This is a discourse by Osho that presents the idea of conscious experiencing—especially regarding painful emotions and feelings. Here, the focus is on sadness.
“Sadness can become a very enriching experience. You have to work on it. It is easy to escape from your sadness—and all relationships are usually escapes; one just goes on avoiding it. But it is always there underneath… the undercurrent continues. Even in a relationship, it erupts many times. Then one is prone to throw the responsibility on the other, but that is not the real thing. It is your loneliness, your sadness. You haven’t settled with it, so it erupts again and again.
You can escape into work. You can escape into some occupation, into relationship and society, here and there, into travel, but it doesn’t go away because it is part of your being.
Every man is born alone—in the world, but alone; comes through the parents, but alone. And every man dies alone, again moving out of the world alone. And between these two lonelinesses, we go on deceiving ourselves and each other. It is good to gather courage and enter this loneliness. No matter how hard and heavy it may look in the beginning, it pays tremendously. Once you settle in it, once you start enjoying it, once you start feeling it not as sadness but as silence, once you realize there is no way to escape, you relax.
Nothing can be done about it, so why not enjoy it? Why not go deep and taste it, see what it is? Maybe you are afraid for no reason. It will be there and it is a fact—existential, not accidental—then why not come to terms with it? Why not enter it and see what it is like?
Whenever you feel sad, sit in silence and allow the sadness to come; don’t try to escape from it. Become as sad as you can. Do not avoid it—that is the one thing to remember. Cry, sob… taste it in its totality. Cry to death… fall on the floor… roll—and then let it go by itself. Don’t force it to go; it will go, because no one can stay in the same mood forever.
When it goes, you will be liberated, absolutely unburdened, as if all gravity has vanished and you can fly, weightless. This is the moment to enter your inner self. First, bring out the sadness. The usual attitude is not to allow it, to find ways and means to divert the attention—to go to a restaurant, to the swimming pool, to meet friends, read a book or go to the cinema, play the guitar—to do something so that you are engaged and your attention is elsewhere.
This is to be remembered—whenever you feel sad, don’t miss this opportunity. Close the door, sit on the floor, and feel as sad as you can be, as if the whole world is just a hell. Enter deep into the sadness… sink into it. Allow every sad thought to penetrate you, every sad emotion to stir you. Cry, sob, and say things—say things out loud, there is nothing to worry about.
So first live the sadness for a few days, and the moment the power of the sadness is gone, you will feel very calm, peaceful—like a person who has passed through a storm. In that moment, sit quietly and enjoy the silence that comes on its own. You didn’t bring it; you brought the sadness. When the sadness is gone, in the empty space, silence settles.
Listen to that silence. Close your eyes. Feel it… feel the very texture of it… the fragrance of it. And if you feel happy, sing and dance.”
— Osho, Be Realistic: Plan for a Miracle, Talk #17
The Path to Wholeness
The attitude of consciously experiencing pain is the direct way to integrate psychic contents that have been rejected by our conscious mind. This is vital because it is the path toward wholeness and mental health. It is also a spiritual practice for mindful presence in everyday life and meditativeness.
Above, Osho speaks about the awareness of sadness, which leads to the release of strong emotions and catharsis. For me, however, this feeling often takes much softer and less dramatic forms. It resembles the feeling of Sorrow, as described in the Osho Zen Tarot card of the same name. It represents the longing for union with the Original Source, which alone can put an end to the feeling of separation and isolation.
Two or three days of catharsis, sobbing, and crying will do some good, but they won’t be enough to clear the deeper sadness. Therefore, for me, the most important sentence in the quote above is: “Once you realize there is no way to escape, you relax.”
And when you relax, a silence of a different quality arrives.
The hole of emptiness begins to fill.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
