Osho - When a man hates you, you can trust that he hates you. But when he loves you, you cannot trust him. You know perfectly well that when you hate someone it has a tremendous force, and when you love someone there is not that force. You remember your enemies more than your friends. You can forget your friends but you cannot forget your enemies.
What is happening? It is because your love has been distorted, and something unreal, which is not love, has been handed to you. And you have been playing with that toy called love, unaware that you have a potential of love within you. So when you love it is just so-so, skin-deep. Scratch it a little bit and it is gone. But when you hate, you hate from your guts. It is not skin-deep – it is gut-deep.
I have been surprised how much purity your hate has, how much authenticity, naturalness, spontaneity. And just because of its spontaneity, naturalness, authenticity, purity, I see in it a certain beauty which is not there in your love. Your love is hocus-pocus. This is the reason why in the world you don’t see so much love and you see so much hate. You listen to too much talk about love in the world.
Everybody is loving everybody else, talking about love, but it is all talk: yakketty-yakketty-yak! It goes on all over the world. Everybody is talking about love – beautiful dialogues – but in fact you see hate everywhere. Religions hate each other. Nations hate each other. Political parties hate each other. Classes hate each other. Just go on looking and you will be surprised how many sources of hate there are.
And every ten years, twelve years, you need a world war – so much hate and still it gets accumulated. Every day you go on expressing hate that’s separate – still it goes on accumulating so much that every ten, twenty years, it explodes into a world war. In three thousand years, five thousand wars have been fought in the world. Who is responsible? – the good-doers who are continuously after you, teaching you about love, kindness, compassion.
Nobody teaches you about hate, so it is still there, far more strong, far more vibrant and young and fresh. I would like a time to come when nobody teaches you about love either. You should be left alone. You should be told to be more aware about whatsoever happens to you – hate or love, that is not important.
What is important is that if you hate, hate with awareness. If you love, love with awareness. If I was going to teach you I would not tell you whom to love, how to love. That is all nonsense. Love is your intrinsic quality. You are born with it, just as hate is also there. I will teach you, be aware. Before anything happens to you – love or hate, anger, passion, compassion, anything – be aware.
Let everything arise out of your awareness. And the miracle of awareness is that without your saying anything, without your doing anything, it simply dissolves all that is ugly in you into all that is beautiful. Awareness is a transforming force. For example, if you are aware of anger, it will disappear. If you are aware of love it will become stronger. If there is hate and you become aware of it, it will disappear, dissipate.
Soon you will find that that cloud of hatred has disappeared and instead a totally opposite quality – a mixture of compassion, kindness, lovingness – has been left behind like an aroma. To me this is the criterion: Whatsoever deepens with your awareness is virtue. Whatsoever disappears with your awareness is sin. To me this is the definition. I don’t label any act as sin, virtue, right, wrong – acts don’t have that quality. It is your awareness.
Just try it and you will be simply amazed that there are things in you which cannot stand in front of awareness, they simply disappear. Awareness functions almost like magic. And what I am saying you can experiment with. I am not telling you to believe in it, because belief will not help. You will have to experiment with it. You will have to see, with the different things in you, what remains and what disappears.
And it is only you who can find what is right for you and what is wrong for you. Then keep the thread of awareness running through all your actions, and in your life you will not find any hate, any anger, any jealousy. Not that you have dropped them, not that you have repressed them, not that you have somehow got rid of them, not that you have practiced doing something against them. No, you have not done anything, you have not even touched them.
This is the beauty of awareness: it never represses anything; but there are things which simply melt in the light ofawareness and change. And there are things which become more solid, more integrated, more profound, more strong: love, compassion, kindness, friendliness, understanding. All the religions up to date have been focusing people’s minds on actions; and labeling – this is bad, this is good, this you have to do, this you have not to do.
I want to change the whole emphasis. Actions have nothing to do with right and wrong. It is you, your alertness, which is decisive. Any action with awareness may become beautiful; the same action without awareness may be ugly. With your awareness, the same action in one situation may disappear, and in another situation may become solid, stronger. So it is not something like a fixed quality of any act, of any emotion; it all depends on a thousand and one things. But your awareness takes note of everything, you need not be worried.
It is just like light in which everything becomes clear to you, you can see it. One Zen monk, throughout his whole life, was imprisoned again and again. He was a great Master with thousands of disciples. Even the magistrates loved him, respected him. And they prayed of him, ”Why do you do such strange things? We can’t understand, it is beyond our comprehension”– because he was stealing small things from his own disciples, and naturally the law had to take its course.
The magistrates would say, ”We know there is something else in it. Why should you steal one shoe of somebody’s? – it is useless, you cannot use it. And now we have to send you for two months into jail.”
The Zen Master was always very happy when he heard, and he used to say to the magistrates,” Can’t you send me for a little longer? – because anyway, when I come out I will do it again, and you will have to send me in again. Why can’t you send me for a longer period and save me from doing all these things?
Only in the end, when he was dying, did his disciples ask, ”Now let us at least ask, because we will never again have a chance to know what was the reason you were stealing things, things which mattered not at all to you. We were always ready to bring anything you wanted, but you never said anything, you never asked for anything.”
He laughed. He said, ”The real reason was I wanted to be as long as possible in the jail because there are three thousand people in the jail, and I have found in those three thousand people more innocent, more natural human beings than I find outside the jail. And outside the jail there are many masters and many religions, and they are doing their work. Nobody takes care of those poor people.
When I am in the jail I teach them meditation, I teach them how to be aware – the jail has become a monastery! ”We have changed it completely. All the prisoners are meditating. The jailer cannot detect it because they are simply doing everything with awareness. They are continuing to do the same work as before: if cutting wood, then cutting wood; if cutting rocks, then cutting rocks; if making roads, then making roads. Whatever they were doing before they are doing now, but with a great difference.
”And the best monastery I know right now,” he said, ”is the jail where I have been going continually, because this jail has people who are sentenced for life – twenty years, thirty years. Now, this is a great opportunity: for thirty years they can meditate without any disturbance from the outside world. Where else could I find such people?
”And I am immensely happy because I am leaving behind me, in that jail, a thread which will continue for centuries. This jail will remain a totally different jail. Whoever comes there is bound to get involved in meditation because some old-timers will always be there.”
Now, looking at it from the outside, a man stealing is doing something wrong, and a man continually going to jail, being sentenced again and again, is certainly a criminal. But if you look at that man’s consciousness and the act out of that consciousness, it is totally different. Never judge anybody by his act, because the real thing is not the act but the consciousness through which that act has been performed. But we all judge by acts because acts are available outside like objects. Consciousness we don’t know.
It happened in a Zen monastery... there were two wings, a left wing and a right wing – the monastery was just made in that way. Five hundred monks lived in one wing, five hundred in the other wing, and the Master’s house was just in the middle of both. The Master had a cat, a very beautiful cat, and all the disciples were very loving towards the cat. But once in a while there was a quarrel because the left wingers wanted the cat – they were having some party, some fun – but the right wingers were not willing to allow them the cat at that time.
The cat became a constant object of quarrels, fights....One day the Master called all the disciples and asked them to bring the cat. He told them, ”You both love the cat, but the cat is only one.” So he cut the cat in two – it was a shock to all the disciples – and told them, ”Now you can have half, and you can have half. Now no more quarreling in this monastery.”
There was silence. They could not understand that such a non-violent person could cut the cat in two. They all wondered and worried and thought about it. The story reached the king, who was also a disciple of the Master. He could not contain his curiosity; he came the next day. He asked, ”I have heard that you have killed your most loved cat.”
The Master said, ”I have not killed the cat, I have killed a conflict, a quarrel which was growing every day and was growing out of proportion. And these fools won’t understand unless I take a drastic step. I have not killed the cat, because nobody dies. The cat is freed from this body because of these fools. And anyway she was going to die; she had already lived long enough – perhaps she would have lived one year or two more years at the most.
”So before killing her I became totally silent, aware, and asked myself, ’What is this poor cat going to do in those two years? Nothing. But in two years these fools will do much.’ ”I have n
What is happening? It is because your love has been distorted, and something unreal, which is not love, has been handed to you. And you have been playing with that toy called love, unaware that you have a potential of love within you. So when you love it is just so-so, skin-deep. Scratch it a little bit and it is gone. But when you hate, you hate from your guts. It is not skin-deep – it is gut-deep.
I have been surprised how much purity your hate has, how much authenticity, naturalness, spontaneity. And just because of its spontaneity, naturalness, authenticity, purity, I see in it a certain beauty which is not there in your love. Your love is hocus-pocus. This is the reason why in the world you don’t see so much love and you see so much hate. You listen to too much talk about love in the world.
Everybody is loving everybody else, talking about love, but it is all talk: yakketty-yakketty-yak! It goes on all over the world. Everybody is talking about love – beautiful dialogues – but in fact you see hate everywhere. Religions hate each other. Nations hate each other. Political parties hate each other. Classes hate each other. Just go on looking and you will be surprised how many sources of hate there are.
And every ten years, twelve years, you need a world war – so much hate and still it gets accumulated. Every day you go on expressing hate that’s separate – still it goes on accumulating so much that every ten, twenty years, it explodes into a world war. In three thousand years, five thousand wars have been fought in the world. Who is responsible? – the good-doers who are continuously after you, teaching you about love, kindness, compassion.
Nobody teaches you about hate, so it is still there, far more strong, far more vibrant and young and fresh. I would like a time to come when nobody teaches you about love either. You should be left alone. You should be told to be more aware about whatsoever happens to you – hate or love, that is not important.
What is important is that if you hate, hate with awareness. If you love, love with awareness. If I was going to teach you I would not tell you whom to love, how to love. That is all nonsense. Love is your intrinsic quality. You are born with it, just as hate is also there. I will teach you, be aware. Before anything happens to you – love or hate, anger, passion, compassion, anything – be aware.
Let everything arise out of your awareness. And the miracle of awareness is that without your saying anything, without your doing anything, it simply dissolves all that is ugly in you into all that is beautiful. Awareness is a transforming force. For example, if you are aware of anger, it will disappear. If you are aware of love it will become stronger. If there is hate and you become aware of it, it will disappear, dissipate.
Soon you will find that that cloud of hatred has disappeared and instead a totally opposite quality – a mixture of compassion, kindness, lovingness – has been left behind like an aroma. To me this is the criterion: Whatsoever deepens with your awareness is virtue. Whatsoever disappears with your awareness is sin. To me this is the definition. I don’t label any act as sin, virtue, right, wrong – acts don’t have that quality. It is your awareness.
Just try it and you will be simply amazed that there are things in you which cannot stand in front of awareness, they simply disappear. Awareness functions almost like magic. And what I am saying you can experiment with. I am not telling you to believe in it, because belief will not help. You will have to experiment with it. You will have to see, with the different things in you, what remains and what disappears.
And it is only you who can find what is right for you and what is wrong for you. Then keep the thread of awareness running through all your actions, and in your life you will not find any hate, any anger, any jealousy. Not that you have dropped them, not that you have repressed them, not that you have somehow got rid of them, not that you have practiced doing something against them. No, you have not done anything, you have not even touched them.
This is the beauty of awareness: it never represses anything; but there are things which simply melt in the light ofawareness and change. And there are things which become more solid, more integrated, more profound, more strong: love, compassion, kindness, friendliness, understanding. All the religions up to date have been focusing people’s minds on actions; and labeling – this is bad, this is good, this you have to do, this you have not to do.
I want to change the whole emphasis. Actions have nothing to do with right and wrong. It is you, your alertness, which is decisive. Any action with awareness may become beautiful; the same action without awareness may be ugly. With your awareness, the same action in one situation may disappear, and in another situation may become solid, stronger. So it is not something like a fixed quality of any act, of any emotion; it all depends on a thousand and one things. But your awareness takes note of everything, you need not be worried.
It is just like light in which everything becomes clear to you, you can see it. One Zen monk, throughout his whole life, was imprisoned again and again. He was a great Master with thousands of disciples. Even the magistrates loved him, respected him. And they prayed of him, ”Why do you do such strange things? We can’t understand, it is beyond our comprehension”– because he was stealing small things from his own disciples, and naturally the law had to take its course.
The magistrates would say, ”We know there is something else in it. Why should you steal one shoe of somebody’s? – it is useless, you cannot use it. And now we have to send you for two months into jail.”
The Zen Master was always very happy when he heard, and he used to say to the magistrates,” Can’t you send me for a little longer? – because anyway, when I come out I will do it again, and you will have to send me in again. Why can’t you send me for a longer period and save me from doing all these things?
Only in the end, when he was dying, did his disciples ask, ”Now let us at least ask, because we will never again have a chance to know what was the reason you were stealing things, things which mattered not at all to you. We were always ready to bring anything you wanted, but you never said anything, you never asked for anything.”
He laughed. He said, ”The real reason was I wanted to be as long as possible in the jail because there are three thousand people in the jail, and I have found in those three thousand people more innocent, more natural human beings than I find outside the jail. And outside the jail there are many masters and many religions, and they are doing their work. Nobody takes care of those poor people.
When I am in the jail I teach them meditation, I teach them how to be aware – the jail has become a monastery! ”We have changed it completely. All the prisoners are meditating. The jailer cannot detect it because they are simply doing everything with awareness. They are continuing to do the same work as before: if cutting wood, then cutting wood; if cutting rocks, then cutting rocks; if making roads, then making roads. Whatever they were doing before they are doing now, but with a great difference.
”And the best monastery I know right now,” he said, ”is the jail where I have been going continually, because this jail has people who are sentenced for life – twenty years, thirty years. Now, this is a great opportunity: for thirty years they can meditate without any disturbance from the outside world. Where else could I find such people?
”And I am immensely happy because I am leaving behind me, in that jail, a thread which will continue for centuries. This jail will remain a totally different jail. Whoever comes there is bound to get involved in meditation because some old-timers will always be there.”
Now, looking at it from the outside, a man stealing is doing something wrong, and a man continually going to jail, being sentenced again and again, is certainly a criminal. But if you look at that man’s consciousness and the act out of that consciousness, it is totally different. Never judge anybody by his act, because the real thing is not the act but the consciousness through which that act has been performed. But we all judge by acts because acts are available outside like objects. Consciousness we don’t know.
It happened in a Zen monastery... there were two wings, a left wing and a right wing – the monastery was just made in that way. Five hundred monks lived in one wing, five hundred in the other wing, and the Master’s house was just in the middle of both. The Master had a cat, a very beautiful cat, and all the disciples were very loving towards the cat. But once in a while there was a quarrel because the left wingers wanted the cat – they were having some party, some fun – but the right wingers were not willing to allow them the cat at that time.
The cat became a constant object of quarrels, fights....One day the Master called all the disciples and asked them to bring the cat. He told them, ”You both love the cat, but the cat is only one.” So he cut the cat in two – it was a shock to all the disciples – and told them, ”Now you can have half, and you can have half. Now no more quarreling in this monastery.”
There was silence. They could not understand that such a non-violent person could cut the cat in two. They all wondered and worried and thought about it. The story reached the king, who was also a disciple of the Master. He could not contain his curiosity; he came the next day. He asked, ”I have heard that you have killed your most loved cat.”
The Master said, ”I have not killed the cat, I have killed a conflict, a quarrel which was growing every day and was growing out of proportion. And these fools won’t understand unless I take a drastic step. I have not killed the cat, because nobody dies. The cat is freed from this body because of these fools. And anyway she was going to die; she had already lived long enough – perhaps she would have lived one year or two more years at the most.
”So before killing her I became totally silent, aware, and asked myself, ’What is this poor cat going to do in those two years? Nothing. But in two years these fools will do much.’ ”I have n
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