Osho – You may not get something that you want, but you always get that which you Need

[A sannyasin says: I see my craving and trying to fill up my spaces with other people. The love between Somendra and me is so beautiful. The pain is not the love.]

Osho – It is a sad situation but can be of tremendous import. Happiness makes people shallow, sadness gives depth – and sometimes it is needed. In fact you never get anything which is not needed. Remember it is a very fundamental law. You may not get something that you want, but you always get that which you need. Somehow the universe goes on fulfilling your needs; you may understand, you may not understand. The more aware you become, the more you see that in that moment, sadness was needed. It is a necessary ingredient in growth.

Love is good. To be together is good, but to be alone is also needed – to be so alone that one feels
absolutely hopeless and there seems to be no possibility that one will be able to be together again; the darkness seems to be infinite. One seems to be absolutely lost, with no hope. One shouts and shouts … no response. One screams and cries, and there is nobody to even listen to you. In these moments, the mind tends to fill itself up with anything, whatever it is – sometimes eating too much, sometimes meeting and mixing with people, sometimes even pretending to fall in love, because the loneliness is so terrible. But if you really want to be benefited by it, blessed by it, then don’t fill this gap – live it.

Go the whole way in it. If it is lonely, be lonely. That is a part of life to be learned, and a very basic lesson – that one is alone. Then everything else is a game. You can hide your loneliness from yourself in a thousand and one ways, but it never goes; it is always there. Layer upon layer of deception you can create – we call it maya, illusion – but deep down, wherever you go, you will again find that emptiness, the loneliness there.

Somehow one has to stop fighting with it. Somehow one 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. It is your own fault – you found a groupleader, so what to do! And this is more real a situation than any group can create.

A group situation is always artificial, arbitrary. It has nothing to compare with a life situation. This is a life situation. Be alone. Let it hurt… Let it hurt the whole way. Go with it; cry and weep but don’t try to escape. There comes a moment when you have touched the very extreme and suddenly you swing back – but that happens only when you have touched the other extreme. It is just like the pendulum of a clock. It goes to the left, to the very extreme, then it turns. The same happens in the mind.

If you can be really sad to the very end of it and you are not resisting it, in fact you are riding on it and are going into it …. You want to see exactly what it is and how far it can go. You are not in any way against it. You are simply going with it. You are really in a very deep enquiry to know how much sadness is possible, how lonely one can be and how much it can hurt.

Nobody has ever been killed by sadness. Nobody has ever been killed by loneliness, otherwise the world would have disappeared long ago. If you can go to the very end of it, all the way, rushing towards the very peak of it, suddenly one moment will come when you can see the swing happening.

And that is a tremendously beautiful moment – to see energies changing. It is the same energy that becomes sadness, that becomes happiness, that becomes joy, that becomes pain. It is the same energy. We don’t have many energies – we have only one. That same energy becomes anger, that same energy becomes compassion. That same energy becomes love, that same energy becomes hatred.

It has multi-potentialities. It is multi-dimensional. And one has to know all its ways because it is us! We have to know ourselves. That’s what self-knowledge is. 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 will remain in ignorance. So never lose any opportunity. These are God-given opportunities. Go into sadness so deeply that you know the whole path, you know the whole pain. And pain transforms. Pain is like fire. It melts the gold but it purifies it. Whatsoever is accidental will be burned in it, but whatsoever is essential will come out of it purer. Out of each sadness – if one goes to the very end – one will come out stronger, more grounded, centred. You will not be able to recognise your own face.

You will have such a grace if you can go to the very end of it. And when it changes, you see that moment when suddenly you are on the threshold of change – the night turning into the morning. The stars disappear and the sun is rising on the horizon. The very darkness becomes light and dawn. It is one of the most beautiful experiences that man can ever have.

But we miss because we never go to the very end. We fight. We somehow manage and manipulate ourselves to be with somebody, to create some sort of happiness, just to avoid it. Of course then that happiness is also bogus. It is not true, it cannot be true, because your inner being was ready to go to the very end of sadness and you created a contradiction. You enforce some false happiness.

The energy was going in one direction and you are forcing it into another. You can force it – it is your energy – but whatsoever the outcome is, it will be unnatural. Happiness will be there but it will not be real. Real happiness comes out of real unhappiness, because only the real can be transformed into the real. This is the base of all alchemical work. The real can be changed only into the real. Even the baser metal can be changed into gold, but it should 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-heartedly you go, the sooner will you reach to the end. It can be reached in a single moment. It depends on the intensity and how fast you go into it. If you don’t fight, the energy will take you. In a single moment you can reach to the very boundary of sadness and you can see the dawn, the sun rising, and the energy changing of its own accord. And you are not making any effort to change.

Source: from Osho Book “The Passion for the Impossible”