It looks a little strange but it is true: you can transform anything into a celebration. Just as you can transform any celebration into a miserable affair — it all depends on YOU.
I have heard, in a small school the drawing teacher made a painting on the board. He was a good painter, and he was showing his students that the artist can change, just by a little touch, the whole meaning of the painting.
It was a portrait of a man, very sad. He touched the lips and immediately the sadness disappeared from the painting — the man was smiling. And as the man started smiling, the whole painting had a different perspective.
If you feel blissful in crying, there is no harm. It is perfectly beautiful. Tears can be of joy, of love. Tears can show that you are overfilled with something that starts flowing through the tears. It need not be sadness, it need not be mourning; it can be festivity. It all depends on you. And you have to feel what it is, because you will be absolutely certain whether your tears are coming out of frustration, out of sadness, out of failure, or they are coming out of love, joy, gratitude, prayer.
Tears are one of the most mysterious things you have. They can have all the colors of the rainbow. It depends on your consciousness what colors you give to them.
I have heard a very beautiful story. It is Julius Caesar’s birthday, and after breakfast the Roman senators are eager for him to take a chariot ride with them to view their present to him.
Caesar is delighted to find the whole of the driveway to the imperial palace is lined with crucified Christians. As they drive along, Caesar brings the procession to a sudden halt.
“That man there!” he cries. “He must be alive — his lips are moving. I want to hear what he is saying.”
The senators raise Caesar on their shoulders. “Closer, closer!” he shouts. “I can’t hear.”
Finally, with his ear almost touching the man’s lips, he hears, “Happy birthday to you.”
One can change every situation. Now he is being crucified, but he has no complaint. Within minutes he may be dead, but his heart wants to say, “Happy birthday to you.”
And he must have embarrassed Caesar; he must have created a deep impression on him.
From that day onwards, Christians were not crucified again in Caesar’s time. He felt so humble. He felt so sorry about what he was doing to these beautiful people, who are capable of rejoicing in his birthday and are being crucified as a present.
IT ALL DEPENDS ON YOU.
If you are feeling blissful, peaceful, silent in your crying, in your tears, and if after tears you feel relaxed, relieved of some burden, it is perfectly good. Don’t try to stop it…because humanity has been given such wrong training about so many things that it has not left any human being natural. Everybody has become artificial, and particularly men – every society has forced them not to cry; it is against your manliness.
It is okay for women to cry and weep. They don’t belong to your status; they are second class citizens. But you, being first class, should show your strength. Your tears expose your weakness. But if you go on for thousands of years teaching every child such nonsense, he starts holding his tears back. Nobody wants to be exposed as a weakling. But the simple truth is, nature has given you exactly the same glands for tears as nature has given to women.
And if nature is listened to, then stopping your tears is a dangerous thing. It is not only tears that will be stopped – you will become less sensitive, you will become less loving. You will become harder, you will become cruel, you will become a sadist. This will be the outcome of a simple thing. You will go neurotic, psychotic – four times more men end up in insane asylums than women. And the reason is that women know how to cry and weep. They know how to let their burdens and tensions be relieved through tears. Man goes on accumulating and one day it is too late. Then either he jumps from a sixty storey building and finishes himself off…
Man has been prevented from being natural so that he can be made into a soldier, so that he can be made into a harder personality, to compete in the world. Because the woman was not going to compete in the world, and she was not going to wars either, there was no need. She could be allowed to cry and weep. It became a distinction, that it is manly not to weep, not to cry.
It is simply against nature. The women don’t go so mad because in their tears they are throwing away all their tensions. They don’t accumulate to such a point that it is beyond their capacity to control it and everything goes through a breakdown.
Exactly four times more men commit suicide, although at least forty times more women threaten to commit suicide. But they don’t. Women have remained in a way closer to nature because they were deprived from participating in man’s power struggle. In disguise, this curse proved a blessing.
It is good to enjoy your tears. And don’t keep them only for tensions and anxieties and frustrations and moments of sadness. No, that is using them in a wrong way. Use them when you are in love. Use them when you are feeling peaceful. Use them when you see a beautiful sunset. It is your original being. The false never cries. The hypocrite never cries. It is only the original, the authentic.
Tears are your strength, not helplessness.
Tears show that you are alive, that you have not shrunk and lost all your juice. Tears show that your heart still feels, still can dance, still can rejoice.
You have to discriminate, and always choose the natural. Even if it goes against all traditions, all religions, all cultures, don’t be worried: except the natural, there is no authentic religiousness anywhere. Except the existential, there is nothing holy that you can find… in the Bible, in the Koran, in the Gita.
Just watch — inside you is nature, inside you is the existential. Always follow it, and you will never be going wrong. To be natural, to be in tune with existence, is the only authentic spirituality.
Osho: Om Mani Padme Hum : Chapter #1 : Chapter title: The music of OM Q 2 (Excerpts)
વધુ હસવાથી આંસુ આવતા જોઈ ને પૂછું છું,
અસર એનાથી ઉલટી કેમ રોવામાં નથી થાતી?
बहोत हसने से आंसू आते देख पूछता हूँ
असर इससे उलटी रोने में क्यों नहीं होती?
One starts tearing up while laughing too hard, so I wonder…
why does such reaction reaction not happen while crying?
A song from the film “Hamrahi” (1963) seems apt here. Written by Hasrat Jaipuri, composed by Shankar Jaikishan and sung by Mohammad Rafi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaiNjBR57qI
Wonderful read Rajiv.
Very insightful and true …
Loved this
Loved this… the other thought I loved was aligning to nature and that’s the true religion