SEEDALIGHT – See Da Light, Seed a Light

The following excerpt from Osho’s ‘From Sex to Superconsciousness’ clearly explains why religions as they are now is just pure poison to humanity. Read on…

WHAT IS LOVE?

To feel it is easy, to define love is difficult indeed. If you ask a fish what the sea is like, the fish will say,”This is the sea. The sea is all around. And that’s that.” But if you insist –”Please define the sea” – then the problem becomes very difficult indeed.

The finest and the most beautiful things in life can be lived, can be known, but they are difficult to define, difficult to describe.

Man’s misery is this: for the last four to five thousand years he has simply talked and talked about something he should have been living earnestly, about something that must be realized from within – about love. There have been great talks on love, countless love songs have been sung, and devotional hymns are continuously being chanted in the temples and in the churches – what all isn’t done in the name of love? – still there is no place for love in man’s life. If we delve deeply into mankind’s languages, we will not find a more untrue word than “love”.

All the religions carry on about love, but the kind of love that is found everywhere, the kind of love that has enveloped man like some hereditary misfortune has only succeeded in closing all the gates to love in man’s life. But the masses worship the leaders of the religions as the creators of love. They have falsified love; they have blocked all love’s streams. In this case there is no basic difference between East and West, between India and America.

The stream of love has not yet surfaced in man. And we attribute this to man himself. We say it is because man is spoiled that love has not evolved, that there is no current of love in our lives. We blame it on the mind; we say the mind is poisonous. The mind is not poison. Those who degrade the mind have poisoned love; they have not allowed the growth of love. Nothing in this world is poison. Nothing is bad in God’s whole creation; everything is nectar. It is man alone who has transformed this full cup of nectar into poison. And the major culprits are the so-called teachers, the so-called holy men and saints, the politicians.

Reflect upon this in detail. If this sickness is not understood immediately, if it is not straightened out right away, there is no possibility – now or in the future – of love in man’s life.

The ironical thing is that we have blindly accepted the reasons for this from the very same sources that are to blame for love’s not dawning on the human horizon in the first place. If misleading principles are repeated and reiterated down the centuries we fail to see the basic fallacies behind the original principles. And then chaos is created, because man is intrinsically incapable of becoming what these unnatural rules say he should become. We simply accept that man is wrong.

In ancient times, I have heard, a hawker of hand-fans used to pass by the palace of the king every day. He used to brag about the unique and wonderful fans he sold. No one, he claimed, had ever seen such fans before.

The king had a collection of all sorts of fans from every corner of the world and so he was curious. He leaned over his balcony one day to have a look at this seller of unique and wonderful fans. To him the fans looked ordinary, hardly worth a penny, but he called the man upstairs anyway. The king asked,”What is the uniqueness of those fans? And what is their price?”

The hawker replied, “Your Majesty, they don’t cost much. Considering the quality of these fans, the price is very low: one hundred rupees a fan.”

The king was amazed. ”One hundred rupees! This paisa-fan, this penny-fan, is available anywhere in the market. And you ask a hundred rupees! What is so special about these fans?”

The man said,”The quality! Each fan is guaranteed to last one hundred years. Even in one hundred years, it won’t spoil.”

”From the look of it, it seems impossible it can even last a week. Are you trying to cheat me? Is this outright fraud? And with the king, too?”

The vendor answered, “My Lord, would I dare? You know very well, sir that I walk under your balcony daily, selling my fans. The price is one hundred rupees a fan, and I am responsible if it doesn’t last one hundred years. Every day I am available in the street. And, above all, you are the ruler of this land. How can I be safe if I cheat you?”

The fan was purchased at the asking price. Although the king did not trust the hawker, he was dying of curiosity to know what grounds the man had for making such a statement. The vendor was ordered to present himself again on the seventh day.

The central stick came out in three days, and the fan disintegrated before the week was out. The king was sure the seller of fans would never turn up again, but to his complete surprise the man presented himself as he had been asked to – on time, on the seventh day.

”At your service, Your Majesty.”

The king was furious. ”You rascal! You fool! Look. There lies your fan, all broken into pieces. This is its condition in a week, and you guaranteed it would last a hundred years! Are you mad, or just a supercheat?”

The man replied humbly,”With due respect, it seems My Lord does not know how to use fans. The fan must last for one hundred years; it is guaranteed. How did you fan?”

The king said, “My goodness. Now I will have to learn how to fan too!”

”Please don’t be angry. How did the fan come to this fate in just seven days? How did you fan?”

The king lifted the fan, showing the manner in which one fans.

The man said, “Now I understand. You shouldn’t fan like that.”

”What other way is there?” the king asked.

The man explained, “Hold the fan steady. Keep it steady in front of you and then move your head to and fro. The fan will last one hundred years. You will pass away but the fan will remain intact. Nothing is wrong with the fan; the way you fan is wrong. You keep the fan steady and move your head. Where is my fan at fault? The fault is yours, not that of my fan.”

Mankind is accused of a similar fault. Look at humanity. Man is so sick, sick from the accumulated illness of five, six, ten thousand years. It is repeatedly said that it is man who is wrong, not the culture. Man is rotting, yet the culture is praised. Our great culture! Our great religion! Everything is great! And see the fruits of it!

They say, “Man is wrong; man should change himself,” yet no one stands up to question whether things aren’t like they are because our culture and religion, unable to fill man with love after ten thousand years, are based on false values. And if love hasn’t evolved in the last ten thousand years, take it from me there is no future possibility, based on this culture and religion, of ever seeing a loving man. Something which could not be achieved in the last ten thousand years cannot be attained in the next ten thousand years. Today’s man will be the same tomorrow. Although the outer wrappings of etiquette, civilization and technology change from time to time, man is the same and will be the same forever.

We are not prepared to review our culture and religion, yet we sing their praises at the top of our lungs, and kiss the feet of their saints and custodians. We won’t even agree to look back, to reflect upon our ways and upon the direction of our thinking, to check if they are not misleading, to see if they are not all wrong.

I wish to say that the base is defective, that the values are false. The proof is today’s man. What other proof can there be?

If we plant a seed and the fruit is poisonous and bitter, what does it prove? It proves that the seed  must have been poisonous and bitter. But it is difficult, of course, to foretell whether a particular seed will give bitter fruit or not. You may look it over carefully, press it or break it open, but you cannot predict for sure whether the fruit will be sweet or not. You have to await the test of time.

Sow a seed. A plant will sprout. Years will pass. A tree will emerge, will spread its branches to the sky, will bear fruit – and only then will you come to know whether the seed that was sown was bitter or not. Modern man is the fruit of those seeds of culture and religion that were sown ten thousand years ago and have been nurtured ever since. And the fruit is bitter; it is full of conflict and misery.

But we are the very people who eulogize those seeds and expect love to flower from them. It is not to be, I repeat, because any possibility for the birth of love has been killed by religion. The possibility has been poisoned. More so than in man, love can be seen in the birds, animals and plants, in those who have no religion or culture. Love is more evident in uncivilized men, in backward woodsmen, than in the so-called progressive, cultured and civilized men of today. And, remember, the aboriginal people have no developed civilization, culture or religion.

Why is man progressively becoming so much more barren of love as he professes to be more and more civilized, cultured and religious, going regularly to temples and to churches to pray? There are some reasons and I wish to discuss them. If these can be understood, the eternal stream of love can spring forth. But it is embedded in stones; it cannot surface. It is walled in on all sides, and the Ganges cannot gush forth, cannot flow freely.

Love is within man. It is not imported from the outside. It is not a commodity to be purchased when we go to the markets. It is there as the fragrance of life. It is inside everyone. The search for love, the wooing of love, is not a positive action; it is not an overt act whereby you have to go somewhere and draw it out.

A sculptor was working on a rock. Someone who had come to see how a statue is made saw no sign of a statue, he only saw a stone being cut here and there by a chisel and hammer.

”What are you doing?” the man inquired. ”Are you not going to make a statue? I have come to see a statue being made, but I only see you chipping stone.”

The artist said, “The statue is already hidden inside. There is no need to make it. Somehow, the useless mass of stone that is fused to it has to be separated from it, and then the statue will show itself. A statue is not made, it is discovered. It is uncovered; it is brought to light.”

Love is shut up inside man; it need only be released. The question is not how to produce it, but how to uncover it. What have we covered ourselves with? What is it that will not allow love to surface?

Try asking a medical practitioner what health is. It is very strange, but no doctor in the world can tell you what health is! With the whole of medical science concerned with health, isn’t there anyone who is able to say what health is? If you ask a doctor, he will say he can only tell you what the diseases are or what the symptoms are. He may know the different technical term for each and every disease and he may also be able to prescribe the cure. But health? About health, he does not know anything. He can only state that what remains when there is no disease is health. This is because health is hidden inside man. Health is beyond the definition of man.

Sickness comes from the outside hence it can be defined; health comes from within hence it cannot be defined. Health defies definition. We can only say that the absence of sickness is health. The truth is, health does not have to be created; it is either hidden by illness or it reveals itself when the illness goes away or is cured. Health is inside us. Health is our nature.

Love is also inside us. Love is our inherent nature. Basically, it is wrong to ask man to create love. The problem is not how to create love, but how to investigate and find out why it is not able to manifest itself. What is the hindrance? What is the difficulty? Where is the dam blocking it? If there are no barriers, love will show itself. It is not necessary to persuade it or to guide it. Every man would be filled with love if it weren’t for the barriers of false culture and of degrading and harmful traditions. Nothing can stifle love. Love is inevitable. Love is our nature.

The Ganges flows from the Himalayas. It is water; it simply flows – it does not ask a priest the way to the ocean. Have you ever seen a river standing at a crossroads asking a policeman the whereabouts of the ocean? However far the ocean may be, however hidden it may be, the river will surely find the path. It is inevitable: she has the inner urge. She has no guidebook, but, infallibly, she will reach her destination. She will crack through mountains, cross the plains and traverse the country in her race to reach the ocean. An insatiable desire, a force, an energy exists within her heart of hearts.

But suppose obstructions are thrown in her way by man? Suppose dams are constructed by man? A river can overcome and break through natural barriers – ultimately they are not barriers to her at all – but if man-made barriers are created, if dams are engineered across her, it is possible she may not reach the ocean. Man, the supreme intelligence of creation, can stop a river from reaching the ocean if he decides to do so.

In nature, there is a fundamental unity, a harmony. The natural obstructions, the apparent oppositions seen in nature, are challenges to arouse energy; they serve as clarion calls to arouse what is latent inside. There is no disharmony in nature.

When we sow a seed, it may seem as if the layer of earth above the seed is pressing it down, is obstructing its growth. It may seem so, but in reality that layer of earth is not an obstruction; without that layer the seed cannot germinate. The earth presses down on the seed so that it can mellow, disintegrate, and transform itself into a sapling. Outwardly it may seem as if the soil is stifling the seed, but the soil is only performing the duty of a friend. It is a clinical operation. If a seed does not grow into a plant, we reason that the soil may not have been proper, that the seed may not have had enough water or that it may not have received enough sunlight – we do not blame the seed. But if flowers do not bloom in a man’s life we say the man himself is responsible for it. Nobody thinks of inferior manure, of a shortage of water or of a lack of sunshine and does something about it, the man himself is accused of being bad. And so the plant of man has remained undeveloped, has been suppressed by unfriendliness and has been unable to reach the flowering stage.

Nature is rhythmic harmony. But the artificiality that man has imposed on nature, the things he has engineered across it and the mechanical contrivances he has thrown into the current of life have created obstructions at many places, have stopped the flow. And the river is made the culprit. ”Man is bad; the seed is poisonous,” they say.

I wish to draw your attention to the fact that the basic obstructions are man-made, are created by man himself – otherwise the river of love would flow freely and reach the ocean of God. Love is inherent in man. If the obstructions are removed with awareness, love can flow. Then, love can rise to touch God, to touch the Supreme.

What are these man-made obstacles? The most obvious obstruction has been the opposition to sex and to passion. This barrier has destroyed the possibility of the birth of love in man.

The simple truth is that sex is the starting point of love. Sex is the beginning of the journey to love. The origin, the Gangotri of the Ganges of Love, is sex, passion – and everybody behaves like its enemy. Every culture, every religion, every guru, every seer has attacked this Gangotri, this source, and the river has remained bottled up. The hue and cry has always been, “Sex is sin. Sex is irreligious. Sex is poison,” but we never seem to realize that ultimately it is the sex energy itself that travels to and reaches the inner ocean of love. Love is the transformation of sex energy. The flowering of love is from the seed of sex.

Looking at coal, it would never strike you that when coal is transformed it becomes diamonds. The elements in a lump of coal are the same as those in a diamond. Essentially, there is no basic difference between them. After passing through a process taking thousands of years, coal becomes diamonds.

But coal is not considered important. When coal is kept in a house it is stored in a place where it may not be seen by guests, whereas diamonds are worn around the neck or on the bosom so that everybody can see them. Diamonds and coal are the same: they are two points on a journey by the same element. If you are against coal because it has nothing more to offer than black soot at first glance, the possibility of its transformation into a diamond ends right there. The coal itself could have been transformed into a diamond. But we hate coal. And so, the possibility of any progress ends.

Only the energy of sex can flower into love. But everyone, including mankind’s great thinkers, is against it. This opposition will not allow the seed to sprout, and the palace of love is destroyed at the foundation. The enmity towards sex has destroyed the possibility of love. And so, coal is incapable of becoming a diamond.

Because of basic misconceptions, no one feels the necessity of going through the stages of acknowledging sex and of developing it and of going through the process of transforming it. How can we transform him whose enemy we are, whom we oppose, with whom we are at continuous war? A quarrel between man and his energy has been forced upon him. Man has been taught to fight against his sex energy, to oppose his sex urges.

”The mind is poison, so fight against it,” man is told. The mind exists in man, and sex also exists in him – yet man is expected to be free from inner conflicts. A harmonious existence is expected of him. He has to fight and to pacify as well. Such are the teachings of his leaders. On the one hand they drive him mad and on the other they open asylums to treat him. They spread the germs of sickness and then build hospitals to cure the sick.

Another important consideration is that man cannot be separated from sex. Sex is his primary point; he is born of it. God has made the energy of sex the starting point of creation. And great men term as sinful what God himself does not consider as sin! If God considers sex as sin, then there is no greater sinner than God in this world, no greater sinner in this universe.

Have you never realized that the blooming of a flower is an expression of passion, that it is a sexual act? A peacock dances in full glory: a poet will sing a song to it; a saint will also be filled with joy – but aren’t they aware that the dance is also an overt expression of passion, that it is primarily a sexual act? For whose pleasure does the peacock dance? The peacock is calling its beloved, its spouse. Papiha is singing; the cuckoo is singing: a boy has become an adolescent; a girl is growing into a woman. What is all this? What play, what leela is this? These are all the indicators of love, of sexual energy. These manifestations of love are the transformed expressions of sex – bubbling with energy, acknowledging sex. Throughout one’s whole life all acts of love, all attitudes and urges of love, are flowerings of primary sex energy.

Religion and culture pour poison against sex into the mind of man. They create conflict, war; they engage man in battle against his own primary energy – and so man has become weak, gross, coarse, devoid of love and full of nothingness. Not enmity, but friendship is to be made with sex. Sex should be elevated to purer heights.

While blessing a newly wed couple, a sage said to the bride, “May you be the mother of ten children and, ultimately, may your husband become your eleventh child.”

If passion is transformed, the wife can become the mother; if lust is transcended, sex can become love. Only sex energy can flower into the force of love. But we have filled man with antagonism towards sex and the result is that love has not flowered. What comes later, the form-to-come, can only be made possible by the acceptance of sex. The stream of love cannot break through because of the strong opposition. Sex, on the other hand, keeps churning inside, and the consciousness of man is muddled with sexuality.

Man’s consciousness is becoming more and more sexual. Our songs, poems, paintings, and virtually all the figures in our temples are centered around sex – because our minds also revolve around the axis of sex. No animal in the world is as sexual as man. Man is sexual everywhere – awake or asleep, in his manners as well as in his etiquette. Every moment man is haunted by sex.

Because of this enmity towards sex, because of this opposition and suppression, man is decaying from inside. He can never free himself from something that is the very root of his life, and because of this constant inner conflict his entire being has become neurotic. He is sick. This perverted sexuality that is so evident in mankind is the fault of his so-called leaders and saints; they are to blame for it.

Until man frees himself from such teachers, moralizers and religious leaders, and from their phony sermons, the possibility of love surfacing in him is nil.