BEGIN THE DEVELOPMENT OF TAKING WITH YOURSELF

You cannot do anything with others that you have not done in the first place with yourself. you can hurt others if you have hurt yourself, you will be a pain in the neck to others if you are a pain in the neck to yourself, you can be a blessing to others only if you are a blessing to yourself.

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Rather than starting by taking the whole misery of the world and absorbing it into your heart, start with your own misery. Don't go into the deep sea so fast; learn swimming in shallow water... You can say to yourself "Yes, I am taking the misery of the whole world" - but what do you know of the misery of the whole world? You have not experienced even your own misery.

We go on avoiding our own misery. If you feel miserable, you put on the radio or the TV and you become engaged. You start reading the newspaper so that you can forget your misery, or you go to the movies, or you go to your woman or your man...just somehow to keep yourself away from yourself, so that you need not look at how much it hurts within.

First, you have to begin with yourself. If you are feeling miserable, let it become a meditation. Sit silently, close the doors. First feel the misery with as much intensity as possible. Feel the hurt. Somebody has insulted you: now, the best way to avoid the hurt is to go and insult him, so that you become occupied with him. This is not meditation.

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If somebody has insulted you, feel thankful to him that he has given you the opportunity to feel a deep wound...Just close the room, sit silently, with no anger for the person but with total awareness of the feeling that is arising in you - the hurt feeling that you have been rejected, that you have been insulted. And then you will be surprised that not only is this man there: all the people who have ever insulted you will start moving in your memory... Stop all occupation, because that too is a subtle drug. Just be silent, utterly alone. Don't even pray, because that again is a drug, you are becoming occupied, you start talking to God, you start praying, you escape from yourself.

Atisha is saying: just be yourself. Whatsoever the pain of it and whatsoever the suffering of it, just let it be so. First experience it in its total intensity. It will be difficult, it will be heart-rending: you may start crying like a child, you may start rolling on the ground in deep pain, your body may go through contortions. You may suddenly become aware that the pain is not only in the heart, it is all over the body - that it is aching all over, that it is painful all over, that the body is nothing but pain.

If you can experience it - this is of tremendous importance - then start absorbing it...Absorb it, drink it, accept it, welcome it, feel grateful to it. It may take a few days for you to be able to digest it, but the day it happens, you have stumbled upon a door which will take you really far away. A new journey has started in your life, you are moving into a new kind of being - because immediately, the moment you accept the pain with no rejection anywhere, its energy and its quality changes. It is no longer pain.

In fact one is simply surprised, one cannot believe it, it is so incredible. One cannot believe that suffering can be transformed into ecstasy, that pain can become joy.

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Whenever anything is total it transforms into its opposite. This is a great secret to be remembered...You will not believe it when it happens the first time, that your own suffering absorbed willingly, welcomingly, becomes a great blessing. The same energy that becomes hate becomes love, the same energy that becomes pain becomes pleasure, the same energy that becomes suffering becomes bliss.

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Ride on the incoming breath and your small heart is bigger than the whole universe, if you know what miracles it can do... Then let blessings go riding on the outgoing breath to all the nooks and corners of existence.

Atisha says: This is compassion. Compassion is to become a transforming force in existence - transforming the ugly into the beautiful, kissing the frog and transforming it into a prince, transforming darkness into light. To become such a medium of transformation is compassion.

From The Book of Wisdom, by Osho
Used by kind permission of Osho Foundation International