The question posed was: In Plato’s ‘the symposium’ Socrates says that, “A man who practises the mysteries of love will be in contact not with a reflection, but with truth itself. To know this blessing of human nature, one can find no better helper than love.”
I have been commenting my whole life on love, in thousands of different ways. But the message is the same. Just one most fundamental thing has to be remembered, that is: it is not the love that you think is love. Neither Socrates is speaking about it, nor I am speaking about it.
The love you know is nothing but a biological urge—it depends on your chemistry and your hormones. It can be changed easily, by a small change in your chemistry—and the love that you thought is the ultimate truth will simply disappear.
You have been calling lust, love. This distinction should be remembered. Socrates says, “a man who practises the mysteries of love….” Lust has no mysteries, it is a plain biological game. Every animal, every bird, every tree knows about it.
Certainly, the love which has mysteries is going to be totally different from the love with which you are ordinarily acquainted. “A man who practises the mysteries of love will be in contact not with the reflection, but with truth itself.”
This love that can become a contact with truth itself arises only out of your consciousness; not out of your body, but out of your innermost being.
Lust arises out of your body. Love arises out of your consciousness. But people don’t know their consciousness, and the misunderstanding goes on and on—their bodily lust is taken for love.
Very few people in the world have known love. Those are the people who have become so silent, so peaceful… and out of that silence and peace they come in contact with their innermost being, their soul.
Once you are in contact with your soul, your love becomes not a relationship, but simply a shadow to you. Wherever you move, with whomsoever you move, you are loving.
Right now, what you call love is addressed to someone, and confined to someone. But love is not a phenomenon that can be confined.
You can have it in your open hands, but you cannot have it in your fist. The moment your hands are closed—they are empty. The moment they are open—the whole of existence is available to you.
The false can disappear if you sit silently, whenever you have time, and just watch your thoughts. No need to argue, no need to fight, no need to push them out, just watch—as if you are seeing something on the TV-screen.
In a single step—from mind to no-mind—all the treasures, all the mysteries of love, life, truth, blissfulness, open their doors. There is no need to argue against the false.
My contention is: even to argue against the false is to give some credit to the false, and that has been the eastern contention for thousands of years.
You don’t argue with your shadow: Don’t come with me today, I don’t like you, when I don’t want you, why do you go on following me? You don’t run away from your shadow—because the shadow will run too.
The East has never fought with the mind; it has found a totally different method. Its method is just to be a watcher on the hills. Let everything pass. Don’t judge, don’t condemn, don’t evaluate.
You are only a mirror; these are not your functions. You simply reflect—and they will all pass. If you don’t take any note of them, if you can ignore them, they will stop coming to you; they don’t want to be uninvited guests.
Perhaps because of the old habit, for a few days they may continue; but you will be able to see that the traffic is becoming less and less; otherwise it is twenty-four-hour rush hour.
Once the mind is silent, empty, spacious, you have found the golden key, the master key, which opens all the mysteries of love, of truth, of eternal life.
Just close your eyes and be silent, and relax. But the conclusion is right: “A man who practises the mysteries of love will be in contact, not with a reflection, but with truth itself. To know this blessing of human nature, one can find no better helper than love.”
Either you can start by increasing your love, expanding your love… but where will you expand it? Your mind is standing like a China wall all around you. First that China wall has to disappear— and that is the function of meditation.
Socrates could have been for the West their Gautam Buddha, and the whole history of the West would have been totally different. He has created the basic path for the western mind: argument.
And argument by and by, rather than discovering love, has discovered atom bombs, nuclear weapons, science, technology.
The East has not been able to discover these things because it has never given any credit to argumentation, to reason. Its whole concentration has been on expanding consciousness—and to give it space, it has to get rid of the mind.
Once the mind is not there you don’t have boundaries, even the sky is not the boundary. You are all over the place. This feeling of being all over the place is love; and knowing it, that it is arising from the very centre of your being, is truth.
But, Socrates is not talking in a certain city. He is not talking to so-called lovers all over the world. He is talking to a few disciples who have come in search of truth. He helped a few people; he could not help many, for the simple reason that with everybody the process was so long.
But the East has been fortunate to discover a single-step pilgrimage: from mind to no-mind—and you have arrived home.
You have always been there. You have never left it for a single moment! Just, your mind has been wandering all over the world, but you have never been anywhere else; you are exactly where you should be. If the wandering of the mind stops, suddenly—the revelation.
Excerpted from The Rebellious Spirit. Courtesy: Osho International Foundation/www.osho.com
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