Question 1

Osho,

Why is growth painful?

 

 

Growth is painful because you have been avoiding a thousand and one pains in your life. By avoiding you cannot destroy them -- they go on accumulating. You go on swallowing your pains; they remain in your system. That's why growth is painful -- when you start growing, when you decide to grow, you have to face all the pains that you have repressed. You cannot just bypass them.

 

You have been brought up in a wrong way. Unfortunately, until now, not a single society has existed on the earth which has not been repressive of pain. All societies depend on repression. Two things they repress: one is pain, another is pleasure. And they repress pleasure also because of pain. Their reasoning is that if you are not too happy you will never become too unhappy; if joy is destroyed you will never be deep in pain. To avoid pain they avoid pleasure. To avoid death they avoid life.

 

And the logic has something in it. Both grow together -- if you want to have a life of ecstasy you will have to accept many agonies. If you want the peaks of the Himalayas then you will also have the valleys. But nothing is wrong with the valleys; your approach just has to be different. You can enjoy both -- the peak is beautiful, so is the valley. And there are moments when one should enjoy the peak and there are moments when one should relax in the valley.

 

The peak is sunlit, it is in a dialogue with the sky. The valley is dark, but whenever you want to relax you have to move into the darkness of the valley. If you want to have peaks you will need to grow roots into the valley -- the deeper your roots go, the higher your tree will grow. The tree cannot grow without roots and the roots have to move deep into the soil.

 

Pain and pleasure are intrinsic parts of life. People are so much afraid of pain that they repress pain, they avoid any situation that brings pain, they go on dodging pain. And finally they stumble upon the fact that if you really want to avoid pain you will have to avoid pleasure. That's why your monks avoid pleasure they are afraid of pleasure. In fact they are simply avoiding all possibilities of pain. They know that if you avoid pleasure then naturally great pain is not possible; it comes only as a shadow of pleasure. Then you walk on the plain ground -- you never move on the peaks and you never fall into the valleys. But then you are living dead, then you are not alive.

 

Life exists between this polarity. This tension between pain and pleasure makes you capable of creating great music; music exists only in this tension. Destroy the polarity and you will be dull, you will be stale, you will be dusty -- you won't have any meaning and you will never know what splendor is. You will have missed life.

 

The man who wants to know life and live life has to accept and embrace death. They come together, they are two aspects of a single phenomenon.

 

That's why growth is painful. You have to go into all those pains that you have been avoiding. It hurts. You have to go through all those wounds that somehow you have managed not to look at. But the deeper you go into pain, the deeper is your capacity to go into pleasure. If you can go into pain to the uttermost limit, you will be able to touch heaven.

 

I have heard: A man came to a Zen master and asked 'How shall we avoid heat and cold?'

 

Metaphorically, he is asking 'How should we avoid pleasure and pain?' That is the Zen way of talking about pleasure and pain: heat and cold. 'How shall we avoid heat and cold?'

 

The master answered 'Be hot, be cold.'

 

To be free of pain the pain has to be accepted, inevitably and naturally. Pain is pain -- a simple painful fact. Suffering however is only and always the refusal of pain, the claim that life should not be painful. It is the rejection of a fact, the denial of life and of the nature of things. Death is the mind that minds dying. Where there is no fear of death, who is there to die?

 

Man is unique among creatures in his knowledge of death and in his laughter. Wonderfully then, he can even make of death a new thing: he can die laughing. It is only man who knows laughter; no other animal laughs. It is only man who knows death; no other animal knows death -- animals simply die, they are not conscious of the phenomenon of death.

 

Man is aware of two things which no animal is: one is laughter, another is death. Then a new synthesis is possible. It is only man who can die laughing -- he can join the consciousness of death and the capacity to laugh. And if you can die laughing, only then will you give a valid proof that you must have lived laughing. Death is the final statement of your whole life -- the conclusion, the concluding remark. How you have lived will be shown by your death, how you die. Can you die laughing? Then you were a grown-up person. If you die crying, weeping, clinging, then you were a child. You were not grown-up, you were immature. If you die crying, weeping, clinging to life, that simply shows you have been avoiding death and you have been avoiding all pains, all kinds of pains.

 

Growth is facing the reality, encountering the fact, whatsoever it is. And let me repeat: Pain is simply pain; there is no suffering in it. Suffering comes from your desire that the pain should not be there, that there is something wrong in pain. Watch, witness, and you will be surprised. You have a headache: the pain is there but suffering is not there. Suffering is a secondary phenomenon, pain is primary. The headache is there, the pain is there; it is simply a fact. There is no judgment about it -- you don't call it good or bad, you don't give it any value; it is just a fact.

 

The rose is a fact, so is the thorn. The day is a fact, so is the night. The head is a fact, so is the headache. You simply take note of it.

 

Buddha taught his disciples that when you have a headache simply say twice 'Headache, headache.' Take note. But don't evaluate, don't say 'Why? Why has this headache happened to me? It should not happen to me.' The moment you say 'It should not' you bring suffering in. Now suffering is created by you, not by the headache. Suffering is your antagonistic interpretation, suffering is your denial of the fact.

 

And the moment you say 'It should not be' you have started avoiding it, you have started turning yourself away from it. You would like to be occupied in something so that you can forget it. You turn the radio or the tell on or you go to the club or you start reading or you go and start working in the garden -- you divert yourself, you distract yourself. Now that pain has not been witnessed; you have simply distracted yourself. That pain will be absorbed by the system. Let this key be very deeply understood: If you can witness your headache without taking any antagonistic attitude, without avoiding it, without escaping from it; if you can just be there, meditatively there -- 'Headache, headache' -- if you can just simply see it, the headache will go in its time. I am not saying that it will go miraculously, that just by your seeing it will go. It will go in its time. But it will not be absorbed by your system, it will not poison your system. It will be there, you will take note of it, and it will be gone. It will be released.

 

When you witness a certain thing in yourself it cannot enter into your system. It always enters when you avoid it, when you escape from it. When you become absent then it enters into your system. Only when you are absent can a pain become part of your being -- if you are present your very presence prevents it from becoming part of your being.

 

And if you can go on seeing your pains you will not be accumulating them. You have not teen taught the right clue, so you go on avoiding. Then you accumulate so much pain, you are afraid to face it, you are afraid to accept it. Growth becomes painful -- it is because of wrong conditioning. Otherwise growth is not painful, growth is utterly pleasant.

 

When the tree grows and becomes bigger do you think there is pain? There is no pain. Even when a child is born, if the mother accepts it there will be no pain. But the mother rejects it; the mother is afraid. She becomes tense, she tries to hold the child inside — which is not possible. The child is ready to go out into the world, the child is ready to leave the mother. He is ripe, the womb cannot contain him any more. If the womb contains him any more the mother will die and the child will die. But the mother is afraid. She has heard that it is very painful to give birth to a child -- birth pangs, birth pain -- she is afraid. And out of fear she becomes tense and closed.

 

Otherwise -- in primitive societies those tribes still exist -- childbirth is so simple, with no pain at all. On the contrary, you will be surprised, the greatest ecstasy happens to the woman in childbirth -- not pain, not agony at all, but the greatest ecstasy. No sexual orgasm is so satisfying and so tremendous as the orgasm that happens to the woman when she gives birth to the child naturally. The whole sexual mechanism of the woman pulsates as it cannot pulsate in any lovemaking.

 

The child is coming from the deepest core of the woman. No man can ever penetrate a woman to that core. And the pulsation arises from the inside. The pulsation is a must -- that pulsation will come like waves, great tidal waves of joy. Only that will help the child to come out, only that will help the passage to open for the child. So there will be great pulsation and the whole sexual being of the woman will have tremendous joy.

 

But what actually has happened to humanity is just the opposite: the woman comes to feel the greatest agony of her life. And this is a mind creation, this is wrong upbringing. The birth can be natural if you accept it. And so it is with your birth. Growth means you are being born every day. Birth does not end the day you were born -- on that day it simply starts; it is only a beginning. The day you left the womb of your mother you were not born, you STARTED being born; that was just the beginning. And a man goes on being born till he dies. It is not that you are born in a single moment. Your birth process continues for seventy, eighty, ninety years, however long you live. It is a continuum.

 

And every day you will feel joy -- growing new leaves, new foliage, new flowers, new branches, rising higher and higher and touching new altitudes.

 

You will be getting deeper, higher, you will be reaching to peaks. Growth will not be painful. But growth IS painful -- it is because of you, your wrong conditioning. You have been taught not to grow; you have been taught to remain static, you have been taught to cling to the familiar and the known. That's why each time the known disappears from your hands you start crying. A toy has been broken, a pacifier has been taken away.

 

Just the other day, one man wrote to me: 'You spoke against transcendental meditation -- and I was planning to go to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to learn levitation. Now I cannot take a jump into you, otherwise I will never be able to levitate.'

 

He was very hurt. A pacifier has been taken away. TM is a pacifier, a pseudo-tit: you can go on sucking it and it keeps you pacified. He was very hurt that I called TM mantra 'a lullaby'

 

I can change my statement: let us call each lullaby a TM mantra, if it satisfies you. And what are you going to do? Even if you learn levitation, how is it going to help your growth? In the first place, don't be foolish, don't be deceived. In the second place, for the argument's sake if it is accepted that you have learnt levitating, that you can rise four feet high above the earth, what are you going to do? Why bother? You can sit in a chair four feet high! and enjoy it! Even if you are four feet high without the chair, how does it help spiritual growth? Even if you can fly like a crow...

 

Chetna has asked me 'Osho, do you come sometimes in the form of a crow flying?' She must be reading Carlos Castaneda. Now, don't be victims of spiritual fiction. But your mind feels very good with these things, you start feeling something is happening -- you can levitate, you can walk on water, you can fly like a crow. But you will be YOU! The same stupid person. Nothing will have changed. You won't become more intelligent by flying like a crow -- otherwise all crows would have been enlightened. And by levitation you will not become a Buddha.

 

Do the real thing; don't go after toys. People go on getting involved with toys their whole life.

 

A man came to Ramakrishna, and he said 'I can walk on the Ganges.' Ramakrishna asked seriously 'How long did it take for you to walk on the Ganges?' The man said 'Eighteen years. I had to work hard with a Himalayan master in Tibet.' Ramakrishna said 'But it puzzles me -- because whenever I want to go, just one paisa to the ferry man and he takes me to the. other side. Eighteen years? Worth one paisa! It puzzles me -- are you stupid or mad or something?'

 

Remember, only one thing is going to help you: awareness -- nothing else. Growth will remain painful if you don't accept life in all its ups and downs. The summer has to be accepted and the winter too.

 

This is what I call meditation. Meditation is when you are emptied of all that is old and told and done to death. Then you see. Or rather, then there is seeing: the birth of the new. But you will have to go through many pains, many agonies. It is because you have lived in a certain society, in a certain culture -- Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Indian, German, Japanese. These are different ways of avoiding pain, and nothing else. You have been part of a culture, that's why growth is painful -- because culture tries to make you not grow; it wants you to remain juvenile. It does not allow you to move psychologically as you move physiologically.

 

In the First World War and then again in the Second World War, psychologists became aware of a very strange fact -- that man's average mental age is not more than twelve or thirteen. Even the man who is seventy, his mental age is somewhere between ten and thirteen. What does it mean? It simply means he stopped growing at ten; the body continued but the mind stopped.

 

No society allows grown-up minds. Why? Because grown-up minds are dangerous for the social structure; they are rebellious. They are dangerous for the social structure because they will see all the kinds of stupidities that go on in the name of culture, society, nation. Now see: the earth is one, and man still remains divided. All the problems of humanity can be solved if nations disappear. There is no problem, actually there is no problem; the basic problem is the boundaries of the nations. Now the technology is there which can feed all the people of the world, there is no need for any starvation. But that is not possible, because those boundaries won't allow it.

 

Once nations disappear, the problems can be solved. But if the problems can be solved, then where will the politician be? He is there only to solve your problems. He exists there and becomes very important because you have problems -- because there is starvation and there is war and there is this and that. If all these problems can be solved... and they can be solved now by science. In fact politics is outdated. There is no need for any politics any more; science has come of age and can solve all the problems. But then the politicians will be gone -- they will be gone with the problems. So they go on talking about how to solve the problems and they go on creating situations so that problems are not to be solved. These nations, their boundaries, prevent it.

 

A grown-up person will be able to see all this nonsense -- a grown-up person will be able to see it through and through. A grown-up person cannot be reduced to a slave.

 

Now in Soviet Russia, people have to be forced to remain juvenile, immature. Otherwise they would throw out this foolish kind of government that exists there, they would throw out this dictatorial totalitarian regime -- they would not be able to tolerate it for a single moment if they were grown-ups. Now the Soviet society has to force them to remain ungrown-up -- dependent, that's what I mean by 'ungrown-up'. Remain dependent.

 

There is not a single society which is communist, neither Russia nor China; no society which is socialist -- because the basic element of socialism is missing there: the freedom to grow. In fact, it will look paradoxical, but the capitalist countries are more socialistic than the communist countries. If socialism exists anywhere else in little bits it is in the capitalistic world, not in the so called communistic or socialistic countries -- because the basic ingredient of socialism is that each individual has a birthright to growl to be himself. You cannot be your-self in a communist world. The communist society can exist only if you are a juvenile, if you are kept pressed down into your childhood and you remain dependent.

 

That's why a country becomes 'the mother country', or it even foolishly becomes a fatherland or a motherland. Why mother and father? What do countries have to do with mother and father? There is a certain logic in it. No father wants his son to be really grown-up, because if the son is really grown-up then he will go on his own. No mother wants her daughter to be really grown-up; if she is really grown-up she is gone. Every mother tries unconsciously to keep the daughter juvenile, dependent. Then she will always look up towards the mother; whenever she is in a difficulty she will search for the mother.

 

In India, it happens -- a person may be sixty years of age and may not feel independent, because his father is still alive. In India a man becomes grown-up only when the father dies. This is ugly. You have to wait for that -- when your father dies then you will be able to be on your own. But a man who has lived for sixty years as a dependent, how can he become independent suddenly when the father dies? He will only pretend; deep down he will remain dependent.

 

The family depends on dependence, the society depends on dependence -- they all depend on your non-growing selves, they all try to keep you stuck somewhere. That's why there is pain. The pain is not because of growth but because your culture, your society, has a great investment in you and it does not allow you to grow.

 

Take hold of your being. Face your pains and throw off all kinds of bond ages -- because only by being free of all bond ages will you be able to sing your song and dance your dance. And that's what prayer is. If you have been able to sing the song that you brought in your heart, you are fulfilled. Then you are a tree which has bloomed.

 

IN SPRING, HUNDREDS OF FLOWERS; IN AUTUMN, A HARVEST MOON.

 

IN SUMMER, A REFRESHING BREEZE; IN WINTER, SNOW.

 

IF USELESS THINGS DO NOT HANG IN YOUR MIND,

 

ANY SEASON IS A GOOD SEASON.

 

It is a Zen saying. 'If useless things don't hang in your mind...' Growth is painful because you are carrying so many useless things in your mind. You should have dropped them long before. But you have not been taught to drop anything, you have only been taught to hold everything -- meaningful, meaningless. Because you are carrying so many hangups, hence the growth is difficult. Otherwise growth will be so smooth, just like a bud opens into a flower.

 

- Osho, “The Revolution, #6, Q1”