This is something by Osho that is closely related to the previous article on the dark night of the soul.
Question to Osho: I feel that I do not allow my heart to open. When I was very young, I rejected my parents. I felt good being a little bad boy. Now I realize that everything I thought was love is nothing.
Osho’s answer: This is a good insight.
To understand that whatever you have called love up to now has not been love is one of the most significant insights. When this happens, many things become possible.
People go on thinking that they love, and this becomes their greatest illusion — and the sooner they are freed from their illusions, the better. Love is such a rare phenomenon that it cannot be so easily available to everyone. No, it is not; it is as rare as being a Buddha — and no less than that.
This insight is good, but it will make you sad, very bitter, and it will bring darkness to you. But do not be worried, because from the dark night the morning is born. When the night is darkest, the morning is closest. You will be very, very dark and sad, because whatever you thought was love was not, and you have been living in dreams and missing reality.
When this insight comes to you, you become very sad, almost dead.
Do not try to escape from this state. Relax into it, allow yourself to be immersed in its sadness, and soon you will come out of it completely renewed. I can even see in your voice, in your eyes, in your very body that there is a great sadness there. Allow it to be there. The human tendency is not to allow — to escape from it: to go to a hotel, to the cinema, to friends and talk nonsense, to do something to keep yourself engaged so that you can escape from this state. But if you escape from it, you will again miss something that was about to happen.
Relax into it.
— Osho, Above All, Don’t Wobble, Talk #14
For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that we become ill from untruth — by escaping into our illusions and projections. And healing begins when we start freeing ourselves from them.
The secret of this liberation is simple: not to resist the pain that accompanies it. The opium of illusions functions as a painkiller only as long as we believe that we cannot bear the pain. But if we change the attitude and tell ourselves that in fact we can bear it, the need for painkillers falls away.
We can bear the sorrow of truth. Of course we can — if we want to come to know the mature forms of love.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
