Jesus, I am Your Child, Too

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Jesus...

Thank You for investing Yourself
in someone like me...
Help me step back and be mindful of my own needs,
because I am Your child, too.
Help me become aware
it was not okay to grow up
in a verbally and physically abusive home,
and not accept that in my life from others.
Help me treat others with excellence, Lord.
Help me add to their lives, not take away.
Help me be mindful,
I do not have to be willing, acceptant
nor an active participant of other's negativity;
I can walk away.
Help me to see-through their suffering, Lord.
Help me to become aware
of when I am being undermined
by someone trying to run me with their energy.
There are so many people out there
struggling with jealousy, stinginess and greed, God!
Please keep me mindful,
they will not be good friends.
If they think I am rude, then I know
they are not doing their homework.
If I can inspire, encourage and help them,
I will.
If they don't want my help,
show me how to move on.
Time is becoming too precious, Jesus!
I don't have time to assume or presume
I know what's going on with others God.
I can't read anyone's mind.
All I can do is ask You help me
stay in my own meditative mind.
I am claiming the peace I need in my life
through You, Jesus.
Because I am Your child, too.
Amen.

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I want people to know there is a difference between humility and humiliation.
Some people think these two words are the same thing.
Some people are unwilling to be humble
because somewhere in the back of their minds
they must feel they are taking a risk in being "humiliated".

Isn't it a shame to consider how all human beings have experienced some sort of humiliation in their childhoods? Some situations may have been fun, or funny, or accidental; others may have run into something that was painful and purposeful. Some people never grow out of this! It's strange to look back on these times in our lives.

When I was about 5, I used to feel very embarrassed by my mother's red lipstick. There was something about that red lipstick? When it came on it changed my mother's face. I found her to be cruel and embarrassing to be near. But it was funny when my brother took that red lipstick and smeared it all over his face! We got the biggest kick out of that! (Mom didn't think it was so funny.)

When I was 7, I was in Catholic school when Sister Theresia called me up in front of the class. She turned me towards the blackboard and hit me around the shoulders with her yardstick. I had the worst trouble getting math! I remember doing everything to fight back my tears. It was even more difficult to turn around and face the smug expressions on the faces of my classmates. I ended up in the hospital with an ulcer that year.

Certain levels of humiliation have a sobering effect on one's life. This is why so many people can be a drag to be around.

We get all-up in ourselves about it. We think we have to go through all kinds of posturing in order to be accepted by others. Whether that happens through socialization, or religion or traditions, it can be hard to break free from. Is it any wonder human beings come to see themselves as entitled?

No one wants to be made fun of. No one wants to take a lesser place, or be a have-not... In our own ways, we overcompensate for this pain by working very hard to be "special". Oddly, over time we might outgrow those efforts. I think this is the real challenge of mid-life, when people hit their 40's, for example. What happens to our passion for life?

Humility, learning when to be humble, quiet and graceful, is a way of helping ourselves find more grace in our world. We have to be able to forgive ourselves before we can forgive others.

Instead of adding to another person's suffering, instead of chastising and pigeonholing people, instead of needing to be right, we can simply be quiet and decisive. It is possible then, to recognize who and what we want to include in our true passions about things. Living our lives would not feel like a waste of time...

For me, humility is like a tai chi movement... A simple one, of getting out of my own way, and allowing God to work with me a little more. So, when I feel good? I can be more decisive about what really matters!

The goal in life should be to feel good about life.

Everyone should feel entitled to make decisions about their lives, then stand on those decisions. That's where the real power rests.

Instead of dodging the balls people throw your way, you can let them fall to the ground if you're being hurt or humiliated. Maybe those games aren't for you. With some practice and awareness, you can just move on.

Instead of going through the motions of dodging the balls of the competition around you - once in awhile you could decide to pick up your own game. Get your own ball; play! Play something new.

And when you do? Let it be something you feel passionate about.

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Bleeding Heart

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Don't be afraid
of my bleeding heart...

I know I'm a snob.
I know I'm bourgeois.
I know I act like my shit doesn't stink.
I know I'm stingy.
I know I'm bitter and condescending.
I know every time we get together
I hurt you.
I know I say cruel things to you,
talk at you, while looking away...
I know I'm judgmental.
I know I'm uptight.

Let's just, please...
Hurry up!!
Have fun -
and get it over with!

(boo-hoo-hoo!)
Don't you feel sorry for me?


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I heard you say that we sometimes carry other people’s wounds. What does this mean? Is another person’s wound simply their thought pattern that we adopt? If we can so easily accept someone else’s wound then why is it so difficult to accept our own buddhahood?

OSHO:
It is a very complicated question. But if you are ready to understand I am willing to answer.

Everybody is carrying other people’s wounds.

In the first place, you are living in a sick society where people are angry, full of hate, enjoy to hurt - that is the superficial level which can be understood easily.

But there are subtle levels, there are so-called religious saints who are creating feelings of guilt in you, who are condemning you to be a sinner. They are giving you an idea which will create misery around you. And the older the idea is, people accept it more easily: everybody around the world is saying, "We are living in sin... All these people are wrong."

I am alone in declaring to you that you have chosen to live in misery; it is your choice.

You can drop it immediately and dance in joy, in blissfulness. But the wound is deep. And one becomes very much familiar with one’s misery. One clings to it as if it gives you a certain coziness, but it only gives you a life of hell.

Your hell is supported by everybody. If you are miserable everybody is sympathetic to you. Have you ever gone into the matter? When you are miserable, those who are sympathetic to you are nursing your misery. Have you ever seen anybody sympathetic to you when you are dancing with joy? When you are blissful, people are jealous, not sympathetic.

According to me, the whole foundation of life has to be changed. People should be sympathetic only when there is pleasure and joy and rejoicing, because by your sympathy you are nourishing.

Nourish people’s joy, don’t nourish their sadness and their misery. Be compassionate when they are miserable. Make it clear that this misery is chosen by yourself. On a deeper level... perhaps the questioner has not asked me to go that deep, but the answer will remain incomplete if I don’t go deep enough...

The very idea of reincarnation, which has arisen in all the Eastern religions, is that the self goes on moving from one body to another body, from one life to another life. This idea does not exist in the religions that have arisen out of Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism. But now even psychiatrists are finding that it seems to be true. People can remember their past lives; the idea of reincarnation is gaining ground.

But I want to say one thing to you: the whole idea of reincarnation is a misconception. It is true that when a person dies his being becomes part of the whole. Whether he was a sinner or a saint does not matter; but he had also something called the mind, the memory.

In the past the information was not available to explain memory as a bundle of thoughts and thought waves, but now it is easier.

And that’s where, on many points, I find Gautam Buddha far ahead of his time. He is the only man who would have agreed with my explanation. He has given hints, but he could not provide any evidence for it; there was nothing available to say. He has said that when a person dies, his memory travels into a new womb - not the self.




And we now can understand it, that when you are dying, you will leave memories all around in the air. And if you have been miserable, all your miseries will find some location; they will enter into some other memory system.

Either they will enter totally into a single womb - that’s how somebody remembers one’s past. It is not your past; it was somebody else’s mind that you have inherited.

Most people don’t remember because they have not got the whole lump, the whole heritage of a single individual’s memory system. They may have got fragments from here and there, and those fragments create your misery system.

All those people who have died on the earth have died in misery. Very few people have died in joy. Very few people have died with the realization of no-mind. They don’t leave a trace behind. They don’t burden anybody else with their memory. They simply disperse into the universe. They don’t have any mind and they don’t have any memory system. They have already dissolved it in their meditations.

That’s why the enlightened person is never born. But the unenlightened people go on throwing out, with every death, all kinds of misery patterns.

Just as riches attract more riches, misery attracts more misery.

If you are miserable, then from miles, misery will travel to you - you are the right vehicle. And this is a very invisible phenomenon, like radio waves. They are traveling around you; you don’t hear them. Once you have the right instrument to receive them, immediately they become available. Even before the radio was there, they were traveling by your side.

There is no incarnation, but misery incarnates.

Wounds of millions of people are moving around you, just in search of somebody who is willing to be miserable. Of course, the blissful does not leave any trace.

The man of awakening dies the way a bird moves into the sky, without making a track or a path. The sky remains empty. Blissfulness moves without making any trace. That’s why you don’t get any inheritance from the buddhas; they simply disappear.

And all kinds of idiots and retarded people go on reincarnating in their memories and it becomes every day thicker and thicker.

Today, perhaps, it has come to the point to be understood and to be dissolved; otherwise it is too thick to allow you to live, to allow you to laugh.

Your own consciousness has no wounds. Your own consciousness knows nothing of misery. Your own consciousness is innocent, utterly blissful. To bring you in touch with your own consciousness, every effort is being made to detract you from the mind. The mind contains all your misery, all your wounds.

And it goes on creating wounds in such a way that, unless you are aware, you will not even find how it creates them.

Don’t keep the past burning you.




You have come into an open space, now learn the ways of freedom and love and friendliness.

You all have the capacity; there is no question of being miserable for any reason. No reason is valid to make anyone miserable. In fact, we have to search for a valid reason to be miserable. Otherwise people will ask, "Are you mad?" Without any reason, and "are you miserable?"

So somehow you go on inventing reasons. But remember, those are only invented reasons. Nobody asks you when you are happy, "Why are you happy?" There is no reason to be happy. Happiness is our nature. To be joyful needs no reason, no cause.

This commune has to be a commune of understanding, awareness, looking into one’s own mind patterns and remembering that they are not yours.

You are simply the watcher, and the watcher is outside the mind. I teach you the watcher.

The only way to get out of misery patterns, whether ancient or new, is witnessing. I say it is the only way, because nobody has escaped from the mind without becoming a witness.

Just witness, and suddenly you will start laughing at your own misery. All our miseries are so superficial - and most fundamentally, they are all borrowed. And everybody is giving his misery to everybody else he comes in contact with.

People are talking continuously about their miseries, about their troubles, about their conflicts. Have you ever heard anybody talking about his joyous moments? About his dances and songs? About his silences and blissfulness? No, nobody talks about these things.

People go on sharing all their wounds, and whenever you are talking about your misery to somebody, without your knowing, you are transferring a miserable pattern. The person may be thinking that he is only listening to you, but he is also catching the vibe of misery, the wounds.

When I said that you carry other people’s wounds, my statement meant that your own consciousness has no wounds. If everybody becomes alert, meditative, there will be no wounds in the world. They will simply disappear. They will not find any house, any shelter. This is possible.

If it is possible for me, it is possible for everybody!

And in your question you also ask why "we can so easily accept someone else’s wound," and why it is "so difficult to accept our own buddhahood."

You can accept somebody’s wounds because you also have wounds. You understand the language of wounds, miseries, sufferings. And you ask why we cannot accept the idea of being a buddha. In the first place, you rarely come across a buddha.

Very rarely does a buddha exist in the world, so even if you meet him you will not understand his language. Most probably you will misunderstand him. You know misery, and he is talking about bliss. You know wounds, and he is talking about eternal health. You know only death, and he is talking about eternity.

In the first place, it is difficult to find a buddha. In the second place, it is difficult to understand his language because it is not your language. Otherwise, this must be the simplest thing in the world - to understand one’s buddhahood. It is so obvious. Your very being is already a buddha! But you have forgotten the path to your inner being.

You have traveled long on many paths, but they all lead outside. And slowly, slowly you have forgotten that there is a small space within you which you have not explored.

Meditation is nothing but an exploration of your ignored inner space.

That small space will suddenly remind you that you are a buddha. And unless it becomes a mindfulness in you that you are a buddha... It is not a concept; nobody can convince you that you are a buddha. You cannot be otherwise. If you simply go in, the very experience of the interior space explodes in the recognition and remembrance of your buddhahood.

It is not a philosophy, it is an existential experience.

- Osho, The Zen Manifesto: Freedom From Oneself,
Chapter 5

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Little Girl and Little Boy Hearts

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The little girl's heart...

is full of sugar and spice and everything nice!

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The little boy's heart...

is full of snaps
and snails and puppy-dog tails!


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Dear God, I know
each human being is special, unique
in their own way.
For this reason it is truly impossible
to compare one person to someone else...
This is why jealousy is so stupid!
A sign of ignorance, really.
We all have our individuality,
God,
complete with the
God-Given gifts and talents
You grant us.
All we have to do is ask
for awareness in our hearts,
in Your name.

It is only through establishing
friendships, relationships with others
that our hopes and dreams and wishes
are shaped.


God, teach the little children
how to find good friends
who are loyal to one another in this way...
(In spite of our differences!)
Amen.


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Child's Heart

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Here is a traditional-looking heart, I feel looks like a child's. You see, this heart is protected by a circle of thorns, but hasn't been touched by them. The crucifix going down the center of the heart could represent things like baptism, vaccinations, learning a little about the holidays (such as Christmas and Easter, or what have you), and how Jesus died for us.

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Then, here is the Child's Rainbow Heart, so familiar to those of us who grew up in the '70's and beyond... With our cartoons and comics in color, our packets of skittles and starbursts and laffy-taffy; our Huggy Bears, Rainbow Brights and My Little Ponies... Yeah.

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If you want your little child to learn a little about how to respect his or her heart early on... Here is the Child's Plush Heart, available at iheartguts.com

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Finally, here is the Lego Heart for more advanced learner... Cool, huh? (I like the purple vein.)

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Dear Lord,
please help us to raise our children
in kindness and compassion,
and keep them from ignorance.
Help us to teach them early on,
regarding the poisons of the heart -
jealousy, anger, and attachment.


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