The second question:

Question 2

BELOVED OSHO,

I FEEL AND REALIZE THE FUTILITY OF DESIRING. THERE SEEMS TO BE NO AMBITION IN ME. BUT YET THERE IS A THIRST, A YEARNING, AND AN INNER SENSE OF UNFULFILLMENT. PLEASE EXPLAIN WHETHER THIS TOO IS A PART OF DESIRING.

Yes, this too is a part of desiring -- the negative part. Everything has two parts, the positive and the negative. The positive part of desiring is to desire something, to be ambitious. To be aware of the object of desire is a positive desire. The negative desire is: one is not aware of the object of desire, but one is aware only of the thirst of desire -- of the yearning.

These are the two parts. The subjective feeling of unfulfillment is the negative part of ambition and being obsessed with an object of desire is the positive part of ambition. Both are ambition. And if you intellectually understand that desire is futile, the negative part will remain with you -- if you INTELLECTUALLY understand that desire is futile and this is not an existential experience.

You have been hearing things, you have been listening and you have been reading. And Buddhas and Christs have been talking to the world and they have been saying that you are in misery because of desire, that you are in suffering because of desire -- and they say they are in bliss because of desirelessness. And you have seen them: you have seen their eyes, you have seen their faces, you have seen the grace, the bliss, the ecstasy that just moves around them. Even in their shadow the ecstasy, the dance is there. You have seen them and you have heard them and they say if you desire you will be in suffering, if you do not desire you will be in ecstasy and bliss.

Now intellectually you can understand this, because desire creates tension, because desire creates the future, because desire creates expectations, and when it is not fulfilled you are in misery. Or even when it is fulfilled you are not in bliss. When it is fulfilled you feel that this is nothing -- that this is nothing compared to the dream, compared to the hope. You fall in love with a person, a girl or a boy, you fall in love with a house, you fall in love with a car, and you think, "If this woman is achieved I will be in absolute bliss." But this is your dream; no woman can fulfill it.

This is just fantasy; no real woman can fulfill it. Every real woman will be just a faint thing compared to it. But there is no fault on the woman's part. This is your mind which goes on fantasizing. You create a fantasy, a romance, and you move high in the heavens. Then you meet the woman. If you cannot achieve her, if you cannot get possession of her, you will be in misery, because you had a dream and the dream remained unfulfilled. You will feel a constant pain in the heart.

But I tell you, if you meet her, if you can get her, you will be in a deeper misery, because at least the dream remains intact if you have not met her -- you can go on dreaming. But if you meet her you will see that no woman lives in heaven. As you live on earth, she lives on earth. She is as earthly as you -- even more. Woman is more earthly than man. She will shatter all your dreams. And when you awake from your dreaming, you will be in misery. Whether your dream is fulfilled or not, misery will be the result. Out of dreaming only misery results.

This you can understand. Your experience can also be helpful. Intellectually you can understand and then you can come to conclude that it is futile to desire -- to be ambitious is futile; it leads to misery and hell. But this will stop only the positive desiring; the negative will remain. Really, you are still desiring -- now desirelessness. You are now desiring a state of NON-DESIRE. Now desirelessness has become the object of desire. You will feel a yearning, a search, a thirst and an unfulfillment.

What is to be done now? What can be done? Intellectually nothing will happen to you: you will go on changing the object of desire and the negative part will go on pushing you into new desires. Live it. Do not believe in Buddha, do not believe in Jesus, do not believe in me. Live it. Desire and live, and experience desire in its totality. And do not hurry, do not make any haste to conclude. Your misery is because you make such hurried conclusions.

You are so susceptible to believing in anything because you do not want to go through experience. Experience may be painful -- let it be. But only experience can help you. Premature conclusions, premature beliefs, will be of no help. You are simply wasting opportunities. Desire and desire intensely, I tell you: desire intensely and suffer!

Buddha comes to his conclusion not because of previous buddhas. Upani-shads were in existence; he could have read them. He was well educated, well cultured, he knew all the scriptures, but they didn't help him. He moved through desire, he moved through experience; he suffered, he went through the fire. And only through his own experience did he come to conclude that desire is futile.

Your conclusion is not YOUR conclusion; that is the problem. Your conclusion is borrowed. You are really afraid to go through suffering, so before going through suffering you start believing. But suffering is a discipline. The only real discipline is suffering. Nothing real can be achieved without it.

And you are acting like small children: in their books, the answers are given in the back. Small children will just look at the answers. They get the answers but they do not know the process. The problem is given and the answer is given in the last chapter. They look at the answer and they know the answer, but this is not THEIR answer. They know the problem and they know the answer, but they do not know the process -- how the answer is achieved.

You have been looking at the answers without going through the process. Answers are there. Buddhas have existed; they have said everything that can be said and you can memorize the answers, but without the process you will not be transformed. So forget the answers; that is what the Upanishads say. Knowledge is the barrier: forget knowledge. If you are ignorant, then you are ignorant. Start from your ignorance; do not start from anybody else's knowledge.

It is better to start with your ignorance because that can lead you toward knowledge. But you always start with somebody else's knowledge. Then you move in a false world, then you go on accumulating conclusions, and you know everything without knowing anything. You are in such a hurry. You say, "I do not want to go through the process; I want the answer."

The answer can be given to you -- but unless you move through the process, the answer will not be a lived answer. Unless lived, it is futile. You know desire is futile, you know anger is poison, you know greed leads to misery -- you know everything. But that knowledge is of no use. Throw it! It is rubbish.

Just be aware of your state of mind: the yearning is there, the thirst is there, the unfulfillment is there. That means you are ready to desire. Now desire, and do not listen to buddhas: they are dangerous. Desire! Move! You will have to move your own way; you will have to suffer your own way. Nobody can escape suffering. The law is universal. Nobody can come to shortcuts; there are none. You will have to move your own way, you will have to pass through your own hells.

When you have passed through them, transcended them, have become richer, experienced them and a maturity has happened to you -- only then will desire fall. Desire will disappear and then there will be no negative part to it. Then the total desire will disappear because you will come to realize this is nonsense. "I have been creating my own hell." And this is not intellectual, this is not in the mind. Your total being, your whole being, will come to conclude and this conclusion will be through your experience, not through anybody else's.

Then desire disappears without giving birth to another desire in a different guise. Otherwise you will go on changing the objects. Sometimes you desire wealth and then you feel misery. And then you conclude that this desire is misery, so you start desiring God or you start desiring heaven or you start desiring liberation or you start desiring meditation, ecstasy -- but you go on desiring. And if you go on desiring, you are simply changing the shape of the desire, the object of the desire. But DESIRE remains the same: YOU are not changing, you remain the same. You are moving in a pattern, in a circle. You are not moving anywhere.

Hence, I go on saying again and again, be aware -- beware of Buddhas, Christs, Krishnas. Beware of me because I go on saying things to you which you can believe and then it is dangerous. When I say something, try to understand it; do not conclude through it. Conclusion must come through your own life; only then will it be a mutation. And do not be in a hurry. There is no hurry; time is eternal.

Experience! Be authentic to your experience and allow the conclusions to come only through your own individual particular search. The truth will happen to you but it will not happen to you if you go on borrowing it from others. That becomes a substitute truth. It creates more problems than it solves.

Your problems, as I see them, are ninety percent because of your borrowed knowledge. Only ten percent of problems are true. Ninety percent are false because they do not belong to you at all. First you start believing in a thing and then problems start to arise out of that belief. This is a borrowed problem which arises because you have believed, because you have concluded intellectually, rationally, that desire is futile. If this is really your conclusion, then how can unfulfillment still exist there? Unfulfillment is the seed of desire.

When you are unfulfilled it means desire: you want to seek fulfillment somewhere. When you are unfulfilled it means you are not that which you would like to be, you are not there where you would like to be. So desire, find, seek, move! Unfulfillment means discontentment with yourself. Fulfillment means: I am what I am; I am where I should be. Or wherever I am, I am absolutely content with me -- fulfilled. Then there is no movement of desire.

Movement is there but that movement is of life, not of desire. I will go on moving and each movement will happen through my life energy, not through desire. Desire is through mind. Life goes on moving but I will move like a river. The very energy will create a movement but the movement will not be according to desire. I will not desire first and then move. Try to understand this distinction.

I am speaking to you. This speaking can be of two types: it can be a sheer movement of life energy, or it can be part of a desire. If I desire it, then I will have to rehearse it. Then before coming to you, in my mind I will desire you to be present. Then in my mind I will think what to say, what not to say, how to say it and how not to say it. Then I will plan it; then I have moved into the future. Then I will repeat it. Then if it is not up to the standard I had planned I will feel frustrated.

I have heard that once Mark Twain was coming back from a lecture hall where he had lectured. When he came back, his wife asked him, "How was the lecture?"

Mark Twain said, "What lecture are you asking about -- the one I rehearsed before, or the one I actually delivered, or the one I wanted to deliver and was delivering instead in the car while coming back?"

If I think about it beforehand it is desire. If I simply come to you and it is a response, not planned, not thought about, it is a sheer movement of life energy, there has been no planning for it, then it is life moving. If it has been planned then it is mind desiring.

Movement will be there but it will be unplanned, spontaneous. Desire cripples movement. It doesn't allow life energy itself to move. It plans, it chooses, it decides beforehand. Before the actual situation you have already decided. You will always be in difficulty because it is never going to be exactly the right response -- because you cannot conceive of the situation beforehand. It always remains unknown. You will feel frustrated.

A mind which desires will always feel frustrated. Only a mind which doesn't desire, which simply moves wheresoever life, the Brahman, leads it to -- whether right or wrong, whether to hell or heaven, wheresoever the life energy leads, the one who is desireless moves within. Nothing can frustrate such a being. How? How can you frustrate him? And nothing can make YOU fulfilled. How can anyone make you fulfilled? With desire there is no meeting with fulfillment. With nondesire there is no meeting with frustration.

Be true and authentic to yourself and if you have not overcome desire do not believe that you have overcome it; that is not going to help. Know that you have not overcome. Know that ambition is there; know that as you are you are unfulfilled. You need something else. That need for something else... whether vague or not, whether you know what it is or not, makes no difference; you are not at this moment whole and total, at ease with yourself. You are not at home. Your home is somewhere else; you are searching for it.

Know it because this knowing will be good and helpful. Know it and move into desire. Suffer it! Feel the pain of it, the frustration of it, and allow life itself to come to a conclusion. Please don't you conclude; allow life itself to come to its conclusion. And when life comes to its conclusion, desire falls without any substitute desire being created there. It simply falls down. Just like dead leaves fall from a tree, desire falls from you -- total desire. Then there is no negative part hidden behind it. And when you are in the state of nondesiring, all that is blissful happens to you, all that is ecstatic happens to you. You flower for the first time. And when there is no unfulfillment, you are fulfilled AS YOU ARE.

But before that happens, if you go on borrowing it will be difficult: you are creating unnecessary barriers for yourself. The conclusions may appeal to you but that appeal is of no meaning. I can convince you about something but that conviction carries no meaning because it has been forced by me. I can argue, I can convince, and you may feel this is right. But that feeling will not help unless your life energy concludes it, unless it is an inner conviction which arises within you and is not forced from without.

That is why I say buddhas are dangerous -- because they are so convincing. When you move around them there is every possibility that you will become a victim, every possibility that you will get convinced. Their very being is convincing. That is why so many religions are created, so many sects are there. Whenever a buddha happens, an enlightened one, necessarily you get convinced, you become hypnotized -- and you borrow conclusions. And then for lives together you go on with those borrowed conclusions and they become a burden.