When you are trying to be somebody else, naturally you start acting. And when you start imitating you will imitate everything. You will imitate love, and that is the most dangerous thing. Jesus loved so you will start loving. But how can you love unless you attain the consciousness that Jesus attained? Love is a fragrance. When the one-thousand-petalled lotus of consciousness opens in you, the fragrance is released. If you start feigning it, that will be just artificial.
You can bring perfume from the marketplace and you can start throwing the perfume all over yourself, and of course, it will stink because it will not be your own flowering. It will be artificial and ugly.
And once a person starts feigning love, his whole life becomes false, because love is the centre of life. Love is the very purpose of life, the destiny of life.
If you feign affection, you will feign intelligence, you will feign freedom—you will start pretending everything else. A man who is capable of deceiving himself that he loves without loving, is so stupid that he will imitate everything and will believe it. But his life will show that that’s not so.
Pretension is schizophrenic
If you feign, you become pseudo. A man who has a pseudo personality loses all intelligence, and that is the greatest loss in the world.
Pseudo people are bound to hear something else. They are bound to see that which is not. They are bound to miss that which is, because in their very beings they have deceived themselves. Now their whole lives will be again, and again missing the point.
The first thing one has to remember is to be whole; not to be divided, not to become two persons. And the teaching, ‘be like somebody else’ always creates two persons in you. One is just a facade, superficial, and you have to live a double life. In your drawing-room you are one person, in your bathroom you are another. You have to live a double life. This split can become so deep that you completely forget: when you are one, you forget the other; when you are the other, you forget the first one.
This is what happens to schizophrenic patients. And now, in the world, schizophrenic patients are growing in number every day, as if humanity has come to a climax. Thousands of years of stupid teachings have brought on this sad state of affairs.
Doubting love is unhealthy
Love is something natural. You can doubt God, there is no problem in it. In fact, one should doubt God because unless you doubt, the enquiry cannot begin. One should begin one’s enquiry into God as an atheist; to begin as a theist is to begin in a wrong way. You have already believed, now how can you enquire? I am not saying disbelieve in God, because that again is a belief, a negative belief. Begin with doubt—doubt is natural.
Love and doubt are both God-given gifts, but you should not doubt love because to doubt love is dangerous. One natural gift will start destroying another natural gift. You will be in a conflict. And if you start doubting love you will start repressing it. If you start doubting love you will become incapable of loving, you will become closed.
And the moment your loving becomes encapsulated you are lost, because you lose the very bridge between you and existence.
Love is the juice of life
Love is as perennial as the grass in the aridity and disenchantment. Your life is arid like a desert. If there is no love then your life will be dry, there will be no juice. There will be no flowering in your life, nothing of greenery.
And there is disenchantment, disillusionment at every step, because each desire is bound to come to disillusionment.
Money cannot buy fulfilment
You desire money and you hope that when the money is there you will be happy. The moment money is there, suddenly you realise you are not happy. Money is there, but the happiness has not followed it. Money cannot purchase happiness; it can purchase comfort.
I am not against money and I am not against comfort either, but comfort is comfort; happiness is a totally different phenomenon. Comfort is good, but it is not happiness, it is not blissfulness, it is not fulfilment. You can live comfortably and die comfortably, but that will not make you contented.
Money can purchase many things, but there are a few things it cannot purchase and those are the few things, which are really valuable. The really valuable has no price, it is priceless, you have to deserve it.
Life is bound to be arid, desert-like, if you don’t have any love in you. It is going to be a continuous disillusionment, from one disillusionment to another. By the time you reach the very end, you are nothing but a sad, sad story.
Love is forever
Love is as perennial as the grass. Love is the only experience, which transcends death. All that is God-given to you, which includes many things—intelligence is there, compassion is there, sympathy is there, creativity is there, sensitivity is there, and so on and so forth—but love is the only experience in which time disappears. Love is the only experience in which naturally you enter into meditation. Love is the only experience in which you are not afraid of death at all.
It is love experienced that one day becomes prayer, and it is prayer that one day becomes the experience of godliness.
Excerpted from Guida Spirituale/Courtesy:Osho International Foundation/www.osho.com
This was first published in the June 2009 issue of Complete Wellbeing.
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