Below is an excerpt from Osho’s book The Art of Dying, which is so poetic and so precise that I translated it with great pleasure. The longer I live, the more I discover the truth and the beauty of what he says. Based on everything I know from my personal experience and from spiritual teachings on duality, I can only agree that this is exactly so—the only way to deal with human suffering at its very root is to allow ourselves to pass through it as it is. Rejection is the problem—the only problem.
“The only problem with sadness, despair, anger, hopelessness, worry, intense pain, unhappiness is that you want to get rid of them. That is the only obstacle.
You will have to live with them. You can’t just run away. They are the situation in which life has to be integrated and grow. They are the challenges of life. Accept them. They are blessings in disguise. If you want to escape from them, if you want somehow to get rid of them, then the problem will arise—because if you want to get rid of something, you never look at it directly.
And then things begin to hide from you because you are judgmental; then the thing goes deeper and deeper into the unconscious, hiding in the darkest corner of your being where you cannot find it. It goes to the core of your being and hides there. And, of course, the deeper it goes, the more problems it creates—because then it starts functioning from an unknown corner of your being and you are totally helpless.
So the first thing is: never suppress. The first thing is: whatever is the case, that is the case. Accept it and let it come—let it stand in front of you. In fact, just to say “Don’t suppress” is not enough. If you allow me, I prefer to say: “Become friends with it.”
Feeling sad? Become friends with it, have compassion for it. Allow it, hug it, sit with it, hold its hands. Be in love with it. Sadness is beautiful! There is nothing wrong with it. Who told you there was anything wrong with being sad? In fact, only sadness gives you depth. Laughter is shallow; happiness goes no deeper than your skin. Sadness goes to your very bones, to your bone marrow.
Nothing goes as deep as sadness.
So don’t worry. Stay with it and the sadness will take you to your innermost self. You will be able to let go with it, and you will be able to know things about yourself that you never knew before. These things can only be revealed to you when you are in a state of sadness; they can never be revealed to you in a state of joy. Darkness is also good, and darkness is also divine. Day is not the only one that belongs to existence—night also belongs to it.
I call this attitude religious…
The person who can patiently be sad will suddenly find that one morning happiness has begun to well up in their heart from some unknown source. That unknown source is the divine. You have earned it because you have been truly sad; if you have been truly miserable, hopeless, despairing, suffering, if you have lived in hell, you have earned heaven. You have paid the price…
Look directly at life. Face it. The difficult moments will be there, but one day you will find that those difficult moments have given you strength because you faced them. They were meant to be. Those difficult moments are difficult while you are going through them, but later you will see that they have made you more integrated. Without them you would never be centered, grounded.
The old religions around the world were oppressive; the new religion of the future will be expressive. And I teach this new religion… allow expression to be one of the most basic rules of your life. Even when you have to suffer, suffer. You will never lose. That suffering will make you more and more capable of enjoying life, the joy in life.”
Osho, The Art of Dying, Talk #10
What I see as the beauty of the text above is that it adds the spiritual dimension to the psychological level at which human problems are usually examined. The first step is to look into the darkest corners of our unconscious, where our most rejected and suppressed parts are hidden, and to bring them into the light by acknowledging them as an inherent part of our human nature. This is the psychotherapeutic approach to integrating the Shadow. Then comes the second step—to see in them not only the human dimension, but also, in their darkness, the face of the Whole, of God. This is the religion of the future that Osho proclaims—the religion of the whole human being.
Many people are familiar with the concept of duality, but few allow themselves to live through the “dark night of the soul” so fully, so totally, that every division between the human being and God disappears completely. And when even the smallest resistance to That Which Is vanishes, deep peace and inner harmony arise. One does not merely know that God is everything that is, but feels with every cell of the body how He breathes through them, suffers through them, looks through them, hurts through them.
They say that this world is God’s creation. If we accept that this is so, then we have only one possibility—to discover Him in every part of His creation, including the darkest and most rejected corners of our soul, the deepest ones. Only then does the ladder to the Upper Land open. Because,
“If you have lived in hell, you have earned heaven. You have paid the price…”
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
