[Someone asks: I feel that different centres have opened in part, but I don’t know which one to go with, to live with. I don’t know which one is best to put more time and energy into.]

 

 

Think more about love, about the heart. We call that chakra ’anahata’ in yoga psychology. There are seven chakras, and the anahata is just in the middle; three below it, three above it. The three below are muladhar, swadhisthan and manipur. Those three belong to an extrovert personality. In the west, the majority lives through those three chakras. And now in the east also, the majority is moving towards the western attitude of life. These three chakras are very easily available. They have a certain given function; you need not work much on them.

 

Without them, life will become impossible. They are survival measures, so nature has not given you a choice between them. From the moment you are born, those three chakras start functioning. They go on functioning until you die. The whole life is covered by those three chakras, and the extrovert person never comes to know that there is anything higher than these. Sex, money, power, prestige, respectability, name, fame – they all belong to those three chakras.

 

And the centre of all those chakras is sex. People seek money in order to seek sex. People seek fame and power and prestige in order to seek sex. Sex remains the centre of the lower three chakras. Sex remains the centre of the extrovert personality. His whole mind revolves around sex. Above the anahata, the heart, there are three chakras: visudha, the fourth centre, then ajna, between the two eyes, the third eye centre, and sahasrar, the last centre, the centre of samadhi, of ultimate unfoldment.

 

Between these two is the heart. Between the introvert and the extrovert, the heart functions as a door, it is a bridge. Just as sex is the centre of the extrovert mind, prayer – or call it meditation – is the centre of the introvert mind. But to call it prayer is more relevant. Between these two – when a person is just in the middle, on the fourth chakra, at the door – love happens. Love is between sex and prayer.

 

When sex is a little purified, it becomes love. When love is also purified, it becomes prayer. So it is the same energy, the sexual energy, which goes into higher formations. In the east people have tried to live an introvert life; they have tried to live above the heart. But both are lopsided. The western extrovert mind and the eastern introvert mind are both lopsided. To become a total man, one needs the functioning of all seven. It is not a question of choice. It is a question of being capable of living in all the centres without any conflict. There is none – we create the conflict.

 

A person can become an extrovert and can become an introvert very easily – just as you go out of your house and you come in. But whether you go out or you come in, you will have to pass from the door, and that door is anahata. So my emphasis is always on the anahata, the heart centre, because that is the door and both the dimensions meet there.

 

If somebody tries to live just below the heart centre, he closes the door. Then he becomes very worldly. He cannot even think that god exists. He cannot even think that religion can mean anything. It is all nonsense, rubbish. He does not even believe in love. He thinks love is just a bait for sex, just a foreplay for sex. Just not to be rude one has to at least pretend love. But the basic thing remains sex. He does not believe in love, he cannot believe in love, because he does not know what love is. He has never functioned at that centre. He has never stood on the door between the two worlds.

 

The introvert person also becomes very lopsided. He also closes the door of the heart because he becomes afraid. From that door opens the world. So he goes on denying. He becomes a renunciate, a monk, anti-life, condemnatory, repressive, afraid – continuously afraid of relationship, of moving with people, of creating any sort of love, because who knows? – love may bring in sex. Once you open the door of love, then the whole three chakras become available – the chakras of the below.

 

It is better not to open the doors so you can forget all about the lower world. Then one remains just inside – but one’s life becomes a morbidity. One becomes like an island – cut off from everything . . . a dry bone. No juice remains. The very shape of life disappears, because if you don’t love, life starts disappearing. Life exists when you love. Love becomes the very foundation for life to exist. It can have its foothold there.

 

The introvert becomes more and more sad – silent of course, but not happy. The extrovert is very excited; the introvert is never excited. He remains calm and quiet, but calmness and quietitude are not the goals of life. Ecstasy is the goal of life. Just to be calm and quiet can mean death, can mean suicide. You can dry up all the sources of life in you. You will become calm and quiet, all the fever gone, all the passion gone, all the lust gone – but then you are also gone. You are just an empty room, a negativity, a sort of absence, not a presence. You are not fulfilled. You cannot dance – you have nothing to dance about. You cannot sing. No song arises in your life because all songs dry up when love dries up.

 

The extrovert seems sometimes to be very happy . . . is more happy than the introvert, but never silent. More joyful – it is a joy to be with an extrovert. You cannot live with an introvert long; that’s why saints are so boring. It is good to pay respect to them, but you cannot live with them for twentyfour hours; they are really boring. And just to think about heaven where all the saints have gathered down the centuries…. One cannot believe how boring that place must now have become. It will be sheer boredom.

 

You can be with an extrovert, happily; you can relate with him. He is an excited being. He sings, he plays around… many games. He enjoys. Of course he is tense. He is never silent; that is his problem. Happiness is at a cost – that he loses tranquillity, equilibrium, balance. His excitement becomes more and more feverish, and there is every possibility of it turning into a delirium. The extrovert can be mad at any time; the breakdown can come very easily to him. He is so excited and so tense. He has no centre – just the revolving periphery.

 

To me, a real man or a real woman has to live in all the seven chakras together. Then you have the tranquillity of the introvert and the excitement of the extrovert. That’s what a rich life has to be – the silence of the introvert and the joy of the extrovert, the centre of the introvert and the periphery of the extrovert.

 

A centre without a periphery is poor. A periphery without a centre is poor. When the periphery and the centre both exist together and you don’t choose – you simply move from one to another enjoying both, not putting them as opposites to each other but balancing them as complementaries – your life becomes tremendously rich.

 

That’s what I call life abundant. Then you really live in luxury, because you have all that the extrovert can have and all that the introvert can have; you have both the worlds together. Yes, in this sense, you can have the cake and eat it too. Then you are very affirmative. You don’t have any negations, any condemnations. Between samadhi and sex, between the muladhar, the first centre, and the sahasrar, the seventh, the whole sky is available to you, and whatsoever you choose, you can be. And it is good to go on changing. Why get fixed to one centre? Why not remain flexible, flowing, streaming like a river? Why become a pond? Why get stagnant and stale? Be dynamic.

 

That’s why I insist on dynamic meditations. ’Meditation’ and ’dynamic’ are a contradiction in terms. That means I am trying to make a combination of the extrovert and the introvert. Meditation means passivity, meditation means just to be oneself. And dynamism means to do many things, to be active, to be flowing. Dynamic meditation is a contradiction in terms but it is only apparently so. It is possible to have both.

 

– Osho, “Dance Your Way to God, #21”