Every Time I Fall in Love, Things Start Crashing Around me...

... I guess that I lose my center but in this state I don't know if I have a center or not. Things get confused and crazy 

The question is from Krishna Priya.

The first thing: you don’t yet have a center. That which you feel as a center is just the ego. It is not your true center. It is a pseudo feeling, very illusory. So when you fall in love, ego has to disappear. In love, the ego cannot exist. Love is something far more true, far more authentic than you are. That’s why you will always feel that things start getting a little bit crazy because you cannot control them. The controller is no more. When the ego is not there, who is there to control or to discipline? 

Then you are in a chaos.

But that chaos is far more beautiful than the ugly ego. Out of that chaos all the stars are born. Out of that chaos you are born anew. It is a rebirth. Each love affair is a new birth. So don’t take it negatively. Don’t think that you are losing something in love you have nothing to lose. If you have something then there is no way to lose it. If you have the real center then love supports that center, integrates it, makes it more crystallized. Truth helps truth. 

For example, if there is darkness in the room and you bring a lamp, the darkness is destroyed. But if there is light – there is a lamp – then the room has more light than before. The light is doubled. The ego is like darkness, a false entity. It only appears to be there, it has no positive reality. When the light of love comes, darkness goes out. If you have the real centre – what Gurdjieff calls crystallisation or what Hindus call ATMAN or what Sufis call ROOH, spirit – if you really have it then each love will make it more and more clear, more and more transparent, more and more available. Each love affair will be a step – and you will be moving higher in crystallisation. 

So this is the first thing to be understood: don’t choose the ego, always choose love. When it is a question between the real and the unreal, choose the real, even if sometimes the real brings inconvenience. It does bring inconvenience. We have chosen the unreal because it is convenient – for no other reason have we chosen it. There is just one reason: it is convenient. You will have to go through inconvenience. That inconvenience is what I call TAPASHCHARYA, austerity, SADHANA. That’s what it means to be initiated into a path.

Always choose the real, howsoever bad and howsoever painful and howsoever destructive it looks. Even if it feels like death, choose it – and you will be benefitted by it. Never choose the comfortable the convenient, the bourgeois, other-wise you will live the life of a hostile – if you are fortunate – or the life of a phony if you are not so fortunate, or, if you are not fortunate at all, the life of a zombie. Love brings you out of your ego, out of your past, out of your patterned life. Hence it appears to be a confusion.

Priya’s observation is right. She says: EVERY TIME I FALL IN LOVE, THINGS START TO CRASH ALL AROUND ME. She really falls in love. I have been watching her love affairs. When she falls, she really falls! It is never so-so, it is never lukewarm. She really goes mad, berserk. And it is happening again, that’s why she has put this question. 

But that’s good. There is nothing to be worried about. Lose the ego. Sometimes to be mad is a basic necessity to remain sane. If you are always sane then your sanity is suspect. Then you must be carrying a great neurosis hidden behind you, and any day it can explode, it can erupt. You are sitting on a volcano. It is good to have a few holidays from sanity. Sunday is good. Sometimes forget all about your sanity, all about your rules, discipline, controlled behaviour, and all that nonsense. Sometimes be on a holiday, relax, and go berserk.

If you go berserk deliberately, consciously, fully aware, it is going to be an incredible experience. and you are never in danger. When you go berserk consciously you can come back. You know how you entered into it and you know how to get out of it. When you don’t go consciously, when you are thrown by a volcano inside you, when it is not your choice, but just an accident, when it is not that you have chosen the holiday but you have been forced to go on a holiday, then it is not within your capacity to come back. That’s what happens to mad people. They become mad only when they have accumulated so much madness that now it is not possible for them to control it. It overwhelms them. And then they cannot come back.

Here, living with me, I am teaching you one basic principle of remaining sane – that is, deliberately, consciously, with ef-fort, to sometimes go mad. It is a good experience. You remain available to both  polarities – sanity/insanity. You swing. You have freedom. 

The person who is always sane is not free and the person who is always insane is not free either. But the person who can swing from sanity to insanity, and can easily swing, smoothly, with no barrier, has great freedom. These are the people who have known what life is. All the mystics are mad and all the mad people could have become mystics, but they missed. And when you go on your own you can come back. That is my basic teaching here. I teach you to be mad consciously. 

So Priya, go into it. Don’t be afraid. All that you lose is not worth keeping.

Sufis: The People of The Path

Osho