Emotions

by Osho

  He must have been pure rage! Indians are upset about that. They cannot trust that Jesus is enlightened, just because of this incident. People have their prejudices, their ideas. Rather than seeing into reality, rather than looking into an enlightened man, they come ready with so many concepts, and unless he fits them he is not enlightened. And let me tell you, no enlightened person is going to fit with your unenlightened prejudices; it is impossible.

  Anger and sadness are the same.

  Sadness is passive anger and anger is active sadness. Because sadness comes easy, anger seems to be difficult. It is because you are too much in tune with the passive. It is difficult for a sad person to be angry. If you can make a sad person angry, his sadness will disappear immediately. It will be very difficult for an angry person to be sad. If you can make him sad, his anger will disappear immediately.

  In all our emotions the basic polarity continues - of man and woman, yin and yang, the male and the female. Anger is male, sadness is female. So if you are in tune with sadness, it is difficult to shift to anger, but I would like you to shift. Just exploding it within won’t help much because again you are seeking some way of being passive. No. Bring it out, act it out. Even if it looks nonsense, then too. Be a buffoon in your own eyes, but bring it out.

  If you can float between anger and sadness, both become, similarly easy. You will have a transcendence and then you will b able to watch. You can stand behind the screen and watch these games, and then you can go beyond both. But first you have to b moving easily between these two. otherwise you tend to be sad and when one is heavy, transcendence is difficult.

  Remember, when two energies, opposite energies, are exactly alike, fifty-fifty, then it is very easy to get out of them, because are fighting and canceling each other and you are not in anybody’s grip. Your sadness and your anger are fifty-fifty, equal energies, so they cancel each other. Suddenly you have freedom and you can slip out. But if sadness is seventy percent and anger thirty percent. then it is very difficult. Thirty percent anger in contrast with seventy percent sadness means forty percent sadness will still be there and it will not be possible; you will not be capable of easily slipping out. That forty percent will hang over you.

  So this is one of the basic laws of inner energies - to always let the opposite polarities come to an equal status, and then you are able to slip out of them. It is as if two persons are fighting and you can escape. They are so engaged with themselves that you need not worry, and you can escape.

  Whatsoever is the case is the case.

  Accept it and let it come - let it come in front of you.

  In fact, just to say ‘do not repress’ is not enough.

  If you allow me, I would like to say, ‘Befriend it.’

  You are feeling sad? Befriend it.

  Have compassion for it. Sadness also has a being.

  Allow it, embrace it, sit with it, hold hands with it.

  Be friendly. Be in love with it. Sadness is beautiful!

  Nothing is wrong with it.

  Who told you that something

  is wrong in being sad?

  In fact, only sadness gives you depth.

  Laughter is shallow; happiness is skin-deep.

  Sadness goes to the very bones,

  to the marrow.

  Nothing goes as deep as sadness.

  So don’t be worried. Remain with it and sadness will take you to your innermost core. You can ride on it and you will be able to know a few new things about your being that you had never known before. Those things can be revealed only in a sad state, they can never be revealed in a happy state. Darkness is also good and darkness is also divine. The day is not only God’s, the night is his also. I call this attitude religious.

  To leave everything and just sit under a tree

  and feel happy is not difficult - anybody will feel that way. Nothing to do, you can be detached; everything to do, you become attached. But when you do everything AND remain unattached, when you move with the crowd, in the world and yet alone, then something real is happening.

  If you don’t feel anger when you are alone, that is not the point. When you are alone you will not feel anger because anger is a relationship, it needs somebody to be angry towards. Unless you are mad you will not feel anger when you are alone; it will be inside but it will not find any way to come out. When the other is there, not to be angry THEN is the point. When you don’t have any money, any things, any house - if you are unattached, what is the difficulty in it? But when you have everything and you remain unattached - a beggar in the palace - then something very deep has been attained.

  If you move to the Himalayas and are unattached, you are a single note of the music; if you live in the world and are attached, again you are a single note of the music. But when you are in the world AND beyond it, and you carry your Himalaya in the heart, you are a harmony not a single note.

  An accord happens, including all discordant notes, a synthesis of the opposites, a bridge between two banks.

  And the highest is possible only when life is most complex; only in complexity the highest happens.

  When you see anger in others,

  go and dig within yourself

  and you will find it there;

  when you see too much ego in

  others, just go inside

  and you will find ego sitting there.

  The inside functions like a projector;

  others become screens

  and you start seeing films on others

  which are really your own tapes.

  The only problem with sadness,

  desperation, anger, hopelessness, anxiety, anguish, misery, is that you want to get rid of them. That’s the only barrier. You will have to live with them. You cannot just escape. They are the very situation in which life has to integrate and grow. They are the challenges of life. Accept them. They are blessings in disguise. If you want to escape from them, if you somehow want to get rid of them, then a problem arises - because if you want to get rid of something you never look at it directly.

  The star of a Broadway hit was visiting friends when talk got around, as usual, to psychiatry. “I must say,” said the hostess, “I think my analyst is the best in the world! You can’t imagine what he has done for me. You ought to try him.”

  “But I don’t need analysis,” said the star. “I could not be more normal - there is nothing wrong with me.”

  “But he is absolutely great,” insisted her friend. “He will find something wrong.”

  There are people who live on finding something wrong with you. Their whole trade secret is to find something wrong with you. They cannot accept you as you are; they will give you ideals, ideas, ideologies, and they will make you feel guilty and they will make you feel worthless, dirt. In your own eyes, they will make you feel so condemned that you will forget all about freedom.

  In fact you will become afraid of freedom, because you will see how bad you are, how wrong you are - and if you are free, you are going to do something wrong, so follow somebody. The priest depends on it, the politician depends on it. They give you right and wrong, fixed ideas, and then you will remain guilty forever.

  There is nothing right and nothing wrong.

  If you are angry, the priest will say anger is wrong, don’t be angry. What will you do? You can repress anger, you can sit upon it, you can swallow it, literally, but it will go into you, into your system. Swallow anger and you will have ulcers in the stomach, swallow anger and sooner or later you will have cancer. Swallow anger and you will have a thousand and one problems arising out of it, because anger is poison. But what will you do? If anger is wrong, you have to swallow it.

  I don’t say anger is wrong, I say anger is energy - pure energy, beautiful energy. When anger arises, be aware of it, and see the miracle happen. When anger arises, be aware of it, and if you are aware you will be surprised; you are in for a surprise - maybe the greatest surprise of your life - that as you become aware, anger disappears. Anger i
s transformed. Anger becomes pure energy; anger becomes compassion, anger becomes forgiveness, anger becomes love. And you need not repress, so you are not burdened by some poison. And you are not being angry, so you are not hurting anybody. Both are saved: the other, the object of your anger, is saved, and you are saved. In the past, either the object was to suffer, or you were to suffer.

  What I am saying is that there is no need for anybody to suffer. Just be aware, let awareness be there. Anger will arise and will be consumed by awareness. One cannot be angry with awareness and one cannot be greedy with awareness and one cannot be jealous with awareness. Awareness is the golden key.

  Try to understand why it is happening,

  from where it is coming, where the roots are,

  how it happens, how it functions,

  how it overpowers you,

  how in anger you become mad.

  Anger has happened before,

  it is happening now,

  but now add a new element to it,

  the element of understanding -

  and then the quality will change.

  Then, by and by, you will see

  that the more you understand anger,

  the less it happens.

  And when you understand it perfectly,

  it disappears.

  Understanding is like heat.

  When the heat comes

  to a particular point -

  one hundred degrees -

  the water disappears.

  They say anger is bad.

  Everyone has said to you that anger is bad, but no one has told you how to know what anger is.

  Everyone says sex is bad. They have been teaching, teaching, that sex is bad, and no one says what sex is and how to know it. Ask your father, and he will become uneasy. He will say, “Do not talk about such bad things!” But these bad things are facts. Even your father could not escape it; otherwise you would not have been born! You are a naked fact. And no matter what your father says about sex, he couldn’t escape it. But he will feel uneasy if you ask him because no one has told him; his parents never told him why sex is bad.

  Why? And how to know it?

  And how to go deep into it?

  No one will tell this to you,

  they will just go on labeling things:

  this is bad and that is good.

  That labeling creates misery and hell.

  So one thing to remember -

  for any seeker, a real seeker,

  this is a basic thing to be understood:

  remain with your facts,

  try to know them.

  Do not allow the society

  to force its ideology on you.

  Do not look at yourself

  through others’ eyes.

  You have eyes; you are not blind.

  And you have the facts

  of your inner life.

  Use your eyes!

  Step within yourself without any prejudice,

  without any assumptions and see what is anger. Let your anger reveal to you what anger is. Do not impose your presumptions on it. And the very day you discover anger in its complete nakedness, in its complete hideousness, in its burning fire, in its murderous venom, you will suddenly discover that you have stepped out of it. Anger has vanished! Any tendency can be treated this way - which tendency, does not matter. The process is the same because the illness is the same, only the names are different.

  Why do people get angry at you?

  They are not angry at you, they are really afraid of you. And to hide the fear they have to project the anger. Anger is always to hide fear. People use all kinds of strategies. There are people who will laugh just so that they can stop their tears. In laughing you will forget, they will forget... and the tears can remain hidden. In anger, their fear remains hidden.

  I am simply helping you to open up in all the dimensions, even if you feel that they are going against your ideas that you have held up to now. Even then, in fact more so, you will be available to them because this is a chance, an opportunity, to judge whether whatsoever you have been thinking is right or not. It is a golden moment when you are encountered by something contrary to your ideas, thoughts, which up to now you have been thinking are rational. But if they are really rational then what is the fear?

  It is fear that keeps people closed. They can’t hear you - they are afraid to hear. And their anger is really their fear upside down. It is only a person who is full of fear who becomes immediately angry. If he does not become angry then you will be able to see his fear. Anger is a cover-up. By being angry he is trying to make you afraid: before you get any idea of his fear, he is trying to make you afraid. Do you see the simple psychology of it? He does not want you to know that he is afraid. The only way is to make you afraid; then he is completely at ease. You are afraid, he is not afraid - and there is nothing to be afraid of in a man who is afraid.

  Their anger is an effort to deceive themselves. It has nothing to do with you.

  But anger simply shows fear, remember always: anger is fear standing on its head. It is always fear that hides behind anger; fear is the other side of anger. Whenever you become afraid, the only way to hide the fear is to be angry because fear will expose you. Anger will create a curtain around you; you can hide behind.

  JEALOUSY

  Jealousy is comparison.

  And we have been taught to compare,

  we have been conditioned to compare,

  always compare.

  Somebody else has a better house,

  somebody else has a more beautiful body,

  somebody else has more money,

  somebody else has a more

  charismatic personality.

  Compare, go on comparing yourself

  with everybody else you pass by,

  and great jealousy will be the outcome;

  it is the by-product of

  the conditioning for comparison.

  Otherwise, if you drop comparing, jealousy disappears. Then you simply know you are you, and you are nobody else, and there is no need. It is good that you don’t compare yourself with trees, otherwise you will start feeling very jealous: why are you not green? And why has God been so hard on you - and no flowers? It is better that you don’t compare with birds, with rivers, with mountains; otherwise you will suffer. You only compare with human beings, because you have been conditioned to compare only with human beings; you don’t compare with peacocks and with parrots. Otherwise, your jealousy would be more and more: you would be so burdened by jealousy that you would not be able to live at all.

  Comparison is a very foolish attitude,

  because each person

  is unique and incomparable.

  Once this understanding settles in you,

  jealousy disappears.

  Each is unique and incomparable.

  You are just yourself.

  Nobody has ever been like you,

  and nobody will ever be like you.

  And you need not

  be like anybody else, either.

  God creates only originals;

  he does not believe in carbon copies.

  Sex creates jealousy but it is a secondary thing. So it is not a question of how to drop jealousy; you cannot drop it because you cannot drop sex. The question is how to transform sex into love, then jealousy disappears. If you love a person, the very love is enough guarantee, the very love is enough security. If you love a person, you know he cannot go to anybody else. And if he goes, he goes; nothing can be done. What can you do? You can kill the person, but a dead person will not be of much use.

  When you love a person you trust that he cannot go to anybody else. If he goes, there is no love and nothing can be done. Love brings this understanding. There is no jealousy. So if jealousy is there, know well there is no love. You are playing a game, you are hiding sex behind love. Love is just a painted word, the reality is sex.

  SOCIETY has exploited the individual

  in so many ways th
at it is almost impossible to believe. It has created devices so clever and cunning that it is almost impossible even to detect that they are devices. These devices are to exploit the individual, to destroy his integrity, to take away from him all that he has got - without even creating a suspicion in him, even a doubt about what is being done to him.

  Jealousy is one of those tremendously powerful devices.

  From the very childhood every society, every culture, every religion teaches everybody comparison.

  Jealousy is one of the greatest devices.Look at it very closely: what does it mean?

  Jealousy means to live in comparison.Somebody is higher than you, somebody is lower than you. You are always somewhere on a middle rung of the ladder. Perhaps the ladder is a circle because nobody finds the end of the ladder. Everybody is stuck somewhere in the middle, everybody is in the middle. The ladder seems to be a round wheel.

  Somebody is above you - that hurts. That keeps you fighting, struggling, moving by any means possible, because if you succeed nobody cares whether you have succeeded rightly or wrongly. Success proves you are right; failure proves that you are wrong. All that matters is success, so any means will do. The end proves the means right. So you need not bother about means - and nobody does bother. The whole question is how to climb on up the ladder. But you never come to the end of it. And whosoever is above you is creating jealousy in you, that he has succeeded and you have failed.