The Way of the Sly Man
I
can feel myself moving from anger into sadness. I don’t know whether I
should try and get the anger out or just let it explode inside.
Anger
and sadness are both the same. Sadness is passive anger and anger is
active sadness. Because sadness comes easy, anger seems to be difficult.
Because you are too much in tune with the passive.
It is
difficult for a sad person to be angry. If you can make a sad person
angry, his sadness will disappear immediately. It will be very difficult
for an angry person to be sad. If you can make him sad, his anger will
disappear immediately.
In all our emotions the basic polarity
continues – of man and woman, yin and yang, the male and the female.
Anger is male, sadness is female. So if you are in tune with sadness, it
is difficult to shift to anger, but I would like you to shift. Just
exploding it within won’t help much because again you are seeking some
way of being passive. No. Bring it out, act it out. Even if it looks
nonsense, then too. Be a buffoon in your own eyes, but bring it out.
If
you can float between anger and sadness, both become similarly easy.
You will have a transcendence and then you will be able to watch. You
can stand behind the screen and watch these games, and then you can go
beyond both. But first you have to be moving easily between these two.
Otherwise you tend to be sad and when one is heavy, transcendence is
difficult.
Remember, when two energies, opposite energies, are
exactly alike, fifty-fifty, then it is very easy to get out of them,
because they are fighting and cancelling each other and you are not in
anybody’s grip. Your sadness and your anger are fifty-fifty, equal
energies, so they cancel each other. Suddenly you have freedom and you
can slip out. But if sadness is seventy percent and anger thirty
percent, then it is very difficult. Thirty percent anger in contrast
with seventy percent sadness means forty percent sadness will still be
there and it will not be possible; you will not be capable of easily
slipping out. That forty percent will hang over you.
So this is
one of the basic laws of inner energies – to always let the opposite
polarities come to an equal status, and then you are able to slip out of
them. It is as if two persons are fighting and you can escape. They are
so engaged with themselves that you need not worry, and you can escape.
Don’t bring the mind in. Just make it an exercise.
You
can make it an everyday exercise; forget about waiting for it to come.
Every day you have to be angry – that will be easier. So jump, jog.
scream, and bring it. Once you can bring it for no reason at all, you
will be very happy because now you have a freedom. Otherwise even anger
is dominated by situations. You are not a master of it. If you cannot
bring it, how can you drop it?
Gurdjieff
used to teach his disciples never to start by dropping anything. First
start by bringing it in, because only a person who can create anger on
demand can be capable of dropping it on demand – simple mathematics. So
Gurdjieff would tell his disciples to first learn how to be angry.
Everybody would be sitting and suddenly he would say, “Number One, stand
up and be angry!” It looks so absurd.
But
if you can bring it.... And it is always available, just by the corner,
you just have to pull it in. It comes easily when anybody provides an
excuse. Somebody insults you – it is there. So why wait for the insult?
Why be dominated by the other? Why can’t you bring it yourself? Bring it
yourself!
In the beginning it looks a
little awkward, strange, unbelievable, because you have always believed
in the theory that it is somebody else whose insult has created the
anger. That’s not true. Anger has always been there; somebody has just
given an excuse for it to come up. You can give yourself an excuse.
Imagine a situation in which you would have been angry, and become
angry. Talk to the wall and say things, and soon the wall will be
talking to you. Just go completely crazy. You have to bring anger and
sadness to a similar status, where they are exactly proportionate to
each other. They will cancel each other out and you can slip away.
Gurdjieff
used to call this “the way of the sly man” – to bring inner energies to
such a conflict that they are engaged together cancelling each other,
and you have the opportunity to escape. Try it, mm?
Osho,
Get Out of Your Own Way, Talk #4
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