I WILL NOT HAVE SUCCESSORS

Beloved Osho,

You have often said you will have no successors. But won't all those who love you be your successors in that we carry you in our blood and bones and so you are part of us forever?

Maneesha,

The concept of the successor is bureaucratic. The very idea of succession is not the right idea in the world of consciousness. That's why I have said I WILL NOT HAVE SUCCESSORS. But you are right in saying that YOU WILL CARRY IN YOUR BONES AND IN YOUR BLOOD MY LOVE, MY INSIGHT. But don't use the word 'successor', rather use the words 'YOU WILL BE ME'.

Why be so far away, a successor, when you can be me? Be so empty that I can make a home in you, that your emptiness can absorb my emptiness, that your heart can have the same dance as my heart. IT IS NOT SUCCESSION, IT IS TRANSMISSION.

THE VERY IDEA OF SUCCESSION IS POLITICAL. Only one person can be a successor, so there is bound to be competition, ambition. There is bound to be a subtle struggle to be closer to the Master, to force others away. It may not be on the surface but, underneath, the problem will remain in the disciples: "Who is going to be the successor?"

I destroy the whole conception. Every disciple who has loved has become one with the Master. THERE IS NO NEED OF ANY COMPETITION, NOR ONE SUCCESSOR. It is for everybody who has offered himself in deep gratitude, who has become one in a certain sense with the Master's presence. There is no need of any competition: thousands can have the same experience, millions can have the same experience.

Awareness & Relaxation

Awareness & Relaxation....The ResolutionAwareness & Relaxation

Step 1: Daily Watching“Start being aware with day-to-day, routine actions, and while you are doing your routine actions, remain relaxed.

“There is no need to be tense. When you are washing your floor, what is the need to be tense? Or when you are cooking the food, what is the need to be tense? There is not a single time in life that requires your tension. It is just your unawareness and your impatience.

“I have not found anything — and I have lived in all kind of ways, with all kinds of people. I have always been puzzled: why are they tense? It seems tension has nothing to do with anything outside you, it has something to do within you. Outside you always find an excuse only because it looks so idiotic to be tense without any reason. Just to rationalize, you find some reason outside yourself to explain why you are tense.

“But tension is not outside you, it is in your wrong style of life.

Step 2: Accept yourself“You are living in competition — that will create tension. You are living in continuous comparison — which will create tension. You are always thinking either of the past or of the future, and missing the present that is the only reality — that will create tension.

“Just find your own talent. Nature never sends any single individual without some unique gift. Just a little search…. Whatever qualities and whatever talents you have, use them to the fullest, and the energy that is involved in tensions will start becoming your grace, your beauty.

Step 3: Be an Artist of Love“Whatever you are doing, do it with such love, with such care that the smallest thing in the world becomes a piece of art. It will bring great joy to you. And it will create a world without competition, without comparison; it will give dignity to all people. It will restore their pride, which religions have destroyed.“Any act done with totality becomes your prayer.”

Osho: The Hidden Splendor

Beloved Osho, I’m afraid that the world is going to end before I get enlightened. What can I Do?

You seem to be very much in a hurry. If you understand me, there is no problem — right now you can become enlightened. At least right now the world has not ended. There are thousands of people in the world trying for enlightenment, but their very trying is the barrier. It postpones enlightenment.

For ninety years J. Krishnamurti has been working, first upon himself, then upon others. And now he is getting immensely frustrated. Nobody is to be blamed, he himself has made it a difficult job. He is obsessed with reading detective novels; he has made the search for enlightenment a very sensational, puzzling, difficult detective story. My Krishnamurti Lake is doing far better: just the other day somebody became enlightened there.

You are asking me, “The world is going to end, what am I supposed to do?” Have I to answer you? Can’t you understand? Krishnamurti Lake is not far away.

MASTER YOUR THOUGHTS

Any thought goes on inside your mind. Watch for a few minutes and you will be surprised: the mind seems to be crazy! It jumps from one thought to another thought for no reason at all. Just a dog starts barking in the neighborhood and your mind takes the clue from it... and you remember the dog that you used to have in your childhood, and the dog died... and you start feeling sad. And because of the death of the dog you start thinking about death, and the death of your mother and the death of your father. And you become angry because you were never at ease with your mother; there was always conflict. The dog is still barking, completely unaware what he has done. And you have traveled so far!

Anything can trigger a process in you. This is a kind of slavery: you are at the mercy of accidents. This is not mastery. And a sannyasin, a seeker, should be a master. He thinks only if he wants to; if he does not want to think he simply puts his mind off. He knows how to put it on and how to put it off.

You don't know how to put it on, you don't know how to put it off; it goes on and on. It starts working in the childhood and goes on working till you die. Seventy years, eighty years, continuously working -- so much work, and then you cannot expect anything great out of it because it is utterly tired. It has not much energy left; it is leaking from everywhere. If you can put it off... that's what meditation is all about: putting the mind off, the art of putting the mind off. If you can put it off, it will gather energy.

If for a few hours every day you are without the mind, you will gather so much energy that that energy will keep you young, fresh, creative. That energy will allow you to see reality, the beauty of the existence, the joy of life, the celebration. But for that you need energy, and your mind has only very little energy. Just somehow you manage your life. You live a poor life for the sheer reason that you don't know how to accumulate your mind energy, how to make a reservoir of your inner being. It goes on and on leaking and you don't know how to stop those leakages.

NEVER ALLOW YOUR BODY TO DO HARM.
Three things, Buddha says: Be careful about words, be master of your thoughts, NEVER ALLOW YOUR BODY TO DO HARM. Because the body comes from the animals, the body IS animal. It enjoys harming, it is violent. Be conscious of it. Don't allow it to go into violence. Don't allow it to harm anybody, because if you harm others the harm will come back to you sooner or later. That's the whole theory of karma: whatsoever you do to others will be done to you. So do to others only that which you would like to be done to you.

Loving and Love in Marriage

Question : If love becomes destroyed in Marriage, how are we to Live if we wish to share love and thoughts on a day-today Basis, and also raise Children with both a Mother And a Father?

Osho : I have never said that love is destroyed by marriage. How can marriage destroy love? Yes, it is destroyed in marriage, but it is destroyed by you, not by marriage. It is destroyed by the partners. How can marriage destroy love? It is you who destroy it, because you don't know what love is. You simply pretend to know, you simply hope that you know, you dream that you know, but you don't know what love is. Love has to be learned; it is the greatest art there is. If people are dancing and somebody asks you, 'Come and dance,' you say, 'I don't know.'

You don't just jump up and start dancing and have everybody think that you are a great dancer. You will just prove yourself to be a buffoon. You will not prove yourself to be a dancer. It has to be learned -- the grace of it, the movement of it. You have to train the body for it. You don't just go and start painting just because the canvas is available and the brush is there and the colour is there. You don't start painting. You say, 'All requirements are here, so I can paint. You can paint -- but you will not be a painter that way.

You meet a woman -- the canvas is there. You immediately become a lover -- you start painting. And she starts painting on you. Of course you both prove to be foolish -- painted fools -- and sooner or later you understand what is happening. But you never thought that love is an art. You are not born with the art, it is nothing to do with your birth. You have to learn it. It is the most subtle art. You are born only with a capacity. Of course, you are born with a body; you can be a dancer because you have the body.

You can move your body and you can be a dancer -- but dancing has to be learned. Much effort is needed to learn dancing. And dancing is not so difficult because you alone are involved in it. Love is much more difficult. It is dancing with somebody else. The other is also needed to know what dancing is. To fit with somebody, it is a great art. To create a harmony between two persons... two persons mean two different worlds. When two worlds come close, clash is bound to be there if you don't know how to harmonise.

Love is harmony. And happiness, health, harmony, all happen out of love. Learn to love. Don't be in a hurry for marriage, learn to love. First become a great lover. And what is the requirement? The requirement is that a great lover is always ready to give love and is not bothered whether it is returned or not. It is always returned, it is inthe very nature of things. It is just as if you go to the mountains and you sing a song, and the valleys respond. Have you seen an echo point in the mountains, in the hills?

You shout and the valleys shout, or you sing and the valleys sing. Each heart is a valley. If you pour love into it, it will respond. The first lesson of love is not to ask for love, but just to give. Become a giver. And people are doing just the opposite. Even when they give, they give only with the idea that love should come back. It is a bargain. They don't share, they don't share freely. They share with a condition. They go on watching out of the corner of their eye whether it is coming back or not. Very poor people... they don't know the natural functioning of love.

You simply pour, it will come. And if it is not coming, nothing to be worried about -- because a lover knows that to love is to be happy. If it comes, good; then the happiness is multiplied. But even if it never comes back, in the very act of loving you become so happy, so ecstatic, who bothers whether it comes or not? Love has its own intrinsic happiness. It happens when you love. There is no need to wait for the result. Just start loving. By and by you will see much more love is coming back to you. One loves and comes to know what love is only by loving.

As one learns swimming by swimming, by loving one loves. And people are very miserly. They are waiting for some great beloved to happen, then they will love. They remain closed, they remain withdrawn. They just wait. From somewhere some Cleopatra will come and then they will open their heart, but by that time they have completely forgotten how to open it. Don't miss any opportunity of love. Even passing in a street, you can be loving. Even to the beggar you can be loving. There is no need that you have to give him something; you can smile at least. It costs nothing -- but your very smile opens your heart, makes your heart more alive.

Hold somebody's hand -- a friend or a stranger. Don't wait that you will only love when the right person happens. Then the right person will never happen. Go on loving. The more you love, the more is the possibility for the right person to happen, because your heart starts flowering. And a flowering heart attracts many bees, many lovers.You have been trained in a very wrong way. First, everybody lives under a wrong impression that everybody is already a lover. Just being born, you think you are a lover. It's not so easy.

Yes, there is a potentiality, but the potentiality has to be trained, disciplined. A seed exists, but it has to come to flower. You can go on carrying your seed; no bee will be coming. Have you ever seen bees coming to the seeds? Don't they know that seeds can become flowers? But they come when they become flowers. Become a flower, don't remain a seed. Two people, separately unhappy, create more unhappiness for each other when they come together. That's mathematical.

You were unhappy, your wife was unhappy and you both are hoping that being together you both will become happy? This is... this is such ordinary arithmetic -- like two plus two makes four. It is that simple. It is not part of any higher mathematics; it is very ordinary, you can count it on your fingers. You both will become unhappy.

You don't love me any more?' asked Mulla Nasrudin's wife. 'You never say anything nice to me any more like you used to when we were courting.' She wiped a tear from her eye with the corner of her apron. 'I love you, I love you,' retorted Mulla Nasrudin. 'Now will you please shut up and let me drink my beer in peace?'

Courting is one thing. Don't depend on courting. In fact before you get married, get rid of courting. My suggestion is that marriage should happen after the honeymoon, never before it. Only if everything goes right, only then marriage should happen. Honeymoon after marriage is very dangerous. As far as I know, ninety-nine percent of marriages are finished by the time the honeymoon is finished. But then you are caught, then you have no way to escape. Then the whole society, the law, the court -- everybody is against you if you leave the wife, or the wife leaves you. Then the whole morality, the religion, the priest, everybody is against you.

In fact society should create all barriers possible for marriage and no barrier for divorce. Society should not allow people to marry so easily. The court should create barriers -- live with the woman for two years at least, then the court can allow you to get married. Right now they are doing just the reverse. If you want to get married, nobody asks whether you are ready or whether it is just a whim, just because you like the nose of the woman. What foolishness! One cannot live by just a long nose. After two days the nose will be forgotten.

Who looks at one's own wife's nose? I have heard:A certain ward was staffed completely by nurses who looked as though they were finalists in the Miss World Contest, but every time one of the patients saw them, he stared intently and said, 'Rubbish! 'The man in the next bed could not understand it at all. 'Gorgeous nurses like these to look after you and all you can say is "Rubbish". Why?'

'I was not thinking of the nurses,' said the other sadly, 'I was thinking of my wife.'  The wife never looks beautiful, the husband never looks beautiful. Once you are aquainted, beauty disappears. 

Two persons should be allowed to live together long enough to become aquainted, familiar with each other. And even if they want to get married, they should not be allowed. Then divorces will disappear from the world. The divorces exist because marriages are wrong and forced. The divorces exist because marriages are done in a romantic mood. A romantic mood is good if you are a poet -- and poets are not known to be good husbands or good wives. In fact poets are almost always bachelors.

They fool around but they never get caught, and hence their romance remains alive. They go on writing poetry, beautiful poetry. One should not get married to a woman or to a man in a poetic mood. Let the prose mood come, then settle. Because the day-to-day life is more like prose than like poetry. One should become mature enough. Maturity means that one is no more a romantic fool. One understands life, one understands the responsibility of life, one understands the problems of being together with a person.

One accepts all those difficulties and yet decides to live with the person. One is not hoping that there is only going to be heaven, all roses. One is not hoping nonsense; one knows reality is tough. It is rough. There are roses, but far and few in between; there are many thorns. When you have become alert to all of these problems and still you decide that it is worthwhile to risk and be with a person rather than to be alone, then get married. Then marriages will never kill love, because this love is realistic. Marriage can kill only romantic love.

And romantic love is what people call 'puppy love'. One should not depend on it. One should not think about it as nourishment. It may be just like ice-cream. You can eat it sometimes, but don't depend on it. Life has to be more realistic, more prose. And marriage itself never destroys anything. Marriage simply brings out whatsoever ishidden in you -- it brings it out. If love is hidden behind you, inside you, marriage brings it out. If love was just a pretension, just a bait, then sooner or later it has to disappear.

And then your reality, your ugly personality comes up. Marriage simply is an opportunity, so whatsoever you had to bring out will come out. I am not saying that love is destroyed by marriage. Love is destroyed by people who don't know how to love. Love is destroyed because in the first place love is not. You have been living in a dream. Reality destroys that dream. Otherwise love is something eternal, part of eternity. If you grow, if you know the art, and you accept the realities of love-life, then it goes on growing every day.

Marriage becomes a tremendous opportunity to grow into love. Nothing can destroy love. If it is there, it goes on growing. But my feeling is, it is not there in the first place. You misunderstood yourself; something else was there. Maybe sex was there, sex appeal was there. Then it is going to be destroyed, because once you have loved a woman, then the sex appeal disappears -- because the sex appeal is only with the unknown. Once you have tasted the body of the woman or the man, then the sex appeal disappears.

If your love was only sex appeal then it is bound to disappear. So never misunderstand love for something else. If love is really love.... What do I mean when I say 'really love'? I mean that just being in the presence of the other you feel suddenly happy, just being together you feel ecstatic, just the very presence of the other fulfills something deep in your heart... something starts singing in your heart, you fall into harmony. Just the very presence of the other helps you to be together; you become more individual, more centered, more grounded. Then it is love.

Love is not a passion, love is not an emotion. Love is a very deep understanding that somebody somehow completes you. Somebody makes you a full circle. The presence of the other enhances your presence. Love gives freedom to be yourself; it is not possessiveness. So, watch. Never think of sex as love, otherwise you will be deceived.

Be alert, and when you start feeling with someone that just the presence, the pure presence -- nothing else, nothing else is needed; you don't ask anything -- just the presence, just that the other is, is enough to make you happy... something starts flowering within you, a thousand and one  lotuses bloom... then you are in love, and then you can pass through all the difficulties that reality creates. Many anguishes, many anxieties -- you will be able to pass all of them, and your love will be flowering more and more, because all those situations will become challenges. And your love, by overcoming them, will become more and more strong.

Love is eternity. If it is there, then it goes on growing and growing. Love knows the beginning but does not know the end.

Jiddu Krishnamurti - Our problems arise because we are conditioned

Question: Do you have a technique which I can learn from you, so that I, too, can carry your message to those who are full of sorrow?

Jiddu Krishnamurti : Sir, what do you mean by carrying a message? Do you mean repeating the words - propaganda? The very nature of propaganda is to condition the mind. Every form of propaganda - the Communist propaganda, the religious propaganda, and so on - is to condition the mind, is it not? If you learn a technique as you call it, a way, and you learn it by heart and repeat it, you will be a good propagandist; if you are keen, clever, if you are capable of using words, you will condition those that hear you in a new way instead of the old way, but it is still conditioning; it is still limited. And that is our problem, is it not?

Our problems arise because we are conditioned. Our education conditions us. Is it possible for the mind ever to be free from conditioning? You can only discover that state. You cannot say whether it is possible or not possible. When you ask, "Have you a technique?" what do you mean? Perhaps you mean a method, a system, which you learn like a schoolboy and repeat it. Sir, surely the problem is something much more fundamental, radically different, is it not? There is no technique to learn. You do not have to carry my message, what you carry is your message, not mine, sirs.

This existence, this misery, this confusion is your problem. If you understand it, if you can understand the experience of a conditioned mind and go beyond, then you will be the person who is teaching; then there will be no teacher and no disciple. But then, you have to understand yourself, not learn my technique or carry my message.

Sir, what is important is to understand that this is our world, that together we can build this world happily, that we - you and I - are related together, that what you do and what I do inwardly matters, that how we think is important, and that thought, which is always conditioned, will not solve our problem. What will solve our problem is to understand the ways of our thinking.

The moment we understand how we think, there will be a radical change inwardly; we will no longer be Hindus, Christians, Communists, socialists, or capitalists; we shall be human beings, human beings with passion, with love, with consideration. That cannot come about by merely learning a technique or carrying somebody's message.

You cannot have love through technique. You can have sensation through a technique, but that is not love. Love is something that cannot be told, that cannot be carried across through newspapers or through techniques or through propaganda. It must be felt, it must be understood. But if you repeat love, love, love, it has no meaning. You will know of that love when the mind is quiet, when the mind is free from its conditioning, from its anxieties, from its fears. And it is that love which is the true revolution that will alter the whole process of our being.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, First Talk in Bombay 1953