While answering a disciple’s question, Osho addresses two issues; not being able to sleep after meditation, and hate. “It happens to every meditator…that sleep in the night becomes difficult.” “Hate sucks your energy, leaves you empty, spent. Love fills you with energy.”
Beloved Osho,
You had suggested to me to combine dancing and listening to music, and doing this keeps me happy. But I also have to move to the other side, of sadness.
Whenever I go to sleep in the night awareness starts happening naturally and to avoid it I turn and toss in the bed. Sleep is difficult. What to do to forget awareness in the night?
I also see that there is no harm in being awake in the night, and I sometimes enjoy it as new spaces are discovered. This awareness also keeps me silent and helps me avoid moving from happiness to sadness, and vice-versa. I prefer silence to moving from happiness to sadness because I hate sadness, even though it may be deeper.
What are your suggestions about this? Osho, please comment.
Your question has its answer in itself.
First, it happens to every meditator – everyone who is trying to be awake and alert – that sleep in the night becomes difficult. But if it creates no problems for you and the next morning you are not tired; just resting without sleep has rejuvenated your body and you feel fresh, there is no problem. It is good. Sleep is no longer your necessity.
Secondly, it helps you to remain more balanced. You are no more like a pendulum moving between sadness and silence. If you remain awake the whole night just resting, relaxing, it is already indicating to you the way, that you are on the right path.
Silence is a reward.
Tranquility is a reward, being balanced between polarities is a reward.
So unless somebody feels that sleep is still a necessity for him – that without it he finds himself tired, without it he finds himself getting crazy, tense – then only does it become a problem. In that case, only in that case, you are not to meditate in the evening. You have to meditate early in the morning. Then get up at four and just meditate for two or three hours and drop it. It will continue to work inside you, but it has to be at least twelve hours away from your sleeping time; otherwise, it is such a force that if you are meditating in the night – trying to be aware on the one hand and on the other hand trying to be asleep – sleep cannot win.
Sleep is a poor thing. The awareness that is coming to you is so deep and so great, that in the flood of awareness all your sleep will be gone.
But if it is not creating any problem, then you are blessed. For almost ninety-five percent of meditators it does not create any problem; only in five percent of people does it create some problem. Those five percent of people can be given different suggestions after looking at their different situations. But for ninety-five percent, there is no problem at all; in fact, you will feel younger, fresher, more in tune with yourself and the world, more together.
The third thing that I want to say to you is: don’t hate anything. Even hate is included, because it makes no difference what the object of hate is; it may be the hate itself. But don’t hate – not simply as a discipline, but as part of an understanding that the same energy which becomes love, becomes hate.
When the same energy can become love, then you are being simply stupid in using that energy as hate – because the hate will create wounds in you. It is not going to harm anybody else except you. And love would have created flowers in the place of wounds in you; it was not going to help anybody else except you. So it is simply a question of intelligence.
Hate is destructive, self-destructive. Love is tremendous respect for oneself. You may hate anything, anybody, hate itself; but in every way you will find yourself low-energy. Hate sucks your energy, leaves you empty, spent. Love fills you with energy, with overflowing energy; not only healing you, but creating an aura around you in which others may be healed.
It is not a question of religion – that hate is bad or immoral. It is a question of intelligence: hate is stupid and love is intelligent.
Osho, The Osho Upanishad, Ch 10, Q 3
Thanks to Nityaprem
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