When you accept Life… -Osho

When you accept life as it is, whatsoever it is, whatsoever the case, when you accept it
in its totality, the devil disappears. It is absorbed by God, it is absorbed by the divine.

The devil is divine — in the very word also. Devil comes from the same root as divine
— they both come from the Sanskrit root dev. Devil is divine — that is the root
meaning of the term. Things have gone a little astray, but the devil is divine. He has to
be called back, and by fighting you cannot call him back. By fighting he goes away
and away, and you will always miss a part. That missing part will not allow you
peace. It has to be called home, it has to be absorbed into the whole.

If you accept everything suddenly love flowers, hate disappears. So when I say accept
hate, I am not saying be hateful; in fact, I am cutting the very root of being hateful.
When I say accept, in that acceptance I am cutting the very root. You will never be
hateful again if you accept; if you don't accept you will remain hateful, and your love
will lack something. This has to be understood deeply because it is not a metaphysical
problem, it is existential. It is a problem that everybody has in him.

You hate somebody. When you hate, what happens inside? What is hate? What do
you want to do to the other person? You want to kill him, destroy him. You want to
throw him away, as far away as possible. You don't want to see him, you don't want
him to be near you. You would like him to disappear, to exist no more — that's why
you want to kill and destroy. When you love a person what do you want to do to him?
You want him to be always and always alive, never to die, to be near and close, to be
available. You would like to protect him, care about him, and you cannot believe that
your love is going to be destroyed by anything. You would like your lover or beloved
to be immortal.

Look at both the phenomena. They are opposite. But can't you feel? — they are two
aspects of the same coin. Love is creative, hate is destructive. But have you observed?
— no creation is possible without destruction; no destruction is meaningful unless it is
for creation. So now: you can destroy if you are going to create, then there is no
problem. You can demolish a house if you are going to create a better house —
nobody will say that you are destructive.

You can destroy a society if a better society is possible, you can destroy a morality for
a better morality — nobody will say that you are destructive because you are
destroying to create, and no creation is possible without destruction. Destruction is
absorbed by the creation; then it is beautiful, then it is part of the creative process. But
you destroy. You destroy a society with no idea what you are going to do next, with
no creative idea in mind. You simply enjoy destruction.

You demolish a house, you destroy a thing, and if somebody asks, "Why are you
doing that?" then you say simply, "I like to destroy" — then you are mad, something
has gone wrong in you. Destruction has become whole in itself, it is trying to claim
that it is the whole. When destruction claims that it is the whole then it is the devil;
when destruction is part of a greater whole, creation, then it is divine.
When you love a person, many many times you will have to hate him also, but then it
is part of love.

In the West, because of the psychologists in this century, much absurdity has
happened in the relationship between the parents and the children. And one of the
absurd things that they have taught is: never be angry with your child, never hit him,
never hate him.

Because of this teaching parents have become afraid. This is something new. Children
have always been afraid of parents, but now in America parents are afraid of children.
Something may go wrong psychologically and then their child may be crazy or go
mad or become schizophrenic or split — neurosis, psychosis, something may happen
in the future and they will be responsible. So what is happening? A father, if he loves
the child, feels the anger — so what will he do? He will suppress the anger. And that a
child can never forgive, because when a father suppresses anger the anger becomes
cold.

Try to understand this. Whenever anger is cold it is of the devil; whenever anger is hot
it is of God. A hot anger is beautiful, alive; a cold anger is deadly, poisonous.

When the father is cold, sarcastic, not angry, but in subtle ways showing his anger —
in a cold way, the way he moves, the way he enters the house, the way he looks at the
child or doesn't look at the child…. This coldness shows that the father doesn't love
him, doesn't love him enough to be hotly angry.

And that has created the generation gap in the West, nothing else. Children have
moved on their own; parents have remained in a cold, dead emotion, imprisoned. Vast
distances have appeared. There is no communication. A father cannot talk to the child
because he is afraid that if he talks — really communicates, becomes hot — anger will
come. So it is better not to talk: avoid the situation, don't communicate.

The same has happened between wives and husbands in the West, and now it is
happening in the East — because in fact the East is disappearing. By the end of this
century, the whole world will be West. There will be no East, it will exist only in the
books of history, in museums; it will be a nostalgia. The East is disappearing — it will
be there in geography, but in the human consciousness it will have no place.
What has happened in the West? The same — if you love your wife how can you hate
her? If you love your wife how can you hit her? If she loves you she loves you
twenty-four hours a day, constantly. You are demanding impossible things.

In life everything is a rhythm. Only in death are things absolute and there is no
rhythm. In life there is a rhythm — the day comes and then the night. Says Heraclitus:
God is summer and winter, day and night, hunger and satiety, life and death. Life is a
rhythm, a constantly vibrating phenomenon between two polarities. You cannot love a
person twenty-four hours a day; if you try the love will become dead. You can love a
person intensely for a few moments, then you have to move because you have to
relax. Otherwise love will become such a fever — and such a feverish state, how can
you remain in it twenty-four hours? Day has to be followed by night, a rest, a
relaxation.

Love is excitement. You cannot remain excited forever. You have to love and you
have to hate the same person, and nothing is wrong if you love. Remember, that is the
point to be remembered: if you love then nothing is wrong. Love sanctifies
everything, even hate.

Love purifies everything, even hate. Love makes everything holy, even hate. You love
your wife and then you hate her, she loves you and she hates you. This makes life a
rhythm. It is not a dead monotony. There are changes of moods, changes of seasons.
And the change is good, because change is an alive phenomenon; otherwise, if
somebody loves you and loves you and loves you, even love will become a boredom.
And nobody can love like that, a twenty-four-hour-a-day love can only be pretended.

Try to understand this: if you pretend love then you can pretend twenty-four hours a
day, but then it is false. Only a plastic flower will not fade, only a plastic flower will
not die. If you are really alive you will die also; that is part of life. If you really love a
person you will be angry also, that is part of it. And nothing is wrong in it. It becomes
a sin only when it becomes the whole. If it is surrounded by love… the island of hate
surrounded by an ocean of love is beautiful.

It is beautiful: it gives tension to love, relaxation to love. It gives a rhythm to love, it

makes life a harmonious whole. Just think of a world where the sun never sets and
you have to be awake twenty-four hours a day — within three weeks you all will go
mad. And that is what has happened in love — you all have gone mad, pretending,
pretending, false faces, masks, hypocrisy, showing that which is not there….
The real trouble is that when you are angry and you don't show it, by and by this
mechanism of suppression becomes so deep-rooted that everything becomes false.
You will not feel love and you will show it, you will not feel compassion and you will
show it — then your life is not authentic, not honest. An honest life is riverlike: it
changes, it moves. Sometimes it is summer and the river has completely disappeared,
only a dry bed is left. And sometimes it is the rainy season and the river is in flood
and breaks all the banks, and flows all over, becomes oceanic.

Just try to see: in life there is a rhythm between polarities, and humanity is caught in a
trap because we have decided to remain on one pole. You cannot remain there; you
will move inside, only on the surface you will try to pose. Then the whole life
becomes poisonous. Then everything enters into everything else. In your love hate is
hidden, because when there was hate you tried to smile and pose; now it is in your
blood and when you love it is mixed in it. Man now is an adulterated phenomenon,
impure. And this has happened because of the wrong teachings of your so-called
religions and moralists. They have all tried to make you live on one pole. That pole
they call God, compassion, love — all that is good, all goodie-goodie. The other pole
they call the devil, all that is bad.

You may also have felt it. When you are angry you can throw a big rock easily, when
you are not angry you cannot even move it. Anger is energy, concentrated energy.
Anger is a deep concentration of being: one-pointed, the whole existence forgotten, all
energies narrowed down to one point.
Jesus must have been beautiful in that moment. Christians hide the fact, they try to
avoid the story. Jesus, and angry? — the man who says that if somebody hits you on
one side of your face show him the other side, angry? This man angry? It looks
contradictory. The man who says that if somebody snatches your coat give him your
shirt also — this man angry? It doesn't fit.

But I say to you that only this man can be angry because his anger will be part of
compassion; only this man can be really angry because he knows what compassion is.
He has known one pole, he knows the other pole also and he can move, he is alive, he
is not dead. He is not a fixed thing, he is not a thing; he is an alive movement — alive,
throbbing — he can move to the other pole. And he threw those money-changers out
of the temple because of compassion. He was angry because of compassion. He was
so compassionate, and sometimes I feel that his compassion is deeper than Mahavir's
and Buddha's because it is so true and so lively.

Don't try to choose. Rather remain choiceless and create a harmony, become a
harmony. Don't create any conflict within you — whatsoever you are, you are
beautiful. You have all the ingredients to create a harmony. If you discard something,
later on you will repent because that discarded part will some day be needed. Some
day you will miss it and you will see then that it was necessary. It was to be there, and
you discarded it. Don't discard anything. Use everything that God has given to you,
make a harmony out of it. Harmony should be the goal.

OSHO