Dealing with Anxiety. Osho.

   

FEELING ANXIOUS? BE ALERT!

When you feel anxious, anxiety-ridden, what is one to do? What do you ordinarily do when anxiety is there? You try to solve it. You try alternatives, and you get more and more into it. You will create a bigger mess because anxiety cannot be solved through thinking. It cannot be dissolved through thinking because thinking itself is a sort of anxiety.

This technique says don’t do anything with anxiety. Just be alert!

I will tell you one old anecdote about Bokuju, another Zen master. He lived alone in a cave, but during the day, or even in the night, he would sometimes say loudly, “Bokuju” – his own name, and then he would say, “Yes, I am here.” And no one else was there.
Then his disciples used to ask him, “Why are you calling ‘Bokuju’, your own name, and then saying, ‘Yes sir, I am here’?”
He said, “Whenever I get into thinking, I have to remember to be alert, and so I call my own name, ‘Bokuju.’ The moment I call ‘Bokuju’ and I say, ‘Yes sir, I am here,’ the thinking, the anxiety disappears.”

Then, in his last days, for two or three years, he never called “Bokuju,” his name, and never had to reply, “Yes sir, I am here.”
The disciples asked, “Master, now you never do this.”
So he said, “But now Bokuju is always there. He is always there, and there is no need. Before I used to miss him. Sometimes the anxiety would take me, cloud me all over, and Bokuju was not there. So I had to remember ‘Bokuju,’ and the anxiety would disappear....”

Try your name. When you feel deep anxiety, just call your name – not “Bokuju” or any name, but your name – and then reply to it, “Yes sir, I am here,” and feel the difference. Anxiety will not be there. At least for a single moment you will have a glimpse beyond the clouds, and that glimpse can be deepened. Once you know that if you become alert anxiety is not there, it disappears; you have come to a deep knowing of your own self and the mechanism of inner working.
 

Excerpted from Osho, The Book of Secrets, Talk #41

 

Osho on Love. The Honeymoon that Never Ends

      

LOVE IS NOT A RELATIONSHIP. 

Love relates, but it is not a relationship. 

A relationship is something finished. A relationship is a noun; the full stop has come, the honeymoon is over. Now there is no joy, no enthusiasm, now all is finished. You can carry it on, just to keep your promises. You can carry it on because it is comfortable, convenient, and cozy. You can carry it on because there is nothing else to do. You can carry it on because if you disrupt it, it is going to create much trouble for you… Relationship means something complete, finished, and closed.

Love is never a relationship; love is relating. It is always a river, flowing, unending. Love knows no full stop; the honeymoon begins but never ends. It is not like a novel that starts at a certain point and ends at a certain point. It is an ongoing phenomenon. Lovers end, love continues– it is a continuum. It is a verb, not a noun.

And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to a relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? Because to relate is insecure, and a relationship is a security. Relationship has a certainty; relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say goodbye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid that we a want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable. We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don't allow it freedom to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun.

You are in love with a woman or a man and immediately you start thinking of getting married. Make it a legal contract. Why? How does the law come into love? The law comes into love because love is not there. It is only a fantasy, and you know the fantasy will disappear. Before it disappears settle down, before it disappears do something so it becomes impossible to separate.

In a better world, with more meditative people, with a little more enlightenment spread over the earth, people will love, love immensely, but their love will remain a relating not a relationship. And I am not saying that their love will be only momentary. There is every possibility their love may go deeper than your love, may have a higher quality of intimacy, and may have something more of poetry and more of godliness in it. And there is every possibility their love may last longer than your so-called relationship ever lasts. But it will not be guaranteed by the law, by the court, by the policeman. The guarantee will be inner. It will be a commitment from the heart; it will be a silent communion.

If you enjoy being with somebody, you would like to enjoy it more and more. If you enjoy the intimacy, you would like to explore the intimacy more and more. And there are a few flowers of love which bloom only after long intimacies. There are seasonal flowers too; within six weeks they are there, in the sun, but within six weeks again they are gone forever. There are flowers that take years to come, and there are flowers that take many years to come. The longer it takes, the deeper it goes. But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another heart. It has not even to be verbalized, because to verbalize it is to profane it. It has to be a silent commitment; eye to eye, heart to heart, being to being. It has to be understood, not said.

Forget relationships and learn how to relate.

Once you are in a relationship you start taking each other for granted– that's what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Neither knows either! It is impossible to know the other, the other remains a mystery. And to take the other for granted is insulting, disrespectful.

To think that you know your wife is very, very ungrateful. How can you know the woman? How can you know the man? They are processes, they are not things. The woman that you knew yesterday is not there today. So much water has gone down the Ganges; she is somebody else, totally different. Relate again, start again, don't take it for granted.

The man that you slept with last night, look at his face again in the morning. He is no more the same person, so much has changed. So much, incalculably much has changed. That is the difference between a thing and a person. The furniture in the room is the same, but the man and the woman; they are no more the same. Explore again, start again. That's what I mean by relating.

Relating means you are always starting, you are continuously trying to become acquainted. Again and again, you are introducing yourself to each other. You are trying to see the many facets of the other's personality. You are trying to penetrate deeper and deeper into his realm of inner feelings, into the deep recesses of his being. You are trying to unravel a mystery which cannot be unraveled. That is the joy of love: the exploration of consciousness.

And if you relate, and don't reduce it to a relationship, then the other will become a mirror to you. Exploring him, unawares you will be exploring yourself too. Getting deeper into the other, knowing his feelings, his thoughts, his deeper stirrings, you will know your own deeper stirrings too. Lovers become mirrors to each other, and then love becomes a meditation. Relationship is ugly, relating is beautiful.

Hence, I say relate. By saying relate, I mean remain continuously on a honeymoon. Go on searching and seeking each other, finding new ways of loving each other, finding new ways of being with each other. And each person is such an infinite mystery, inexhaustible, unfathomable, that it is not possible that you can ever say, "I have known her," or, "I have known him." At the most you can say, "I have tried my best, but the mystery remains a mystery."

In fact, the more you know, the more mysterious the other becomes.

Then love is a constant adventure.

Osho on Love and Relatedness

                                         

When you fall in love with a woman, everybody laughs. They think, 'This man has gone crazy!' People start asking, 'What do you see in this woman?' People start asking the woman, 'What do you see in this guy?' But lovers go on seeing things -- all kinds of hallucinations. In a very ordinary girl's face, a lover can see the moon! And the woman can see in her lover all kinds of gods! She cannot believe that such a love has ever happened before or is going to happen again. It is happening for the first time and the last time!

That's why in every language there exists the expression 'falling in love'. It is really falling -- it is falling from your intelligence, falling from your humanity. it is really falling into a ditch! And if you become committed, then you cannot get out of the ditch either! Commitment means, 'I am falling forever,' so the ditch is going to become your grave.

                                     

Marriages have become people's graves -- and I have seen no relationship that works. What works is love, but love is a delicate flower; you cannot depend on it. What works is momentary, but under the impact of love you can become committed and then you will repent, but then you cannot escape from the commitment. You have been brought up with these beliefs: that you have to stick to your promise that you have to be consistent, that you have to fulfill whatsoever word you have given. Now your whole work is wasted. What works as far as love is concerned is momentary; it certainly works for the moment, but no relationship works.

                                  

Relatedness works but not relationship, and you have to understand the difference between the two. Love, the moment it becomes a relationship, becomes bondage. And when you are in bondage it is impossible for you to be festive, to be joyous. You can fulfilL the duty, but duty is an ugly, four-letter word. Duty means now you are caught and you have to do it. Love is not something that you do, it is something that happens; duty is something that you have to do. It is a drag! You become a martyr. You start carrying your cross on your own shoulders, and you may think that you are becoming a Christ...

Look at all the husbands carrying crosses! Look at the wives! Nobody seems to be happy. They are continuously quarrelling, continuously fighting, continuously destroying each other, and reducing each other to commodities, to means. The wife is using the husband; the husband is using the wife. It may be for different purposes -- the wife uses the husband for economic purposes and the husband uses the wife for sexual purposes -- but both are using each other. And how can one be happy when one is being used?

                               

So the moment the husband says, 'What about it tonight?' the wife immediately says, 'I am suffering from a headache,' or she goes into a tantrum or starts a quarrel. So when the husband wants to make love to the wife he has to bring ice cream and a bouquet and a sari, or something economic; then it is business, then it is simply a give and take.

This is not working -- you cannot say that the relationship is working. Yes, if love becomes conscious, then there is a tremendous joy -- it works.

Love ordinarily is unconscious and animal. If you make it conscious -- that means love plus meditation -- then there is a totally different quality to it, a different beauty, a different flavour; then it works. But it works because of consciousness not because of love. And consciousness changes love from a relationship into a relatedness; it changes it more into a friendliness. It is no longer bondage, it gives freedom.

Zen - Zest, Zip, Zap and Zing
Osho