry office also, the social sanction may be needed, but those are just on the periphery; they are not the central core of it. In the center is the heart, in the center is freedom.

And sometimes out of marriage also love can grow, but it rarely happens. Out of marriage love rarely happens. At the most, familiarity. At the most, a certain kind of sympathy, not love. Love is passionate; sympathy is dull. Love is alive; sympathy is just so-so, lukewarm.

But why do I tell people to get married? When I see that they are after security, when I see that they are after social sanction, when I see they are afraid, when I see that they cannot move into love if marriage is not there, then I tell them to go into it -- but I will go on helping them to go beyond it. I will go on helping them to transcend it.

Marriage should be transcended; only then real marriage happens. Marriage should be forgotten completely. In fact the other person you have been in love with should always remain a stranger and never should be taken for granted. When two persons live as strangers, there is a beauty to it, a very simple, innocent beauty to it. And when you live with somebody as a stranger....

And everybody is a stranger. You cannot know a person. Knowledge is very superficial; a person is very profound. A person is an infinite mystery. That's why we say everybody carries a god within. How can you know a god? At the most you can touch the periphery. And the more you know about a person, the more humble you will become -- the more you will feel that the mystery is untouched. In fact the mystery becomes more and more deep. The more you know, the less you feel that you know.

If lovers are really in love, they will never reduce the other person to a known entity; because only things can be known -- persons never. Only things can become part of knowledge. A person is a mystery -- the greatest mystery there is.

Transcend marriage. It is not a question of legality, formality, family -- all that nonsense. Needed, because you live in a society, but transcend; don't be finished at that. And don't try to possess a person. Don't start feeling that the other is the husband -- you have reduced the beauty of the person into an ugly thing: husband. Never say that this woman is your wife -- the stranger is no longer there; you have reduced it to a very profane level, to a very ordinary level of things. Wives and husbands belong to the world. Lovers belong to the other shore.

Remember the sacredness and holiness of the other. Never impinge on it; never trespass it. A lover is always hesitant. He always gives you space to be yourself. He is grateful; he never feels that you are his possession. He is thankful that sometimes in rare moments you allow him your innermost shrine to enter and to be with you. He is always thankful.

But husbands and wives are always complaining, never thankful -- always fighting. And if you watch their fight it is ugly. The whole beauty of love disappears. Only a very ordinary reality exists: the wife, the husband, the children, and the day-to-day routine. The unknown no longer touches it. That's why you will see dust gathers around -- a wife looks dull, a husband looks dull. Life has lost meaning, vibrancy, significance. It is no longer a poetry; it has become gross.

Love is poetry. Marriage is ordinary prose, good for ordinary communication. If you are purchasing vegetables, good; but if you are looking at the sky and talking to God, not enough -- poetry is needed. Ordinary life is proselike. A religious life is poetrylike: a different rhythm, a different meter, something of the unknown and the mysterious.

I am not in favor of marriage. Don't misunderstand me -- I am not saying to live with people unmarried. Do whatsoever the society wants to be done, but don't take it as the whole. That is just the periphery; go beyond it. And I tell you to get married if I feel that this is what you need. In fact if I feel that you need to go in hell I would allow you -- and push you -- to go in hell, because that is what you need, and that is how you will grow."

OSHO

Source: from Osho Book "Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 6" (New Title : Essence of Yoga)

To view or buy this book, visit the url:
http://oshoonline.com/index.php?route=product%2Fproduct&keyword=essence&category_id=0&product_id=198