Man can function from three centres: one is the head, another is the heart and the third one is the navel. If you function from the head you will go on spinning thoughts and thoughts and thoughts. They are very insubstantial, dream-stuff – they promise much, they deliver nothing.

 

The mind is a great cheat but it has tremendous capacities to delude, because it can project. It can give you great utopias, great desires, and it always goes on saying ’Tomorrow it is going to happen’… and it never happens.

 

Nothing ever happens in the head – the head is not the place for anything to happen. … The second centre is the heart. It is the centre for feeling, one feels through the heart. You are closer home – not home yet, but closer. When you feel, you are more substantial, you have more solidity; when you feel, there is a possibility that something may happen. There is no possibility with the head, there is a small possibility with the heart.

 

But the real thing is not even the heart. The real thing is deeper than the heart – that is the navel. It is the centre of being. Thinking, feeling, being – these are the three centres. But certainly feeling is closer to being than thinking, and feeling functions as a method. If you want to come down from the head you will have to pass through the heart – that is the crossroads from where the roads separate. You cannot go to being directly, there is no way; you will have to pass through the heart. So the heart has to be used as a method.

 

Feel more and then you will think less. Don’t fight with thinking, because fighting with thinking is again creating other thoughts of fighting. Then the mind is never defeated. If you win, it is the mind which has won; if you are defeated, you are defeated. Either way you are defeated – so never fight with thoughts, it is futile.

 

Rather than fighting with the thoughts, move your energy into feeling. Sing rather than think, love rather than philosophise, read poetry rather than prose. Dance, look at nature, and whatsoever you do, do it through the heart.

 

For example, if you touch somebody, touch through the heart, touch feelingly, let your being vibrate. When you look at somebody don’t just look with stone-dead eyes. Pour out your energy through the eyes and immediately you will see that something is happening in the heart. It is only a question of trying….

 

The heart is the neglected centre: once you start paying attention to it, it starts functioning. When it starts functioning, the energy that was moving in the mind automatically starts moving through the heart. And the heart is closer to the energy centre – the energy centre is in the navel – so to pump it to the head is hard work in fact.

 

That’s why all the education systems exist: they teach you how to pump the energy from the centre to the head and how to by-pass the heart. So no school, no college, no university, teaches how to feel. They destroy feeling, because they know that if you feel you cannot think.

 

If you feel too much then the energy will be stopped at the heart centre; it will never go to the head. It can only go to the head when the heart centre is completely denied. It has to go somewhere, it has to find an outlet. If the heart is not the outlet, it will go to the head.

 

In fact, the whole educational system which has developed all over the world is just to teach you how to avoid the heart, how to become more and more heady and how to pump the energy directly to the head.

 

So love is denied, feeling is denied, condemned – it is almost a sin to feel. One has to be logical and rational, not emotional. If you are emotional, people will say you are childish – in a way they are literally true, because only a child feels. A grown-up person, educated, cultivated, conditioned, stops feeling. He becomes almost dry, dead wood – no juice flows any more.

 

Hence there is so much misery: misery is because of the head. The head cannot celebrate, there is no celebration possible through the head. It can think about celebration – it can think about and about and about, but it cannot celebrate. Celebration happens through the heart.

 

So the first thing for you is to start feeling more and more…. Become an abode of love, a shrine of love, a house of love; this is the first step. Once you have taken this step the second will be very very easy. First, you love – half the journey is complete. And as it is easy to move from the head to the heart, it is even more easy to move from the heart to the navel. In the navel you are simply a being, a pure being – no feeling, no thinking; you are not moving at all.

 

That is the centre of the cyclone. Everything else is moving: the head is moving, the heart is moving, the body is moving. Everything is moving, everything is in a constant flux. Only the centre of your existence, the navel centre, is unmoving; it is the hub of the wheel.

 

Once you enter that, you have entered samadhi. Sannyas is the first step towards samadhi… It means pain of bliss – and bliss is very very painful. Not because it is painful, but because it is so unknown and so strange that when it happens for the first time, it is almost as if one is dying. It is a death – the old dies and disappears – and it is a birth too; the birth is also painful. The new is born. So you are completely destroyed and completely re-created.

 

So bliss has a pain – sweet of course, delicious of course. One is fortunate if it happens. It is just like when a woman gives birth to a child – she is tremendously happy and yet in pain. But she is happy that the pain is there, because that pain is not just pain – great life is going to happen through it, a new life is going to happen through it, god is going to create something out of it. That pain is creative.

 

- Osho, “For Madmen Only (Price of Admission: Your Mind), #10”