I look at you and am convinced of one thing, that you once had something-some treasure, some symmetry, some secret, some key-but you have lost it.
Every moment, asleep or awake, you are always busy looking for something. It is quite possible you do not know exactly what you are searching for and that you are unaware of what you have lost, but I see the hunger in your eyes. It is apparent in every beat of your heart.
This quest has been going on for countless lives. Sometimes you call it the search for truth. But you have never known truth, so how can you lose it? And sometimes you search for God. But your meeting with Him has never taken place, so how can you be separated form Him?
You go in search to the temples, to the mosques, to Kashi and to mecca; you knock on every door you come across in the hope you will find what you have lost. But as long a you do not know exactly what it is you have lost your search cannot be fulfilled.
Love is the ability to experience. Love is sensitivity. Love is the experience in which all your impurities are washed away and you throw open all your doors, all your gates.
Then whosoever stands at your door is no longer an enemy or a friend but a beloved, and you open your door to him.
When you begin to feel the whole world is yours, when you begin to see the beloved in whosoever comes to your door, when you no longer see strangers or enemies, when you begin to see only friends everywhere—when this phenomenon takes place in you, know that you have found love.
The man who has found love has found the key to the door of God.
For first-time readers of Osho this book itself will be introduction enough. Those familiar with Osho’s recent books will need to remember that these discourses were delivered in 1975 to a predominantly Hindu gathering. By then only a few hundred Westerners had found him.
The discourses are commentaries on ten of Kabir’s poems, in which Kabir sings of his love of God. Osho too talks of God: “You will only be able to love others when you become so overwhelmed by the love of God that it begins to overflow from your very being.” And at the same time he reminds us that, “God is not a person to be communicated with.” “God is not the way you describe him. He is something like this and something like that.” “There is great difficulty in trying to describe him.” “Anything I say about him will be incorrect.”
Recent friends of Osho may find it strange to hear him using the name of God in this way. It was ten years after these Kabir discourses that he shocked his disciples, who thought of ourselves as iconoclastic, rebellious freethinkers who had finished with the idea of a personal God a long time ago, by showing us how subtly our conditioning still looked for something, someone out there who knew more than we did. And in 1989 another series, dedicated to Friedrich Nietzsche entitled God is Dead, Now Zen is the only Living Truth, showed yet again that our minds may know that God is dead, but our blood and bones still haven’t realized that he was never alive, that “he is a fiction,” “an insult to man,” “a puppeteer who has made you beggars and slaves,” “a lie” that has dragged behind it the muck-cart of organized religion and the hypocrisy of our society.
In later discourses, by talking the truth, Osho has bit every vested interest of society so hard that it has provoked savage, fearful retaliation from the governments of the world. So to read these commentaries of 1975 is to be taken back to a calmer world, before society had felt Osho’s power and reacted so violently, to a world filled by the great subjects of Kabir’s songs — love, truth, death, enlightenment.
A story told by Osho in a recent discourse may be relevant to the change of language over those ten years. “I was watching a film about Jesus. And I love the man. Unless I love somebody I don’t criticize him.” He told the story of the rich young man going to Jesus who tells him to give all that he has to the poor. Osho says “You ask him too much, too early. A master should not be in a hurry.” The young man “has just inherited an empire and you ask him to distribute it all!” “He had come and he was ready, but asking him too much when the time is not ripe shows too much hurry.” “In fact before a person becomes alert and aware you should not ask such impossible things.” He takes us at our own pace.
And once you are at ease again with the word ‘God’ these discourses will fill you to overflowing. With what will they fill you? That is the great secret — words like wisdom, understanding, truth, ecstasy, love, God, all fall far short. Osho has spoken on Kabir more than on any other mystic. “I love Kabir.” Love is the subject.
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