The Art of Living

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Osho presents and explores five principles: nonviolence, non-possessiveness, non-theft, non-desire, and non-unawareness. He shows how they can be applied to everyday life by bringing awareness to the simplest of actions and the minutest of details, as well as to the most powerful of human energies, sex.
Osho presents and explores five principles: nonviolence, non-possessiveness, non-theft, non-desire, and non-unawareness. He shows how they can be applied to everyday life by bringing awareness to the simplest of actions and the minutest of details, as well as to the most powerful of human energies, sex.

Excerpt from The Art of Living
"The first form of violence, the first dimension, its first rule, is very deep; let us start from there. The first violence begins whenever one considers the other as the other. As soon I say that you are the other, I have become violent towards you. Actually it is impossible to be non-violent towards the other. We can only be non-violent towards ourselves; such is nature. We can only be non-violent towards ourselves; we simply cannot be non-violent towards another. The question itself does not arise, because violence begins with the very perception of the other as the other. It is very subtle; it is very deep.
"Sartre's dictum is: the other is hell; whoever is the other is hell. I am in agreement with this statement of Sartre up to a point. His understanding is deep. He is correct in saying that the other is hell. But his understanding is also incomplete. The other is not hell. Seeing the other as the other is hell. That is why whatever few moments of bliss we experience, we get them when we accept the other as ourselves. This is what we call love.
"If I consider someone to be my own self in some moment, then in that moment the stream that flows between him and me is one of non-violence; it cannot remain one of violence. That moment of seeing someone as our own self is a moment of love. But the one that we have considered our own remains the other deep inside. Calling someone else our own is just a recognition of the fact that you are another, but we consider you to be one with us.
"Hence somewhere in the depths of what we call love, there is violence. Hence the flame of love, the fire of love, keeps waxing and waning. Sometimes the other becomes the other; sometimes he is one with us. In twenty-four hours, this change may happen several times. When someone goes a little too far and appears as the other, then violence comes in between. When someone comes a little closer and begins to appear as our own self, then the violence will diminish. But the one we call our own is also the other. The wife is also the other, however much she is ours. The son is also the other, however much he is our own. The husband is also the other. The feeling of the other is always present, even when calling someone our own. That is why love cannot be completely non-violent. Love has its own ways of violence.

"Love commits violence in its own way; it commits violence lovingly. The wife tortures the husband in a loving manner. The husband tortures the wife in a loving manner. The father tortures the son in a loving manner. And when the torture is loving, it becomes very secure, then to torture becomes easy because violence has put on the masks of non-violence. The teacher tortures the student and says, "I am torturing you for your own good." Osho

More Information
Type Series of Talks
Publisher Osho Media International
ISBN-13 978-0-88050-386-0
Number of Pages 826
File Size 2.04 MB
Format Adobe ePub