We go on avoiding our own misery. If you feel miserable, you put on the radio or the tv and you become engaged. You start reading the newspaper so that you can forget your misery, or you go to the movies, or you go to your woman or your man. You go to the club, you go shopping in the market, just somehow to keep yourself away from yourself, so that you need not see the wound, so that you need not look at how much it hurts within.
People go on avoiding themselves. What do they know of misery? How can they think of the misery of the whole existence? First, you have to begin with yourself. If you are feeling miserable, let it become a meditation. Sit silently, close the doors. First feel the misery with as much intensity as possible. Feel the hurt. Somebody has insulted you.
Now, the best way to avoid the hurt is to go and insult him, so that you become occupied with him. That is not meditation.
If somebody has insulted you, feel thankful to him that he has given you an opportunity to feel a deep wound. He has opened a wound in you. The wound may be created by many many insults that you have suffered in your whole life; he may not be the cause of all the suffering, but he has triggered a process.
Just close your room, sit silently, with no anger for the person but with total awareness of the feeling that is arising in you -- the hurt feeling that you have been rejected, that you have been insulted. And then you will be surprised that not only is this man there: all the men and all the women and all the people that have ever insulted you will start moving in your memory.
You will start not only remembering them, you will start reliving them. You will be going into a kind of primal. Feel the hurt, feel the pain, don't avoid it. That's why in many therapies the patient is told not to take any drugs before the therapy begins, for the simple reason that drugs are a way to escape from your inner misery. They don't allow you to see your wounds, they repress them. They don't allow you to go into your suffering and unless you go into your suffering, you cannot be released from the imprisonment of it.
It is perfectly scientific to drop all drugs before going into a group -- if possible even drugs like coffee, tea, smoking, because these are all ways to escape.
Have you watched? Whenever you feel nervous you immediately start smoking. It is a way to avoid nervousness; you become occupied with smoking. Really it is a regression.
Smoking makes you again feel like a child -- unworried, nonresponsible -- because smoking is nothing but a symbolic breast. The hot smoke going in simply takes you back to the days when you were feeding on the mother's breast and the warm milk was going in; the nipple has now become the cigarette. The cigarette is a symbolic nipple.
Through regression you avoid the responsibilities and the pains of being adult. And that's what goes on through many many drugs. Modern man is drugged as never before, because modern man is living in great suffering. Without drugs it will be impossible to live in so much suffering. Those drugs create a barrier; they keep you drugged, they don't allow you enough sensitivity to know your pain.
The first thing to do is close your doors and stop any kind of occupation -- looking at the tv, listening to the radio, reading a book. Stop all occupation, because that too is a subtle drug. Just be silent, utterly alone. Don't even pray, because that again is a drug, you are becoming occupied, you start talking to God, you start praying, you escape from yourself.
Atisha is saying: Just be yourself. Whatsoever the pain of it and whatsoever the suffering of it, let it be so. First experience it in its total intensity. It will be difficult, it will be heart-rending. You may start crying like a child, you may start rolling on the ground in deep pain, your body may go through contortions. You may suddenly become aware that the pain is not only in the heart, it is all over the body -- that it is aching all over, that it is painful all over, that your whole body is nothing but pain.
If you can experience it -- this is of tremendous importance -- then start absorbing it.
Don't throw it away. It is such a valuable energy, don't throw it away. Absorb it, drink it, accept it, welcome it, feel grateful to it. And say to yourself, "This time I'm not going to avoid it, this time I'm not going to reject it, this time I'm not going to throw it away. This time I will drink it and receive it like a guest. This time I will digest it."
It may take a few days for you to be able to digest it, but the day it happens, you have stumbled upon a door which will take you really far far away. A new journey has started in your life, you are moving into a new kind of being -- because immediately, the moment you accept the pain with no rejection anywhere, its energy and its quality changes. It is no longer pain. In fact one is simply surprised, one cannot believe it, it is so incredible. One cannot believe that suffering can be transformed into ecstasy, that pain can become joy.
But in ordinary life you are aware that opposites are always joined together, that they are not opposites but complementaries. You know perfectly well, your love can at any moment become hate, and your hate can at any moment become love. In fact if you hate too much, intensely and totally, it is bound to become love.
That's what happened to the person called Saul who later on became Paul and founded this ugly phenomenon, the Christian church. Jesus is not the founder of the Christian church, the founder of the Christian church is Saint Paul. And the story is worth remembering.
When he was born, his name was Saul. And he was so anti Christ that his whole life was devoted to destroying Christians and Christianity. His whole dedication was to persecute Christians, destroying any possibility of Christianity for the future, and effacing the name of Christ. He must have hated tremendously, his hate cannot be ordinary. When you devote your whole life to the object of your hatred, it is bound to be really total.
Otherwise who cares? If you hate something you don't devote your whole life to it. But if you hate totally, then it becomes a life-and-death problem.
Persecuting Christians, destroying Christians, destroying their power-holds, arguing with Christians, convincing them that this was nonsense, that this man Jesus was mad, a neurotic, a pretender, a hypocrite, one day it happened, the miracle happened. He was going to persecute more Christians in another town. On the way he was alone, and suddenly he saw Jesus appearing out of nowhere and asking him, "Why do you persecute me?"
Out of shock, terror, he fell on the ground, apologizing, crying great tears of repentance.
The vision disappeared, and with the disappearance of the vision the old Saul disappeared. To remember this point he changed his name to Paul; the old man was dead, a new man had arrived. And he became the founder of the Christian church. He became a great lover of Jesus -- the greatest lover the world has ever known.
Hate can become love. Jesus did not appear; it was just the intensity of his hate that projected Jesus. It was not Jesus who asked him, "Why do you persecute me?" It was his own unconscious which was suffering so much because of this hatred for Jesus. It was his own unconscious that asked him, "Why do you persecute me?" It was his own unconscious that became personified in the vision of Jesus. The miracle happened because the hate was total.
Whenever anything is total it turns into its opposite. This is a great secret to be remembered. Whenever something is total it changes into its opposite, because there is no way to go any further; the cul-de-sac has arrived.
Watch an old clock with a pendulum. It goes on and on: the pendulum goes to the left, to the extreme left, and then there is a point beyond which it cannot go, then it starts moving towards the right.
Opposites are complementaries. If you can suffer your suffering in totality, in great intensity, you will be surprised: Saul becomes Paul. You will not be able to believe it when it happens for the first time, that your own suffering absorbed willingly, welcomingly, becomes a great blessing. The same energy that becomes hate becomes love, the same energy that becomes pain becomes pleasure, the same energy that becomes suffering becomes bliss.
But start with your own self.
Make a small experiment with your own pains, sufferings and miseries. And once you have found the key, then you can share it with the whole existence. Then you can take all the suffering of all the world, or all the worlds.
Ride on the incoming breath and your small heart is bigger than the whole universe, if you know what miracles it can do. And then pour out your blessings. It is the same energy passing through your heart that becomes bliss, that becomes a blessing. Then let blessings go riding on the outgoing breath to all the nooks and corners of existence.
Atisha says: This is compassion. Compassion is to become a transforming force in existence -- transforming the ugly into the beautiful, kissing the frog and transforming it into a prince, transforming darkness into light. To become such a medium of transformation is compassion.
- Osho, "The Book of Wisdom, #5"