#osho
If you really want to get beyond the mind and all its experiences — sadness and joy, anger and peace, hate and love; if you want to get beyond all these dualities, you have to watch them equally, you cannot choose. If you choose, you will not be able to watch those which you don’t want to choose. So the first thing is, just be a watcher.
Watch everything with equal distance, with equal aloofness. Sadness, anger, jealousy, happiness, joy, love — remain aloof from all and just be total in your watching. Your watchfulness should be total.
Existence does not make me sad. My own inner being for three decades has never felt a single moment of sadness for myself. I have completely forgotten the strategy, how to be sad. But what goes on happening around the world just brings tears to my eyes.
Joy is contagious! Laugh, and you see others start laughing. So is it with sadness: be sad, and somebody looking at your long face suddenly becomes sad. We are not separate, we are joined together, so when somebody’s heart starts laughing many other hearts are touched — sometimes even faraway hearts.
This sadness is existential: unless you can be your natural self, the spring will never come to you, the flowers will never blossom in your being, love will never grow.
Sickness is unnatural, sadness is unnatural, misery is unnatural — there must be a cause to it, but just rejoicing in life, in the small things of life is a natural thing. There is no question of finding any cause.
Be creative, and the more creative you are, the more rejoicing, the more dancing, the more songful your aloneness becomes. Those periods of sadness, of grumpiness — old habits — will start falling like dead leaves falling from the trees. They also cling for a little while, but they have to fall.
These are the only two situations possible, and you are in the sad situation. Everybody may know about you — who you are — but you yourself are completely oblivious of your transcendence, of your real nature, of your authentic being. This is the only sadness in life. You can find many excuses, but the real sadness is this: you don’t know who you are. How can a person be happy not knowing who he is, not knowing from where he comes, not knowing where he is going? A thousand and one problems arise because of this basic self-ignorance.
Only people who want to be somewhere, somebody, have to suffer the sadness of failure. But a person who never wants to be anybody, never wants to be anywhere else, cannot suffer the sadness of failure — he is always successful, just like me.
Meditation is the only answer to all the questions of man. It may be frustration, it may be depression, it may be sadness, it may be meaninglessness, it may be anguish: The problems may be many but the answer is one. Meditation is the answer. And the simplest method of meditation is just a way of witnessing.
Sadness has come. It has happened to you; it is not you. The moment you remember this, suddenly you will see a distance arising between you and the sadness. It does not affect you anymore. When you lose awareness, it affects you; when you gain awareness, there is a distance. The more awareness rises to a higher peak, the more the distance becomes greater and greater. A moment comes when you are so far away from your sadness that it is as if it is no longer there. The same has to be done with happiness also. It will be difficult, because one wants to cling to happiness. But if you want to cling to happiness, you are sowing the seeds of unhappiness.
People go on repeating the same thing, again and again. If you look at the faces of people in the world, you will be surprised: why do all these people look so sad? Why do their eyes look as if they have lost all hope? The reason is simple; the reason is repetition. Man is intelligent; repetition creates boredom. Boredom brings a sadness because one knows what is going to happen tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow… until one goes into the grave, it will be the same, the same story.
Make it a point: whatsoever — sadness, anger — whatsoever — depression, unhappiness — be with it. And you will suddenly become surprised that if you remain with sadness, sadness changes into a beautiful thing, sadness becomes a depth. If you remain with anger, not thinking about, just being with, anger is transformed; it becomes forgiveness. If you remain with sex, sex takes on a different quality; it becomes love.
Life consists of sadness too. And sadness is also beautiful; it has its own depth, its own delicacy, its own deliciousness, its own taste. A man is poorer if he has not known sadness; he is impoverished, very much impoverished. His laughter will be shallow, his laughter will not have depth, because depth comes only through sadness. A man who knows sadness, if he laughs, his laughter will have depth. His laughter will have something of his sadness too, his laughter will be more colorful.
All your so-called religions are too serious. To me seriousness is sickening. Laughter has a health, a beauty, a quality of grace and dance. I am in absolute favor of laughter and against sadness. Sadness is sickness and is very close to death. Laughter is life and is very close to the universal life, to the very God that is spread all over.
Just look: happiness, unhappiness, sadness, joy, they come and go, they are beggars around you. The witnessing remains the very center, uncaused, unchanging, one. Seek that within you and then everything becomes clear. When you are clear within, everything is transparent. The truth is everywhere around you, only you have to become one.
To make the phenomenon of sadness happen, you have to give energy. That’s why after sadness you feel so dissipated, drained. What happened? — because in depression you were not doing anything, you were simply sad. So why do you feel so much dissipated and drained? Out of sadness you must have come full of energy — but no. Remember, all negative emotions need energy, they drain you. And all positive emotions and positive attitudes are dynamos of energy; they create more energy, they never drain you.
You will be surprised: if you can meditate on sadness, sadness will reveal its secrets to you — and they are of tremendous value. And sadness, once it has revealed its secrets to you, will disappear. Its work is done, its message delivered. And when sadness disappears, joy arises. Joy arises only when sadness disappears out of meditation; there is no other way. Joy wells up when you have broken the ice of sadness that surrounds it. In fact, sadness is like the shell that surrounds the seed; it is protective, it is not the enemy. Once the seed has dropped its protection, is surrendered into the soil, the shell has died, only then the sprout is born.
When you are like a rock, sitting dead with your sadness, nursing your sadness, nobody is with you. Nobody can be with you. There simply comes a gap between you and the life. Then whatsoever you are doing, you have to depend on your energy source. It will be dissipated, you are wasting your energy, you are being drained by your own nonsense. But one thing is there, that when you are sad and negative you will feel more ego. When you are happy, blissful, ecstatic, you will not feel the ego. When you are happy and ecstatic there is no I, and the other disappears. You are bridged with existence, not broken apart — you are together.
When you are sad, angry, greedy, moving just within yourself and enjoying your wounds and seeing them again and again, playing with your wounds, trying to be a martyr, there is a gap between you and existence. You are left alone, and there you will feel I. And when you feel I, the whole existence becomes inimical to you. Not that it becomes inimical because of your I — it appears to be inimical. And if you see that everybody is the enemy, you will behave in such a way that everybody HAS to be the enemy.
Responsibility is yours. And if you take it as yours, you can do something about it. If it is somebody else’s, what can you do? If others create sadness, you will always remain sad because what can you do about it? Millions of others are all around: if others make you frustrated then nothing can be done. You will remain frustrated, then this is your destiny — because how can you change others? If you are responsible, immediately you become a master. Now you can do something. You can change yourself, you can change your attitudes. You can look through different attitudes towards the world, and you can feel that if you feel miserable, somewhere you are a misfit in the total energy system. That’s all that sin means: you are a misfit, not knowing how to move in this total energy system. And the energy system is neutral. If you follow it you will be happy. If you don’t follow it, you will be miserable.
Don’t fight it, don’t try to distract your mind into something else. Don’t go to see a movie because you are feeling very sad. Don’t try to repress your feeling. It is a great opportunity for meditation.
Just watch from where the anger arises. Just go to the very roots. Just go to the very roots from where the sadness is coming — and the greatest surprise is that it doesn’t have any roots. So when you look for the roots, by that time your emotions start disappearing seeing that, “This man is strange — he is looking for the roots!” And those afflictions, emotions, sentiments, feelings — none of them have any roots. They are just clouds, without any roots, surrounding your mind.
So, if you start looking for roots, your emotions start dispersing — “This is not the right man, he is not going to be affected by us. He is a little strange; here we are, and he is looking for the roots!”
Rather than being sad, rather than being angry, rather than being miserable — search for the roots! Every sentiment, every emotion, every feeling will disappear if you look for the roots. If your awareness goes that deep in search, then the emotion will be gone, and the sky of your inner being will be absolutely clear and clean.
My sadness is not about myself. I am absolutely contented. Death cannot take anything from me. My sadness is concerned with the whole of humanity, because their death will take away any opportunity of their becoming enlightened, of their becoming blissful, of their knowing meaning and significance. They have lived in darkness. Are they going to die in darkness too?
Why is the whole world against me? I have not harmed anybody, I have not committed any crime. It is unprecedented that the whole world, all the religions, all the nations, all the politicians, should be against a man who is absolutely innocent. But I know their reason, why they are against me: They are miserable, and I teach you to be blissful. They have been living in sadness — sadness has become their second nature — and I teach you to live fully, intensely and totally. Then even your tears will be part of your laughter. Then your dark nights will also be nothing but moments of relaxation and peace, and wombs for a new day, a new dawn. My teaching is for life, and all the teachings in the world that have gone by are against life — that is their problem. And they cannot argue.
Anger is active sadness; sadness is inactive anger. They are not two things. Watch your own behaviour. When do you find yourself sad? You find yourself sad only in situations where you cannot be angry. The boss in the office says something and you cannot be angry; it is uneconomical. You cannot be angry and you have to go on smiling — then you become sad. The energy has become inactive. You come home, and with your wife you find a small thing, anything irrelevant, and you become angry.
People enjoy anger, they relish it, because at least they feel they are doing something. In sadness, you feel that something has been done to you. You have been at the passive end, at the receiving end. Something has been done to you and you were helpless and you could not retort, you could not retaliate, you could not react.
In anger, you feel a little good. After a big bout of anger, one feels a little relaxed… feels good. You are alive. You also can do things. Of course you cannot do to the boss, but you can do to the wife.
Then the wife waits for the children to come home — because it is uneconomical to be angry with the husband. The whole life seems to be economics. He is the boss, and the wife depends on him, and it is risky to be angry at him. She will wait for the children. They will come home from school, and then she can jump and she can beat them — for their own sake. And what will the children do? They will go in their rooms, they will throw their books, tear them, or beat their dolls, or beat their dogs, or torture their cats. They will have to do something. Everybody has to do something, otherwise one becomes sad.