BELOVED MASTER,

CAN IT BE THAT CRYING IS MY CELEBRATION AT THE MOMENT? WHEN I LOOK AT YOU, MY HEART IS TURNING INSIDE OUT AND A WHOLE MONSOON IS BREAKING LOOSE, LEAVING ME HELPLESS.

BELOVED MASTER, WHO IS IT THAT IS CRYING?

Deva Paro, it looks a little strange but it is true: you can transform anything into a celebration. Just as you can transform any celebration into a miserable affair — it all depends on you…You are saying, “Can it be that crying is my celebration?” If you feel blissful in crying, there is no harm. It is perfectly beautiful. Tears can be of joy, of love. Tears can show that you are overfilled with something that starts flowing through the tears. It need not be sadness, it need not be mourning; it can be festivity. It all depends on you. And you have to feel what it is, because you will be absolutely certain whether your tears are coming out of frustration, out of sadness, out of failure, or they are coming out of love, joy, gratitude, prayer. Tears are one of the most mysterious things you have. They can have all the colors of the rainbow. It depends on your consciousness what colors you give to them…

If you are feeling blissful, peaceful, silent in your crying, in your tears, and if after tears you feel relaxed, relieved of some burden, it is perfectly good. Don’t try to stop it… because humanity has been given such wrong training about so many things that it has not left any human being natural. Everybody has become artificial, and particularly men — every society has forced them not to cry; it is against your manliness. It is okay for women to cry and weep. They don’t belong to your status, they are second class citizens. But you, being first class, should show your strength. Your tears expose your weakness. But if you go on for thousands of years teaching every child such nonsense, he starts holding his tears back. Nobody wants to be exposed as a weakling. But the simple truth is, nature has given you exactly the same glands for tears as nature has given to women.

And if nature is listened to, then stopping your tears is a dangerous thing. It is not only tears that will be stopped — you will become less sensitive, you will become less loving. You will become harder, you will become cruel, you will become a sadist. This will be the outcome of a simple thing. You will go neurotic, psychotic — four times more men end up in insane asylums than women. And the reason is that women know how to cry and weep. They know how to let their burdens and tensions be relieved through tears. Man goes on accumulating and one day it is too late. Then either he jumps from a sixty-storey building and finishes himself off…

Man has been prevented from being natural so that he can be made into a soldier, so that he can be made into a harder personality, to compete in the world. Because the woman was not going to compete in the world, and she was not going to wars either, there was no need. She could be allowed to cry and weep. It became a distinction, that it is manly not to weep, not to cry. It is simply against nature. The women don’t go so mad because in their tears they are throwing away all their tensions. They don’t accumulate to such a point that it is beyond their capacity to control it and everything goes through a breakdown. Exactly four times more men commit suicide, although at least forty times more women threaten to commit suicide. But they don’t. Women have remained in a way closer to nature because they were deprived from participating in man’s power struggle. In disguise, this curse proved a blessing…

It is good, Paro, to enjoy your tears. And don’t keep them only for tensions and anxieties and frustrations and moments of sadness. No, that is using them in a wrong way. Use them when you are in love. Use them when you are feeling peaceful. Use them when you see a beautiful sunset. What can be said to the sunset? It won’t understand any language. But your tears, perhaps, will be understood. When you see a beautiful flower, how can you resist having a few tears that existence is so beautiful? If you see a Gautam Buddha and you don’t have tears in your eyes, then you are behaving inhumanly, unnaturally. Seeing Gautam Buddha, you should be in such a celebration — at least one of us has reached to the ultimate potential of his being, and he is a proof that we can also reach.

You are also saying, Paro, “When I look at you my heart is turning inside out and a whole monsoon is breaking loose, leaving me helpless. Who is it that is crying?” It is your original being. The false never cries. The hypocrite never cries. It is only the original, the authentic. This is the whole purpose of the communion that is happening here — to fall into a synchronicity with my heart. Naturally your heart will have to change. It will have to take a new rhythm, a new harmony, a new wavelength. And it is natural to feel helpless because you have been told that tears are a sign of weakness, helplessness. Tears are your strength, not helplessness. Tears show that you are alive, that you have not shrunk and lost all your juice. Tears show that your heart still feels, still can dance, still can rejoice…

But tears are taboo — one of the things that have been repressed. Friedrich Nietzsche is quoted as saying that he smiles because he is afraid if he does not smile he will start crying and tears will come to his eyes. His smile is just a protection; it keeps him occupied, he remains with a false smile so that authentic tears cannot come out. Naturally, for a German, it is a question of manliness. How can a German cry and weep and have tears? But more or less all men around the world are Germans. They are all male oriented, trying to impose a supremacy of men over women. But I say unto you, your tears are far more valuable than man’s domination. His supremacy is nothing. He has suffered much because of this stupid attitude. Allow those tears. They are not of helplessness, they are of tremendous joy.

And you ask, “Who is it that is crying?” It is you in your originality, not you in your personality…Just be a little more understanding of all your sentiments, emotions — they all have a certain place in the total harmony of your being. But we have been kept almost blind to our own potentialities, dimensions. Be a little more alert about everything, and remember that the natural is the superior and the unnatural is phony and American…

There is so much misunderstanding. You don’t know what is real, what is unreal. You don’t know what has been imposed on you by others and what you have brought from existence itself as a gift. You have to discriminate, and always choose the natural. Even if it goes against all traditions, all religions, all cultures, don’t be worried: except the natural, there is no authentic religiousness anywhere. Except the existential, there is nothing holy that you can find… in the Bible, in the Koran, in the Gita. Just watch — inside you is nature, inside you is the existential. Always follow it, and you will never be going wrong. To be natural, to be in tune with existence, is the only authentic spirituality.

Source:

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

Discourse Series: Om Mani Padme Hum

Chapter #1

Chapter title: The music of OM

7 December 1987 am in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium

References:

Osho has spoken on ‘crying, sadness, bliss, joy, love’ in many of His discourses. More on the subject can be referred to in the following books/discourses: