by Osho
A priori conclusions make you believers, not scientists.
When I say “meditate over it,” I mean watch. Be a scientist in your inner world. Let your mind be your lab, and you observe - with no condemnation, remember. Don’t say, “Jealousy is bad.” Who knows? Don’t say, “Anger is bad.” Who knows? Yes, you have heard, you have been told, but that is what others say, this is not your experience. And you have to be very existential, experiential: unless your experiment proves it, you are not to say yes or no to anything. You have to be utterly non-judgmental. And then watching jealousy or anger or sex is a miracle.
What happens when you watch without any judgment?
You start seeing through and through. Jealousy becomes transparent: you see the stupidity of it, you see the foolishness of it. Not that you have already decided that it is stupid; if you have decided you will miss the whole point. Remember it: I am not saying decide it is stupid, it is foolish. If you decide, you miss the whole point. You simply go without any decision, just to see what exactly it is.
What is this jealousy?
What is this energy called jealousy? And watch it as you watch a rose flower - just look into it. When there is no conclusion your eyes are clear; the clarity is attained only by those who have no conclusions. Watch, look into it, and it will become transparent, and you WILL come to know that it is stupid. And knowing its stupidity, it drops of its own accord. You don’t need to drop it.
You cannot even see the other person being happy with someone for a minute - and you think you can die for the other person? Just try to see what actually is in you for the other person - and jealousy will disappear. In most of the cases with jealousy, your love will also disappear. But it is good, because what is the point of having a love which is full of jealousy, which is not love?
If jealousy disappears and love still remains, then you have something solid in your life which is worth having.
Jealousy is one of the most prevalent areas of psychological ignorance about yourself, about others and more particularly, about relationship.People think they know what love is - they do not know. And their misunderstanding about love creates jealousy. By ‘love’ people mean a certain kind of monopoly, some possessiveness - without understanding a simple fact of life: that the moment you possess a living being you have killed that person.
Life cannot be possessed.
You cannot have it in your fist.
If you want to have it,
you have to keep your hands open.
What makes you jealous?
Jealousy itself is not the root. You love a woman, you love a man; you want to possess the man or the woman just out of fear that perhaps tomorrow he may move with somebody else. The fear of tomorrow destroys your today, and it is a vicious circle.If every day is destroyed because of the fear of tomorrow, sooner or later the man is going to look for some other woman because you are just a pain in the neck. And when he starts looking for another woman or starts moving with another woman, you think your jealousy has proved right. In fact it is your jealousy that has created the whole thing.
So the first thing to remember is: Don’t be bothered about tomorrows; today is enough. Somebody loves you... let this be a day of joy, a day of celebration. Be so totally in love today that your totality and your love will be enough for the man not to move away from you. Your jealousy will move him away; only your love can keep him with you. His jealousy will move you away; his love can keep you with him.
Don’t think of tomorrow. The moment you think of tomorrow your living today remains half-hearted. Just live today, and leave tomorrow, it will take its own course. And remember one thing, that if today has been such a beauty of experience, such a blessing - out of today is born tomorrow, so why be worried about it?
If some day the man you have loved, the woman you have loved finds somebody else - it is simply human to be happy, but your woman is happy with somebody else - it does not make any difference whether she is happy with you or happy with somebody else, she is happy. And if you love her so much how can you destroy her happiness?
A real love will always be happy if the partner feels joyous with somebody else. In this situation - when a woman is with somebody else, and you are still happy and you are still grateful to the woman and you still tell the woman, “You have absolute freedom; just be totally happy, that is my happiness. With whom you are happy is insignificant, what is significant is your happiness” - my feeling is that she cannot remain away from you for long, she will be back. Who can leave such a man or such a woman?
Your jealousy destroys everything. Your possessiveness destroys everything.
This is a universal problem;
and it cannot be solved, it can only be transcended. People try to solve it. They create more problems; that’s what is being done all over the world. These problems - jealousy, possessiveness - are not really problems but symptoms, symptoms that you don’t yet know what love is. We take it for granted that we know what love is, and then the problem of jealousy arises. That is not right. The problem is arising because love is not yet there; it simply shows that love has not yet arrived, it simply shows the absence of love. So you cannot solve it.
All that is needed is to forget about jealousy, because that is a negative fight. It is fighting with darkness; it is pointless. Rather, light a candle. That’s what love is. Once love starts flowing, jealousy and possessiveness and all that simply become non-existent. You are simply surprised at where they have gone, you cannot find them. It is just as when you light a candle you can go on looking for darkness all over the room and you will not find it. You are even looking with a light and you cannot find it. You cannot find it with light because it is no more there; it was simply an absence of light. Jealousy is absence of love.
My approach is: don’t be bothered about jealousy, otherwise you will be getting into such a trap that you will never be able to get out of. Forget about it! It is symptomatic, it is simply indicative. It is good that it indicates something; it is a signal that love has not yet happened. It is good! Learn something from it, take note of it and start moving into love. Enjoy love more and there will be less jealousy. Delight in love more and there will be still less jealousy. Let your love become a totality, a madness. Let it have an intensity, and in that intensity jealousy will be burned out.
A real lover has never known what jealousy is. So I will not say to start doing something about jealousy; no, not at all. Thank it because it simply shows something which has to happen has not happened. Put more energy into love. Rather than putting energy into analyzing jealousy and fighting with it, put more energy into love. Otherwise you will be distracted: you will start following jealousy, and that is a desert. You will never come to its end. That’s where the whole of psychoanalysis has got stuck: it takes symptoms as problems and then starts penetrating those symptoms, analyzing. You can go on peeling the onion, you can go on and on, after one layer another layer, and after that another layer.
Have you come across a person who is really psychoanalyzed? There exists not a single person on the earth whose psychoanalysis is complete. It cannot be! Year in and out you can go to the psychoanalyst, and there is always something which you have to explore. It is a futile direction, it takes you sideways. Go straight into love!
Make love a great celebration.
Put your total energy into it
with no thought of the future.
While you are in love
with anybody,
don’t hold back.
If you hold back in the moment, that will become jealousy. If you go totally into it when you are making love, without holding anything, if you are utterly lost in it, your whole body and being becomes orgasmic; you are wild, screaming and singing and crying and weeping and laughing all together, you will feel such peace arising out of it that nothing can distract you, nothing can disturb you. Make love a feast and these things like jealousy will disappear
Jealousy has nothing to do with love.
In fact, your so-called love also has nothing to do with love. These are beautiful words which you use without knowing what they mean, without experiencing what they mean. You go on using the word ‘love’. You use it so much that you forget the fact that you have not experienced it yet. That is one of the dangers of using such beautiful words: God, love, prayer. Beautiful words - you go on using them, you go on repeating them, and by and by, the very repetition makes you feel as if you know. What do you know about love?
Wherever jealousy is present, love is not present.
Jealousy is not part of love, jealousy is part of possessiveness. Possessiveness has nothing to do with love. You want to possess. Through possession you feel strong: your territory is bigger. And if somebody else tries to trespass on your territory, you are angry. Or if somebody has a bigger house than your house, you are jealous. Of if somebody tries to dispossess you of your property, you are jealous and angry.
If you love, jealousy is impossible; it is not possible at all.
Jealousy is like a rock - very gross.
Possessiveness is a rock - it is pure poison. Love is destroyed, crushed, shattered. And these monsters are dominating people. Love has to be freed from these monsters. The only way is to kill the root cause.If you can destroy jealousy, kill it, you will see such beautiful energies arising in you.
Love
becomes so easy
if you can destroy jealousy;
otherwise jealousy destroys love.
If you destroy hate, suddenly you have so much love that you become unconditional. You don’t bother about whether the person is worthy of love or not. Who bothers when you have too much to give? You simply give and you feel grateful that he accepted.
And the moment
Adam and Eve had
eaten from the tree
of knowledge he drove
them out of heaven,
out of paradise,
because of the fear that
now they would try
the other tree. And once
they ate from the other
tree they would become
immortal,
they would be like gods.
That means that
God felt jealous.
They have become half
like God because now
they know, they are no
longer immortal. Then there
would be no difference
between God and them:
they would know,
God knows; they would
be immortal,
God is immortal.
So a great jealousy
arose in God’s mind.
It was out of jealousy
that Adam and Eve were
thrown out of paradise.
This is not a very healthy
concept of God.
Your gods cannot be different from you. Who will create them? Who will give them shape and color and form? You create them, you sculpt them; they have eyes like you, noses like you - and minds like you!
The Old Testament God says:
“I am a very jealous God!”
Now who has created this God who is jealous? God cannot be jealous. And if God is jealous, then what is wrong in being jealous? If even God is jealous, why should you be thought to be doing something wrong when you are jealous? Then jealousy is divine!
Jealousy means somebody else has more than you have. And it is impossible to be the first in everything. You may have the largest amount of money in the world, but you may not have a beautiful face. And a beggar may make you jealous - his body, his face, his eyes, and you are jealous. A beggar can make an emperor jealous.
Your whole life you have been jealous.
What have you learned out of it?
If you are not learning out of these experiences, you will have to repeat your life again.
Learn out of every experience, small or big. Whenever you are jealous you are in a fire, your heart burns - and you know what you are doing to yourself. You know the wrongness of it, but you know it only because others say so. It is not your own understanding, your own insight. Let it become your own insight, so the next time the situation arises to be jealous you can laugh at it, so the next time the same situation arises you don’t behave in the same old pattern; you can get out of the old pattern.
Your jealousy will destroy your energy unnecessarily.
Rather than being jealous, find out what you can do with your energy, what you can create.
FEAR
WHAT IS THIS FEAR?
There is only one basic fear.
All other small fears are byproducts of the one main fear that every human being carries with himself.
THE FEAR IS OF LOSING YOURSELF.
It may be in death, it may be in love, but the fear is the same: You are afraid of losing yourself. And the strangest thing is that only those people are afraid of losing themselves who don’t have themselves.
Those who have themselves are not afraid.
So it is really a question of exposure.
You don’t have anything to lose; you just believe that you have something to lose.
People are afraid of life, and they are afraid of life because life is
only possible if you are capable of being wild.
wild in your love,
wild in your song,
wild in your dance.
This is where fear is.
Who is afraid of death? I have never come across such a person. And almost every person I
have come across is afraid of life.
Drop fear of life. Because either you can be afraid or you can live; it is up to you. And what is there to be afraid of? You can’t lose anything. You have everything to gain. Drop all fears and jump totally into life. Then, one day, death will come as a welcome guest, not your enemy, and you will enjoy death more than you have enjoyed life, because death has its own beauties. And death is very rare because it happens once in a while - life is everyday.
It’s a good kind of fear if you don’t know what exactly it is.
That simply means that you are on the verge of something unknown. When the fear has some object it is an ordinary fear. One is afraid of death-it is very ordinary fear, instinctive; nothing great about it, nothing special about it. When one is afraid of old age or disease, illness, these are ordinary fears, common, garden variety.
The special fear is when you cannot find an object to it, when it is there for no reason at all; that makes one really scared!
If you can find a reason, the mind is satisfied. If you can answer why, the mind has some explanation to cling to. All explanations help things to be explained away; they don’t do anything else. But once you have a rational explanation, you feel satisfied. That’s why people go to the psychoanalyst to find explanations. Even a stupid explanation is better than nothing; one can cling to the explanation.
You have fear - don’t ask why.
Fear is natural, guilt is a creation of the priests.
Guilt is man-made.
Fear is in-built, and it is very essential.
Without fear you will not be able to survive at all.
Fear is normal.
It is because of fear that you will not put your hand in the fire. It is because of fear that you will walk to the right or to the left, whatsoever is the law of the country. It is because of fear that you will avoid poison. It is because of fear that when the truck driver sounds his horn, you run out of the way.
If the child has no fear there is no possibility that he will ever survive. His fear is a life-protective measure. But because of this natural tendency to protect oneself...and nothing is wrong in it - you have the right to protect yourself. You have such a precious life to protect, and fear simply helps you.
Fear is intelligence.
Only idiots don’t have fear, imbeciles don’t have fear; hence you have to protect the idiots, otherwise they will burn themselves or they will jump out of a bui
lding, or they will go into the sea without knowing how to swim or they can eat a snake...or anything they can do!
Fear can become abnormal, it can become pathological. Then you are afraid of things of which there is no need to be afraid - although you can find arguments even for your abnormal fear. For example, somebody is afraid of going inside a house. Logically you cannot prove that he is wrong. He says, “What is the guarantee that the house will not fall?” Another person is afraid - he cannot travel because there are train accidents. Somebody else is afraid and cannot go into a car, because there are car accidents. And somebody else is afraid of an airplane. If you become afraid in this way, this is not intelligent. Then you should be afraid of your bed too, because almost 97 percent of people die in their beds! That is the most dangerous place to be in, logically you should remain as far away from the bed as possible, never go close to it. But then you will make your life impossible.
