Mahashivratri

Mahashivratri is a hindu festival celebrated annually in honour of the lord Shiva. There is a Shivaratri in every luni-solar month of the Hindu calendar, on the month’s 13th night/14th day, but once a year in late winter (February/March, or Phalguna) and before the arrival of Summer, marks MahaShivaratri which means “the Great Night of Shiva”.

Osho has spoken on VIGYAN BHAIRAV TANTRA (A talk between Shiva and Parvati) in his English discourse series “VIGYAN BHAIRAV TANTRA VOL.1 AND VOL.2”

Osho differentiates Shiva from other enlightened figures and saysIf you do a technique, your mind will turn from its journey into the future or the past. Suddenly you will find yourself in the present. That is why Buddha has given techniques, Lao Tzu has given techniques, Krishna has given techniques. But they always introduce their techniques with intellectual concepts. Only Shiva is different. He immediately gives techniques, and no intellectual understanding, no intellectual introduction, because he knows that the mind is tricky, the most cunning thing possible. It can turn anything into a problem. Shiva proceeds immediately with no introduction whatsoever. He immediately starts talking about techniques. Those techniques, if followed, suddenly turn your mind: it comes to the present. And when the mind comes to the present it stops, it is no more. You cannot be a mind in the present, that is impossible. Osho further saysShiva proposes one hundred and twelve methods. These are all the methods possible. If nothing clicks and nothing gives you the feeling that this is for you, then there is no method left for you — remember this. Then forget spirituality and be happy. Then it is not for you. But these one hundred and twelve methods are for the whole humanity — for all the ages that have passed and for all the ages that have yet to come. In no time has there ever been a single man, and there will never be one, who can say, “These one hundred and twelve methods are all useless for me.” Impossible! This is impossible!

Osho says….

The first technique: WHILE BEING CARESSED, SWEET PRINCESS, ENTER THE CARESSING AS EVERLASTING LIFE. Shiva starts with love. The first technique is concerned with love, because love is the nearest thing in your experience in which you are relaxed. If you cannot love, it is impossible for you to relax. If you can relax, your life will become a loving life. A tense man cannot love. Why? A tense man always lives with purposes. He can earn money, but he cannot love because love is purposeless. Love is not a commodity. You cannot accumulate it; you cannot make a bank balance of it; you cannot strengthen your ego out of it. Really, love is the most absurd act, with no meaning beyond it, no purpose beyond it. It exists in itself, not for anything else.

You earn money FOR something — it is a means. You build a house for someone to live in — it is a means. Love is not a means. Why do you love? For what do you love? Love is the end in itself. That is why a mind that is calculative, logical, a mind that thinks in terms of purpose, cannot love. And the mind that always thinks in terms of purpose will be tense, because purpose can only be fulfilled in the future, never here and now. You are building a house — you cannot live in it just now, you will have to build it first. You can live in it in the future, not now. You earn money — the bank balance will be created in the future, not now. Means you will have to use now, and ends will come in the future.

Love is always here; there is no future to it. That is why love is so near to meditation. That is why death is also so near to meditation — because death is also always here and now, it can never happen in the future. Can you die in the future? You can die only in the present. No one has ever died in the future. How can you die in the future? Or how can you die in the past? The past has gone, it is no more, so you cannot die in it. The future has not yet come, so how can you die in it?

Death always occurs in the present. Death, love, meditation — they all occur in the present. So if you are afraid of death, you cannot love. If you are afraid of love, you cannot meditate. If you are afraid of meditation, your life will be useless. Useless not in the sense of any purpose, but useless in the sense that you will never be able to feel any bliss in it. It will be futile. It may seem strange to connect these three: love, meditation, death. It is not! They are similar experiences. So if you can enter in one, you can enter in the remaining two.

Shiva starts with love. He says, WHILE BEING CARESSED, SWEET PRINCESS, ENTER THE CARESSING AS EVERLASTING LIFE. What does it mean? Many things! One: while you are being loved the past has ceased, the future is not. You move in the dimension of the present. You move in THE NOW. Have you ever loved someone? If you have ever loved, then you know that the mind is no longer there. That is why the so-called wise men say that lovers are blind, mindless, mad. In essence what they say is right.

Lovers ARE blind because they have no eyes for the future, to calculate what they are going to do. They are blind; they cannot see the past. What has happened to lovers? They just move here and now without any consideration of past or future, without any consideration of consequences.

That is why they are called blind. They are! They are blind for those who are calculating, and they are seers for those who are not calculating. Those who are not calculating will see love as the real eye, the real vision.

So the first thing: in the moment of love, past and future are no more. Then, one delicate point is to be understood. When there is no past and no future, can you call this moment the present? It is the present only between the two — between the past and the future. It is relative. If there is no past and no future, what does it mean to call it the present? It is meaningless. That is why Shiva doesn’t use the word `present’. He says, EVERLASTING LIFE. He means eternity… enter eternity. We divide time into three parts — past, present, future. That division is false, absolutely false. Time is really past and future.

The present is not part of time. The present is part of eternity. That which has passed is time; that which is to come is time. That which is, is not time because it never passes — it is always here. The now is always here. It is ALWAYS here! This now is eternal.

If you move from the past, you never move into the present. From the past you always move into the future; there comes no moment which is present. From the past you always move into the future. From the present you can never move into the future. From the present you go deeper and deeper, into more present and more present. This is everlasting life. We may say it in this way: from past to future is time. Time means you move on a plane, on a straight line. Or we may call it horizontal. The moment you are in the present the dimension changes: you move vertically — up or down, toward the height or toward the depth. But then you never move horizontally. A Buddha, a Shiva, live in eternity, not in time.

Jesus was asked, “What will happen in your kingdom of God?” The man who asked him was not asking about time. He was asking about what is going to happen to his desires, about how they will be fulfilled. He was asking whether there will be life everlasting or whether there will be death; whether there be any misery, whether there will be inferior and superior men. He was asking things of this world when he asked, “What is going to happen in your kingdom of God?” And Jesus replied — the reply is like that of a Zen monk — “There shall be time no longer.”

The man who was replied to in this way may not have understood at all: “There shall be time no longer.” Only this one thing Jesus said — “There shall be time no longer,” because time is horizontal and the kingdom of God is vertical… it is eternal. It is always here! You have only to move away from time to enter into it.

So love is the first door. Through it, you can move away from time. That is why everyone wants to be loved, everyone wants to love. And no one knows why so much significance is given to love, why there is such a deep longing for love. And unless you know it rightly, you can neither love nor be loved, because love is one of the deepest phenomena upon this earth. We go on thinking that everyone is capable of love as he is. This is not the case — it is not so. That is why you are frustrated. Love is a different dimension, and if you try to love someone in time you will be defeated in your effort. In time, love is not possible.

I remember one anecdote. Meera was in love with Krishna. She was a housewife — the wife of a prince. The prince became jealous of Krishna. Krishna was no more; Krishna was not present, Krishna was not a physical body. There was a gap of five thousand years between Krishna’s physical existence and Meera’s physical existence. So really, how can Meera be in love with Krishna? The time gap was so great.

One day the prince, her husband, asked Meera, “You go on talking about your love, you go on dancing and singing around Krishna, but where is he? With whom are you so much in love? With whom are you talking continuously?” Meera was talking with Krishna, singing, laughing, fighting. She looked mad — she was, in our eyes. The prince said, “Have you gone mad? Where is your Krishna? Whom are you loving? With whom are you conversing? I am here, and you have completely forgotten me.”

Meera said, “Krishna is here — you are not here — because Krishna is eternal; you are not. He will always be here, he was always here, he is here. You will not be here; you were not here. You were not here one day, you will not be here another day, so how can I believe that between these two non-existences you are here? How is an existence possible between two non-existences?”

The prince is in time, but Krishna is in eternity. So you can be near the prince, but the distance cannot be destroyed. You will be distant. You may be very, very distant in time from Krishna, but you can be near. It is a different dimension, however. I look in front of me and there is a wall; I move my eyes and there is a sky. When you look in time there is always a wall. When you look beyond time there is the open sky… infinite. Love opens the infinity, the everlastingness of existence. So really, if you have ever loved, love can be made a technique of meditation. This is the technique: WHILE BEING LOVED, SWEET PRINCESS, ENTER LOVING AS EVERLASTING LIFE.

Do not be a lover standing aloof, outside. Become loving and move into eternity. When you are loving someone, are you there as the lover? If you are there, then you are in time and love is just false, just pseudo. If you are still there and you can say, “I am,” then you can be physically near but spiritually you are poles apart. While in love, YOU must not be — only love, only loving. Become loving. While caressing your lover or beloved become the caress. While kissing, do not be the kisser or the kissed — be the kiss. Forget the ego completely, dissolve it into the act. Move into the act so deeply that the actor is no more. And if you cannot move into love, it is difficult to move into eating or walking — very difficult, because love is the easiest approach for dissolving the ego. That is why those who are egoists cannot love. They may talk about it, they may sing about it, they may write about it, but they cannot love. The ego cannot love!

Shiva says, become loving. When you are in the embrace, become the embrace, become the kiss. Forget yourself so totally that you can say, “I am no more. Only love exists.” Then the heart is not beating but love is beating. Then the blood is not circulating, love is circulating. And eyes are not seeing, love is seeing. Then hands are not moving to touch, love is moving to touch. Become love and enter everlasting life. Love suddenly changes your dimension. You are thrown out of time and you are facing eternity. Love can become a deep meditation — the deepest possible. Lovers have known sometimes what saints have not known. And lovers have touched that center which many yogis have missed. But it will be just a glimpse unless you transform your love into meditation. Tantra means this: the transformation of love into meditation. And now you can understand why tantra talks so much about love and sex. Why? Because love is the easiest natural door from where you can transcend this world, this horizontal dimension.

Look at Shiva with his consort, Devi. Look at them! They don’t seem to be two — they are one. The oneness is so deep that it has even gone into symbols. We all have seen the Shivalinga. It is a phallic symbol — Shiva’s sex organ — but it is not alone, it is based in Devi’s vagina. The Hindus of the old days were very daring. Now when you see a Shivalinga you never remember that it is a phallic symbol. We have forgotten; we have tried to forget it completely.

Jung remembers in his autobiography, in his memoirs, a very beautiful and funny incident. He came to India and went to see Konark, and in the temple of Konark there are many, many Shivalingas, many phallic symbols. The pundit who was taking him around explained everything to him except the Shivalingas. And they were so many, it was difficult to escape this. Jung was well aware, but just to tease the pundit he went on asking, “But what are these?” So the pundit at last said into his ear, in Jung’s ear, “Do not ask me here, I will tell you afterwards. This is a private thing.”

Jung must have laughed inside — these are the Hindus of today. Then outside the temple the pundit came near and said, “It was not good of you to ask before others. I will tell you now. It is a secret.” And then again in Jung’s ear he said, “They are our private parts.”

When Jung went back, he met one great scholar — a scholar of oriental thought, mythology, philosophy — Heinrich Zimmer. He related this anecdote to Zimmer. Zimmer was one of the most gifted minds who ever tried to penetrate Indian thought and he was a lover of India and of its ways of thinking — of the oriental non-logical, mystic approach toward life. When he heard this from Jung, he laughed and said, “This is good for a change. I have always heard about great Indians — Buddha, Krishna, Mahavira. What you relate says something not about any great Indians, but about Indians.”

Love for Shiva is the great gate. And for him sex is not something to be condemned. For him sex is the seed and love is the flowering of it, and if you condemn the seed you condemn the flower. Sex can become love. If it never becomes love then it is crippled. Condemn the crippledness, not the sex. Love must flower, sex must become love. If it is not becoming it is not the fault of sex, it is your fault. Sex must not remain sex; that is the tantra teaching. It must be transformed into love. And love also must not remain love. It must be transformed into light, into meditative experience, into the last, ultimate mystic peak. How to transform love? Be the act and forget the actor. While loving, be love — simply love. Then it is not your love or my love or anybody else’s — it is simply LOVE. When you are not there, when you are in the hands of the ultimate source, or current, when you are in love, it is not you who is in love. When the love has engulfed you, you have disappeared; you have just become a flowing energy.

D. H. Lawrence, one of the most creative minds of this age, was knowingly or unknowingly a tantra adept. He was condemned in the West completely, his books were banned. There were many cases in the courts only because he had said, “Sex energy is the only energy, and if you condemn it and suppress it you are against the universe. Then you will never be capable of knowing the higher flowering of this energy. And when it is suppressed it becomes ugly — this is the vicious circle.” Priests, moralists, so-called religious people — popes, shankaracharyas and others — they go on condemning sex. They say that this is an ugly thing. And when you suppress it, it becomes ugly. So they say, “Look! What we said is true. It is proved by you. Look! Whatsoever you are doing is ugly and you know it is ugly.” But it is not sex which is ugly, it is these priests who have made it ugly. Once they have made it ugly they are proved right. And when they are proved right you go on making it more and more ugly.

Sex is innocent energy — life flowing in you, existence alive in you. Do not cripple it! Allow it to move toward the heights. That is, sex must become love. What is the difference? When your mind is sexual you are exploiting the other; the other is just an instrument to be used and thrown away. When sex becomes love the other is not an instrument, the other is not to be exploited; the other is not really the other. When you love, it is not self-centered. Rather, the other becomes significant, unique. It is not that you are exploiting him — no! On the contrary, you both are joined in a deep experience. You are partners of a deep experience, not the exploiter and the exploited. You are helping each other to move into a different world of love. Sex is exploitation.

Love is moving together into a different world. If this moving is not momentary and if this moving becomes meditative — that is, if you can forget yourself completely and the lover and the beloved disappear, and there is only love flowing — then, says Shiva, everlasting life is yours.

Source:

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in Buddha Hall, Shree Rajneesh Ashram, Pune.

Discourse Series: Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 1

Chapter #7

Chapter title: Techniques to put you at ease

7 October 1972 pm in Woodlands, Bombay

References:

Osho has spoken on ‘Krishna, Jesus, Buddha, Shiva, Lao Tzu and many other enlightened Masters’ in many of His discourses. More on them can be referred to in the following books/discourse titles:

Vigyan Bhairav Tantra
The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha
Tao: The Three Treasures
Zarathustra: The Laughing Prophet
The Mustard Seed: My Most Loved Gospel on Jesus
The Path of Love
Bodhidharma: The Greatest Zen Master
When the Shoe Fits
Hyakujo: The Everest of Zen, with Basho’s Haikus
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega
Sermons in Stones
The Book of Wisdom
The Divine Melody