Only in loving light does the darkness within you disappear. love is light and the flame of love has to be taught, says OSHO
The word ‘initiation’ is very significant and profound. There are three initiations: First, when a student becomes a disciple; second, when a disciple becomes a devotee; and third, when the devotee disappears in the master.
The student has questions, but he has no quest. His questions are easily answerable, he is easily satisfied — just borrowed knowledge is enough for him. He does not yet need a master; he only needs a teacher. He accumulates answers, becomes an intellectual, but does not become intelligent. It is an established fact that a student is interested in collecting knowledge. His mind functions like a computer. And the master slowly makes the student aware that if you are really a man, then just to be curious is childish. Maturity demands that you should go on a quest, that you should not ask only for knowledge, you should ask for ways and means and methods so that you can know — not knowledge that has come from generation to generation.
A genuine seeker has no questions, but a tremendous thirst. The master changes the student’s focus from knowledge towards knowing, from memory towards intelligence. Once the emphasis has moved from knowledge to knowing, your concern is no more with the past; your concern is with the present. Your concern is no more with the great philosophers, wise people; your concern is about your own consciousness. For the first time you become interested not in objects but in your subjectivity, not about other things but about the one who wants to know: Who is this who wants to knowIJ This is the first initiation: The student dies, and the disciple is born.
The second initiation is when the disciple also disappears into a devotee. A disciple is still interested in gaining methods, disciplines, ways to know himself. The master has to be used; hence, he is grateful. But he is the end, and the master is the means; he is using the master for his own ends. As he comes closer to the master, the master takes him into the second initiation. And the second initiation is that unless you drop this obsession with yourself you will never know yourself. It appears contradictory; it is not. Your very obsession is preventing you; it is egoistic. You drop the ego, surrender the ego; you forget yourself, and in the very moment you forget yourself, you will find yourself; the student was never interested in himself. He was interested in things, objects, and the whole world. The first initiation brought him into a new world of interest about himself. The second initiation takes away the ego.
Only in loving light does the darkness within you disappear. love is light, and the flame of love has to be taught. The master loves, his presence is love. His very presence is magnetic. Without saying a word, just to be close to him, you will feel a certain pull, a certain love, a trust. And you don’t know the man, you don’t know whether he is trustworthy or not. But you are prepared to risk it. The presence of the master is so convincing that there is no need of any argument to prove it.
This is the third initiation, and only after the third initiation is there communion — because there is union, there is no more separation, there is at-oneness. The path of a mystic begins as a student, ends as a master... begins as a dewdrop, ends as an ocean.
Excerpts from Osho’s discourses