Osho – Awareness is a Transforming Force
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 of awareness 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 not killed the cat out of anger, I have not killed the cat out of hate. I loved her and I love her more now because she helped to solve a problem. And it was a good shock to these idiots, because without shocks their minds don’t function. Once in a while you have to hit them.”
And certainly it happened from that day all kinds of quarreling simply disappeared, because those disciples became aware that this man is dangerous, he can kill somebody; the quarrel can be too hazardous. All arguments ceased. And the king was absolutely satisfied. He said, ”This has always been your teaching, that it is not the act but the consciousness. We can only see the act; we don’t know in what consciousness you did it. That is only known to you. Who are we to decide about it?”
Never judge anybody by the act. Wait. Try to find out his awareness – otherwise don’t judge at all. It is safer not to judge. And about yourself, remember, whatsoever you are doing, keep only one thing in mind, that you are doing it with full awareness. Then I allow you total freedom. No religion has allowed you freedom. I allow you total freedom.
No religion has given you responsibility unto yourself, no religion has given you the right to decide what is right, what is wrong. I give you the right, the responsibility, because to me everything arises out of a single source – and that is awareness. The question says that I have talked about love, my message is about love, and I also have said that the man of enlightenment has neither love nor hate.
Now, rather than asking me, you are mature enough to work out simple things. It is so simple: when through awareness the whole hate energy turns into love, it is totally a new phenomenon – it needs a new name. But what to do? Languages are poor so we have to use the same words, giving them different meanings, definitions. My message of love is not the message of that love which is the polar opposite of hate.
My message of love is of that love which is capable of absorbing hate and transforming it.
Now, the question arises that if there is no more hate, how and why should this new energy be called love? Love, in our minds, is something against hate. Now, there is no opposite to love. That’s why, once in a while, I have been reminding you that the man of enlightenment has neither hate nor love – that is to deny your hate and your love.
Love and hate as polarities, he has none. That does not mean that he is indifferent, although that’s how it will appear to you. That’s why I speak of the poverty of language. If the man of enlightenment has no love, no hate, that means he will be indifferent, neutral – no, that is not the meaning. He has a new kind, a new quality of love which is not opposed to hate.
Now, there is no word for it; so either I have to say he has no hate, no love the way you have, or I have to say that his love is a totally new kind of love; a love which is closer to compassion than to passion, which is closer to a relatedness than to a relationship; a love which is more a giving without asking anything in return than your so-called love. which is a bargain – where each party is trying to get more and give less.
The enlightened man simply gives. It is not that he wants to get something from you – you don’t have anything to give to him. What do you have to give him? He gives because he has too much to give, he is overburdened. He gives because he is like a raincloud, so full of rain that it has to shower. It does not matter where, on whom – on rocks, on good soil, on gardens, in the ocean… it doesn’t matter at all. The cloud simply wants to unburden itself. The enlightened man is just like a raincloud.
He gives you love, not to get anything back. He shares it and is obliged to you that you allowed him the opportunity; that you were open enough, available, vulnerable; that you did not reject when he was ready to pour all his blessings on you; that you opened your heart and received as much as was within your capacity. The world can be full of love, the love I am talking about.
And only that love will transform the hatred in the world – not the love that has been taught to you. That has not made the world more loving, it has made the world more hateful: made its hate truer and more authentic and its love more of a hypocrisy. I would like a world full of love. But remember, that love has no opposite to it. It is simply because you inside yourself have been able, through awareness, to transform your hate into love.
Even to say that you have been able to transform it is not right, but what else to do with language? Whatever you say, something is wrong in saying it, something goes wrong in saying it. The fact is, awareness itself transforms your hate into love, not that you transform it. Your work and function is simply to remain aware. Don’t let anything happen in your life without awareness.
I am giving you the simplest and the most natural religion possible. That’s why I say it is the first and the last, because it cannot be simplified more. There is nothing more below awareness; we have come to the very last root. There is no way to go beyond it, further than it. This is it! Just go on doing all the things that you are doing, but keep aware. Make it a constant remembrance that no act passes in unconsciousness.
It will take a little time. Every day you will miss many things; later on you will remember, ”My God! I forgot again.” But there is nothing to be worried about. Don’t get worried about it, otherwise you are going to miss something else. That which is gone is gone – don’t waste a single moment on it. It is good that you have remembered. Use that remembrance to be aware right now in whatever you are doing.
So, many times you will forget, many times you will remember. Slowly slowly, you will forget less, remember more. And one day it happens… whenever the balance of remembrance is more than the balance of forgetfulness, whenever it is weightier than your forgetfulness – instantly the revolution, the transformation. Suddenly you are a totally different man – the new man is born.
And that new man will find this whole world new because he will have fresh eyes with new qualities to see, fresh ears with new ways to hear, new hands to feel and touch things in a new way. And a single man of that awareness starts triggering the process of awareness in others. Not by any effort, not that he has to do something to trigger the process – that doing has been our undoing – he has just to go on living his way, being his way, and it starts happening of its own accord.
His presence somehow starts something in people who come close to him… an arising of a new energy, the beginning of a new flame. He does nothing, nor does the other person do anything: it happens. All that is needed is a little closeness, friendship. And that’s what the function of the Master is – to gather friends around himself. There is no goal to be achieved, no particular activity to be done.
The function of the Master is just to remain available. One never knows when somebody is on the borderline from where the jump can happen. One never knows in what moment one is open – and just a look from the Master’s eyes, and things will never be the same again. But these are all unpredictable moments, so one has to wait silently in awareness. The most you can do is: don’t create barriers, don’t create hindrances, don’t keep yourself tight, away. Be relaxed… come closer. You have nothing to lose – you have only to gain.
Source: ” From Misery to Enlightenment, Chapter 13 “- Osho
