from darshan at one time or another.
We represent the last barrier to actually being with Osho. The role is certainly a potential “button-pusher.” In fact, the general consensus is that we don’t turn someone away out of consideration for Osho’s well-being but that we randomly reject someone on a whim, as a “device”: that is, to provide them with an opportunity to “look at their stuff”! But I’ve internally writhed my way through too many evenings when some fragrance has clearly caused his discomfort to be lenient.
The two of us must look like a couple of expert wine tasters: positioned either side of the proffered head, simultaneously we bend to smell it. If we both feel it passes muster we nod to each other. But when one of us is unsure we indicate the offending portion of the head, and the other comes to our side to sniff. Maybe there is a slight fragrance? But is the perfume herbal (allowable) rather than artificial (a definite no-no), perhaps? If the smell is mild we suggest a scarf. Some people learn to come prepared with a scarf in case, and, when needed, they hastily wrap it around their head. (You may not look as pretty as you had hoped but hey, if this is the price you must pay for admission…) Perhaps people can be forgiven if they think it is all some extraordinary charade we are performing simply to heighten their pre-darshan excitement.
Osho’s physical proximity to us in these evenings creates a certain intimacy, distinct from when we are several hundred strong in the public discourses. And of course, it’s a chance to have the master focus only on oneself for a precious few moments.
Some attendees want to receive sannyas: Osho gives them a mala and explains the meaning of their names, usually at some length. He might ask how long they will be staying, and then, consulting his list of what is on offer, suggest their participating in some workshops.
Perennial problems, in all sorts of shapes, are brought to him: on meditation, work, health, love, sex, aloneness, and, the universal favorite, relationships. One evening a sannyasin tells Osho that her relationship is beautiful but that her lover is possessive of her. He is aware that he is and is trying to work on it; meanwhile she wonders what her part in this should be.
Osho responds:
Keep him aware, mm? And you remain aware, too.
…A few things have to be understood when you are in a love relationship. One is: never allow possessiveness to settle in it. It tries to. Wherever love happens, possessiveness immediately enters and starts using the possibility of love, starts destroying it. It is the death of love. So the more aware you are, the longer the love can continue—one thing….
The second thing: You should not do something unnecessarily to hurt the feelings of the other. When we love a person we have to be very sensitive about his feelings, too; that which can be avoided should be avoided. Keep alert so that possessiveness does not settle in, but keep alert also that in the name of anti-possessiveness you don’t start destroying the delicacy of it; otherwise that happens immediately, and both are destructive….
Love is such a delicate flower. It is very rarely that it is preserved: it is destroyed, either this way or that. Either possessiveness destroys it—you become an old-fashioned wife and husband—or fooling around destroys it, and you become a modern husband and wife; but both ways it goes down the drain. It has to be protected from both….
Love is always beautiful in the beginning, but that is nothing: it is always so. When love is beautiful in the end, it is really a rare flower, a very rare flower, and then you know exactly what love is… but only in the end you know. Ninety-nine loves die before that ultimate peak is reached.
In the old world there was no love because the marriage was too tight. In the modern world there is no love because in the name of freedom people have become licentious. In the old world love could not grow because the marriage was too much of a legality. In the new world love is not growing because the marriage is almost nil—it is too licentious. License and legality both have to be avoided.
It is a great art to be in love. To fall in love is very easy, to remain in love is very difficult, arduous. Only a few artists of life are capable of remaining in love.
Try it. Give it a try! Mm? be alert and make him alert. Good!
To a sannyasin who is still pining over a relationship that ended two years ago, Osho speaks of the illusoriness of love affairs. The first love is always magical, he points out; then, when frustration inevitably sets in, we change partners in the hope that we can recapture that same magic. But even then the magic, if recaptured, will disappear until we come to the point where we realize that it is simply an illusion, a sweet dream:
This is the way of growth. A day comes—and that day is the most fortunate of days—when you can live without illusions, when you can live without magic, when you can live quietly, silently, with no hankering for any excitement. And then a totally different kind of life starts growing in you. That life has value and truth.
These affairs of love, relationships, are good, but they have to go. I am not against them—when I call them illusions I am not saying that I am against them. I am all for them, because you can grow only by going through those illusions. You can grow only through frustrations; there is no other way to growth. Each success and each failure contributes to growth. Failure contributes more than success, because success can go on nurturing the illusion; failure simply opens your eyes to the reality.
There is a magical dimension to life, Osho continues, but it lies elsewhere than in the biological, chemical, and hormonally induced magic we call love:
[Your love] is not very spiritual or very significant. Search: other magic is there. That’s what I am trying to make available to you here: other magic. And there is a magic that comes through truth. Only that is lasting, only that is eternal…. Now search for it. And I am not saying stop relating with people. Relate, but knowing well that that’s okay—a game is a game. Play it, beautifully and artistically and aesthetically. But it is time to become a little more mature. Search inward now. Let meditation become your love now.
On one occasion in darshan a visitor from America explains that she “gets high” from meditating, but that now and then she slips back into drug taking. Osho comments that although the experience brought about by drugs and that of meditation might appear to be similar, in fact they are completely different and opposite:
The drug experience is a forced, phony experience, but because we don’t know the real, the phony seems to be right…. If you compare your life with an ordinary man who has never taken anything like LSD, marijuana, then you feel very high—if you compare it with an ordinary man, because he has not known any moment, he has not even had a false glimpse; he lives such a mundane life. You have lived the same mundane life—then one day this drug creates a dream, gives you a euphoria, and you are tremendously happy. But once meditation can give you an experience, then you will see that this experience was just a dream experience….
If we go on meddling—sometimes with meditation, sometimes with drugs, Osho adds—drugs can slowly destroy our capacity to meditate.
But if you are really interested in meditation, then drugs are dangerous…. The so-called common people think drugs are dangerous. It is not dangerous for them at all because they have nothing to lose; they have nothing to be destroyed! But if you are really interested in the search and you want to grow, then drugs are dangerous.
Drugs are not dangerous for politicians—drugs are dangerous for the religious people because something delicate arises out of meditation. It is very delicate and it comes out of much effort. Just a small quantity of a drug and it is destroyed and you will have to start again from abc.
The drug experience is
