Sadness has something tremendously beautiful to give to you

By Osho

26 January 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Rajneesh Foundation, Poona, India, 1976
 
Excerpt from
Above All Don't Wobble, p.159-162 

 

[A sannyasin had previously told Osho that he had powerful experiences of death in his meditation. Osho had suggested he do the humming meditation. Tonight he said he doesn’t feel comfortable doing it: “‘I feel morose. I don't feel happy. I used to feel happy before, but now I'm just going into my shell. I don't feel like doing anything.”]

Osho: It happens…If you have ordinarily been happy and outgoing and enjoying things, it simply means that you have been repressing the other side.

People who laugh go on repressing tears. In fact they laugh so that nobody should become aware of their tears - their laughter is a defence. They are afraid of the tears. So they go on laughing and enjoying, but they remain on the surface. Then they meditate, and whatsoever has been repressed, bubbles up, surfaces. Then one starts feeling morose, sad. But it is a good sign; it simply shows that the other side of your being has been entered.

One has to understand that life is both. The person who is really free and alive, is free to move from one polarity to another. He is not fixed in one pattern; he is neither happy nor unhappy. If he becomes happy, he is happy; if he becomes unhappy, he is really unhappy. If he is loving, he is really loving; if he becomes angry, he is really angry - he lives both the polarities. You can rely on his anger and on his love and on his sadness. He is not inauthentic, he is true.

Your happiness was not true - you were managing it, manipulating it. If it were true, meditation would deepen it, because meditation deepens whatsoever is true. Your real situation inside was morose - but you had been wearing a face, a mask. We all learn how to be happy and to go on laughing and joking…that's how the whole society goes on, a merry-go-round. But everybody is carrying a deep dark night within them, and nobody is even aware of it. 

When you enter a meditative state you will first enter this dark night of the soul. If you can pass through it - and there is no difficulty in passing through it - then for the first time you will become aware that your happiness was not true.

False happiness will go and real sadness will come, and only after real sadness will real happiness surface. Then you will know that the false happiness was even worse than the real sadness, because at least in that sadness there is a reality. If you are sad - but truly and sincerely sad - that sadness will enrich you.

It gives you a depth, an insight. It makes you aware of life and its infinite possibilities and the limitedness of the human mind, the smallness of human consciousness encountering the infinity all around; the fragile life always surrounded by death. When you are really sad you become aware of all these things. You become aware that life is not just life...it is death too.

In a true insight one has to go through both. I know that this sadness is good, so don't be afraid. If you really want to be happy, just don't go on pretending, playing the game of being happy. As unhappiness comes, soon you will see that it will darken, it will become intense. But when the night is dark, the morning is very close. The night becomes darkest when the morning is really close.

So don't lose courage, and don't try to escape into the old ways. Nothing is wrong in being sad, but our whole conditioning is wrong. You have been taught, everybody has been taught, not to be sad. But I teach you to be truly sad, because sadness has something tremendously beautiful to give to you.

Happiness gives you the feeling of vastness, and sadness gives you the feeling of depth - and both are needed. For a really rich consciousness, both are needed. People who have lived superficially happy are always shallow.

They cannot give birth to stars…they don't have that much chaos in them. They are mediocre. People who have touched deep sadness have become aware of many things which ordinarily no one becomes aware of. Everybody has to pass through the school of sadness, so accept it.

And the uneasiness is coming because you are fighting it; the discomfort is felt because you are fighting it. Accept it, relax into it. Whatsoever life gives, accept in deep gratitude. Don't poke your nose in. Simply allow life to take you over, to possess you. Relax into it and then the discomfort will go. Then you will start enjoying sadness - and I tell you, it is beautiful.

Once you stop fighting, once you accept it, there is nothing but to enjoy. It will give you a silence, a deep humming. Of course it is sad, but beautiful. Even the night has its own beauty, and those who cannot see the beauty of the night will miss much.

Once you allow the discomfort that you feel coming, the strain on the body and the tensions will disappear. Just relax, and as you go deeper a totally different quality of happiness will arise - that's what we call bliss, anand.

It is not of that happiness that you have known; it is not shallow and it is not against sadness. It is great enough to comprehend sadness, it is vast enough. The sadness can live in it as a guest, and the blissful state of consciousness does not lose anything because of the sadness; it gains much - it gives colour, it gives contrast.

So just wait and don't be in a hurry. Things are going as they should. But I can understand your trouble...”