Growth situations: in life and in therapeutic groups

In the 70's, in addition to the daily lectures, Osho received, in more intimate meetings, groups of seekers in a small auditorium. These meetings, called darshans, took place every night and were attended by people who wanted to be initiated into sanyas, people who were arriving or departing, and, on a rotating basis, groups of sannyasins (disciples) who worked in the commune. In these darshans, Osho answered questions and touched on everyday issues. These meetings were recorded and later published in several volumes each with a title, but forming part of a series called "Darshan Diaries".

This month, we are publishing the comments that Osho made during one of the meetings transcribed in the Darshan Diary: "The Passion for the Impossible", answering questions and providing guidance regarding situations of growth, in life and in therapeutic groups.

                                                               Monday, September 6th

A visitor who participated in the Tathata group said he found it easy. Osho suggested that he do the Intensive Enlightenment group, saying that that one would be more intense.

Osho: "When you accept the challenge of a certain difficult method, you grow. Something easy is not necessarily good. Something may seem easy, but it does not force any change on you. It allows you to be as you are, but then it is meaning. The whole meaning is to create something in you greater than you are, something in you deeper than you are. All effort is to help you go a little beyond yourself.

A thing is easy when it fits you. A thing is difficult when you have to adjust to it. So always remember that the path is hard. There are no shortcuts. Everyone arrives through an arduous path. When something becomes too easy, look for something hard again. Otherwise you will live conveniently, you will die conveniently, but nothing will have happened. Keep looking for new challenges. Keep looking higher. Even if it seems impossible to achieve, it will help you grow. The very vision of something great immediately begins to transform you. You start to become bigger even with a dream of something great.

So never settle for easy. People tend to settle very easily and then, naturally, growth stops. As psychologists say, if you look at people's mental ages, the average never goes beyond thirteen. A man may be seventy years old, his average mental age remains close to twelve, thirteen, or at most fourteen. Physically he's seventy, mentally he hangs somewhere close to thirteen, and that's an average too. And this average includes geniuses and talented people. So when you meet a real person, forget the average. You'll find it hanging somewhere around seven to nine. Since that age they have never accepted any challenge: they are stuck there. Everyone is retarded in that sense.

So never miss any challenge. And if there is no challenge, create one. Create even barriers and obstacles, they will help you. They will make you stronger.

Osho: Pratima, what's going on?

Anand Pratima (annoyed): I am very sad. I feel very alone and scared. I feel now that I've been running away from this space of being alone for a long time.

I see my desire and attempt to fill my spaces with other people. The love between Somendra and I is very beautiful. Pain is not love.

Osho: This is a sad situation, but it can be of tremendous importance. Happiness makes people shallow, sadness gives depth. And sometimes it's necessary. In fact, you never get anything you don't need. Remember, this is a very fundamental law. You may not get what you want, but you always get what you need (Pratima starts crying). Somehow the universe goes on fulfilling your needs. You can understand or not. The more aware you become, the more you see that in that moment sadness was necessary. It is a necessary ingredient for growth.

Loving is good. Being together is good, but being alone is also necessary. To be so lonely that one feels absolutely hopeless and there seems to be no possibility that they will ever be able to be together again; the darkness seems to be endless. The person seems to be absolutely lost, without any hope. The person screams and screams... and no response. The person screams and cries, and no one is even there to hear him.

At such times the mind tends to fill itself with anything: sometimes overeating, sometimes meeting people and mixing with them, sometimes pretending to be in love, because loneliness is so terrible. But if you really want to be benefited by it, blessed by it, then don't fill those spaces, live them.

Go all the way through it. If he is loneliness, be alone. That's a part of life that has to be learned, and a very basic lesson, that you're alone. Then everything else is a game. You can hide your loneliness from yourself in a thousand and one ways, but it's never gone, it's always there. Layer after layer of lies you can create, we call it maya, illusion, but deep down wherever you go you will find that emptiness again, loneliness will be there.

Somehow the person has to stop fighting with her. Somehow the person has to accept it. It is painful, terribly painful to accept, but what to do? That's how life is. So my suggestion is: don't escape this time. Somendra has put you in a real growth situation. This is a problem you've run into by finding a therapist who leads groups, so what do you do? And this is a more real situation than any group can create.
A group situation is always artificial, arbitrary. It has nothing to compare with the life situation. And this is a life situation. Be alone. Let it hurt... Let it hurt anyway. Go into it, cry and wail, but don't try to escape. There will come a time when you will have hit rock bottom and suddenly you will move back up. But that only happens when you've reached the extreme. This is like the pendulum of a clock. He goes to

left, to the extreme, and from there it comes back. The same happens in the mind.
If you can be really sad, to the very depths of sadness, and if you're not resisting it, if you're actually riding it and going into it... If you want to see exactly what it is and how far it goes you will be able to take it, not being against it at all... You will be simply going with it, you will be really in a deep investigation to know how much sadness is possible, how alone a person can be and how much it can hurt him.. .
No one has ever been killed by grief. No one has ever been killed by loneliness, otherwise the whole world would have disappeared long ago. If you can go all the way to the very end of it, running all the way, running towards the maximum of it, suddenly a moment will come when you will see the movement back happening. And that is a tremendously beautiful moment: seeing the energies shift. It is the same energy that becomes sadness and that becomes happiness, that becomes pain and that becomes joy. It's the same energy.
We don't have many energies, we only have one. That same energy becomes anger, becomes compassion, becomes love, becomes hate. She has multi-potentialities. She is multi-dimensional. And we have to know all sides of it because we are that energy. We have to know ourselves. This is self-knowledge.
When Socrates says 'know thyself', what does he mean? He simply means: know all the possibilities of your being. Sadness is a possibility. If you don't know it, you will never become aware of yourself. Self-knowledge will never happen because a part of you has remained in ignorance. So never miss any opportunity. These are God-given opportunities.
Go into sadness very deeply so that you know all the way, all the pain. And the pain transforms. Pain is like fire. He melts gold, but purifies it. All that is accidental will be burnt in it, but all that is essential will come out of it even purer. In each sadness, if the person goes to the end of it, he will return even stronger, more rooted, more centered. You won't be able to recognize your own face. You will have immense grace if you can go to the very bottom of sadness. And when it changes, you'll see that moment when, suddenly, you're on the verge of change, night turning to day. The stars disappear and the sun is rising over the horizon. Darkness becomes light and dawn. This is one of the most beautiful experiences that man can have.
But we miss it, because we never go all the way. We Fight. Somehow we manage and manipulate ourselves to be with someone, to create some kind of happiness, just to avoid that experience. It is natural that this happiness is also false. She is not true. It cannot be true because your innermost being was ready to go to the depths of sadness and you have created a contradiction. You forced some fake happiness. The energy was going in one direction and you are forcing it in another. You can force it, as it is your energy, but whatever comes out of it will be unnatural.
There will be happiness, but it will not be true. True happiness arises from true unhappiness, because only the real can be transformed into the real. This is the basis of all alchemical work. The real can only be transformed into the real. Even the most base metal can be turned into gold, but it has to be real.
So, go with it. Have a real trip to hell. Visit hell and go deliberately. The faster you go and the more whole you are, the sooner you will reach the end. It can be achieved in a single moment. It depends on the intensity and how fast you go in it. If you don't fight, the energy will lead you. In a single moment you can reach the limits of sadness and you will see the dawn, the sun rising and the energy transforming itself. And you will not have made any effort to transform it.
(Osho said that as one becomes able to observe this phenomenon, little by little there is no longer any need to suffer the anguish and confusion. Everything is led towards 'satchitanand' - truth, awareness, bliss.
Once a person has experienced being alone, love will have a totally different quality. It is no longer a necessity, but simply a sharing, a luxury.)
And I'm here, don't worry. I am in your solitude, waiting and watching you. So be brave and don't escape this time, mm? Good! 🇧🇷


Vinod (a German sannyasin): I had a lot of difficulties in the group (Primal Therapy). At least halfway. I didn't want to be forced and many times I wanted to quit, but I kept going. I had a lot of trouble getting in touch with deep feelings through those exercises.

Osho: No, the problem was with you and not with the group. If you didn't want to be forced, then you missed the whole group, there was no point in it. You should have left. Always remember that there is no point in doing something you don't want to do. There is no sense because nothing will come out of it, only frustration. You actually never will. You're just playing around, letting it go, thinking something might happen. But you resent it. You don't like being told to do this or that, you don't like being disciplined. Then nothing can happen, because a group has a discipline.

.
Vinod: Yes, but how do I get rid of my stupid resistance?

Osho: I'll give you a few stupid things to do and you'll get rid of it bit by bit. A lot of people have this attitude, particularly the younger generation, that there's something wrong with being disciplined, with doing what you're told to do. They think their freedom is being denied. But only a disciplined man can have freedom, no one else. You can have license, but that is a totally different thing, not freedom. Freedom is a very responsible thing. It needs a great state of alertness and for that it takes great discipline. They need each other.
That's a hierarchy. If you discipline your life in a certain way, you become more centered. With a more centered being, you have more light inside, more awareness. Otherwise, everything becomes fuzzy. Everything becomes blurred and you become a mess, a chaos. Hence, you don't have any internal order.
So there is no need to become a slave. Discipline is not slavery. If any discipline is forced on you, against you, then it is bondage. But if it's your choice, then it's not. For example, if someone comes and starts, without permission, operating on your stomach, he is being an intruder inside you. But if you go to a surgeon, pay him for his service and he operates on you, that is freedom. It was from your voluntary act that you came to him. You're the one who decided to have the operation. So he's not a butcher or a murderer or anything like that. You can say at any time: 'Stop! I do not want it. He arrives!' And he has to stop.
When you go to a group, it is of your own free will that you decide to join. Nobody is forcing you. You've decided to join the game, so you have to follow the rules. That's what I'm suggesting. If you were feeling that he wasn't for you, that you didn't want to be disciplined, then leave him immediately. What's the point of being there? It would be useless.
Join two other groups after the Meditation Camp. First, during the Camp, try to do what I'm telling you. Be in accordance with your will. If you want to participate, then follow the game rules. In the Field, do all the meditations as intensely and as fully as possible. Particularly Dynamic meditation will be helpful to break this, because when you get up early in the morning, the mind starts thinking, 'Why bother? Why keep forcing something? Why not let things happen spontaneously? Why not sleep a little longer?'
Going into some discipline is very beautiful and it brings you a lot of new views and insights, and once you know that... People make a wrong association about discipline. Parents told them: 'do this, don't do that' and their orders were almost always silly. The child saw their foolishness but they had to give in because the parents were powerful. Then the teachers and all kinds of stupid people taught and forced things on the child, which he knew were meaningless, but still he knew he had to do it. Then the whole society does the same. It's a stupid society and it goes on forcing stupid things on people, so the wrong associations arise. But this wrong association is dangerous because you will miss some beautiful things.
It is bad to follow a stupid man and his discipline, but if you can find someone who is more alert than you, follow him. Follow him blindly because he will introduce you to something new. If you can find someone who knows better and more than you, who loves more than you, listen to them. Your discipline will help you.



OSHO - The Passion for the Impossible