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AH, THIS!
Chapter 4: Dying Into the Master
Question 4
Energy Enhancement Enlightened Texts Zen Ah, This!
The fourth question
Question 4
OSHO,
MOST OF MY EARLY LIFE WAS SPENT IN DEADENING MYSELF TO UNBEARABLE PUNISHMENT. THE DEADENING WAS ENTIRELY NECESSARY FOR ME TO SURVIVE THOSE TIMES, BUT THOSE DAYS NO LONGER EXIST, AND AFTER THIRTY-TWO YEARS I AM TERRIFIED AND LACK THE COURAGE TO GO WITHIN. FROM WHERE IS THE SOURCE OF FORGIVENESS, AND, OSHO, WHAT KIND OF FOOLISH NAME HAVE YOU GIVEN ME?
Devaprem,
ALL NAMES ARE FOOLISH. That s why I have to explain the name to you, so at least it looks as if it is not foolish. I have to give it a beautiful meaning...otherwise names are names! They are just labels. "Devaprem" means divine love. What a beautiful name I have given to you! But, still, names are names.
There is an ancient Chinese ceremony in which the parents of a child choose the baby's name: as soon as the baby is born, all the cutlery in the house of its parents is thrown in the air. The parents then listen to the falling knives, forks, and spoons and choose a name -- Ping, Chang, Tang, Fung, Chung....
That's also perfectly right! That seems to be a wise way to find out the name, as if God himself has chosen. And that's how I go on choosing your names. Do you think there is much esoteric, secret knowledge behind it? Nothing of the sort! Just anything, and I make a name out of it. I don't even think twice.
But I can understand why you feel that the name does not fit you. You have become a closed person and love has become difficult. It happens to many people -- in fact, to the majority of people, more or less.
The child has to become unloving, unspontaneous. He has to deaden his sensitivity just to survive -- every child, more or less; the difference is only of degrees. Every child has to learn tricks to survive. And the basic trick is: never be spontaneous. Be formal, never be natural, because your spontaneity is bound to be punished and your formality praised, rewarded.
The parents enforce a subtle strategy: they create fear in the child if he says the truth. Nobody wants the child to say the truth, and the child is not yet capable of Lying. But he has to learn.
When Cleo's parents threatened to forbid her to see her boyfriend unless she told them why he had been there so late the night before, she began to talk.
"Well, I took him... him into the loving room, and..."
"That is LIVING, dear," said the mother.
"You're telling me!"
Children are careful watchers, observers of what is happening all around. Of course, their senses are very clear, unclouded. They see the truth immediately. You cannot cheat a child; he knows it immediately, intuitively. And he is so innocent that it is impossible for him to be formal. But he has to be formal to survive. And man's child is very helpless. It is because of man's child's helplessness that our whole civilization exists. We can manage, mold the child in every possible way, whatsoever way we want.
Children are not supposed to say things that they know. They know much more than they ever tell you. They pretend to be innocent because you don't want them to know more than is taught in the school, than is taught by the preacher, than is taught by you; and they certainly know more. They move in society, in life, with keen, alert senses. They are watching everything, whatsoever is happening all around. But they learn one thing sooner or later: that they have to be diplomatic -- with the grown-ups you can't be true, honest, sincere.
Three young French boys were spending the summer in the country. One afternoon they were strolling through a field when they happened to see a couple Lying under a tree, locked in a loving embrace.
"Mon dieu," exclaimed the youngest boy, who was only six, "those people are having a terrible fight."
"But no, mon petit," replied the more sophisticated nine-year-old, "those people are making love."
"True," agreed the oldest boy, a lad of eleven years, "but what amateurs!"
But children cannot say these things to their parents or before their parents. They know much more than you think they know. They are so alert, so available to life. They are so open and vulnerable; they go on allowing every sensation to reach into their being. But they have to deaden themselves sooner or later; they have to become stiff, they have to become closed. They learn one thing: that unless they follow their parents, their priests, their politicians, they will have to suffer much. Respectability is only for those who are obedient.
Devaprem, you say: MOST OF MY EARLY LIFE WAS SPENT IN DEADENING MYSELF TO UNBEARABLE PUNISHMENT. THE DEADENING WAS ENTIRELY NECESSARY FOR ME TO SURVIVE THOSE TIMES, BUT THOSE DAYS NO LONGER EXIST, AND AFTER THIRTY-TWO YEARS, I AM TERRIFIED AND LACK THE COURAGE TO GO WITHIN.
Now there is no need to be terrified; that has to be understood. You can snap out of it! It is just an old habit. A little intelligence...and that much intelligence everyone has. If you had the intelligence in childhood to deaden yourself to survive, you ARE an intelligent person.
Now, the parents are not there...nobody is forcing anything on you, nobody is punishing you. It is just an old fear, a memory. You can snap out of it!
You don't need primal therapy: to go screaming against your parents for three years. That is not going to help -- that is simply stupid. If it takes three years to shout and scream at your parents, and only then will you come out of it, that means you don't have any intelligence. And what is the guarantee that just by screaming for three years and shouting at your parents you will become intelligent? I think you will be less intelligent than you were before -- three years of screaming and shouting? You will lose any intelligence that is left by your parents in you! There is no need! One has simply to see that those days are over. Meditation is enough.
Meditation means SEEING, becoming aware, that those days are over, the fear is no more there, nobody is going to punish you. It is just an old habit. Snap out of it with as little fanfare as possible. Don't make much fuss about it. Because you make much fuss about it so many therapies have evolved. They are just aids for you so that you can make a fuss scientifically, so that your fuss is rationalized. But they are not needed by intelligent people.
An intelligent person is one who can see that it is no more night, it is day. Why are you afraid of darkness? Do you need first to scream for three hours against the night and the dark and the fear? That will be utterly stupid! That will destroy the day. Why waste it? The night is no more.
That's why in the East we have not developed any therapeutic methods like the West, for the simple reason that we came to understand one thing: that all that is needed is a little intelligence -- and everybody has it. And meditation helps the intelligence to become sharp.
Just seeing is enough; seeing brings transformation. And when transformation comes without any long process it is far deeper. When it takes a long process that means it will remain superficial.
So I have not come across a single person yet whose primal therapy has totally succeeded. It can NEVER succeed. Psychoanalysis has not been able to create a single person who is totally psychoanalyzed; even Sigmund Freud was not in that totality. Janov is not really what he is talking about -- the primal man, the primal innocence -- he is not. You can see in his face all kinds of tension, anguish, anxiety; it is so apparent. He needs a few more years of screaming; and then too I don't think those tensions will disappear. They may even become more subtle, more nourished, because if you scream for years, remember, you are practicing it; it is a kind of practice, a kind of cultivation of it. Then you become addicted to it; without screaming for a few hours you won't feel good. Then it is an intoxicating process, a kind of auto-hypnosis. Yes, screaming for one hour every day will make you feel a little relaxed, but it is a stupid kind of relaxation.
Seeing is transformation. That is our experience in the East. All the Buddhas in the East have given only one meditation: watchfulness, awareness.
Now, Devaprem, you know, you are aware of how this fear has arisen in you: out of thirty years of fear, continuous fear of punishment, you have become closed, encapsulated, and you are always on guard. You cannot relax, you cannot be true, you cannot be honest. You cannot say the thing that you want to say, you cannot do the thing that you always wanted to do. You KNOW -- and now....
It was right in those years -- you behaved intelligently. Nothing was wrong, otherwise you would not have survived. Now you have survived, get out of it -- it is no more needed. The disease is no more, why go on carrying the bottles of medicines and prescriptions? Do you need a therapy to throw the bottles and the prescriptions? Will you go to a therapist and say, "Now the disease is no more, but I can't let go of this prescription. I go on carrying it, and these bottles. I don't need them any more. How to drop them?" Is any "how" needed? No "how" is needed. Go to the Rotary Club and donate them! They collect medicines, etcetera, which are not needed by anybody else. Their motto is: We serve. So help them serve people.
It is very simple to come out. But why do people make so much out of it? -- because that is part of your ego. You don't want it to be so simple. Thirty years of life -- and I am making a joke of it! You would like to pay some therapist good money and you would like to invest some time. That feels good; it makes you feel important.
In fact, in the West now people brag that they have been in psychoanalysis for three years or seven years. And somebody else brags that "Psychoanalysis is out of date. I have been in gestalt therapy, in primal therapy." And there are "groupies" now who go on moving from one group to another group. Their whole life consists of moving from one group to another group.
Many groupies come to me and they say, "We have done ALL the groups." And they say it in the same way as in the old days people used to say, "We have fasted, prayed, and we have sacrificed all our joys, and we are saints" -- in the same way! This is a new kind of holiness that is arising in the world: "I have passed through all kinds of groups." And I look in their eyes and they say, "And nothing has happened."
They are saying, "My problems are far more complex, far more deep-rooted than these therapies can go. They can't help me. I am no ORDINARY person; my problems are extraordinary."
People enjoy saying it. I see a light in their eyes when they say, "Nobody has been able to help me. Osho, can you help me?" They are giving me a challenge! All that they want is to add one more name to their list: "I have been to this guy too and he cannot help. My problems are such...not ordinary problems that anybody can help."
People brag about their diseases too, remember. They may just have some ordinary disease, but who wants to have some ordinary disease?
Have you ever watched your own reaction? When you go to the doctor with a throbbing heart, thinking it is cancer, and he says, "It is nothing. It is just a common cold"...have you observed? -- you feel a little sad. Just a common cold? A desire arises to visit another doctor. you and a common cold?! You are not a common person, how can you have a common cold? Ego is such that it thrives on every kind of thing, right or wrong.
So don't be much worried about it. It is past, it is finished. Slip out of it -- and without making any noise, without making any ceremony that you are getting out of it. Just start being again alive, sensitive, as you had always been in your childhood. That is your nature so it can be reclaimed easily. What you have learned is not your nature so it can be unlearned very easily.
Next: Chapter 4: Dying Into the Master, Question 5
Energy Enhancement Enlightened Texts Zen Ah, This!
| ENERGY
|
GAIN ENERGY APPRENTICE
LEVEL1
|
THE ENERGY BLOCKAGE REMOVAL
PROCESS
|
THE KARMA CLEARING
PROCESS APPRENTICE LEVEL3
|
MASTERY
OF RELATIONSHIPS TANTRA APPRENTICE LEVEL4
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