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Beyond Enlightenment 01-32Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Enlightenment 28 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You have recently said that most of humanity is vegetating, not living. Please explain to us the art of living so that death may become also a celebration.Man is born to achieve life, but it all depends on him. He can miss it. He can go on breathing, he can go on eating, he can go on growing old, he can go on moving toward the grave – but this is not life. This is gradual death from the cradle to the grave, a seventy-year-long gradual death. And because millions of people around you are dying in this gradual, slow death, you also start imitating them. Children learn everything from those who are around them, and we are surrounded by the dead.So first we have to understand what I mean by life. It must not be simply growing old. It has to be growing up. And these are two different things. Growing old, any animal is capable of. Growing up is the prerogative of human beings. Only a few claim the right.Growing up means moving every moment deeper into the principle of life, it means going farther away from death, not toward death. The deeper you go into life, the more you understand the immortality within you. You are going away from death; a moment comes when you can see that death is nothing but changing clothes, or changing houses, changing forms. Nothing dies, nothing can die; death is the greatest illusion there is.For growing up, just watch a tree. As the tree grows up, its roots are growing down, deeper. There is a balance: the higher the tree goes, the deeper the roots will go. You cannot have a tree one hundred and fifty feet high with small roots; they could not support such a huge tree. In life, growing up means growing deep within yourself – that’s where your roots are.To me, the first principle of life is meditation.Everything else comes second. And childhood is the best time. As you grow older, it means you are coming closer to death, and it becomes more and more difficult to go into meditation. Meditation means going into your immortality, going into your eternity, going into your godliness. And the child is the most qualified person because he is still unburdened by knowledge, unburdened by religion, unburdened by education, unburdened by all kinds of rubbish. He is innocent.But unfortunately his innocence is being condemned as ignorance. Ignorance and innocence have a similarity, but they are not the same. Ignorance is also a state of not knowing, just as innocence is. But there is a great difference too, which has been overlooked by the whole of humanity up to now. Innocence is not knowledgeable, but it is not desirous of being knowledgeable either. It is utterly content, fulfilled. A small child has no ambitions; he has no desires. He is so absorbed in the moment: a bird on the wing catches his eye so totally; just a butterfly, its beautiful colors, and he is enchanted; the rainbow in the sky… And he cannot conceive that there can be anything more significant, richer than this rainbow. And the night full of stars, stars beyond stars… Innocence is rich, it is full, it is pure.Ignorance is poor, it is a beggar – it wants this, it wants that, it wants to be knowledgeable, it wants to be respectable, it wants to be wealthy; it wants to be powerful. Ignorance moves on the path of desire. Innocence is a state of desirelessness.But because they both are without knowledge, we have remained confused about their natures. We have taken it for granted that they are both the same. The first step, in the art of living, will be to create a demarcation line between ignorance and innocence. Innocence has to be supported, protected – because the child has brought with him the greatest treasure, the treasure that sages find after arduous effort. Sages have said that they become children again, that they are reborn.In India the real brahmin, the real knower, has called himself dwij, twice born. Why twice born? What happened to the first birth? What is the need of the second birth? And what is he going to gain in the second birth? In the second birth he is going to gain what was available in the first birth but society, parents, the people surrounding him crushed it, destroyed it.Every child is being stuffed with knowledge. His simplicity has somehow to be removed, because simplicity is not going to help him in this competitive world. His simplicity will look to the world as if he is a simpleton; his innocence will be exploited in every possible way. Afraid of the society, afraid of the world we have created ourselves, we try to make every child be clever, cunning, knowledgeable, to be in the category of the powerful, not in the category of the oppressed and the powerless. And once the child starts growing in the wrong direction, he goes on moving that way, his whole life moves in that direction.Whenever you understand that you have missed life, the first principle to be brought back is innocence. Drop your knowledge, forget your scriptures, forget your religions, your theologies, your philosophies. Be born again, become innocent – and it is in your hands. Clean your mind of all that is not known by you, of all that is borrowed, all that has come from tradition, convention, all that has been given to you by others: parents, teachers, universities. Just get rid of it. Once again be simple; once again be a child. And this miracle is possible by meditation.Meditation is simply a strange surgical method which cuts you away from all that is not yours and saves only that which is your authentic being. It burns everything else and leaves you standing naked, alone under the sun, in the wind. It is as if you are the first man who has descended onto earth – who knows nothing, who has to discover everything, who has to be a seeker, who has to go on a pilgrimage.The second principle is the pilgrimage. Life must be a seeking, not a desire, but a search; not an ambition to become this, to become that, a president of a country or a prime minister of a country, but a search to find out: “Who am I?”It is very strange that people who don’t know who they are are trying to become somebody. They don’t even know who they are right now! They are unacquainted with their being, but they have a goal of becoming. Becoming is the disease of the soul.Being is you. And to discover your being is the beginning of life. Then each moment is a new discovery, each moment brings a new joy; a new mystery opens its doors, a new love starts growing in you, a new compassion that you have never felt before, a new sensitivity about beauty, about goodness. You become so sensitive that even the smallest blade of grass takes on an immense importance for you. Your sensitivity makes it clear to you that this small blade of grass is as important to existence as the biggest star; without this blade of grass, existence would be less than it is. And this small blade of grass is unique, it is irreplaceable, it has its own individuality.And this sensitivity will create new friendships for you – friendships with trees, with birds, with animals, with mountains, with rivers, with oceans, with stars. Life becomes richer as love grows, as friendliness grows.In the life of St. Francis, there is a beautiful incident. He is dying, and he has always traveled on a donkey from place to place sharing his experiences. All his disciples are gathered to listen to his last words.The last words of a man are always the most significant that he has ever uttered because they contain the whole experience of his life.But what the disciples heard, they could not believe… St. Francis did not address the disciples; he addressed the donkey. He said, “Brother, I am immensely indebted to you. You have been carrying me from one place to another place with never a complaint, never grumbling. Before I leave this world, all that I want is forgiveness from you; I have not been humane to you.”These were the last words of St. Francis – a tremendous sensitivity to say to the donkey, “Brother donkey,” and ask to be forgiven.As you become more sensitive, life becomes bigger. It is not a small pond; it becomes oceanic. It is not confined to you and your wife and your children; it is not confined at all. This whole existence becomes your family, and unless the whole existence is your family, you have not known what life is – because no man is an island, we are all connected. We are a part of a vast continent, joined in millions of ways. And if our hearts are not full of love for the whole, in the same proportion our life is cut short.Meditation will bring you sensitivity, a great sense of belonging to the world. It is our world – the stars are ours, and we are not foreigners here. We belong intrinsically to existence. We are part of it; we are the heart of it.Secondly, meditation will bring you a great silence, because all rubbish knowledge will have gone. Thoughts that are part of that knowledge have gone too…an immense silence, and you are surprised: this silence is the only music there is.All music is an effort to bring this silence somehow into manifestation.The seers of the ancient East have been very emphatic about the point that all the great arts – music, poetry, dance, painting, sculpture – are all born out of meditation. They are an effort to in some way bring the unknowable into the world of the known for those who are not ready for the pilgrimage – just gifts for those who are not ready to go on the pilgrimage. Perhaps a song, perhaps a statue may trigger a desire to go in search of the source.The next time you enter a temple of Gautam Buddha or Mahavira, just sit silently and watch the statue. The statue has been made in such a way, in such proportions that if you watch it you will fall silent. It is a statue of meditation; it is not concerned with Gautam Buddha or Mahavira. That’s why all those statues look alike – Mahavira, Gautam Buddha, Neminatha, Adinatha… In the same temple you will find twenty-four statues, twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas, all alike, exactly alike.In my childhood I used to ask my father, “Can you explain to me how it is possible that twenty-four persons are exactly alike? – the same size, the same nose, the same face, the same body.”And he used to say, “I don’t know. I am always puzzled myself that there is not a bit of difference. And it is almost unheard of; there are not even two persons in the whole world who are alike, what to say about twenty-four?”But as my meditation blossomed I found the answer – not from anybody else; I found the answer: that these statues have nothing to do with the people. These statues have something to do with what was happening inside those twenty-four people, and that was exactly the same.And we have not bothered about the outside; we have insisted that only the inner should be paid attention to. The outer is unimportant. Somebody is young, somebody is old, somebody is black, somebody is white, somebody is man, somebody is woman; it does not matter, what matters is that inside there is an ocean of silence. In that oceanic state, the body takes a certain posture. You have observed it yourself, but you have not been alert. When you are angry, have you observed? – your body takes a certain posture. In anger you cannot keep your hands open, in anger…the fist. In anger you cannot smile – or can you?With a certain emotion, the body has to follow a certain posture. Just small things are deeply related inside. So those statues are made in such a way that if you simply sit silently and watch, and then close your eyes, a negative shadow image enters into your body, and you start feeling something you have not felt before.Those statues and temples were not built for worshipping; they were built for experiencing. They are scientific laboratories. They have nothing to do with religion. A certain secret science has been used for centuries so the coming generations could come in contact with the experiences of the older generations – not through books, not through words, but through something which goes deeper – through silence, through meditation, through peace.As your silence grows, your friendliness, your love grows; your life becomes a moment-to-moment dance, a joy, a celebration.Do you hear the firecrackers outside? Have you ever thought about why, all over the world, in every culture, in every society, there are a few days in the year for celebration? These few days for celebration are just a compensation – because these societies have taken away all celebration in your life, and if nothing is given to you in compensation, your life can become a danger to the culture. Every culture has to give some compensation to you so that you don’t feel completely lost in misery, in sadness. But these compensations are false. These firecrackers outside and these lights outside cannot make you rejoice. They are only for children; for you, they are just a nuisance. But in your inner world there can be a continuity of lights, songs, joys. Always remember that society compensates you when it feels that the repressed may explode into a dangerous situation if it is not compensated. Society finds some way of allowing you to let out the repressed. But this is not true celebration, and it cannot be true.True celebration should come from your life, in your life.And true celebration cannot be according to the calendar, that on the first of November you will celebrate. Strange, the whole year you are miserable and on the first of November suddenly you come out of misery, dancing. Either, the misery is false, or the first of November is false; both cannot be true. And once the first of November has gone, you are back in your dark hole, everybody in his misery, everybody in his anxiety.Life should be a continual celebration, a festival of lights the whole year round. Only then can you grow up, can you blossom.Transform small things into celebration. For example, in Japan they have the tea ceremony. In every Zen monastery and in every person’s house, who can afford it, they have a small temple for drinking tea. Now, tea is no longer an ordinary, profane thing; they have transformed it into a celebration. The temple for drinking tea is made in a certain way: in a beautiful garden, with a beautiful pond, swans in the pond, flowers all around. Guests come and they have to leave their shoes outside. It is a temple.And as you enter the temple, you cannot speak; you have to leave your thinking and thoughts and speech outside with your shoes. You sit down in a meditative posture. And the host, the lady who prepares tea for you, her movements are so graceful, as if she is dancing, moving around preparing tea, putting cups and saucers before you as if you are gods. With such respect, she will bow down, and you will receive it with the same respect.The tea is prepared in a special samovar, which makes beautiful sounds – music of its own. And it is part of the tea ceremony that everybody should listen first to the music of the tea. So everybody is silent, listening…birds chirping outside in the garden, and the samovar…the tea is creating its own song. A peace surrounds. When the tea is ready and it is poured into everybody’s cup, you are not just to drink it the way people are doing everywhere. First you will smell the aroma of the tea. You will sip the tea as if it has come from the beyond, you will take time – there is no hurry. Somebody may start playing on the flute or on the sitar. An ordinary thing – just tea – and they have made it a beautiful religious festival, and everybody comes out of it nourished, fresh, feeling younger, feeling juicier. And what can be done with tea, can be done with everything: with your clothes, with your food.People are living almost in sleep; otherwise, every fabric, every cloth has its own beauty, its own feel. If you are sensitive, then the clothing is not just to cover your body; then it is something expressing your individuality, something expressing your taste, your culture, your being. Everything that you do should be expressive of you; it should have your signature on it. Then life becomes a continuous celebration.Even if you fall sick and you are lying in bed, you will make those moments of lying in bed moments of beauty and joy, moments of relaxation and rest, moments of meditation, moments of listening to music or to poetry. There is no need to be sad that you are sick. You should be happy that everybody is in the office and you are in your bed like a king, relaxing – somebody is preparing tea for you, the samovar is singing a song and a friend has offered to come and play the flute for you. These things are more important than any medicine. When you are sick, call a doctor. But more important, call those who love you, because there is no medicine more important than love. Call those who can create beauty, music, poetry around you, because there is nothing that heals like a mood of celebration. Medicine is the lowest kind of treatment.But it seems we have forgotten everything, so we have to depend on medicine and be grumpy and sad – as if you are missing some great joy that you were having in the office. In the office you were miserable – just one day off, and you cling to misery too; you won’t let it go.Make everything creative; make the best out of the worst – that’s what I call “the art.” And if a man has lived his whole life making every moment and every phase of it a beauty, a love, a joy, naturally his death is going to be the ultimate peak of his whole life’s endeavor. The last touches… His death is not going to be ugly as it ordinarily happens every day to everyone. If death is ugly, that means your whole life has been a wastage. Death should be a peaceful acceptance, a loving entry into the unknown, a joyful good-bye to old friends, to the old world. There should not be any tragedy in it.One Zen master, Lin Chi, was dying. Thousands of his disciples had gathered to listen to the last sermon, but Lin Chi was simply lying down – joyous, smiling, but not saying a single word.Seeing that he was going to die and he was not saying a single word, somebody reminded Lin Chi – an old friend, a master in his own right… He was not a disciple of Lin Chi. That’s why he could say to him, “Lin Chi, have you forgotten that you have to say your last words? I have always said your memory isn’t right. You are dying, have you forgotten?”Lin Chi said, “Just listen.” And on the roof two squirrels were running, screeching. And he said, “How beautiful,” and he died.For a moment, when he said just listen, there was absolute silence. Everybody thought he was going to say something great, but only two squirrels fighting, screeching, running on the roof… And he smiled and he died.But he had given his last message: don’t make things small and big, trivial and important. Everything is important. At this moment, Lin Chi’s death is as important as the two squirrels running on the roof, there is no difference. In existence it is all the same. That was his whole philosophy, his whole life’s teaching: that there is nothing which is great and there is nothing which is small; it all depends on you, what you make out of it.Start with meditation, and things will go on growing in you – silence, serenity, blissfulness, sensitivity. And whatever comes out of meditation, try to bring it out in life. Share it, because everything shared grows fast. And when you have reached the point of death, you will know there is no death. You can say good-bye, there is no need for any tears of sadness – maybe tears of joy, but not of sadness. But you have to begin from being innocent.So first, throw out all crap that you are carrying. And everybody is carrying so much crap – and one wonders, for what? Just because people have been telling you that these are great ideas, principles… You have not been intelligent with yourself. Be intelligent with yourself.Life is very simple; it is a joyful dance. And the whole earth can be full of joy and dance, but there are people who are seriously vested in their interest that nobody should enjoy life, that nobody should smile, that nobody should laugh, that life is a sin, that it is a punishment. How can you enjoy when the climate is such that you have been told continually that it is a punishment, that you are suffering because you have done wrong things, and it is a kind of jail where you have been thrown in order to suffer?I say to you life is not a jail; it is not a punishment. It is a reward, and it is given only to those who have earned it, who deserve it. Now it is your right to enjoy; it will be a sin if you don’t enjoy. It will be against existence if you don’t beautify it, if you leave it just as you have found it. No, leave it a little happier, a little more beautiful, a little more fragrant.Osho,As a disciple of your mystery school, I want to ask you the following question: when I heard you say that you were beyond enlightenment now, it felt like a relaxation in my heart. That very moment a picture arose in me showing me that you are even closer to us now, and it feels to me as if I can somehow understand “beyond enlightenment” better than enlightenment itself.Can you please say something about this?It raises a few fundamental questions. First, if you cannot understand enlightenment, how can you understand that which is beyond it? You are misunderstanding. Your misunderstanding is that perhaps beyond enlightenment means below enlightenment. And you are feeling happy, but I cannot feel happy with your happiness. I feel sorry for it. You are feeling happy that I have come close to you. You should feel happy when you come close to me.Just think: if I say that I have dropped even “beyond enlightenment,” that it was all fiction – enlightenment, beyond enlightenment; I am just one of you who had a few imaginative, fictitious ideas – you will feel even happier. Now there is nothing for you to worry about, nowhere to go, nothing to achieve, you are perfectly okay.Your question makes me understand why Gautam Buddha remained with enlightenment – although he was seeing it, the stars beyond were calling him. He was the first man to see beyond enlightenment, but he didn’t go beyond; he remained at the stage of enlightenment. Perhaps it was for people like you, because you will not be able to understand the person who goes beyond enlightenment, in a way he will become almost ordinary, and there is the danger. Your ordinariness and his ordinariness are poles apart – but both are ordinariness, and the danger is that you will misunderstand. He has come back home. You have not even started the journey.It is almost like meeting someone on a staircase – you are both standing on the same step; one is going, one is coming. Both are on the same step – in a way equal – but one is going up, one is going down. Hence, they are not equal; their equality is illusory.I thought perhaps that in the twenty-five centuries after Gautam Buddha man might have become a little more intelligent – and someone some day has to try going beyond and see what happens, how people take it. The way you have understood it is absolutely wrong. I have not come closer to you; I have gone farther away. And you cannot avoid enlightenment; if you avoid it, you cannot reach beyond it. It is simple arithmetic. That’s what is making you happy, that perhaps enlightenment can be avoided: when one has to go beyond it, what is the need to first go to enlightenment and then go beyond it? We are already beyond it! You are not beyond it. You are behind it. And in any case enlightenment cannot be avoided. One has to pass through that fire, through that great experience.So drop that idea that I have come closer to you. My being closer to you is not significant. What is significant is your being closer to me. You say, “Now you are a friend to us.” I have always been a friend to you. The question is from your side: are you a friend to me? And my friendship will enhance and enrich my life, not your life. It is your friendship that is going to enhance and enrich your life. And if you can be a friend to one who is enlightened you have taken a long jump, you have extended your hands to a faraway star, you have stretched your being to its fullest. This will give you an evolution.And only after you have reached the point of enlightenment can you see that there are skies beyond skies, that enlightenment is not the end. Existence is not exhausted yet; there is still much more ahead, the journey continues.Osho,Now that I am slowly, slowly turning inward, I find this longing mixed with sadness welling up frequently. It seems connected with the feelings that arise when I see you or dream about you.Is it the realization that I really don't know much love and bliss in my life, or is it the longing for home?Would you please speak to me about this?It is good and fortunate that nothing satisfies you completely and entirely. That means you don’t become stagnant, that means you have to keep moving. Slowly, slowly, you will understand that there is no home, that movement itself is the home; that there is no end to the pilgrimage, but the pilgrimage itself is the end.It is very difficult to understand because we are accustomed to a certain logic: if we want to go somewhere, going is always just a means, reaching somewhere is the end. But as far as the universal life is concerned, there cannot be a place where you can say “I have come and now there is nothing further.”It is inconceivable that you will find a place which will be the end, and there will be a fence and a board saying, “Here ends the world.” And even if you can find such a place, I would like you to jump the fence – because there must be something beyond the fence. If the fence cannot just stand by itself, there must be something beyond it. Somebody is playing a joke by putting up a board: “Here ends the world,” and fixing a fence there. Don’t be deceived.You will come to many places where you would like to make your home because it is so blissful, so peaceful; you feel so fulfilled you don’t see the point… Why should you continue? But I say unless you continue, you will never know that there is much more. But if you stop, nobody is going to prevent you. You need a master to go on goading you, to go on destroying every home you make, so finally you decide not to make any home – it is better to be homeless under the sky and continue the journey.In the life of al-Hillaj Mansoor, a beautiful incident is related. He was a poor man. He collected money from people because he wanted to go to Kaaba, the sacred place of pilgrimage for the Mohammedans. And everybody contributed because he was going to Kaaba, and whoever contributes also gets a share in the virtue that he will get by reaching there. It is according to how much you give. So people gave him money – those who could give more gave more. People even gave beyond their capacity; they borrowed and gave him the money.The next day he was back. And they said, “So soon?” – because in those days the journey from his place to Kaaba and back used to take three to six months. “What happened? And where is the money?”He said, “A strange man met me on the way just as I was going out of town. He said, ‘Listen, where are you going?’ I said, ‘I am going to Kaaba.’ He said, ‘There is no need.’ I said, ‘But every scripture says there is a need.’ He said, ‘I am a living master, and I am saying there is no need. Just go around me seven times and put all the money in front of me. I am Junnaid, the great master. Give the money first.’ So I said, ‘If you are Junnaid, then…’”Junnaid’s name was known all over the country. So al-Hillaj said, “If Junnaid says something he cannot be wrong. I gave the money to Junnaid, went around him seven times, and he told me to go back home.”Those people said, “You idiot. First, have you inquired whether he is Junnaid or not? It seems some cheat has deceived you. Let us go and find out. If he was really Junnaid, he would be sitting there.”They reached, and Junnaid was sitting there. Junnaid said, “So you have all come. Put your money here, whatever money you have. Take seven rounds – I am a living Kaaba – and then go home. And whenever you have money you can come again.”So the poor fellows had to put their money there and take seven rounds, sadly. “This is strange, we never thought that Kaaba would come just outside our village.”But the news spread. People started coming from other villages. They said, “If Junnaid says so, it must be right. That is a dead stone in Kaaba, and this is a living master.”Somebody told him, “We have come. We heard that you were here, so we have come for the pilgrimage.”He said, “Just give the money and do the pilgrimage.”But the man said, “I have a question: after taking seven rounds around you, is the journey finished? Is the pilgrimage over?”He said, “No, whenever you have money, again you can come. This pilgrimage is never going to end. And if you don’t find me here, you will find somebody else. You can do this pilgrimage around anybody; you just have to be sensitive to see the real, the living god within. It is not only within me, it is within you also. If you are alert, you can take seven rounds around yourself – no need to waste the money and no need to go anywhere. Remember, there is no home. Or, the home is everywhere – both are true.”I will not say to you that the home is everywhere – although it is true. I will say there is no home.If you can continue your pilgrimage with this sincerity – that there is no home and there is no place you are going to, that just the going is in itself the beauty, the joy, the blissfulness, everything…the going itself – then the second will also be true: that wherever you are, it is home. But the second can be deceptive because people are very cunning, even cunning with themselves. They have misused all truths, they have managed to give them meanings which support their own ideas. If I say “Everywhere is home” then they will relax wherever they are, then there is no need…So I say there is no home, and the journey has to be continued. It has to be a dance. Take your guitars and go on, and never stop anywhere. That does not mean that you cannot rest for a while. There are caravanserais but no homes – stay over for the night, but in the morning we have to go. This ongoing process is what life is. The moment it stops, it is death – and there is no death.And why do people hanker for the home – security, safety? But in the name of security and safety, they don’t make homes, they make prisons, and they are the jailed and they are the jailers, but because they have the keys in their own hands, they think they are free. They are not free…only a constantly moving river sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes falling from the mountains, sometimes moving very slowly on the plains, but moving all the time. Movement is life; change is life.Stay for a while if you feel tired, but stay only to regain enough energy so that tomorrow morning you can move again. The home is everywhere, but that home is just a caravanserai. Never make anything in life stable. That’s how things die, that’s how things start stinking. Allow movement – it keeps things fresh; it keeps things alive. It keeps the adventure alive, the excitement, the ecstasy of the discovery of the unknown and finally the unknowable.Osho,Ever since I have been with you listening, listening, I have never been able to remember anything you said. As so often before, you are speaking from my own heart, but the moment the words are heard, they are forgotten too.Can you please say something? Am I not really listening?It is perfectly good. It is as it should be, because this is not a kindergarten school where you have to remember every word spoken by me. Here the emphasis is not on remembering; the emphasis is on listening. If you have listened in silence, then whatever is significant will be absorbed by the heart. You may forget the words. Words are only containers, not the content. The content will be absorbed in the heart, and the containers have to be thrown away. You cannot always carry all the containers.Listen perfectly. Never bother about remembering, because that is a disturbance. Doing the two things together, then one starts taking notes – if not visibly, then inside in the mind. No, don’t create disturbance; just listen. If something is true, your heart will simply absorb it. And the heart has no memory system. The memory system is in the head. But whatever the heart absorbs will be changing your actions, will be changing your behavior, will be changing you. It will bring a transformation.It will not bring you knowledge; it will bring you transformation. It will make you a new man. So don’t be worried about memory at all.Osho,Is there any way to transcend being a German?There is only one way. And you have done it; you have become a sannyasin. A sannyasin is neither German nor Indian, neither Chinese nor Japanese. A sannyasin declares that he is simply a human being. He drops all boundaries, all limitations of nations, of religions, of ideologies. And that you have done; now don’t be worried. Now the whole of Germany is afraid of sannyasins.You need not be worried about being a German. You just be a sannyasin and make more and more sannyasins, and Germany will disappear! We are going to make Germany the first Sannyasland.

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Beyond Enlightenment 01-32Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Enlightenment 29 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Research over the past few years has suggested that certain states of consciousness brought about by meditation techniques appear to evoke specific brainwave patterns. These states are now being created by feeding electronic and auditory stimulation to the brain, and they can also be learned through biofeedback.The traditional “meditative state” – sitting silently, or at least quietly alert, is composed of bilateral, synchronous alpha waves. Deeper meditation also has bilateral theta waves. A state called “lucid awareness” has the bilateral synchronous alpha and theta waves of deep meditation, plus the beta waves of normal thought processes. Lucid awareness can be learned through biofeedback, using the most modern equipment.Are these kinds of stimulation feeding and biofeedback useful tools for the meditator? What is the relationship of these technological techniques to the meditation beyond technique? Is this an example of bringing science together with meditation?I would like to experiment with these new technologies – both personally in my own meditation, and professionally in my work as a physician. Do I have your blessings?It is a very complex question. You will have to understand one of the most fundamental things about meditation: that no technique leads to meditation. The old so-called techniques and the new scientific biofeed techniques are the same as far as meditation is concerned. Meditation is not a byproduct of any technique.Meditation happens beyond mind. No technique can go beyond mind.But there is going to be a great misunderstanding in scientific circles, and it has a certain basis. The basis of all misunderstanding is: when the being of a person is in a state of meditation, it creates certain waves in the mind. These waves can be created from the outside by technical means. But those waves will not create meditation – this is the misunderstanding.Meditation creates those waves; it is the mind reflecting the inner world. You cannot see what is happening inside. But you can see what is happening in the mind. Now there are sensitive instruments… We can judge what kinds of waves are there when a person is asleep, what kinds of waves are there when a person is dreaming, what kinds of waves are there when a person is in meditation. But by creating the waves, you cannot create the situation – because those waves are only symptoms, indicators. It is perfectly good; you can study them. But remember that there is no shortcut to meditation, and no mechanical device can be of any help. In fact, meditation needs no technique – scientific or otherwise. Meditation is simply an understanding.It is not a question of sitting silently, it is not a question of chanting a mantra. It is a question of understanding the subtle workings of the mind. As you understand those workings of the mind a great awareness arises in you, which is not of the mind. That awareness arises in your being, in your soul, in your consciousness.The mind is only a mechanism, but when awareness arises it is bound to create a certain energy pattern around it. That energy pattern is noted by the mind. The mind is a very subtle mechanism. And you are studying from the outside, so at the most you can study the mind. Seeing that whenever a person is silent, serene, peaceful, a certain wave pattern always, inevitably appears in the mind, the scientific thinking will say: if we can create this wave pattern in the mind through some biofeed technology, then the being inside will reach the heights of awareness.This is not going to happen. It is not a question of cause and effect. These waves in the mind are not the cause of meditation; they are, on the contrary, the effect. But from the effect you cannot move toward the cause. It is possible that by biofeed you can create certain patterns in the mind and they will give a feeling of peace, silence and serenity to the person. Because the person himself does not know what meditation is and has no way of comparing, he may be misled into believing that this is meditation. But it is not, because the moment the biofeed mechanism stops, the waves disappear, and the silence and the peace and the serenity also disappear.And you may go on practicing with those scientific instruments for years; it will not change your character, it will not change your morality, it will not change your individuality. You will remain the same.Meditation transforms. It takes you to higher levels of consciousness and changes your whole lifestyle. It changes your reactions into responses to such an extent that it is unbelievable that the person who would have reacted in the same situation in anger is now acting in deep compassion, with love, in the same situation.Meditation is a state of being, arrived at through understanding. It needs intelligence; it does not need techniques. There is no technique that can give you intelligence. Otherwise, we would have changed all the idiots into geniuses; all the mediocre people would have become Albert Einsteins, Bertrand Russells, Jean-Paul Sartres. There is no way to change your intelligence from the outside, to sharpen it, to make it more penetrating, to give it more insight. It is simply a question of understanding, and nobody else can do it for you – no machine, no man.For centuries the so-called gurus have been cheating humanity. Now, in the future instead of gurus, these guru machines will cheat humanity. The gurus were cheating people, saying, “We will give you a mantra. Repeat the mantra.” Certainly by repeating a mantra continuously, you create the energy field of a certain wave-length, but the man remains the same, because it is only on the surface. Just as if you throw a pebble into a silent lake, and ripples arise and move all over the lake from one corner to the other corner, but they do not touch the depths of the lake at all. The depths are completely unaware of what is happening on the surface. And what you see on the surface is also illusory. You think that ripples are moving; that’s not true, nothing is moving.When you throw a pebble into the lake, it is not that ripples start moving. You can check it by putting a small flower on the water. You will be surprised: the flower remains in the same place. If the waves were moving and going toward the shore, they would have taken the flower with them. The flower remains there. The waves are not moving; it is just the water going up and down in the same place, creating the illusion of movement. The depths of the lake will not know anything about it. And there is going to be no change in the character, in the beauty of the lake, by creating those waves.The mind is between the world and you. Whatever happens in the world, the mind is affected by it; and you can understand through the mind what is happening outside. For example, you see me – you cannot see me; it is your mind that is affected by certain rays and creates a picture in the mind. You are inside, and from inside you see the picture. You don’t see me; you can’t see me. The mind is the mediator. Just as when it is affected by the outside, the inner consciousness can read it – what is happening outside – what the scientists are trying to do is just the same: they are studying meditators and reading their wave lengths, the energy fields created by meditation. And naturally, the scientific approach is that if these certain patterns appear without any exception when a person is in meditation, then we have got the key; if we can create these patterns in the mind, then meditation is bound to appear inside. That’s where the fallacy is.You can create the pattern in the mind, and if the person does not know about meditation, he may feel a silence, serenity, for the moment, as long as those waves remain. But you cannot deceive a meditator, because the meditator will see that those patterns are appearing in the mind. The mind is a lower reality, and the lower reality cannot change the higher reality. The mind is the servant; it cannot change the master. But you can experiment. Just remain aware that whether it is a biofeed machine or the chanting of Om, it does not matter; it only creates a mental peace, and mental peace is not meditation. Meditation is the flight beyond the mind. It has nothing to do with mental peace.One of America’s great thinkers, Joshua Liebman, has written a very famous book, Peace of Mind. I wrote him a letter many years ago when I came across the book, saying, “If you are sincere and honest, you should withdraw the book from the market because there is no such thing as peace of mind. The mind is the problem. When there is no mind then there is peace, so how there can be “peace of mind?” And any peace of mind is only fallacious; it simply means the noise has slowed down to such a point that you think it is silence. And you don’t have anything to compare it with.”A man who knows what meditation is cannot be deceived by any techniques, because no technique can give you understanding of the workings of the mind. For example, you feel anger, you feel jealousy, you feel hatred; you feel lust. Is there any technique that can help you to get rid of anger, of jealousy, of hatred, of sexual lust? And if these things continue to remain, your lifestyle is going to remain the same as before.There is only one way – there has never been a second. There is one and only one way to understand that to be angry is to be stupid: watch anger in all its phases, be alert to it so it does not catch you unawares; remain watchful, seeing every step of the anger. And you will be surprised: that as awareness about the ways of anger grows, the anger starts evaporating. And when the anger disappears, then there is peace. Peace is not a positive achievement. When the hatred disappears, there is love. Love is not a positive achievement. When jealousy disappears, there is a deep friendliness toward all.Try to understand – but all the religions have corrupted your minds, because they have not taught you how to watch, how to understand; instead they have given you conclusions that anger is bad. And the moment you condemn something, you have already taken a certain position of judgment. You have judged. Now you cannot be aware. Awareness needs a state of no-judgment. And all the religions have been teaching people judgments: this is good, this is bad, this is sin, this is virtue. This is the whole crap that for centuries man’s mind has been loaded with. So, with everything – the moment you see it – there is immediately a judgment about it within you. You cannot simply see it; you cannot be just a mirror without saying anything.Understanding arises by becoming a mirror, a mirror of all that goes on in the mind.There is a beautiful story – not just a story but an actual historical fact.One disciple of Gautam Buddha was going on a journey to spread his message. He had come to see Gautam Buddha and to get his blessings, and to ask if there was any last message, any last words to be said to him.And Gautam Buddha said, “Just remember one thing: while walking, keep your gaze just four feet ahead, looking four feet ahead of you.”Since that day, for twenty-five centuries, Buddhist monks have walked in the same way. That was a strategy to keep you from seeing women in particular. Those disciples were monks. They had taken the vow of celibacy.Ananda, another of Gautam Buddha’s disciples, could not understand what the matter was, why the monk should keep his eyes always focused four feet ahead. He inquired, “I want to know what is the matter?”Buddha said, “That’s how he will avoid looking at a woman, at least a woman’s face – at the most he will see her feet.”But Ananda said, “There may be situations when a woman is in a danger. For example, she has fallen into a well and is shouting for help. What is your disciple supposed to do? He will have to see her face, her body.”Buddha said, “In special situations he is allowed to see her, but it is not the rule, it is only the exception.”Ananda said, “What about touching? – because there may be situations when a woman has fallen on the road. What is your disciple supposed to do? Should he help her to get up or not? Or an old woman wants to cross the road – what is your disciple supposed to do?”Buddha said, “As an exception – but remember it is not a rule – he can touch the woman with one condition, and if he cannot fulfill the condition he is not allowed the exceptions. The condition is that he should remain just a mirror; he should not take any judgment, any attitude. The woman is beautiful – that is a judgment. The woman is fair – that is a judgment. He should remain a mirror, then he is allowed the exceptions. Otherwise, let the woman drown in the well – somebody else will save her. You save yourself!”What he is saying is this: in every situation where mind starts any kind of desire, greed, lust, ambition, possessiveness, the meditator has to be just a mirror. And what is that going to do? To be just a mirror means you are simply aware. In pure awareness the mind cannot drag you down into the mud, into the gutter. In anger, in hatred, in jealousy, the mind is absolutely impotent in the face of awareness. And because the mind is absolutely impotent, your whole being is in profound silence: the peace that passeth understanding.Naturally that peace, that silence, that joy, that blissfulness will affect the mind. It will create ripples in the mind, it will change the wave lengths in the mind, and the scientist will be reading those waves, those wave patterns and he will be thinking, “If these wave patterns can be created in someone by mechanical devices, then we will be able to create the profoundness of a Gautam Buddha.” Don’t be stupid!All your technical devices can be good, can be helpful. They are not going to do any harm; they will be giving some taste of peace, of silence. Although very superficial, still it is something for those who have never known anything of peace. For the thirsty, even dirty water does not look dirty. For the thirsty, even dirty water is a great blessing.So you can start your experiments with all my blessings, but remember it is not meditation that you are giving to people – you don’t know meditation yourself. You may be giving them a little rest, a little relaxation, and there is nothing wrong in it. But if you give them the idea that this is meditation then you are certainly being harmful, because these people will stop at the technical things, with the superficial silence; thinking that this is all and they have gained it.You can be helpful to people. Tell them that this is just a mechanical way of putting your mind at peace, and the mind at peace is not the real peace – real peace is when the mind is absent. And that is not possible from the outside, but only from the inside. And inside you have the intelligence, the understanding to do the miracle.It is good for people who cannot relax, who cannot find a few moments of peace, whose minds are continuously chattering. Your technical devices are good, your biofeedback mechanisms are good. But make it clear to them that this is not meditation; this is just a mechanical device to help you relax, to give you a superficial feeling of silence. If this silence creates an urge in you to find the real, the inner, the authentic source of peace, then those technical devices have been friends, and the technicians who have been using them have not been barriers but have been bridges. Become a bridge!Give people the little taste that is possible through machines, but don’t give them the false idea that this is what meditation is. Tell them that this is only a faraway echo of the real; if you want the real, you will have to go through a deep inner search, a profound understanding of your mind, an awareness of all the cunning ways of the mind, so that the mind can be put aside. Then the mind is no longer between you and existence, and the doors are open.Meditation is the ultimate experience of blissfulness. It cannot be produced by drugs, it cannot be produced by machines; it cannot be produced from the outside.Osho,The communes of Mahavira and Buddha survived even after their lifetimes, but your communes are not surviving in your lifetime although they are self-sufficient.Does survival of communes depend on social structure, affluence of the society, prevalent religions, or national and international politics? Please comment.The first thing to understand: Gautam Buddha and Mahavira had no communes. Their disciples were wandering monks; they were not living a commune life in one place, they were always on the move, except for the rainy season. And even in the rainy season they used to stay in different places.My commune was an alternative society. Gautam Buddha and Mahavira did not provide an alternative society; hence they were not in conflict with the society. On the contrary, they were dependent on the society for food, for clothes, for shelter; their disciples were dependent on the society for everything. They could not be rebellious. How can you be rebellious against a society which gives you food, which gives you clothes, which gives you shelter, which gives you everything that you need? You cannot go against its morality – it may be rotten, but you have to support it. You cannot go against its traditions.My commune was a totally new experiment. It has never happened before. There is no comparison with the past because my people were not dependent on anybody, and they were against the society, the culture, the civilization, the religion, the politics, the education – everything that constitutes the world. We were fighting an impossible fight – a small group trying to live in a totally different way from the whole of humanity. Mahavira was not against marriage; I am. Mahavira was not respectful toward women; I am. Buddha was as much a male chauvinist as anybody else. For twenty years continually, he refused to initiate any women into Buddhism. He never accepted the idea that they are equal to men. I say they are not only equal but in some respects superior. My commune was a revolt.Their religions – Gautam Buddha’s and Mahavira’s religions – were simply offshoots of the same civilization, the same society, the same morality, the same superstitions. Yes, they were arguing about invisible things which nobody bothers about – whether God is seven feet high or six feet high is nobody’s business. Whether God has three faces or only one face – it is God’s problem, it is nobody else’s problem. Maybe if he has three faces then God’s tailor might have a problem!They were disagreeing on many points, but all those points were immaterial, not substantial, not concerned with the life that man is living here and now – about that they were all in absolute agreement.Hence it was absolutely to be expected that my commune would be destroyed. It was against the church, it was against the state; it was against all that your so-called civilization stands for – because I don’t believe man has yet become civilized. If man has become civilized, then there is no need for wars; if man has become civilized, then there is no need for discrimination between blacks and whites, men and women; if man has become civilized then there is no need for people to die because they have nothing to eat – and there are people who are dying because they have too much to eat. In America, thirty million people are dying from overeating, and thirty million people are dying because they have nothing to eat.And you call this world a civilized world? It is not even sane. And it cannot be just coincidence: exactly thirty million people overeating, knowing perfectly well that they are eating themselves to death, knowing perfectly well that thirty million people are on the streets dying without food. Strange: sixty million people can be saved within a second, but these sixty million people will die.I have heard…A man was very worried because his wife was getting fatter and fatter and fatter.And women have greater capacity for becoming fatter than men – it is a biological privilege, because the woman has to be able to become pregnant, to become a mother; then for nine months she cannot eat well, she throws up, she is carrying such a load in her belly. And every day the child needs more and more food. It is a very strange situation: the woman cannot eat, and the child wants more food because he is growing. Hence nature has made woman’s body capable of collecting more fat for emergency measures. So even if she does not eat, the child can get as much as he needs from the reserve fat the woman has; and the woman can also go on eating her own fat. And nine months is a long time, so the woman has immense capacity. If she uses her full capacity, then man is no competitor.And women are thinner while they are not married. Once they are married they start becoming fat, because now there is no problem. They have got hold of a man who cannot escape, so it does not matter what happens to their body proportions; they are no longer interested in any beauty competition.The man asked his doctor, “What has to be done?”The doctor said, “Do one thing: take a beautiful picture of a naked woman and paste it inside the fridge, so whenever your wife opens the fridge for more ice cream she will think, ‘What a beautiful body.’ And she may start thinking about herself, that this is not good.”The man said, “That idea is very good.”After two months the doctor met the man, and he could not believe it. He said, “What happened? I have not seen you for two months, and you have become so fat!”The man said, “Everything went wrong because of your suggestion, you idiot! Are you my doctor or my enemy? I pasted a beautiful woman, naked, inside the fridge. Since then my wife does not open the fridge, but I cannot remain more than fifteen minutes away before a desire arises to see the photo. But when one opens the fridge, it is not just the photo one sees – the ice cream, the cake… You have destroyed my life. So my wife has become slimmer, beautiful, and I have become ugly. And the whole credit goes to you.”This society, this world is based on insane superstitions. My commune was a revolt. It survived five years – it was a miracle, because the whole fascist and imperialist government of America tried everything to destroy it. Legally they could not do it because we had four hundred legal experts in the commune, the commune had the biggest legal firm in the whole world: four hundred sannyasins – a few of them very well known legal experts; others, new graduates from the universities – four hundred legal experts continually fighting the American government on every legal point. Finally the government decided that legally it was impossible to destroy us, and then they started doing illegal things. And when a world power – the world’s greatest power – starts being criminal and illegal, what can four hundred people do? We were ready to fight legally, rationally, logically, in every possible way. But illegally it was impossible to fight.I was arrested illegally, without any arrest warrant – because they could not find a reason to arrest me, so how to issue an arrest warrant? In the middle of the night at the point of twelve loaded guns, I was arrested. And I asked them, “Where is the arrest warrant?”They said, “There is no arrest warrant.”I said, “You can at least tell me verbally what the reason is, why I am being arrested.”They said, “We don’t know.”I asked them, “Then give me the opportunity to inform my attorney.”And they refused. That is every citizen’s right everywhere in the world – to inform his attorney if the government is doing such an illegal act. But they were worried that if the attorney comes, the first thing he is going to ask is, “Where is the arrest warrant?”They destroyed the commune in such a way that the world would think nothing criminal had been done, but everything criminal… In court they produced one hundred and thirty-six charges against me. I was silent for three and a half years, never going out of my room. And if a man remaining silent – not meeting anybody, not talking to anybody, not going out of his room – can manage to commit one hundred and thirty-six crimes, then I thought there must be miracles, I must be doing miracles! And they had no proof of anything.They asked for negotiations. The government attorney made it clear to my attorneys that the government could not accept defeat. They themselves had foolishly called the case “The United States of America versus Osho,” they themselves had called the case that; there was no need to give it such a name. Now they were in trouble: if I had won the case that would mean the United States of America would have been defeated in their own courts under their own law, by their own constitution. So they said, “We cannot… The government cannot accept defeat. And you know and we know that we don’t have any proof. So the best way will be not to go to trial. We are ready for negotiations. And the negotiating agreement is that Osho should accept any two charges, should admit that he has committed two crimes – just to show the world that we have not done anything wrong by arresting him – and pay a nominal fine. Then on the surface everything looks legal.”But my attorney said, “It will be very difficult to convince him to accept.”They said, “We should make you aware of the fact that if he does not accept and if the case goes to trial, then the trial can be prolonged for ten years, twenty years. It is a case against the government, and you should be aware that the government is not ready to lose the case. So we will go on postponing it, and bail will be canceled and Osho will have to remain in jail. His whole movement will be destroyed, and all his sannyasins all over the world will be in immense torture.” And they suggested – whispered into my chief attorney’s ear – “You should be aware that he can be killed too. If we see that the case is going to be lost, he can be killed too.”My attorneys came to me crying – and they were the topmost attorneys of America. I asked them, “Why you are crying? What is the matter? – because there is nothing in those hundred and thirty-six charges. We are going to win.”They said, “We are going to win, but your life is at risk and we don’t want your life to be at risk.”And my attorneys were right, because a bomb had already been planted under my seat, so if something went wrong then they could finish me on that very day. It was just a coincidence that I reached the jail earlier than they expected – and the bomb was a time bomb, so it did not explode.After I left America, the attorney general told the press, “Our first priority was to destroy the commune.”Why? – because the commune had done no harm to America in any way. But deep down it had hurt America’s ego, its pride – because we have shown them that a dream can be realized, that five thousand people can live without any law enforcement authority, without any court, without any fight, without any drugs, without any murder, without any suicide, nobody going mad. And people were living so joyously and so beautifully that the whole of America was starting to feel jealous.The very existence of the commune was dangerous to the American politicians because it showed that they don’t have any intelligence; otherwise they could have done what we had done very easily – they had all the power, all the money. This small commune of five thousand people had everything that man needs, and all the freedom, all the love. And everybody was working seven days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day, and still were not tired, because it was not something forced; it was something they wanted to do, they wanted to create. It was such a creative act that after working fourteen hours they were still dancing in the streets; late into the night they were playing on their guitars, singing, dancing.The commune was destined to be destroyed. It was too good not to be destroyed. It was the alternative society.Mahavira and Buddha did not create any alternative society. They were part of this society, they remained dependent on this society. Their revolution was intellectual, verbal. My revolt was actual and existential.And the destruction of the commune in America does not mean that the idea of the commune will disappear. There are still communes around the world flourishing in many countries. More and more communes will be coming up.America is going to repent; it has missed an opportunity. It could have supported the commune and made it clear to the world that it stands for freedom, that it stands for a new man, that it stands for a future humanity. It missed a great opportunity. By destroying the commune, it has destroyed its own credibility, its own democracy. It has proved itself simply nothing but a hypocritical society.Osho,The most powerful experience in my life is the love that I feel for you. It's like a shower that cleanses my soul and fills my heart with gratitude.But still I keep searching for something else, as if there is a secret you haven't shared with me yet. Is this crazy love affair between us really and truly all that is needed? Why am I not satisfied with this experience?Love can never be satisfied. If it is satisfied, it is not much of a love. The greater and deeper it is, the more dissatisfaction there will be. That is not against love; it simply shows the vastness, that your heart wants to love in a way, which is infinite, that it will never be satisfied. And it is good that it is not satisfied. The moment it is satisfied, it is dead.The love between the master and the disciple can never be satisfied. It will always remain a thrill, a new excitement, a new ecstasy. It will always go on opening doors upon doors. Disciplehood will become devotion; one day devotion will become a merger, just as the river merges in the ocean. But that too is not going to satisfy.Satisfaction is not a great quality. It belongs to the little minds, to the little hearts which are satisfied with small things. There are people who are satisfied with a little money, there are people who are satisfied with a house, there are people who are satisfied with a little name, a little fame – these are pygmies.Giants are never satisfied. On every new step they find the journey is becoming deeper, more miraculous, more mysterious – and the longing is growing and the heart is full of a sweet ache. To be in a love affair with a master is to be in a love affair with existence itself; the master is only an arrow pointing toward the unknowable, the miraculous, the mysterious. The master is not the end; the master is only the beginning.The whole function of the master is to push you the same way a mother bird pushes a small bird, a new bird who has never opened his wings into the sky. Naturally he is afraid – a vast sky. He has lived in a small cozy nest, safe and secure, the mother has been taking care, and now she wants him to take a jump and fly. And one day she pushes him. And the moment he is pushed out of the nest, for a moment it feels as if he is going to fall down on the earth, but before he falls on the earth his wings open and the whole sky is his. And there are skies beyond skies.The function of the master is nothing but to push you into a more divine discontentment, into a discontentment that knows no satisfaction.Osho,You are really something – talking about “beyond enlightenment” when most of us are not beyond pettiness, futility and postponement!Do you believe in miracles or something, perhaps love?It is true; I am something!I know you are not beyond pettiness, beyond jealousy, beyond greed, beyond anger. But I don’t talk about going beyond them for the simple reason that if you start struggling with your pettiness, you will remain petty; if you start struggling against your jealousy, you will remain jealous.An ancient proverb is: Always choose the enemy very carefully.A friend can be chosen without much care, but an enemy has to be chosen very carefully because you will be fighting with him, and in fighting you will become just like the enemy, because you will have to use the same methods, the same means. Enemies are very precious!I don’t want you to fight with small things. Rather than looking down at the earth, and all around is your pettiness and jealousy and anger, my effort is to show you the stars and help you to know that you have wings. And once you start moving toward the stars, those small things will disappear on their own accord. It is better to look at a star and to strive to get to it because the journey is beautiful, the heart is throbbing with excitement, rather than fighting with small things. You will remain small, fighting with small things. All your religions teach you to fight with small things, and that’s why the whole of humanity has remained small – fight with small things. I insist: don’t fight with small things. Fight for something great, and as you move toward the great the small ones will disappear.I am crazy, but you are crazier! And that is the only bond between us: I am crazy, you are crazier. That is the only commitment. We will reach to the stars, we will not bother about small things. Leave them here for other people; they will fight with them.Osho,What is needed to not miss you?Only one thing is needed not to miss me, and that is: you have to remember constantly that in every mind, in every person who comes in search of truth, the ego plays a very cunning game.I will tell you one story:It is said that one of the great Zen masters, Bokuju, used to ask every newcomer: “Have you realized that the path of disciplehood is very difficult? Before you enter on the path, it is my duty to make you alert to all the difficulties, arduousness, hostilities; it is an uphill task. Are you ready, or you have come here just out of curiosity?”One man said, “No, I have come here to find the truth, but if it is too difficult to be a disciple then what about making me a master?”It is a very strange story.But that is the only thing that can prevent you coming closer to me – the desire in the ego somewhere to become a master. You have to become something bigger, something greater. The master is just a finger pointing to the moon. Don’t be bothered to become a master; while you can become the moon, why become the finger?You are asking what can keep you missing me. Only one thing: the desire to be a master. It is one of the mysteries of life that only those who don’t have any desire to be a master become masters, and those who have the desire even fall from the status of being a disciple, because the desire to be a master is nothing but a subtle ego. So just watch your mind.From disciple become a devotee; from devotee take a quantum leap, a merger with existence. Never think for a moment of becoming a master. Leave it to existence; if existence wants you to become a master – that means if existence wants to use you as a master, you will be used. If existence thinks you have done enough and wants you to relax, disperse into eternity, leave it to existence. You should not be desirous of anything. The moment you come to the state of desirelessness, then existence uses you in whatever way is needed: as a mystic, as a master, as a singer, as a dancer, as a flute player, or just as nobody; but everything is a benediction.That which comes to you from existence, without your desiring it, is always the greatest ecstasy there is.

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Beyond Enlightenment 01-32Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Enlightenment 30 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/beyond-enlightenment-30/

Osho,I have heard you speak for the past month on “beyond enlightenment” – and I don't understand it.I have heard you speak for the past twelve years on enlightenment – and I don't understand it.All I know is the moment when I sit before you, you feel like blood to my body, your voice more familiar than my own heartbeat.Osho, have I let you down?There are things which are beyond understanding.Enlightenment is beyond understanding, and of course beyond enlightenment is going to be more miraculous, more mysterious. Understanding itself is not the heart of human beings, it is not their very being. It is useful only as far as the outside world is concerned. The moment you start moving inward, you have to learn new ways of feeling, of loving, of knowing, and finally of being.Understanding is perfectly right for the mind, for intelligence, for the objective world; but life does not consist only of those things which you can understand. In fact, the things that you can understand don’t make life a celebration, they don’t give life a meaning, a significance; they don’t allow life to become love.Understanding is the demarcation line between the mundane and the sacred. The mundane can be understood and should be understood. And the sacred cannot be understood and should not be understood. Its sacredness is basically a secret that you experience, just the way you feel the heartbeat, the way you feel your breathing.The sacred gives color to existence, gives music to that which is mundane. It transforms all prose into poetry and makes everything a mystery unto itself, so that the whole existence becomes a constant challenge to discover. You go on discovering, but the discovery is never finished, hence you can never say you have understood. On the contrary, the deeper you enter into the sacred dimension of life the more you feel you don’t understand, you don’t know.Socrates had become very old, and before he was given poison, the oracle of the temple of Delphi declared him to be the wisest man in the whole world. A few people who knew Socrates were immensely glad, they rushed to Athens to inform Socrates: “It has never happened before, it is unprecedented that the oracle of Delphi should declare anybody as the wisest man in the world. You are the first.”Socrates said, “You will have to go back to the temple of Delphi and tell the oracle that although it has always been right, this time it has missed – because I know nothing.”The people who brought the news were shocked.They went back and told to the oracle: “Socrates refuses… Not only does he refuse to be the wisest man in the world, he says, ‘I know nothing.’”And here is the beauty of the incident: The oracle said, “That’s why he is the wisest man in the world, there is no contradiction.”If you had understood what I was saying for twelve years about enlightenment, you would have missed. If you had understood what I have been saying for one month continually about beyond-enlightenment, you would have missed. Because you are aware that you have not been able to understand anything, you have not missed.And your feeling that sitting close to me you feel as if I have become your heartbeat, your breathing, your circulation of blood – this is true understanding. This is not knowledge; this is the same understanding as when Socrates says, “I know nothing.” This is closer to love, this is closer to music; this is closer to feeling beauty. You don’t understand beauty, you don’t understand music, you don’t understand dance – you enjoy, you rejoice, you feel. It enters into your being. It becomes part of you, but you cannot say it is knowledge.Listening to the music of the winds as they pass through the pine trees, what can you understand? Or listening to the sound of running water, what can you understand? Or looking at a beautiful sunset and all the colors spread over the horizon, what can you understand? What do you understand? But something happens which is far more precious than understanding. You fall in love, you feel it; you become it. This is how it should be – aes dhammo sanantano. This is how religion has always been; this is the eternal mystery I call religion – not the religion of the mind, but the religion of the heart, of the being; not the religion of knowing, but the religion of innocence.Whatever is happening to you is exactly what should happen to everybody. Those who go from here understanding things, knowing things, becoming more knowledgeable, it would have been better that they had not come, because I have not been a help to them, I have burdened them; I have not been able to unburden them. And my whole effort is to take all the weight of knowing, knowledge, wisdom, from you and to make you innocent children again – again collecting flowers in the garden, running after butterflies, collecting seashells, making houses of sand on the beach utterly absorbed in whatsoever you are doing, utterly blissful – so the whole existence around you is a fairyland because everything is mysterious. If I can take away your knowledge and give you back the sense of mystery, then I have done my job, I have fulfilled my function.Osho,Reading a scientific report about brain manipulation, questions arose in me.For instance, if every feeling – like happiness, sadness, sexuality, aggression, and so on – can be stimulated by electrodes, or indirectly by chemistry, can be manipulated from the outside, then these feelings are not my own; they are just puppets in someone's hands. They are either manipulated from the outside or from the inside as automatic reactions to situations; they are not me. This is about feelings.Maybe some day thoughts can be manipulated equally easily. Then what is really mine? Then what is left? Then who am I?Questioning and thinking in these directions, I came to recognize that I often think about myself, about life, about truth in these ways. And then the question arose: is this way of questioning and thinking the way the mind tries to know something? Is it able to reach any truth at all? If not, is this thinking or questioning just a futile effort, just a waste of time? Or is it not the mind, not the intellect, but a deeper intelligence, a deeper instrument that is able to come to some truth?Would you please comment?It is absolutely true: your emotions, your sentiments, your thoughts – the whole paraphernalia of the mind – are from the outside, are manipulated by the outside.Scientifically it has become clearer. But even without scientific investigation, the mystics, for thousands of years, have been saying exactly the same thing: that all these things that your mind is filled with are not yours; you are beyond them. You get identified with them, and that’s the only sin. For example, somebody insults you and you become angry. You think you are becoming angry – but seen scientifically, his insult is only a remote controller. The man who has insulted you is managing your behavior. Your anger is in his hands, you are behaving like a puppet.Now scientists are able to put electrodes in the brain at certain centers – there are seven hundred centers. And it is almost unbelievable – the mystics have been talking about these seven hundred centers in the brain for almost seven, eight thousand years. Science has just now discovered that there are exactly seven hundred centers controlling all your behavior. An electrode can be put at a particular center – for example, anger – with a remote control so you cannot see that anybody is doing anything to you. Nobody insults you, nobody humiliates you, nobody says anything to you; you are sitting silently, happily, and somebody pushes the button of the remote control and you become angry. It is a very strange feeling because you cannot see the reason anywhere, why you are becoming angry. Perhaps you will rationalize somehow – you see a man passing down the street and you remember that he insulted you – you will find some rationalization just to console yourself that you are not going mad. Sitting silently…and suddenly feeling so angry without any provocation?And the same remote controller can work to make you happy: sitting in your chair you start giggling, and you look all around in case somebody sees you – he will think you are going crazy. Nobody has said anything, nothing has happened, nobody has slipped on a banana peel, so why are you giggling? But you will rationalize it; you will give some apparently rational grounds for giggling. And the strangest thing is that when the next time the same button is pushed and you giggle, you will again have the same rationale, the same consolation, the same explanation – that too is not yours. It is almost like a gramophone record.And the scientists have come to discover a tremendously meaningful thing: the moment the remote controller releases the center it rewinds itself immediately. For example, your speech center, the remote control can force you to speak. There is no audience, you will feel awkward, but you cannot do anything, you have to speak. It is just like a recording. When the remote controller releases the button, the pressure on the electrode, you become silent. Press the button again…and the strange thing is, you start your speech again from the very beginning!When I was reading about the scientific investigations into these centers, I was reminded of my student days. I was a competitor in an inter-university debate; all the universities of the country were participating. The Sanskrit University of Varanasi was also participating, but naturally the students from the Sanskrit University were feeling a little inferior compared with competitors from other universities. They knew ancient scriptures, they knew Sanskrit poetry, drama, but they were not familiar with the contemporary world of art, literature, philosophy or logic. And the inferiority complex works in very strange ways.Just after I had spoken, the next person was the representative from the Sanskrit University. And just to impress the audience and to hide his inferiority complex he started his speech with a quotation from Bertrand Russell – he had crammed it, and Sanskrit students are more capable of cramming things than anybody else. But his stage fright… He knew nothing about Bertrand Russell, he knew nothing about what he was quoting. It would have been better to have quoted something from Sanskrit, because he would have been more at ease. In the middle he stopped – just in the middle of a sentence. And I was sitting by his side, because I had just finished. There was silence, and he was perspiring. And just to help him, I said, “Start again” – because what else to do? He was simply stuck. “And if you cannot go ahead, you start again; perhaps it may come back to you.”So he started again: “Brothers and sisters…” And at exactly the same point he got stuck again. Now it became a joke. The whole hall was shouting, “Again!” And he was in such a difficult situation: neither could he go ahead nor could he keep standing there, silent; it looked very idiotic. So he had to start again. But he would start again, “Brothers and sisters…” For a whole fifteen minutes we heard only that portion: “Brothers and sisters” up to the point where he got stuck, again and again.When his time was finished he came and sat next to me. He said, “You destroyed my whole thing.”I said, “I was trying to help you.”He said, “This is help?”I said, “You were going to be in difficulty anyway. This way at least everybody enjoyed it except you – that I can understand, but you should rejoice that you made so many people happy. And why did you choose that quotation? When I was saying to you, ‘Start again’ there was no need to start over – you could have dropped that quotation, there was no need to begin again from the very beginning.”But I came to know through reading the scientific research that the speech center is exactly like a gramophone record, but with one thing very strange and special: the moment the needle is taken away from the record you cannot put the needle back where you took it from. Once it is taken away, it will have to begin again exactly at the beginning. The center instantly goes back to the beginning.And if this happens, can you say you are the master of what you are saying? Are you the master of what you are feeling? Certainly there are no electrodes scientifically put into you, but biologically exactly the same work is going on. You see a certain woman, and immediately your mind reacts: “How beautiful!” This is nothing but remote control. That woman functioned like a remote control and your speech center simply went into a recorded speech: “How beautiful!” The mind is a mechanism. It is not you.It records things from outside, and then reacts to outside situations according to the recordings. That’s the only difference between a Hindu and a Mohammedan and a Christian and a Jew: they have just got different gramophone records; inside they are one humanity. And do you think when you play a gramophone record – it may be in Hebrew, it may be in Sanskrit, it may be in Persian, it may be in Arabic, but it is the same machine that plays the record… To the machine it does not matter whether it plays Hebrew or Sanskrit. All your religions, all your political ideas, all your cultural attitudes are nothing but recordings. And in certain situations certain recordings are provoked.There is a beautiful incident in the life of one of the very wisest kings of India, Raja Bhoj. He was very interested in wise people. His whole treasury was open only for one purpose: to collect all the wise people of the country, whatsoever the cost. His capital was Ujjain, and he had thirty of the country’s most famous people in his court. It was the most precious court in the whole country. One of the greatest poets of the world, Kalidas, was one of the members of the court of Raja Bhoj.One day a man appeared at the court saying that he spoke thirty languages with the same fluency, the same accuracy and accent as any native person could, and he had come to make a challenge: “Hearing that you have in your court the wisest people of the country, here are one thousand gold pieces…”The rupee used to be golden. We should stop calling it the rupee now, because the word rupee comes from the word rupya. Rupya means gold. It went on falling from gold to silver, from silver to something else. Now it is just paper and you go on calling it rupee. The very word means gold.And he said, “Anybody who can recognize my mother tongue, these one thousand gold pieces are his. And if he cannot recognize it, then he will have to give me one thousand gold pieces.”There were great scholars there, and everybody knows that whatever you do, you can never speak any language the way you can speak your own mother tongue, because every other language has to be learned by effort. Only the mother tongue is spontaneous, you don’t even learn it, just…the very situation and you start speaking it. It has spontaneity.That’s why even Germans who call their country fatherland… It is the only country which calls itself fatherland. All other countries call their land motherland. But even the Germans don’t call their language father tongue. Every language is called a mother tongue because the child starts learning from the mother, and anyway the father never has the chance to speak in the house. It is always the mother who is speaking; father is listening.Many took the challenge. He spoke in thirty languages – a few pieces in one language, a few pieces in another language – and it was really hard; he was certainly a master artist. He was speaking each language the way only a native can speak his own mother language. All of the thirty great scholars lost. The competition continued for thirty days, and every day one person took the challenge and lost it. The man would say, “This is not my mother tongue.”On the thirty-first day… King Bhoj had been continually saying to Kalidas, “Why don’t you accept the challenge? – because a poet knows language in a more delicate way, with all its nuances, more than anybody else.”But Kalidas remained silent. He had been watching for thirty days, trying to find out which language the man spoke with more ease, with more spontaneity, with more joy. But he could not manage to find any difference, the man spoke all the languages in exactly the same way.On the thirty-first day, Kalidas asked King Bhoj and all the wise people to stand outside in front of the court. There was a long row of steps and the man was coming up; as he came up to the last step, Kalidas pushed him down. And as he fell rolling down the steps, anger came up – he shouted.And Kalidas said, “This is your mother tongue!” Because in anger you cannot remember, and the man had not been expecting this to be a challenge.And that actually was his mother tongue. Deepest in his mind, the recording was of the mother tongue.One of my professors used to say – he lived all over the world, teaching in different universities – that only in two situations in life have I been in difficulty in different countries, fighting or falling in love. In those times one remembers one’s mother tongue. However beautifully you express your love, it is not the same; it seems superficial. And when you are angry and fighting in somebody else’s language, you cannot have that joy.He said, “Those are two very significant situations – fighting and loving – and mostly they are together with the same person. With the same person you are in love, with that same person you have to fight.”And he was right, that everything remains superficial – you can neither sing a beautiful song nor can you use real four-letter words of your language. In both cases, it remains lukewarm. The mind certainly is a mechanism for recording experiences from the outside, and reacting and responding accordingly. It is not you. But unfortunately the psychologists think the mind is all, beyond mind there is nothing. That means you are nothing but impressions from the outside. You don’t have any soul of your own. The very idea of the soul is also given by the outside.This is where the mystics are different; they will agree absolutely that about the mind, the contemporary scientific research is right. But it is not right about man’s total personality. Beyond the mind, there is an awareness which is not given by the outside and which is not an idea, and there is no experiment up to now which has found any center in the brain which corresponds to awareness.The whole work of religion, of meditation, is to make you aware of all that is the mind and dis-identify yourself with it. When the mind is angry, you should think it is simply a gramophone record. When the mind is sad, you should simply remember it is only a gramophone record. A certain situation is pressing the remote controller, and you feel sad, you feel angry, you feel frustrated, you feel worried, you feel tense – all these things are coming from the outside, and the mind is responding to them.But you are the watcher. You are not the actor. It is not your reaction. Hence the whole art of meditation is to learn awareness, alertness, consciousness.While you are feeling angry, don’t repress it; let it be there. Just become aware. See it as if it is some object outside you. Slowly, slowly, go on cutting your identifications with the mind. Then you have found your real individuality, your being, your soul. Finding this awareness is enlightenment – you have become luminous. You are no longer in darkness, and you are no longer just a puppet in the hands of the mind. You are a master, not a servant. Now the mind cannot react automatically, autonomously, the way it used to do before. It needs your permission.Somebody insults you, and you don’t want to be angry… Gautam Buddha used to say to his disciples that to be angry is so stupid that it is inconceivable that intelligent human beings go on doing it. Somebody else is doing something and you are getting angry. He may be doing something wrong, he may be saying something wrong, he may be making some effort to humiliate you, to insult you, but that is his freedom. If you react, you are a slave. And if you say to the person, “It is your joy to insult me, it is my joy not to be angry,” you are behaving like a master. And unless this master becomes crystal clear in you, crystallized, you don’t have any soul. You are just a phonograph record. As you grow older, your recording goes on becoming longer and longer. You become more knowledgeable. People think you are becoming wiser – you are simply becoming a donkey loaded with scriptures.Wisdom consists only of one thing, not of knowing many things but of knowing only one thing: that is your awareness and its separation from the mind. Just try watching small things, and you will be surprised. People go on doing the same things every day. They go on deciding to do something, and they go on repenting because they have not done it; it becomes a routine.Everything you do is not new. The things which have been giving you misery, sadness, worries, wounds, and you don’t want, somehow mechanically you go on doing these things again and again as if you are helpless. And you will remain helpless unless you create a separation between mind and awareness. That very separation is the greatest revolution that can happen to man. And from that very moment your life is a life of continuous celebration – because you need not do anything that harms you, you need not do anything that makes you miserable. Now you can do and act on only that which makes you more joyous, fulfills you, gives you contentment, makes your life a piece of art, a beauty. But this is possible only if the master in you is awake. Right now the master is fast asleep, and the servant is playing the role of master. And the servant is not your servant; the servant is created by the outside world, it belongs to the outside world, it follows the outside world and its laws.This is the whole tragedy of human life: you are asleep, and the outside world is dominating you, creating your mind according to its own needs – and the mind is a puppet. Once your awareness becomes a flame, it burns up the whole slavery that the mind has created. And there is no blissfulness more precious than freedom, than being a master of your own destiny.The mind is not your friend. Either the mind is pretending to be the master or it has to be put into its right place as a servant, but the mind is not your friend. And the struggle for freedom, for bliss, for truth is not with the world; it is a fight with this puppet mind. It is very simple.Kahlil Gibran has a beautiful story. The farmers in the villages, to protect their cultivated farms, create a false man: just a stick, another stick… It looks almost like a cross. And then they put a kurta on it, and a mud pot in place of the head. That’s enough to make poor animals afraid that somebody may be standing there. The white kurta and two hands, in the night…somebody is watching. For the animals it is enough, they keep away from the farm.Gibran says, “Once I asked such a false man, ‘I can understand the farmer who made you, he needs you. I can understand the poor animals; they don’t have great intelligence to see that you are bogus. But in rain, in sun, in hot summer, in cold winter you remain standing here – for what?’“And the false, bogus man said, ‘You don’t know my joy. Just to make those animals afraid is such a joy that it is worth suffering rain, suffering sun, suffering heat, winter – everything. I am making thousands of animals afraid! I know I am bogus, there is nothing inside me – but I don’t care about that. My joy is in making others afraid.’”I want to ask you: would you like to be just like this bogus man, nothing inside, making somebody afraid, making somebody happy, making somebody humiliated, making somebody respectful? Is your life only for others? Will you ever look inside? Is there anybody in the house or not?The people who are with me, their search is to find the master of the house. I say to you the master is there – perhaps asleep, but he can be awakened. And once the master is awakened within you, your whole life takes new colors, new rainbows, new flowers, new music, new dances. For the first time you become alive. Before, you were only vegetating.Osho,I love being here. I wanted and felt to be with you even if it were just for two days.At your birthday in 1981 we met for the first time. The reason was that I had just read a book about Gurdjieff and the phenomenon of baraka. This gave me such a hit that I came to the ranch.These days I am working with managers and teaching them meditation techniques. I'm also preparing a worldwide meditation project. Again I feel I need baraka.Please can you say something about baraka?Baraka is a Sufi word meaning grace. George Gurdjieff was trained in Sufi schools. He has carried many ideas of the Sufis into the West.The Sufi master – just like any other master in the world – is full of grace. If you are receptive, if you are open, just coming close to the master something invisible, some vibe of the divine, some rays of the unknowable start penetrating you. It also has the meaning of blessing. People come to the masters and ask for blessing.In English there is no exact word to translate baraka, but in Sanskrit, in Hindi, we have the word prasad. Blessings carry a faraway echo of it. If you are receptive… And unless one is receptive one never goes to a master. That has been the Eastern tradition. Why waste your time and why waste the master’s time? You go only when you see that your heart is opening; it needs a ray of light, as if your being is just like thirsty earth which needs a raincloud to shower on you. Only in such moments people go to a master, they touch the feet of the master; they sit with the master. Nothing is said and everything is heard; nothing is asked and everything is given.Baraka is a mystical principle that happens between the receiving disciple and the overflowing master. It is possible to pass a master without even noticing him, if you are not open. Sufis are very careful. It is not easy to find a Sufi master; he may take months or sometimes years to find – and perhaps the master is just living in front of your house. The Sufis wait for the right moment.They have their disciples who come to know that a certain man is asking if this village has a Sufi master. And the disciples go on telling him, “Yes, the Sufi master is here, and you will be called only when you are ready – because the real thing is your openness. The master is ready, but what will you be doing? Even if we take you to the master, you will not be able to recognize him.” So the disciples will keep the person hanging around, giving him hope, giving him time – “Next month we will try” – making him more and more thirsty. And when they see that he has become a longing, that now it is no longer an ordinary inquiry, it is not just a curiosity to see a Sufi master, but a deep longing, a question of life and death: that if this man does not get in contact with a master he may die, only then will he be introduced into the company of the master. And he will be surprised: the master is a man he has passed in the village many times, he sells vegetables – because Sufis keep themselves hiding in very ordinary life. Somebody is a shoemaker, somebody is a weaver, somebody sells vegetables – ordinary things, nothing special about it. And they meet in the middle of the night.Then the same man sits with the dignity of an emperor. It is called “the court of the master.” The same man who was selling vegetables the whole day long in the marketplace – now even the emperor comes to touch his feet. But nobody can come to the Sufi master unless somebody from his company introduces him, unless somebody takes the responsibility that the person is ready, somebody brings him, introduces him: “He is ready. He needs your grace.”When Gurdjieff entered into a Sufi circle for the first time – it took him three years to enter the circle – when he entered, almost a dozen people were sitting there silently with their eyes closed. He was brought close to the master.The friend who brought him told him, “Just sit down. Nothing is needed on your part except a silent opening, and the rain will come. And then don’t close yourself. Drink of the master as much as you can – this is his blessing; this will keep you on the path, on the right track. It will keep you courageous enough to pass all the dark nights; it will keep you trusting that the morning is going to happen. The face of the master, the eyes of the master, the gestures of the master, the silence of the master – everything has to be soaked up so it becomes part of you.” When the master is no longer outside you only, but inside you too, that is real blessing. Then the disciple is pregnant, the master has come into his womb, and it will help him in times of danger, in times of discouragement, in times of darkness. It will always keep him together, remembering that if truth can happen to one man, if godliness can happen to one man, then it is everybody’s birthright.Remembering: “It may take a little time for me, I have joined the path a little late. But the dawn is not far away.”Osho,Rajneeshpuram was a rare experiment in the history of human consciousness, where for the first time seekers of truth from the whole world gathered around a master. It was an international commune for the most intense and the fastest growth of human consciousness.The Rajneeshpuram commune could not survive because of orthodox religions and international politics.Is there any hope of such a rare experiment happening again around you? Or is there any alternative experiment possible on an individual scale in the present situation? Or is it destined that such a rare opportunity for human consciousness to flower to its optimum should be missed?Please comment.The commune in America was only a beginning; a beginning of many communes around the world. They will go on spreading, because it is not only a question of orthodox religions and dirty politics, it is also a question of the future of humanity. And the future is always more important than the past. The past is heavy and long. The future is light, unknown. But the past is dead, and life belongs to the future; and death cannot win over life. One commune can be destroyed. Thousands of other communes will arise.Of course my way of functioning will be different, because the experiment in Rajneeshpuram needed me to be there, it was the first commune. Every step had to be taken carefully. And within five years, so much was done that is not possible to do even in fifty years. But now the basic rules are clear. And my being in any commune is going to be dangerous for the commune.It was absolutely necessary for the first commune that I should be present. I took the risk, and the commune has succeeded. Now there are communes all around the world. More communes will be arising. I am just waiting for the right moment to trigger a new kind of process. I will not be part of any commune because my presence will be dangerous for the commune. So now I will be just wandering from one commune to another. Before my presence becomes dangerous in one commune, I will move to another so the commune is saved, and whatever I can give and my presence can give, can be given on a much bigger scale around the globe. There is no need for people to come to me. I can move from commune to commune. This way, many more communes can flourish.I am just waiting for the right moment. Preparations are being made, and soon I will start working on a series of communes – because the movement has to become worldwide, it is already worldwide. The commune is the lifestyle of the future. The family has gone and the commune is going to take its place. Much depends on the success of commune life, and we have to make the commune life such a celebration that it starts spreading like wildfire, that others start communes of their own.Each village can become a commune, there is no need to establish different villages. We just have to prove that life in a commune is much richer, much more lovely, much more meditative, that there is a possibility of living in a different way, different from the way humanity has lived up to now. We have proved it in Rajneeshpuram.It was our success that forced America to destroy the commune. If we were not successful, nobody would have bothered about us. Remember this: it was not a failure that we were destroyed; it was our success which could not be tolerated.And if we have been successful in one place… We are successful in Germany, in Italy, in Holland, in Japan, in Australia, in other different countries. Because I am not there, the politicians are not worried, the theologians are not afraid. So I want the communes to become more consolidated before I start my world tours, because now it will not be a world tour, it will be just the beginning of world tours. I will be continually rotating like a satellite around the earth, creating as much trouble as possible. Only then these traditional vested interests can be destroyed.But if the truth is with us, the victory is also with us.Osho,Do those cells needed for a lively and growing intelligence have only a limited life span, so that there is a point beyond which one either becomes senile or simply stagnates?Or, given the necessary stimulus, is it possible for intelligence to continue to grow right up to the moment of one's death?The ordinary human being stops his growth of intelligence at age fourteen because the biological purpose is complete. At the age of fourteen, the person is mature enough to give birth, to reproduce. Biology is no longer interested beyond this point. This is the reason why the average human being is stuck at the age of fourteen as far as his mental age is concerned. People go on growing physically up to seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred years – in some places like Caucasia, up to one hundred and fifty, even one hundred and eighty. But their mental age remains stuck at fourteen. This has been the routine up to now.This can be changed. And this should be changed because there is infinite potential for growth, but the change will come only if you have some goals beyond biology. If your life remains concerned only with sex, children, family, food, house, then there is no need; that much intelligence is enough. But if your interest is that of an Albert Einstein then your intelligence starts moving sometimes even ahead of your physical body.Emerson is reported to have said – and rightly so when asked how old he was – “Three hundred and sixty years.”The journalist who was asking asked, “Three hundred and sixty? You don’t look more than sixty.”Emerson said, “That’s right. From one point of view, I am sixty years old. But I have done so much work as far as my intelligence is concerned that either six people would be needed to do it or I would need three hundred and sixty years. My intelligence is so far ahead of my physical body.”Intelligence depends on what you are doing with it. The person who is meditating has the greatest possibility of reaching the highest peaks of intelligence, because in meditation he is doing the greatest possible work that a man is capable of, and that is realizing oneself, knowing: “Who am I.” Entering into the deepest interiority of one’s subjectivity is the greatest work for intelligence. Then you cannot even count; you cannot count Gautam Buddha’s intelligence, it is beyond calculations, beyond measurements.And if you are a meditator, as your meditation goes on becoming more and more luminous, your intelligence will be growing to the last breath of your life. Not only that, even after the last breath your intelligence will continue to grow – because you are not going to die, only your body will be dying. And the body has nothing to do with intelligence; the mind has nothing to do with intelligence.Intelligence is the quality of your awareness – more aware, more intelligent. And if you are totally aware, you are as intelligent as this whole existence is.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I remember you so often using the phrase, “Be in the marketplace, but not of it.” I thought this meant that when I was away from you, I would need to constantly remind myself that I was no longer part of the marketplace mentality – I was a sannyasin.Recently, dropped into the so-called normal reality of bargain-hunting and flat-finding, of supermarkets and skinheads, I realized your people aren't part of the marketplace; that now there is no need to remind ourselves – we are very obviously and irrevocably a race apart.Only weeks ago, my question was about helping your vision to be realized. Now, after my recent experience of the world, and seeing its treatment of you, I don't even have the energy to talk to people about you. Does this mean they are too far gone – or am I?The way the world has treated me is absolutely natural, you should not feel offended by it. If they had been respectful, understanding, and loving toward me, that would have been a shock. Their treatment is absolutely expected.You have not gone far away, they have gone far away and they have been going on and on for millions of years. The distance between the real man and the man that exists in the world has become almost unbridgeable. They are so far away from their own reality, they have forgotten the way back home.They have forgotten what the purpose of their being here was.There is an ancient parable:A very wise king wanted his son – his only son, who was going to be his successor – to be a wise man before he succeeded him and became the king of a vast kingdom. The old man chose a way which was very strange: he sent the son away from the kingdom, told him that he was abandoned, that he should forget completely that he was a prince: “He is no longer a prince and I am not going to make him my successor.”All his beautiful clothes, ornaments – everything was taken away. He was given the clothes of a beggar and sent away in the middle of the night in a chariot, to be thrown out of the kingdom. And there were strict orders that he should not be allowed back in the kingdom from anywhere.Years passed; the prince really became a beggar. He really forgot that he was a prince. In fact there had been no effort on his part to forget – he was a beggar. He was begging for clothes, for food, for shelter, and he had slowly accepted the condition he was in.After many years, one day he was sitting outside a hotel, begging. It was hot summer and he wanted enough money to purchase a pair of shoes – secondhand of course – because the earth was almost like fire and to walk without shoes was becoming impossible. He had wounds on his feet, and he was crying out for just a few coins. At that very moment a golden chariot stopped before the hotel and a man descended. The man said, “Your father has called you back. He is very old and dying, and he wants you to be his successor.”In a single split second the beggar disappeared. The man was totally different; you could see it in his face, his eyes. The clothes were of a beggar still, but the man was totally different. A crowd gathered – the same crowd before whom he had been spreading his hands for a few coins – and they all started showing great friendship. But he was not even paying attention to them. He went up to the chariot, sat in it and told the man who had come to get him, “First take me to a beautiful place where I can have a good bath, find clothes worthy of me, shoes, ornaments – because I can go before the king only as a prince.”He came home, and he came as a prince. He said to his father, “Just one thing I want to ask: why did I have to be a beggar for so many years? I had really forgotten… If you had not called me back, I would have died as a beggar, never remembering that once I was a prince.”The father said, “This is what my father did to me. It was not done to harm you, but to give you the experience of the extremes of life – the beggar and the king. And between these two, everybody exists.“That day I told you to forget that you were a prince; now I want you to remember that being a prince or being a beggar are just identities given by others. It is not your reality, it is not you – neither the king, nor the beggar. And the moment you realize that you are not what the world thinks of you, that you are not what you appear to be, but you are something so deeply hidden in yourself that, except for you, nobody else can see you – then a man becomes wise. Knowing it, wisdom follows.“I was angry with my father and I know you must have been angry with me. But forgive me, I had to do it to make it clear to you: don’t get identified with being a king, don’t get identified with being a beggar, because in a split second these identities can be changed. And that which can be changed is not you. You are something eternal, something unchangeable.”People have gone far away from their reality, and to remind them of their reality hurts them. Their treatment of me is nothing but an expression of their wounded hearts. They don’t want to see those wounds; they don’t want to be reminded of anything else which they have tried so hard to forget, to forgive. Somehow they have managed a certain identity in the world and here comes a man who shatters it completely.It is natural they should be angry with me. It is natural they will stone me. It is natural they will do everything that they have always done with people like me. That does not mean that you have to lose hope, that you have to become pessimistic, that you have to stop even talking about me. That way you are not helping them, and that way you are not helping yourself either.Their behavior should not be taken into account at all. They are absolutely asleep. We are trying something which goes against their sleep, and naturally they feel disturbed and react. This is absolutely acceptable. But how long can they react? It is a question of a great challenge.Losing hope means you have lost the game. I am not going to lose the game. To my very last breath I will go on doing the same, whatever their reaction. It is only by bringing their reaction to the surface that there is a possibility of change. It will take time, because millions of years have taken them away from themselves. You should have patience with them. They need your compassion, they need your patience.They will come home, they want to come home, but it goes against the ego to recognize that they are not at home already. It goes against the ego to recognize that they are false, that they are phony.But their reaction – their throwing stones at me, or throwing knives at me, or putting me in jail, or crucifying me – is going to change them. This is the only way that they will start thinking about what they are doing and why they feel offended. You feel offended only when something truthful is told about you, something which you have been hiding. You are never offended by lies. Truth is the greatest offender.Their very disturbance, their fear that I will destroy their morality, I will destroy their religion, I will destroy their tradition, shows one thing: they don’t have religion, they don’t have morality, they don’t have any tradition. They are managing to believe that they have, but it is only a belief which can be easily destroyed; otherwise what happened in Greece?I was just a tourist for four weeks in a country thousands of years old. The Greek Orthodox Church is the oldest church in the world – the Vatican is not that old. Jesus and his sayings were first translated into Greek; that’s why he became “Christ” and his followers became “Christians.” These are Greek words.Now, this country – which for two thousand years has been perpetually propagating Christianity, teaching every child a conditioning – is afraid of a tourist who is going to be there for only four weeks. The archbishop was so disturbed that he threatened that my house would be burned, that I would be stoned if I was not removed immediately from the country because my presence would destroy the morality of the country, it would destroy the religion of the country, the family, the church, the tradition – just in four weeks!If I can manage to do that in four weeks, then whatever I am destroying deserves to be destroyed. It simply means that it is phony. People are not really in it – they are just pretending. Only pretensions can be destroyed in four weeks; realities cannot be destroyed. But the archbishop of the oldest church of Christianity is so afraid, and he goes on saying things which are absolute lies. But that’s what I have been telling you again and again – that all your religions are based on lies and hence they are afraid.The archbishop was sending telegrams to the president of the country, to the prime minister, to other ministers and he was saying that I had been sent specially from hell to destroy the Christian Orthodox Church in Greece. Can you believe a sane man saying something like that? And he holds the highest post, so even the president is afraid, the prime minister is afraid and they have to do something criminal, because that man can provoke the masses against them.But I enjoyed the whole thing for the simple reason that it shows that truth has really a strength and power of its own. Truth has an authority which lies cannot have. You may have been conditioning people with those lies for centuries, but just a ray of light, just a small truth, can destroy that whole structure.So there is no need to be hopeless. Talk to people – and if they are offended, rejoice. It means whatever you have said has disturbed their conditioning and they are trying to protect it. You cannot disturb an unconditioned man. You can say anything about him, but you cannot disturb him.Now my sannyasins are in the world, and I have told them to mix with the world so that they can spread the truth more easily. You are fortunate – just our people, a small minority in the world of five billion people, are enough to create a wildfire. But don’t be in a hurry and don’t be impatient. And there is no need ever to be in a state of losing hope. Truth is intrinsically indefatigable, intrinsically impossible to defeat.It may take time, but there is no scarcity of time. And there is no need that the revolution should happen before our eyes. It is contentment enough that you were part of a movement that changed the world, that you played your role in favor of truth, that you will be part of the victory that is ultimately going to happen.Osho,Why is money such a loaded issue? It seems as though when we have money either we feel guilty about it, and thus compelled to spend it, or insecure, and therefore want to hold onto it.Obviously it affects a multitude of areas that revolve around the pivot of power and freedom. The curious thing is that even to discuss the subject of money is somehow as much a taboo as discussing sex or death at the dinner table. Please comment.Money is a loaded subject for the simple reason that we have not been able to work out a sane system in which money can be a servant to the whole humanity and not the master of a few greedy people.Money is a loaded subject because man’s psychology is full of greed; otherwise money is a simple means of exchanging things, a perfect means. There is nothing wrong in it, but the way we have worked it out everything seems to be wrong in it.If you don’t have money, you are condemned; your whole life is a curse, and your whole life you are trying to have money by any means.If you have money, it does not change the basic thing: you want more, and there is no end to wanting more. And when you finally have too much money – although it is not enough, it is never enough, but it is more than anybody else has – then you start feeling guilty, because the means that you have used to accumulate the money are ugly, inhuman, violent. You have been exploiting, you have been sucking the blood of people, you have been a parasite. So now you have got the money, but it reminds you of all the crimes that you have committed in gaining it.That creates two kinds of people: one who starts donating to charitable institutions to get rid of guilt. They are doing “good work,” they are doing “God’s work.” They are opening hospitals, and schools. All they are doing is trying somehow not to go mad because of the feeling of guilt. All your hospitals, all your schools and colleges and all your charitable institutions are outcomes of guilty people.For example, the Nobel Prize was founded by a man who earned money in the First World War by creating all kinds of destructive bombs, machines. The First World War was fought using the means supplied by Mr Nobel. And he earned such a huge amount of money. Both the parties were getting war material from the same source; he was the only person who was creating war materials on a vast scale. So whoever was killed, was killed by him. It doesn’t matter whether he belonged to this side or to that side; whoever was killed was killed by his bombs.So in old age, when he had all the money in the world a man can have, he established the Nobel Prize. It is given as a peace award – by a man who earned the money by war! Whoever is working for peace receives a Nobel Prize. It is given for great scientific inventions, great artistic, creative inventions.And with the Nobel Prize comes big money – right now it is over one million dollars. The best award, and more than one million dollars with it; and it goes on increasing because money goes on becoming less and less valuable. That man must have created such a fortune, that all these Nobel Prizes that are distributed every year are given only out of the interest. The basic money remains intact, will remain intact forever. Every year so much interest accumulates that you can give twenty Nobel Prizes.All charitable work is really an effort to wash your guilt – literally. When Pontius Pilate ordered the crucifixion of Jesus, the first thing he did was to wash his hands. Strange! The order for crucifixion does not make your hands dirty, why should you wash your hands? It is something significant: he was feeling guilty. It took two thousand years for man to understand this, because for two thousand years nobody even mentioned or bothered to comment on why Pontius Pilate washed his hands. It was Sigmund Freud who found out that people who are feeling guilty start washing their hands. It is symbolic, as if their hands are full of blood.So if you have money, it creates guilt. One way is to wash your hands by helping charitable institutions, and this is exploited by the religions. They are exploiting your guilt, but they go on buttressing your ego, saying you are doing great spiritual work. It is nothing to do with spirituality; it is just that they are trying to console the criminals.The first way is what religions have been doing. The other is that the man feels so guilty that either he goes mad or commits suicide. His own existence becomes just anguish. Each breath becomes heavy. And the strange thing is that he has worked his whole life to attain all this money because the society provokes the desire, the ambition, to be rich, to be powerful. Money does bring power; it can purchase everything, except those few things which cannot be purchased by it. But nobody bothers about those things.Meditation cannot be purchased, love cannot be purchased, friendship cannot be purchased, gratitude cannot be purchased – but nobody is concerned with these things. Everything else, the whole world of things, can be purchased. So every child starts climbing the ladder of ambition, and he knows if he has money then everything is possible. So the society breeds the idea of ambition, of being powerful, of being rich.It is an absolutely wrong society. It creates psychologically sick, insane people. And when they have reached the goal that the society and the educational system have given to them, they find themselves at a dead end. The road ends there; there is nothing beyond. So either become a phony religious person or just jump into madness, into suicide, and destroy yourself.Money can be a beautiful thing if it is not in the hands of the individuals – if it is part of the communes, part of the societies, and the society takes care of everybody. Everybody creates, everybody contributes, but nobody is paid by money; they are paid by respect, paid by love, paid by gratitude, and are given all that is necessary for life.Money should not be in the hands of individuals, otherwise it will create this problem of being burdened with guilt. And money can make people’s lives very rich. If the commune owns the money, the commune can give you all the facilities that you need, all the education, all the creative dimensions of life. The society will be enriched and nobody will feel guilty. And because the society has done so much for you, you would like to pay it back by your service.If you are a doctor you will do the best you can do, if you are a surgeon you will do the best you can do because it is the society that has helped you to become the best surgeon, given you all the education, given you every facility, taken care of you from your very childhood. That’s what I mean when I say that children should belong to the communes and the commune should take care of everything.And all that is created by people will not be hoarded by individuals; it will be a commune resource. It will be yours. It will be for you, but it will not be in your hands. It will not make you ambitious; it will make you more creative, more generous, more grateful, so the society goes on becoming better and more beautiful. Then money is not a problem.Communes can use money as an exchange, because each commune cannot have all the things it needs. It can purchase from another commune; then money can be used as a means of exchange – but from commune to commune, not from individual to individual, so that every commune is capable of bringing in things which are not available there. So money’s basic function remains, but its ownership changes from the individual to the collective. To me this is basic communism: the money’s function changes from the individual to the collective.But the religions will not want that. Politicians will not want it because their whole game will be destroyed. Their whole game depends on ambition, power, greed, lust.It seems very strange to say that the religions exist almost on irreligious things, or it will be better to say on anti-religious things. They use those things, but on the surface you don’t see that. You see charity, but you don’t see from where charity comes and why. In the first place, why should there be a need for charity? Why should there be orphans, why should there be beggars? Why in the first place should we allow beggars to happen and orphans to happen? And in the second place, why are there people who are very willing to do charity work, to give money, to give their whole lives to charity and serving the poor?On the surface everything seems to be right because we have lived in this kind of structure for so long; otherwise it is absolutely absurd. No child is an orphan if the commune owns the children, and if the commune owns everything, then nobody is a beggar; we all share whatsoever we have. But then religions will not have their sources of exploitation. They will not have the poor to console, they will not have the rich to help get rid of their guilt. These are the reasons they are so much against me.My work is almost like that of a gravedigger who goes on digging up beautiful marble graves and bringing out skeletons. Nobody wants to see them. People are afraid of skeletons.One of my friends was a student in a medical college, and I used to stay with him once in a while, while traveling. If I had to stay the whole night, rather than staying at the station I would stay in the hostel with this student. One day it happened that somehow, late in the night, the discussion went on about so many things, and came around to ghosts. And I was simply joking; I said, “They are a reality. It is strange that you have not come across them.”There were almost fifteen students there in the room and they said, “No, we don’t believe in them. We have dissected so many bodies; we have never found any soul, and there is no ghost, nothing.”So I prepared my friend… In their surgical ward they had many skeletons, and they also had another ward where autopsies were done when beggars died or somebody was killed or committed suicide. It was a big city, it was the capital of a state. The wards were joined together; on this side of the hall were the skeletons, and the other side of the hall many dead bodies used to wait. And who cares about the beggars and this and that? – whenever there was time the professors would do the autopsies and decide about the death.I told my friend, “Do one thing: tomorrow night, lie down on a stretcher where the dead bodies are lying and I will bring in your friends. You have to do nothing. In the middle of the conversation, when I am there with your friends, you just have to sit up. From the lying position, simply sit up.”It was a simple thing, there was no problem. He said, “I will do it.”But a problem arose, it became very complicated… We went into the surgical hall, and my friend was lying down. As we entered he got up, and all fifteen people started trembling. They could not believe their eyes that a dead body…! But the problem became real because a real dead body got up! So my friend who was pretending jumped up and he said, “There are really ghosts! Just look at that body!”There had been some misunderstanding: that man was in a coma. Some servants had brought him in the night, so they put him in with the dead bodies. Then he came back to consciousness, so he stood up. When he saw these people he thought it must be morning and time to get up and ask what is going on. Even I could not manage at first to work out what had happened, because I had sent only one. This second man…! We closed the doors and started to leave. The man was shouting, “Wait, I am alive! Why I am being put here?”We closed the doors. We said, “It is not our business,” and we left. It was difficult to convince my friend who had been laying there that it was not a ghost, that the other man was just a mistake. He said, “But never a next time! It was good that he stood up only when you had all come. If he had stood up when I was lying there alone, I would have died! I could not have survived.”If you go on digging at the roots – which are ugly, which nobody wants to see… That’s why words like sex or death or money have become taboos. There is nothing in them that you cannot discuss at the dining table, but the reason is that we have repressed them deep down and we don’t want anybody to dig them out. We are afraid.We are afraid of death because we know we are going to die, and we don’t want to die. We want to keep our eyes closed. We want to live in a state as if “Everybody else is going to die, but not me.” That is the normal psychology of everybody: “I am not going to die.”To bring up death is taboo. People become afraid because it reminds them of their own death. They are so much concerned with trivia, and death is coming. But they want that trivia to keep them engaged. It functions as a curtain: they are not going to die, at least not now. Later on: “Whenever it happens, we will see.”They are afraid of sex because so many jealousies are involved. Their own life experiences have been bitter. They have loved and failed, and they really don’t want to bring the subject up – it hurts.So is the case with money, because money immediately brings in the hierarchy of the society. So if there are twelve persons sitting around the table, you can immediately put them in a hierarchy; the similarity, the equality is lost for the moment. Then somebody is richer than you, somebody is poorer than you, and suddenly you see yourself not as friends but as enemies, because you are all fighting for the same money, you are grabbing at the same money. You are not friends, you are all competitors, enemies.So at least when you are eating at the dining table you want no hierarchy, not the struggle of the ordinary life. For a moment you want to forget all those things. You want to talk only of good things – but these are all facades.Why not create a life which is really good? Why not create a life where money does not create a hierarchy, but simply gives more and more opportunity to everybody? Why not create a life where sex does not make bitter experiences, jealousies, failures; where sex becomes just fun – nothing more than any other game, just a biological game.A simple understanding. I can’t conceive why… If I love some woman and she enjoys some man, it is perfectly okay. It does not disturb my love. In fact I love her more because she is being loved by more people; I have chosen a really beautiful woman. It will be really ugly to find a woman whom only I love, and she cannot find anybody else in the whole world to love her. That will be really hell.And what is wrong if she is happy sometimes with somebody else? An understanding heart will be happy that she is happy. You love a person and you want her to be happy. If she is happy with you, good; if she is happy with somebody else it is as good. There is no problem in it.Once we stop the old nonsense that has been continuously poured into our minds – of monogamy, of one-to-one relationship, of fidelity, which is all nonsense. When there are so many beautiful people in the world, why shouldn’t they be intermixing? You play tennis; that does not mean your whole life you have to play tennis with the same partner – fidelity…! Life should be richer.So it is only that a little understanding is needed and love will not be a problem, sex will not be taboo. Nor will death be a taboo once your life has no problems, no anxieties; once you have accepted your life in its totality, death is not the end of life, it is part of it.In accepting life in its totality you have accepted death too; it is just a rest. The whole day you have been working – and do you want to rest in the night or not?There are a few insane people who don’t want to sleep. I have come across one person who was brought to me because he did not want to sleep. The whole night he made every effort to keep himself awake. The problem was that he was afraid that if he sleeps, then what is the guarantee that he will wake up? Now, who can give the guarantee? That is really a great problem – who can give him a guarantee?He wants a guarantee: “I will wake up. What is the guarantee that I will not go on sleeping? – because I have seen many people just go to sleep and – finished! People say that they are dead, and they take them to the burning place and burn them. I don’t want to be burned. So why take the risk? This sleep is risky!” Now sleep can become a problem.Death is a little longer sleep, a little deeper. The daily sleep rejuvenates you, makes you again capable of functioning better, efficiently. All tiredness is gone, you are again young. Death does the same on a deeper level. It changes the body, because now the body cannot be rejuvenated only by ordinary sleep, it has become too old. It needs a more drastic change, it needs a new body. Your life energy wants a new form. Death is simply a sleep so that you can easily move into a new form.Once you accept life in its totality, life includes death. Then death is not against it but is just a servant, just as sleep is. Your life is eternal, it is going to be there forever and forever. But the body is not eternal, it has to be changed. It becomes old, and then it is better to have a new body, a new form, rather than dragging the old.To me, a man of understanding will not have any problems. He will only have clarity to see – and the problems evaporate. And tremendous silence is left behind, of great beauty and great benediction.

https://oshoworld.com/osho-audio-discourse-english-b/

Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/beyond-psychology-02/

Osho,I hear you saying that we are all leaves on the same tree, and that enlightenment is only possible when we really come together. On the other hand, I hear you saying that only the single individual can fulfill his being in deep aloneness.I feel both of these are right, but still I have no real understanding of it. Please comment.Both are right, but they appear to be contradictory; hence the confusion. On the one hand I am saying that when you are one with existence you come to realization – and to be one with existence means you disappear, you are no more. And on the other hand I am telling you to be yourself, to be authentically your original face; only then can you experience realization.I can see your dilemma. You feel that they are both right – that is significant to remember, that you feel that they are both right – but your mind is not convinced, your thinking is not convinced. Your thinking creates questions: “How can they both be right?”Mind functions in an either–or way. Either this can be right or its opposite can be right. Both together cannot be right as far as mind, its logic, its rationality is concerned.If mind is either–or then the heart is both–and. The heart has no logic, but sensitivity, perceptivity. It can see that not only can they both be together, in fact they are not two – it is just one phenomenon seen from two different aspects. And there is much more than the two; that’s why I say both–and.And, if there is a question of choosing between the mind and the heart, the heart is always right – because mind is a creation of the society. It has been educated. It has been given to you by the society, not by existence. The heart is unpolluted, it is pure existence. Hence it has sensitivity.Look from the viewpoint of the heart, and the contradiction starts melting like ice. I say to you, “Be one with the universe; you have to disappear and let existence be. You just have to be absent so that existence can be present in its totality.” But the person who has to disappear is not your reality, it is only your personality; it is just an idea in you. In reality you are already one with existence; you cannot exist in any other way. You are existence. But the personality creates a deception and makes you feel separate.You can assume yourself to be separate – existence gives you total freedom, even against itself. You can think of yourself as a separate entity, an ego. And that is the barrier that is holding you back from melting into the vastness that surrounds you every moment – it has no closed doors, all its doors are open. Sometimes you do feel a certain door open – but only for a fragment of a moment; your personality cannot afford more. Those moments you call moments of beauty, moments of ecstasy.Looking at a sunset, just for a second you forget your separateness. You are the sunset. That is the moment when you feel the beauty of it. But the moment you say “It is a beautiful sunset,” you are no longer feeling it; you have come back to your separate, enclosed entity of the ego. Now the mind is speaking.This is one of the mysteries, that the mind can speak – and knows nothing; and the heart knows everything – and cannot speak. Perhaps to know too much makes it difficult to speak. The mind knows so little, it is possible for it to speak. Language is enough for it, but is not enough for the heart.But sometimes, under the impact of a certain moment – a starry night, a sunrise, a beautiful flower – just for a moment you forget that you are separate. And even forgetting it releases tremendous beauty and ecstasy.When I say you have to disappear for the realization of the ultimate, I do not mean you; I mean the you that you are not. I mean the you that you think you are.With the second statement, that only in feeling one with existence, totally dissolved in it, do you realize yourself, you realize truth, there is no contradiction for the heart, because this “you” that you realize when you are one with existence is not the old you. That was your personality, and this is your individuality. That was given by the society, and this is nature, reality, a gift of existence. You can forget it, but you cannot destroy it.The other you, the false you, you can create, but you cannot make it real. It will remain a shadow, a painted face. It will never become your original face.When I was a professor in the university, in the professors’ campus there used to be a small street. There were very few bungalows and those were the best bungalows – for the deans, and the vice-chancellor, and the heads of the departments. So very silent, empty, no traffic. And the street was not long. It went just half a mile and then there was an end, a dead end, and a deep valley.Whenever there was rain… I loved to walk in the rain. The last house saw it happening again and again, that whenever it rained, I was certain to appear on the street. And that was the last house; then there was the valley.They thought I must be mad – without an umbrella, soaked with water, with a beard, long hair, and walking so slowly and at ease, as if there the rain was no problem. And then I used to stand by the side of a big bodhi tree, just at the very end of the street.The bodhi tree has many beauties. One of the beauties is that its leaves are such that when it is raining you can stand underneath it and save yourself from the rains: the leaves prevent the water from reaching to you. And it has very thick foliage, so the water goes on gathering on the leaves. The leaves are like cups, so they hold much.If you are suddenly caught in the rain and don’t want to spoil your clothes, the bodhi tree protects you longer than any other tree. But the other beauty – which was more important for me – is that when the rain has stopped, then under the bodhi tree, rain starts! – because how long can it contain all that water? Sooner or later it becomes weightier, and leaves start… So when the whole world is silent, under the bodhi tree it is raining.I used to go to the end of the street and rest under the bodhi tree. That was another madness to the people of the house. Only in the beginning few minutes of rain can the bodhi tree protect you; after that is dangerous, the most dangerous. The rain has stopped, but it will not stop under the bodhi tree for at least one hour.The children of the house, the wife, daughters, sons would all gather in the verandah and look at me. And it became an absolute thing to them, that both things happened together – rain and my coming to their house.The house was given to one of the most important physicists, the head of the physics department and he was very interested in me because once in a while I was making statements which were bringing physics and mysticism closer than ever. Perhaps the same statement can be made by the physicist as is being made by the mystics.He was a very humble man. He had been teaching all over the world in different universities. Whenever I was giving a lecture in the students’ union – which was once or twice a week, almost every week – he would certainly come. Many other professors used to come, but he was absolutely regular. We became friends.He was very old. He had worked with Albert Einstein, and after Albert Einstein’s death he went to America in his place – because he was his closest colleague, and nobody could have taken that place except him.We became such great friends that he said, “Sometime I would like you to come to my house; I would like to introduce you to my wife and my children.” I had no idea that those were the people who knew me already, and I knew them already.When I reached their house they all started giggling, and he was very angry. He said, “I have brought a friend. Accepted he is very young and I am very old, and the friendship looks strange, but our conceptions about reality are very close, and you should not behave like this – you have never behaved like this.”But the wife said, “You don’t know this man.”I said to him, “She is right, we have been well-acquainted for almost two years.”He said, “What! You are acquainted with my wife and children?”I said, “Not actually, but a sort of acquaintance is there.” Then I told him, “I come here on this street when it is raining; I love rain, and these people love to see me – a madman. And don’t think they are unmannerly: you are introducing me and they are laughing and giggling, even your wife cannot contain herself.”This physicist had met a sannyasin in America, and had sent me a message: “The last person I want to see is you, and I am coming back to India as soon as possible just to see you. The reason is that I feel you are perfectly right, that the way of the heart in seeing things is far closer to reality than the way of the mind.”But before he could come to India, he died. I feel that I must have been in his thoughts when he died.We are one as far as our reality is concerned. We look separate as far as our fabricated egos are concerned.So when I say dissolve your “you,” I mean your own creation, or the creation of the society in you, and just feel the silence of the moment when you are not. Then you will feel far more in tune with clouds and the ocean and the mountains.The day you drop it completely is the greatest day in your life, because this brings you the whole universe. You lose nothing – you lose only a false idea – and you attain everything: the whole universe, the infinite universe with all its beauties, with all its treasures.But before you can drop the false I, you have to find your real I; otherwise dropping the false I you will feel you are becoming empty.That’s why I say become an individual, be yourself. That simply means that feeling your reality you will be, without any trouble, capable of dropping the false. In fact the false will drop itself. As the real comes in, the false goes out. And the real is from one standpoint, individual – individual against personality.The personality was just hodgepodge; something was put by your mother, something by your father, something by your neighbors, friends, wife, teachers, priests, leaders… It was a patchwork, it was not indivisible. It was almost falling apart – any moment, a small accident and it will fall apart. It had no soul connecting all its parts. It had no wholeness, it was only parts.Against personality I use the word individuality in the meaning of indivisibility. Individual means indivisible: you cannot divide it, there are no parts – it cannot fall apart. It is solid rock, it is one piece, seen in comparison with personality. But that is only one aspect.Seen from the universal, you are no longer individual either. Even that much demarcation disappears. You are the whole. The winds, the trees, the moon are not separated anywhere; neither are you. You are breathing every moment. Existence is not separate from you, even when you think you are separate.When you know that you are not separate, it is a tremendous realization. Then all fear of losing your face, all fear of losing your personality – which is always slipping – disappears. You have come to the origins. You have come to the eternal, to the universal. This is what I call enlightenment. You have become full of light and clarity. Now you live the whole mystery of existence. Seeing a roseflower, you become it. You don’t see it from outside; you feel it from its innermost being. Its petals are yours, its perfume is yours. You are not an observer – you are it.Krishnamurti used to say again and again, his whole life he was saying it… I don’t think the people who were listening were really listening to him. This is his most repeated observation: that the observed becomes the observer, or the observer becomes the observed.You don’t see a sunset from far away; you are in it, you are part of all those beautiful colors. And to live existence in such deep empathy is the richest experience man is capable of.Trust your feeling. Never trust your mind – your mind is the Judas.Osho,The more I move into meditation, the more I feel responsible for myself and for the situation in the whole world. How is that possible?It is the same thing – it is the same question.The more you become yourself, the more you will feel responsible for the world because you are becoming more a part of the world – you are not separate from it. Your being authentically yourself means a tremendous responsibility, but it is not a burden. It is a rejoicing that you can do something for existence.Existence has done so much for you, there is no way to pay it back. But we can do something. It will be very small compared to what existence has done for us, but it will show our gratitude. It is not a question of whether it is big or small; the question is that it is our prayerfulness, our gratitude, and our totality is involved in it.Yes, it will happen: the more you become yourself, the more you will start feeling responsibilities which you had never felt before.I am reminded of the life of Mahavira, the most important Jaina philosopher:He is going from one village to another village with his close disciple, Goshalak, and this is the question they are discussing. Mahavira is insisting, “Your responsibility toward existence shows how much you have attained to your authentic reality. We cannot see your authentic reality, but we can see your responsibility.”As they are walking, they come across a small plant. Goshalak is a logician – he pulls the plant and throws it away. It was a small plant with small roots.Mahavira said, “This is irresponsibility. But you cannot do anything against existence. You can try, but it is going to backfire.”Goshalak said, “What can existence do to me? I have pulled up this plant; now existence cannot bring it to life again.”Mahavira laughed. They went into the town, they were going to beg for their food. After taking food, they were coming back, and they were surprised: the plant was rooted again. While they were in the town it had started raining, and the roots of the plant, finding the support of the rain, went back into the soil. They were small roots, it was windy, and the wind helped the plant to stand up again.By the time they had come back the plant was back to its normal position. Mahavira said, “Look at the plant. I told you, you cannot do anything against existence. You can try, but that will turn against you, because that will go on separating you from existence. It will not bring you closer.“Just see that plant. Nobody could have imagined that this will happen, that the rain and the wind together will manage for the small plant to be back, rooted into the earth. It is going to live its life.“It seems to us a small plant, but it is part of a vast universe, a vast existence, of the greatest power there is.” And Mahavira said to Goshalak, “From this point our paths separate. I cannot allow a man to live with me who is against existence and feels no responsibility.”Mahavira’s whole philosophy of nonviolence can be better expressed as the philosophy of reverence for existence. Nonviolence is simply a part of it.It will go on happening: the more you will find yourself, the more you will find yourself responsible for many things you have never cared about. Let that be a criterion: the more you find yourself responsible for people, things, existence, the more you can be at ease that you are on the right track.One of my professors, Dr Ras Biharidas – he was a very old man – had lived his life alone, because he was so contented, and so joyous in himself that he never needed anybody else. He was the head of the department, so he had a big bungalow – living alone in it. And as we became acquainted with each other, he became very loving toward me, like a father.He said, “There is no need for you to live in the hostel, you can come and live with me. I have lived all alone in my life.” He used to play sitar – perhaps better than anybody else I have heard, and I have heard all the best sitarists. But he never played it to entertain people; he just played out of his joy.And his timing was such that nobody would have ever thought… Every day, at three o’clock in the morning he would play his sitar. For seventy years he had been playing. The difficulty arose the first day, because I used to read up to three, and then I would go to bed – and that was the time for him to wake up.This was a disturbance for both of us, because I loved to read things that I liked, not silently but loudly. When you are just reading with your eyes there is only a partial connection. But when you read poetry loudly you are involved in it; for a moment, you become the poet. You forget it is somebody else’s poetry; it starts becoming part of your blood and bones and marrow.Naturally it was difficult for him to sleep. And when I would go to sleep at three it was difficult for me to sleep. Just by my side, in the next room, he was playing his electric instruments – the guitar, sitar, and other instruments. In two days we were both tired.He said to me, “Live in this house – I am leaving!”I said, “You need not leave. And where would you go? I have at least a place in the hostel. I will leave.”But he said, “I cannot say to you to leave. I love you, I love your presence here. But our habits are dangerous to each other. I have never interfered with anybody; there has never been anybody with me to interfere with. And I know you; you will not interfere with me. But this will kill both of us! You will not say, ‘Change your time.’ I will not say, ‘Change your time.’ I cannot say that you should leave the house; that’s why I said that I am leaving – you live in the house.”I persuaded him, “I cannot live in the house. Once you leave the house, the university cannot allow me to live in this house – this house is meant for you. I have to go to my hostel.” With tears in his eyes he came to lead me to the hostel.I remembered him at this point because I have never seen anybody else in my life who was so responsive, so sensitive. Even if by mistake he had hit the chair, he will apologize to the chair. I told him, “Dr Biharidas, this is going too far!”He said, “That’s how I feel. I have hit the poor chair. She cannot speak; otherwise she would have been angry. And she is part of this whole cosmos, and she has served me, and I have not been friendly toward her; I have hit her. I have to apologize.”People in the university thought that he was mad. A man who asks forgiveness from a chair, in this world cannot be thought to be sane. I have watched him closely; he was one of the sanest persons. His responsibility was tremendous.He could not say to me… It was his house. He could have said to me, “You can read silently,” or “You can read at some other time,” or “You can read while I am playing my instrument.” But that he would not do. It would have been easy – that’s what everybody else is doing in the world. But his sensitivity and deep respect for the other person, even his reverence for things, was impeccable.People have looked at his behavior and have thought, “He is not in the right state of mind.” But nobody bothered to think that the right state of mind makes people responsible, so responsible that they start looking mad to others.For example, Mahavira slept only on one side his whole life. He would not change his side in the night. Asked why, he said – because he was living naked, having nothing, lying down on the bare floor – if he changes his side, some ant, some small insects may be crushed by his turning, and he will not do such a thing. His responsibility toward very small things simply shows his integrity with existence.His way of begging will explain to you what I mean. Nowhere else in the world has anybody done such a thing – so much trust for existence! In the morning, after his meditations, he would visualize in what condition he was going to accept today’s food. And sometimes it happened that thirty days would pass and he would not be able to receive food because what he has visualized, a particular condition, was not fulfilled. Strange things…For example, he thinks that he will accept food if a woman at the house where he stands begging comes out of the house with her baby still sucking milk from her breast. Only then will he accept food from that woman; otherwise that day is gone. Then next day he will try again.His people persistently said to him, “This is strange! There have been great ascetics… You can fast as much as you want, that is another thing.”He said, “This is not a question of fasting. I am leaving it to existence, and I am making a condition so that I can know if existence wants me to eat today or not. It is between me and existence. If the condition is not fulfilled, that simply means existence wants me to fast. It is not my fast, it is simply that existence does not want me to eat today, and the wisdom of the whole is bigger.”Sometimes such strange conditions were fulfilled that nobody could have imagined that it would be possible. For example, one of the conditions that was fulfilled…After thirteen days remaining hungry, fasting, he continued: unless that condition was fulfilled he would not change the condition. He would change it only when it is fulfilled; then he would add the second condition.The condition was that a princess – no ordinary woman, but a great princess – chains on her legs, handcuffed… If she offers food to him, he will accept. Now, this is asking something absurd. In the first place, if she is a princess, why should she be handcuffed, with chains on her feet? And if she is handcuffed and with chains on her feet, she will be in jail! She may be a princess, but she will not be able to offer food.But it happened that one of the kings got very angry with his daughter – her name was Chandana – and out of anger he ordered that she should be handcuffed and chained for twenty-four hours. She was not put in jail, but she was free in the home.When Mahavira came… And that was the argument that created the whole problem: she wanted to offer food to Mahavira. She loved the man, she loved his way of thinking, and her father was absolutely against it. That’s why she was handcuffed and chained – she would not be able to go out of the house in that way because it would be so embarrassing. When Mahavira came, he came with thousands of his followers.But she went out with the food, and those thousands of followers could not believe their eyes. Because that very day, after thirteen days, they had insisted, “Mahavira, we would like to know what the condition is. We are not going to tell anybody; we just want to see whether there is any meaning in your conditions. Is existence compassionate enough, is existence caring enough? Does it bother about you? Just for once, we want to know what your condition is.”He said, “This is my condition…”They said, “My God, this may never be fulfilled!”Mahavira said, “That simply means existence does not need me. I have no complaint; perhaps my work is completed and I am unnecessarily being a burden.” But the condition was fulfilled.Such trust in existence, such unwavering trust, comes when you start taking responsibilities. As you feel more responsible toward small things around you, existence goes on responding in a thousand-fold way. You are not a loser.Osho,Can a chain-smoker become meditative? I have smoked for twenty-five years, and I feel that in smoking I stop going deeply into meditation. Still, I can't stop smoking. Can you tell me something about it?A meditator cannot smoke, for the simple reason that he never feels nervous, in anxiety, in tension.Smoking helps – on a momentary basis – to forget about your anxieties, your tensions, your nervousness. Other things can do the same; chewing gum can do the same, but smoking does it the best.In your deep unconscious, smoking is related with sucking milk from your mother’s breast. And as civilization has grown, no woman wants the child to be brought up by breast-feeding – naturally; he will destroy the breast. The breast will lose its roundness, its beauty.The child has different needs. The child does not need a round breast, because with a round breast the child will die. If the breast is really round, while he is sucking the milk he cannot breathe; his nose will be stopped by the breast. He will get suffocated.The child’s needs are different from a painter’s need, from a poet’s need, from that of a man of aesthetic sensibility. The child needs a long breast so his nose is free and he can do both – he can breathe and also feed himself. So every child will try to make the breast according to his needs. And no woman wants the breast to be destroyed. It is part of her beauty, her body, her shape.So as civilization has grown, children are taken away from the breast of the mother sooner and sooner, and the longing to drink from the breast goes on in their minds. And whenever people are in some nervous state, in tension, in anxiety, the cigarette helps. It helps them to become a child again, relaxed in their mother’s lap.The cigarette is very symbolic; it is just like the nipple of the mother. The smoke that goes through it is warm just like the milk is warm, so it has a certain symmetry. You become engaged in it and for the moment you are reduced to a child who has no anxieties, no problems, no responsibilities.You say that for thirty years you have been smoking, a chain-smoker; you want to stop it, but you cannot stop it. You cannot because you have to change the causes that have produced it.I have been successful with many of my sannyasins. First they laughed when I suggested to them: they could not believe that such a simple solution could help them. I said to them, “Don’t try to stop smoking, but rather bring a milk bottle that is used for small children. And in the night when nobody can see you, under your blanket enjoy the milk, the warm milk. It is not going to do any harm at least.”They said, “But how is it going to help?”I said, “Forget about how and why, just do it. It will give you good food before you go to sleep and there is no harm. My feeling is that the next day you will not feel so much need for cigarettes. So count.”They were surprised. Slowly, slowly the cigarettes were disappearing, because their basic need which had remained hanging in the middle was fulfilled: they were no longer children, they were maturing and the cigarette disappeared.You cannot stop it. You have to do something which is not harmful, which is healthier, as a substitute for the time being, so that you grow up and the cigarettes stop themselves.Small children know this – I have learned the secret from them. If a child is crying or weeping and is hungry, and the mother is far away, then he will put his thumb in his mouth and start sucking it. He will forget all about hunger and crying and weeping, and will fall asleep. He has found a substitute – although that substitute is not going to give him food, at least it gives a sense that something similar is happening. It relaxes him.I have even tried a few of my sannyasins with sucking the thumb. If you are too afraid to bring a bottle and fill it with milk, and if your wife comes to know about it or your children see you doing it, then the best way is, go to sleep with your thumb in your mouth. Suck it and enjoy it.They have always laughed, but they have always come back and said, “It helps, and the number of cigarettes next day is less and it goes on becoming less.” Perhaps it will take a few weeks, then the cigarettes will disappear. Once they have disappeared without your stopping them… Your stopping is repression, and anything repressed will try to come up again with greater force, with vengeance.Never stop anything. Find the basic cause of it and try to work out some substitute which is not harmful so the basic cause disappears – the cigarette is only a symptom. So the first thing is, stop stopping it. The second thing is, get a good bottle, and don’t be embarrassed. If you are embarrassed, then use your own thumb. Your own thumb will not be that great, but it will help.I have never seen anybody failing who has used what I am saying. One day, suddenly, he cannot believe that he was unnecessarily destroying his health rather than having pure and clean air, smoking dirty smoke and destroying his lungs.This is going to become a problem more and more, because as the women’s liberation movement grows, children will not be breast-fed. I am not saying that they should be breast-fed; but they should be given some substitute breast so that their unconscious does not carry some wound that will create problems for them. Chewing gum and cigarettes and cigars are all symptoms. In different countries they are different.In India they go on chewing pan leaves, or there are many people who use snuff. These are all the same. The snuff looks far away, but it is not that far away. The people who are nervous, tense, in anxiety, will take a dose of snuff. It gives a good sneeze, clears their mind, shakes their whole being, and it feels good.But those anxieties will come back. The snuff cannot destroy them. You have to destroy the very base of your being nervous. Why should you be nervous?Many journalists have told me, “One of the greatest difficulties is that we feel nervous with you.” And they have said, “This is strange because we interview politicians – they feel nervous, we make them nervous. You make us nervous, and immediately the desire to smoke arises. Then you prevent us smoking: ‘You cannot smoke here.’ You are allergic.“You have a great strategy! – we cannot smoke, and you are making us nervous and tense, and this allergy you have which prevents us from smoking… So you have no way out for us.”But why should they feel nervous before me? Those politicians are powerful people – if they feel nervous before them, it can be understood. But the reality is, those powerful people are just hollow inside and that power is borrowed from others, and they are afraid for their respectability. They have to think twice about each word they have to speak,. They are nervous that these journalists may create a situation in which their influence over people is destroyed. Their image that they have created has to become better and better. That is their fear. Because of that fear, the journalist – any journalist, who has no power – can make them nervous.To me there is no problem. I have no desire for respectability. I am notorious enough – they cannot make me more notorious. I have done everything that could have made me nervous; I have managed already. What can they do to me? – I don’t have any power to lose and I can say anything that I want because I am not worried about being contradictory, inconsistent. On the contrary, I enjoy being contradictory, inconsistent.They start feeling nervous, and the nervousness immediately brings the idea to do something, to get engaged, so nobody feels that you are nervous. Just watch: when you start feeling that you need a cigarette, just watch why you need it. There is something that is making you nervous, and you don’t want to be caught.I am reminded…One day, in a New York church, as the bishop entered he saw a strange man, a perfect hippy type. But he made the bishop nervous, because that man looked into his eyes and said, “Do you know who I am? I am Lord Jesus Christ.”The bishop phoned Rome: “What am I supposed to do?” he asked the pope, “a hippy-looking man, but he also looks like Jesus Christ. And I am alone here, early in the morning, and he has come here. I have never been told what we have to do when Jesus Christ comes, so I want instruction, clearly, so I don’t commit any mistake.”The pope himself was nervous. He said, “Do only one thing: look busy! What else can be done? Meanwhile, give a phone call to the police station. Look busy so that man cannot see your nervousness.”Cigarettes help you to look busy; your nervousness is covered by it. So don’t try to stop it; otherwise you will feel nervous and then you will fall back to the old pattern. The desire is there because something is left incomplete in you.Complete it – and there are simple methods to complete it. Just a baby’s milk bottle will do. It will give you good food, it will make you healthier and it will take away all your desire for looking busy!

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The pope and his bishops – are they really fully aware of how they are cheating their people? I can't imagine that they are just a big heap of criminals, without any respect for truth.The religious leaders are as asleep as the people they are leading. The only difference between the leaders and the led is theoretical. The leaders have a great store of theological knowledge, all borrowed. Nothing in it is of their own experience, but it gives them great authority over the people who don’t have even borrowed knowledge. And these leaders are consistently emphasizing the fact: “You are sinners, you are ignorant. We are the saints, we are the knowers.”The poor masses cannot make a distinction between authentic knowing and borrowed knowledge. Even these leaders – popes, bishops, shankaracharyas, ayatollahs – even they are not alert of the distinction. They know only one kind of knowledge, and that is borrowed knowledge. They have no awareness of a different dimension of knowing, so whatever they are doing is done in deep sleep. They are not cheating people consciously.You cannot cheat anybody consciously. Consciousness will prevent you from doing anything as ugly as cheating, deceiving, pretending, being a hypocrite, condemning people as sinners and fulfilling your own egos as great saints. No, it is not done consciously.I never, for a single moment, suspect their good intentions. Whatever these people are doing, they are doing with good intentions; but the questions is not of good intentions, the question is: what is the result? You may murder me with good intentions, but your good intentions cannot justify my murder.I have come in contact with almost all kinds of religious scholars, and on one point they are the same, whether Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jewish. That point is that they are perfectly at ease, feeling very good in whatever they are doing – they are doing “God’s work,” and they are spreading “wisdom.” They don’t even know the meaning of wisdom. They have never tasted anything like that; they have heard about it, they have read about it, they have crammed hundreds of scriptures.I am reminded of a historical event:When Alexander the Great invaded India, his master was no one other than Aristotle, the father of logic in the western hemisphere. Aristotle had asked him, “When you come back, bring the four Vedas of the Hindus. The rumors for hundreds of years have been that those four books contain all the knowledge that is in the world; if you know those four Vedas, you know all. So bring those four Vedas for me.”Alexander said, “That is very simple.” But in those days the Vedas were not printed. Hindus resisted printing them for hundreds of years after the printing press was invented; they never wanted their sources of wisdom to be printed and sold in the market. Knowledge cannot be sold, and you cannot purchase wisdom. And purchasing the four Vedas from a bookstall, you will be deceiving yourself – those words are dead.Alexander inquired because he was thinking he could get them easily, but it was difficult. Very few prominent brahmin families had copies of the Vedas, and that was their whole treasure. But finally he found one old brahmin… People said, “He has one of the most authentic copies of the Vedas. And he is old; you can get them from him.”Alexander went to the old man. The old man said, “There is no problem, but traditionally we can give the Vedas only when the sun is rising. You have come at the wrong time – the sun is setting. Come tomorrow morning, just before sunrise. As the sun is rising I will hand over all the four Vedas to you.”Alexander said, “I was not thinking that it is going to be so simple. You don’t ask anything in return?”He said, “No, this is enough, that you will be taking the Vedas to the wide world. Come early in the morning.” But that old man was really clever.The whole night he and his four sons remained awake sitting around a fire. He told the sons, “Read one page of the book that I have given to you.” He distributed the four Vedas to the four sons, according to their age. The eldest got the Rigveda, the oldest scripture. “Read aloud one page so I can hear that you are reading it rightly, and then remember it and drop it into the fire. By the morning all four Vedas have to be burned, and by the morning you four have to become my four Vedas. I am going to present you to Alexander the Great.”In ancient India memory was particularly trained. Still, all universities, and colleges’ educational systems depend on cultivating memory. They deceive you and themselves, thinking that this is intelligence. Memory is not intelligence, because memory can be part of a computer – which has no consciousness, which has no intelligence. Your mind is also a natural bio-computer. Memory is simply remembering, but not understanding; understanding is totally different. Memory needs a very mechanical mind, and understanding needs a very non-mechanical mind. In fact the ways are diametrically opposite.In the morning when Alexander appeared, he was stunned. All the four Vedas were burned, and the old man said, “Now you can take my four sons. They have perfect memory. They will repeat the Vedas exactly. I could not give you the Vedas – that is never done – but I can give my sons to you. My whole life I have trained them in memorizing. You just have to repeat something one time and it remains in their memory, as if written on a stone.”Alexander was defeated by the old man. He could not take those four sons because they didn’t know the meaning of what they were saying; they could not explain anything. The language was different, and they could not translate it – they didn’t know Greek. What purpose would be served by taking these people?But all your religious scholars and leaders are nothing but memories, trained memories. They don’t know what they are saying, but they say it correctly. Their language is right, their grammar is right, their pronunciation is right, their accent is right, but all these are futile because they don’t know the meaning, they have never lived it. That meaning comes through living, through experiencing. But they will remain in a deception, and they will spread the same deception to other people.So I say again: the popes, the bishops, the shankaracharyas are not intentionally doing any crime. They are fast asleep; they cannot do anything intentionally! They are living an unconscious life. Their words are beautiful – they have collected them from beautiful sources – but the words have not grown within their being, the words are not part of their life. They are as ignorant as the people they are teaching.Socrates used to say that there is a knowledge which is ignorant, and there is an ignorance which is knowledge. Borrowed knowledge is ignorance.Experienced truth makes you not knowledgeable, but humble. The more you know it, the less you claim to know it. The day you know it perfectly, you can only say, “I am utter ignorance. I am just a child, collecting seashells on the beach. I know nothing.”“I do not know,” can only be said by a man who knows perfectly.The people who say, “We know,” are utterly ignorant people – but their memories are full. And those memories are dead, because they have not given birth to any experience of their own.Gautam Buddha used to say, “I used to know a man – he was my servant. Sitting by the door, he would count the cows that were going early in the morning to the pasture, to the river.”The man would count them – it had become almost an automatic thing with him. His duty was to sit in front of the door of Gautam Buddha, in case Buddha needs anything; otherwise he was sitting there the whole day. And by the time the cows returned… It is one of the most beautiful times. In Indian villages, which are still not modernized, the time when the sun is setting has got a special name, gaudhooli. Gau means cow, and dhooli means dust: the cows are coming, raising dust. The sun is setting, the birds are returning to their trees; it is a very peaceful moment.So at the time of gaudhooli he would again count the cows that were returning home. And he would become very worried if a cow was missing, if the count was not exactly as it should have been. Later, when Gautam Buddha became a great master, he used the story of that man and his habit to explain something immensely meaningful.He said, “I used to ask that poor fellow, ‘Do you have a cow?’ And he would say, ‘I am so poor, I don’t have a cow.’ And I would say to him, ‘Then why do you unnecessarily go on counting thousands of cows in the morning, then in the evening again – thousands of cows? And if one cow is missing – or perhaps you have miscounted – then you are worried, you cannot sleep. And it is not your cow, it is not your concern!’”Buddha used to say to his disciples, “All knowledge that is not yours is not your concern. You are counting other people’s cows, unnecessarily wasting your time. It is better to have one cow of your own – it will be nourishment.”But all your scholars are just counting other people’s cows. And they are doing immense harm without knowing it, because they are helping people to become knowers without knowing. This is the greatest harm that can be done to man, to give him a sense that he knows – and he knows nothing. You have destroyed his whole life. You have destroyed the opportunity in which he may have known, experienced, lived. You have taken all his opportunities, all his possibilities of growth.I am against all these scholars, not because their intentions are bad but because the outcome of their very good intentions is disastrous. They have destroyed millions of people on the earth; they never allowed them to grow, they gave them a false notion that they know already. This is pure poison.George Gurdjieff used to tell a story:There was a magician who had many sheep, and it was a trouble to get them home from the forest every night – there were wild animals, and he was losing many of his sheep. Finally the idea came to him, “Why do I not use my expertise, my magic?”He hypnotized all his sheep and told them different things. To one sheep he said, “You are a lion. You need not be afraid; you are the king among the animals.” To another he said, “You are a tiger,” to another, “You are a man.” And he told to everybody, to all the sheep: “You are not going to be butchered because you are not sheep, so you need not be afraid to come back home. You should come early, before nightfall.”And from that day no sheep was missing. In fact, from that day no sheep was behaving like a sheep: somebody was roaring like a lion, somebody was behaving like a man, and nobody was afraid of being butchered, killed – the very question was irrelevant. And the magician was butchering them every day for his food. They may have been roaring like lions, that did not matter; a sheep is a sheep after all.But he managed very beautifully. Giving one sheep the notion of being a lion, there was no need now to be bothered that he would try to escape, seeing that other sheep are being killed. Sheep were still being killed, but this sheep will know, “I am a lion, I am not a sheep. Sheep are bound to be killed!” When he is killed, others will be thinking, “He was just a sheep, we are men. And he was not only a sheep, but a foolish sheep who used to think that he is a lion, and never listened to us. We argued many times, ‘You are a sheep. We are men, we know better. Stop roaring, that is not going to help.’” But the magician was in absolute control.The story Gurdjieff was telling was about your religious leaders. They have managed to tell you things which you are not. They have managed to convince you that you know things which you know not. And this is the greatest crime that can be committed. But you cannot call them criminals because they are not doing it to harm you. They are trying to serve you, they are trying to help you.Just because all the religions have been doing the same thing, the whole world is under a certain hypnosis. And why have I created so many enemies? – for the simple reason that I am telling you that your knowledge is not knowledge, that it is a cover-up. You are utterly ignorant. You know nothing, and you believe that you know. It hurts!I am taking away your knowledge, I am taking away your virtue, I am taking away your morality. I am taking away everything that you used to think is a great treasure, everything that was cherished by you, nourished by you, protected by you, because you thought that you have got the real secrets of life, that you know the real mysteries of life. And to take away these things from people is naturally going to create enemies.It is a strange world. The enemies are popes, are archbishops, are shankaracharyas, are ayatollahs – they are the respected people of the world, and the friend looks like the greatest enemy. The enemies appear to be friends, and the friends appear to be enemies. Humanity has misbehaved with its friends and given all its respect to the enemies. That is the reason why the whole world is in misery: you have listened to the enemies and you have destroyed your friends. And the same story continues.I have talked to so many wise people, and found that all their wisdom is just memory. Not even a small bit is their own; all has come from others. And this is something fundamental to realize, that truth can only be your own experience. There is no other way to get it. Lies you can get in abundance. There are supermarkets all over the world, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Mohammedan, Buddhist – all kinds of lies, all colors, all shapes and sizes, whichever you prefer. They are available and suitable to you. You are not to fit with them, they fit with you. It is very easy. They are made for you, they are tailored for you.Truth is a totally different matter. You will have to fit with it. Truth knows no compromise. You will have to change according to it. You will have to go through a transformation.So I am creating enemies, not without any reason. The reason is clear. I am creating a few friends also, but those few friends have to go through a deep fire test. They have to drop their false personalities, their egos, their knowledge – everything they have. They have to be ready to be utterly naked and empty. Only then are they at the right point of the journey, the journey toward truth. Naked, empty, and alone.But it is such a joy, and each moment is such a glory, such a paradise, that once you have tasted a single moment on the way toward truth you will never look back on all that you had to leave. It is a great unburdening, a freedom. Now you can open your wings unto the sky. Now the whole sky is yours.Osho,You were saying that the new will be victorious. Will it really be the new, or will it be the old polished up here and there? There are publications now in Germany that use you. Some mention you in the list of literature as the source, but others use you and don't mention you – or they even condemn you. I am really afraid of those people. What is their intention? Can you please take away that fear?There is no need to be afraid of those people. That is happening in every language all over the world. People are taking my statements and not mentioning my name. There is no harm in it, because my name is not important; what is important is the statement. Even if these people are stealing, there is no harm. That statement may start something in somebody which these people cannot fulfill. That statement may trigger a process in somebody, who will have to come to the original source.They are not mentioning my name for two reasons. One reason is, they would like to appear original. Secondly, they are afraid that if they mention my name they will be condemned; then their books are not going to be praised, respected.But don’t be afraid of these people, whatever their reason. Anything taken from me is fire, and it does not matter in what way the fire reaches to somebody’s heart. These people who are doing such things cannot be great writers, poets, creative thinkers; otherwise they would not do such an act of stealing. These people are third rate.So if they have stolen something from me, it is going to stand out in their whole book as separate, unrelated, out of context. Anybody who has a little intelligence will see that that part has not come from the same man who has written the book, because the book has a third-class flavor; there is no originality, there is no understanding of the deeper problems of life, and there is no courage to say the truth as it is. So anything that they have stolen to decorate their books, to make their books valuable, unknowingly that very part is going to destroy the whole book. They have stolen fire and put it into their books.In India a radio station was reading my statements, passages from books, stories, every day for ten minutes in the morning, without mentioning my name. Hundreds of letters came to me saying, “These people are stealing from your books.”I said, “Don’t be worried. My name is not significant, my message is. They are cowards, or perhaps they love me, but they are government servants.”In India the radio is owned by the government, the television is owned by the government. If they use my name, they may lose their jobs. And certainly during that series, which was continuing for six months, even ministers, cabinet ministers and the prime minister, were quoting from those statements, thinking that they have nothing to do with me. But the people who were listening knew that those statements were not coming from Indira Gandhi – they could not be, they had no relevance with the person, they were stolen. And they started searching for the place from where the statements had been stolen.Finally I met the person, the director of that radio station. He was a lover of me, and he said, “I have been condemned. Hundreds of letters are coming to me, saying, ‘You are stealing. You are not mentioning Osho’s name.’ But if I mention your name then the series will be stopped that very day. I will continue as long as they don’t discover…”And the moment it was discovered, immediately the series was stopped and the man was removed. He told me, “It happened because of that series. People started writing letters to the prime minister saying, ‘This man is stealing passages from Osho.’”The prime minister herself had been stealing. Her lectures have been sent to me and, word for word, long passages have been stolen from me. But I have always taken the standpoint: let the truth reach to people by any means, by anyone.I have been thinking that if the great powerful governments of the world are so afraid that they will not allow me entry into their country, just as a tourist for three or four weeks – if they are so impotent with all their power that they will not even allow me an overnight stay at the airport, which is legally my right…My jet plane was standing at the airport in England, and the pilots had to rest. According to the law, after a certain period they cannot fly, so only in the morning would they be able to fly. I had every right to stay in the lounge at the airport, but they refused – as if with me there are different laws!One of my friends who was traveling with me just happened to see the file of the man who was preventing me, because he went to the bathroom, leaving the file on the table. And my friend just looked and was surprised, because there were government instructions… I had just arrived, but the file was ready, saying that if I try to stay even overnight I should not be allowed to stay in the first-class lounge, but I should be put in jail; I am a dangerous person.In the airport lounge, from where I cannot get into the country… There is no way to get into the country from the lounge. There was every instruction about how they had to treat me. Without any crime, we had to stay a night in jail in England, just because the pilots could not fly overtime. And the government was ready beforehand. It was not a spontaneous decision, it was well planned.Now there are countries who have decided in their parliaments that I should not be allowed into their country. And just the other day I was informed that now they are considering in the European parliament – which is just a combined body of all the parliaments of Europe – a decision that I should not be allowed even to land my plane at any airport in Europe.Today they will be doing this in Europe; America has done it already. Tomorrow they will be doing it in Asia, in Australia, in Africa. It is possible, very possible, that if they are so afraid of me, they will start banning my books. And it may become necessary that my books go without my name or with any name – like the Holy Ghost! The name does not matter. But the message has to reach.It is unprecedented: the whole world against a single man – a man who has no power, no nuclear weapons, who cannot do any harm to anybody. The whole world is at war with a single person. It simply shows that I am hitting at their very roots.You need not be worried. If somebody has taken a passage, that passage will prove more important than his whole book. And I would like more and more writers, poets, film makers to steal as much as they can, because truth is not my property, I am not its owner. Let it reach in any way, in anybody’s name, in any form, but let it reach.Osho,These words “taking responsibility for yourself,” confuse me. I am an individualist and enjoy being on my own. If I do what feels good to support myself, is it not a way of feeding my ego? Where is the limit between taking responsibility for oneself and feeding the ego by fulfilling its tendencies?There is no limit for taking responsibility for yourself. The question has arisen, and not only this question, many questions arise because you only think about them; they are not your existential experiences. If you take responsibility for yourself you cannot be an egoist, because to be an egoist simply means you are fast asleep and you cannot take any responsibility. Responsibility comes with awareness, alertness.You are asking an intellectual question like, “When we bring light into the room, what are we going to do with the darkness? Where have we to throw it?” Intellectually it is perfectly right. There is darkness in the room and you say, “Bringing light into the room, the question arises: where then has the darkness to be pushed? Where has it to be thrown? In what way?”But it is not existential. Just try to bring light in and there will be no question about darkness. There will be no darkness!Responsibility is awareness, alertness, consciousness. Ego is just unconsciousness. They cannot coexist. As you grow more conscious you grow more toward light, and anything belonging to the world of darkness starts disappearing. Ego is nothing but darkness.So remember one thing: try to ask questions which are existential. Intellectual questions may look logical, but are really absurd. Try responsibility, and by being responsible you will have to be conscious and alert.Remaining responsible, you will create the light that automatically dispels the darkness of the ego.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Often, when I am deeply relaxed, a strong feeling to die comes up in me. In these moments I feel myself as part of the whole cosmos and I want to disappear into it. On one hand, it is such a beautiful feeling and I am so grateful for it. On the other hand, I mistrust it: maybe I have not said “yes” to myself, to my being, if the desire to die is so strong. Is it a suicidal desire?It is not a suicidal desire.One basic thing about suicide is that it arises only in people who are clinging very much to life. And when they fail in their clinging, the mind moves to the opposite pole. The function of the mind is of either–or: either it wants the whole or none of it. The lust for life cannot be fulfilled totally, because life as such is a temporal thing; it is bound to end at a point, just as it began one day at a point. You cannot have a line with only a beginning; somewhere or other there is bound to be an end.So the people who commit suicide are not against life; it only appears so. They want life in its totality, they want to grab it whole, and when they fail – and they are bound to fail – then out of frustration, out of failure, they start thinking of death. Then suicide is the only alternative. They will not be satisfied with whatsoever life gives them; they want more and more and more.Life is short, and the series of desire for more and more is infinite, so the failure is certain. Somewhere or other there is bound to come a moment when they will feel they have been cheated by life. Nobody is cheating them – they have cheated themselves. They have been asking too much, and they have only been asking, they have not been giving anything, not even gratefulness. In anger, in rage, in revenge the pendulum of the mind moves to the other end – still they do not know with whom they are taking revenge. They are killing themselves: it does not destroy life, it does not destroy existence.So this experience is not of a suicidal nature. It is something similar to suicide, but on a very different level and from a very different dimension. When you are relaxed, when there is no tension in you, when there is no desire, when the mind is as silent as a lake without any ripples, a deep feeling arises in you to disappear in this moment, because life has not given you anything better than this. There have been moments of happiness, of pleasure, but this is something far beyond happiness and pleasure; it is pure blissfulness.To turn back from it is really hard. One wants to go deeper, and one can see going deeper means disappearing. Most of him has already disappeared in relaxation, in silence, in desirelessness. Most of his personality has already gone, just a small thread of the ego is still hanging around. And he would like to take a jump out of this circle of the ego, because if relaxing even within the ego brings so much benediction, one cannot imagine what will be the result if everything is dissolved, so that one can say, “I am not and existence is.”This is not a suicidal instinct. This is what is basically meant by spiritual liberation: it is liberation from ego, from desire, even from the lust for life. It is total liberation, it is absolute freedom.But in this situation the question is bound to arise in everyone. The question is arising not out of your intelligence; the question is arising out of your cowardice. You really want some excuse not to dissolve, not to evaporate into the infinite. Immediately the mind gives you the idea that this is what suicide is: “Don’t commit suicide. Suicide is a sin, suicide is a crime. Come back!” And you start coming back. And coming back means you again become tense, again full of anxieties, again full of desires. Again, the whole tragic drama of your life.It is your fear of total dissolution. But you don’t want to accept it as a fear, so you give it a condemnatory name – suicide. It has nothing to do with suicide; it is really going deeper into life.Life has two dimensions. One is horizontal – in which you are all living, in which you are always asking for more and more and more. The quantity is not the question; no quantity is going to satisfy you. The horizontal line is the quantitative line. You can go on and on. It is like the horizon – as you go on, the horizon goes on receding. The distance between you and the goal of your more and more, the goal of your desire, remains always exactly the same. It was the same when you were a child, it was the same when you were young, it is the same when you are old. It will remain the same to your last breath.The horizontal line is an illusion. The horizon does not exist, it only appears: there, perhaps just a few miles away, the sky is meeting the earth. It meets nowhere. Out of the horizon comes the horizontal line – unending, because the goal is illusory; you cannot come to make it a reality. And your patience is limited, your span of life is limited. One day you realize that it all seems futile, meaningless: “I am unnecessarily dragging myself, torturing myself, reaching nowhere.” Then the opposite of it arises in you – destroy yourself. It is not worthwhile to live, because life promises you, but never delivers the goods.But life has another line – a vertical line. The vertical line moves in a totally different dimension. In such an experience, for a moment you have turned your face toward the vertical.You are not asking – that’s why you are being given. You are not desiring – that’s why so much is made available to you. You don’t have any goal – that’s why you are so close to it. Because there is no desire, no goal, no asking, no begging, you don’t have any tension; you are utterly relaxed. In this relaxed state is the meeting with existence.The fear comes at the moment when you come to dissolve your last part, because then it will be irrevocable; you will not be able to come back.I have told many times a beautiful poem of Rabindranath Tagore:The poet has been searching for God for millions of lives. He has seen him sometimes, far away, near a star, and he started moving that way, but by the time he reached that star, God has moved to some other place. But he went on searching and searching – he was determined to find God’s home – and the surprise of surprises was, one day he actually reached a house where on the door was written: “God’s Home.”You can understand his ecstasy, you can understand his joy. He runs up the steps, and just as he is going to knock on the door, suddenly his hand freezes. An idea arises in him: “If by chance this is really the home of God, then I am finished, my seeking is finished. I have become identified with my seeking, with my search. I don’t know anything else. If the door opens and I face God, I am finished – the search is over. Then what? Then there is an eternity of boredom – no excitement, no discovery, no new challenge, because there cannot be any challenge greater than God.”He starts trembling out of fear, takes off his shoes, and descends back down the beautiful marble steps. He took off his shoes so that no noise was made. The fear was that hearing a noise on the steps, God may open the door, although he has not knocked. And then he runs as fast as he has never run before. He used to think that he had been running after God as fast as he can, but today, suddenly, he finds energy which was never available to him before. He runs as he has never run, not looking back.The poem ends, “I am still searching for God. I know his home, so I avoid it and search everywhere else. The excitement is great, the challenge is great, and in my search I continue, I continue to exist. God is a danger – I will be annihilated. And now I am not afraid even of God because I know his home. So, leaving his home aside, I go on searching for him all around the universe. And deep down I know that my search is not for God; my search is to nourish my ego.”I place Rabindranath Tagore as one of the greatest religious men of the twentieth century, although he is not ordinarily related with religion. But only a religious man of tremendous experience can write this poem. It is not just ordinary poetry; it contains such a great truth. And that’s what your question is raising. Relaxed, you come to a moment where you feel you are going to disappear, and then you think, “Perhaps this is a suicidal instinct,” and you come back to your old miserable world. But that miserable world has one thing: it protects your ego, it allows you to be.This is the strange situation: blissfulness does not allow you; you have to disappear. That’s why you don’t see many blissful people in the world. Misery nourishes your ego – that’s why you see so many miserable people in the world. The basic central point is the ego.So you have not come to a point of suicide. You have come to a point of nirvana, of cessation, of disappearance, of blowing out the candle. This is the ultimate experience. If you can gather courage, just one step more… Existence is only one step away from you.Don’t listen to this garbage of the mind saying that this is suicide. You are neither drinking poison, nor are you hanging yourself from a tree, and you are not shooting yourself with a gun – what suicide? You are simply becoming thinner and thinner and thinner. And the moment comes when you are so thin and so spread all over existence that you cannot say you are, but you can say that existence is.This we have called enlightenment, not suicide. This we have called realization of the ultimate truth. But you have to pay the price. And the price is nothing but dropping the ego. So when such a moment comes, don’t hesitate. Dancingly disappear. With a great laughter, disappear; with songs on your lips, disappear.I am not a theoretician, this is not my philosophy. I have come to the same borderline many times and turned back. I have also found the home of God many times and could not knock. Jesus has a few sayings. One of the sayings is, “Knock, and the door shall be opened unto you.” If this sentence has any meaning, it is this meaning that I am giving you now.So when this moment comes, rejoice and melt. It is human nature – and understandable – that many times you will come back. But those many times don’t count. One time, gather all courage and take a jump.You will be, but in such a new way that you cannot connect it with the old. It will be a discontinuity. The old was so tiny, so small, so mean, and the new is so vast. From a small dewdrop you have become the ocean. But even the dewdrop slipping from a lotus leaf trembles for a moment, tries to hang on a little more because he can see the ocean – once he has fallen from the lotus leaf he is gone. Yes, in a way he will not be; as a dewdrop he will be gone. But it is not a loss. He will be oceanic. And all other oceans are limited. The ocean of existence is unlimited.Osho,When I close my eyes I often hear the sound of a tiny bell ringing within. Can you please tell us about hearing, meditation, sound and silence?It is possible that hearing a tiny bell inside you when you enter into meditation may be related to your past life, particularly as a Tibetan, because for centuries in Tibet this has been the conditioning of the mind – that when you enter meditation, you hear tiny bells. And if a conditioning has been continued too long, it is carried into new lives.But hearing the tiny bell is not meditation; it is just a conditioning. When you start entering into total silence where no bells are ringing, then meditation begins. The tiny bell rings in the mind, and meditation is a state of no-mind. Tiny or not tiny, no bell can ring there; it is utter silence.But many religions, particularly in the East… And the most prominent is the Tibetan religion which has used tiny bells. It is a significant technique but dangerous, as all techniques are: you can get attached to the technique. If you listen to a tiny bell for hours it will have a hypnotizing effect on your mind. Thinking will stop, only the bell will go on ringing. Even when you have stopped the bell it will go on ringing in the mind. The idea behind the technique was that slowly, slowly the sound of the bell will fade away into silence. If it happens, good. But the greater possibility is that you will become attached to the bell. And it gives great peace, it will give you a feeling of great well-being, because the mind will not be thinking; it cannot do two things.It is not only the bell – anything can be used. Lord Tennyson, the great poet, was embarrassed to recognize, in his autobiography, that from his very childhood – he does not know how, perhaps sleeping in a separate room as a small child – he was afraid of darkness. Just to make sure that he was not alone, he started repeating his own name, “Tennyson, Tennyson…” and repeating his own name he forgot all about the darkness and the ghosts, and all kinds of creatures that humanity has invented for poor children to be tortured with. He would repeat a few times, “Tennyson, Tennyson, Tennyson…” and he would become silent and would fall into a deep sleep.Later on, as he grew up, it became his usual practice. Without it he could not fall asleep – it became a necessary ritual. But it started giving him new insights: that it was not only sleep, but by repeating, “Tennyson, Tennyson,” his own name, he became silent, peaceful; he became somehow more than the body, somehow immaterial. And then, as he came to know about meditation… He had already developed a technique throughout his whole life. He tried it for meditation, and it worked. Just as it was leading him into deep sleep, it started leading him into deep relaxation, a great peacefulness.So it is not a question of what mantra, what chanting, what name of which god or just the sound of a bell; it doesn’t matter. All that matters basically is that you become concentrated on one thing, that the mind is so full of one thing that all other thoughts stop. And any one thing for a long time is going to give you a certain kind of hypnotic state.Just a few days ago, Anando brought me a press clipping. The man was authentic in writing it: he was puzzled, he could not understand what was the matter. He had been listening to me – he had come as a journalist to report. He had never heard such long discourses, and on subjects which were not his area! So he reports on me: “What is striking,” he reports, “is that first Osho speaks very slowly, with gaps – sometimes with closed eyes and sometimes he looks very intensely at you. He speaks so long that one feels bored, but the strange thing is that after boredom one feels a deep serenity, a silence – which is strange, because usually out of boredom one feels frustration, one feels angry.”But he has observed well his own mind, that one feels a certain serenity, silence, peacefulness, and finally it seems that a kind of hypnosis has happened: “Perhaps this is Osho’s method – to speak so slowly, to speak with gaps, that you start feeling bored. But out of that boredom comes serenity.”It is strange for him – it is strange for Western psychology too – that if boredom is used rightly it is going to create serenity, peacefulness and a state of hypnosis. And hypnosis is healthy. It is not meditation, but it still somehow reflects meditation. It is like the moon reflected in the water; it is not the moon, but it is still a reflection of the moon.So all the religions – in the East particularly, but in the West also – have used very small techniques. Now a Buddhist monk in Tibet, in the silence of the Himalayas, goes on ringing a small bell for hours. No other sound – the whole universe around him is silent. The only sound is the bell. Naturally his mind starts getting bored, starts feeling disinterested. There is no excitement, it is just repetition, but that is the point: if the bell can be stopped – and the bell has to be stopped – the mind will go on listening to it for a little time longer.The monk has become so accustomed to listening to it that he will go on listening to it. And as the sound of the bell recedes, becomes thinner, becomes distant, more distant, the mind is left in a certain silence. This silence can either give you hypnosis… And hypnosis is another name for deliberately created sleep. It is deeper than your ordinary sleep, healthier than your ordinary sleep; it rejuvenates you within minutes, which your ordinary sleep can do only in eight hours. That is one line that it can move on, but that is not meditation.The other line is, listening to the bell inside you getting more and more distant, you become more and more alert so that you can listen to it, even though the sound is going away from you. Now you have to be more conscious to listen to it. First you were unconscious and you were listening to it; now it is getting distant so you have to be very alert, very conscious. And a moment comes when the sound disappears – you have to be perfectly conscious. You have taken a different route.This state of consciousness is meditation.I am not against hypnosis; what I am against is, hypnosis should not be understood as meditation. Hypnosis is of the mind, and good for the mind, good for the body. Meditation is neither of the body nor of the mind, it belongs to the third within you – your being. It is good for the being, it is nourishment for the being.So it is possible that if, sitting in meditation, you suddenly start hearing bells, you may have practiced this in your past lives. I don’t talk about past lives for the simple reason that for you it will be just a belief. But the question was such that I had to bring the past life in, because it had nothing to do with this life. You had not practiced meditation on the sound of bells, so from where can it come into your mind? It can come only from the past conditioning, and a very deep conditioning.Nothing is wrong in it. Enjoy it, but remember not to go toward sleep. Go toward more consciousness. Sleep is unconsciousness, so they are diametrically opposite directions. And there comes a point from where you can move either way. When the sound of bells is receding, disappearing, that is the moment. You can fall asleep, which is good – but it is not meditation, and it is not going to give you any spiritual experience. If you remain alert, aware, the sound disappears; only silence remains.Consciousness and silence together is what meditation is all about.Osho,I once drew a picture of a flower blossoming. The flower was simple and lovely; it had a faint light coming out of the just-opening bud, and the leaves were strong and healthy. But the roots were underdeveloped and weak, as if they didn't belong to this flower at all. This picture was to symbolize me, and I have a deep attachment to it. But I am constantly worried by the roots, as they contradict the promise of the blossom.There are many questions connected with this picture, but I would be very happy if you would answer me somehow.This is not only your situation. This is the situation of almost all human beings: their roots are weak, and without strong roots the possibility of a healthy blossoming of thousands of flowers is not possible. Why are the roots weak? They are kept weak.In Japan they have trees four hundred, five hundred years old and six inches high. It is considered to be an art. To me it is simple murder. Generations of gardeners have passed, keeping those trees in this situation.Now, a tree which is five hundred years old… You can see its branches are old, although small; it is a very tiny old man, but it shows on the leaves, on the trunk, on the branches. The strategy that has been used is this: they plant a tree in a mud pot which has no bottom, then they go on cutting the roots – because the pot has no bottom. When the roots come out and try to reach the earth, they will cut them. They will not do anything to the tree; they will simply go on cutting the roots. Now for five hundred years a family has been continuously cutting the roots. The tree may live for thousands of years, but it will never blossom, it will never come to fruition.The same has been done to man all over the world. His roots have been cut from the very beginning, about everything. Every child has to be obedient. You are cutting his roots. You are not giving him a chance to think whether to say yes to you or to say no. You are not allowing him to think, you are not allowing him to make a decision on his own. You are not giving him responsibility – you are taking responsibility away behind the beautiful word obedience. You are taking his freedom away, you are taking his individuality away by a simple strategy – that he is a child, he does not know anything. The parents have to decide, and the child has to be absolutely obedient. The obedient child is the respected child.But so much is implied in it, that you are destroying him completely. He will grow old, but he will not grow up. He will grow old, but there will be no blossoming and there will be no fruition. He will live, but his life will not be a dance, will not be a song, will not be a rejoicing. You have destroyed the basic possibility for all that makes a man individual, authentic, sincere, gives him a certain integrity.In my childhood there were many children in my family. I had ten brothers and sisters myself, then there were one uncle’s children and another uncle’s children. And I saw this happening: whoever was obedient was respected. I had to decide one thing for my whole life – not only for being in my family or for my childhood – that if I in any way desire respect, respectability, then I cannot blossom as an individual. From my very childhood I dropped the idea of respectability.I told my father, “I have to make a certain statement to you.”He was always worried whenever I would go to him, because he knew that there would be some trouble. He said, “This is not the way a child speaks to his father – ‘I am going to make a statement to you.’”I said, “It is a statement through you to the whole world. Right now the whole world is not available to me; to me you represent the whole world. It is not just a question between a son and a father; it is a question between an individual and the collectivity, the mass. The statement is that I have renounced the idea of respectability, so in the name of respectability never ask anything from me; otherwise I will do just the opposite.“I cannot be obedient. That does not mean I will always be disobedient, it simply means it will be my choice to obey or not to obey. You can request, but the decision is going to be mine. If I feel my intelligence supports it, I will do it; but it is not obedience to you, it is obedience to my own intelligence. If I feel it is not right, I am going to refuse it. I am sorry, but you have to understand one thing clearly: that unless I am able to say no, my yes is meaningless.”And that’s what obedience does: it cripples you – you cannot say no, you have to say yes. But when a man has become incapable of saying no, his yes is just meaningless; he is functioning like a machine. You have turned a man into a robot.So I said to him, “This is my statement. Whether you agree or not, that is up to you; but I have decided, and whatever the consequences, I am going to follow it.”It is such a world… In this world to remain free, to think on your own, to decide with your own consciousness, to act out of your own conscience has been made almost impossible. Everywhere – in the church, in the temple, in the mosque, in the school, in the university, in the family – everywhere, you are expected to be obedient.Just recently I was arrested in Crete. They did not show me my arrest warrant. I told them, “This is absolutely criminal.”They said, “We have got it, but it is in Greek.”I said, “Do you have another warrant to search the house?” They had none – they had never thought about it. I said, “You were allowed by your warrant to arrest me outside the house; you were not allowed to enter the house. You not only entered the house, but Anando, my secretary, was trying to tell you, ‘Just wait! Osho is asleep and I will go and awaken him. It will take only five minutes.’ You could not even wait five minutes.“You threw Anando from the four-foot-high porch onto the ground – which was gravel and stone – and dragged her away and arrested her with no warrant. And the only crime she had done was to tell you, ‘Just wait. We are bringing Osho down, then you can show your papers to him.’”When I was awakened by John, they had already started throwing rocks at the windows, at the doors, trying to break into the house from all sides. I heard noises as if bombs were being thrown. They had dynamite bombs, and were threatening to dynamite the house.On the way to the police station they stopped in an empty, silent space and gave me a paper, describing all that had happened, that I should sign it. I said, “I would be happy to sign it, but it is not a true description. You have not mentioned anything about breaking the windows, the doors of the house, threatening that you will destroy the house with dynamite. You have not mentioned anything about Anando, that you threw her on the ground, dragged her along the stones without any arrest warrant for her. I will not sign it! You want to cover it up. If I sign it, that means I cannot go to the court because you can present this paper that I have already signed. Make it exactly factual, whatever has happened; then I will be willing to sign it.”They understood that I am not a person who can be threatened, and they took the paper away. And they never again asked me to sign it, because they were not in a position to write all those things that they had done; that would have been their condemnation. They wanted to immediately send me to India by boat, and I refused. I said, “Sailing by boat on the sea does not suit me. I will be seasick, and who will be responsible for it? So you have to give me a written document saying that you will be responsible for my sea-sickness and the damages.” They forgot all about that boat!I said, “My jet plane is waiting in Athens. You have to take me on a plane from here to Athens, or you have to allow my plane to come here. I am not interested in living in such a country even for two weeks” – because my visa was valid only for two weeks more – “where government authorities behave in such a primitive, ugly, inhuman way.”I told the police officer, “Wherever the pope goes, he kisses the ground after landing. I should start spitting on the ground, because that’s what you deserve.”The comment that he made to me reminded me of all this. He said, “It seems that from your very childhood, nobody has disciplined you in obedience.”I said, “That’s right, that’s an absolutely right observation. I am not against obedience, I am not disobedient, but I want to decide my life in my own way. I don’t want to be interfered with by anybody else, and I don’t want to interfere in anybody else’s life either.”Man can only be truly human when this becomes an accepted rule. But up to now the accepted rule has been to destroy the person in such a way that his whole life he remains servile, submissive to every kind of authority, to cut his roots so that he doesn’t have enough juice to fight for freedom, to fight for individuality, to fight for anything. Then he has only a small amount of life, which will enable him to survive till death relieves him from this slavery that we have accepted as life. Children are slaves of their parents; wives are slaves, husbands are slaves, old people become slaves of the younger people who have all the power. If you look around, everybody is living in slavery, hiding the wounds behind beautiful words.You felt that drawing of yours, of a flower with beautiful petals and a light aura, but with very weak roots describes you: it describes all human beings.The roots can be strong only if we stop what we have been doing up to now, and do just the opposite of it. Every child should be given a chance to think. We should help him to sharpen his intelligence. We should help him by giving him situations and opportunities where he has to decide on his own. We should make it a point that nobody is forced to be obedient, and everybody is taught the beauty and the grandeur of freedom. Then the roots will be strong.But even your God has been cutting the roots of his own children because they were not obedient. Their disobedience became the greatest sin, such a great sin that hundreds of generations have passed, but the sin continues; you have not committed it, but you come in the line of hundreds of generations. Somebody in the beginning disobeyed God, and God is so furious that not only Adam and Eve should be punished, but all their future generations, forever.These are the religions which have made human beings live without any blossoming and without any fragrance; otherwise each individual has the capacity to be a Socrates, to be a Pythagoras, to be a Heraclitus, to be a Gautam Buddha, to be a Chuang Tzu. Each individual has potential, but the potential is not getting enough nourishment. It remains potential. And the man dies, but the potential never becomes actuality.My whole effort and approach is to give each individual opportunity to develop his potential, whatsoever it is. Nobody should try to divert his life – nobody has the right to do it. And then we can have a world which is truly a garden of human beings. Right now we are living in hell.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I feel divided in two parts – half going toward the unknown, and half toward all that is familiar from my past. When I get close to letting go of what I believe is mine, I panic – even though I yearn to go to the place you talk about. Please give me courage to take the next step.The real question is not of courage, the real question is that you don’t understand that the known is the dead, and the unknown is the living.Clinging to the known is clinging to a corpse. It does not need courage to drop the clinging; in fact it needs courage to go on clinging to a corpse. You just have to see. That which is familiar to you, which you have lived – what has it given? Where have you reached? Are you not still empty? Is there not immense discontent, a deep frustration and meaninglessness? Somehow you go on managing, hiding the truth and creating lies to remain engaged, involved.This is the question: to see with clarity that everything that you know is of the past, it is already gone, it is part of a graveyard – do you want to be in a grave, or do you want to be alive? And this is not only the question today; it will be the same question tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. It will be the same question at the last breath.Whatever you know, accumulate – information, knowledge, experience – the moment you have explored them you are finished with them. Now carrying those empty words, that dead load is crushing your life, burdening your life, preventing you from entering into a living, rejoicing being – which is awaiting you each moment.The man of understanding dies to the past every moment and is reborn again to the future. His present is always a transformation, a rebirth, a resurrection. It is not a question of courage at all, that is the first thing to be understood. It is a question of clarity, of being clear about what is what.Secondly, whenever there is really a question of courage, nobody can give it to you. It is not something that can be presented as a gift. It is something that you are born with, you just have not allowed it to grow, you have not allowed it to assert itself, because the whole society is against it.The society does not want lions, it wants a crowd of sheep. Then it is easy to enslave people, exploit people, do whatever you want to do with them. They don’t have souls; they are almost robots. You order, and they will obey. They are not free individuals.No society wants you to be courageous. Every society wants you to be a coward. Nobody says it so sincerely; they have found beautiful words to replace it. They will not say, “Be cowardly,” because that will look offensive to the person and he will start thinking, “Why should I be cowardly?” – and a coward is not something respectable.No, they say, “Be cautious. Think twice before you leap. Remember your tradition, your religion is thousands of years old; it has wisdom. You are a newcomer, you cannot afford to disbelieve in it. There is no comparison. You have just come in, and your religion has been there for ten thousand years, accumulating more and more experience, knowledge. It is a Himalayan phenomenon.“You are a small pebble. You cannot fight with tradition – it is fighting against yourself, it is self-destructive. You can only submit to tradition; that is wise, intelligent. Being with the crowd you are protected, you are secure, you are assured that you will not go astray.”In so many ways you will be told a simple thing: just be a coward; it pays to be cowardly. It is dangerous to be courageous, because it is going to bring you into conflict with all the vested interests – and you are a small human being. You cannot fight the whole world.My grandfather used to say to me, “Whatever you say is right. I am old, but I can understand that you are saying something true. But I will suggest – don’t say it to anybody. You will be in trouble. You cannot be against the whole world. You may have the truth, but truth does not count; what counts is the crowd. Somebody may be simply lying” – and all religions have been doing that, lying about God, lying about heaven, lying about hell, lying about a thousand and one things – “but the crowd is with them. Their lies are supported by the immense humanity and its long tradition. You are nobody.”I was very friendly with my grandfather. He used to take me to the saints who were visiting the town. He very much enjoyed my arguments with the so-called saints, creating a situation absolutely embarrassing for the saint because he was unable to answer me. But coming back he would tell me, “Remember, it is good as a game, but don’t make it your life, otherwise you will be alone against the whole world. And you cannot win against the whole world.”The last thing he said was the same. Before he died, he called me close and told me, “Remember, don’t fight against the world. You cannot win.”I said, “Now you are dying. You have been with the world – what have you gained? What is your victory? I cannot promise you what you are asking. I want it to be absolutely clear to you that whatever the cost… I may lose the fight, but it will be my fight, and I will be immensely satisfied because I was in favor of truth. It does not matter whether I win or lose – the defeat or victory is irrelevant. What is important is that whatever you feel is right, you stand for it.”This courage is in everybody. It is not a quality to be practiced, it is something that is part of your life – your very breathing. It is just that the society has created so many barriers against your natural growth that you have started thinking, “From where to get courage? From where to get intelligence? From where to get truth?”You have to go nowhere. You contain in the seed form everything that you want to be. Realizing this and seeing the other side – what is the gain of the people who live with the crowd? They lose everything. In fact they don’t live at all; they only die. From their birth they start dying, and go on dying till the last breath. Their whole life is a long series of deaths. Just look at the whole crowd of people. You can be with them, but the same is going to be your fate.It is so simple if you see it: the only way to live life is to live on your own. It is an individual phenomenon, it is independence, it is freedom. It is a constant unburdening of all that is dead, so that life can go on growing and is not crushed under the weight of the dead.Osho,You are my inspiration. I have heard you say you never had a master; but was there any source of inspiration for you when you began your journey?Life itself is enough.Seeing people all around – walking corpses – is inspiration enough not to move with them, not to go their way, but to find a small footpath of your own if you want to be alive.I have never had a master, and I am fortunate that I never had a master. I have been, in my past lives, with a few living masters. They were beautiful people, lovable, but one thing has been clear all along to me – that nobody can be a source of inspiration for me, because that word inspiration is dangerous.First it is inspiration, then it becomes following, then it becomes imitation – and you end up being a carbon copy. There is no need to be inspired by anybody. Not only is there no need, it is dangerous too because, just watching, I have seen each individual as unique. He cannot follow anybody else.He can try. Millions have been trying for thousands of years. Millions are Christians, millions are Hindus, millions are Buddhists. What are they doing? Inspiration from Gautam Buddha has made millions of people Buddhists, and now they are trying to follow in his footsteps and they are not reaching anywhere, they cannot.You are not a Gautam Buddha, and his footprints won’t fit you, neither will his shoes fit you; you will have to find the exact size of shoes that fit you. He is beautiful, but that does not mean that you have to become like him. That’s the meaning of the word inspiration. It means you are so influenced that the man becomes your ideal, that you would like to be like him. That has misled the whole humanity. Inspiration has been a curse, not a blessing.I would like you to learn from every source, to enjoy every unique being that you come across. But never follow anybody and never try to become exactly like somebody else; that is not allowed by existence. You can be only yourself.This is a strange phenomenon: the people who have become an inspiration for millions of other people were themselves never inspired by anybody – but nobody takes note of this fact. Gautam Buddha was never inspired by anybody, and that’s what made him a great source of inspiration. Socrates was not inspired by anybody, but that’s what makes him so unique.All these people whom you think of as sources of inspiration have never been inspired by anybody else. That is something very fundamental to be understood. Yes, they learned; they tried to understand all kinds of people. They loved unique individuals, but nobody was to be followed. They still tried to be themselves.So please don’t be inspired by me; otherwise you will never become a source of inspiration. You will be just a carbon copy, you won’t have your authentic, original face. You will be a hypocrite: you will say one thing and you will do another. You will show your face in different situations with different masks, and slowly, slowly you will forget which one is your real face; so many masks…I have heard about a man…One hundred years had passed since Abraham Lincoln was shot dead, so for one year a great celebration was arranged in his honor all over America. One man looked like Abraham Lincoln; just a few touches here and there and he was almost a photographic copy of Abraham Lincoln.He was trained to speak the way Abraham Lincoln used to speak, with his gestures, his emphasis, his accent, everything – small details, even the way he walked – for twenty-four hours a day. He was to perform this drama of the life of Abraham Lincoln all over the country, moving from one place to another place the whole year.He was shot dead many times, every night in every show, sometimes even twice a day. That year was a long year – he died so many times – and his part in the drama became almost his second nature.So when the celebrations were finished, people were surprised: he walked out of the hall the same way Abraham Lincoln used to walk – he used to limp a little. He was limping. His wife said, “Come to your senses!”He spoke in the same way, in an accent one hundred years old. His wife said, “Don’t stretch the joke too much. Just become your real self and come home.”He said, “I am my real self, I am Abraham Lincoln.” For one year continuously he had lived as Abraham Lincoln, he died thousands of deaths as Abraham Lincoln; he slept, he dreamt as Abraham Lincoln; he had completely forgotten that he was ever anybody else.He was brought to a doctor. The doctor talked to him, but he was still in his dramatic role. The doctor said, “Just forget that drama.”The man said, “What drama?”The doctor turned to the wife and said to her, “This man won’t listen unless he is shot dead!”The family was getting mad. He lost his job; nobody was ready to treat him because he was not sick. He was simply glued to a mask. One year is a long time, and every day, twenty-four hours a day, he was Abraham Lincoln. And to be Abraham Lincoln for one year and then suddenly become an ordinary human being – who would like it? He had seen the glorious days, the golden days, and he was clinging tightly to them.That man lived for a few years as Abraham Lincoln; he used to sign “Abraham Lincoln” exactly the same as Abraham Lincoln used to sign. Would you say this man has attained something or lost something? He has lost himself, and what he has gained is just a dramatic act. He has become absolutely phony.This is the situation of almost everybody in the world – not so dramatic, not so outstanding – but everybody is playing a certain role that has been taught to him, for which he has been brought up.A child is born – he is not Christian, he is not a Jew, he is not Mohammedan – and then we start putting a mask on him. His innocent face disappears, and he will die believing that he is a Christian. So don’t laugh at that poor man who died believing that he was Abraham Lincoln, because everybody else is doing the same. People are dying as Hindus – they were not born as Hindus.It was a continual trouble for me whenever there was a census. The officers would come to me to fill out the form, and when it came to religion, I would say, “I don’t have any religion.”They would be shocked, but they would say, “You must have been born into some religion. Your parents must have been Hindus, Mohammedans, Jainas.”I said, “That does not make any difference. My father can be a doctor or an engineer – that will not make me a doctor or an engineer. He may be a Hindu or a Mohammedan – that is his business. He cannot biologically transfer his religion to me. If he cannot transfer his medical knowledge to me, how can he transfer his spiritual knowledge to me? It is a deception, and I don’t want to be part of any deception.”People are being trained as actors; in this whole big world you will find everybody acting. Everybody is brought up to act: beautiful names – etiquette, manners – but hidden behind is a subtle psychology to make you forget your originality and imbibe some acting which the vested interests want you to be.Never be inspired by anybody. Remain open. When you see a beautiful sunset, enjoy the beauty of it; when you see a buddha, enjoy the beauty of the man, enjoy the authenticity of the man, enjoy the silence, enjoy the truth the man has realized – but don’t become a follower. All followers are lost.Remain yourself. This man, Gautam Buddha, has found because he has remained himself. And all these beautiful names – Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Bodhidharma, Nagarjuna, Pythagoras, Socrates, Heraclitus, Epicurus – all these beautiful names which have been a great inspiration to many people were themselves never inspired by anybody. That’s how they protected their originality; that’s how they remained themselves.I have been with masters, and I have loved them. But to me the very desire to be like them is ugly. One man is enough; a second like him will not enrich existence, it will only burden it.To me, uniqueness of individuals is the greatest truth.Love people when you find in them a true and authentic, blossoming dimension. But remember, they are blossoming because of their authenticity and originality; so remember, be mindful not to fall in the trap of following them. Be yourself.The famous maxim from Socrates is: “Know thyself.” But it should be completed – it is incomplete. Before “Know thyself” another maxim is needed, “Be thyself”; otherwise you may know only some actor that you are pretending to be. Knowing thyself comes second; first is being thyself.The real, great masters have been only friends, a helping hand, fingers pointing to the moon; they have never created slavery. But the moment they died they left such a great impact around them that cunning people – theologians, priests, scholars – started preaching to people, “Follow Gautam Buddha.”Now the man is dead and he cannot deny anything. And these people started exploiting the great impact that Buddha had left. Now the whole of Asia, millions of people, have followed in the steps of Gautam Buddha for twenty-five centuries, but not a single Gautam Buddha has been created. It is enough proof: two thousand years and not a single Jesus again; three thousand years, not a single Moses again.Existence never repeats. History repeats itself because history belongs to the unconscious mob. Existence never repeats itself. It is very creative and very inventive. And it is good; otherwise, although Gautam Buddha is a beautiful man, if there are thousands of Gautam Buddhas around – if wherever you go you meet Gautam Buddha, in every restaurant! – you will be really bored and tired. It will destroy the whole beauty of the man. It is good that existence never repeats. It only creates one of a kind, so it remains always rare.You are also one of a kind. You just have to blossom, to open your petals and release your fragrance.Osho,I have heard it said that some sannyasin therapists now imagine that they are on the same plane as you are, doing the same kind of work – if perhaps on a somewhat smaller scale. They no longer even mention your name, and appear to have discarded the mala and red clothes entirely. Have they achieved – or what is really going on with your therapists?What is going on is hilarious.These people think they have become individuals, they have attained freedom. But they don’t even see a simple thing. I said to them, “You can drop your malas, and you can drop your red clothes, and you can be free” – and they immediately followed! They proved that they are followers – chronic followers! If I had not said that, they would have been wearing the mala and red clothes still. Their freedom is not their attainment, but just my joke!Naturally when I said, “I am your friend,” they started thinking that they are my friends. These are two totally different things. When I say I am your friend, that does not mean that you are my friend. For the second to be real, you will have to travel long.I say out of my compassion that I am your friend, and you say out of your ego that you are my friend. And naturally, when you are my friend, then you are doing the same work as I am doing. It is just out of humbleness that they are saying, “Perhaps you are doing it on a bigger scale and we are doing it on a smaller scale.” But deep down they may be thinking that they are doing it on a bigger scale – or a more personal and intimate scale.They have been with me for years, but they have been less with me than with their patients. The people who have missed me most are the therapists.Once I declared some people enlightened – and they became enlightened! And when I said it was just a joke, they became unenlightened again. I had told them, “You are now free.” So they are free! Tomorrow I can call them back and put them in red clothes and in the mala: “This much freedom is enough; more than that is dangerous. Just come back and be your old self!”If you really understand me, you will see the point: I give you chances to show your ego to yourself, to show your reality to yourself. And that’s what is happening, and it is really hilarious. I saw one therapist who has even shaved his beard and mustache. Perhaps he thinks by shaving the beard and mustache, he has shaved himself spiritually too. And all that he looks like is like a well-shaved ape – just stupid.It is unfortunate but it is true that the therapists have missed me most, for the simple reason that in the commune they were working on people’s psychology and they started getting a subtle ego that they were helping my work. They forgot completely that they have not even started working on themselves.They had a certain knowledge of therapy; they were useful for people and they helped to bring people close to me. Their patients became more intimate to me, more open to me, became more understanding of my work than the therapists. And because they were therapists and they were answering the questions from people, running groups, they would not ask questions to me about themselves.They had come for themselves, but they got lost because they had brought a load of knowledge. It was useful for others, and I told them that they should help people. But all their knowledge was not capable of indicating a single small thing to them: “We have come here to realize ourselves; we can do the therapy, but that is not what we have come here for.”They went on doing therapy, and when the commune dispersed, they went back to their countries thinking that now they are doing exactly the work I am doing – and they don’t know even the ABC of my work. They were the most blind and the most deaf, because they were the most knowledgeable people.They have missed the first opportunity. Now in the second opportunity, all those therapists who are just behaving like buffoons will be called back and put to some other work – not therapy. They have to be completely removed from their knowledge; otherwise it is very simple for them to think like this.They are afraid to mention my name because that may create the feeling in people that they are still not free of me. Their fear shows that they are not free of me. If they were really free of me, there would have been gratitude. They would have taken my name to different parts of the world with great respect and love if they were really free.But they know they are not free; hence the fear. If somebody discovers that they have been my sannyasins, then what will happen to the sudden mastery that they have attained? A few of them have become “enlightened,” a few of them have become “liberated” – and they are simply proving one thing, that they are utter fools. And the sooner they realize it, the better!Osho,It seems to me that perhaps all the master needs to do is to hand out to each of his disciples a length of rope. Over the course of time, we either use that rope to skip with or to hang ourselves with. Please comment.That’s true – it needs no comment!

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Can you tell us what happened to you since we last met on that beautiful morning in Crete, some weeks ago?A lot – and nothing. A lot on the periphery, and nothing to my being – nothing to me.The first thing I became alert to was that man has not been evolving, that perhaps the concept of evolution is wrong, because for thousands of years he has been behaving in the same pattern.That beautiful morning on the island of Crete, the people and their mistreatment of me and my friends who were with me, reminded me of Socrates. These were the same people, and strangely the crime alleged against Socrates was the same: corrupting the young minds, destroying their morality. Their allegation against me was exactly the same.It seems twenty-five centuries have simply passed by and man is stuck, not evolving. Their behavior was brutal, inhuman. They could have told me to leave the country – it is their country – there was no need for brutality, smashing the windows and the doors of the house with rocks. To me, coming from the top floor, it sounded as if bombs were being exploded. They had dynamite with them, and they were threatening that they would dynamite the whole house. It seems as if to send me out of the country was just an excuse to give expression to this brutality; otherwise it was a simple matter to tell me that I am not welcome.The man who had given me the tourist visa for four weeks was the chief of police; and the man who canceled it after fifteen days was the deputy chief of police. That seems to be absolutely improper – that the chief should give the permission and the deputy should cancel it.At the airport in Athens there were at least forty police officers, just for a single man without any weapons, and that deputy chief was also present. There was a huge crowd of press people from newspapers, radio, television – and dozens of cameras – they all wanted an interview with me. And I said, “There is not much to say, other than it seems man is not going to be civilized, ever.”The press people were in front of me, those forty police dogs – all big officers – were surrounding me, and the deputy chief was standing by my side. I said, “With this kind of police, this kind of government, you are destroying the very future of humanity, particularly of your own country. These people were responsible for killing Socrates.” When I said this, pointing toward the deputy chief, he wanted to interfere.For the first time in thirty-five years, I pretended to be angry. I could not succeed because inside I was giggling! But I told that man, “Shut up! And stand by the side where you belong. Don’t come close to me.” I shouted, “Shut up!” so loudly, that he really became silent and went back and stood in the crowd. Later on I saw the reports: they thought I was ferocious, very angry – I was nothing! But that is the only language those people will understand. And when you are talking to somebody, you have to use the language he understands.But I enjoyed it. Anger can be acted – you can remain absolutely silent within and you can be ferocious outside. And there is no contradiction, because that ferociousness is only acting.On the airplane I remembered George Gurdjieff, who was trained in many Sufi schools in different methods. In a certain school one method was used, and that was acting: when you are not feeling angry, act angry; when you are feeling very happy, act miserable.The method has a tremendous implication. It means that when you are miserable you will be capable of acting happy; when you are angry you will be able to act peaceful. Not only that, it implies that you are neither misery nor happiness, these are faces you can make: you are different, your being is not involved in it. And Gurdjieff became so proficient in it. The school was training him for this particular method. Strange methods have been used for meditation, to discover your being, to detach it from your emotions, sentiments, actions.Gurdjieff became so capable that if he was sitting between two persons, to one person he would appear immensely peaceful and silent – half of his face, one profile; to the other he will appear to be murderous, dangerous, criminal – the other profile, the other side. And when both persons would talk about Gurdjieff, how could they agree? They were bound to disagree. According to one, they have met a very silent, peaceful person, and according to the other, a very murderous, dangerous, criminal type.When asked, Gurdjieff would say, “They are both right. I can manage not only to divide my being and my action, I can manage to divide even my face into two parts.”I was presented a statue of Buddha from Japan – a very beautiful statue, but very strange. In one hand he is holding a naked sword, and in the other hand he is holding a small lamp. In the East they use mud lamps, which are just small cups of mud filled with oil. They are almost like candles with a flame, so the flame was there. The flame was shining on one part of his face: it was lighted, silent, peaceful. And the sword was reflected on the other side of his face: a warrior, a fighter, a born rebel, a revolutionary.At the airport in Athens, I saw those forty police officers… They must have been the topmost people, except for the chief, because he could not gather courage to come. I would have asked him, “On what grounds has the visa given by you been canceled by your assistant?” Only he was not there.But from the others I saw a strange thing: they were behaving in very inhuman ways, but they were all cowards. When I shouted, “Shut up!” that deputy chief simply slipped back like a small child, afraid that the television would catch my words and me, and him with all the honors of the police on his coat, with a pistol hanging by his side. But inside there was a child, a cowardly child.It was an experience – because democracy was born in Athens. Democracy is a Greek idea, and yet the man who created the idea of democratic values was poisoned by Athenians; that’s what history goes on saying. But that day I became suspicious of history.Socrates was not poisoned by the people of Athens, but by the bureaucracy of Athens. And one should make a distinction, because I was mistreated on the island of Crete by the police. But the people of the village where I was staying, Saint Nicholas, were not with the bureaucracy. When one journalist asked me, “What is your message to the people of Saint Nicholas?” I said, “Just tell them to come to the airport, to show the police that they are with me and not with them.”Three thousand people were at the airport in the middle of the night, filling the whole terrace of the airport. They had been standing there for hours. The whole village was empty; those who were left behind had to walk because they could not get a taxi, a bus – everything had gone to the airport. But people walked miles to reach the airport to demonstrate a simple fact: they were not with the brutality and the fascist behavior of the government; they were with me.People have always been blamed for the bureaucracy and its brutality. I don’t think Socrates would have been killed by the people of Athens. He was such a loving person, and with no egoistic idea of being holier than you.In the morning he would go to fetch some vegetables, and he would not return even by night – because everywhere on the streets, in the vegetable shop, in the market, he was discussing with everybody things which are beyond the ordinary man. He was the teacher of the whole of Athens. A single man made Athens one of the most intelligent cities that has ever existed in the world: single-handedly, just moving, meeting anybody. To say hello to him meant you were entering into a dialogue in spite of yourself. You may have been in a hurry – Socrates was not in a hurry.These people could not have killed him. The bureaucracy became afraid. The Crete experience made me look again at history. The books are lying: the people have not killed the man. They could not have even imagined it. But the government… And why should the government kill the man? – because the man was making the masses so intelligent, so independent, so freedom-loving, so individualistic, that the government would soon find itself in troubled waters. It would not be able to control those people, it would not be able to enslave those people.“It is better to kill Socrates than let him go on sharpening people’s minds to such an extent that the bureaucrats look like fools! Before it happens, it is better to kill him.” But the history books go on saying that the people of Athens killed Socrates. Now, I saw the people of Saint Nicholas come running to the airport to demonstrate that they were not with the police. And even when I had left their country, a deputation from Saint Nicholas, on their own decision, went to see the president of the country to protest about what had happened in their village.I had been there only two weeks, and I had never gone out of the house; but they could see my people – at least five hundred sannyasins from all over Europe had gathered. They were well accustomed to tourists, because it is a tourist place, but they had never seen such loving people. And just because of my sannyasins… They could not understand me, the language was a great barrier, still, a few of the village people started coming just to sit with me in the morning, in the evening. And that’s what was hurting the religious hierarchy.The archbishop was getting mad because nobody was coming to his congregation; and I had been there for fifteen days and I had created a big congregation. In his congregation, between six to twelve old women – who were almost dead – used to come to listen to him.He was getting afraid, sending telegrams to the president, to the prime minister, to other ministers, to the police chief, giving interviews which were full of lies – because he knew nothing about me. And his fear became infectious: the government also became afraid.One of my sannyasins, Amrito – who had invited me to Greece – was a close friend of the president, of the prime minister. She was well connected with all the high-position people, because twenty years before she had been chosen as the beauty queen, “Miss Greece,” and she had become famous. And since then she had been modeling, so all the film directors, businessmen, all kinds of people were related to her. She was never asked to make an appointment; she simply went to their houses – the president or the prime minister.But that day she went to the president and for six hours she remained there, and she was not allowed into the house. Why was the president afraid of a woman whom he knows, who has been coming to him and they have been friends? The fear was because – what would he say? He had no answer for what had been done to me and my people by his government.And you will be surprised: the answer came in a very strange way. I left Athens because they wouldn’t allow me even to stay for the night in a hotel under their supervision, or at the airport.As I left, they immediately started searching for Amrito. She must have found out from some source: “Now you will be the target. Why did you invite Osho here, knowing him?” And she had to escape out of the country.Amrito is a very simple and loving person. She is not rich; she has only a small juice bar. And still the police went to the juice bar and tried to find out strange things with which the police had no concern: that it was not clean. Of course it was not clean, because for three days she had been out of the country. And it was not clean because for fifteen days she was on the island of Crete with me, so only the servant was running it. But that is not a crime, at least not for the police. Perhaps the municipal authorities who look for cleanliness in restaurants, hotels may have come, but they were not there; the police were finding faults.But I have told her to go back and give fight, because she has not done anything wrong. Everything wrong is on the part of the government. Because they could not do any harm to me, afraid of its international results, they found a scapegoat: they can harass her, they can torture a woman who is divorced, has a little child, an old mother, and she is the only earning person. And what earning can come out of a juice bar?These people always throw their crimes on the masses – and the masses are dumb. And history is really bunk: there are more lies in history books than anywhere else. The incident was small, but the implications were great.I had not stepped out of the house, I was not talking in Greek. The people of the country could not understand me. The people who were listening to me were all from outside of Greece. To say that I am corrupting the minds of youth, destroying the morality of the country, its tradition, its church, the family – but the people who were listening to me were not Greek! In what way could I have had any effect on their morality, on their religion?But it seems bureaucracy does not think; it simply lives out of fear: nobody should raise questions about the very roots of their society. But it is foolish because wherever I am, I am going to do the same, and my word is going to reach everywhere in the world.What can I do if their roots are rotten? What can I do if their morality is not morality but only a pretension? What can I do if their marriage is hypocrisy and not love? What can I do if the family has been outlived, and needs to be replaced by something better? It has done its work. It has done a few good things which can be done in a different way. It has done a few very dangerous, poisonous things which can be avoided.The family, as it has existed down the ages, cannot be allowed to exist. If it exists, then man has to die. To save man we have to change the social structure around him, to bring a new man because the old has been an utter failure.For ten thousand years at least, we have moved on the same lines, reaching nowhere. It is time to understand that we have taken a wrong route. It is stale; it leads to death. It does not allow people joy, rejoicing; it does not allow people to sing and to dance. It makes people serious, heavy – for themselves and for others.In the family are the seeds of all wars, of all religions, of all nations. That’s why they call the family, the “unit of our civilization.” There is no civilization and the unit is rotten. It creates only a pathological man, who needs all kinds of psychotherapies and still remains pathological. We have not been able to create a sane humanity.So on the periphery I thought what happened in Greece perhaps may happen in other countries, because it is the same structure – and it happened.From Greece we moved to Geneva, just for an overnight rest, and the moment they came to know my name they said, “No way! We cannot allow him into our country.” I was not even allowed to get out of the plane.We moved to Sweden, thinking that people go on saying that Sweden is far more progressive than any country in Europe or in the world, that Sweden has been giving refuge to many terrorists, revolutionaries, expelled politicians, that it is very generous.We reached Sweden. We wanted to stay overnight because the pilots were running out of time. They could not go on anymore; otherwise it would become illegal. And we were happy because we had asked only for an overnight stay, but the man at the airport gave seven-day visas to everybody. Either he was drunk or just sleepy – it was midnight, past midnight.The person who had gone for the visas, came back very happy that we had been given seven-day visas. But immediately the police came and canceled the visas, and told us to move: “We cannot allow this man in our country.”They can allow terrorists, they can allow murderers, they can allow Mafia people and they can give them refuge, but they cannot allow me. And I was not asking for refuge or permanent residence, just an overnight stay.We turned to London, because it was simply a question of our basic right. And we made it twice legal – we purchased first-class tickets for the next day. Our own jet was there, but still we purchased the tickets in case they started saying, “You don’t have tickets for tomorrow, so we won’t allow you to stay in the first-class lounge.”We purchased tickets for everybody, just so that we could stay in the lounge, and we told them, “We have our own jet – and we also have tickets.”But they came upon a bylaw of the airport that the government or anybody cannot interfere with: “It is at our discretion – and this man we won’t allow in the lounge.”“In the lounge,” I thought, “how can I destroy their morality, their religion? In the first place I will be sleeping, and by the morning we will be gone.”But no, these so-called civilized countries are as primitive and barbarous as you can conceive. They said, “All that we can do is, we can put you in jail for the night.”Just by chance one of our friends looked into their file. They had all the instructions from the government already about how they were to treat me: I should not be allowed in any way to enter into the country, even for an overnight stay in a hotel or in the lounge; the only way was that I should be kept in jail.In the morning we moved to Ireland. Perhaps the man did not take note of my name among the passengers. We had asked just to stay for two, three days: “At the most seven, if you can give us.” We wanted time because some other decision was being made, and they were delaying it, and our movement was dependent on that decision.The man was really generous – must have taken too much beer! He gave everybody twenty-one days. We moved to the hotel and immediately the police arrived at the hotel to cancel it, saying, “That man is mad – he does not know anything.”They canceled the visas, but they were in a difficult situation – what to do with us? We were already in the land, we were in the hotel; we had passed a few hours in the hotel. They had given us twenty-one days on the passports. Now he had canceled them, and we were not ready to go. We had to wait still a few days.You can see how bureaucracy covers its own errors. They said, “You can stay here, but nobody should come to know about it: no press, nobody should come to know that Osho is here because then we will be in trouble. And of course we cannot do anything, because that will stir up problems immediately.“If you don’t want to go… And we have given you twenty-one days’ permission – on what grounds are we canceling? You have not done anything. You have only slept the night here, unless sleeping is a crime, so we are in a difficulty. The only way is you remain silent and absolutely hidden.”Now, it was absolutely illegal to stay without a visa; and the police were suggesting to us to remain silent so that nobody knows it – and leave silently. And they were keeping the press away; they were giving them false clues so they were looking in some different places.But the strange thing is that these people are in direct communication with the government. The question was raised in the parliament, “What happened? Their jet is standing at the airport. They have entered the country – where have they disappeared to?”The minister simply lied, saying, “They had come, and they have left.” We were in the country, and the parliament was told that we have left the country. This whole journey has been an exposure of the bureaucracies.And just now I have received the information that all the countries of Europe, jointly, are deciding that I cannot land my plane at any airport. How will refueling the plane affect their morality?They simply want to cut me off from humanity. That’s why I had to leave India. Their conditions were clear: they wanted me to remain in India – naturally they cannot deny me; it is my birthland. “You can remain,” they said, “but no foreign disciple can be allowed to reach you, and no news media can be allowed to reach you.”That was a way to cut me off from the world, from my people, and even from news media, so nobody knows whether I am alive or dead. It was a strategy to make me almost dead – although I am alive – to cut me off from everybody.I refused their conditions. I have never lived under any conditions, and particularly such ugly conditions. I left the country and went to Nepal – because that is the only country where I can go without a visa; otherwise the Indian government had informed all the embassies that no visa should be issued to me so that I could not leave India. They have a treaty with Nepal; no visa is needed.But Nepal is a small and very poor country, the poorest, and under tremendous pressure from India. India can take it over any moment. It has no army worth the name. When it became absolutely certain from reliable sources that they would compel the Nepalese government either to arrest me or to send me back to India, I had to leave Nepal.It makes no difference to my being. But it makes a lot of difference to my attitude about the society in which we are living. It is absolutely ugly, barbarous, uncultured, uncivilized.That’s why I said, “A lot – and nothing.”Osho,I found the story you told us about Mahavira, when he went begging, very odd. That he should stipulate how existence should present his daily food seemed to me like a trip, and not the attitude of someone totally available to, and accepting of, life's ways. Probably I have misunderstood the whole point. You have said we need not be in a hurry in our search; but around you I always feel such a great sense of how precious time is, so I want to use it to the maximum. And to me at the moment that means asking all and any questions I once might have held back, from fear of appearing stupid. I really do want to stand before you, “naked, empty, and alone.”The story of Mahavira has always been misunderstood – it is not only you who have misunderstood it – because we understand things according to our minds. If you were in place of Mahavira then perhaps it would be stipulating existence, but for Mahavira it is not so; it is not stipulating existence.As far as Mahavira is concerned, he simply wants a signal from existence – whether he should continue, or he is no longer needed. He never complains. At times he had remained fasting for three months continuously, but not a single word of complaint.If he was stipulating, then there would be frustration, there would be complaint. If he was trying to manipulate existence, then there would be a certain sense of failure. For three months he had not been able even to get food but there was no complaint. He was one of the most peaceful, loving, silent beings.Why did he make this decision after his morning meditation? – simply not to be a burden on existence. Let existence decide. He is not stipulating existence; he is allowing existence to take total charge of his life, even of his breathing, of his food. He is leaving everything in the hands of existence.But how will he know? There is no linguistic communication between you and existence; there can be only a symbolic communication; that was nothing but a symbolic communication. He wanted a symbol.One thing has to be remembered, that these people like Mahavira, Parshvanatha, Buddha, are very unique beings. They have their own ways, and their ways fit perfectly with their personalities.Now I will never do that kind of thing. I am a totally different person – but I will not misunderstand Mahavira either. I accept his uniqueness, and I respect the way he lived his life: always undemanding. This was not a demand that existence should fulfill this condition, it was simply an agreement: “Because language is not possible, I will choose a certain symbol, and then it is up to existence.” He is leaving himself in the hands of existence so totally that he does not want to breathe even a single breath on his own.But I am a totally different person, almost the very opposite of Mahavira. I will never ask such a thing from existence. My whole way is of let-go. And why bother? – once and for all leave it to existence, and when existence does not need you, you will be absorbed into the universe. There is no need every day to ask again and again – that is a kind of nagging. I have done it once, and that’s all. I will not do it twice, because to do it twice means that the first time you were not total; otherwise who is doing it again? Let-go can be done only once.When I was a child we used to have many puzzles, and particularly we used to ask a teacher – who was a little dumb – simple things, and he would get into such a nervous state. For example we used to ask him, “A man tried to commit suicide four times. Can you tell us when he succeeded? – the first time, the second time. Which time did he succeed?”He would start thinking about it. He would say, “How should I know?” If a man succeeds, then the last time is really the first time!In my understanding, let-go is only once. If you need it again, that means the first time… Whom were you deceiving? And what is the guarantee that the second time is not going to be just like the first?Let-go is an understanding. It is not something that you have to do. It is not something that you have to say to existence. It is simply an understanding: “I will not swim against the current, because that is simply stupid.” You are going to be tired soon, you can never be victorious against the current. Understanding that, you accept the current’s way as your way. That is let-go.Now, wherever the river leads you… You don’t have to check every day; you simply go with the river. Some day, any day, you may reach the ocean, you may disappear.So I will not suggest to anybody to do what Mahavira used to do. But Mahavira has his own unique being. His real name was not Mahavira; “Mahavira” means a great warrior. His real name was Vardhaman, but nobody remembers his real name for the simple reason that his whole approach is that of a warrior, a fighter. He is in a constant fight even with existence. He is saying, “I can live only if I am welcome. I don’t want to live even a single moment more if I am not welcome.”Deep down he was fighting, but his fighting had a beauty of its own. He was total in it; that was its beauty. It was not a partial war, it was total. And the secret is, whatever is total transforms you; your let-go, if it is total, will transform you; your fight, if total, will transform you. What transforms is neither let-go nor war, but your totality.Even today there are monks who follow Mahavira doing the same. There are not many because as soon as Mahavira died there was a division.There were people who were not ready for such a fight. And that division has many monks. They have compromised on many points on which Mahavira would not compromise. For example, they wear clothes, Mahavira remained naked. These people stay in homes, Mahavira never stayed under a roof. It may have been raining, it may have been cold, it may have been hot – he was always under a tree. So the people who wanted to compromise could not compromise when he was alive. He was a tremendously powerful man. But the day he died, his followers divided.There are only twenty-two of the orthodox ones, who still follow Mahavira. At least there were when I was in India; a few may have died because they were all old people, and once a monk dies it is very difficult to replace him. The other party, the compromisers, have almost five thousand monks and they go on growing. And they go on compromising.First they started using clothes; then they started using people’s houses to stay in. Now they have started even using airplanes. Mahavira walked all his life, never using any vehicle. I have seen these compromisers hiding toothpaste; Mahavira never washed his teeth. I know about these monks, that whenever they have a chance they take a shower; Mahavira never took a shower himself unless the sky was raining and he was standing under a tree.I have seen in one monk’s place, where he was staying… He was very friendly to me, and he was not worried that I would expose him.He asked, “What you will take? – Fanta or Coca Cola?”I said, “What are you asking?”He said, “Just don’t tell anybody!” And he opened a closet and he was hiding Coca Cola, Fanta! Compromise has no limit. But what is harmful in it? It is absolutely nonviolent junk; you can drink it.But the number of those who have followed Mahavira has been getting less and less; one dies and is not replaced. Even they, in an underground way, have compromised. It is difficult to be exactly like Mahavira. That’s what I say: following is impossible.After their meditation in the morning these people also make a certain condition that should be fulfilled. But those conditions are limited – six or eight – and everybody knows, so if they are staying in a city, then they will go to all the Jaina houses and the Jaina houses will be fulfilling different conditions. And they have made very simple conditions.For example, if two bananas are hanging on the door of a house, then the food will be accepted. And this is known. So every Jaina is hanging two bananas, and they come and they accept the food: the condition is fulfilled. Just such small conditions which are known, and which must be made known by the monks.They cannot eat food from anybody other than a Jaina family, so you will be surprised to see that they have renounced their family, one family, but when they are moving… And they are constantly moving. They cannot stay more than three days in one place, because this is Mahavira’s understanding. And I feel that he is right, that after three days some kind of attachment starts growing.For example, for the first day you will not find the place suitable to you. You may not sleep well, you may have a certain tension in you. But after the third day things start settling; and after the twenty-first day you become well-accustomed to the place, as if you had been born in it.A certain amount of time is needed for adjustment, so Mahavira does not allow more than three days. And there are very few Jainas in India, so there are many, many places where there are no Jainas – so what will the Jaina monk do? So twenty families follow him with their buses and their cars and tents, and wherever there is no Jaina family they make a small campus of tents and bananas are hanging… And all eight conditions that are known are fulfilled. And every family has prepared food. The man must have made one condition out of eight, so he will get food.Now, formally he is following Mahavira, but this was not what Mahavira was doing. That was a totally different thing. It was not let-go; he was not a man for let-go, he was a warrior.Truth has to be conquered, according to him, and to conquer it you have to fight totally. And the story I told you is part of his fight. His whole life is part of his fight.I will tell you one more story:He remained silent for twelve years, till he became enlightened. Those twelve years are filled with great incidents. One day he is meditating… And his meditation is also not that of a relaxed way. The meditation ordinarily done in the East is in the lotus posture, and the lotus posture physiologically is the most relaxed phenomenon once you have learned it, because your spine is straight and the gravitation is the least, and that makes your body hang on the straight spine like a loose cloth.Mahavira meditates standing. In his every attitude he is a warrior. There are people who meditate with closed eyes, which is more relaxed. There are people who meditate with open eyes, just the natural way, blinking. That too is not a fight. Mahavira meditates with eyes half closed and half open, and no blinking.One day he is standing and meditating by the side of the river, and a man comes and says to him, “You are standing here, just watch my cows. I am leaving – I have to go to my home urgently; my mother is sick and somebody has come to inform me that she is dying. So I will be back soon, but you are standing here for the whole day anyway, just have a look so my cows don’t get lost in the jungle.”Mahavira, because he cannot speak, is silent. And the man is in such a hurry – his mother is dying – he does not bother that this man is not speaking. He simply takes his silence as a yes.When he comes back after one or two hours, Mahavira is still standing there but all the cows are gone. Now, he gets furious. He says, “You seem to be a cunning man. So you were standing here the whole day just for my cows. Where are my cows?”And because he does not speak, the man becomes more and more furious: “So you are trying to be dumb! I will make you speak!” And he takes two pieces of wood and forces those two pieces into Mahavira’s two ears and hits them hard with a rock, so that he becomes deaf for his whole life. But still he will not speak, he will not blink.The man thought, “He seems to be mad. Anybody would have spoken.” And he goes and looks in the forest. In the evening the cows come back, and when the man comes back, he finds they are all sitting around Mahavira where he had left them before.He said, “You are really a man! I destroyed your ears and you did not speak! I have been going all over the forest, and the cows are sitting here! Where have you been hiding them?” And he beats him – he is naked.And Mahavira remains standing. The man is thinking that he is really mad. Beating hasn’t any effect. You cannot do anything to him – he will not react. That is total silence, that whatever happens he will remain centered without any reaction. It is not only a question of speaking.The story is beautiful. Up to this point it is factual, but it takes a mythological ending. In India there are many gods. India does not believe in one god – one god seems to be like believing in a dictator; it is undemocratic. India believes in many gods, actually thirty-three million. That was the population of India when they invented gods: one god for each one. That seems to be right and fair.Indra, one of the gods, feels terribly hurt and disturbed by what has happened to Mahavira, a silent man who has done nothing. The cows moved themselves, came back again, and he is utterly innocent.Indra came – and gods can speak without words – so he spoke to Mahavira, “I can give you two gods as bodyguards, because it is unthinkable, unbelievable! This should not happen.” And to gods you may not speak, but they can read your thought.Indra reads Mahavira’s thought: “Just leave me alone. I don’t want anybody’s help; I want to fight it alone. I don’t want to be indebted to anybody. Forgive me. Whatever happens, I am going to fight this whole war alone until I am victorious.”Now, his victory will sound strange to anybody who has been listening to the idea of let-go, surrender to existence. But this is a good place to remind you: be compassionate about others, their uniqueness. It does not mean that you have to follow their path, it simply means a deep understanding that people are unique; and if people are unique then their ways are going to be unique. Sometimes very opposite ways lead to the same goal.It is very easy to misunderstand, but I would like you to understand different ways, different people, different uniquenesses. All that will help to broaden your heart, your compassion, your comprehension. And whatever path you are following, it will be helpful to it.This is broadness – that it can contain contradictions.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I remember while you were in the police station in Crete, those two young smiling Greek women, dressed in black like typical Cretan women, coming to the window, holding your hand and saying in very broken English, “Osho, we love you. We are Cretan, we want you to stay here.”It seems that as the governments become increasingly strident in their attacks on you – in spite of the increasingly obvious love the common man has for you – one of the most important parts of your work will be to show how the bureaucracy, far from representing the common man, is in fact in complete opposition to him.I certainly remember those two young women holding my hand and trying to convey to me that “We, the people of this island, want you to stay here. We love you.”The question you have raised has occurred to me many times in my life, again and again. The bureaucracy is not for the people, it is against them. It uses them, it exploits them, it manipulates them; it makes them believe that it is serving their purposes. But the reality is just the opposite.They define democracy as the government of the people, for the people, by the people. It is none of these things. It is neither by the people, nor of the people, nor for the people.The people who have been holding power down the centuries have always been able to persuade people that whatever is being done is done for their sake. And the people have believed it because they have been trained to believe. It is a conspiracy between religion and state to exploit humanity.The religion goes on preaching belief and destroys the intelligence of people to question, makes them retarded. And the state goes on exploiting them in every possible way – still managing to keep the people’s support, because the people have been trained to believe, not to question. Any kind of government – it may be monarchy, it may be aristocracy, it may be democracy. It may be any kind of government; just the names change, but deep down the reality remains the same.In Japan before the Second World War, Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, was believed to be the direct descendant of the Sun God, and whatever he was saying was not human, it was divine; his order had just to be followed. For centuries Japanese people have believed in him as a Sun God, and they have died in hundreds of wars, willingly, joyously, because they are dying for God himself. What more blissful and beautiful a death could one aspire to?Japan is a small country, but no other country has been able to conquer it – even countries like China, vast countries. China is the greatest country as far as numbers are concerned, as far as land is concerned, but a tiny Japan was able to defeat the Chinese because the people had this fanatic belief that God was behind them, so victory was theirs. And the same has more or less been the situation all over the world.That day when those two Cretan women, holding my hand with great love, said to me, “We are not against you. We love you and we want you to stay here,” they represented the real consciousness of the people. And then I saw at the airport, that three thousand people – it must have been the whole population of Saint Nicholas – came to show their support, and to show that they were not with the brutality and nazi actions of the police against me, that they were for me.Yes, it has to be one of my works to awaken people to the real situation: you are being exploited in different names. The exploiters even call themselves public servants, saying that they serve you. For thousands of years they have been serving – and the people are in immense misery, ignorance. They don’t have anything to their life; they are born, they somehow live, and they die. Nothing happens to them which could be called ecstatic, which could be called an experience. Empty from birth to death, hollow; nothing flowers, nothing blossoms – and they have all the potentiality of being a song of joy. But these bureaucracies, religious and political, would not allow it. They are so afraid of joyous people.It was a strange feeling for me in the beginning. I had never thought that people should be so afraid of joyous people. Slowly slowly, I became aware that joy has many implications: a joyous person is not retarded. A joyous person is intelligent. A joyous person knows the art of life; otherwise he cannot be joyous. And a joyous person is dangerous to all those vested interests which go against humanity.Those interests want humanity to live in hell forever. They have managed in every possible way to keep you in misery. They destroy everything that you can rejoice in, and they give you ample opportunity to be miserable. A miserable person is not a danger to this rotten society.Yes, it has to be one of my basic works to make people aware that the powerful ones – either religious or political – are not your friends. They are your enemies. And unless the common humanity goes through a rebellion against all types of bureaucracies man will remain stuck, not evolving, not reaching to the heights which are his birthright.Osho,Has anyone really understood your message of love? Recently it has been painfully clear to me that I haven't, and I wonder if we aren't all, with some slight variations on the theme, still singing the same old song.Why is it so difficult to live something that is so simple and natural?Just because it is so simple and so natural, that’s why it is so difficult.You are not simple and you are not natural. And it is simple and natural. My message of love is absolutely simple; nothing can be more simple than that. But your mind is very complex, very tricky. It makes simple things complicated – that’s its work. And for centuries it has been trained for only one thing: to make things so complicated that your life becomes impossible.Your mind has become expert in destroying you, because your life consists of simple things. The whole existence is simple, but man’s mind has been cultivated, conditioned, educated, programmed in such a way that the simplest thing becomes crooked. The moment it reaches to your mind it is no longer simple. The mind starts interpreting it, finding things in it which are not there, ignoring things which are there.And you think that you have heard whatever I have been telling you? It is not so. I have been telling you one thing, and you have been hearing something else because your hearing is not direct. There is a mediator – your mind. It functions in many ways as a censor, it does not allow many things to enter inside you.You will be surprised to know how much the mind prevents – ninety-eight percent. It allows in only two percent of what is being said to you, and that too not in its purity. First it pollutes it by its own interpretations, by its own past experiences, conditionings, and by the time it comes to have the sense that it has understood, what was said and what was heard are poles apart.Gautam Buddha used to tell a story… It is strange that all great masters have depended on stories. There is some reason for it: the mind relaxes when it is a question of a story; when it is just a joke the mind relaxes. There is no need to be tense and serious, just a story is being told, you can relax. But when something like love or freedom or silence is being explained, you are tense. That’s why the masters have to use simple stories. Perhaps by the end of the story they can manage it so a small message enters in from the back door while you are still relaxed.Gautam Buddha used to say – it was his custom after his evening talk – he used to say to his disciples, “Now go and do the last thing before you go to sleep.” That last thing was meditation.One day it happened that a prostitute was listening and a thief was also in the audience. When Buddha said, “Now it is time for you to go and do the last thing before you go to sleep,” all the sannyasins went to meditate. The thief simply became awakened – “What am I doing here?” This was the time to do his business. The prostitute looked around and felt that Buddha was really very perceptive, because when Buddha had said that, he was looking at her. She bowed down in gratitude because she was reminded, “Go to do your business before you go to sleep.”A simple statement, but three types of people heard three meanings. In fact there must have been more meanings, because to somebody meditation must have been a joy, to somebody else meditation must have been something one has to do; and then the meaning differs. To all those meditators the message was the same, but what was heard by them could not have been the same.All my life I have never taught anything complex to anybody. Life is already too complex, and I don’t want to burden you more. But I have been more misunderstood than perhaps anybody else in this whole century, for the simple reason that I am saying simple things which nobody says. I am talking about the obvious which everybody has forgotten, which has been taken for granted. Nobody talks about it.You can look at the great theological treatises of the Christians, at great works of religion by Hindus, Jews – very scholarly, very difficult to understand. The more difficult they are, the more they are respected. When people cannot understand something they think it is something great, mysterious, something far above their comprehension. And naturally it becomes respectable.The Hindus use a language for their religious treatises, Sanskrit, which has never been a living language. It has never been spoken by the people in the marketplace; it has been a language of the experts. But they have continuously resisted that Hindu scriptures should be translated.I was always wondering, why this resistance? In fact they should be happy that their scriptures are being translated and their message is being spread to all corners of the earth. But when I studied their scriptures, I understood the reason.The reason was that those scriptures have nothing. Just the language is so difficult and people don’t understand it, so they go on paying respect to it. Once it is translated into the language of the people it loses all glory, all spirituality. It becomes so ordinary because it is no longer difficult.The same is true about others – for example the Jews. The rabbis still prefer Hebrew. Now it is not a living language, why go on insisting on it? But it gives the mind the impression of something mysterious, impenetrable, holy, far beyond, so that all that you can do is bow down. Once it is translated, it has nothing. And especially, it has nothing that you need.None of these scriptures teach about love, its implications, its different dimensions. None of these scriptures teach about freedom. None of these scriptures teach about you, your life, and how it can be transformed into a celebration. They talk about God! I have never come across a single man who has any problem with God – it is so irrelevant. Is God anybody’s problem? Is the Holy Ghost anybody’s problem? – things which are absolutely irrelevant to human existence.The mind has been filled with all kinds of unnecessary luggage. No space is left in the mind for the realities that you have to live. So even your greatest theologian is as foolish about love as you are, has no understanding of freedom, has never inquired into the distinction between personality and individuality.I had one professor who was teaching religion. After listening for a few days I stood up and told him, “I think you are talking about irrelevant things. I don’t see a single student here for whom God is a problem, and I don’t see that God is a problem to you either” – because I used to live just in front of his house, and his wife was the problem.I told him, “Your wife is the real problem; that you can discuss. God is absolutely abstract. I have never seen you thinking about God in your house. And all that you are teaching about God has nothing of your experience in it, it has not been your quest. You are filling the minds of these innocent people with ideas which are of no use. Talk about love!”He was very angry. He said, “You have to come with me to the principal.”I said, “I can come even to God. You cannot threaten me.”On the way toward the principal’s office he said, “You don’t feel afraid?”I said, “Why should I feel afraid? You should feel afraid! Because I know all the students; their problem is love, and your problem is love. And I am going to tell the principal, ‘If you don’t believe me, just call this professor’s wife, and you will know what I mean by problem.’”He said, “You are making it too complex.”I said, “I am making it absolutely simple, factual. I can bring all the students to the office; they all have problems of love. Somebody is chasing a woman, and is not getting her – that’s his problem. Somebody has got her – and that is his problem.”He said, “It is better you should come back; there is no need…”I said, “I never go back from anywhere. If you are not coming, I am going alone.”He said, “When I am saying there is no need…”I said, “It may not be a need for you; it is a need for me. I have to decide it finally, because to me love is a religious phenomenon, while God is not. God is only a hypothesis. It means nothing, because there is nothing corresponding to it.“And love is a religious phenomenon. Unless it is understood in its totality, a man is bound to become miserable by something which could have made his life divine. The same thing which could have been his heaven is going to become hell because he has no understanding. And it is certainly an art. Who cares about God? So start talking sense. We have come here to understand religion, not nonsense.”“But,” he said, “in the whole syllabus there is no mention of love, freedom, individuality, silence. We have to complete the syllabus.”Universities are completing their syllabuses without bothering about the real life of man, his real problems.Because I am talking about simple things, many people simply feel that this is not what religion has to be. They have got an idea of religion, of complicated abstract hypotheses. You can go on thinking about them but it makes no difference to your life, you remain the same. You may be a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a Christian it does not matter; your real problems are the same. Your unreal problems are different, but those unreal problems are nothing but a burden to the mind.It is possible to understand me if you can just put aside your mind and its complicated mechanism. It is not needed, because my work is heart to heart. I am speaking from my heart. I am not a theoretician, I am not speaking from my mind. I am pouring my heart to you, but if you are going to listen from the mind you are going to miss it.If you are also ready to open a new door into your being, if you are ready to hear from the heart, then whatever I am saying is so simple that there is no need to believe in it, because there is no way to disbelieve it. It is so simple that there is no way to doubt it.I am against belief for the simple reason that, for all my teaching, no belief is needed. I am all for doubt because, for my simple teaching, you cannot doubt. All the religions of the world insist on belief, because what they are teaching can be doubted. And they are all against doubt because doubt can destroy their whole edifice.I am simple and real. I am not metaphysical; hence there is no need to believe in me. If you have heard me, a trust is bound to arise which is not belief, which is closer to love; even if you try to doubt, you cannot. And when you cannot doubt something then there is real trust, indubitable trust. It transforms simply by being within you.In the whole history of man, only Mahavira has made a distinction to be remembered – which is significant in this reference. He says that there are two ways to reach to the truth. One is the way of the shravaka. Shravaka means one who can hear, one who is able to hear from the heart. Then he need not do anything. Just hearing is enough, and he will be transformed. The other is the way of the monk, who will have to try hard to reach to the truth.My effort has been not to create monks. That’s why I have chosen to speak, because just hearing you can be reborn. Nothing else is needed on your part, except a willingness to open the doors of your heart. Just let me in and you will not be the same again.I have seen thousands of my people changing without their knowing; they have changed so drastically, but the change has happened almost underground. Their mind has not been even allowed to take part in it – just from heart to heart.These people had not needed any therapy. These people here have not needed any meditation. If they have heard, the way I am telling you, then this is their meditation, and this is their therapy, and this is their revolution.Osho,I have heard you extol “commune-ism” as the highest form of economic system, the sharing equally of abundance and richness in a loving family of man. Further, I have heard you say that the poor should be brought up to the level of the rich rather than the rich being dragged down into poverty, as has happened in all existing communistic societies. But how can the rich share wealth now, and live in “commune-ism” without being dragged down into economic mediocrity?The first thing is that the rich people of the world should start living in communes. Let those communes be of the rich! – so they will not be dragged down from their standard of life, their comforts, their luxuries. Let there be around the world hundreds of communes of rich people – rich communes.And to me, wealth is a certain kind of creativity. If five thousand rich people who have all created wealth individually are together, they can create wealth a millionfold. Their standard will not go lower; their standard can even go higher. Or they can start sharing. They can start inviting people who are not rich but who are creative in some other way, who will enhance the life of their commune although they may be poor.Five thousand rich people, together with their genius for creating wealth, are capable of creating so much wealth that they can invite thousands of other people who may not be rich in the sense of being wealthy, but who may be rich as painters, as poets, as dancers, as singers.What are you going to do only with wealth? You cannot play music on money; you cannot dance just because you have so much cash in the bank. And these rich communes can start becoming bigger, absorbing more and more creative people. These rich communes will need every kind of thing.Talking about the rich commune, I am reminded of the Jaina community. There was a time in India, in the history of Jainism – because Jainism is a small community and it is a community of rich people. In India you cannot find a single Jaina beggar, a single Jaina orphan. In the ancient days it was a fundamental rule that if a Jaina was poor, then all other Jainas would simply contribute just little parts.For example, if he needs a house, the whole commune simply provides it. Somebody provides the wood, somebody provides the bricks, somebody provides the tiles and the whole community provides some money for the man to start off with. You have changed a poor man into a rich man. Nobody has been forced to do it, it is just out of generosity. And that man will do the same when a new arrival happens to come to the commune.You are asking me right now what the rich people should do. They should drop their private ownership and make a rich commune wherever they can manage – and they can manage everywhere, anywhere. They can make beautiful places all around the world, and slowly, slowly new people can be absorbed.For example, you will need plumbers, however rich you may be; you will need mechanical people; you will need technicians; you will need shoemakers. Invite these people – and they come to you not as servants, but as members of the commune. They will be enriching the commune doing whatever they can do the best. And it is the commune’s duty to raise those people to the same standard of life.Slowly, slowly we can transform the whole world – without any bloodshed and without any dictatorship.A communism that comes out of love, out of intelligence, out of generosity, will be real. A communism that comes through force is going to be unreal. There is not a single man in the world, howsoever poor, who has nothing to contribute.I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln. I love this anecdote so much!It was his first address in the Senate as president. He was a poor man’s son, his father was a shoemaker – in India he would have been an untouchable. Even in America people were very annoyed, irritated, angry that a shoemaker’s son had become the president; the aristocrats, the rich, the super-rich naturally were angry. There was great tension on the first day when he addressed them.As he stood up, one aristocrat also stood up and said, “Mr. President, before you start speaking, I would like you to remember that your father used to make shoes for my family. Right now I am using the shoes made by your father, so don’t forget that. Just becoming president does not mean anything. Don’t forget that you are a shoemaker’s son.”There was absolute silence, pin-drop silence. Everybody felt that Abraham Lincoln would feel embarrassed, but instead of feeling embarrassed, he made the whole Senate feel embarrassed.He said, “It is good, I am immensely thankful to you that you reminded me about my father” – and tears came to his eyes. And he said, “How can I forget him? I know that he was a perfect shoemaker and I can never be that perfect a president. I cannot defeat the old man.“You are still wearing shoes he has made – many of you must be wearing them. If they do not fit you, if they are pinching, if you are feeling uncomfortable, don’t be worried. Although my father is dead, he made me learn the art enough to mend your shoes. I cannot replace him; he was a perfect master. I am just an amateur, but I can mend your shoes and I will always remember to try at least to become as good a president as he was a shoemaker. I cannot hope to be better than him – that is impossible, because I know him.”The poorest man in the world has also got something to contribute. Create rich communes and suddenly you will find that you need many people, not just the rich. They may be able to create wealth, but wealth is not all. Life is much more than wealth. It needs so many things that naturally you will have to invite many people. Around the world all the rich communes will need people; and slowly, slowly your commune will become bigger and bigger.The richer will not become poorer, but the poorer will become richer, and respectable, and equal – in no way inferior to anybody else – because they are also functioning in the same way as anybody else. And whatever they are doing is needed as much as anybody else’s expertise is needed.I conceive of this just like a flower opening up, becoming bigger – all the petals opening up. A commune, full-blown, complete, lacking nothing, will not be only of rich people. Many poor people will have been transformed into richness. And they will be contributing – they will not be a burden, and they will not be beggars. They will have their pride. You cannot exist without them.We can transform the whole earth into a rich society, but it should start the way I am telling you: not by the dictatorship of the proletariat, but by communes of the rich.Osho,I really felt affected when you talked about Rajen the other night, because I feel friendship for him, and I feel he loves you as he did before. I feel that in dropping the mala and the red clothes, he is simply trying to experience something new.I must admit, though, that having worked with him for years, in the most recent group experience with him just a few days ago the quality of his work felt different: I missed the feeling of your presence through him. Please comment.Your question itself is the answer. If he loves me, then in his groups my presence would have become even more tangible. If my presence in his groups has disappeared, then what he calls love is just an empty word. This is a simple thing.Neither dropping the mala nor the red clothes is important, because I have allowed it myself. But in his groups he is saying, “I used to serve Osho through surrender. I am still serving him, through making you free of Osho.” The whole world is free of me. Nobody needs to work to make people free of me. The whole world is already free of me.But why is my presence being missed? He has lost contact with my heart; his heart is no longer beating with my heart. And it is not only with Rajen. It is so with many other therapists. Only a few have proved the fire test, like Prasad, who has not just remained the same, but has become more deeply involved with me on a new basis, a new flowering of love. In his groups my presence has become deeper. And his work has changed; his therapy has become different, more effective.But all these people are unconscious. Their love is not what I mean by love. Perhaps at the most, their love means that they don’t hate me. Even that much will be great, because most of them may even be angry with me for the simple reason that they had become accustomed to being just a follower. The whole responsibility was on me. Now I have given back the responsibility to them; they can be angry – they are bound to be angry. They may go on saying like old parrots, “I love you,” but their actions don’t prove it.Ananda Teertha and a few others with him have opened a meditation academy in Italy. Devageet was there. In finding the place, in arranging the place he worked hard, but finally he was very disappointed because they did not want my name to be associated with the academy.Devageet said, “I have been working day and night just so that we can create an academy for Osho, and you are not ready even to mention his name in the brochure!” They all had their pictures in the brochure, and they were not willing to have my picture in the brochure.Devageet had to leave in disgust. They were all saying, “We love Osho,” but no mention of me in the brochure, no mention of me in their groups. And all their groups are filled by sannyasins, and those sannyasins are coming because of me. Devageet made it clear that this is pure exploitation. “These people are coming to your groups because of Osho, not because of you. And you are no longer working for Osho.”Devageet came to see me in Crete, and I told him, “Don’t be disturbed. This is how unconscious humanity is. Let them do what they are doing. If it is good for people, people will go on coming to them; if it is not good, they will disappear.”“But,” he said, “it hurts that you made these people great therapists. You made their name famous around the world.”I said, “You don’t understand the unconscious mind’s logic: now they are taking revenge. They cannot forgive me because I have made them; they feel a certain inferiority, and they would like to proclaim their superiority. So let them do it – don’t be worried. This is how this world goes on.”It makes no difference to me whether my name is associated with their academy, because there are thousands of other therapists in the world who have nothing to do with me, so these few also can be part of that. Or, they may realize sooner or later that what they are doing is ugly, unloving, and to a man who has made them world-famous; otherwise nobody knew about them, nobody would have ever heard about them.But this is the problem: it is very difficult to forgive a person who has helped you in any way. You cannot pay it back to me; there is no way of repaying, and you feel indebted. A certain inferiority that you are not self-made creates anger, revenge. But all this will subside.Just look at your question. You say that you have been with Rajen, and you feel, “He loves you just as he loved you before.” And still you observe that in his work I am no longer there; I am absent.Can’t you see the contradiction? If he loves me, I should be more present and he should be more absent. If he loves me totally, then only I will be present and he will not be present at all; otherwise the word love is just a word as everybody else is using it.But these people will come to understand soon. It will take a little time because while they were with me, and they were working with the people in therapy groups, it was as if they were constantly nourished by my love.Soon they will find out that that nourishment is no longer there because their hearts are closed, and they will start feeling tired, exhausted, because all those people who come for therapy are going to take their energies. Soon they will find that they have lost their roots, that now they cannot blossom. But it will take a little time. You can cut the roots – still the flowers will remain for a few days, but not for long.So let them come to the understanding by themselves, that here they used to work so much with so many people – they worked with thousands of people – but they never felt as if their energies were sucked. They were not aware they were feeling like that because their roots were within me. But in the name of freedom, they have withdrawn their roots. They will start dying. It will be sad if they don’t understand it.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You talked the other morning of the child being forced to be obedient. That child is still sitting here: I hate being told what to do. But in a way that should be the other person's problem; however, I insist on making it my problem by reacting with anger, resentment, and the need to justify myself. It is clear that those who do the telling also hate being told what to do. It seems as if we are all caught in the same intricate web, playing different roles at different times. As an adult how can I convert reaction into response and responsibility?The first thing to be understood very clearly is what I mean by disobedience. It is not the disobedience you will find in the dictionaries. My idea of disobedience is not to hate being told what to do or, in reaction, to do just the opposite.Obedience needs no intelligence. All machines are obedient; nobody has ever heard of a disobedient machine. Obedience is simple, too. It takes the burden of any responsibility from you. There is no need to react, you have simply to do what is being said. The responsibility rests with the source from where the order comes. In a certain way you are very free: you cannot be condemned for your act.After the Second World War, in the Nuremberg trials, so many of Adolf Hitler’s top men simply said that they were not responsible, and they didn’t feel guilty. They were simply being obedient: whatever was told they did it, and they did it with as much efficiency as they were capable of.In fact to make them responsible and condemn them, punish them, send them to the gallows, according to me was not fair. It was not justice, it was revenge. If Adolf Hitler had won the war, then Churchill’s people, Roosevelt’s people, Stalin’s people or they themselves would have been in the same situation, and they would have said exactly the same: that they were not responsible.If Stalin had been on the stand in the court, he would have said that it was the order of the high command of the Communist Party. It was not his responsibility because it was not his decision; he had not done anything on his own. So if you want to punish, punish the source of the order. But you are punishing a person who simply fulfilled what all the religions teach, and all the leaders of the world teach – obedience.Obedience has a simplicity; disobedience needs a little higher order of intelligence. Any idiot can be obedient, in fact only idiots can be obedient. The person of intelligence is bound to ask why? “Why am I supposed to do it?” And, “Unless I know the reasons and the consequences of it, I am not going to be involved in it.” Then he is becoming responsible.Responsibility is not a game. It is one of the most authentic ways of living – dangerous too – but it does not mean disobedience for disobedience’s sake. That will be again idiotic.There is a story about the Sufi mystic, Mulla Nasruddin:From the very beginning it was thought that he was upside down. His parents were in trouble. If they would say, “Go to the right,” he would go to the left. Finally his old father thought that rather than bothering with him, it is better, if they want him to go to the left, to order him to go to the right – and he is bound to go to the left.One day they were crossing the river. On their donkey they had a big bag of sugar, and the bag was leaning more toward the right so there was a danger that it may slip into the river; it had to remain balanced on the donkey. But to tell to Nasruddin, “Move the bag toward the left,” will mean losing the sugar – he will move it toward the right.So he said to Nasruddin, “My son, your bag is slipping; move it toward the right.” And Nasruddin moved it toward the right.The father said, “This is strange, for the first time you have been obedient!”Nasruddin said, “For the first time you have been cunning. I knew you wanted it to be moved toward the left; I could see with my eyes where it needs to be moved. Even in such a subtle way you cannot make me obedient.”Just to go against obedience is not moving your intelligence higher. You remain on the same plane: obedient or disobedient, but there is no change of intelligence.To me disobedience is a great revolution. It does not mean saying an absolute no in every situation. It simply means deciding whether to do it or not, whether it is beneficial to do it or not. It is taking the responsibility on yourself. It is not a question of hating the person or hating to be told, because in that hating you cannot act obediently, disobediently; you act very unconsciously. You cannot act intelligently.When you are told to do something, you are given an opportunity to respond. Perhaps what is being told is right; then do it, and be grateful to the person who told you at the right moment to do it. Perhaps it is not right – then make it clear. Bring your reasons, why it is not right; then help the person – what he is thinking is going in a wrong way. But hate has no place. If it is right, do it lovingly. If it is not right, then even more love is needed, because you will have to tell the person, explain to the person, that it is not right.The way of disobedience is not stagnant, just going against every order and feeling anger and hate and revenge toward the person. The way of disobedience is a way of great intelligence. So it is not ultimately obedience or disobedience. Reduced to the basic fact, it is simply a question of intelligence – behave intelligently.Sometimes you will have to obey, and sometimes you will have to say, “I am sorry, I cannot do it.” But there is no question of hate, there is no question of revenge, anger. If hate, anger or revenge arises, that simply means you know that what is being told is right, but it goes against your ego to obey it; it hurts your ego. That hurt feeling comes up as hate, as anger.But the question is not your ego; the question is the act that you have to do – and you have to bring your total intelligence to figure it out. If it is right, then be obedient; if it is wrong, be disobedient. But there is no conflict, there is no hurt feeling. If you are obeying it, it is easier; you need not explain to anybody. But if you are not obeying it, then you owe an explanation. And perhaps your explanation is not right. Then you have to move back, you have to do it. A man should live intelligently – that’s all. Then whatever he does is his responsibility.It happens that even great intellectuals are not living intelligently. Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest intellectuals of this age, was a follower of Adolf Hitler. After Adolf Hitler’s defeat and the exposure of his basic animality, brutality, murderousness, violence, even Martin Heidegger shrank back and said, “I was simply following the leader of the nation.”A philosopher has no business to follow the leader of the nation. In fact a philosopher’s basic duty is to guide the leaders of the nation, not to be guided by them, because he is out of active politics, his vision is more clear. He is standing aloof, he can see things which people who are involved in action cannot see.It is easy to throw responsibility. If Adolf Hitler had been victorious, I am certain Martin Heidegger would have said, “He is victorious because he followed my philosophy.” Certainly he was a great intellectual compared to Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was just a retarded person. But power…We have been brought up to follow the powerful: the father, the mother, the teacher, the priest, God. Essentially whoever has the power is right: “Might is right.” And you have to follow it. It is simple because it needs no intelligence. It is simple because you can never be told that it was your responsibility, that whatever happened was your responsibility.In all the armies around the world only one thing is taught through years of training, and that is obedience. In Germany, in the Second World War, there were good people, but they were heads of concentration camps. They were good fathers, good husbands, good friends. Nobody could have conceived – watching them in their families, with their friends, in the club – that these people were burning thousands of Jews every day.And they were not feeling guilty at all, because it was only an order from above. That was their whole training: “You have to follow the order.” It had become part of their blood and bones and marrow. When the order came, obedience was the only way.This is how man has lived up to now, and that’s why I say obedience is one of the greatest crimes, because all other crimes are born out of it. It deprives you of intelligence, it deprives you of decisiveness, it deprives you of responsibility. It destroys you as an individual. It converts you into a robot.Hence I am all for disobedience. But disobedience is not just against obedience. Disobedience is above obedience and the so-called disobedience described in the dictionaries. Disobedience is simply the assertion of your intelligence: “I take the responsibility, and I will do everything that feels right to my heart, to my being. And I will not do anything that goes against my intelligence.”My whole life, from my childhood to the university, I was condemned continuously for being disobedient. And I insisted, “I am not disobedient. I am simply trying to figure out, with my own intelligence, what is right, what should be done, and I take the whole responsibility for it. If something goes wrong, it is my fault. I don’t want to condemn somebody else because he has told me to do it.”It was difficult for my parents, for my teachers, professors:In my school it was compulsory to wear a cap, and I entered the high school without a cap. Immediately the teacher said, “Are you aware or not that the cap is compulsory?”I said, “A thing like a cap cannot be compulsory. How can it be compulsory to put something on your head or not? The head is compulsory, but not the cap. And I have come with the head; perhaps you have come only with the cap.”He said, “You look to be a strange type. It is just written in the school code that without a cap, no student can enter the school.”I said, “Then that code has to be changed. It is written by human beings, not by God; and human beings commit mistakes.”The teacher could not believe it. He said, “What is the matter with you? Why can’t you just wear a cap?”I said, “The trouble is not with the cap; I want to find out why it is compulsory, its reason, its results. If you are unable, you can take me to the principal and we can discuss it.” And he had to take me to the principal.In India, Bengalis are the most intelligent people; they don’t wear caps. And Punjabis are the most unintelligent, simple people, and they wear turbans. So I said to the principal, “Looking at the situation – Bengalis don’t wear any caps and they are the most intelligent people in the country, and Punjabis wear not only a cap but a very tight turban, and they are the most unintelligent people. “It has something to do with your intelligence. I would rather not take the risk.”The principal listened to me and he said, “The boy is stubborn, but what he is saying makes sense. I had never thought about it – this is true. And we can make this code non-compulsory. Anybody who wants to wear a cap can wear it; anybody who does not want to use one, there is no need – because it has nothing to do with learning, teaching.”The teacher could not believe it. On the way back he told me, “What did you do?”I said, “I have done nothing, I simply explained the situation. I am not angry; I am perfectly willing to wear a cap. If you feel it helps intelligence, why only one? I can wear two caps, three caps, caps upon caps, if it helps intelligence! I am not angry. But you have to prove it.”The teacher said to me – I still remember his words – “You will be in trouble your whole life. You will not fit in anywhere.”I said, “That’s perfectly okay, but I don’t want to be an idiot and fit in everywhere. It is good to be an ‘unfit,’ but intelligent. And I have come to the school to learn intelligence, so I can be an unfit intelligently! Please never try again to change me from an individual into a cog in the wheel.”And from the next day the caps disappeared; only he came with a cap. And looking at the class and the school – because the new rule had come into force that caps were not compulsory, all other teachers, even the principal, had come without caps. He looked so idiotic. I said to him, “There is still time. You can take it off and put it in your pocket.” And he did!He said, “That’s right. If everybody is against the cap… I was simply being obedient to the law.”I said, “The law is made by us. We can change it, without any anger. Can we not discuss each and everything intelligently?”So remember, when I say disobedience I don’t mean replace obedience by disobedience. That will not make you better. I use the word disobedience only to make it clear to you that it is up to you; you have to be the decisive factor of all your actions in life. And that gives tremendous strength, because whatever you do, you do with a certain rational support to it.I entered the university, and the first question the vice-chancellor asked me was, “Why have you been growing your beard and mustache?” And it was in a way natural because no other student was doing that.I said to him, “I have come here to see you for a scholarship, but I can risk the scholarship. I cannot risk a chance for an argument.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “I mean I should ask you why you have shaved your beard, your mustache. I have done nothing; they are growing by themselves. You have done something; you have not allowed them to grow: you are shaving twice a day. You owe me an explanation. What is the reason you are doing it?”He said, “I have never thought about it. Because everybody else was doing it I started doing it.”I said, “That is not a very intelligent answer. You can think over it. I will come every day and knock on the door, so whenever you have found the answer you can give me the answer, and from that day I will start shaving.”I had to go to his office to knock only four three days. On the fourth day he said to me, “Please excuse me, you have taken away my sleep. The whole day I am thinking about my beard and mustache, and the whole day I am looking at the door, thinking that you must be coming to knock. And sometimes I hear that there has been a knock, and I open the door and there is nobody, so I am hallucinating! You have made me so afraid! Simply take your scholarship and do whatever you want; it is your beard and your mustache. And just please forgive me that I asked you.”I said, “It is not so easy. You have to stop shaving; otherwise I will continue coming every day, knocking on the door, waiting for the answer.”He said, “My God! I am giving you the scholarship, which really should not be given to you because you don’t belong to this university – you are coming from another university, and according to our rules, the first preference will be for a graduate of this university. I am not bothering about the rule; I am giving you the scholarship because I simply want you to stop knocking on my door.”I said, “You can keep your scholarship and you can give it to anybody you want, but you will have to stop shaving.”He said, “Don’t be so hard on an old man – because what will people say? Don’t make me a laughingstock!”I said, “You will become a laughingstock if you don’t listen to me, because then I am going to tell everybody the whole story of what has been happening in these four days.”And you will not believe it: he gave me the scholarship, and he started growing a beard! The whole university was surprised, because he was very fussy about his clothes, and about shaving – he had been in Oxford, a professor of history, head of the department of history there. Everybody started asking him, “What has happened?”He said, “Nothing has happened. I just came to realize that I was doing something wrong, because I cannot give any reason. This young man has made me aware that you should live your life rationally. I have been an imitator, I have been very obedient to the surroundings. Nobody has told me – I have been obedient on my own. But because I don’t have any reason, I will let my beard grow. And this young man seems to be right, that if women start growing beards, mustaches…”It is not very difficult. There are hormones which can be injected and they will start growing beards. Do you think it will be a beautiful world, where men are shaving beards and women are growing beards? A woman with a beard will freak out anybody! And the same happens with the man; just the women are very patient, very tolerant. They even tolerate people without beards. No man can tolerate his wife with a beard, I tell you; it is absolutely certain. Either he will throw her out, or he will hang himself! But millions of women are tolerating beardless men.Nature never does anything without any reason. I have tried to look at people without beards. It seems something is missing in the man. Just look at Milarepa! When I first saw him here I was so shocked. He was looking so beautiful with a beard and now he is looking simply idiotic! He has lost all his grandeur.Just live intelligently. If something is told to you, decide whether it is right or wrong, then you can avoid all guilt feelings. Otherwise, if you don’t do it, then you feel guilty; if you do it, again you feel guilty. If you do it you feel that you are being obedient, subservient, that you are not being assertive, that you are not being yourself. And if you don’t do it, then you start feeling guilty again – because perhaps it was the right thing to do and you are not doing it.There is no need for all this clumsiness. Just be simple. If something is told to you, respond intelligently. And whatsoever your intelligence decides, do it this way or that – but you are responsible. Then there is no question of guilt.If you are not going to do it, explain to the person why you are not going to do it without any anger, because anger simply shows that you are weak, that you don’t really have an intelligent answer. Anger is always a sign of weakness. Just plainly and simply explain the whole thing; perhaps the other person may find that you are right and may be thankful to you. Or perhaps the other person may have better reasons than you; then you will be thankful to the other person because he has raised your consciousness.Use every opportunity in life for raising your intelligence, your consciousness. Ordinarily what we are doing is using every opportunity to create a hell for ourselves. Only you suffer, and because of your suffering, you make others suffer. And when so many people are living together, if they all create suffering for each other, it goes on multiplying. That’s how the whole world has become a hell. It can be instantly changed. Just the basic thing has to be understood, that without intelligence there is no heaven.Osho,You have been called “the genius of the absurd.” Your way in this world seems so relentlessly wild and crazy that many people – perhaps all people – are filled with wonder, or confusion; and sometimes, even anger. But the European Parliament, gathering votes to ban you from Europe forever seems also absurd and crazy. I wonder who is more absurd: you or them? What can we discover about truth in your absurdity?They are not absurd; they are functioning very logically. They can see the potential danger that I can bring to the younger generation, which can destroy their centuries of vested interests.They are not absurd. It may look absurd – the whole world against one single man – but it is very logical. They can see that what I am saying is true, and they have no way to defend their morality, their marriage, their family, their social structure. Naturally, they would not like me to come in contact with their youth, because their youth is going to be powerful tomorrow; and if their youth becomes aflame with my ideas, tomorrow the old world will have completely collapsed.To save the old and to prevent the new, they are taking every measure – and it is logical. I am certainly absurd.You have to understand the meaning of absurd. In life everything that is significant is absurd. When you fall in love with someone it is absurd, it is not logical. You cannot give us a logical answer why you have fallen in love with a particular person, man or woman. It is something beyond you that has gripped you. It is not your doing. Even if you wanted to prevent it, you could not have succeeded; in fact you were absolutely helpless.Your joy in a world full of misery is absurd. It has no relation to the miserable humanity. You are completely alone. Everything that is valuable – you love music, you are enchanted with beauty, you are seeking truth, you want to know yourself – all these are absurd activities. Meditating is absurd; it would be better and more logical to earn money.Just before I left Nepal, a group of sannyasins from Delhi had come to prevent me from going out of Nepal or out of India – a kind of deputation. They were ready to purchase a big palace and make every arrangement for a commune. But I told them, “Right now you are being emotional. You will be in difficulty. The palace costs one million dollars. Perhaps you can collect that much donation, saying that if the palace is not purchased, I am going to leave. But the palace is not the only thing; then there will be at least fifty people living there, and you will not be able to support them.“It is not a question of one day, so be logical. Your asking me to remain in India is out of love, but it is absurd. You will create trouble for me and trouble for yourselves. So go back, think it over. I will wait here ten more days. You can come after seven days with the decision.”They never came. They must have understood the implications – they would not be able to manage it. But their insistence was out of love, not out of reason.I am absurd because whatever I am teaching to you goes against everything that you have been taught. And you have been taught things for so long that you have forgotten completely that they are questionable.For example, every culture in the world has believed, has conditioned its younger generations, with an idea that love is permanent, that if you love a person, you love that person forever. This idea has prevailed for centuries all over the world. It looks logical that if you love a person, the very phenomenon of love will make it permanent. And why has everybody accepted it? – because you also desire that it should be permanent. Everybody wants his love to be permanent.So the idea and your desire synchronize, and it becomes a truth; so much so, that if your love changes, then not only others, but you yourself start thinking that it was not love – that’s why it changed. You don’t change the basic idea of permanent love; you start thinking, “Perhaps what I thought was love was not love, because it has changed – and love does not change.”I am bound to be absurd, because I want to say to you that in life everything changes – in spite of your desire for no change. It does not matter that sitting by the side of the river you desire that the river should not go on flowing, that the seasons should not change, that the flowers should not die, that youth should never turn into old age, that life should never end up in a graveyard.Existence does not listen to your desires, and does not follow your desires, however beautiful and however pious. Existence goes on in its own way. Everything changes – and love is not an exception.Now, perhaps I am the first person who wants to make it understood by everyone that love changes: it begins, it comes of age, it becomes old, it dies. And I think it is good the way it is. It gives you many more chances of loving other people, to make life richer – because each person has something special to contribute to you. The more you love, the more rich you are, the more loving you become.If the false idea of permanence is dropped, jealousy will drop automatically; then jealousy is meaningless. Just as you fall in love and you cannot do anything about it, one day you fall out of love and you cannot do anything about it. A breeze came into your life and passed. It was good and beautiful and fragrant and cool, and you would have liked it to remain always there. You tried hard to close all the windows and all the doors, to keep the breeze fragrant, fresh. But by closing the windows and the doors, you killed the breeze, its freshness, its fragrance; it became stale. Every marriage is stale.I am absurd because I don’t want to enforce logic – which is man-made – on existence. In trying to impose logic on existence, you simply create misery for yourself because you are going to fail; your failure is absolute. Millions of people are simply pretending that they go on loving each other. Once they had loved, but now it is only a memory, and becoming fainter and fainter every day. But because of the idea of permanency they are afraid to say the truth.It is not anger, it is not hate; it is nothing against the other. It is simply the way of life – love changes. It is seasonal, and it is good to have summer and to have winter, and to have rain, to have the fall and the spring.Your whole life can be lived either as logic or as existence. Existence will be absurd. One moment it is one thing; another moment it is something else. You are left with the choice either to go on pretending that it is still the same, or to be honest and sincere and to say that it was a beautiful moment, but it has passed. The oasis is passed and now we are in a desert, and we know that we are in a desert; we cannot enjoy, we cannot rejoice. Still we are bound to each other with the idea of permanent love. That permanent love is a logical idea.Real love is a real roseflower: it is going to change. From morning to evening it is going to take different shapes, different shades, and by the evening it will be gone. And I don’t think that there is anything wrong.Love is just one example. Your whole life is full of such things. For example, every child is taught respect for the parents, respect for the teachers, respect for the elders. Respect is a beautiful experience, but when you have to be respectful just as a mannerism, it is ugly.I was told again and again in my childhood, “You have to be respectful.”I used to tell my father, “Before you tell me to be respectful toward somebody, you should at least be certain whether he is worthy of respect; otherwise you are making me phony. I know that a man is not worthy of respect, but he is elder, and I am supposed to be respectful. I am ready to be respectful, but there must be something corresponding to it. What am I going to be respectful for?”For centuries upon centuries, the same idea in different dimensions: “Be respectful toward your parents.” But why? Just because they have given birth to you? Was it not a joy to them? If it was a joy to them, they have already got their reward. Now if they want respect from you, then they should be worthy of respect.And my father would say, “You are always talking absurdities. We have to live in a society, and the society runs through a certain discipline. Certain manners have to be followed, otherwise you will be crushed by the society.“So don’t be absurd,” he was continuously saying to me.I said, “I would not like to be crushed by the society, but I cannot behave logically, seeing that existence is moving in a different direction. What you are saying is logical. You are saying, ‘This is the way things have always been done; and this is the way things should be done.’”And there is a logic in it – that if you are respectful toward others, others will be respectful toward you; if you help the society, the society will help you. But if you go on criticizing the society, if you go on finding faults everywhere, you will fall alone, and you cannot win against the vast majority. Logic is the way of winning in the society. Be logical, and it will be easier for you to climb the ladder.I said, “I would like to remain true to existence – and existence is absurd. It has no logic, it has no meaning. It has immense beauty, it has tremendous possibilities for ecstasy, but you cannot make a logical system out of it.”So remember it: the European parliament, the American government, are all behaving very logically – and soon others will be following.But I am not a logician. I am an existentialist. I believe in this meaningless, beautiful chaos of existence, and I am ready to go with it wherever it leads. I don’t have a goal, because existence has no goal. It simply is – flowering, blossoming, dancing – but don’t ask why. Just an overflow of energy, for no reason at all.I am with existence. And that’s what I call being a sannyasin: to be with existence. The only thing you will have to renounce will be your logical mind. So start living in an existential but illogical way. The world may call you absurd, mad. So what?

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Because of your genius in combining and then going beyond the material and the spiritual, and because you seem to have an abundance of both worlds, I think that many non-sannyasins and sannyasins feel jealous of you. People resent and don't want to feed abundance. If they feed anything, they feed poverty. If you were sitting in a cave, naked, cold, and meditating, it would be one thing, but you are not. Sannyasins who never dreamed of having a Rolls Royce seem to yearn for one more than for the state of meditation even after spending years with you. You seem to be sparking greed for the material, rather than a yearning for the beyond – or at least that's the message that's being received by some. Could you comment.It is part of my whole device to change the very structure of human consciousness.The past has revered poverty, asceticism, masochistic attitudes. A man was respected if he was renouncing all that is pleasant, all that is comfortable. He was respected for torturing himself; the greater the torture, the greater the respect. The whole human past is masochistic, and all the religions have contributed to this insanity.My effort is to change such a vast past and its influence. So it has been only a device. I have not been creating desires for materialistic things in people; they are there without anybody’s creating them. Yes, they have been repressed so deeply that people have even forgotten that they had them. I am not creating them; I simply want to remove the cover-up, the repression, and to make the person realize that he wants a Rolls Royce more than enlightenment. This realization will be a basic step toward enlightenment, because it will make him aware of his own reality, his greed.There was no need for ninety-three Rolls Royces. I could not use ninety-three Rolls Royces simultaneously – the same model, the same car. But I wanted to make it clear to you that you would be ready to drop all your desires for truth, for love, for spiritual growth to have a Rolls Royce. I was knowingly creating a situation in which you would feel jealous.The function of a master is very strange. He has to help you come to an understanding of your inner structure of consciousness: it is full of jealousy. And all the traditions and the whole past have done just the opposite. The so-called saint, in all the traditions, lives in such a way that you will never feel jealous of him. Note that point.You will feel sympathetic toward him, respectful toward him; but respectfulness is not your reality, sympathy is not your nature. The saint is torturing himself, that is not his nature either. He is being unnatural to gain respect, to fulfill his ego. He is not interested in spiritual growth; he is interested in respectability, in being worshipped like a god. And he is ready to do anything for it.He is living in an illusion, and he is creating a great illusion in people who come to him. He helps them to feel that they are religious, that they are spiritual, because they respect a saint, they worship a saint. Although they are not yet ready to do such ascetic disciplines for themselves, they hope someday… This is their ideal. They are completely forgetting that they are jealous human beings. And the saint is helping them to forget their jealousy; he is helping them to repress it.My work is bound to be totally different. I want to provoke your jealousy because that is the only way to get rid of it. First you have to know that you have it; then you can drop it because it is misery and hell. But you can repress it so deeply that the question of dropping it does not arise.I have lived in abundance because to me there is no division between the material and the spiritual. The teaching to live in poverty is dangerous: you will be materially poor, and you will be spiritually poor too because there is no division. I teach you to live richly, in abundance both materially and spiritually. It is not a question of whether you should live materially in abundance or spiritually. The basic question is whether you should live in abundance, in richness. It is natural and existential. It is your very basic urge to blossom in abundance, to know all the colors, to know all the songs, to know all the beauties of life.Certainly I am bound to come in conflict with the old, because the whole human past has been praising poverty and making it equal to spirituality, which is absolute nonsense. Spirituality is the greatest richness that can happen to a man, and it contains all other richnesses. It is not against any other richness; it is simply against all kinds of poverty.So what I have been trying is something so radical that it is bound to create antagonism all around the world from every corner. People have lived with certain values for so long that although those values have given them only misery, they don’t see the connection. Those values have not made them fulfilled, contented but they don’t see the connection.I want my people to become symbolic, to make the whole world aware that their misery is caused by their wrong values, that they are poor because they have respected poverty. And their behavior is so insane: on the one hand they will respect poverty, and on the other hand they will say, “Serve the poor.” Strange! If poverty is so spiritual then the most spiritual thing will be to make every rich man poor, to help the rich man to be poor, so he can become spiritual. Why help the poor? Do you want to destroy their spirituality?But a deep unconsciousness, a great blindness exists; I am fighting against a mountainous unconsciousness, darkness. Naturally they will be very much annoyed. They would have loved me, they would have worshipped me. It would have been so easy for me to do what they wanted, but then I would have been continuing the old misery, the old disease, the old stupidity. I decided to be disrespectable and not to help any nonsensical value system.It is a very simple thing to see why ascetics – self-destructive people engaged in a kind of slow suicide – have been respected: because it is unnatural, because you cannot do it. They are doing something which you cannot do. Somebody is standing on his head in the road – and there will be a crowd immediately. You are walking on your legs – no crowd will be there!What is that man doing that attracts the crowd? He is doing something that the crowd cannot do. He is proving mind over body, he is proving spirit over nature. Torturing his body he is proving that he is not the body, it does not affect him. By fasting, not sleeping or standing for days, he is proving that what you cannot do he can do; he is superior to you. You can also do what he is doing, you just have to be a little stupid, you just have to be a little suicidal, destructive. All that you need is a certain pleasure in pain and you can become a great spiritual saint.I have looked at the whole history and found not a single man revolting against this suicidal attitude toward life, this anti-life attitude. Perhaps they were afraid that nobody was going to listen to them, afraid that they would lose their respectability.I decided in the very early days of my life that there is one thing I have to be aware of, and that is not to be bothered about respectability. Then things are very simple. Then I can do what is natural and what is healthy. And then I can manage a bridge between matter and spirit, between this world and that world.To me, to live in abundance is the only spiritual thing in the world. Just look at existence and its abundance. What is the need of so many flowers in the world? Just roses would have been enough, but existence is abundant: millions and millions of flowers, millions of birds, millions of animals – everything in abundance. Nature is not ascetic. It is dancing everywhere – in the ocean, in the trees. It is singing everywhere – in the wind passing through the pine trees, in the birds.What is the need of millions of solar systems, each solar system having millions of stars? There seems to be no need, except that abundance is the very nature of existence, that richness is the very core; existence does not believe in poverty. Look at nature, look at existence and you will see that what man has done is against it.My effort is to bring man back to his natural self. I will be condemned, I will be criticized. Every tradition, every religion, every morality, every ethical code is going to condemn me. That does not surprise me! I expect it, because what I am saying and doing is changing the very course of human consciousness.I don’t think that by torturing yourself you can meditate more easily; on the contrary, if your body is pleasantly at ease you can meditate more easily. I don’t think that when you are fasting you can meditate. You can only think of food and nothing else; you will dream of food and nothing else. But if you are well fed, well nourished, you don’t think of food – there is no need. The body is completely satisfied, it will not create any disturbance. To live pleasurably, to live joyously is not against meditation. It is really the basic need of meditation.I know many kinds of ascetics but I have never seen any intelligence in them, I have never seen any creativity in them. I have never seen in their eyes a light of the beyond, or in their gestures some message that cannot be said through words. They don’t have anything. They are simply starving – and starving because it fulfills the ego, because the more they starve, the more they torture themselves, more and more people come to worship them.Now this, to me, is just an insane chapter in the history of man; it has to be closed. It is time that we start a new natural, existential, life-affirmative chapter; and create a bridge between the body and the soul – not a wall but a bridge.There is no need for any conflict and war. Fighting with yourself, you are not going to get anything; you will be simply destroying yourself slowly. Your so-called saints are mostly mentally sick, and they have made the whole of humanity sick.Your question is significant. I have been asked again and again, “Spiritual people are respected everywhere, why are you opposed everywhere?” I said, “Only one thing is certain: either they are not spiritual, or I am not spiritual. We both cannot be spiritual, that is certain. And as far as I am concerned, I say that they are sick, not spiritual, and they are worshipped by a sick society.”It is a vicious circle: society creates the sick saint, the sick saint creates the sick society – and it goes on and on. I have no part in this sickness, the so-called spirituality. I am just a contented, fulfilled human being. What more do you want? And what more can spirituality be?We want people to be fulfilled and contented, and this journey toward contentment, fulfillment, enlightenment should start with the body. You cannot begin from anywhere else. You can begin only from the beginning. You cannot ignore the roots and just go on praising the flowers. Your flowers will die, and you will have to replace them with plastic flowers if the roots are not taken care of. Is there any conflict between the roots and the blossoms? It is the same juice – and you have to begin with the roots, because flowers will come only in the end.But with humanity we have been almost mad. We have never bothered about the roots, and we have talked only about flowers. We talk about people being nonviolent, being compassionate, being loving – so much that you can love your enemy, so much that you can even love your neighbor. We talk about flowers, but nobody is interested in the roots.The question is: “Why are we not loving beings?” It is not a question of being loving to this person, to that person, to the friend, to the enemy. The question is whether you are loving or not. Do you love your own body? Have you ever cared to touch your own body with a loving caress? Do you love yourself? No, all your religions teach you to hate yourself: you are the wrong person and you have to put yourself right; you are a sinner and you have to become a saint. How can you love yourself? – you cannot even accept yourself. And these are the roots!I will teach you to love yourself. If you can love yourself, if you can rejoice in being yourself, naturally your love will go on spreading. It will become an aura around you; you will love your friends, and in a certain way you will love your enemies too – because just the way the friend defines you, your enemy also defines you.I am reminded of a recent incident:In India, before freedom came to that country, there was great struggle between Hindus and Mohammedans because Hindus wanted the country to remain one, undivided. It was favorable to them because they were the majority religion. If India was undivided, then Mohammedans had no possibility of ever being in power; they were the second majority religion.The Mohammedans wanted a separate country and they had their reasons: “We have a different language, we have a different religion, we are a different race, we cannot live together.” But the basic reason was not language, not culture, not race, because they had lived together for two thousand years, so there was no problem about that. The real thing was, having a separate country on their own, they would have power.The leader for an undivided India was Mahatma Gandhi, and the leader for the division of India and for a new land, Pakistan, for Mohammedans was Mohammed Ali Jinnah. They were archenemies their whole life.In 1948 Gandhi was shot dead. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was now governor general of Pakistan. He was sitting on the lawn as the news reached him that Gandhi had been shot. The person who had brought the news thought that he would be happy to hear that his long, long enemy is dead. But he was surprised: Jinnah became sad, and he went into the house and told his secretary that he should not be disturbed. “If Gandhi is dead, much of me is dead too, because we defined each other.”A great insight: the enemy defines you in the same way as the friend defines you. Jinnah lived only one year longer, and he was never again seen as happy as he used to be; the last year was just sadness. Without Gandhi there was a great gap. A life-long enmity is a relationship, a deep relationship. And the man of understanding will love the enemy too; not for any spiritual reason, but for the simple reason that he is defining him, he is part of his existence. Without him there will be a gap which nobody else can fill.The question is not “Love your enemies” the way Jesus says it. That is simply egoistic: love your enemies because you are a superior spiritual being, and he is just an ordinary human being; love him, show him the true path of spirituality. But it is just fulfilling your own ego.I will also say, “Love him,” but not for the same reasons. I will say, “Love him,” because he defines you; he is part of you, just as you are part of him – not only the friend, but the enemy too. It does not make you “holier than thou.” It is a simple understanding of how psychology functions.Love yourself. But you can love yourself only if you drop the idea of being a sinner. You can drop the idea of being a sinner if you drop the idea that there is a God. If there is a God, you are a sinner; you cannot be anything else. If there is a God, then you are a sinner. You have been expelled from the kingdom of God, and you will be accepted back only if you become obedient – so obedient that you lose your individuality to a hypothetical God whom you have never ever seen and whom you will never see.Your religions don’t allow you to love yourself, and then they talk all this bullshit of loving your enemies and loving your neighbors. But you can see the point. If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love anybody else in the world. That loving energy has to come from your heart, and there sits a sinner, condemned, waiting to be thrown into hellfire.I have heard, in the middle ages when people, particularly women, were more naive, more simple, there were Christian preachers who would go on threatening them with hellfire, describing in minute details how they would be tortured. And it used to happen that many women would faint in the churches listening to the sermons, because the hellfire and the minute details would drive them nuts. Now these women, can they accept themselves as they are? – no!All the religions stand upon a single word, and that is how you should be. That word is should – that word is not is. The “is” is condemned, and the “should” is praised; and the “should” is opposed to your “is.”You cannot love yourself, your wife cannot love herself – and you are both supposed to love each other. I don’t understand how it is possible. You can pretend, but basically you will hate, because the wife knows you are dragging her further into hell, you know that she is dragging you further into hell – how can you love? Jesus is clever. He talks about loving your enemies, but he does not say anything about loving your wives. Strange, that should have been the first thing to be reminded of – “Love your husbands.” But no, these things are not mentioned.Religions have been talking about flowers; I am working with the roots. I am against plastic flowers. Real flowers have many differences: plastic flowers are permanent, plastic love will be permanent. The real flower is not permanent, it is changing moment to moment. Today it is there dancing in the wind and in the sun and in the rain. Tomorrow you will not be able to find it; it has disappeared just as mysteriously as it had appeared.Real love is like a real flower. But all religions teach you plastic love. Then they destroy the very possibility of ever coming to know a real flower. The real flower will have fragrance; the plastic flower has nothing to contribute to your life. It only looks like a flower, it is not a flower. The plastic flower is easy. You do not need to water it, you do not need to take care of the roots. Real flowers need some creativity on your part. Every real value needs creativity.Just look at your saints: none of them is creative. All their qualities are just hilarious – somebody can lie down in a grave for seven days, and then you dig him up and he is still alive; and he becomes a great saint. But I don’t see that there is any contribution, any creativity in it. He may lie for seven hundred years in a grave; that does not matter. How can he become a saint by lying in a grave for seven days, by learning a certain technique of holding in the breath?Paul Brunton, a great seeker going from one country to another country all over the East, came across many people who were worshipped as saints in the beginning of the twentieth century. In Ajmer in India he came across a Mohammedan saint who used to put both his eyes down, hanging out of their sockets – that was his only quality. And he was worshipped far and wide, because he was doing really the impossible!He came across a Hindu yogi who was able to drink any kind of poison. He had exhibited his great achievement at many universities – in Oxford, in Cambridge, in Varanasi, in Kolkata. But in Kolkata an accident happened. He was capable of keeping the poison in his body without getting it into his bloodstream only for half an hour; more than that he was incapable of. He had learned his whole life how to do it, but in Kolkata the traffic defeated him.In India, you know the traffic is great; all the centuries are moving on the road – a bullock cart, a horse-driven vehicle, a donkey, a camel-driven cart, cars, buses, trams. Particularly in Kolkata you will find all the centuries together on the street: from the very beginning when man first invented a vehicle, to the latest car, everything is available. Just stand by the side of the road and watch.So he was stuck somewhere in a traffic jam and could not reach the place where he was going to vomit; that was the whole art. For half an hour he could keep it in; and then he would vomit – not to let it go into his bloodstream. But he was late; it reached his bloodstream and he died. But he was a world famous saint. What was his contribution?I cannot conceive why these people should be called saints. Perhaps they should be called certain kinds of experts; they have a certain expertise, but it has nothing to do with spirituality. In the name of spirituality you have been worshipping utter nonsense. And behind this nonsense is the real man – suffering, uncared for, unlooked at. Nobody bothers about him and his problems; nobody answers his real need.My whole effort is to make a fresh beginning. It is bound to create condemnation of me from all over the world. But it doesn’t matter – who cares!I care only for those who are ready to change the very course of human consciousness. I will offend others, I will annoy others, I will irritate others, I will create jealousy in others. These are part of my devices. I am really exposing them. If they have any intelligence they will understand it.Ninety-three Rolls Royces… But I have not looked back at them, at what happened. They were not mine, and I am as happy without them as I was with them. I never went to see those Rolls Royces in the garage. My director of the garage, Avesh, is here. I went on saying to him, “One day I am coming,” but that day never came. I have never seen those cars together. It was he who would bring a car for a one-hour drive, it was his choice. I have not looked back.Those cars fulfilled their purpose. They created jealousy in the whole of America, in all the super-rich people. If they were intelligent enough, rather than being my enemies, they would have come to me to find a way to get rid of their jealousy, because it is their problem. Jealousy is a fire that burns you, and burns you badly. You are in the hands of somebody else.I was just a tourist there, and I disturbed the whole of America. They had all the money, they could have purchased more Rolls Royces if they wanted. But they had no guts for that either. They were condemning me, saying that I am a materialist. And you will be surprised; one bishop who was continuously condemning me as a materialist, wrote me a letter, privately, saying, “It would be very compassionate of you if you could donate a Rolls Royce to my church. It won’t make any difference to you – ninety-three or ninety-two – but it will make much difference to us.” And every Sunday he was condemning me. His condemnation was not about my materialism; his condemnation was to hide his jealousy.The politicians, the rich, could have managed it for themselves. Why were they worried? But the worry was that a tourist, on a tourist visa, has defeated all the super-rich – it hurts! If they were intelligent enough, they could have understood that there must be a purpose behind these Rolls Royces. It cannot be just the one-hour ride. For that, one Rolls Royce would have been enough.Everything that I have done in my life has a purpose. It is a device to create something in you of which you are not aware. If you are intelligent, you would like to get rid of it because it is a poison which is killing you. A jealous mind is incapable of love; a jealous mind is incapable of rejoicing. It is not only incapable of rejoicing, it is incapable of seeing anybody else rejoice. These kinds of people fill the whole earth. And your so-called saints have not been a help to them. Your so-called saints have exploited them.It is hilarious! Your saints are exploiting you by being poor, torturing themselves; they are helping you not to feel jealous, not to feel hurt. They are protecting your ego. And it is not one-sided. That’s why I say it is hilarious. The game is strange: they are helping you to remain in your misery, in your insanity, and you are helping them to remain in their suicidal, torturous life: a mutual conspiracy of the whole of humanity to remain in hell.The commune in America was also a device. It did its work. It made people aware that to be joyous, to be loving is possible on this earth; you do not have to wait for heaven. I can’t see, I can’t understand what a person who has never been dancing and singing here, when he enters heaven and a harp is provided for him, is going to do with the harp. He will be at a loss! He will ask, “What is it, and what am I supposed to do with it?”Only my people will be immediately able to do something, whichever instrument is provided. It is not only a question of rejoicing; all other things too. If here, for your whole life you learn only torture, what are you going to do in heaven? That self-torture has become a second nature to you.I am reminded of a story:There was a very beautiful man, Eknath, who was going on a pilgrimage with his disciples. A well-known thief approached him, and asked the master, “Although I am a sinner – you know me, everybody knows, I am a thief – a great desire has arisen in me to go on a pilgrimage with you, if you allow me in your company. Thirty people are going; one person more won’t make much difference.”Eknath said, “There is no harm, but one condition: while you are with me, and it is going to take nine months” – because they were going to be traveling by foot all around the country, covering all the holy places, singing and dancing – “you will not steal anything from the group or from somebody else where we are staying in a village. You will have to stop your art for nine months. If you promise me, you are allowed.”The man said, “I promise absolutely that I will not steal anything for the coming nine months.” But within just two, three days there was trouble. A strange kind of thing started happening, and that was that somebody’s money bag was found in somebody else’s luggage, somebody’s coat was found in somebody else’s bag! Strange! Things were missing from here, but they were found there.Finally one night Eknath had to remain awake to see what was going on, because it was very disturbing. Every morning you would have to find out where your things were; they were always found, but it was an unnecessary nuisance. Eknath had a suspicion that that man may be the cause of it – and he was. In the middle of the night he started changing things around, and Eknath caught him red-handed. He said, “You had promised me that you would not steal.”He said, “I am completely following my promise; I am not stealing. But I never promised you that I would not change things from one bag to another. That is not stealing. I am not putting anybody’s things into my bag. But just to practice… Otherwise in nine months I may forget my whole art. And moreover, I cannot sleep unless I do something. It is a lifelong habit.”Eknath said, “I understand your problem, but you must understand my problem too. Every morning everybody is disturbed and upset: money has gone, somebody’s shirt is missing, somebody’s blanket is missing. And for an hour every morning we unnecessarily have to sort it out.”But he said, “This you will have to tolerate. This I have never promised. And I am not doing too much – just one hour in the night then I can sleep at ease.”Do you think a man who has tortured himself for his whole life will be able to rejoice in heaven? He will have forgotten how to smile, he will have forgotten what joy means. No, I say to you the whole human past has been ugly, insane; it has created a kind of spirituality which is another name for schizophrenia. I have to fight against it, whatsoever the cost.Somebody has to raise his hand and say to the people, “You have been misled. Your misery is a proof; no other proof is needed.”Osho,Recently I read an old saying: A man who loves one woman will surely lose his mind; but a man who loves two women loses his soul. Is there any truth to understand in this?I am sure this question must be from Milarepa!It is true: if you love one woman you will lose your mind; if you love two you will lose your soul. But if you go on loving more and more, you have nothing else to lose – with the second you are finished!When Milarepa came I asked Vivek, “Has he brought his guitar? And what else does he do?”She said, “He does nothing else – just plays on his guitar and chases women.”I said, “Inquire if he has got his guitar. Then he should start playing guitar; otherwise chasing women the whole time will not be good for his health. So once in a while, just to get some rest, he can play guitar.”But he has not brought his guitar. I think you should provide him with a guitar, because he has lost everything. Now he has nothing to be worried about losing; he can go on chasing…That’s why the saying stops at two women, because for the third you have nothing to lose. And it is good to go beyond the second, because then you really become humble – you have nothing.To me that is spirituality.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,A little while ago the British government refused your admission to England, even for an overnight stay, on the basis that your exclusion from the country was “conducive to the public good.”Just a few weeks later, the head of that same government authorized the use of military bases by American bombers for the recent attack on Libya. The prime minister justified the decision to assist America's bombing of Middle Eastern cities saying that it was her duty to “prevent the evils of terrorism.” The notions of good and evil expressed by the British government are simply mind-boggling. Please comment.One has to understand that everything is relative, not ultimate; hence what appears to be good to one person may look evil to another. And there is no contradiction: both may be right. What is good depends on your preconceived ideas; so does evil.The British government thinks my entry even for an overnight stay in England, is not conducive to the public good. The same government is ready to allow American bombers, missiles, to use their bases to destroy a small country like Libya, and to the government this seems to be conducive to the public good.There is no inconsistency. In their eyes their society, their culture, their religion, their country has to be saved at any cost, because they think they stand for good – although the British government has tortured humanity more than any other government in the world. For three hundred years it has been the greatest terrorist possible; it killed millions of people around the world, to create the greatest empire of history. This government is absolutely in tune with the American imperialistic ideology.Out of necessity it has been compelled to give freedom to the countries of its empire, but not willingly and joyously. Those countries had to fight for almost one century, without any arms. They were butchered, without any consideration of human values.I am reminded…In India, there happened an incident which can be considered one of the most inhuman in history. In Amritsar, the holy place of the Sikhs, they have a beautiful public garden, a vast area that can contain thousands of people for any gathering, meeting, discourse. And it has been used for that purpose. It has a very high wall so that no traffic noise comes in, and it has only one door, so small that only one person can come out or go in; two persons together cannot pass through the door.They were having a silent meeting of thousands of people – children, women, old men. The prayer was, “The British government should change its heart and should leave our country.” Now, it is not terrorism; they were simply praying for a change of heart.Colonel Dyer, who was in charge of the area, went there with his troops, fixed machine guns on the people and started firing – because this prayer is revolution against the empire: “You should change your heart”!There was only one door, and from that door they were shooting bullets at random, with no discrimination – children, women, old men. And nobody could escape from there because of the high wall.Dyer killed the whole crowd; not a single human being came out of that door alive.Now, it was their country; the British had been terrorists, had been ruling their country, exploiting their country.India has been rich, known for thousands of years as “a golden bird” – that’s how Pythagoras describes it, that’s how Alexander the Great describes it. So many invaders, but still India seemed to be inexhaustibly rich. People would come, invade the country, take away their treasures, take over their beautiful women…This had been going on for thousands of years; the Britishers were the last. For three hundred years they squeezed all the richness, the last drop of it, from the Indian soil. And people were not even allowed to pray for a change of heart: it became an act against the empire. And there was no need for any magistrate, for any judge; there was no need for any trial. Just a colonel simply kills all those people!The British government has been one of the ugliest phenomena that we know of. It created the biggest empire: it was said that in the British Empire the sun never set. It was true, because the empire was all around the earth. So the sun may have set in one part, but it was rising in another; there was not any gap. The sun was always rising somewhere in the British Empire.These imperialists have a deep sympathy, friendship, with America. Naturally, it is for the public good to allow American troops, to allow America a base to destroy a small country.And why destroy Libya? – because the man who is leading Libya now is one of the most outspoken politicians in the whole world. Just a few days ago, Qaddafi said that Ronald Reagan is “Adolf Hitler Number Two.” I, commenting on it, say that Qaddafi is wrong. He will agree with me when he understands the reason I am saying he is wrong: Adolf Hitler himself is now Number Two. Ronald Reagan is Adolf Hitler Number One, because what power did Adolf Hitler have? Reagan has a million times more power. Adolf Hitler could not have destroyed the world; Reagan can do that.To allow Reagan a base in England seems, to the British government, to be for the public good. Both are imperialists, both are agreed on exploiting people, both are agreed that nothing like communism should happen in the world, both are agreed that Christianity should be imposed on people who are not Christian. Naturally Ronald Reagan is a friend, although he is going to do something inhuman which may trigger the Third World War.I understand Qaddafi. He is not a man to sit back. And he is not sitting back. He has a small country but he is not just a politician, he is a warrior. He would rather the country die than to allow the country to be enslaved. I praise him for being a pioneer. He has responded well. Now he is bombing American bases all over Europe. He has bombed in Spain; in other countries he is going to bomb – in Greece… Wherever American bases exist in Europe, he is going to bomb them. And he will have the sympathy of all the downtrodden countries. He will rise as a world leader. Ronald Reagan may have the power, but he will not have any sympathy.This imperialist government of Britain feels afraid of me. Just my overnight stay at the airport – I was not asking to enter their country – and against their own laws they refused me. They said it was not good for their public; my overnight stay would have destroyed their morality, their religion, all their cherished values!There is something to understand clearly: I am against imperialism. I am against exploiting man, other human beings. I am against torturing people just so that you can have power. Perhaps they were afraid that overnight my sannyasins from all over England may gather. Just one night may be enough to give them a fresh insight, a new life to go against all traditional values.And it is a conspiracy. Not only Britain is responsible for it. All those who are living and thriving on traditional values are really afraid of a man who has no power except that he can show people that their misery is caused by their own wrong ideas, and that those wrong ideas are being emphasized by their government, by their church.There is a conspiracy. All the European governments are agreeing on the point that I cannot land at their airports. They do not understand that this is defeatism, that they have already accepted defeat. They are showing that they have no arguments to save their religion, their morality, their politics, it is all rotten.They are afraid that their youth will be on my side, not on their side. I can give an open challenge to any country: let me speak to your young people, and you speak to the same young people, and let the people who are going to own the future decide. These governments know perfectly well they cannot defend anything that they believe.These efforts to prevent me are a good sign; they are good news. It means they have accepted their defeat, otherwise what was the fear? – they could have allowed me to talk to people. They have their archbishops and popes and priests who could have demolished my arguments, and that would have been a cultured way, a human way. I am alone. They have millions of priests. But they don’t have a single argument for anything that they think of as the basis of their society.Yes, it is not conducive to their rotten society. It may ring the death bell. But they cannot prevent me. It is not me who is going to destroy the rottenness; it is time itself which is not in favor of them. If not me, then somebody else will have to do it.It is impossible to protect those societies, those governments, those churches. They have lost all roots. And they are aware of it, that just a push and they will fall down. They cannot even resist – not even that much power is left. You can make a corpse stand, but if you push it, it cannot retaliate; it is bound to fall down.All these countries are corpses. And they don’t want their youth to come in contact with anybody who can show them that the old is dead and they have to find a new way of life. This is not a question of one country; it is a question of the whole human past. Just a deep attachment, a deep conditioning…There is a beautiful story in India:Shiva is one of the Hindu trinity of gods. It is not called a trinity, it is called “trimurti” – three faces of one god. Shiva is one. He fell in love with a beautiful woman, Parvati, and he loved her so much that when she died he would not accept that she was dead.Nobody could dare to tell him that she was dead and now it was time to take her to the crematorium. On the contrary, he carried the corpse of Parvati on his shoulder all over India, in search of some physician, some healer, who could bring her back to life. You cannot carry a corpse. It took twelve years for him to move around the country – it is a big country. Wherever he heard that there was a physician, he would go there.In those twelve years the parts of the woman he was carrying started falling off – the hand fell off, the leg fell off, the head fell off. But he was not worried about that; he was not even looking at her, because he was afraid to look.Note that point. He was afraid to look at her, because deep down he also knew that she was dead. But his mind would not like to believe it; he wanted to believe she was alive. Now she was not even whole. The head had fallen somewhere, the legs had fallen somewhere else, the hands had fallen somewhere else.India is a country of stories, signifying tremendous meanings. Now there are twelve pilgrimage temples which are made at points where one part of Parvati fell, to give the story a feeling of reality. Twelve temples exist all over the country representing… Because some part of Parvati had fallen there, they became sacred.But Shiva remained completely blind, knowingly blind. And this is the situation of the world. The societies are rotten, the religions are dead; the politicians are only promising, knowing perfectly well they cannot fulfill any promise.The future is dark, but nobody wants to see it. The past is dead, and if you go on clinging to the past, the future is going to become darker and darker. I will be avoided by every country. I will be persecuted by every power, for the simple reason that I want them to see the reality. They are keeping their eyes closed.In logic it is called the “ostrich argument.” The ostrich has a tendency: whenever he comes against an enemy and knows that death is certain, he simply puts his head into the sand. He lives in the desert, eyes closed, head in the sand. He is perfectly happy because he cannot see any enemy anywhere.But this does not eliminate the enemy; in fact it makes the enemy more powerful. Now, this ostrich is not going to do anything to escape, to fight, to negotiate, to do something. Now there is no question: he is simply available as food. And ostriches are eaten by their predators without any fight, because the ostrich is living with the idea: “I don’t see any enemy here.”This ostrich argument is widespread around the world today. Nobody wants to see the reality: that you are sinking, that all your values are false, that all your civilization is hypocrisy, that all your smiles are just exercises of lips and there is no heart in it, that you have forgotten to live, to love, to laugh, that you don’t know what life means at all. You go on clinging because there is nothing else, there is no alternative.I am being prevented because I can give you the alternative. I can show you that this is not the only way a society can exist, this is not the only way that a marriage can exist, this is not the only way that children can be brought up, this is not the only way that governments should function. There are alternative ways.But even to hear of the alternative, they are afraid. The message should not reach the young – because the young are bound to be affected by the news that there is an alternative, that you need not remain in this misery, continuously fighting, killing human beings unnecessarily.Now Libya is destroying the American bases. America cannot remain silent: it will start destroying Libya – not only its military bases but its civilians. It is a small country, but Libya knows that if America starts to destroy the civilians, the whole East – particularly the Middle East – will be on Libya’s side. And behind the curtains will be the Soviet Union.So if America has guts, it is not going to start a fight with Libya, which would be very unbalanced – Libya has nothing with which to fight against one of the greatest nuclear powers. But Libya has the assurance of the Soviet Union: “Don’t be worried, Libya is just a facade, just a front.” And once these two powers start fighting, they cannot resist using nuclear weapons; it is impossible.The government of England is not afraid of this. The government of England should have prevented America: “This is not a right beginning; this is not conducive to the public good. This will lead more and more into war. Don’t take the first step; otherwise the last step will not be far away.” But they would like to have a Third World War rather than change the human mind.Why? – because to change the human mind means that for millions of years you have been behaving stupidly, that all your great ancestors have been simply fools and nothing else. They knew nothing about human consciousness; they were unconscious, they were blind. And blind people have been leading other blind people toward the goal of light. It seems it is difficult to accept that our whole past has been wrong. It is better to destroy the whole future but remain stubborn that our past has been right: let man die, but save your ego.That will give you a clue why I am a danger just for an overnight stay, and American nuclear missiles are not dangerous. They think alike; their mathematics is the same.To them I am a dangerous person because I have no pride in the past. I am a dangerous person because I do not consider that for thousands of years man has lived intelligently. Otherwise why so much misery, why so much anxiety, why so much anguish? The fruit shows the quality of the tree. And the fruit that we have shows that the whole human past went wrong somewhere, and just out of ego went on pushing in a wrong direction.I am ready and willing to change my ideas if somebody can show me that they are wrong, that they will not lead to the good of the people. But nobody is ready to do that; they simply accept it. No argument is needed, no discussion is needed.The government of Spain was continually thinking for one month whether or not to allow me into Spain. They have nuclear bases for the American army; they are members of NATO, and the man who is the prime minister became prime minister by promising the people of Spain that he would pull Spain out of NATO, and that he would order the American bases to be removed from Spain. And the people of Spain don’t want the bases because they have seen Franco, who ruled for forty years with absolute dictatorship. He destroyed all freedom of thinking and killed anybody who said anything against him. After forty years of this experience, this nightmare, they don’t want to get into another nightmare again.They voted in this man on a single point: he was promising that he would pull out of NATO and force the Americans to leave Spain. Two years have passed and the people have been asking, “What happened? You are not pulling out of NATO, and neither have the American bases moved out of Spain.”When the man had come to power he was not a politician, but these two years have turned him into a politician. He said, “My experience of two years in power makes me change my idea: we are going to remain in NATO, and American bases are going to remain in Spain.”It was such a betrayal that the people demanded a vote on the point, a referendum. But the prime minister, the whole bureaucracy, the whole government, is now for American military bases and membership in NATO. Still, they do not have a big majority. The young people of Spain have still voted against them: forty-five percent of the people have voted against NATO. But the government with all their powers certainly managed to get just a little bit larger number of votes in favor.If this man had any sense of dignity he would have resigned, because he was chosen for a simple program. He was not chosen – the program was chosen, and because he has dropped the program he should resign immediately. These politicians seem to be so shameless, with no dignity, with no honor, with no self-respect.He wanted me to stay in Spain, but the problem was the American pressure. For one month he went on postponing. He informed me that I should not leak the news that Spain had invited me, because the royal family of Spain, the prime minister, the president, the cabinet would all be at the airport to receive me. I was going to be their invited guest, so they would proclaim the date and time, and they would inform me.But slowly, slowly he saw that if forty-five percent of the people can vote against him, then to bring a man like me into the country is dangerous because these young people are bound to be influenced by me.The parliament decided that I should be welcomed, the cabinet decided that I should be welcomed, but finally the prime minister informed me that it would not be possible – politically it would be difficult.I know the difficulty; the difficulty came after the referendum. And I have been telling John every day that if any decision has to be taken, it should be taken before the referendum. After the referendum I don’t see any hope, because once the prime minister sees how many people can vote against him, he will not be courageous enough to invite a person who can influence his people.This is the fear, and the fear is now almost all over the world, in every country – strange fears. In this small, beautiful country, I was told that we should not mention that we have one million sannyasins around the world and three million sympathizers, because that may become a fear: this country has only three million people, and they would not like such a powerful man in the country, who has four million people around the world who love him.The country should be proud to have someone… And I am not a political person, I am not going to have any political contest with anybody; but still, fear is fear. All these powerful people are deep down very inferior and very fearful. The only thing in their minds is power, what can enhance their power and what can destroy their power. And they put conditions…The president of Greece was willing for me to have a commune in Greece, and in fact he wanted it. His reasons were different: that it would bring thousands of tourists and that it would boost the economy. In fact he was the cause that I was allowed a four-week visa for Greece.But then the condition came that if I wanted to stay there and make a commune, I should remember a few things: “The Greek Orthodox Church is respected by our constitution; you cannot criticize it. The family is our foundation; you cannot criticize it. You cannot criticize our code of morality. We believe in virginity; you cannot criticize it.”They certainly believe in virginity, but it is difficult to find a single virgin in the whole of Greece. That’s okay – but you should not criticize it. You can see the political mind: the reality can be tolerated but it should not be exposed.I cannot accept anybody’s conditions, whatever happens to me, whatever the consequences. But to accept conditions, and that too for a little piece of land…I am reminded of the story of Leo Tolstoy. How much land does a man require? I might like to live without a country – a wanderer in the true sense. There have been wanderers but they had a home base. I will be really a wanderer without any home base, being rejected from one country to another country.Their rejection of me is simply an acceptance of their defeat, their impotency. Sooner or later they will have to pay for it, pay highly for it, because in every country there are intelligent people. How long can these intelligent people tolerate this? Sooner or later it will become a revolution. Without my entering those lands, I will find my friends there.I cannot lose hope because I cannot see that intelligence is dead. It is repressed, but it is alive. It has become an undercurrent, but my rejection is going to provoke it to come to the surface. Soon there will be protests in every country which is denying me entry.In Italy they have been postponing for almost three months, just for a three-week tourist visa. The president and the prime minister and the minister of foreign affairs, are all saying, “We are going to give it to him tomorrow.” And sannyasins are going every day; they are sitting there in their offices, saying, “Whenever you want we are ready. But when will your tomorrow come?”After three months they got so frustrated because the pope is holding them back. They cannot say no to the sannyasins because they have no reason to say no. And they know my impact in Italy.Just a few days ago, a television interview of one and a half hours was seen by thirty-four million people – unprecedented. The director informed me, “We could not believe that so many people would be interested in you. You have never come to this country.” No other program in his whole life had attracted so many people. And not only the show – the show was finished in one and a half hours – but people are discussing each and every point in the marketplace, in the university, everywhere. Somebody is for, somebody is against, but everybody is intensely involved.So the government could not say no because that might create trouble. And the pope is insisting that I should not be allowed into Italy. So they go on postponing. Finally the sannyasins got so frustrated that they started making a protest. One of the most famous Italian film directors, Fellini, has signed their petition first. They have thirty-six other world-known people who have signed the protest, and they are collecting more names. And I have never been there.One thing is certain, whether you agree with me or not: I cannot be prevented from presenting my views, my perspective, to the people. And what is happening there will happen in Germany, will happen in Greece, will happen in England, will happen in Spain, is going to happen everywhere. Sannyasins have to create a worldwide chain of protests, signed by all the important creative artists, novelists, musicians, sculptors, dancers, actors, directors – people of all dimensions who have made an impact on the world.Collect their names for the protest first in every country, and then send a final protest to the UN, with all the protests of all the countries together – because now it is not a question of one country. If the European parliament decides that I cannot even land my plane at their airports, you cannot now take me just as an individual. I have become representative of a worldwide intelligence of creative, talented people. That is my country.My sannyasins have to go to the UN because this is simply ugly. But as I said in the beginning, it is something relative. To me it is ugly. And to all those who can understand, it will be ugly. But to those who believe in the ostrich logic, it is good, it is “for the public good.” But we will show to the world what is good for the public and what is bad for the public!Osho,I was one of those who was taken for a ride when the list of enlightened people was announced, because I thought, “If Osho says I'm enlightened, why not try it out?”I enjoyed it: I threw a party for a hundred or so friends, and for the next six months – until I became endarkened again – tried to use what I saw as a really potential situation.The main thing I saw was that I really am okay. Am I kidding myself about that experience?No, if you can understand it you cannot be kidding.First let me explain a few other things. After I declared a few people enlightened – Santosh was also one of them. He wrote me a letter saying, “Your declaration of my enlightenment gives me no excitement, but my being accepted as a member of the committee of the enlightened ones makes me feel very great.”I sent him a message: “Why does your being enlightened not make you feel excited? The reason is that you think that you are already enlightened and that is not true. That’s why your becoming a member of the committee of the enlightened ones makes you feel great: at last your enlightenment has been recognized. It is not a declaration for you but a recognition that you have been enlightened long before.“But if enlightenment is not an excitement, then how can it be a great thing to be a member of the party, or the committee, of enlightened people? If enlightenment itself makes no sense to you, then being the member of the committee cannot make any sense, except this: it fulfills your ego.“You were enlightened, and nobody was taking note of it. Finally I have recognized it, and now you are part of the committee of enlightened people, so it is sealed. But you are wrong – because it was all a joke! The committee was a joke, the declaration was a joke. And it was a device.”Somendra immediately sent a telegram to Teertha, saying, “I have got it – what about you?” He was continuously a competitor. That was his problem, that he should be higher than Teertha. And this was a good chance.He has dropped sannyas, he has not been in any contact with us, but he accepts my declaration of his enlightenment. He has dropped sannyas, he is no longer part of my family, but enlightenment… Immediately a telegram was sent: “I have got it – what about you?”It was a device to see how people react. Your response to it was perfectly beautiful. Your response was, “If Osho says I am enlightened, I must be.” It simply shows trust, love. It has nothing to do with ego. Throwing a party and rejoicing the moment with your friends was perfectly right.And when I said it was a joke, you were not angry. You simply took it again the same way: “If Osho says I am not enlightened, and it was a joke, perhaps I am not enlightened and it was really a joke.” The six months that you lived as enlightened, the joy and the peace and the serenity that you felt was not of enlightenment, it was of trust and love. It was a good experience for you. But different experiences happen to different people.There were only two Indians in the group who were declared enlightened, and they understand traditionally what enlightenment means. One was Vinod Bharti.He became very nervous, was crying, came to Vivek to give me the message, “Osho, I am not enlightened. And you have created a trouble for me: I cannot say you are wrong, and I know perfectly well that I am not enlightened. So what am I supposed to do? I am just torn apart. Just tell me the truth!”He knows about enlightenment. He knows that for centuries in India enlightenment has been the ultimate peak of spiritual search. In the West the very idea has never existed. So he cannot conceive of himself as Gautam Buddha, and he cannot deny me because he loves me and trusts me. So I can see his trouble. So I sent him the message, “Don’t be worried, it was just a joke. You are not enlightened, relax!”Until he heard that he was not enlightened, he could not sleep for two days. Then he relaxed: he is not enlightened; there is no problem.The other man was Maitreya, who was the only one who understood the joke immediately, because as he left the room he said, “Osho is really a rascal. Saying to me that I am enlightened proves it!” But he was also an Indian and particularly comes from Bihar where most of the enlightened people happened in India: Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Parsunatha, Naminatha, Adinatha, a long series of enlightened people. All twenty-four enlightened masters of the Jainas, Gautam Buddha happened in Bihar. Bihar has the deepest understanding and experience of enlightenment. So naturally he said, “Osho is a rascal.” But it was also his love.He was not disturbed, because once you know that it is a joke, there is no question of any difficulty about it.A few people simply remained silent: they neither reacted this way nor that. That too is good. They were not affected by it; they simply remained themselves, as they were. “If Osho says it is enlightenment, it may be; if he says it is not, it may not be.” It did not make any difference to them; they remained aloof and detached.It was a good experience to see how people reacted to a single idea with their different minds. Those who were not included in the committee were angry. I received a few letters saying, “If these people have become enlightened, then why have I not become enlightened?” As if it were something… “You have given it to these people. Why have you not given it to me?”Somebody wrote, “I have been with you longer than these people, and I am not enlightened yet. Have you forgotten me or what?” But it was good to know how people react.Your reaction was perfectly beautiful on both ends. “If Osho says it is enlightenment, it must be” – that is a simple trust. “And if he says it is not….” Then you don’t feel any contradiction or inconsistency, you simply accept it: “If he says it is not, then it must not be.” You have transcended the world of consistencies, inconsistencies.Love knows no contradiction. It knows no comparison. Each moment it is available.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is a natural death?It is a significant question, but there are many possible implications in it. The simplest and the most obvious is that a man dies without any cause; he simply becomes old, older, and the change from old age to death is not through any disease. Death is simply the ultimate old age – everything in your body, in your brain, has stopped functioning. This will be the ordinary and obvious meaning of a natural death.But to me a natural death has a far deeper meaning: one has to live a natural life to attain a natural death. A natural death is the culmination of a life lived naturally, without any inhibition, without any repression – just the way the animals live, the birds live, the trees live, without any split: a life of let-go, allowing nature to flow through you without any obstructions from your side, as if you are absent and life is moving on its own.Rather than you living life, life lives you, you are secondary; then the culmination will be a natural death. According to my definition, only an awakened man can die a natural death; otherwise all deaths are unnatural, because all lives are unnatural.How can you arrive at a natural death, living an unnatural life? Death will reflect the ultimate culmination, the crescendo of your whole life. It is all that you have lived, in a condensed form. So only very few people in the world have died naturally, because only very few people have lived naturally. Our conditionings don’t allow us to be natural.Our conditionings teach us from the very beginning that we have to be something more than nature, that just to be natural is to be animal; we have to be supernatural. It seems very logical. All the religions have been teaching this – that to be man means going above nature – and they have convinced centuries of humanity to go above nature. Nobody has succeeded in going above nature. All that they have succeeded in is destroying their natural, spontaneous beauty, their innocence.Man need not transcend nature. I say unto you, man has to fulfill nature – which no animal can do. That is the difference.The religions were cunning, cheating and deceiving people. They made the distinction that animals are natural and you have to be supernatural. No animal can fast; you cannot convince any animal that fasting is something divine. The animal only knows that it is hungry, and there is no difference between fasting and being hungry. You cannot convince any animal to go against nature.This gave an opportunity to the so-called religious people, because man has the capacity at least to fight against nature. He will never be victorious, but he can fight. And in fighting he will not be destroying nature; he will be destroying only himself.That’s how man has destroyed himself – all his joy, all his love, all his grandeur – and has not become something higher than animals, but something lower, in every possible way. Perhaps you may have never thought about it: no animal in the wild is homosexual. The very idea, and the whole world of animals will burst into laughter. It is simply stupid! But in a zoo, where females are not available, animals turn into homosexuals out of sheer necessity.Man has turned the whole world into a zoo: millions and millions of people are homosexuals, lesbians, sodomists, and what-not – all kinds of perversions. And who is responsible? – the people who were teaching you to go beyond nature, to attain supernatural divineness.This is only one example. In every other way they have done the same. For example, in India Mahavira was so much attached to the idea of nonviolence that even cultivation – gardening – was prohibited to his followers, because if you cultivate you will have to cut plants, and plants have life and that will be violence.His followers were mostly coming from the warrior race, the kshatriyas; he himself was a warrior king. Now they could not fight because fighting was violence; they could not be cultivators because cultivation was violence. They could not be teachers because that was the monopoly of the brahmins, and a brahmin is born; you cannot enter into the brahmin fold, howsoever wise you are. You may be wiser than all those brahmins, but you cannot become a teacher of the people – that is the birthright of a brahmin. So they could not be accepted by the brahmins. They would not like to become the sudras, the untouchables, making shoes, cleaning streets and toilets.Now the only way possible for them was to become businessmen; all other possibilities were closed. So all the Jainas in India became businessmen, and a strange phenomenon happened: all their violence – because just by not being a fighter or a hunter or a cultivator makes no difference, you are the same person – all their violence became exploitation. They cannot cut off your head, but they can suck your blood. They became the richest people in the country, for the simple reason that all their violence became concentrated only on one thing and that was money.This was not evolution. These people were not better people. The teaching of nonviolence has not helped them to become better – they have become worse! They are the greediest, the most materialist, the most money-minded; their whole world is money, because every other avenue is closed. They talk about money, they think about money, they dream about money. They can do anything to accumulate money.Whenever you enforce something, the result is not going to bring betterment. They have not become compassionate; to be nonviolent means to be loving and to be compassionate. They have become just the opposite. They are not compassionate, they are not kind, they are not loving.It has been tried in many other spheres, by different religions to make man something above nature. The result has been failure, without any exception. You are born as a natural being. You cannot go above yourself. It is just like pulling yourself up by pulling on your legs. You may hop a little, but sooner or later you are going to fall to the ground, and you may have a few fractures. You cannot fly.And that’s what has been done. People have been trying to raise themselves above nature, which means above themselves. They are not separate from nature, but the idea suited their egos: you are not animals so you have to be above nature; you cannot behave like animals. People have even tried to make animals not behave like animals; they have tried to make them go a little above nature.In the Victorian age in England, dogs were clothed when people used to take them for a walk. The dogs had coats to prevent them being natural, to prevent them being naked and nude – that is suitable to animals and those people were trying to raise their dogs a little higher than animals.You will be surprised to know that in the Victorian age in England, even the legs of chairs were covered – for the simple reason that they were called legs, and legs should be covered. Bertrand Russell, who lived almost a century, a long life, remembers in his childhood that seeing the feet of a woman was enough to get sexually excited. The dresses were made in such a way that they covered the feet; you could not see the feet.Even just a hundred years ago it was believed that the women of the royal family didn’t have two separate legs. Royalty had to be somehow different than ordinary, common humanity, and nobody had seen – and there was no possibility to see – whether their legs were separate from each other.Neither did those royal people make it clear: “This is nonsense, we are as human as you are.” The ego prevented them. If the people are putting them on a higher pedestal, then why bother? – just remain royal. That was one of the reasons why royal families would not allow anybody, a commoner, to be married into the royal family, because he may expose the whole thing: “These people are just as human as everybody else; there is nothing royal about them.” But for centuries they maintained the idea.I would also like you to be different from the animals, but not in the sense that you can go above nature – no. You can go deeper into nature, you can be more natural than animals. They are not free, they are in a deep coma; they cannot do anything other than what their ancestors have been doing for millennia.You can be more natural than any animal. You can go to the abysmal depths of nature, and you can go to the very heights of nature, but you will not be going beyond in any way. You will be becoming more natural, you will be becoming more multidimensionally natural.To me the religious man is not one who is above nature, but is the man who is totally natural, fully natural, who has explored nature in all its dimensions, who has not left anything unexplored.Animals are prisoners; they have a certain limited area of being. Man has the capacity, the intelligence, the freedom to explore. And if you have explored nature totally, you have come home. Nature is your home. Then death is a joy, is a celebration. Then you die without any complaint; you die with deep gratitude, because life gave you so much, and death is simply the ultimate height of all that you have lived.It is just as the flame of a candle burns brightest before it goes out; the natural man, before he dies, lives brightest for a moment. He is all light, all truth. To me this is natural death. But it has to be earned; it is not given to you. The opportunity is given to you, but you have to explore, you have to earn, you have to deserve.Even to see the death of an authentic man, just to be near him while he is dying, you will be filled suddenly with a strange joy. Your tears will not be of sadness, sorrow; they will be of gratitude and blissfulness – because when a man dies naturally, living his life fully, he spreads his being into the whole of nature. Those who are present and close to him are bathed in a sudden freshness, a breeze, a new fragrance and a new feeling that death is not something bad, that death is not something to be afraid of, that death is something to be earned, to be deserved.I teach you the art of life. But it can be called also the art of death. They are both the same.Osho,How can one get out of the trap the mind creates of never quite being blissful in the moment, of never being patient and letting the grass grow by itself. I always want to move faster, pushing the river and missing the beauty of it taking me in its own time. Would you please comment?It is one of the eternal questions.The East has come up with something very close to the truth. There are religions born in India and religions born outside India; the religions born outside all believe in one life – that is, seventy years. Naturally, one is in a hurry; one has to be in a hurry: such a small life and so much to do, so much to experience, so much to explore. That’s why the Western mind is speedy, wanting to do everything faster and faster, quickly, because his conception of life is too small. You cannot blame him.The religions born in India have an eternal expanse, life after life. There is no hurry, there is no haste. But man is so stupid that you solve one question, and out of the solution a thousand other questions will arise. The idea of many lives was really to help you to relax: there is no hurry; the eternity is yours, so don’t run, just walk the way you go for a morning walk – at ease, relaxed.That was the idea of the people who gave the conception of reincarnation, but people are such that rather than becoming relaxed, they became lazy. They said, “There is no hurry, so why bother even to walk? Running is out of the question but even to go for a morning walk, what is the need? Eternity is yours – you can go for your morning walk any time.”The East became poor because of this, because no technology was evolved. Technology is just to make things quickly, to produce things faster than man can do with his own hands. The people remained poor, went on becoming poorer. The idea was good, but the consequences proved not to be good.The West has just the opposite idea, that of a small life. It created great tension and anxiety, but it created technology, scientific developments, richness, comfort, luxuries; it created everything. But the man inside was lost, because he was always running. He was never where he was; he was always going for something else. And that goal where you can stop never comes. So in the West people have the means of speed, and they are going fast. But don’t ask them, “Where are you going?” Don’t waste their time in asking such stupid questions! All that matters is that they are going fast; it does not matter where they are going and why they are going.Both ideas have failed. Eastern religions have not been of help; Western religions have not been of help. They both tried to give you an idea, but they never gave you an insight into your own being. That’s where I differ.For example, your question is that you understand “relax and let the grass grow by itself,” but still you go on pushing. No, you don’t understand. The first thing for you to understand is that you don’t understand the meaning of the grass growing by itself. If you understand that, the pushing, the forcing, will disappear. When I say it will disappear, I am not saying it will stop. It will differ with different people.If you understand what it means that the grass grows by itself: such a vast universe is going so silently, so peacefully; millions of solar systems, millions of stars moving day in, day out, from eternity to eternity… If you understand that existence is happening, it is not doing, then if pushing is your nature you will accept it. It is not a question of stopping it, because that will again be doing. You simply understand that things are happening, that this is how you are: that you push, that you force. Then there is a great acceptance of it, and in that acceptance, the tension disappears.For a few others the pushing may disappear if it is not part of their nature – if they are imitating somebody else, if they are competing with somebody else and because everybody else is pushing, they are pushing. It may stop, understanding that things are happening and you need not unnecessarily bother about them. You can enjoy silently the way things are happening. You can contribute without any anxiety anything that comes naturally to you; but not beyond that.So each individual will have different things happening out of the same understanding. If pushing is your nature, then there is nothing wrong in it. Enjoy it, push as much as you can – but with a song and with a dance, and without being worried that you are pushing. This is you. This is your grass, and it grows this way. There are grasses and grasses.Just one thing has to be remembered, that anything that you are doing is joyfully done, rejoicingly done – that’s enough. Different people will be doing different things, and the world needs that different people should do different things. It is the richness of the world that all are not alike and should not be alike. But on one point they should meet; and that is the cosmic center of being relaxed.In Japan they have developed strange things for meditative purposes. Japan has done a tremendous service to humanity. Meditation was developed in India, but it remained a very limited phenomenon – just sitting in a lotus posture witnessing your thoughts, becoming silent. It did the work, but Japan tried different dimensions, strange dimensions: swordsmanship, but with meditation. Two swordsmen bent upon killing each other have to remain centered in themselves without tension, without fear, without anger, without revenge, just playful.To the observer it is a question of life and death, but to those two meditators it is playfulness. And a strange thing has been observed again and again: if both the meditators are of the same depth in meditation, nobody wins, nobody is killed. Even before one person raises the sword to hit the other person at a certain point – even before he has done that – just that idea of his has reached to the other, and his sword is ready to protect him.It is impossible to declare who is the winner. Ordinarily it is difficult to think of swordsmanship and meditation, aikido and meditation, jujitsu and meditation, wrestling and meditation. But in Japan they have tried every dimension possible, and they have found that it doesn’t matter what you are doing; what matters is, are you centered?If you are centered then you can do anything and it will not create any tension; your relaxation will remain the same.So don’t be worried about pushing. Just try to understand that we are so small compared to this immense universe; what we do or don’t do makes no difference to existence. We are not to be serious about it. I was not here and existence continued; I will not be here, and existence will continue. I should not take myself seriously.That is a fundamental understanding of a meditator – that he does not take himself seriously. Then relaxation comes automatically. And with relaxation, whatsoever is natural to you continues, and whatsoever is not natural to you falls on its own accord.Osho,The question for the meditator used to be, “How to be in the world and not of it?” Since the Ranch and having moved back into the world, many of us feel alien, different, not of it. The question now seems to be, “How to be in it?”No, the question is still to be in the world and not to be of it. To be in it does not change the first position. The first position allows you to be in the world but not to be worldly.It is perfectly good that you feel alien; there is nothing wrong in it. You should feel so, that this world in which you have to be is not the world where you can synchronize with people, with their ideas, with their behavior.This world is not the right world – I mean the human world. And you want to be in it, part of it? Then you have to be a Christian in a Christian society. Then you have to go to the church, then you have to believe in the Holy Bible. Do you want to be in this way in the world? Then all that you have done before has been a sheer wastage of time.“Being in the world” only means that you will be doing a job, that you will be earning your bread, that you will be living with people who are not of the same mind as you, that you will be living among foreigners; and naturally, you will feel alien. But that is something to be happy about.I have not sent you into the world to get lost. I have sent you into the world to remain yourself in spite of the world. That was the meaning of the original statement: To be in the world but not of it. It remains unchanged. It is so fundamental that it will remain unchanged.Osho,One of the things I enjoy most in this life is hearing you describe the state of enlightenment. For those of us who love to listen, can you once again say something about the unsayable?It is true that there is nothing more beautiful, more blissful than enlightenment – even the talk of it, even the faraway echo, even the shadow of it. The moon reflected in the water is not the real moon, but still it has tremendous beauty; and if the waters of your mind are silent, then the moon reflected in those waters is exactly the same.It is not your experience, but it is someone you love’s experience, it is someone you trust’s experience. And just because you love and you trust, you start sharing the experience in a subtle way.It is certainly difficult to say anything about it, although my whole life I have been saying things about it – and only about it. Even if I am talking about other things, I am only talking to lead you toward an understanding of enlightenment. It is your state of silence, it is your state of universal-hood. It is you without the ego and its problems. It is you without any questions and without any answer either – simply silent. There is no joy which can transcend this silence. It is pure light, it is pure delight.I can understand your question. Just to hear about it again and again is a necessary need, so you don’t forget why you are here.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When I hear you speaking of your vision, I can't help but feel that those few daring people around you will live to experience the new man. But it feels more like a hundred years away before man at large will come to see and live the genius of your ways. Is this true?It is true. Even if it happens in a hundred years time it will be too soon.But the question is significant in a totally different way. It is not the realization of the vision, the coming of the new man, a new humanity – that will come in its own time. The more important thing is to be able to visualize it.Everything great that has happened in the world has been an idea first. Sometimes it took hundreds of years for it to become a reality, but the joy of having a vision, an insight into the future, is immense. The people who are with me should rejoice that they can see a possibility of the old rotten world disappearing and a new fresh human being taking its place.Just the vision will change you at least, will shift your being from the past to the future. In a certain way you will start living the new man, who has not yet come. You will start living the new man in small ways, and each moment of that living will be a blessing. As you become acquainted, within yourself, with the explosion of the new and the destruction of the old, you are changing, you are going through a revolution.I am interested in you. Who cares about what is going to happen after a hundred years? Something must be going to happen, but it is not our business. When I talk about the new man I am really talking about you, for you to become aware of the possibility, because that very awareness will change you. I am not interested in the future; I am simply interested in the immediate present.The future will go on for eternity, but if your mind can be cleaned of the past rubbish, and if you can see the faraway rising sun… I am not interested in the sun, I am interested in your vision, in your capacity to see, in your understanding, in your hope that it is possible. That very hope will become a seed in you. The new man will come whenever it has to come. But the new vision can come right now.With the new vision, you participate in a subtle way with the man who has not yet come, with the humanity who is still in the womb. You start having a synchronicity, a certain relationship. Your roots from the past start dropping, and you start growing your roots into the future.My interest, I repeat, is basically in you. I am neither interested in the past, nor in the future. I talk about the past so you can get rid of it; I talk about the future so you can remain open to it. But you are the point of my emphasis.Osho,Nothing thrills me more than when you speak about nirvana. How mysterious it is that I can long so much for something that I don't know and you can't say. The word itself is still unpolluted and so wondrous. On the other hand, I noticed last week that we now have “enlightened” insurance policies! Would you please thrill my heart once more?This must be Kaveesha, because the question can come only from California. In California you can have enlightened insurance policies. In California everything is possible! But there is no insurance, no guarantee for enlightenment. You have to earn it, you have to deserve it. Nobody can give it to you; it is not a commodity.And I can see why the word nirvana thrills you into ecstasies. It is certainly one of the words which is unpolluted. There is a reason why it remained unpolluted. The first reason that it remained unpolluted was its meaning. Unless you have come to a deep understanding of yourself and existence, the word nirvana will create fear in you. It is a negative word. Literally it means blowing out the candle.Gautam Buddha used the word for the ultimate state of consciousness. He could have chosen a positive word, and in India there were many positive words for it: moksha, freedom, liberation; kaivalya, aloneness, absolute aloneness; brahmanubava, the experience of the ultimate. But he chose a strange word, which has never been used in spiritual contexts: blowing out the candle. How can you relate it with a spiritual experience?Buddha says your so-called self is nothing but a flame, and it is being kept burning through your desires. When all desires disappear the candle has disappeared. Now the flame cannot exist anymore. The flame also disappears – disappears into the vast universe, leaving no trace behind it; you cannot find it again. It is there but it has gone forever from any identity, from any limitation.Hence Buddha chose the word nirvana rather than realization, because realization can still give you some egoistic superiority – that you are a realized person, that you are a liberated being, that you are enlightened, that you are illuminated, that you have found it. But you remain. And Buddha is saying you are lost – who is going to find it? You disperse, you were only a combination. Now each element goes to its original source. The identity of the individual is no more. Yes, you will exist as the universe…So Buddha avoided any positive word, knowing the human tendency, because each positive word can give you a feeling of ego. No negative word can do that; that’s why it remains unpolluted. You cannot pollute something which is not. And people were very much afraid to use the word – with a deep inner trembling – nirvana.Thousands of times Buddha was asked, “Your word nirvana does not create in us an excitement, does not create in us a desire to achieve it. The ultimate truth, self-realization, the realization of God – all those create a desire, a great desire. Your word creates no desire.”Buddha said again and again, “That is the beauty of the word. All those words which create desire in you are not going to help you, because desire itself is the root cause of your misery. Longing for something is your tension. Nirvana makes you absolutely free from tension: there is nothing to desire. On the contrary, you have to prepare yourself to accept a dissolution. In dissolution you cannot claim the ego, hence the word remains unpolluted.”No other word has remained unpolluted. Its negativity is the reason – and only a great master can contribute to humanity something which, even if you want, you cannot pollute. Twenty-five centuries…but there is no way. Nirvana is going to dissolve you; you cannot do anything to nirvana.It is certainly the purest word. Even its sound, whether you understand the meaning or not, is soothing, gives a deep serenity and silence, which no other word – god-realization, the absolute, the ultimate – no other word gives that feeling of silence. The moment you hear the word nirvana it seems as if time has stopped, as if there is nowhere to go. In this very moment you can melt, dissolve, disappear, without any trace behind.Osho,The anecdote you told about Mulla Nasruddin and the sack of sugar pinpointed the reason for my occasional resistance to being told what to do. When Nasruddin's father saw what was happening to the sugar, he need only have made his son aware of it, without providing a solution. Having had the situation pointed out to him, the Mulla, if he had any intelligence – and it seems he had his fair share – could have immediately seen what was needed to be done and acted accordingly. But his father did not allow him the chance to think it out for himself.To encourage people to use their intelligence and initiative seems to be a creative way of putting one's authority into action.I would be grateful for your comment.The story is simply a way of saying very complex and complicated things. As far as the story is concerned, you are right; the father could have explained. There was no need for any order, and no need for obedience or disobedience. But it is a story.In actual life there are things – particularly, for example God or the soul or paradise, the temple, worship, prayer to an unknown God – there is no way to explain. The father cannot explain God; he himself does not know. He has been told, he accepted it, and he has believed it. Now it is time for him to tell his son – how can he explain? And that’s where I come into the story.Your whole society and the mind of your society is based on things which can be only believed but cannot be explained; hence the necessity of obedience; hence the angry reaction of your elders if you disobey.It was a problem for me also in my childhood…My whole family was going to the temple and I was resistant. I was willing – if they could explain what this whole thing was all about. They had no explanation except, “It has always been done, and it is good to follow your elders, to follow your old generations, to follow the ancient heritage. It is good.” This is not an explanation.I told them, “I am not asking whether it is good or bad; I am asking what it is. I don’t see any God, I see only a stone statue. And you know perfectly well that it is a stone statue – you know better than me, because you have purchased it from the market. So God is being sold in the market? You have installed it with your own hands in the temple; at what point did it become God? – because in the shop of the sculptor it is not worshipped. People are haggling for its price; nobody is praying to it! Nobody thinks that these are gods, because there are so many statues and you can choose according to your liking.“You haggled for the price, you purchased the statue. I have been an observer all the time, waiting to see at what moment the stone statue becomes God, at what moment it is not a commodity to be purchased and sold, but a divinity to be worshipped.”They had no explanation. There is no explanation, because in fact it never became God; it is still a statue. It is just no longer in the shop, it is in the temple. And what is the temple? – another house.I was asking them, “I want to participate with you in your prayers, in your worship; I don’t want to remain an outsider. But I cannot do it against myself. First I have to be satisfied, and you don’t give any answer that is satisfying.“What are you saying in your prayers? ‘Give us this, give us that’ – and do you see the whole hilarious scene? You have purchased a stone statue, installed it in a house, and now you are begging from the statue, which is purchased by you, ‘Give us this, give us that – prosperity to our family, health to our family.’ You are behaving very strangely, in a weird way, and I cannot participate in it.“I don’t want to disobey for disobedience’s sake. This is not disobedience; I am ready to follow your order, but you are not ready to give an explanation to me. You never asked your own parents. They lived in ignorance, you are living in ignorance, and you want me also to live in ignorance.”They thought that I would cool down by and by. They used to take me to the temple. They would all bow down, and I would stand by the side. My father would say to me, “Just for our sake… It doesn’t look good; it looks odd that you stand in the corner when everybody is bowing down with so much religiousness.”I said, “I don’t see any religiousness; I simply see a certain kind of exercise. And if these people are so interested in exercise, they can go to a gymnasium, which will really give them health.“Here they are asking, ‘Give us health,’ and ‘Give us wealth.’ Go to the gymnasium and there you will get health, and you will have real exercises. This is not much! And you are right that it looks odd – not my standing here, but you doing all kinds of stupid rituals. You are odd. I may be in the minority, but I am not odd.“And you say for your sake I should participate. Why are you not participating with me for my sake? You all should stand in a line in the corner – that will show that you really want to participate.”Finally he told me, “It is better you don’t come to the temple, because other people come and they see you, and you are always doing something nasty.”I said, “What?” – because I was always sitting with my back toward the god, which is not allowed – that was “nasty.” I said, “If the god is omnipotent, he can change his position. Why should I be bothered about it? But he goes on sitting in the same position. If he does not want to see my back, he can move; he can start looking at the other side. I am more alive than your god, that’s why you tell me to change my position; you don’t tell your god. You know that he is dead.”They said, “Don’t say such things!”I said, “What can I do? He does not breathe, he does not speak, and I don’t think he hears, because a man who is not breathing, who is not seeing, who cannot move, cannot hear – all these things happen in an organic unity, and the organism has to be alive. So to whom are you praying?”Slowly, slowly I managed it that my family got rid of the temple. It was made by my family, but then they gave it to the community; they stopped going there. I told them, “Unless you explain it to me, your going shows that you are not behaving intelligently.”So the question is not the story. The story is a simplification of the complicated life situations where explanations have never been given. For thousands of years man has lived without explanations, has lived in obedience, has not questioned, has not doubted, has not been skeptical; has been afraid to, because these are all sins: obedience is virtue.To me obedience is not virtue: intelligence is virtue. If you follow something because it appeals to your intelligence, it becomes virtuous. If you don’t follow something because your intelligence is against it, it has not to be condemned as sin.For centuries, the mind of man has been conditioned to obey. I want a society where we will drop all those things which cannot be explained. Only then can obedience be dropped. I have not removed God without a reason; it is all a connected whole. If God is not removed, obedience remains in religion. Then religion never becomes a scientific approach toward your own interiority.So anything that cannot be explained should not be ordered. Those things should be taken out of the human mind. But then, what remains of your religion? God disappears, hell and heaven disappear.Mahavira believed in three hells because people commit sins in different categories. Naturally, to put all of them in one hell and punish them in the same way is illogical. He was a man of logic; he was very mathematical. You will be surprised to know that twenty-five centuries before Einstein, he said everything about the theory of relativity that Einstein discovered in the twentieth century. Of course not in such minute detail, because he had no way to experiment; it was just his vision.So he has three hells. Christianity has only one, Mohammedanism has only one, Judaism has only one – why does Mahavira insist on three? Because he can see that it is unjustified: somebody has committed a small sin, has simply stolen a little money from somebody else, and somebody has killed many people, murdered, raped. Now putting them together with the same punishment is illogical. So he has three categories.In the first will be the light sinners: the people who have been smoking, and drinking tea and coffee, and eating ice cream etc. They are not doing very great sins, so just the first hell will be for them, just to give them a little torture. Not to give them their ice cream will be enough; to put them in hellfire seems too much! In the second will be the heavier sinners. And in the third will be the heaviest ones, the greatest sinners.But it is not so easy to categorize into three. Buddha has seven hells, because he sees that with three you still cannot be fair, because there are so many kinds of people and so many kinds of sins that a little more scope is needed to be fair. He has seven hells. But nobody has any explanation; nobody can prove their existence. It is just hypothetical.There was a man, Sanjay Belattiputta who was also a great teacher, contemporary to Buddha and Mahavira. He has seven hundred hells because, he says, “These people don’t understand the complexity.” And I think he is right. As far as complexity is concerned, even seven hundred hells may not be enough. You may have to find a hell for everyone, for every single sinner, because two sinners cannot be put together: it will be unfair to this person, or to that person. There is no criterion, no weighing machine so that you can decide how much sin you have done, how many kilos.But it is all hypothetical. And whom to listen to? – all three people are great teachers, great masters. But although what they are saying seems to be reasonable, it is still hypothetical. Somebody may come and may talk about seven thousand, and you cannot refute them and you cannot prove them.Once you ask for an explanation for everything, your religions will start withering away. Your political ideologies will be found to be based on nonsense.For example, communism is based on the equality of man – and there are not two men who are equal, or have ever been equal. It is psychological nonsense to talk of the equality of man. Each individual is unique; there is no question of comparison. All that your mind is filled with – if you take it item by item and try to find out evidence, proof, explanation – you will be surprised: you are carrying an unnecessary load.Yes, there are things which cannot be explained but still they are true. But they are not to be ordered either; they have to be learned in a deep, loving atmosphere. If you trust a master, if you love a master, if you can feel his authenticity, sincerity, his humanness, then perhaps he can talk about things which are, but can only be experienced, cannot be explained. But such a man will not order you to believe in them.For example, I cannot tell you to believe in reincarnation, although I know it is a truth. But because I cannot prove it, I cannot ask you to believe in it. I can only ask you to explore, to go deeper into your meditation, to go deeper into your own being, so that you can reach to when you were born; and still a little deeper, so that you can feel that you are in your mother’s womb.You have been in your mother’s womb, and the memory of it is carried by you. Go further back, and you can see the moment in which you were conceived, the moment when your father and mother provided the opportunity for your soul to enter into a body. Go back a little more, and you can see yourself dying – your past life’s end. You can move backward into a few lives but that will be your experience; still you cannot explain to anybody else, and you cannot insist that they should believe your experience. You may be hallucinating, it may be an illusion, it may be a dream. It is not – because dreams have a different definition.You cannot repeat a dream. Have you thought about it? You see a dream, and tomorrow you want to repeat it – can you repeat it? It is beyond you. It may come sometime, but you cannot repeat it.But by going into your past life, you can repeat; it is within your hands, it is not a dream. A hallucination needs unconsciousness, a drugged state. In meditation you are not unconscious, you are conscious – more conscious than ever; hence your experience of past lives cannot be a hallucination. But these are your inner experiences, and they remain individual.There are things which cannot be explained; they are there, but they need not be ordered either. They have been ordered – to be a Hindu you have to believe in reincarnation, but the person who believes in reincarnation knows nothing about it. And every belief dulls your intelligence.So it is right that Mulla Nasruddin’s father could have explained to his son rather than ordering him, but he is ordering because otherwise the story would have lost all meaning. The story is a Sufi story; it has a certain purpose. If the father had explained, and Mulla Nasruddin had followed the explanation, what story would there be?The story is there to indicate something about human beliefs, which can only be ordered, which can only be obeyed, which cannot be explained. If the younger generation wants to get rid of them, the only way is to disobey everything that does not convince them.Disobedience is an art. It is not against anybody, and it is not something hard. You can be very polite, you can be really nice, and yet disobedient. It looks difficult because we have become accustomed to the association that the disobedient person is a hard person, that he is not gentle, that he is not nice. That is a wrong association.I have disobeyed my whole life – my parents, my teachers, my elders – but I have never let them feel that I am in any way disrespectful to them, or that I am being nasty to them. Disobedience is a greater art than obedience. Obedience needs no art.One of my professors, Professor S. S. Roy, was in deep love with me – so much so that at times he would say, “Okay, so come here, near the board, and explain to the class if you feel my explanation is not enough or is not adequate.” He would go and sit in my place, and I would stand in his place and teach the class.I asked him again and again, “Do you feel that I am disrespectful to you?”He said, “Never. Don’t be worried about it.” He was very concerned that I go to the examination hall, because he knew perfectly well that I was not interested in examinations or in getting degrees or anything. I was in the university to sharpen my intelligence, not to get a certificate. So he would come to my room, take me in his car to the examination hall, see with his own eyes that I had entered into the hall, and then he would leave.I told him the first day, “I have not prepared at all about this subject. And I am going to be absolutely original, because any answer that I am going to give will not be found in any book.”He said, “My God, why did you not tell me? – because I have set this paper. Don’t be worried, there is still time.” He took out his notebook and gave me five questions, and told me, sitting in the car, answers to each, in short. He said, “I am giving you just the essential answers, then you can elaborate.”When he was finished, I told him, “Don’t feel hurt – I will not use a single sentence of what you have told me, because it is unfair. You have set the paper; you should not let me know. You have created more difficulty for me. Now I will have to avoid everything that you have said.”He said, “You are strange!”I said, “I am not strange, I am simply saying that you have done wrong; now please don’t force me to do wrong.” It was a difficult paper because he had given me the questions, he had given me the answers, and I had to avoid his answers. But it was a great exercise to find my own answers – absolutely clean, unpolluted. He was also the examiner of that paper, so when my paper reached him and he saw it, he could not believe his eyes: I had really avoided everything that he had said; I had not even used one word.He called me, and said, “I am sorry that I gave you such trouble. I can see how difficult it must have been for you to avoid all the right answers, and yet remain right. But you did well, and I am giving you ninety-nine percent marks. I wanted to give you one hundred percent, but that would look a little too much, so I have cut one mark.“But to you I can say that that was my desire – to give you one hundred percent, for the simple reason that you have been able to avoid all the real answers and yet you have managed to answer my questions relevantly. And these answers cannot be found in any textbook; it must have been a strain on you.”I said, “No, it has not been. It has been just a play, just an exercise.”“Still,” he asked, “why did you not listen to me? That would have been the easiest thing.”I said, “You know that I cannot do anything which is unfair; no other student knew it. Now the ninety-nine percent is my own earning. If I had repeated your answers I would have always felt guilty that I was part of some unfair process. But don’t feel hurt; I have not rejected your answers for any other reason.”You can be disobedient with great artfulness; in fact you will have to learn much artfulness to be disobedient. So to anything that has no explanation, and is being forced on you, it is good to say no.But there will come a moment in your life when you are close to a mystic – then don’t ask for explanations, because he is not ordering you to believe anything or disbelieve anything. He is simply opening his heart to you. He is not asking for any response from you, so the question of obedience and disobedience does not arise.Don’t ask explanations from him. Ask how to experience what he is saying. So there is a world of explanations, which is mundane. And there is a world of experience, which is really the very truth, the very essence of life, the very foundation of existence.Osho,Are we really looking for the answer to our numerous questions? It occurs to me there must be, for each of us present here, one question that characterizes us, and which, if we could just pinpoint it, would act like a beacon. Then that question would be enough in itself and without the need for an answer.In fact there is no question which will be an answer to you. The reality is unquestionably here. All your questions are not really in search of answers – but they can put you in great trouble.If the man you are asking the question to is a scholar, a pedagogue, then he can give you an answer which will create thousands of questions. You had come only with one question; he has given one answer. Now that answer creates thousands of questions – and that’s how it has been going on in philosophy, in theology. Each question leads to an answer, and that answer leads to many questions. And this goes on growing.In fact, if the man you are asking knows, then he is not answering your question, he is destroying it. He is trying to rid you of it. He is not putting an answer in its place, because then that will torture you.This is the real work of a master, a mystic, that sooner or later the people who are with him start feeling questionless. To be questionless is the answer. There is no answer. It is not that when you are questionless all your questions have been demolished. It is not that you come upon a hidden answer. No, there is nothing hidden.All the rubbish has been removed. You feel just a clean and clear consciousness. This is the answer. Not the answer to any question, but the state of no question is the answer that we are seeking and searching. Every question is a burden, every question is a wound, every question is a tension. To be questionless, to be completely free of all questions…There is a story in the life of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi:He was working with his disciples in the desert, in a small monastery. A few travelers passing by, just out of curiosity stopped and went in. They saw that in the courtyard the students were sitting, the disciples were sitting, and Mevlana – Mevlana means the beloved master – Mevlana Rumi was answering them.They got fed up, because of the strange questions and strange answers. They went on their way. After years of traveling, they came back, and stopped again to see what was happening. Only Mevlana Rumi was sitting there, and there were no disciples. They were really shocked – what had happened? They went to Mevlana and they asked, “What happened?”Mevlana laughed. He said, “This is my whole work. I crushed all their questions, and now they have no questions so I have told them, ‘Go and do the same to others: crush their questions. And if you find somebody you cannot manage, send him here!’”When all questions are removed, you are again a child, utterly innocent. Then your mind is bound to be silent, and there is no possibility of it getting disturbed. And a great serenity…This is the answer. There are no words in it, and it is not relevant to any question in particular; it is only a state of silence.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Modern Christians are making desperate attempts to save their religion from its primitive, superstitious past – and from the fundamentalists!For example, a modernist in the Church of England believes, it is said, in a God who works through evolutionary processes only, does not doubt the existence of Jesus Christ, but would not lose his faith if it were to be proved that Jesus never existed, and claims to believe in the supernatural, but not in the miraculous. His Jesus did not perform miracles and was not born of a virgin. The tomb was not empty. Ethics are more important to the modernist than doctrine.Down the same path is traveling our old friend, the Bishop of Durham, who got into trouble for his comments last year about the virgin birth and resurrection. He was recently quoted as saying, “Either God does not exist or else he must establish his own existence.”Is the resurrection of Christianity any more likely than that of a Jesus Christ himself?The resurrection of Jesus Christ may be possible, but not the resurrection of Christianity.In fact Jesus never died on the cross. It takes at least forty-eight hours for a person to die on the Jewish cross; and there have been cases known where people have existed almost six days on the cross without dying. Because Jesus was taken down from the cross after only six hours, there is no possibility of his dying on the cross. It was a conspiracy between a rich sympathizer of Jesus and Pontius Pilate to crucify Jesus as late as possible on Friday – because on Saturday, Jews stop everything; their Sabbath does not allow any act. By the evening of Friday everything stops.The arrangement was that Jesus would be crucified late in the afternoon, so before sunset he would be brought down. He might have been unconscious because so much blood had flowed out of the body, but he was not dead. Then he would be kept in a cave, and before the Sabbath ended and the Jews hung him again, his body would be stolen by his followers. The tomb was found to be empty, and Jesus was removed from Judea as quickly as possible. As he again became healthy and healed, he moved to India and he lived a long life of one hundred and twelve years in Kashmir.It is a coincidence, but a beautiful coincidence, that Moses died in Kashmir and Jesus also died in Kashmir. I have been to the graves of both. The graves are ample proof, because those are the only two graves that are not pointing toward Mecca. Mohammedans make their graves with the head pointing toward Mecca, so in the whole world all the graves of Mohammedans point toward Mecca, and Kashmir is Mohammedan.These two graves don’t point toward Mecca, and the writing on the graves is in Hebrew, which is impossible on a Mohammedan grave – Hebrew is not their language. The name of Jesus is written exactly as it was pronounced by the Jews: Joshua. “Jesus” is a Christian conversion of the Jewish name. The grave is certainly of Jesus.A family has been taking care of both graves. They are very close together in one place, Pahalgam, and only one family has been taking care of them down the centuries. They are Jews – they are still Jews – and I had to take their help to read to me what is written on the graves.Moses had come to Kashmir to find a tribe of Jews that was lost on the way from Egypt to Jerusalem. When he reached Jerusalem his deep concern was the tribe that had got lost somewhere in the desert. When his people were established in Jerusalem, he went in search of the lost tribe, and he found the lost tribe established in Kashmir. Kashmiris are basically Jewish – later on Mohammedans forcibly converted them – and Moses lived with them and died there.Jesus also went to Kashmir, because then it was known that Moses had found the lost tribe there. The doors of Judea were closed – he would be crucified again – and the only place where he would find the people who speak the same language, the people who have a same kind of mind, where he would not be a foreigner, was Kashmir. So it was natural for him to go to Kashmir.But he had learned his lesson. He had dropped the idea of being the only begotten son of God; otherwise those Jews would crucify him too. He dropped the idea of being a messiah. He lived with his few intimate friends and followers in Pahalgam.Pahalgam is named after Jesus, because he used to call himself “the shepherd” – Pahalgam means the town of the shepherd. So it was a small colony of Jesus and his friends, surrounding the grave of their forefather and the founder of Judaic tradition. Jesus remained a Jew to the very end; he never heard of Christianity.But the followers who were left in Judea managed to create the story of resurrection. And there was no way to prove it this way or that. They could not produce Jesus – if he was resurrected then where was he? Nor could the other party prove what had happened. They had put such a big rock on the mouth of the cave that it was impossible for Jesus to have removed it, and there was a Roman soldier on duty twenty-four hours a day, so there was no possibility of anybody else removing the rock and taking the body.But Pontius Pilate was from the very beginning against crucifying Jesus. He could see the man was absolutely innocent. He had some crazy ideas, but they were not criminal. And what harm did it do to somebody? If someone thinks he is the only begotten son of God, let him enjoy it. Why disturb him, and why get disturbed? If somebody thinks he is the messiah and he has brought the message of God – if you want to listen, listen; if you don’t want to listen, don’t listen. But there is no need to crucify the man.But Jesus learned his lesson – learned the hard way. In Kashmir he lived very silently with his group, praying, living peacefully, no longer trying to change the world. And Kashmir was so far away from Judea that among the followers of Jesus in Judea, the story of resurrection became significant.So I say a kind of resurrection certainly happened – it was a conspiracy more than a resurrection. But certainly Jesus did not die on the cross, he did not die in the cave where he was put; he lived long enough.But Christianity cannot even conspire to revive itself, to resurrect itself. There is a great movement among Christian theologians, and they are making desperate efforts. Their very efforts show that they are going to fail. In fact their efforts are ridiculous.There is one theologian who says, “There is no God, and we have to accept a God-less Christianity.” He knows that it is impossible to prove God to the coming generation; to the young and the fresh mind it is impossible to prove God. The days of belief are over. It is a scientific age: you must prove, give evidence; nobody is going to accept something just by your saying it. So he is ready to sacrifice God to somehow save Christianity. But what will Christianity be without God?There is another theologian who is ready to believe that perhaps Jesus is only a myth, he never existed. It is as difficult to prove Jesus’ existence as the existence of God, because no contemporary literature even mentions his name. There is no proof other than those four gospels of his own disciples – they cannot be called proof. This theologian is willing to drop Jesus to save Christianity, but what will Christianity be without God, without Jesus? They are so desperate to save Christianity that they don’t see the implications of what they are doing.Another theologian says there have been no miracles; all miracles are just inventions of the followers. Up to now, for two thousand years, Christianity has depended on the miracles. Those were its basic foundations to prove it a superior religion to any other religion – because Gautam Buddha does not walk on water, Mahavira cannot revive a dead man, Krishna cannot heal the sick just by touching them, Mohammed cannot make wine out of water.These miracles have been the superiority of Christianity over all religions for two thousand years; otherwise what has Christianity got? But he is ready to drop the miracles because now they are continuously hammered. Nobody is ready to believe in them, they go against the very way things are. Nature does not change its rules, its laws, for anybody; it does not take anybody as an exception. So the new theologian feels embarrassed. He himself knows that it is impossible to prove the miracles.I asked the archbishop in Mumbai, “You represent Jesus, the pope represents Jesus. You should at least do some little miracles as evidence that you are really representatives; otherwise what have you got to prove that you are the representative? Walk on water, and the whole world will become Christian. And you say faith in Jesus can do miracles – then try it! You must have faith.”But no theologian, nor any pope is ready to walk on water. They all know that nature does not change its laws for anybody.So it is a bold step, but very dangerous. If you take away all the miracles of Jesus then a very poor man, just a carpenter’s son, is left behind with nothing to be compared with Gautam Buddha or Mahavira or Zarathustra. Really you take away all his glory which depends on the miracles. But you cannot prove the miracles, and because you cannot prove the miracles you create suspicion about Jesus. So it is better to drop the miracles; at least the suspicion about Jesus will be dropped. But you don’t understand the implication: without the miracles Jesus means nothing.Without the miracles Buddha remains the same, because he never did any miracles. People loved him not for his miracles. People loved him for his clarity of perception, of seeing into the very root of things, of giving insights to people to transform life. Walking on water is simply stupid. Even if you can do it, then too it is not a miracle, it is simply stupidity, because you will remain the same. You will not come out of the water a transformed human being.Just to give you an idea of how Gautam Buddha and Jesus will behave in a similar situation… Lazarus is dead. His sisters are great devotees – Lazarus was a great friend of Jesus. They send a message to him, “Come, Lazarus is dead!” And they keep his body inside a cave. Jesus comes and he calls Lazarus, standing outside the cave, “Lazarus, come out!”Lazarus says, “Have you come? Great, I am coming!” And he comes out. It seems to be dramatic, it seems to be all planned. It seems the man was not dead. He was a friend, his two sisters were devotees – it was as if he was simply sitting there, waiting.It is not a miracle. And even if it is a miracle, even if Lazarus comes back to life, he is not transformed. We don’t hear anything else again of Lazarus. A man who has died, a man who has gone through the process of death to the beyond, who comes back, cannot be the same. Lazarus would have become a great master, but he remained the same person – no change at all.In a similar situation Gautam Buddha behaves differently, and I think that is the way any wise man will behave. A woman, Krishagautami, had only one son. Her husband had died, her other children had died; she had seen death in its brutal ugliness. Only one son remained, and she was living only for him; otherwise there was nothing for her to live for. She wanted to kill herself; she had lost everything – all those people she had loved and lived for. But her neighbors suggested, “One son is alive – without you he will also be dead. Take care of him. We understand your sorrow.”But one day that boy also died, and Krishagautami went completely mad. It was a coincidence that Buddha was staying in the same city of Shravasti. Somebody suggested to Krishagautami, “A great mystic is here. Why don’t you take your son to him? He can do anything; he is a man of tremendous power. Seeing your situation, and knowing his compassion, something is possible. Perhaps your son may come back to life.”Krishagautami went with the dead body. She put the body at the feet of Gautam Buddha and said, “I have lost everything – all my children, my husband. I was living only for this son; now he is also dead. I have heard much about your compassion. Now is the time to show it. Let my son get up again, resurrect him.”Buddha said, “On one condition: go into the town. To resurrect your child I need a few mustard seeds, but they should be from a family where nobody has ever died.”Krishagautami was not in a state of mind to think that this was impossible, that the condition could not be fulfilled. She went from one house to another and people said, “We can give you as many mustard seeds as you want. We can fill our bullock carts with mustard seeds and bring them to Gautam Buddha if your son can be revived. But our mustard seeds won’t help, because not only one but thousands must have died in our family. For generations after generations, people have been dying. These mustard seeds are not going to fulfill the condition.She went on, and the same was the answer everywhere. She went to the king of Shravasti and told him, “Can’t you do just a small thing for me? A few mustard seeds and my son can be back, alive.”The king said, “You can have as many mustard seeds as you want.”But the woman said, “There is a condition, and the condition is that in your family no one should have died. And your family is royal – certainly you will fulfill my condition.”The king said, with tears in his eyes, “Royal or not royal, death makes no difference. My father has died, my son has died, and an unaccountable number of people must have died in my family before I was born. You have to forgive me; I can give you anything you want, but that condition cannot be fulfilled.”The whole day going round the city, the woman became alert of a fact: death is inevitable, today or tomorrow.After seeing the king she came back to Buddha, touched his feet and said, “Please forgive me. I was asking you to do something against nature, and you were wise enough not to say no to me. Instead you gave me an opportunity to understand that my asking was wrong. Please initiate me. I don’t have anything to live for, but I would like to know what it is that lives and what it is that dies.” Buddha initiated her, and she became one of the great meditators among his followers.Now, which one do you think is a miracle, Lazarus or Krishagautami? Which one do you think is doing the miracle? – Jesus or Gautam Buddha?Gautam Buddha is not doing a miracle at all, but if you understand it rightly, he is doing the miracle, because he is changing the woman from a mad state into a meditative state. Even if Lazarus becomes alive he remains Lazarus, and one day he will die again, so what is the point?Christianity has depended on these miracles in proving its superiority over other religions; in fact those religions are far superior because they don’t depend on such stupid, childish ideas. So there are theologians who are ready to drop all miracles. But if you drop all the miracles then Jesus is left naked; you have taken all his clothes, he has nothing to give to the world.One theologian takes God away, another theologian makes Jesus himself a myth, another theologian takes the miracles away, and the fourth theologian takes religion itself away – he wants a religionless Christianity, but Christianity has to remain! I don’t understand – when you have taken all the contents, why cling to the box? Now even religion has to be taken away because half of humanity is already religionless.The communists don’t believe in religion, and the communists are not only in the communist countries, which is half of humanity; communists are in other countries also. In fact, three-fourths of humanity has already dropped religion. The remaining ones are only formally religious. They are not disturbed by the idea of taking religion out. But then what remains?It seems you are clinging just to the label, to the name Christianity. It is a desperate effort, and stupid too. Why not accept that Christianity is dead? God is dead, miracles are dead, religion is dead, Jesus is no longer born out of a virgin Mary – so what are you saving?I have been looking into all these theologians who are prominent people in the Christian world. They have taken all the contents; only an empty box… Why carry on this empty box? For what reason? – just an old habit, an old attachment.Then there is another effort… Because you cannot carry an empty box for long, you will also feel that you are doing something foolish. Others will start feeling, when they look into your box, that you have a great Christianity! – Jesus is missing, God is missing, the miracles are not there, the Virgin Mary is not there. All that was Christianity is not there; then why are you carrying this empty box? So there is another effort going on, side by side, to fill the box with something.So, Christian theologians are studying other religions, so as to have something similar. It is going to be imitation, inauthentic, because it is not their experience. Now they call it “comparative religion”; in all Christian colleges they study comparative religion.I asked the professors and the principals of those colleges, “Why should you be worried about other religions? You have Christianity.” The need is that they have to fill the box with something, so from other religions they are collecting ideas.They are studying psychoanalysis. Now every Christian preacher has compulsorily to study psychoanalysis. Now, what does psychoanalysis have to do with religion? The problem is, what religion used to do was to console people in their misery. Now they don’t have that religion at all, so they have to find some contemporary way to console people. Psychoanalysis is a very thriving business all around the world; the most highly-paid professionals are psychoanalysts. So Christians think, “They must be doing something for people. Let us learn their art and use it to save Christianity.” But they don’t understand that Freud was against religion, the whole of psychoanalysis is against religion. They cannot use it.They are studying Karl Marx because the man converted three-fourths of humanity; he must have had something: the idea of equality of human beings. Although he was against religion and against God, he had certain values; those values can be taken.They are collecting all kinds of things in the box where Christianity used to be. It is so eclectic that it does not make one organic whole. If you look into the box you will get into madness, because the things they are taking belong to different systems. Within those systems they have a living quality; out of those systems they are dead.Somebody’s eyes, somebody’s hand, somebody’s legs, somebody’s heart… Do you think in your box there will come a man, because you have arranged everything that is needed for a man – hands, head, eyes, heart? Everything is there, but it is just nonsense. Those eyes were able to see in an organic unity in a body; now they cannot see. There is no organic unity, and you cannot bring an organic unity.Christianity is dead. Their desperate effort to save it simply confirms that it is dead. But it needs guts to accept it.You will be surprised to know that when Joseph Stalin died it was not declared to the world. It took a few days for the communist high command to declare it because they had believed that this man is immortal. Stalin, man of steel, cannot die! But men of steel, or whatever your conception may be, have to follow nature: he died. For a few days they delayed informing the world. In fact they could not believe it, but finally they had to accept that Stalin was dead.The same happened with Mao Tse-tung. His death was not immediately reported to the world because he had become a god.I know about Sri Aurobindo, because he himself was teaching his whole life that his special work was to give methods to people to attain physical immortality. All old teachers have taught you spiritual immortality; that’s not a big problem, because the spiritual element in you is already immortal.He used to say, “I am doing the real thing. The physical body, which is not immortal, I am going to make immortal.” And one day he died.One of my friends was there in Pondicherry, in his ashram. He told me, “For seven days we were hiding the fact that Aurobindo had died. We could not believe it ourselves, because if he himself is not immortal, then what about us who have gathered here just to become physically immortal? And the man who was going to make us physically immortal is dead! Now we cannot even ask him, ‘You deceived us. What happened?’ To declare it to the world looked so embarrassing.”The chief disciple, “the Mother” of the Sri Aurobindo ashram, finally found a solution to it. She said, “He is not dead, he has gone into deep samadhi, the deepest that anyone has ever gone. He will wake up again – he is simply asleep.”So they made a marble grave for him, with all the comforts, because he was just sleeping and one day he was going to wake up; this was his last experiment in physical immortality. Then years passed, but he did not knock from the grave. People started suspecting, but the mother was over ninety, and she was still preaching physical immortality.Then one day she died. It was very difficult for the believers, because the believers had some investment; their investment was their own immortality. If both the leaders were dead, then there was no hope for them. And they had not yet told them the real secret; they had been telling them that they were working on it.Sri Aurobindo used to give an audience only once a year to his disciples. The rest of the year he was working constantly – that was the idea in the ashram – for physical immortality. Now both are lying in their graves, and there are still idiots living in the ashram, believing that they will awake one day.Idiots are also miracles – they still believe. My friend who has been there, and still is there, is a doctor of philosophy, but he still believes. He had been coming to see me, but there is no way to convince him. I tried every possible way, but he said, “Patanjali himself says in the Yoga Sutras that samadhi and sushupti – samadhi and deep sleep – are exactly alike. They have gone into deep sleep to find out the secret of physical immortality.”I said, “But how long will it take? Even if they come, by that time you will all be dead! Just go and open the grave, and you will know that it is no longer sleep. There are only skeletons, stinking of death, not the fragrance of immortality.”The believer is such that he goes on believing because his belief is basically for a reason: he is afraid that perhaps they are dead, and then what about him? And the idea that they are dead stops him. Do you see the point? He cannot accept that Sri Aurobindo and the mother are dead because that means he will have to die – and he does not want to die. That’s why he has come and lived there for years, waiting for the secret to be revealed. He will wait: “They are asleep and working.”Desperate efforts happen only when something is really gone and you don’t have it. Then you get into a frenzy of creating some way that you can continue to believe in it. For example, the Bible believes that God created the world four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ, which is only six thousand years ago. Now, that is disproved so abundantly that it is absolutely wrong.In India we have found cities seven thousand years old which were lying hidden underneath the earth. And not ordinary cities: I have been to Harrapur, Mohanjodro – both are in Pakistan now – and it is something to see. Seven thousand is a very orthodox idea; there are scholars who say they must be more than fifteen thousand years old. But, even if the cities are only seven thousand years old, there must have been a long past to them, because that kind of city cannot be instantly created.They have bigger roads than New York. Now, a city seven thousand years old, having a wider road than New York… It means they must have had vehicles, traffic, otherwise why create such a road? They had beautiful bathrooms, they had a system of running water. Even if they were seven thousand years old, they must have been developed for thousands of years to come to such technology, to such plumbing, that they can have running water in their bathrooms, in their houses. They had swimming pools.In China we have found human bodies, frozen in ice, ninety thousand years old. Now, when all these facts came to the Christian theologians, there was great turmoil: What to do? – because God created the world six thousand years ago. I am giving you this example of how a desperate believer functions.One theologian came up with the idea, which became accepted by the whole Christianity, that God created the world exactly as it is said in the Bible, six thousand years ago, with cities under the earth, with bathrooms, with plumbing, with wide roads, with ninety-thousand-year-old bodies, just to test your faith! “God can do anything. If he can create the world, do you think he cannot create a body that looks ninety thousand years old to all scientific investigation? But the world was created six thousand years ago.” A desperate effort to cling to superstitions.There comes a point where all your superstitions are proved to be superstitions. Then this situation arises that you start saying, “They are all superstitions, and we can drop them and still we can save Christianity.”You cannot. Those superstitions have been the very backbone of your Christianity. Without those superstitions your Christianity will lose all its life. And it will be more absurd to believe in a Christianity devoid of all superstitions, miracles, God – even of religion.Now they are saying it is only ethics, not doctrine. But ethics need not be Christian – ethics has nothing to do with Christianity. Ethics is a science in itself. I have been a teacher of ethics, and I had never thought that ethics can be Christian. Ethics thinks about what is truth, what is good, what is bad. It has nothing to do with religion; it has something to do with your actions. And it is the same for everybody. Whether you are in Tibet or China or in America, it does not make any difference, the ethical standard will be the same. Ethics is a science completely in itself.Now, finding nothing in their doctrines, they are falling back on ethics, saying that the essential thing is not doctrine because all their doctrines have been proved wrong. Up to now it was doctrine; now because all doctrines are proved wrong, or at least questionable, and they have not been able substantially to support their doctrines and their truth…This is the last effort of a dying religion. You drop the doctrines – they are dangerous, they are killing you – so you jump upon something else that can give you a resurrection. But ethics is purely a science in itself. It thinks about values, which have nothing to do with Hindu, Mohammedan or Christian. Ethics is not going to save Christianity; it is not going to give a resurrection.There is no possibility for Christianity, and it will be good that they accept it and drop the dead body. It is a great load, and by carrying it unnecessarily, you are missing your life. Living with a dead religion you are bound to die. Your churches are graveyards. There is no song of life, there is no dance of existence.It is better to simply get out of the old habit. These are just old habits. I don’t know why Christian priests, nuns, bishops call their clothes “habits” – I don’t know. But one thing I know: just drop the habit! – whatever it means. Just be natural and human.It is not only a question of Christianity. Your question was concerned with Christianity; otherwise the same is the situation with other religions.Man has come of age, and he does not need those old, superstitious religions; he needs a more scientific approach to explore his being. That will be possible only if he gets rid of the old habits. And they are very dirty, because for thousands of years the same habits have been used by so many people. They are stinking! Get out of those habits as quickly as possible.Osho,This morning, as you spoke of the “questionless answer,” I watched my questions dissolving into silence, which I shared for a moment with you. But one question survived, and that is: If we don't ask you questions, how are we going to play with you?That’s really a question!It will be difficult, so whether you have the questions or not, still you can go on asking. Your question need not be yours, but it must be somebody else’s, somewhere. And my answer may help somebody somewhere, sometime. So let us continue the game.I cannot say anything on my own. Unless there is a question, I am silent. Because of the question it is possible for me to respond. So it does not matter whether the question is yours; what matters is that the question is bound to be somebody’s somewhere.I am not only answering you. I am answering, through you, the whole of humanity – not only the contemporary humanity, but also the humanity that will be coming when I will not be here to answer.So find out all the possible angles and questions, so that anybody, even in the future when I am not here, who has a question can find an answer in my words.To us it is a play. To somebody it may become really a question of life and death.Osho,Questions seem to be the offspring of the capacity to doubt; and doubt, the spark of an alive and active intelligence. Without questions – and thus, without doubt – how can intelligence continue to flourish? And yet within you is the ultimate in silence and the ultimate in intelligence.It is true in the beginning. Doubt helps your intelligence, sharpens it. Questioning makes you aware of many possibilities which you may not have been aware of before.But this is only the beginning of the journey. At the end, when all your questions have disappeared… And the real master never gives you the answer. Let me repeat it: the real master never gives you the answer, so you cannot doubt it. He brings you to a point where all your questions disappear. His answers are murderous, killing your questions, destroying them mercilessly, to bring you to a point where there is no question in your consciousness.The master does not give you any answer that you can doubt. This non-questioning consciousness is the answer. And it is your experience; you cannot doubt it, it is there.From this point, silence and intelligence are just two aspects of the same thing. From this point, not knowing, innocence and knowing are two aspects of the same thing. This is the mysterious world which is available to you if you can pass the jungle of questions and doubts and reach into the clear, where there are no questions and no doubts, and no answers either. You are just in utter silence, with immense clarity, with tremendous sharpness.That’s why I am against belief, because it will never allow you to reach to this stage. It will stop you in the very beginning of the journey. It will not help to make you more intelligent, it will make you more unintelligent. It will make you more fanatic, superstitious. It will not allow you to come into the clarity which can be called the very goal of what transpires between master and disciple: the moment of total silence, the moment where everything is crystal clear.It has to be earned. Belief is cheap. This will bring you something totally different, what I call trust in existence. In the dictionaries, trust and belief and faith are all synonymous – but not in reality.Belief is opposite to trust. You believe because you have doubt; the belief is an antidote to doubt, it is a need to cover up the doubt. Trust is when you don’t have any doubt, so trust is not a belief. Belief is always in something – in some doctrine, in some principle, in some philosophy.Trust is in the totality of the cosmos. It has nothing to do with books – Holy Bibles, Gitas, Korans – no. Then there is only one scripture which is spread all around you – in the trees, in the rivers, in the ocean, in the stars. You don’t have to read it; you have to be just silent, and it starts showering on you all its wisdom, which is eternal.I am against belief because I want you to come to the point of trust.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Recently I heard you say that transcendence of life's misery and confusion can occur by either a let-go of life or by fight – as long as either is done with totality. Mahavira's way was fight, and yours is let-go. Could you say more about let-go and its relationship to intelligence and responsibility? I don't have this understanding, and my life seems to be an odd mixture of let-go and fight. Let-go seems more natural, and fight seems more responsible.It is not only your question, it is everybody’s question – a mixture of let-go and fight. But your let-go is not my let-go; your let-go is simply a defeatist attitude. Basically you want to fight, but there are situations where you cannot fight, or perhaps you have come to the very end of your energy for fighting. Then, to cover up your defeat, you start thinking of let-go. Your let-go is not true, it is phony.Real let-go is not against fight. Real let-go is absence of fighting. You cannot mix real let-go with fighting attitudes, for the simple reason that the presence of let-go means the absence of a fighting attitude. How can you mix something which is present with something which is absent? Just as you cannot mix light and darkness, however great an artist you may be. You cannot mix light and darkness for the simple reason that darkness is only an absence of light. You cannot bring them together; only one can be present.So the first thing to remember is that the basic attitude of every human being is to fight. So don’t think of it particularly as your problem. It will help you immensely to understand that it is a human problem. Then you can stand aloof and watch it, observe it, understand it.Fighting is a basic attitude because it feeds the ego. The more you fight, the more your ego becomes stronger. If you become victorious the ego has great joy. You are giving life to the ego by your victories. On the other hand, as the ego becomes stronger, your being is receding farther and farther away from you.As your ego becomes stronger you are losing yourself. You may be fighting and being victorious, not knowing at all that it is not a gain but a loss. Each child is taught to fight in different ways. Competition is a fight, to come first in your class is a fight, to win a trophy in a game is a fight. These are preparations for your life. Then fight in the elections, fight for money, fight for prestige. This whole society is based on fighting, competition, struggle, putting each individual against the whole. So it is almost everybody’s situation.Then you listen to me about let-go. Let-go means no competition, no struggle, no fight; just relaxing with existence, wherever it leads. Not trying to control your future, not trying to control consequences, but allowing them to happen; not even thinking about them. Let-go is in the present; consequences are tomorrow. And let-go is such a delightful experience, a total relaxation, a deep synchronicity with existence.I am reminded of a parable. I call it a parable because it is so good it cannot be true. In the East, the name of Majnu is very famous. It is a Sufi story – perhaps nobody of that name existed, but it is irrelevant whether he existed or not. He has become the symbolic lover:Majnu was a poor young man, with tremendous love and a great heart, and he fell in love with the richest man’s daughter. The marriage was not possible; even meetings were not possible. He could only see his beloved Laila once in a while, from far away. But the rumor about his love started spreading, and the rich man, Laila’s father, was afraid that it would contaminate the family’s name and he would not be able to find the right man for his daughter. So he left the village to go to a faraway country, where nobody would know anything about Majnu.The day they were going, he had so much money and so many things to take, hundreds of camels carrying things, so a great caravan… Majnu was standing on the way, by the side of a tree, hiding himself in the foliage of the tree – because the father was so mad he could even shoot him, although he had not done anything. He had not even spoken to Laila.He was standing there just to see her for the last time. It was enough for him that she was happy and healthy – and he would wait. If his love had any power, she would come back. There was tremendous trust in him. He had seen the love, the same flame that was burning in his heart, in the eyes of Laila. Laila was also searching and looking all around from the camel she was riding. She knew Majnu must be waiting somewhere on the way, and then she saw him hiding under a tree in its thick foliage. For a moment, without a single word or gesture, they were one; and then the caravan passed.For Majnu time stopped then and there. He remained standing by the side of the tree waiting and waiting. It is said years passed. Laila came, but came a little late. She inquired. People said, “We have never heard about him. Since you left he has not come to the town again.”She rushed to the tree where she had left him. He was still there, but a strange thing had happened – he had become one with the tree. That’s why I say it is a parable: it is too good to be true. He relaxed so utterly because there was nothing else to do but to wait. He relaxed with the tree, and slowly, slowly they started merging with each other. The tree became his nourishment; they were no longer separate, they became one. Branches grew out of his body. He was no longer hiding under the foliage; the foliage was on his body – beautiful leaves and beautiful, fragrant flowers.Laila could not recognize him. But the whole tree was saying only one thing, “Laila, Laila!”She was getting mad, and asking, “Where are you hiding?”And the tree said, “I am not hiding. Waiting so long, doing nothing, and just being relaxed, I have become one with the tree. You came a little late.“What was going to happen between us has happened between me and the tree. We were going to become one – that was not acceptable to destiny perhaps. But I was ready to relax in the moment, without thinking of any consequences. And I am happy that you are alive, still young, and more beautiful. But I am gone, far away. I am immensely happy; alone, relaxed, in a let-go.”To me, let-go means you are not fighting for anything in life, but giving everything to life to take care of. You say let-go seems to be natural. It only “seems” because your whole conditioning is against it. You have been brought up for millions of years to fight. Fighting, you can either be defeated, which will create a wound, which will create revenge; or you can be victorious, which will again create another kind of wound. That is the ego. In either case you are a loser. Defeated you lose, victorious you lose. In either case you are going farther away from yourself.Let-go has not been taught to people because it will go against the whole structure of the society, which is based on competition and fighting, where everybody is your enemy. Even your friend is your enemy, even your wife is your enemy, even your children are your enemies, because everybody is trying to snatch as much from you as possible. You are trying to do the same thing. The world of misery is created because everybody is snatching things from everybody else. It is not a peaceful, silent, loving existence; we are still barbarous and animalistic.Let-go is a totally different approach. Its first step is dropping the ego, remembering that you are not separate from existence. With whom are you fighting? You are not separate from people. With whom are you fighting? With yourself – and that’s the root cause of misery. With whomsoever you are fighting, you are fighting with yourself because there is nobody else.Let-go is a deep understanding of the phenomenon that we are part of one existence. We cannot afford to have separate egos; we are one with all. And the all is vast, immense. Your understanding will help you to go with the whole wherever it is going. You don’t have a goal separate from the whole, and the whole has no goal. It is not going anywhere. It is simply being here.The understanding of let-go helps you to simply be here, without any goals, without any idea of achievement, without any conflict, struggle, fight; knowing that it is fighting with yourself, which is simply foolish.Let-go is a deep understanding. It is not an act that you have to do. Every act is part of the world of fight. That which you have to do is going to be a fight. Let-go is simply an understanding. Then a silent relaxation, flowing with the river, unconcerned where it is going, unworried that you can get lost: no anxiety, no anguish, because you are not separate from the totality, so whatever is going to happen is going to be good.With this understanding you will find there is no mixing: understanding cannot mix with ignorance; insight into existence cannot mix with blindness; consciousness cannot mix with unconsciousness. Let-go cannot mix with different kinds of struggles – that is an impossibility.Just let it sink within your heart, and you will find a new dimension opening up, in which each moment is a joy, in which each moment is an eternity unto itself.Osho,I have heard you say, in connection with Martin Heidegger, that the work of a philosopher is to guide the leaders of the nations, not to follow them. Your work at this time seems to be moving in that direction. Your work is more global, involving whole nations and their people, and even transcending nations. Diogenes stood naked – and largely unknown – holding a lamp in broad daylight, and repeated the statement, “I am looking for a man.” Is your work really different from Diogenes' or does it only appear so? Are you also looking for a man?Diogenes is one of the most loved human beings, as far as I am concerned. As far as the world is concerned, he is one of those who are destined to be condemned for their behavior, for their ideas – and Diogenes particularly, because he is so unique.His ways would have been understood in the Far East. In Japan he would have become a great Zen master. In Greece he was simply condemned. He was not in the right place. First, he was naked – for a certain reason: that naked we have come into the world, and all the animals are naked, why should man hide his body behind clothes?The strange insight was that it is not weather, cold or heat that has prompted man to use clothes – because if all the animals can exist without clothes, there is no reason… Your face is naked, but it becomes immune. That’s how the whole animal world lives. Small birds are more powerful than you: they are immune to cold and to heat, they don’t need any clothes. Why did man need clothes? Not to protect his body, but to hide it, because he is the only animal who has not been natural, and his body has become ugly. Now, Diogenes has a strange insight.I agree with him, that clothes help you immensely to hide your body. Man has lost his natural beauty, agility, and that’s why he had to discover clothes. It is very strange: if your naked body is brought before you, or just a photograph of your naked body is brought before you, you will not be able to recognize that it is your body. People are recognizable only by their faces; the whole body is ignored. Through clothes you can create the illusion of beauty. You can hide the ugly parts and you can expose the beautiful parts; you can emphasize the beautiful parts.Diogenes was disgusted with the whole idea. This is exhibitionism, not what Sigmund Freud thinks is exhibitionism. I agree with Diogenes and not with Sigmund Freud.Sigmund Freud calls a man exhibitionist if he tries to show his naked body to somebody. Diogenes calls all people who have been forced by your so-called civilization to wear clothes, exhibitionists. This is a beginning of deception, hypocrisy. My feeling is that one day man will return to being naked, because only then will he regain his health – for the simple reason that then he will have to be healthy, otherwise he will feel embarrassed. Then he will have to exercise, then he will have to go to some gymnasium and maintain his body and his beauty, because now it is not only his face that is his identity; now his whole body is his identity. He will not be ashamed of it; it is his body and nature has given it to him. He will be proud of it.Diogenes was as beautiful a man as Mahavira – both lived naked – so proportionate, so beautiful. In India Mahavira’s nakedness became spiritual; in Greece Diogenes became a madman.He used to carry a lamp with him, and whomsoever he met – even in full daylight – he would raise his lamp and look at the man. People would ask, “What are you doing? It is full daylight, the sun is shining; why are you carrying a lamp? And what do you go on looking for in people’s faces?”He used to say, “I am looking for a real, authentic man.”My search is, in a way, similar: I am also looking for a real, authentic man. But the real, authentic man cannot be searched for with a lamp.Diogenes’ lamp is only symbolic. It simply says that he is putting his whole lighted being as a beam on the person, as an X ray, to see whether there is anything left or everything is hypocrisy. The day he died he had his lamp by his side, still in his hand. One man, just to joke, asked Diogenes, “Now you are dying. Before you die, please answer one question. Your whole life you have been searching for the authentic, real man, with your lamp. Have you found him or not?”Diogenes was really a beautiful man. He laughed. He said, “I have not found him, but I am grateful to the whole of humanity that nobody stole my lamp, because I found all kinds of thieves all around. I have not been able to come across an authentic man, but even this is enough, that they have left my lamp with me. Otherwise when I looked at these people they were criminals, murderers, thieves, and I was worried about my lamp – that’s the only thing I possess. So one thing I can say before I die – a good thing about humanity – is that my lamp was not stolen.”At the moment of death also he could laugh and joke. In Greece he was not understood at all. He belongs to the category of people like Bodhidharma, Chuang Tzu, Hotei. That was his category, but he was with the wrong people. Diogenes was a contemporary of Aristotle. Aristotle had defined man as “a two-legged animal without feathers.” That shows the depth of logic, and the insight of Aristotle. When Diogenes heard it, he caught hold of bird, took away all the feathers, and sent it as a present to Aristotle, saying, “This is your man: a two-legged animal without feathers.”Aristotle was very angry: “It is not a joke, and this Diogenes is never serious!”But I say to you, he was serious. He was saying to Aristotle, “This is not the way to define man – two-legged, without feathers. You are degrading man to animals with a little different variety – without feathers. That’s the only difference: there are many animals with two legs.”He was not just joking – he was serious. And he was serious in his search for the authentic man. It is not a question of defining it; it is a question of finding it. You can define it only after you have found him. The man that exists is not authentic.Yes, my work is similar in a way: I am also searching for the authentic man, destroying all that is not authentic in you, at the risk of being condemned all over the world. But I am not carrying a lamp in my hand because I know that was only a gesture.I am really working with each individual who has come in contact with me to help him to drop all unnecessary conditionings and to have a communion with nature. To be natural you will be authentic. To be natural you will be human. To be natural you will be a being full of rejoicings.It is your unnaturalness that is creating the whole misery, and just as money brings more money, misery brings more misery. Whatever you have attracts its own kind. If you have a little joy, you will attract much joy. If you have a little silence, then even from the faraway stars you will be attracting silence, then even in a crowd, in the marketplace you will be attracting silence.It depends what you have within you; that becomes the gravitation, and it attracts its own kind. Just a little experience and then there is no need to push you; you will go in that direction on your own.My whole effort is to give you just a glimpse, just to open a window so you can see the sky with all its colors and sunset. And I know you will come out of the hole to see the whole sky, to see the birds returning home, to see the trees going to sleep, preparing their beds.Right now you have only misery, and that misery goes on attracting more misery. My work is somehow to create a small gap in your miserable existence; just a little window.Osho,Does a natural death also transcend nature?Nothing transcends nature. Everything goes on becoming more and more natural – deeper and deeper nature, higher and higher nature – but nothing transcends nature, because there is nothing but nature.You have to drop the old categories: that there is nature and then there is supernature. What has been called supernature is nothing but the highest peak of being natural. Why create categories, when nature alone is capable of containing all?The lowest and the highest point of life are both natural. The murderer and the enlightened man, are both natural. The murderer is at the lowest point, the enlightened man is at the highest point. But as man they are part of the same nature, and being natural they are similar. This opens a new possibility: the murderer can become enlightened. We are not preventing him, we are not putting him in a separate category. He can become enlightened, because he is part of nature. Perhaps he was upside down, he just has to change his posture.Nature is profound. It contains everything – the good, the bad, the evil, the divine – and I want them all to be part of nature, so transformation is not impossible. Old religions have created categories, and created such gaps that it is impossible.For example, Christianity believes in eternal hell, which is absolutely absurd. You cannot commit so many sins in a small life of seventy years. One third of it is lost in sleep; much of it is lost in childhood, in sickness, in earning the bread, in quarreling with your husband, with your wife, with your neighbors. You don’t have much time to commit sin. And even if you continuously commit sin, from your very birth to the last breath, without any coffee break – just sinning and sinning – then too eternal hell is not justified. Then at least seventy years in hell will do. But eternal hell, unending, forever and forever… Christianity does not leave any possibility for the sinner to change. It cuts away all his future.My approach is simple: the worst and the best are both part of the same nature. One may be at the lowest, one may be at the highest, but they belong to the same nature, and hence have the possibility of transformation. The lowest person can start climbing to the highest peak – and it has happened many times.There is a Hindu story in India:The oldest book on the life of Rama is written by Balmik. Balmik was a robber, thief, murderer; everything that you can conceive of he had done. That was his only profession. Uneducated but a tremendously powerful man, just on the highway he would be waiting for people, and anybody who was caught had to give everything; otherwise he was finished. Balmik’s family was living in luxury – he was bringing so much every day.One day it happened that Narda, a beautiful saint who was always carrying his ektara, a simple musical instrument with only one string that had become his symbol… Singing and playing on his ektara, he was passing and Balmik caught hold of him. But he was still singing and playing on his ektara.Balmik said, “Are you mad or something? Can’t you see me, can’t you see my sword? Give me everything that you have!”Narda said, “You have caught a beggar; I have only this ektara. And that too I am not going to give easily, because what will you do with this? But if you want it, I can give it to you. If you want my life I can give that too. But before I give you anything, I want to ask you one question.”Balmik said, “Question? What question?”Narda said, “Go home, ask your wife. You have been killing people, robbing people – is she ready to share the responsibility of it? Ask your father, your mother, your son, your daughter. Are they willing to share the responsibility of what you are doing?”Balmik had never thought about such a thing; he was an uneducated man. He said, “I have never thought about it. They must share the responsibility. I am doing it for them.”Narda said, “I will be here. Don’t be worried, you can just tie me to the tree so I cannot escape.” He was tied to the tree and Balmik rushed to his home and asked his wife. His wife said, “I have nothing to do with your responsibilities. It is your responsibility to feed your wife; I have no concern for how you do it.”The response of everybody was the same. Even the mother said, “It is your responsibility to take care of your old father and mother. How you are doing it, that you have to work out. We have not told you to kill people and rob people; you are doing it on your own. We are simply not responsible for any of your acts.”Not a single man in his house was ready to share responsibility. He was shocked! He went back, untied Narda, touched his feet and said, “I have been a wrong person my whole life. Is there any possibility for me to get rid of all that I have done?”Narda said, “There is no problem. Stop doing it because the people you are doing it for are not even ready to take responsibility for it! And I will teach you my song. My song is very simple; I simply repeat the name of Rama. It is so simple, no education is needed. Sit under the tree and repeat, ‘Rama, Rama…’ as long as you can, and you will be transformed – because intrinsically your innermost core always remains pure. It is only the layers on it which can be dropped.”After a few months Narda came back and he was surprised. Balmik was sitting there under the tree. Narda had been repeating the name of Rama, the Hindu god, his whole life, but nothing like this had happened to him. Balmik was surrounded by an aura of light. Just going close to him you felt a tremendous silence, a great rejoicing.He said, “My God, I have been repeating the name of God my whole life. And this man is a murderer, a robber, he has done every sin possible, and he is my student – I have taught him to repeat the name of Rama – and he seems to be transformed, transmuted!”Narda had to wait. He did not dare touch him or disturb him, his presence was so sacred. When Balmik opened his eyes, he touched the feet of Narda.Narda said, “You need not touch my feet – I have to touch your feet. What has happened? Within a few months you are a new man! Have you found something more than I have given to you? Because I have been using that mantra, ‘Rama, Rama…’ my whole life and now I feel like a fool; within a few months… You must have got something else!”Balmik said, “My God, is it Rama? I forgot.” Repeating it continuously, if you repeat, “Rama, Rama, Rama…” and he was uneducated, a robber, murderer; he had never done any such thing. “Rama” repeated continuously without any gaps – he forgot and started repeating, “Mara, Mara….” Instead of “Rama,” two “Ramas” became joined and he forgot what it was, so he started, “Mara, Mara….” Mara means dead.Narda said, “This is another miracle! You have been repeating, ‘Mara’ which means dead; it is not the name of God. But your sincerity, your innocence, your totality has changed it. You are far away from me. Never touch my feet again!”The lowest can change to the highest. There is no barrier, there is no wall. And nature is all that is there. So even a natural death does not transcend nature; it simply fulfills nature in its totality.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Soon I will be spending a few days with my two teenage daughters. They want a full-time mother and are angry that I have chosen to be with you instead of them. I am torn, because although I have been told that my greatest gift to them is getting free, it is only an idea. On the other hand, my desire for approval for being a good mother is very strong and I feel guilty being with you while they continue to suffer alone.Would you please talk about how to break free of society's conditioning about motherhood?Everything depends on a very simple understanding. The whole idea that children are your possession is wrong. They are born through you but they do not belong to you. You have a past; they have only future. They are not going to live according to you. To live according to you will be almost equivalent to not living at all. They have to live according to themselves – in freedom, in responsibility, in danger, in challenge. That’s how one becomes steel, strong.Parents down the ages have carried the idea that children belong to them, and that they have to be just carbon copies of them. A carbon copy is not a beautiful thing, and existence does not believe in carbon copies; it rejoices in originality.Once you understand that your children do not belong to you, that they belong to existence, you have been just a passage – you have to be grateful to existence that it has chosen you to be a passage for a few beautiful children. But you are not to interfere in their growth, in their potential. You are not to impose yourself upon them. They are not going to live in the same times, they are not going to face the same problems; they will be part of another world. Don’t prepare them for this world, this society, this time, because then you will be creating troubles for them. They will find themselves unfit, unqualified.You have to help them to grow beyond you; you have to help them not to imitate you. That is really the duty of the parents – to help the children not to fall into imitation. Children are imitative, and naturally, who are they going to imitate? The parents are the closest people. Up to now parents have enjoyed it very much that their children are just like them. The father feels proud because his son is just like him. He should be ashamed that his son is just like him. Then a life is wasted; then his son is not needed – he was enough. Because of this wrong conception of pride in children imitating you, we have created a society of imitators.One of the most famous Christian books was written by Kempis: Imitation of Christ. It is almost second to the Holy Bible. One great Christian theologian and a world-famous author of many, many treatises, Stanley Jones, used to stay with me whenever he used to come to my city. He was continuously going around the world, and he always kept the book, Imitation of Christ. Once I told him, “If you really understand, then this book should be burned.”To teach anybody to imitate Christ is to destroy that person. One Christ is enough, more than enough. Many, many Christs carrying their crosses on their shoulders would make a very hilarious scene – and everybody proclaiming himself to be the only begotten son of God!The word imitation has never been condemned, but it should be condemned. The religious founders have wanted people to imitate them, the parents have wanted their children to imitate them; the teachers, the professors, the priests – everybody wants children to imitate them. The children become a mass phenomenon; carbon copies of many people: much ado about nothing!I remember, I must have been seven years old and a friend of my father’s who had not seen me, who had not come for seven years… He had gone for a long pilgrimage around the Ganges. Hindus do that – go around the whole Ganges, both sides. That is thousands of miles, deep in the Himalayas, dangerous valleys, mountains. After seven years he came and he wanted to see me. He said to my father, “His eyes look like yours,” and to my grandfather, “His nose looks like yours,” and to my uncle, “His face looks like yours.”I said, “Wait! Does anything look like me? Am I here or not? You are being utterly disrespectful to me.” He was shocked. He could not conceive that it would be disrespect, because this is commonly done, every day, in every home: the child’s eyes look like the mother’s, his face looks like the father’s. And they all feel proud; and nobody bothers about the child, whether anything looks like him or not.But I made it clear to him, “Just take your words back, because I can say to you that my eyes don’t look like my father’s. You have another look. And my face does not look like my uncle’s – how can it? I have my own eyes and I have my own face, and I am going into the world with my face and with my eyes.”He asked to be forgiven. Later on he told my father, “Your son seems to be dangerous. I have never seen anybody so assertive – and at this age!”My father said, “At first we used to feel very embarrassed by the things he did or said, but now we have started feeling proud, because he seems to be right. You are not the first man who has compared my eyes with his – many others have done that. And he has taken me to the mirror and told me, ‘Look, they are not the same.’ And I have to say to you that they are not the same; he is right.”The whole of humanity has lived in such a wrong way, and for so long, that we have completely forgotten that there can be some other way, that there can be an alternative.You are here with me. In fact, you should make your children understand that this is a great opportunity for you to be yourself: “If I was with you, there is every possibility that knowingly, unknowingly, I may treat you habitually – just the old things, behaving the way my parents have behaved with me – and that would be ugly.”And tell them not to feel angry at me; rather, bring them to me sometimes. Once in a while, when they have holidays, let them come to me. They will understand me more clearly than you, because they are fresher, younger, closer to nature, yet unspoiled. They are not going to be angry at me.Once they start understanding me, they will be proud of you – not feeling that they have been abandoned by you, but feeling that they have been given freedom, which is the greatest gift possible in the world. And your children will start feeling proud of you because you are one of the rarest mothers who can give them freedom, and bring them to a man who can help them how to be free and how to be responsible – how to be oneself.In this world of imitators, how to be original and authentic? – because only those few individuals who are themselves feel fulfilled. Others simply live miserably, hoping that tomorrow things will be better; but that tomorrow never comes.Once your children start understanding something of what I am doing here and why you are here, they will be proud of you. And their being proud of you will immediately erase the feeling of guilt in you.You are feeling guilty that you have left children alone – that perhaps it is not right. According to the old mind it is not right. According to the old mind everything has to be taught: they are not to be allowed to be themselves; they have to be molded into a certain ideal. This very process of molding is going to kill them. There are corpses all around the world – moving, doing things – but I say that they are corpses because they are not themselves. If they had been given freedom, if they had been given a chance to grow naturally, to be themselves, they would never have been the persons they are. Only then would they have been able to find a certain contentment and satisfaction.You need not feel guilty. Those who are destroying their children, they should feel guilty. Giving children freedom… And once in a while you will be going, once in a while you will be with your children and that is a pure gift, to be with them once in a while, because then you can be loving. You have gathered so much love; for so many days you have been far away. There has been so much longing. You will shower all your love upon them. They will see only your loving being.Being with them twenty-four hours every day, year in, year out, you cannot remain loving. You are bound to be angry, you are bound to be jealous; you are bound to be everything that you should not be before your children because they will learn those things from you.My whole idea is that parents should meet their children only occasionally, so they can pour out their whole hearts, and the children know their mothers and their fathers only as pure love. They don’t know that both these persons continuously fight, that they nag, they throw things at each other.I used to live in a place where everybody was surprised… It was a big apartment house with thin, modern walls. You could hear everything that was going on, on the other side. You need not go to the movies or any other entertainment, it was available free and just without any effort – just lying on your bed, and all around things were happening.The most amazing part was that always from every apartment came screams, shouting, fighting, beating, things being thrown, plates being broken; just from one house there was always heard great laughter. The whole neighborhood was surprised; they seemed to be the ideal couple – never anything except great laughter was heard from that apartment.One day, going for a morning walk, I met the man and I asked him, “You are the ideal couple – not only in this building, but perhaps in the whole world. Nothing else is ever heard except laughter. Can you tell me the secret?”He said, “Don’t ask me. It is better not to ask, not to say anything about it, because I feel like crying.”I said, “I am praising you and you feel like crying?”He said, “You don’t understand at all. The reality is, she throws things at me. When she hits me, she laughs; when she misses, I laugh. But don’t tell it to anybody. This arrangement is going well.” But the same man, after five years, went to the court – he wanted a divorce.The whole neighborhood was surprised. I had never told anybody, because it was such a private thing. Everybody was just amazed, “What happened that they have gone to the court? And, we hear, for divorce!” I was going to the university. I thought that first I should visit them – the court was just on the way – so I stopped at the court and went into the court.The judge was asking, “How long have you been married?”They said, “For six years.”“So why do you want now to divorce? What has happened?”He said, “What has happened? She throws things at me.”The judge said, “Recently she has started throwing things at you?”He said, “No, she has been throwing things from the very first night.”The judge said, “You amaze me. If she has been throwing things from the very first night, then what have you been doing for six years? Why did you not come earlier for a divorce?”He said, “You don’t understand. Now she has become so practiced that she never misses. It is always she who is laughing. For months I have not laughed; now I cannot tolerate it. At first it used to be almost fifty-fifty: one time she will laugh, one time I will laugh. It was okay, we were equal. Now it is intolerable – only she laughs, and I am just standing there like an idiot, with never a chance to laugh.”It is better that the children don’t see your ugly faces. If no child comes to know about those ugly faces, his life will be totally different. It will be a life of love, without jealousies, without nagging, without throwing things, because he had no chance to learn those things.You need not feel guilty; those parents who never leave their children alone should feel guilty. Once in a while go and be with them, and then you can be as totally with them as possible. And once in a while bring them here.You have to share me with your children. If you love me, you would like your children also to love me. Don’t leave them in anger at me; that is not right. Their love toward me will help you immensely to not feel guilty. It will help the children also to feel that it is good that you are here. They would also like to be here someday: when their educations are complete, when they are grown up and they are ready to move into life. They would like to learn more about the complexities of existence, the intricacies of life, its delights, and the art of how to achieve it.Osho,I realized this morning when you were talking that I am a fighter, but I don't know anything except fighting, that unfortunately I am a proud fighter – and even worse, that I love fighting. I love to stand in the face of the strongest storm and laugh. It is great joy. I don't like to lie in the sun and melt. And yet behind my mind, my heart longs to melt. It yearns, but it never seems to have even a fighting chance. How can I salvage my being?There is no problem in it. If you feel you are a fighter, if you enjoy fighting, not only that, if you are proud of being a fighter – then relax. Fight totally! Then don’t fight your fighting nature. That will be let-go for you.It is perfectly beautiful to stand before the strongest storm and laugh. Don’t feel guilty. Just try to understand one thing: when I say let-go, I don’t mean you have to change anything. I simply mean, whatever you feel you are, just allow it its totality.Be a fighter with your whole being, and in this totality you will find the melting of the heart. That will be the reward of your being total. You do not need to do anything for it; rewards come on their own. Just be total in anything that you feel you love, that you feel proud of – just be total in it. Don’t create a split. Don’t be half and half; don’t be partial.If you are total, one day – standing against the strongest storm, laughing – you will suddenly feel your heart melting in the sun. That will come to you as a reward.Man unnecessarily creates problems. I want you to understand that there are no problems in life, except that you create them. Just try to see that whatsoever feels good for you is good. Then go the whole way. Even if the whole world is against it, it doesn’t matter. Whether you have gone totally and whole will be decided by the reward.If you start feeling at one point a sudden melting then you know you have not cheated yourself, that you have been sincere, true. This is really the point where you can be proud.Osho,What do you feel the next phase of your work will be, once you have found a stable residence, And what do you see your sannyasins doing?That’s really a problem – an unanswerable one too, because I never think of tomorrow, and I don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. I leave it up to tomorrow. I don’t burden myself too much. Today is enough unto itself.Tomorrow I will be there, the problems will be there, the challenges will be there; and I will be available to those challenges, to those problems.My whole life I have lived this way – without any predecision, without any commitment for the future, without any promise to myself or to anybody else for the next moment. And that has given me the most precious gift of life. I have become attuned with existence; knowing not where I am going, I am going joyously.One thing I know: existence has no goal, and as part of existence I cannot have any goal. The moment you have a goal, you cut yourself away from existence. Then a small dewdrop is trying to fight against the ocean. Unnecessary is the trouble, meaningless is the struggle.I never think of the yesterdays and I never think of the tomorrows. That leaves me just a small moment, the present moment – unburdened, uncluttered, clean, free.So I don’t know the answer to your question. If you try to recapitulate all that has happened in my life, you will find certainly a tremendously systematic program – as if I had planned everything from the very beginning in minute detail. But this is an absolutely wrong idea.As far as I am concerned, I have never planned anything; I have simply lived, wondering what is going to happen next. I have kept my wondering eyes alive, just like a small child.Hasya has to plan, Jayesh has to plan, John has to plan – so they are all suffering from fever, tired. Just look at Jayesh!But I am simply wondering what is going to happen.Osho,You are giving your life to help people find inner freedom, and the whole world is trying to take away your freedom – that is, freedom of speech, of movement and so on. How is it possible that you do not give up? What is compassion? Does compassion possess you like love, or can you choose whether or not to be compassionate?The question has many questions in it.Firstly, I am not making any effort to give to people freedom from the bondage of their rotten past. It is not my effort, it is simply my joy. I enjoy doing it; hence there is no tension about it, whether I succeed or not. I am not serious – it is just playfulness. I am free, I have enjoyed it, and out of that joy arises an overflow of energy, spreading on its own accord. I am just a watcher, not a doer.Secondly, the world cannot take my freedom. It can try, but its failure is absolutely certain, for the simple reason that to me freedom is more valuable than my life. I would rather risk my life than choose to lose my freedom; hence nobody can take it. They can kill me, but they cannot kill my spirit, they cannot kill my freedom. They are doing everything in their hands, and they seem to be desperate. And I am joyfully trying to find new ways to reach people. At the most they can take my life, but they cannot take my freedom.They can take your freedom only when you value your life more than freedom; then your freedom can be taken very easily. Just a threat to your life and your freedom can be taken. But they cannot take my freedom because to me life has no value, and freedom has all value. To me, freedom is life.They can destroy my body but they cannot destroy my consciousness. So there is no question of their taking my freedom. They may be powerful – they are powerful. All the governments of the world are together against a single individual, and still they cannot take his freedom. And I can say it with absolute certainty that they cannot take my freedom, because I am ready to offer my life at any moment.Thirdly, you ask, is your compassion as possessive of you as love? No, compassion is not possessive. In love you fall; hence the phrase “falling in love.” Have you ever heard of somebody “falling in compassion”? That kind of phrase does not exist in any language. You rise in compassion.Compassion does not possess you; neither do you possess compassion. That is something subtle to be understood. It is easy to understand whether it possesses you or not, but my answer is: compassion does not possess me, neither do I possess it. Compassion has become my nature. There is no duality of the possessor and the possessed. So it is a very different situation from love. It is not in my hands to stop being compassionate, because I am not separate from it. Whether you possess something or something possesses you, in either case, the duality remains. But in compassion the duality disappears. You are it, there is nobody else; so you can simply be it. There is no other way of being.Osho,To have such an incredible opportunity to ask you a question, and to be so fearful of doing so, shows me how little trust I have. Can I still be your sannyasin?The question is not of being my sannyasin, the question is of being a sannyasin. To be my sannyasin certainly needs a certain commitment, a certain surrender. And I do not want you to be surrendered to me or to be committed to me. I want you to be surrendered to nature, committed to existence. You need not be my sannyasin, you have just to be a sannyasin – and that’s the only way of being my sannyasin.It is not a direct phenomenon – that directly you commit yourself and surrender to existence. But the deeper you surrender to existence, life, nature, the more loving, the more understanding, the more insightful you become; and that insight will bring you closer to me. You will find in me, indirectly, the state of total surrender, total trust.Don’t be worried that you don’t have that total trust now. Even if you have a little bit of trust, that is enough to begin with. Just open the bank account; you need not have millions to open a bank account. With the smallest trust you can start the journey, and as the journey grows deeper, the trust grows deeper. Soon you will find yourself surrounded only with trust. That moment you will feel you are my sannyasin.Those who have come directly to me can betray. Those who have come indirectly to me cannot betray, because even before coming to me they had already tasted something of the beyond, and to betray is impossible. But there have been many sannyasins who have come directly to me. They started their commitment, their trust, toward me as a beginning. That is not a right beginning, because that means there is a certain belief. They don’t know me, they can’t know me – and still they have believed.There is danger because the doubt is there; the doubt can any day take over their belief. But the authentic sannyasins, the real ones, have come to me in a very indirect way. It is very difficult for you to find out who has come in what way, because it is something inner that you cannot see. But the people who have come slowly, trying to understand me, step by step, moving toward being natural, authentic, sincere, suddenly one day find they are related to me. Strange – they had never tried for it, they had not made any effort. It is a discovery.So sannyas to me has to be a discovery. Then you cannot lose it; it is your own discovery.Don’t be worried that your trust is partial – that’s enough, that much will do. To learn swimming, you need not jump into the deep water immediately; otherwise there is a danger you will get scared for your whole life. You will never come close to water again.There is a Sufi story that Mulla Nasruddin wanted to learn swimming. But as he went close to the river with the teacher who was going to teach him, he slipped and fell in – and it was a deep river. He was saved by the teacher, but he went a few times under the water; and as he was taken out, he took his shoes and ran away.The teacher said, “Where are you going? You have come to learn swimming.”He said, “Now, first I will learn swimming and then I will come near the water; otherwise I am not going to come near the water – it is too dangerous. First I will learn swimming.”But where is he going to learn swimming? You cannot learn swimming in your bedroom. There is no other way… But unfortunately he entered the river from the wrong end. The teacher would have taken him to where the water was shallow, and slowly would have encouraged him to go toward deeper waters. As he would have become more proficient, the teacher would have encouraged him to go farther and farther. Just a little trust is enough.In the beginning you cannot hope to have total trust. That’s how we start making impossible demands upon ourselves, and then we cannot fulfill them. Guilt arises, a condemnation of oneself arises, a rejection: “I am not worthy.” But all these things are unnecessary.This has happened all over the world. Everybody is feeling unworthy because he aspired in the very beginning to find the end. Naturally it was impossible – he could not reach it – and that stopped him even starting the journey again.I used to live in the same house with one of my professors. I had been living alone, and looking at the condition of my cottage, he felt that… He said, “It will be better if you come and start living with me.” I had my bed just near the door so that I could simply jump into bed, jump out of it. I never used to enter the house, because who was going to clean it?When he saw this situation he said, “I have never seen such a way of living.” Just in front of me was my bathroom; that much space was all that I used to move in – from the bed to the bathroom. All my books were around the bed so I could pick up any book that I needed, and whenever the bed became too dirty I simply used to put the light off – then everything looks the same!He said, “This is not good. My wife will take care of you; come with me. And we don’t have any children.” He was an old man – he was just like my father. He said, “I won’t let you live here. I had never thought that you are living in this way. You have invented an absolutely new way of life – that you put the light off if you see that it is too dirty.”So I went to live in his house. He was an atheist; he did not believe in God. He was interested in me because he thought I was also an atheist. He had heard me speaking in the university and at other places, declaring that there is no God. So he thought we were both atheists.But on the way I made it plain to him, “You may be under a wrong impression. I am not an atheist.”He sad, “What! And you declare everywhere that there is no God.”I said, “Yes, I declare there is no God. That’s why I cannot be a theist; a God is needed to be a theist – to believe in it. But a God is needed also to be an atheist – not to believe in it. And there is no God, so I don’t fall into any category.”He said, “My God! So you don’t fall into any category?”I said, “No.”I lived with him for a few months, and the more I tried to understand him, the more I came to the conclusion – a very strange conclusion, which proved right about many other atheists I had to meet during my life – that this man had been a great theist in his past life, and because he failed to find God he reversed his position to the other extreme. Otherwise it is unexplainable that atheists should waste so much time in denying God. When there is no God, why bother about it? They write books and pamphlets, and they make associations. They have their own philosophy, and they are more argumentative than theists. Almost all the time, the whole time, whoever they meet, sooner or later the conversation turns into atheism, that there is no God.This insistence, this wastage on something negative simply means they are taking revenge with themselves. They have been theists.I came to the conclusion because I started hypnotizing this old man. I told him, “This is my logical conclusion, but I want to know exactly where you were in your past life – in what belief, in what religion.” He was excited to know about it, so he was willing.Unless someone is willing you cannot hypnotize him. The art of hypnosis needs a very intelligent man and a very willing man. You cannot hypnotize an idiot, that is an impossibility. You can hypnotize only very few people – who are very intelligent, sharply intelligent, and yet ready to go on an inner journey willingly. You cannot force, they have simply to go with you.Living with him, slowly, slowly I persuaded him, and he became a good medium for hypnosis. His wife was the judge – I used to tell her to sit there and to watch the situation, because this man would not remember when he woke up, and he would deny what I said. She had to be my witness. That man had been a very great theist, lived his whole life worshipping God, renounced his family, did all kinds of ascetic disciplines. And he failed, as he was bound to, because there is no God to achieve. That failure turned the whole pendulum of his consciousness to the other extreme and now he was revengeful – unknowingly, unconsciously. And when I woke him up and told him, he would deny it: “No, I have never been a theist and I don’t believe in a past life.”I said, “I have a witness – your wife – that you can regress, under hypnosis, back into your past life.” And I did it dozens of times, and it was always the same result: without any exception he was a great theist. He had turned against himself because he had wasted a life.I said to him, “Now you are wasting another life. That’s why I say I don’t belong to any category. I don’t want to waste my life for God – this way or that.”To me, man has in him the highest potential of existence and consciousness. If he explores it he will reach to a state of godliness – not of God, but only of godliness.Don’t be worried that you are starting with a small amount of trust; that much is enough. To begin with, anything is enough. Just the desire to go on a pilgrimage is enough. Don’t be bothered that you have to be my sannyasin; just be a sannyasin. Just be a seeker of truth. And perhaps later on, on the way somewhere, I will be meeting you.I will tell you a Sufi story:A man is going in search of truth. As he comes out of his city, he finds an old man sitting under a tree. The young man does not know where to go in search of truth. He has heard that one has to go somewhere in search of truth, one has to go on a pilgrimage – but where? Roads go to all sides. Which road is the road?Seeing the old man sitting under the tree, he thought: perhaps this man is old enough; he must know which road leads to truth. And he asked the man. He said, “Yes I know the road. Follow the right and go on until you come to a certain tree” – he described the tree in detail, its leaves, its fruit – “and you will find under it a very old man. Just to give you an example, something like me but thirty years older. And that is the man who is going to be your guide.”The man was very happy. He thanked the old man and rushed toward the way he had shown him. For thirty years he was wandering and wandering, and the tree never came and the old man never came. He was getting tired, and he himself was getting old, and he said, “What nonsense!”Finally he decided, “It is better to go back home. Enough is enough! I have wasted thirty years in searching truth, and I have not even met the old man who is going to be my guide. And God knows, when the guide meets me, what kind of guidance it will be and how long it will take. It seems to be too complicated; it is better to go home. I was running a good business. I destroyed the business and unnecessarily got into trouble hearing this word truth again and again.”He came back. Again he passed the tree – and he was shocked! This was the tree the old man had described. And he looked under the tree and the old man was there – the same old man, thirty years older and exactly the same as the description of everything. He said, “My God! Then why did you waste my thirty years?”He said, “I wasted your thirty years – or you wasted my thirty years? At that time you were not ripe enough to be guided, because I gave all the guidance and you didn’t even look at the tree – and I was describing it in minute detail. I was describing your guide in minute detail, and you did not look at me, to see that I was describing myself. You were in such a hurry; you were too young. But nothing is wasted. I was waiting, knowing that one day you will come back, one day you will recognize this tree, one day you will recognize this old man, that I am your guide!”The young man said, “This seems to be a strange business.”The story is immensely significant. Have a little trust. Don’t be worried, go to the right: this time not under a tree, this time you will find an old man on a beautiful chair, someone looking similar to me. That will be the right time for you to become my sannyasin. Right now just be a sannyasin; don’t be greedy!

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,For years I have contemplated what seems to me to be the basic message for well-being: love yourself. When I was a therapist, all day hearing: “I hate myself; I feel sorry for myself, I am proud of myself; I want to destroy myself; I feel good about myself,” I started wondering – who is this self?I love when you say there is no self. That seems so freeing. Could you please say more?The whole therapeutic movement has gone wrong on that point: “Love thyself.”Socrates used to say, “Know thyself.” And there have been masters, particularly Sufis, who say, “Be thyself.” But there is only one person in the whole history of man, Gautam Buddha, who said, “There is no self. You are an emptiness, utter silence, a non-being.”His message was much opposed by all the traditions because they all depended in some way or other on the idea of the self. There may have been differences on other points, but on one point they were all totally in agreement – and that was the existence of the self. Even people like George Gurdjieff – who used to talk about a very novel idea that you are not born with a self, you have to earn it: “Deserve thyself.” Finally, he also ends up with the self.Gautam Buddha does not make any distinction between the self and the ego – and there is none. It is just sophistry, linguistic gymnastics, to make such distinctions; then you can discard the ego and save the self. But the self is simply another name of the ego. You are only changing names, and no transformation of being is happening.Buddha’s message is tremendously significant: You are an emptiness; there is no point in you which can say “I.” Looked at from my vision, when I say to you, “Melt, dissolve into existence,” I am simply saying the same thing in more positive terms. Buddha’s way of saying it was so negative that many people were stopped, because the question naturally arose that if there is no self, why bother? What is there to achieve? Just to know that you are not?A whole life of discipline, great effort for meditation, and the result is to know that you are not? The result does not seem to be worth it! At least without the meditation, without the discipline you have some sense of being. It may be wrong, but at least you are not feeling hollow and empty. Knowing that you are not, how will you live? Out of nothingness there is no possibility of any love, of any compassion – no possibility of anything. Out of nothing comes only nothing.So the opponents of Buddha described his method as a subtle way of spiritual suicide – far more dangerous than ordinary suicide, because with ordinary suicide you will survive, you will take a new form, a new birth. But with Buddha you will be committing total suicide, annihilation. There will no longer be anything left of you, and you will never be heard from again, never found again. You never were in the first place.Buddhism died in India, and one of the basic reasons was Buddha’s way of putting his philosophy. I can understand why he was so insistent on negatives, because all other philosophies were so positivistic, and all their positivism was turning into stronger and stronger egos. Seeing that positivism is going to give you egoistic ideas, and that is a hindrance between you and existence, he moved to the other extreme. To stop this idea he became totally negative.You cannot complain about it, because the positivistic ideologies were in a strange situation: you have to drop the ego to find your self, you have to drop the ego to find God, you have to drop the ego to become God, you have to drop the ego to find ultimate liberation – liberation of whom? Liberation of your self. So there was achievement, and achievement is always of the ego. There is a goal, and the goal is always of the ego.Seeing all this, Buddha said, “There is no self. There is nothing to be achieved, and there is no goal to be found. You have never existed, you do not exist, you will not exist. You can only imagine, you can only dream that you are.”Chuang Tzu’s story is famous. I never get tired of Chuang Tzu because his small absurd stories have so many aspects to explore that each time I can bring them in with a new light, with a new meaning, with a new perspective:One morning he wakes up, calls all his disciples and says, “I am in great trouble, and you have to help me.”The disciples said, “We have come to be helped by you, and you want our help?”Chuang Tzu said, “It was okay, but this night everything got disturbed: I dreamt that I had become a butterfly.”They all laughed. They said, “All nonsense! Dreaming does not create any mess.”Chuang Tzu said, “It has, because now I am thinking that perhaps I am a butterfly, thinking, dreaming that I am Chuang Tzu. Now, who am I? And I have to be certain, in order to live, whether I am Chuang Tzu or I am a butterfly.”He looks absurd, but he is really bringing the absurdity of logic to the surface. If a butterfly cannot dream of being a Chuang Tzu, then how can Chuang Tzu dream of being a butterfly? And if Chuang Tzu can dream of being a butterfly, then there is no logical objection to a butterfly falling asleep under the morning sun on a beautiful flower and dreaming of herself being Chuang Tzu.None of his disciples could help him. For centuries Taoists have been using that as a koan, because it is insoluble – but to Buddha it is not so.Chuang Tzu and Gautam Buddha were contemporaries, but far away; one was in China, one in India. They were divided by the great Himalayas, so no communication; otherwise Buddha would have solved Chuang Tzu’s problem because he says, “Both are dreams. It does not matter whether Chuang Tzu dreams of being a butterfly or the butterfly dreams of being a Chuang Tzu – both are dreams. You simply don’t exist.”Many came to Buddha and turned away, because no one can make nothingness his life’s achievement – for what? So much discipline and so much great trouble in getting into meditation just to find out that you are not. Strange kind of man this Gautam Buddha: we are good as we are, what is the need of digging so deep that you find there is nothing? Even if we are dreaming, at least there is something.My own approach is just the same, but from a very different angle. I say to you that you don’t have a self because you are part of the universe. You are not nothing. Only the universe can have a self, only the universe can have a center, only the whole can have a soul. My hand cannot have a soul, my fingers cannot have a soul; only the organic unity can have a soul. We are only parts. We are, but we are only parts; hence we cannot claim that we have a self.So Buddha is right – there is no self – but he is not helping people, poor people, because they cannot figure out all the implications of the statement.I say to you, you don’t have a self because you are part of a great self, the whole. You cannot have any separate, private self of your own. This takes away the negativity, and this does not give you the positive desire for becoming more and more egoistic. It avoids both the extremes and finds a new approach: the universe is, I am not. Whatever happens and appears to be in me, as me, is simply universal.To call it “I” is to make it too small. That is what makes it untrue; it does not correspond to reality. To call it “self” makes it unreal, because the self is possible only if you are totally independent – and you are not. Not even for a single breath are you independent. Not even for a single moment are you independent of the sun, of the moon, of the stars. The whole is contributing all the time. That’s why you are.To recognize it is not a loss, it is a gain; and yet it is not an egoistic gain. See the subtlety of it: it is a tremendous achievement to understand that you are part of the whole, that the whole belongs to you, that you belong to the whole. And yet with such a great achievement, there is no shadow of the self.That we are not separate is one of the most beautiful understandings: not separate from the mountains, not separate from the trees, not separate from the ocean, not separate from anybody. We are all connected, interwoven into oneness. The gain is immense, but there is no sense of I, of me, of my, of mine. As far as these things are concerned, there is utter silence and emptiness. But this emptiness is not just empty.We can empty this room – we can take out all the furniture, everything in the room – and anybody coming in will say, “The room is empty.” That is one way of looking at it, but not the right way.The right way is that now the room is full of emptiness. Before, the emptiness was hindered, cut into parts, because so much furniture and so many things were not allowing it to be one: now it is one.Emptiness too is. It is existential; it does not mean that it is not. Somebody empty of jealousy will become full of love, somebody empty of stupidness will become full of intelligence. Each emptiness has its own fullness. And if you miss seeing the fullness that absolutely and certainly comes with emptiness, then you are blind.There is no self. And that’s a great relief. You don’t have to love it, you don’t have to hate it, you don’t have to accept it, you don’t have to reject it. You don’t have to do anything. It simply is not there. You can relax, and in this relaxation is the melting into the universe. Then nothingness becomes wholeness.Buddha was very miserly; he would never say that nothingness is wholeness. He knew it; it is impossible that a man who knows nothingness to such depths will not know the other side of the coin – wholeness. But he was very miserly, and for a reason – because the moment you utter “wholeness,” immediately the ego feels at ease.The ego says, “So there is no fear. You have to attain to wholeness. ‘Nothing’ was a danger; ‘wholeness’ gives hope.” That’s why he was so persistently denying something which is ultimately real. He was leading people toward it, but denying it because the moment you assert it those people start going astray.But I would like to tell you the whole thing:One day Buddha is passing through a forest. It is fall and the whole forest is full of dry and dead leaves, and the wind is taking those dry and dead leaves from here and there and making beautiful music; and just to walk on those leaves is a joy.Ananda asked Buddha, “Can I ask you…because there is nobody around and I rarely get a chance to be alone with you. Although I am twenty-four hours a day with you, somebody is always there and of course he has preference to ask, to talk, because it is an opportunity for him; I am always with you. But today there is nobody. Can I ask you one thing: have you said everything that you know? Or have you been keeping a few things back and not revealing them to people?”Buddha stooped down and filled one of his fists with dead leaves.Ananda said, “What are you doing?”He said, “I am trying to answer your question. What do you see in my hand?”Ananda said, “I see a few leaves.”Buddha said, “What do you see all over the forest?”He said, “Millions and millions of dead leaves.”Buddha said, “What I have said is just this much, and what I have not said is equal to the leaves that are in the whole forest.”But my whole desire is to take you to the forest, to leave you to listen to the music of the whole, to walk and run on dry leaves just like children. I don’t want to give you a few leaves in my fist. No, I want to give you the whole.And this is my understanding: you may trust me or not, but I trust you. You may change, you may even become an enemy to me, but my trust will remain the same in you because my trust is not something conditional upon you, it does not depend on you. My trust is my joy, and I want to give you the whole.Nothingness is half of the truth – immensely relieving, but yet it leaves something like a wound, something unfulfilled. You will be relieved, relaxed, but you will still be looking for something because emptiness cannot become the end.The other side, wholeness, has to be made available to you. Then your emptiness is full – full of wholeness. Then your nothingness is all. It is not just nothing, but all.These are the moments when contradictory terms are transcended, and whenever you transcend any contradiction you become enlightened. Whatever the contradiction may be, all contradictions transcended bring enlightenment to you. And this is one of the fundamental contradictions: emptiness and wholeness. The transcendence needs nothing but just a silent understanding.Osho,Since being with you, I have noticed that when a person becomes close to you they sometimes get a fixed idea about who you are. It seems like they forget who you really are and even why they have come to you. This situation puzzles me, even scares me a little. Would you please comment?The mind has a natural tendency to quickly get fixed ideas. It is very much afraid of change, because change means rearrangement. Each time you change something, you have to rearrange your whole inner being.Mind wants to live with fixed ideas. When a person comes to me – and it has been happening for thirty-five years continually – he starts loving me. He comes closer, becomes intimate and then gets a fixed idea. And that’s where he misses me, because now his fixed idea is going to create trouble.I am not an idea and I am not fixed. I am changing. I am in absolute agreement with Heraclitus that you cannot step twice in the same river. Translated, it means you cannot meet the same person again. I not only agree with him, I go a little further: I say you cannot step in the same river even once. Again translated to the human world, it means you cannot meet the same person even once, because even while you are meeting him he is changing, you are changing, the whole world is changing.But once you get a fixed idea you cling to it, and I am constantly going to change. Tomorrow you will find yourself in a conflict. So many have come, so many have gone, and this has been one of the basic reasons: they became so much fascinated with their own idea of me that I became secondary. Their idea of me became primary – and that too, old, dated. I am with them, fresh and young, but I became secondary. If there was any conflict between their idea and my reality, they went with their idea – even to the point of becoming enemies to me, telling people that I am no longer the same, I am no longer the person I used to be; they have worshipped a great saint, but I am no longer the same person. They will keep their memory of the past deep in their heart, but it is simply a photograph. Photographs don’t change.Once it happened…One of my friends was collecting photographs of me from my childhood, from wherever he could get them. He had made a big album, and he was showing me. He had done a great work; he had gone to many places, to many people. Wherever he heard that somebody had a picture of me he went there, either to get the original or a copy of it. But while he was showing them to me he felt I was not interested.He stopped and said to me, “You don’t seem to be interested.”I said, “I don’t seem to be interested because none of these photographs represent me; they only represent that which is dead. The photograph can only represent that which is dead. A photograph is always of the dead; you cannot find a photograph which is of the living.”In Picasso’s home there used to be a portrait, a self-portrait of Picasso. He never sold it, at any price; that was the only picture he insisted on not selling. And the more he insisted on not selling, the more and more people were coming with bigger and bigger offers for the picture. It became a challenge for art collectors.One beautiful woman had come with the same idea, to purchase the picture. Whatever the price she was ready to pay; she was rich enough. She said to Picasso, “I am willing to pay you as much as you want for your portrait.”Picasso said, “People are mad. For a dead thing they go on harassing me. You can have it without any price, but remember, it is not me.”The woman looked puzzled. She said, “It is not you? What do you mean?”He said, “If it were me it would have kissed you by now! It does not speak, it does not love, it does not sing, it does not dance. Such a beautiful woman is standing before it and the idiot is not even kissing. You can just take it. It is dead. Remove it from here – it is not me!”People get fixed ideas – and very soon. Ordinarily it goes perfectly well, because you meet only dead people who are not changing, who go on saying the same thing their whole life just like a parrot. They are consistent people; they have all your respect.I seem to you self-contradictory, inconsistent, for the simple reason that I have decided not to die before I die. I am going to live to the very last breath, so you cannot be certain about me till my last breath. After that you can make any image of me and be satisfied with it. But remember, it will not be me.To be with me needs courage, and the greatest courage is being capable of seeing the change and moving with it. It may be difficult; it is easier to have an idea once and then be finished.A Sufi story:Mulla Nasruddin was appointed as the prime minister of a king because he was known to be very wise; his wisdom was somewhat weird, but still, wisdom is wisdom. The first day when they went to have their dinner together, a certain vegetable called bindhi was made by the cook, stuffed with Eastern spices. It is a delicacy.The king appreciated the cook, and after that Mulla said, in appreciation of the bindhi, “This is the most precious vegetable in the world. It gives you long life, it keeps you healthy, it gives you resistance against diseases,” and so on and so forth.The king said, “I never knew that you know so much about vegetables.”The cook heard about it, so he thought, “If bindhi is such a thing that our king can live long and healthy…” Next day again bindhi was made, and again Mulla praised it, going even higher than the first day. The third day bindhi was made and Mulla went still higher. The fourth day bindhi was made and Mulla was going higher and higher. The fifth day Mulla even said that bindhi is a divine food – God eats only bindhi.But the king was bored. He threw the plate of bindhi and told Mulla Nasruddin, “You are an idiot. And God eats bindhi every day? You will drive me mad!”Mulla said, “Lord, you are getting unnecessarily hot. I am your servant; you said bindhi was good, I simply followed you, and when I do something I do it perfectly. I am not a servant to bindhi, I am your servant. The truth is that bindhi is the worst thing in the world – even devils don’t eat it. You did well that you threw it.”He threw his plate farther away than the king. He said, “You should always remember that I am your servant, and you are always right. And I am a consistent man; I will remain consistently your servant, whatever happens.”There are people – almost the whole world – who live in a certain consistency. It is easier. But when you come close to a man like me, you are going to be in difficulty; either you will have to drop your idea of consistency or you will have to drop me. And people are so infatuated with their own ideas that they can drop me, but they cannot drop their ideas.My first book was published in 1960. I was staying in someone’s home, and the housewife of the home told me, “My father is a monk, a Jaina monk; he is old, ninety years old. He has been told by the Jaina order that he need not go begging, he is too old, so he remains outside the town in a hut, and we take his food there. But he wants to come to see you – he insists. We’ve told him, ‘We can bring the person you want to see.’” In fact I used to go on that road every morning. She said, “It is very easy for you to go to meet the old man, but he insists, ‘No, that will not be respectful.’ He reads your books; he has stopped reading all other books. And he says, ‘If it was in my power I would declare this man as our twenty-fifth tirthankara.’”They have twenty-four tirthankaras in one cycle of existence – in Jainism there are cycles of existence. It is a very mathematical philosophy. Everything moves in the world in cycles. Existence also has a cycle: it begins, it ends, it begins again, it ends again. It is a long, long way. In fact, India has the biggest terms for counting; no other language has such big terms for counting. And it has to use its biggest terms to count how long it takes one cycle to complete.In one cycle there are twenty-four tirthankaras, just as in one day there are twenty-four hours. For each hour in the cycle of existence there is one master.This old Jaina monk had said something almost sacrilegious: that if it was in his power he would declare me the twenty-fifth tirthankara. He was so infatuated with the book that he said that he had never understood things which the book had made him understand, and he was happy that he had found it before his death.He came to see me; it must have been nearabout six in the evening when he came. The daughter of the woman I was staying with came and told me, “You should take your bath because your supper is ready.”I said, “Wait, this old man has come from so far.” And the old man had already said – just within the few minutes he had been there – “You are the twenty-fifth tirthankara. Perhaps if it is not possible according to existence, then you will be the first tirthankara in the new cycle. Your book has given me so much; all the books that I have read in my whole life, all the scriptures, have proved useless.”He had touched my feet. I told him, “It is not good. You are ninety years old, and a Jaina monk is not supposed to touch anybody’s feet.”He said, “I don’t care. I consider you as my master.” But when he heard the girl asking me to get ready, he was shocked – because the sun had set, and Jainas don’t eat after the sun has set. Immediately everything changed.He said, “Do you eat after sunset?”I said, “Ordinarily, no. But you have come from so far, an old man, and I wanted to be with you. It doesn’t matter if it is a little late. I can take my supper a little late.”He said, “Then forgive me. Whatever I have said to you, I want to take it back. You are not even a Jaina, how can you become a Jaina tirthankara? First you should learn how to discipline your life.”He started teaching me. Just a moment before I was the master, and I was going to be the first tirthankara of the new cycle; now I was not even a disciple! And there was absolute condemnation in his mind. The book that he had brought with him – my book – he simply left there. He didn’t take it with him.I asked him, “What happened? I may have fallen from your mind, but that book does not eat supper. You can take the book.”He said, “I cannot even touch it. You have written it and you don’t know even simple things, that after sunset one cannot eat. If one eats after sunset, one can never know what reality is.”It was really hilarious to see the whole scene; the whole family gathered to see. The husband of the woman was a rare man. He said to me, “Except me, everybody in my family is going to betray you. Only I will remain in the end with you, because I am not a religious person; they are all against me. I don’t go to the temple, I don’t read their scriptures, I don’t follow the discipline of a Jaina – not eating in the night, not eating before sunrise, and other things. I will be the last one to still be with you, because whatever you do will not hurt me; I don’t make any image, I simply see it.“Each time you come to my home you are different, and all these people get into difficulty. They are puzzled – last time you said something and this time you have been saying something which goes against it. Only to me it does not seem puzzling simply because last time was last time! So much water has gone down the Ganges. This time is this time, and to me you are beautiful each time.”And he was right. By and by, all the people in his family started getting stuck with some image of me. Only he remained to the very last. He is dead now. Just before dying he said, “Convey to Osho, ‘Only you are in my mind right now, when I am leaving my body.’” He was a real man who had guts to go along with me through all the seasons of the year, all the changes of life.If you really want to be with me you have to stop making images. What is the need to make an image? The need is to cling.Remain without an image so that your eyes are not cluttered with old images and you are available to me directly, each moment. This direct immediacy is the true relationship between me and you. Anything less than that is worthless.Osho,The other day I heard you saying, “Just listening to me can be enough to be transformed.” I felt so grateful to you and relaxed for a moment. But a part of me was doubtfully asking, “Is it really that easy? Can I really relax and let existence take over?” My chattering mind wants to do something. How can I be more patient and really trust?Just for a moment you had the glimpse. Now make yourself available more and more. That glimpse comes again and again, becomes deepened. Don’t be bothered by your chattering mind. Use that chattering mind to make new questions.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 17 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In the land of money, power, designer drugs and enlightened insurance, many of your sannyasins are now working with a job and earning their livelihood. Laughter, a sense of humor and a deep love and gratitude toward you keep us all connected with each other somehow. With your people in the world now and physically so far away, has your work with us taken on a new significance?It has certainly taken on a new significance, a new turn. I always wanted my people to be in the world, occasionally coming to me, being with me, refreshing themselves, then going back again to the world – because the world has to be changed. We are not the ones who renounce the world. All the religions have been teaching renounce the world. I teach you transform the world.Renouncing it is sheer cowardice, and by renouncing it nothing significant happens – the world goes on living, producing new generations in the old pattern. The persons who have renounced the world also don’t go through a transformation – for a simple reason that they lose all the opportunities where they can test whether they are growing or not. You can sit in the Himalayas for half a century and you will feel silent, but that silence is not yours; it belongs to the Himalayas. Everything is silent, eternally silent, and there is nobody to disturb you.Just to get out of the situations where you get disturbed does not mean that you are attaining peacefulness; it simply means you are running away from situations where you are certain that your peace will be disturbed. Renouncing the world has never been my idea; it was always to change it.Millions of people are suffering, and suffering for stupid reasons. It is absolutely inhuman to turn your back on it and move to the mountains or to the deserts to live peacefully there. That peace is very cheap, very superficial; it has almost no meaning. Just come back to the world and it will be disturbed, it will be shattered into pieces. And that will be immensely significant to awaken you; that what you have been thinking of as peace, silence, has been just a dream which is shattered by the reality, just as a mirror is shattered when hit by a rock – and it is shattered forever. That mirror you cannot put together again, and all those years that you were enjoying the idea that you have attained peace have gone down the drain.So my idea has always been come to me to rejoice, come to me for a holiday. Come to me for pure joy. Be filled with the fragrance, be filled with my presence, then take it back into the world. There is the real test: whether it remains with you or not. If you want to keep it, then spread it, share it, and it will grow within you. But whenever you feel stuck somewhere, not growing, unavailable, come back to me, be with me. When you feel the clarity again, go back to the world.If you start living with me, you will be a loser on two counts. One: you will by and by start taking me for granted because I will be available to you – which is a great loss. It is dangerous, because the more I am available to you, the less you will become available.I lived for almost twenty years in Jabalpur in India; it has one of the most beautiful spots in the world. For two to three miles continuously a beautiful river, Narmada, flows between two mountains of marble; just three miles of pure white marble on both sides, high mountains. And the river is deep. In the full-moon night, when the moon comes in the middle and you can see those rocks also reflected in the waters, it creates almost a magical world. I don’t think there is anything in the world which can be compared to that magic. It is simply unimaginable.I insisted again and again to my professor, Doctor S. K. Saxena… I had loved him very much because he was the only teacher I came across who never treated me as a student. We argued, we fought on small points, and if he was wrong he was always ready to accept it, and he was grateful.He had a PhD from America – he lived his whole life in America, and taught as a professor of Indian philosophy there. Just at the end he wanted to go back to his own country. He had been searching for someone who could translate his doctoral thesis into Hindi, but he never came across a man who could. And his thesis was really of great significance; just a literal translation would not have done. It needed someone with a deep understanding. The subject matter of the thesis was, “The evolution of consciousness in the East.” It was one of the most difficult subjects, very elusive, but he had managed, worked hard, and had come to certain very significant conclusions.He asked me – I was only a student – to translate it. I said, “You should ask some professor, at least someone qualified.”He said, “I have seen many professors, many qualified people; they can translate only literally. And I trust you. Arguing with you I have come to the conclusion that you are the man who can translate it.”It took me two months continuously – my whole holiday one summer. It was hard work. And it was harder because there were faults, there were mistakes, and I could not tolerate them. So I pointed out to him, “These are mistakes; out of your seven conclusions, three are wrong, and if it was in my hands I would take your doctorate back. The people who have given you a doctorate know nothing about consciousness.”He said, “I was afraid of this!”But I said to him, “I have translated it; just in the footnotes I have made my comments where you have gone wrong, why you have gone wrong. Perhaps anybody would have gone wrong. As a scholar, this mistake was bound to happen. I am not a scholar.”I gave the thesis to him and I said, “Look at it, and tell me how you feel.”He hugged me and told me, “You have done such a tremendous job that I feel ashamed. It looks like my book is a translation and your book is the original! And I am not going to publish it because that would destroy my whole reputation. You have also made comments which I agree with – you are right and my examiners were wrong. I was wrong, my examiners were wrong.”So he kept the translated thesis with him and never allowed anyone to see it, never allowed anyone to publish it.I said, “You wasted my two months unnecessarily!” I said, “Just to compensate, now you have to come with me to Jabalpur.” It was one hundred miles from the university, where he was professor, to the marble rocks. “I would not let you die without seeing it.”But he said, “Howsoever beautiful it is, I have seen the whole world” – he had been a world traveler – “I have seen everything that is worth seeing. What can be there?”I said, “I cannot describe it. Just come with me.” And I took him there. He was asking again and again, when we were moving in the boat, “Do you call this the most beautiful place?”I said, “Just wait. We have not entered it yet.” And then suddenly the boat entered into the world of marble, the mountains of marble. And in the full-moon night they were just so pure, so virgin-pure, and their reflections…The old man had tears in his eyes. He said, “If you had not insisted, I would have missed something in my life. Just take the boat close to the mountains, because I would like to touch them. It looks so illusory! Without touching I cannot believe that what I am seeing is real.”I told the boatman to come close to the mountains. Dr. Saxena touched the mountains and he said, “Now I can leave – they are real! But for three miles continuously…!”This man wrote beautifully, spoke beautifully, but still was miserable. And I said, “Neither your writings mean anything, nor your speeches mean anything. To me what is significant is whether you have been able to drop all the causes of misery. You are so miserable that you drink just to forget. You are so miserable that you smoke just to forget. You gamble just to forget.”Now, this world is not to be renounced. There are beautiful people, there are immensely capable people; they have just never come across a person who could have triggered a process of mutation in their life. So my idea has always been, come to me whenever you start feeling, “Perhaps I am living in an illusion.” Then come and just touch me. Let yourself be showered by my presence, my love, so that you can regain confidence, courage, and you can go back to the world.But the world is where the work is. This is a mystery school. We prepare people and send them to change the world.That was my idea of a commune from the very beginning, but because I was silent and in isolation, things went not according to my idea. The commune, rather than becoming a refreshing place, a place for holiday, became just another world of work, of hierarchy, of bureaucracy. All those things that we wanted to change evolved in the commune itself.So my new phase of work will be that there will be a mystery school. It will live like a commune, but the people will be changing. People will be coming whenever they can manage, whenever they need. There will be a certain number of people who will be permanent, to take care of all the visitors. But the commune will be a continuous pilgrimage place, where you learn something, where you drink something and go back to the world.We are not the renouncers – we are the revolutionaries. We want to change the whole world. And in changing the world, you will change yourself. You cannot change anything else unless you go through the change simultaneously.So on one count it was a loss that if you were staying with me continuously you started taking me for granted: I was available.I told you about this beautiful spot because in Jabalpur there are thousands of people who have not seen it. It is only thirteen miles away, and I have told those people – professors, doctors, engineers – “Just go and see!”And they say, “We can see it anytime. It is there; it is not going to go away.”In the Second World War it happened that suddenly, when Adolf Hitler declared that he was going to bomb the Tower of London, thousands of people rushed to see it. They had been living in London all their lives; they were born there. They were passing the tower every day on the way to their job; going to the office, coming back home, it was there. Other people were coming from faraway places to see it, but they were taking it for granted: “It is there, so what is the hurry?”It is absolutely certain that thousands of people have been born in London and died in London without seeing the tower. I know about Jabalpur; thousands of people must have died… It is always there, but you are not always there.As far as the relationship with me is concerned, neither you are forever nor I am forever. But you can take it for granted, and by and by a fog surrounds your mind. Rather than my presence there is a fog – which separates you, not connects you.This was the most disastrous thing that was happening in the commune. People were with me, but they had created a fog around themselves. Seen from the outside, physically they were close, but spiritually they had gone far away.Secondly: when five thousand or ten thousand people start living in a commune, their whole orientation, why they have come there, changes without their knowledge. They had come there to meditate, to be with me, to be as open as possible and available to my experience: to enjoy, to relax, to sing, to dance, to be ecstatic. They had all come for that.But when ten thousand people have to live together, you have to make houses, you have to make roads, you have to prepare food, you have to prepare clothes; a thousand and one things are needed which go on taking all your time. Slowly, slowly you completely forget the real reason you had come. You go on getting into other things, and the original intention is completely forgotten.This time I am working in a totally different way, so these two things can be avoided. To you, I always want to be just a holiday. To you, I always want to mean nothing but ecstasy, music, dance. It is good to be only for a few days with me and then go into the world. Take the music, take the ecstasy with you, spread it, and whenever you feel thirsty come back again.So it will be a world school of mysticism where people will be coming and going, taking the message to all the nooks and corners of the world. I don’t want you to be in any way associated with anything like road-making, making houses, and creating a dam – all that is just damned foolery!I simply want you to remember me as a flower, a fragrance, a flame, a light; associate me with these things. That is going to be the purpose of the new mystery school. I would like to call it “the mystery school” rather than a commune, because that name has become associated with the commune we had.I am not in any way thinking that the disappearance of that commune has been a loss. Not at all – because the way it was functioning, it was a non-ending rut. You would have needed new roads, because new houses were to be built, then new roads would have had to be connected. You would have needed more restaurants, bigger restaurants; you would have needed more clothes… And finally, you were going to have to produce: you would have had to make factories and other productive directions – because how long can five thousand people live only on donations? Friends can support for a time being, but not forever.So soon you would have completely forgotten that you are separate from the world. In fact you would have been in more difficulty because in the other world somebody else takes care of the roads, somebody else takes care of the post office, and somebody else takes care of other things. You have just to work five hours, six hours. In the commune you were working for twelve hours, sometimes fourteen hours; even then the work was unending.The resources that were helping the commune were going to be soon exhausted; the commune was going to collapse. I was telling the people who were in power in the commune, “The commune will collapse, because how long can you live on other people’s support? And if you become productive – you open factories and you start making things – then why bother? All these things are being done everywhere else.”This time, from the very beginning, only the small nucleus of people who are absolutely necessary to run the mystery school, will be living with me. Everybody else will be a guest for a few days, a few weeks, a few months, as much as he can manage. His being here with me will be all relaxation, meditation, so he can be rejuvenated. Then he can go back. The whole world is there to work on.This way we will avoid the most basic thing – that he does not take me for granted. And the second thing – that he does not forget his basic intention in coming to me.Osho,Once, when I was sitting with a dying patient – it was Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud's youngest daughter – I was in conversation with her companion, and it happened I was speaking of you. When, an hour or so later, my patient died, I recalled I had mentioned your name, and in retrospect it felt as if because of that, rosewater had been sprinkled into the atmosphere. Is it just being fanciful to feel that simply the mention of your name, or even a brief glimpse of your face on our lockets, can in some way have an effect on people?It all depends on you – not on my name, not on my face on your locket, but on your heart. If you are talking about me with deep love, with trust, with reverence, your heart creates a certain milieu. If you are talking not just from the mind but from the very innermost core of your being, it can happen: you can feel as if rosewater has been sprinkled, a great cleanliness, a great freshness, a fragrance. But they are not contained in my name or in my photograph; those are just instrumental. The reality that is created is by your heart.There are people who are against me, who are saying my name continually, and they will never feel that rosewater has been sprinkled. The archbishop in Greece has some source of information! As I was arrested, and the whole population of Saint Nicholas was at the airport to show their support to me, he alone with his half a dozen old, almost dead church women, was ringing the bell of victory – that God has won over the Devil, that I was sent specially from hell to destroy God’s land, his church, his morality. It depends. To him it may be that my name gives him such electric shocks, that he will think, “This man must be evil.”Just a few days ago, when I was here in the ministry of interior, there were many people – a great crowd. Nobody recognized me because they were all people either from this country or from Argentina or Brazil where I have never been. But as I was being taken in, one woman immediately pulled back her three children and whispered to them, “Don’t touch him!” She must have been either English or American, afraid that if you touch him, and if he is really the Devil or comes from hell, it is going to be disastrous.So it all depends on you.But it was good that you were mentioning me when Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s youngest daughter, was dying, and she heard about me with deep love and reverence from you. She was not an orthodox woman. She was really representative of Sigmund Freud – the same quality of mind, the same sharpness, the same fearless intelligence to cut through all nonsense, superstitions. She was one of the most significant women of this century – and sensitive, alert.I hope that what you felt, she also may have felt a little bit. At the moment of death, nothing could have been a greater gift to her – and she deserved it.Osho,An old Tibetan is quoted as saying:Like a lion, I have no fear.Like an elephant, I have no anxiety.Like a madman, I have no hope.I tell you the honest truth.Osho, what is so wondrous and precious about the honest truth?In fact, to use these two words together shows a deep misunderstanding. Honest truth implies that there can be dishonest truth. Truth is enough. Honesty is a very ordinary quality that comes as a shadow of truth, with many other qualities. There is something immensely important about truth. But remember, never use the words honest truth. That means you have a suspicion: deep down, you yourself are not convinced of the truthfulness of truth. To substitute, to compensate, you add honesty to it.Nothing can be added to truth. Truth is always pure, nude, alone. And there is great beauty, because truth is the very essence of life, existence, nature. Except for man, nobody lies. A rosebush cannot lie. It has to produce roses; it cannot produce marigolds – it cannot deceive. It is not possible for it to be other than it is. Except for man, the whole existence lives in truth. Truth is the religion of the whole of existence – except man.The moment a man also decides to become part of existence, truth becomes his religion. It is the greatest revolution that is possible to happen to anyone. It is the glorious moment.When I say that except for man everything is living truth – the ocean, the clouds, the stars, the stones, the flowers; everything is nothing but truthfulness, nothing but just itself with no mask, and only man is capable of deceiving others, of deceiving himself – it has to be remembered that this is a great opportunity. It has not to be condemned, it has to be praised because even if a rosebush or a lotus wants to lie, it cannot. Its truth is not freedom; its truth is bondage. It cannot go beyond the boundaries.Man has the prerogative, the privilege of being untrue. That means man has the freedom to choose. If he chooses to be truthful, he is not choosing bondage, he is choosing truth and freedom. Freedom is his privilege. In the whole of existence, nobody else has freedom.But there are dangers when you have opportunities. When you have freedom, you can go wrong. No rose can go wrong, no rock can go wrong. You can go wrong; hence a deep awareness of each act, of each thought, of each feeling, has to penetrate you.To me that is the meaning of “a seeker of truth.” Only man needs to seek it; everybody has already got it, but the glory of freedom is not there. You have to seek it, and find it. In that very seeking and finding you are glorious, you are the very crown of existence.But truth is enough. Don’t burden it with honesty or anything else.Osho,How can I thank you?There is no need: just be what you can be. Allow yourself to blossom. Enjoy in glory – and that will be thankfulness enough.Anybody who blossoms close to me has already shown his gratitude. Saying it would be profane. Saying it would destroy the beauty of the unsaid, the silent. If you have really come to a point when you want to say thank you to me, then don’t say it; I will understand it. By saying it, you will be bringing down something from a very high level.You will be surprised to know that in India, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, perhaps the oldest, you rarely hear anybody thanking somebody else. Particularly, no child will thank his parents; no parents will thank their child. In the West that is part of your formal training: on each occasion say, “Thank you.”I was thinking about the difference, why it has not developed in this old civilization. And I understand: the reason is what I said. If you are really thankful, then saying it is useless, because you cannot put your heart into it. If you are not thankful, then why unnecessarily destroy a beautiful word?To make it a formality means you are making it an unconscious part of your behavior. So, just as somebody presents you with a cup of coffee and you say, “Thank you,” if somebody brings enlightenment to your consciousness, are you going to use the same words? It is absolutely impossible to use those same words; they have become so formal. You say them without even thinking about it. You simply say them like a robot.It is a good question to ask how to say thank you to me because there must be a great feeling of gratitude, but all words seem to be meaningless. The words thankfulness, gratefulness seem to be too small. What has happened to you is so vast.My suggestion is: you need not give me any thank you. I will take it myself. It will be so apparent through your eyes and through your face, that there will be no need to say it. I will simply take it from there.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 18 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In Europe the threat of terrorism is striking fear in everyone. Airplanes are delayed by extraordinary security measures, many of the seats are empty, and some airports are closing. People are even thinking twice about going out in the evening. And all this is more prevalent since the recent bombing of Libya. Is the rise of terrorism over the last decade in some way symbolic of what is happening to society in general?Everything is deeply related with everything else that happens. The event of terrorism is certainly related with what is happening in the society. The society is falling apart. Its old order, discipline, morality, religion, everything has been found to be wrongly based. It has lost its power over people’s conscience.Terrorism simply symbolizes that to destroy human beings does not matter, that there is nothing in human beings which is indestructible, that it is all matter – and you cannot kill matter, you can only change its form. Once man is taken to be only a combination of matter, and no place is given for a spiritual being inside him, then to kill becomes just play.Nations are irrelevant because of nuclear weapons. If the whole world can be destroyed within minutes, the alternative can only be that the whole world should be together; now it cannot remain divided. Its division is dangerous, because division can become war any moment. The division cannot be tolerated. Only one war is enough to destroy everything, hence there is not much time left for man to understand that we should create a world where the very possibility of war does not exist.Terrorism has many undercurrents. One is that because of the creation of nuclear weapons, the nations are pouring their energies into that field, thinking that the old weapons are out of date. They are out of date, but individuals can start using them. And you cannot use nuclear weapons against individuals – that would be simply stupid. If an individual terrorist throws a bomb it does not justify that a nuclear missile should be sent.What I want to emphasize is that the nuclear weapon has given individual people a certain freedom to use old weapons, which was not possible in the old days because the governments were also using the same weapons.Now the governments are concentrated on destroying the old weapons, throwing them into the ocean, selling them to countries which are poor and cannot afford nuclear weapons. And all those terrorists are coming from these poor countries – with the weapons that have been sold to their countries. And they have a strange protection: you cannot use nuclear weapons against them, you cannot throw atom bombs at them.They can throw bombs at you and you are suddenly impotent. You have a vast amount of atomic bombs, nuclear bombs in your hands – but sometimes where a needle is useful, a sword may not be of any use. You may have the sword; that does not mean that you are necessarily in a superior position to the man who has a needle, because there are purposes in which only the needle will work – the sword will not be of any use.Those small weapons from the old times were piling up, and the big powers had to dispose of them. They could drown them in the ocean, which meant so much money, so much manpower, so much energy would go to waste, that economically it was disastrous. But just to go on piling them up was also economically impossible. How many weapons can you gather? There is a limit. And when you get a new way of killing people more efficiently, then the old simply has to be got rid of.It was thought that it would be better to sell them to poor countries. Poor countries cannot create nuclear weapons – it costs too much. And these weapons were coming cheap, as help. They accepted them, but those weapons cannot be used in a war. In a war those weapons are already useless. But nobody has seen the possibility that those weapons can be used individually, and a new phenomenon – terrorism – can come out of it.Now a terrorist has a strange power, even over the greatest powers. He can throw bombs at the White House without any fear because what you have is too big and you cannot throw it at him. And his weapons are the weapons sold by you! But the phenomenon was not conceived of, because human psychology is not understood.My understanding is that the way he has lived, man needs a war every ten to twelve years. He accumulates so much anger, so much rage, so much violence, that nothing short of a war will give him release. So, there is war after war, with a gap of only ten to fifteen years. That gap is a kind of relaxation. But again you start accumulating, because the same psychology is working – the same jealousy, the same violence.Man is basically a hunter; he is not by nature vegetarian. First he became a hunter, and for thousands of years he was just a meat-eater, and cannibalism was prevalent everywhere. To eat human beings caught from the opposing tribe you were fighting was perfectly ethical. All of that is carried in the unconscious of humanity.Religions have imposed things very superficially on man; his unconscious is not in agreement. Every man is living in a disagreement with himself. So whenever he can find a chance for a beautiful cause – freedom, democracy, socialism – any beautiful word can become an umbrella to hide his ugly unconscious, which simply wants to destroy and enjoys destruction.Now a world war has become almost impossible; otherwise there would have been no terrorism. Enough time has passed since the Second World War; the Third World War should have happened nearabout 1960. It has not happened. This has been the routine for the whole of history, and man is programmed for it.It has been observed by psychologists that in wartime people are happier than in peacetime. In wartime their life has a thrill; in peacetime they look bored. In wartime, early in the morning they are searching for the newspaper, listening to the radio. Things may be happening far away, but they are excited. Something in them feels an affinity.A war that should have happened somewhere between 1955 and 1960 has not happened, and man is burdened with the desire to kill, with the desire to destroy. It is just that he wants good names for it.Terrorism is going to become bigger and bigger, because the Third World War is almost impossible. And the stupid politicians have no other alternative. Terrorism simply means that what was being done on a social scale now has to be done individually. It will grow. It can only be prevented if we change the very base of human understanding – which is a Himalayan task; more so because these same people whom you want to change will fight you, they won’t allow you to change them easily. In fact they love bloodshed; they don’t have the courage to say so.In one of the existentialist’s novels, there is a beautiful incident which can almost be said to be true:A man is presented before the court because he has killed a stranger who was sitting on the beach. He had never seen the stranger. He did not kill him for money. He does not yet know how that man looked because he killed him from the back, just with a big knife. They had never met – there was no question of enmity. They were not even familiar; they had not even seen each other’s faces.The magistrate could not figure it out, and he asked the murderer, “Why did you do it?”He said, “When I stabbed that man with a knife and a fountain of blood came out of his back, it was one of the most beautiful moments I have ever known. I know that the price will be my death, but I am ready to pay for it; it was worth it. My whole life I have lived in boredom – no excitement, no adventure. Finally I had to decide to do something. And this act has made me world famous; my picture is in every newspaper. And I am perfectly happy that I did it.”There was no need for any evidence. The man was not denying it – on the contrary, he was glorifying it. But the court has its own routine way: witnesses still have to be produced; just his word cannot be accepted. He may be lying, he may not have killed the man. Nobody saw him – there was not a single eyewitness – so circumstantial evidence had to be presented by the police.One of them was that possibly this man had killed according to his past life and his background. When he was young, his mother died. And when he heard that his mother had died, he said, “Shit! That woman will not leave alone me even while dying! It is Sunday, and I have booked tickets for the theater with my girlfriend. But I knew she would do something to destroy my whole day – and she has destroyed it.”His mother had died and he was saying that she had destroyed his Sunday! He was going to the theater with his girlfriend, and now he had to go to the funeral. And the people who heard his reaction were shocked. They said, “This is not right, what are you saying?”He said, “What? What is right and what is wrong? Couldn’t she die on any other day? There are seven days in the week – from Monday to Saturday, she could have died any day. But you don’t know my mother – I know her. She is a bitch! She did it on purpose.”The second evidence was that he attended the funeral and in the evening he was found dancing with his girlfriend in a disco. And somebody asked, “What! What are you doing? Your mother has just died.”He said, “So what? Do you mean now I can never dance again? My mother is never going to be alive, she will remain dead; so what does it matter whether I dance after six hours, eight hours, eight months, eight years? What does it matter? – she is dead. And I have to dance and I have to live and I have to love, in spite of her death. If everybody stopped living with the death of their mother, with the death of their father, then there would be no dance in the world, no song in the world.”His logic is very right. He is saying, “Where do you draw the demarcation line? After how many hours can I dance? – twelve hours, fourteen hours, six weeks? Where will you draw the line? On what grounds? What is the criterion? So it doesn’t matter. One thing is certain: whenever I dance I will be dancing after the death of my mother, so I decided to dance today. Why wait for tomorrow?”Such circumstantial evidence was presented to the court – that this man is strange, he can do such an act. But if you look closely at this poor man, you will not feel angry at him; you will feel very compassionate. Now, it is not his fault that his mother has died; and anyway, he has to dance some day, so it makes no difference. You cannot blame this man for saying ugly things: “She deliberately died on Sunday to spoil my joy,” because his whole experience of life must have been that she was again and again spoiling any possibility of joy. This was the last conclusion: “Even in death she will not leave me alone.”And you cannot condemn the man for killing a stranger – because he is not a thief; he did not take anything from him. He is not an enemy; he did not even see who the man was he was killing. He was simply bored with life and he wanted to do something that made him feel significant, important. He is happy that all the newspapers have his photo. If they had published his photo before, he would not have killed; but they waited – until he killed they would not publish his photo. He wanted to be a celebrity; just an ordinary human desire. And he was ready to pay with his life to become known to the whole world, recognized by everybody for at least one day.Until we change the basic grounds of humanity, terrorism is going to become more and more a normal, everyday affair. It will happen in the airplanes, it will happen in the buses. It will start happening in the cars. It will start happening to strangers. Somebody will suddenly come and shoot you – not that you have done anything to him, but just the hunter is back.The hunter was satisfied in war. Now war has stopped and perhaps there is no possibility for it. The hunter is back; now we cannot fight collectively. Each individual has to do something to release his own steam.Things are interconnected. The first thing that has to be changed is that man should be made more rejoicing – something which all the religions have killed. The real criminals are not caught. These terrorists and other criminals are the victims.It is all the religions who are the real criminals because they have destroyed all the possibilities of rejoicing. They have destroyed the possibility of enjoying the small things of life; they have condemned everything that nature provides you to make you happy, to make you feel excited, feel pleasant. They have taken everything away; and if they have not been able to take away a few things because they are so ingrained in your biology – like sex – they have at least been able to poison them.Friedrich Nietzsche, according to me, is one of the greatest seers of the Western world; his eyes really go penetrating to the very root of a problem. But because others could not see it – their eyes were not so penetrating, nor was their intelligence so sharp – the man lived alone, abandoned, isolated, unloved, unrespected.He says in one of his statements that man has been taught by religions to condemn sex, to renounce sex. Religion has not been able to manage it; and man has tried hard, but has failed because it is so deeply rooted in his biology; it constitutes his whole body. He is born out of sex – how can he get rid of it except by committing suicide? So man has tried, and religions have helped him to get rid of it; thousands of disciplines and strategies have been used. The total result is that sex is there, but poisoned.That word poisoned is a tremendous insight. Religions have not been able to take away sex, but they have certainly been successful in poisoning it.The same is the situation about other things: religions are condemning your living in comfort. Now, a man who is living in comfort and luxury cannot become a terrorist. Religions have condemned riches, praised poverty; now, a man who is rich cannot be a terrorist. Only the “blessed ones” who are poor can be terrorists – because they have nothing to lose. And because others have things they don’t have, they are boiling up against the whole of society. Religions have been trying to console them.But then came communism – a materialist religion – which provoked people and said to them, “Your old religions are all opium to the people, and it is not because of your evil actions in this life or in past lives that you are suffering poverty. It is because of the evil exploitation of the bourgeois, the super-rich that you are suffering.”The last sentence in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is: “Proletariats of the whole world unite; you have nothing to lose and you have the whole world to gain.” – you are already poor, hungry, naked, so what can you lose? Your death will not make you more miserable than your life is making you. So why not take a chance and destroy those people who have taken everything away from you. Take those things back, distribute them.What the religions have somehow been consoling people with, communism suddenly made them aware of: although it was wrong and it was cunning and it was a lie, it kept people in a state of being half asleep.Now that means this world is never going to be peaceful if we don’t withdraw all the rotten ideas that have been implanted in man. The first are the religions. Their values should be removed so that man can smile again, can laugh again, can rejoice again, can be natural again.Second, it has to be put clearly before the people that what communism is saying is psychologically wrong. You are falling from one trap into another. No two men are equal; hence the idea of equality is nonsense. And if you decide to be equal, then you have to accept a dictatorship of the proletariat. That means you have to lose your freedom.First the church took away your freedom, God took away your freedom. Now communism replaces your church, and it will take away your freedom. And without freedom you cannot rejoice; you live in fear, not in joy.If we can clean the basement of the human mind’s unconscious – and that’s what my work is. It can be cleaned away: the terrorism is not in the bombs in your hands; the terrorism is in your unconscious. Otherwise, this state of affairs is going to grow more bitter. It seems all kinds of blind people have bombs in their hands and are throwing them at random.The Third World War would have released people for ten or fifteen years. But the Third World War cannot happen because if it happens it won’t relieve people, it will only destroy people.So individual violence will increase – it is increasing. And all your governments and all your religions will go on perpetuating the old strategies without understanding the new situation.The new situation is that every human being needs to go through therapy, needs to understand his unconscious intentions, needs to go through meditation so that he can calm down, become cool, and look toward the world with a new perspective – of silence.Osho,Whenever in life I've had a bout of feeling miserable, a point always comes when I just laugh at myself, feel freedom return and see that all I had done was to stop loving myself.This insight in itself is perhaps not particularly profound, but at the moment of its realization I am always amazed to see how easily, for what and for how long I am willing to forsake my own self-love. Is this at the root of most people's suffering or is it just my trip?It is not just your trip. It is at the root of most people’s suffering – but not with the meaning you are giving to it.It is not that you have stopped loving yourself that you fall into misery. It is that you have created a self which does not exist at all, so sometimes this unreal self suffers misery in loving others because out of unreality love is not possible. And it is not on one side: with two unrealities trying to love each other, sooner or later the arrangement is going to fail. When this arrangement fails, you fall upon yourself – there is nowhere else to go. So you think, “I had forgotten to love myself.”In a way it is a small relief, at least instead of two unrealities now you have only one. But what will you do by loving yourself? And how long can you manage to remain loving yourself? It is unreal; it won’t allow you to see it for a long time because that is dangerous: if you see it for a long time, this so-called self will disappear, and that will be a real freedom from misery.Love will remain unaddressed to someone else or to yourself. Love will remain unaddressed because there is nobody to address, and when love is there unaddressed, there is great bliss.But this unreal self won’t allow you much time. Soon you will be falling in love with someone else again because the unreal self needs the support of other unrealities. So people fall in love and fall out of love and fall in love and fall out of love – and the phenomenon is strange, that they do it dozens of times and still they don’t see the point. They are miserable when they are in love with someone else; they are miserable when they are alone and not in love, a bit relieved for the moment.In India, when a person dies, people carry him on a stretcher-like construction on their shoulders. But they go on changing it on the way, on their shoulders – from this shoulder they will put it on the right, and after a few minutes they will again change and put it on the left. It feels a relief when you put it from the left shoulder onto the right. Nothing is being changed – the weight is there and on you, but this left shoulder feels a kind of relief. It is momentary because soon the right shoulder will start hurting so you will have to change it again.And this is what your life is. You go on changing the other, thinking that perhaps this woman, this man will bring you the paradise you have always been longing for. But everybody brings hell – without fail! And nobody is to be condemned for it because they are doing exactly the same as you are doing: they are carrying an unreal self out of which nothing can grow. It cannot blossom. It is empty – decorated, but inside empty and hollow.So when you see somebody from far away he or she is appealing. As you come closer the appeal becomes less. When you meet, it is not a meeting but a clash. And suddenly you see the other person is empty, and you have been deceived, cheated because the other person has nothing which had been promised.The same is the situation of the other person about you. All promises fail, and you become a burden to each other, a misery to each other, a sadness to each other, destructive to each other. You separate. For a little while there is relief, but your inner unreality cannot leave you in this state for long; soon you will be searching for another woman, another man, and you will get into the same trap. Only the faces are different; the inner reality is the same – empty.If you really want to get rid of misery and suffering then you will have to understand you don’t have a self. Then it will be not just a small relief but a tremendous relief. If you don’t have a self, the need for the other disappears. It was the need of the unreal self to go on being nourished by the other. You don’t need the other. And listen carefully: when you don’t need the other, you can love, and that love will not bring misery.Going beyond needs, demands, desires, love becomes a very soft sharing, a great understanding. When you understand yourself, that very day you have understood the whole of humanity. Then nobody can make you miserable; you know that they are suffering from an unreal self, and they are throwing their misery on anybody who is close by.Your love will make you capable of helping the person you love to get rid of the self. I know of only one present. Love can present you only with one thing: that you are not, that your self is just imaginary. This realization between two persons suddenly makes them one because two nothings cannot be two. Two somethings will be two, but two nothings cannot be two: two nothings start melting and merging. They are bound to become one.For example, if we are sitting here… If everybody is an ego then there are so many people; they can be counted. But there are moments I can see – perhaps many times you see them too – when there is utter silence. Then you cannot count how many people are here. There is only one consciousness, one silence, one nothingness, one selflessness. And only in that state can two persons live in eternal joy, can any group live in tremendous beauty; the whole of humanity can live in great benediction. But try to see the self, and you will not find it. Not finding it is of great importance.I have told many times the story of Bodhidharma and his meeting with the Chinese emperor, Wu – a very strange meeting, very fruitful.Emperor Wu was perhaps at that time the greatest emperor in the world; he ruled over all China, Mongolia, Korea, the whole of Asia except India. He became convinced of the truth of Gautam Buddha’s teachings, but the people who had brought the message of Buddha were scholars. None of them were mystics.Then the news came that Bodhidharma was coming, and there was a great thrill all over the land. Because Emperor Wu had become influenced by Gautam Buddha, his whole empire had become influenced by the same teaching. And now a real mystic, a buddha, was coming. It was such a great joy!Emperor Wu had never before come to the boundary where India and China meet to receive anyone. With great respect he welcomed Bodhidharma, and he asked, “I have been asking all the monks and the scholars who have been coming, but nobody has been of any help – I have tried everything. But how to get rid of this self? And Buddha says, ‘Unless you become a no-self, your misery cannot end.’”He was sincere. Bodhidharma looked into his eyes, and he said, “I will be staying by the side of the river near the mountain in the temple. Come tomorrow morning, at four o’clock exactly, and I will finish this self forever. But remember, you are not to bring any arms with you, any guards with you; you have to come alone.”Wu was a little worried – the man was strange! “How can he just destroy my self so quickly? He had been told by the scholars it takes lives and lives of meditation; then the self disappears. This man is weird! And he wants me in the darkness, early in the morning at four o’clock, alone, even without a sword, no guards, no other companion. This man seems to be strange, he could do anything. And what does he mean that he will kill the self forever? He can kill me, but how will he kill the self?”The whole night he could not sleep. He changed his mind again and again: to go or not to go? But there was something in the man’s eyes and there was something in his voice, and there was some aura of authority when he said, “Just come at four o’clock sharp, and I will finish this self forever! You need not be worried about it.”What he said looked absurd, but the way he said it and the way he looked were so authoritative: he knew what he was saying. Finally Wu had to decide to go. He decided to risk: “At the most he can kill me – what else? And I have tried everything. I cannot attain this no-self, and without attaining this no-self there is no end to misery.”He knocked on the temple door, and Bodhidharma said, “I knew you would come; I knew also that the whole night you would be changing your decision. But that does not matter – you have come. Now sit down in the lotus posture, close your eyes, and I am going to sit in front of you.“The moment you find your self inside, catch hold of it so I can kill it. Just catch hold of it tightly and tell me that you have caught it, and I will kill it and it will be finished. It is a question of minutes.”Wu was a little afraid. Bodhidharma looked like a madman; he is painted like a madman – he was not like that, but the paintings are symbolic. That’s the impression he must have left on people. It was not his real face, but that must be the face that people would have remembered.He was sitting with his big staff in front of Wu, and he said to him, “Don’t miss a second. Just the moment you catch hold of it – search inside every nook and corner – open your eyes and then tell me that you have caught it, and I will finish it.”Then there was silence. One hour passed, two hours passed and the sun was rising, and Wu was a different man. In those two hours he looked inside himself in every nook and corner. He had to look – that man was sitting there; he could have hit him on his head with his staff.You could expect anything whatsoever. Bodhidharma was not a man of etiquette, manner; he was not part of Wu’s court, so Wu had to look intently, intensively. As he looked, he became relaxed, because it was nowhere. And in looking for it, all other thoughts disappeared. The search was so intense that his whole energy was involved in it; there was nothing left to think and desire, and this and that.As the sun was rising, Bodhidharma saw Wu’s face; he was not the same man – such silence, such depth. He had disappeared. Bodhidharma shook him and told him, “Open your eyes – it is not there. I don’t have to kill it. I am a nonviolent man, I don’t kill anything! But this self does not exist. Because you never look at it, it goes on existing. It is in your not looking for it, in your unawareness, that it exists. Now it is gone.”Two hours had passed, and Wu was immensely glad. He had never tasted such sweetness, such freshness, such newness, such beauty. And he was not.Bodhidharma had fulfilled his promise. Emperor Wu bowed down, touched his feet and said, “Please forgive me thinking that you are mad, thinking that you don’t know manners, thinking that you are weird, thinking that you can be dangerous. I have never seen a more compassionate man than you. I am totally fulfilled. Now there is no question in me.”When Emperor Wu was dying, he said that on his grave, the memorial, a statement about Bodhidharma should be engraved in gold for the centuries to know: “There was a man who looked mad, but who was capable of doing miracles. Without doing anything he helped me to be a non-self. And since then everything has changed. Everything is the same, but I am not the same, and life has become just a pure song of silence.”

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 19 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Sometimes, when dark sides of my mind come up, it really scares me. It is very difficult for me to accept that it is just the polar opposite of the bright ones. I feel dirty and guilty and not worthy of sitting with you in your immaculate presence.I want to face all facets of my mind and accept them because I hear you often say that acceptance is the condition to transcend the mind.Can you please talk about acceptance?The basic thing to be understood is that you are not the mind – neither the bright one nor the dark one. If you get identified with the beautiful part, then it is impossible to disidentify yourself from the ugly part; they are two sides of the same coin. You can have it whole, or you can throw it away whole, but you cannot divide it.The whole anxiety of man is that he wants to choose that which looks beautiful, bright; he wants to choose all the silver linings, leaving the dark cloud behind. But he does not know that silver linings cannot exist without the dark cloud. The dark cloud is the background, absolutely necessary for silver linings to show.Choosing is anxiety. Choosing is creating trouble for yourself. Being choiceless means: the mind is there and it has a dark side and it has a bright side – so what? What has it to do with you? Why should you be worried about it?The moment you are not choosing, all worry disappears. A great acceptance arises, that this is how the mind has to be, this is the nature of the mind – and it is not your problem because you are not the mind. If you were the mind, there would have been no problem at all. Then who would choose and who would think of transcending? And who would try to accept and understand acceptance?You are separate, totally separate. You are only a witness and nothing else.An observer who gets identified with anything that he finds pleasant and forgets that the unpleasant is coming just behind it as a shadow… You are not troubled by the pleasant side – you rejoice in it. The trouble comes when the polar opposite asserts – then you are torn apart.But you started the whole trouble. Falling from being just a witness, you became identified. The biblical story of the fall is just a fiction. But this is the real fall: the fall from being a witness into getting identified with something and losing your witnessing.Just try once in a while to let the mind be whatever it is. Remember, you are not it. And you are going to have a great surprise. The less identified you are, the less powerful the mind becomes because its power comes from your identification; it sucks your blood. But when you start to stand aloof and away, the mind starts shrinking.The day you are completely unidentified with the mind, even for a single moment, there is the revelation. Mind simply dies; it is no longer there. Where it was so full, where it was so continuous – day in, day out, waking, sleeping, it was there – suddenly it is not there. You look all around and it is emptiness, it is nothingness.With the mind, the self disappears. Then there is only a certain quality of awareness, with no I in it. At the most you can call it something similar to am-ness, but not I-ness. To be even more exact, it is is-ness because even in am-ness some shadow of the I is still there. The moment you know its is-ness, it has become universal.With the disappearance of the mind the self disappears. So many things disappear which were so important to you, so troublesome to you. You were trying to solve them and they were becoming more and more complicated; everything was a problem, an anxiety, and there seemed to be no way out.I will remind you of the story The Goose is Out. It is concerned with the mind and your is-ness:The master tells the disciple to meditate on a koan: a small goose is put into a bottle, fed and nourished. The goose goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, and fills the whole bottle. Now it is too big; it cannot come out of the bottle’s mouth – the mouth is too small. And the koan is that you have to bring the goose out without destroying the bottle, without killing the goose.Now it is mind-boggling. What can you do? The goose is too big; you cannot take it out unless you break the bottle, but that is not allowed. Or you can bring it out by killing it; then you don’t care whether it comes out alive or dead. That is not allowed either.Day in, day out, the disciple meditates, finds no way, thinks this way and that way – but in fact there is no way. Tired, utterly exhausted, a sudden revelation: suddenly he understands that the master cannot be interested in the bottle and the goose; they must represent something else. The bottle is the mind, you are the goose. And with witnessing, it is possible. Without being in the mind, you can become identified with it so much that you start feeling you are in it!He runs to the master to say that the goose is out. And the master says, “You have understood it. Now keep it out. It has never been in.”If you go on struggling with the goose and the bottle, there is no way for you to solve it. It is the realization: “It must represent something else; otherwise the master cannot give it to me. And what can it be?” – because the whole function between the master and the disciple, the whole business is about the mind and awareness.Awareness is the goose which is not in the bottle of the mind. But you believe that it is in it and asking everyone how to get it out. And there are idiots who will help you with techniques to get out of it. I call them idiots because they have not understood the thing at all.The goose is out, has never been in, so the question of bringing it out does not arise.Mind is just a procession of thoughts passing in front of you on the screen of the brain. You are an observer. But you start getting identified with beautiful things – those are bribes. And once you get caught in the beautiful things you are also caught in the ugly things, because mind cannot exist without duality.Awareness cannot exist with duality, and mind cannot exist without duality. Awareness is non-dual, and mind is dual. So just watch. I don’t teach you any solutions. I teach you the solution: just get back a little and watch. Create a distance between you and your mind.Whether it is good – beautiful, delicious, something that you would like to enjoy closely – or it is ugly, remain as far away as possible. Look at it just the way you look at a film. But people get identified even with films.I have not seen any movie for a long time. When I was young I have seen people weeping, tears falling down – and nothing is happening! It is good that in a movie house it is dark; it saves them from feeling embarrassed: nothing is happening!I used to ask my father, “Did you see? The fellow by your side was crying!”He said, “The whole hall was crying. The scene was such…”“But,” I said, “there is only a screen and nothing else. Nobody is killed, there is no tragedy happening – just a projection of a film, just pictures moving on the screen. And people laugh, and people weep, and for three hours they are almost lost. They become part of the movie, they become identified with some character.”My father said to me, “If you are raising questions about people’s reactions then you cannot enjoy the film.”I said, “I can enjoy the film, but I don’t want to cry; I don’t see any enjoyment in it. I can see it as a film, but I don’t want to become a part of it. These people are all becoming a part of it.”My grandfather had an old barber who was an opium addict. For something which was possible to do in five minutes he would take two hours, and he would talk continuously. But they were old friends from their childhood. I can still see my grandfather sitting in the chair of the old barber… And he was a lovely talker. These opium addicts have a certain quality, a beauty of talking, telling stories about themselves, what is happening day-to-day – it is true!My grandfather would simply be saying, “Yes, right, that’s great.”I said to him one day, “You go on saying, ‘Yes, right, it is great,’ about everything.’ Sometimes he is talking nonsense, simply irrelevant.”He said, “What do you want? That man is an opium addict.” In India razor blades are not used; blades almost like six-inch long knives are used as razor blades. “Now what do you want me to say? – with that man who has a knife, a sharp knife in his hand, just on my throat. To say no to him… He will kill me! And he knows it. He sometimes tells me, ‘You never say no. You always say yes, you always say great.’ And I have told him, ‘You should understand that you are always under the influence of opium. It is impossible to talk with you, to discuss with you or to disagree with you. You have a knife on my throat, and you want me to say no to something?’”I said, “Then why don’t you change from this man? There are so many other barbers, and this man takes two hours for a five-minute job. Sometimes he shaves half your beard and then he says, ‘I am coming back, you sit.’ And he is gone for an hour because he gets involved in a discussion with somebody and completely forgets that a customer is sitting in his chair. Then he comes and says, ‘My God, so you are still sitting here?’”And my grandfather would say, “What can I do? I cannot go home with half the beard shaved. Just complete it. Where have you been?”The barber would say, “I got in such a good argument with somebody that I completely forgot about you. It is good that that man had to go; otherwise you would have been sitting here the whole day. And sometimes I don’t even close the shop at night. I simply go home, just forget to close it, and once in a while a customer is still sitting in the chair and I am sleeping. Somebody has to say to him, ‘Now you can go; that man will not be seen again before tomorrow morning. He is fast asleep in his home. He has forgotten to close his shop and he has forgotten about you.’”Sometimes new people went into his shop, and became angry. He would say, “Calm down. At the most you need not pay me. I have cut only half of the beard; you can just go. I don’t want to argue. You need not pay me; I don’t ask even half payment.”But nobody can leave his chair with half the beard shaved, or half the head shaved! You ask him just to shave the beard and he starts shaving your head, and by the time you notice, he has already done the job. So he asks you, “Now what do you want? – because almost one-fourth of the work is done. If you want to keep it this way I can leave it; otherwise I can finish it. But I will not charge for it because if you say that you never wanted it to be cut, then it is my fault and I should take the punishment. I will not charge you.”This man was dangerous! But my grandfather used to say, “He is dangerous but he is lovely and I have become so much identified with him that I cannot conceive that if he dies before me I will be able to go to another barber’s shop. For my whole life he has been my barber. The identity has become so deep that I may stop shaving my beard, but I cannot change my barber.”But fortunately my grandfather died before the opium-addict barber.You get identified with anything. People get identified with persons and then they create misery for themselves. They get identified with things, then they get miserable if that thing is missing.Identification is the root cause of your misery. And every identification is identification with the mind.Just step aside, let the mind pass. And soon you will be able to see that there is no problem at all: the goose is out. You don’t have to break the bottle, you don’t have to kill the goose either.Osho,How best to deal with fear? It affects me variously, from a vague uneasiness or knotted stomach to a dizzying panic, as if the world is ending. Where does it come from? Where does it go?It is the same question that I was just answering.All your fears are by-products of identification. You love a woman and fear comes in the same parcel with the love: she may leave you – she has already left somebody and come with you. There is a precedent; perhaps she will do the same to you. There is fear, you feel knots in the stomach. You are too attached.You cannot get a simple fact: you have come alone in the world; you have been here yesterday also, without this woman, perfectly well, without any knots in the stomach. And if this woman goes tomorrow, what is the need of the knots? You know how to be without her and you will be able to be without her.The fear is that things may change tomorrow: somebody may die, you may go bankrupt, your job may be taken away. There are a thousand and one things which may change. You are burdened with fears and fears, and none of them are valid because yesterday also you were full of all these fears, unnecessarily. Things may have changed, but you are still alive. And man has an immense capacity to adjust himself to any situation.They say that only man and cockroaches have this immense capacity of adjustment. That’s why wherever you find man you will find cockroaches, and wherever you find cockroaches you will find man. They go together, they have a similarity. Even when man traveled to faraway places like the North Pole or the South Pole he suddenly found that he had brought cockroaches with him, and they were perfectly healthy and living and reproducing.If you just look around the earth you can see man lives in thousands of different climates, geographical situations, political situations, sociological situations, religious situations, but he manages to live. And he has lived for centuries; things go on changing, he goes on adjusting himself. There is nothing to fear. Even if the world ends, so what? You will be ending with it. Do you think you will be standing on an island and the whole world will end, leaving you alone? Don’t be worried. At least you will have a few cockroaches with you!What is the problem if the world ends? It has been asked of me many times. But what is the problem? – if it ends, it ends. It does not create any problem because we will not be here; we will be ending with it, and there will be no one to worry about. It will be really the greatest freedom from fear. The world ending means every problem ending, every disturbance ending, every knot in your stomach ending. I don’t see the problem. But I know that everybody is full of fear.But the question is the same: the fear is part of the mind. The mind is a coward, and has to be a coward because it doesn’t have any substance – it is empty and hollow, and it is afraid of everything. And basically it is afraid that one day you may become aware. That will really be the end of the world!Not the end of the world, but the mind’s basic fear is of your becoming aware, your coming to a state of meditation where mind has to disappear. Because of that fear, it keeps people away from meditation, makes them enemies of people like me who are trying to spread something of meditation, some way of awareness and witnessing. People become antagonistic to me – not without any reason; their fear is well-founded. They may not be aware of it, but their mind is really afraid to come close to anything that can create more awareness. That will be the beginning of the end of the mind. That will be the death of the mind.But for you there is no fear. The death of the mind will be your rebirth, your beginning to really live. You should be happy, you should rejoice in the death of the mind, because nothing can be a greater freedom. Nothing else can give you wings to fly into the sky; nothing else can make the whole sky yours. Mind is a prison. Awareness is getting out of the prison – or realizing it has never been in the prison; it was just thinking that it was in the prison. All fears disappear.I am also living in the same world, but I have never for a single moment felt any fear because nothing can be taken away from me. I can be killed, but I will be seeing it happening, so what is being killed is not me, is not my awareness.The greatest discovery in life, the most precious treasure, is of awareness. Without it you are bound to be in darkness, full of fears. And you will go on creating new fears – there is no end to it. You will live in fear, you will die in fear, and you will never be able to taste something of freedom. It was all the time your potential; any moment you could have claimed it, but you never claimed it.It is your responsibility.Osho,When you came to say farewell to Dadaji on the podium in Buddha Hall, suddenly the area where you and Dadaji's body were became like a film. You both seemed to be without substance. The other half of the podium where Mataji sat, and the rest of Buddha Hall where we were all sitting, seemed normal. Just the part where you were seemed different. What happened?Death, if it happens with enlightenment, is a tremendous experience. On the one hand the man dies; on the other hand he achieves the totality of life.When I touched my father’s seventh chakra, just on the top of the head, those who were perceptive, silent, meditative, may have experienced something strange happening. According to the centuries-old science of inner reality, a man’s life energy is released from the center, the chakra, at which he was living.Most people die from the lowest chakra, the sex center. There are seven chakras in the body from where life can go out of the body. The last is on top of the head, and unless you are enlightened life cannot go out from that chakra.When I touched my father’s seventh chakra, it was still warm. Life had left it, but it was as if the physical part of the chakra was still throbbing with the tremendous happening.It is a rare happening. And in that moment it may have looked to many as if the small section on the podium where I was with my father’s body was in a different world. It was, in a sense, because it was on a different level. Just by his feet was my mother, and ten thousand sannyasins in Buddha Hall – that was the normal world.But something abnormal had happened. The chakra was still warm, the body was as if it were still rejoicing in the phenomenon. If you had eyes to see, then this distinction was bound to be seen. It is good that the difference came to your vision. It is a difference of levels. The lowest is where most people are living, and the effort here in this mystery school is to bring everybody to the highest.Slowly, slowly, moving from one center into another, you will also feel a few things within your body. For example, if you are existing at the sex center, you will find a subtle division – below the lower center and above the lower center. You can feel that in the body below it and the body above it there seems to be a division, because the lower body has no centers, no chakras. It is the same for anybody. Wherever he is, the body below the sex center remains the same; it is our roots in the earth.But if your center changes, comes to a higher level – for example if your heart becomes your very life – you will see again that below your heart the whole body is separate, and above the heart the whole body is separate. Wherever your energy is, there will be a separation line.When you reach to the seventh chakra, then the whole body is below it and there is no division. The seventh chakra is only in a sense in the body; otherwise it is above the body, as if a line touching your head is pulsing. Your whole body will become one, and for the first time you will see there are no divisions. This you can watch.With each chakra coming into function, your actions will change, your responses will change, your dreams will change, your aspirations will change, your whole personality will go through a change. As you move higher, newer dimensions start happening which were not available to you before.For example, the heart center is almost in the middle; three centers are above it and three centers are below it. The man of the heart will be the most balanced man. In his actions, in his feelings, in everything he does he will find a subtle balance, an equilibrium. He will never be hectic; there will be a grace.In other words, he has found the center of his life, exactly the middle path. You will not see any extremes in him, and because all extremes have disappeared from his life he will have a balanced view of everything. He will not be rightist, he will not be leftist; he will always be fair and just.If the world was run according to me, then I would choose as magistrates and judges only people who are at their heart center, because only they can be just and fair. It is not a question of intellectual qualifications or seniority; it is a question of your inner balance.A Sufi story is:Mulla Nasruddin is chosen as an honorary magistrate. The first case appears. He hears one side and declares to the court, “Within five minutes I will be back with the judgment.”The court clerk could not believe it – he has not heard the other side! The clerk whispered in his ear, “What are you doing? Don’t you see a simple thing? You have heard only one party, one side. The other side is waiting, and without hearing them you cannot give any judgment.”Mulla Nasruddin said, “Don’t try to confuse me. Just now I am absolutely clear. If I hear the other side too, then there is bound to be confusion.”These Sufi stories are not just ordinary stories, they are extraordinary. It is saying that every judge is listening only to one side because he already has a prejudiced mind; he is not capable of listening to both sides. For that a totally different kind of man is needed, which no educationalist concerning law and jurisprudence has even thought about.You ask the judge to be fair, but his mind is prejudiced. He cannot even hear both stories, both sides with the same clarity. It is impossible. He only pretends. In all the courts of the world there are pretensions. Now that I have been in the courts I can see, and say with absolute authority that they don’t listen to both sides. They can’t! I am not complaining: I am simply stating a fact. Their education is wrong.As you go above the heart center, new things that may not have ever been a part of your life start happening. The next chakra above the heart is the throat. If that chakra has your life energy, then whatever you say has a deep authority in it. Without any effort to convert anybody, it converts because it convinces.The chakra above that is the most famous and well-known: the one on the forehead between the two eyes. That kind of energy moving through the agnya chakra, the sixth, has a deep hypnotic influence. The person is not doing anything, it is not managed; it simply happens, his eyes become so full of some unknown magnetism.The man with the seventh chakra open has the capacity, the intrinsic flowering, so that his presence becomes infectious. Below the seventh, the presence is not infectious; with the seventh chakra opening, it is as if the consciousness has blossomed and there is a fragrance, an aura.Whoever is available to this presence, to this aura, will feel the freshness of a breeze, the freshness after a shower. Many rotten things – rubbish that you have been entangled in, fighting – will simply disappear from your life. Just a touch from this kind of man will be a transformation.But that evening something was transpiring, and what you noted was an energy phenomenon; many others must have noted the same. I answer such questions in order that you become aware of your own situation and start moving upward.Osho,Do you ever surprise yourself? – and if you do, who is surprising whom?There is no one to surprise or to be surprised. I am as absent as I will be when I will be dead, with only one difference: that right now my absence has a body, and then, my absence will not have a body.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 20 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,For me, being here with you is as if I have arrived at the end of a long journey, no desire to be anywhere else. My heart should jump high and I should bliss out, but looking at myself, carrying this great gift of being with you, there seems to be only a great sense of calm. Happiness and sadness are always simultaneously in me and it is as if they cancel each other out. It seems as if my life flame burns constantly but low, and this worries me.This question of whether I am living intensely enough or not is with me always and pulls my energy down even more. Please destroy it.It is good that you feel calm and quiet, rather than ecstatic, excited, because every ecstasy, every excitement is bound to come down; it cannot remain high forever. It burns your energy and burns it intensely. But you don’t have an inexhaustible source; as an individual, in the body, all that you have is limited.To be with me, silently and calmly, peacefully is the right way; you can afford it. Even with the limited sources of individual beings, a calm state of mind can remain forever.I have seen both types of people coming to me. Those who come and become too excited are soon exhausted, and when they are exhausted they are angry at me; when they are exhausted they turn into enemies rather than into friends. Obviously to them I am the cause for their breakdown and they cannot forgive me. Deep down in their minds they carry an idea that ecstasy was given to them and now it has been taken away.I don’t give you anything and I don’t take anything away. Whatever happens in you simply happens in you; I am not more than a catalytic agent. So the best that can happen to you is a deep calmness. It is more reliable because it is going to last your whole life – maybe even beyond life.You are getting mixed up in your question between this happening in my presence, with me, and your intensive living. Intensive living I teach to people just so that they can transcend their desires, their turmoil, quickly. If they live very miserly, as many live, then in this life there is no hope for them to experience transcendence.Don’t mix that with your state, because your calmness is the beginning of transcendence. That’s why you are feeling that your happiness and sadness are happening together. It cannot happen – either you can be happy or you can be sad. You cannot be sadly happy, neither can you be happily sad. That would be a very strange situation!What is happening is that your calmness is giving you this impression because in your calmness, you are feeling something that belongs to happiness and something that belongs to sadness. Sadness is not all wrong; happiness is not all right.The essential part of happiness is a feeling of well-being; that you are feeling in your calmness, so you think you are happy. The essential part of sadness is silence; that you are feeling in your calmness. These can both exist together; in fact they can only exist together.A silent feeling of well-being, that whatever is happening is perfectly right: don’t ask me to destroy it, ask me to enhance it. Don’t make it a problem! It is not. It is a tremendous gift that the master never gives and the disciple always receives.There are things the master never says and the disciple always hears. It is one of those mysterious phenomena that are not handed over by the master to you – but you receive it, it arises within you.It is just like the sunrise when millions of birds start singing. They are not even aware of the sunrise, but something in their hearts are triggered by the presence of the sun; the sun is not aware of so many birds. Millions of flowers suddenly open their petals. The sun is not going to each single flower saying, “Wake up! It is time, and I have come.” Neither are the flowers aware of why they are opening their petals, why they are releasing their perfume. It is all happening silently. The presence of the sun is needed, but that presence does not do anything. Just its being there is enough.Gurdjieff used to say that the situation of the human mind is like that of a small school class. The master is out, and all children are shouting and screaming and jumping and every kind of thing is going on, books are being thrown at each other. Then suddenly the master appears and there is absolute silence. All screaming, all jumping, all throwing books disappears. They are all leaning on their books – although they are not reading, but pretending that they are reading.One thing is certain, that the very presence of the master makes a difference. He does not do anything, he does not say anything. If he needs to say anything, if he needs to do anything, he is not a master – he is not respected, he is not loved. The children don’t feel that he is worthy enough that they should behave differently in his presence than they behave in his absence.In ancient Eastern scriptures it is again and again discussed because it has been one of the eternal questions: should the disciple respect the master or not? All the organized religions have decided that he should respect.I have been talking to different religious leaders and I have said to them, “That is just wrong. The disciple should not respect. The master should be respectable. That is a totally different thing. The master should have the weight; he should be lovable, he should be respectable. Don’t put the responsibility on the disciple, who is after all a disciple, a learner. It is easy for him to err.”One of my vice-chancellors said in his convocation address, that respect for the teachers is disappearing from the world of students, and this is dangerous. Ordinarily nobody stands up in a convocation address, because that is not a place to discuss. But I stood up and I said, “Before you say anything more, let me correct you. You are right in your observation that respect is disappearing from the student community, but you are wrong in your conclusion. The responsibility is not of the students but of the teachers. Can you say with authority that the teachers are worthy of respect? And if you cannot say it with authority that the teachers are worthy of respect, then why make the students responsible for this whole situation? If the teacher is worthy of respect, the question of respect from the students does not arise at all.”I said to him, “I am saying this to you with my own experience.” At that time I had been a teacher in the university for five years and I had not come across a single student who was not respectful. “And if you come across students who are disrespectful to you, you should go home and think over it. Something must be wrong in you. Somewhere you have lost the worth.”There was immense silence in the whole auditorium. The professors were shocked, the students were shocked, the chancellor was suddenly frozen like a statue, and the vice-chancellor could not think of what to say. I said, “You can see this silence – I have not told anybody to be silent, but most of them are my students or have been my students and they know what I mean.”The vice-chancellor had to take his words back. He said, “I can understand it. The responsibility should always be on the stronger person, not on the weaker person. The student is weak, a learner, has no power. The teacher has all the power, all the learning, all the authority and if he cannot manage respect, then he is responsible. You are right.”But he used the word manage. I didn’t say anything, but that was a wrong word. To manage means you are thinking about it, you are using certain tactics, strategies. A real master simply comes among his disciples and there is silence, and there is calm.The same happens within you. You need not be worried about intensive living. If you can live this calmness, if this calmness can become your very life, where happiness and sadness contribute their essential beauty, then there is no need to think of people who talk of ecstasy. Their ecstasy will be gone in two days; your calmness will go with you beyond the grave.Osho,Only in moments of love do I feel my body dancing with joyful sweetness, and only in moments of love do musicians create music which touches my heart. To feel the music moving my body and the dance moving the fingers of the musicians is for me the most beautiful experience. Can you please say something about it?It is a beautiful moment and a beautiful experience – but there is much more in life. There is much more than music, because music is after all sound, and there is silence too. Music is beautiful but you should not forget silence. Dance is beautiful, but there is something beyond it: an absolute unmoving state of consciousness: no dance.There are beauties and beauties; and there are categories. Music and dance are very physical. As far as they go they are beautiful, but one should not get stuck with them, one should not be stopped by them. They should open the door for the higher realm. For example, if you are really a lover of music, soon music will be forgotten and you will be entering into silence. If you are really in deep attachment with dance, soon the dance has to disappear, so that you can be in an unmoving state of being.In China there is an ancient story:A man declared himself to be the greatest archer, and he went to the king and said, “I am ready to accept anybody’s challenge. I have practiced archery for thirty years, and I know that there is nobody in the whole empire who can be a competitor to me. A time should be given and within this time, if there is somebody who wants to compete with me, I am ready; otherwise you have to declare me the champion of the whole empire, the master archer.”The king knew that he was the greatest archer he had seen and what he was saying was not boasting: it was really true. There was nobody in the whole empire even close to him; he had gone into the art so deeply. But an old servant who was the constant companion of the king, who was very respected by the king because his father had died early and this servant had been almost a father to him: he had protected him, he had disciplined him, he had trained him to be a king, and he managed to put him on the throne, to make him the emperor. He was sitting by his side on the ground, and he laughed.The king said, “Why are you laughing? What he is saying is true. I know this man, I know his archery. Even with closed eyes he never misses his target; with closed eyes he can kill a flying bird. There is nobody who is in any way comparable to him.”The old man said, “You are too young. I know a man before whom this man is just an amateur. He is very ancient, very old – older than me. He lives deep in the mountains. Before you declare this man the champion, he has to meet that old man. Just meeting him will be enough – a competition is out of the question.”This was a great challenge: just meeting him will be enough, a competition is out of the question – you cannot compete with that man, he is a master. The servant showed the archer the way to the place where he could be found, the cave where he lived. The archer went miles into the mountains, finally found the cave and laughed, because there was the old man sitting not even with a bow in the cave anywhere, no arrows – what kind of master archer is he? And he was so old, maybe ninety, ninety-five or more. He could not hit the target, his hands would tremble, he was so old!But the man said, “I have been sent by the king to meet you.”The old man said, “I have received the message of the king, but before I meet you I will give a little test. I don’t meet each and everybody! At least you must be capable of being an archer; you will have to take a little test.” To be a master archer is out of the question: he wanted to check whether he had any capacity for archery, any talent, any genius.The old man came out of his cave, took the young man with him and said, “The moment I saw you coming with your bow and with your arrows, I knew that you were an amateur because the real master does not need these things. Have you not heard the ancient saying: when a master reaches to his ultimate genius, if he is an archer he throws away his bow and his arrows; if he is a musician he throws away his musical instruments; if he is a painter he throws away his brushes, his canvases.”He said, “I have heard it, but I have never understood it.”The old man said, “Now you have come to the place where you will understand it. Come with me.”There was a rock protruding into the valley, and the valley was thousands of feet deep. If you fell from the rock there was no possibility of your being alive; in fact you could not even be found as a whole body, you would be scattered. It was a dangerous valley.The old man went onto the protruding rock; the young man was standing there trembling – he was not going onto the rock. The old man was going and the young man was trembling. The old man said, “Stop that trembling. That is not the sign of a master archer.” And the old man went to the very end of the rock, standing with half of his feet off the edge of the rock. He was standing there and he said to the young man, “Now come and stand by my side.”The young man took one step, two steps – and then fell flat, trembling, everything whirling. He said, “You have to forgive me. I cannot come where you are standing. Just a little mistake, a little breeze of wind, a little forgetfulness and you are gone forever! I have come here to meet you, not to commit suicide. I cannot believe how you are standing there.”The old man said, “That’s what archery brings to a man – an untrembling heart, a non-moving mind. Now I do not need the bow and the arrows. I know that you have looked around in my cave and I have seen your subtle smile, ‘How can this man be an archer?’ Now I will show you my archery.”He looked up and there were nine birds flying. As he looked up all the nine birds fell down on the earth. He said, “If you are absolutely immobile inside, even your eyes are enough; arrows are not needed. So go back, practice archery. Championship is far away. While I am alive, never think again of championship – although I am not a competitor. Even if you were declared champion I would not have bothered to object – who cares? Your championships, your titles are children’s games.“But the old man in the palace knows me. Now as long as I am living you cannot be a champion; you can be a champion if you really go deeper into archery, practice. And only I can make you a champion, not the king. What does he know about archery? So tell him, ‘You don’t have any authority.’ I will come in the right time if I am alive. Or I will send somebody, or I will make some arrangement, even if I am dead.”Ten years passed and the old man was dying. He called his son from the village down in the plains and told him – he was also very old – “Go to this certain archer and just report to me the situation.”He went there. The archer was very loving, very happy that the old man still remembered him and had sent his son. The son saw the big bow hanging on the wall. He asked, “What is it?”And the archer said, “I used to know what it is, now I don’t know. I will have to ask; somebody must know.”But the son said, “I have heard you are an archer.”He said, “I used to be in my youth, and in youth everybody is foolish. I used to be, but your father brought me to my senses.”This was reported to the old man, that he had forgotten the name of the bow. The old man said, “That means he has proved his mettle. I will have to go down before I die to declare him the champion, the master archer.”Now he was also capable – just looking at a bird was enough to kill it. Just those two rays going from the eyes were enough, because his inner being was so solidly immobile that those two rays became like arrows. He said, “Now I understand the meaning of the old saying: the musician breaks down his musical instruments when he really becomes a master. Then what is the use of those instruments, because they are still part of the world of sound, and the real music is silence.”Even when you are listening to music, what really touches your heart is not the sound but the gap between two sounds. How to bring that gap to your heart is the whole art of music. But if a man can bring that gap just by his presence, and you fall into deep silence, you will know the real music. Then you will know that what you used to think of as music was only a preliminary training. And the same is true about dancing, the same is true about every creative art. What it appears to be is not the reality; it is just a device so that you can become aware of something intangible, hidden, beyond.To love music is good, to love dance is good, to play music is good, to dance is good – but remember, that is not the end. You have to go far – away from music, away from dance – to understand the real beauty of any creative art. Every creative art brings you to your innermost being where there is just calmness, utter quietness, absolute silence. Then you can say, “I have heard that which cannot be heard. And I have seen that which cannot be seen.”Osho,Until now I have not had many sexual experiences, but lately I have felt to become more sexually active. I seem to avoid heterosexual men, and desire those who are homosexual.I am not clear if I am running away from sex out of fear, or toward people I really like and need. Would you please shed some light on this?It is possible that avoiding sex for a long time and now getting interested in it you will have to go slowly toward it.To be attracted to homosexuals is a step. Finally you will be attracted to heterosexuals. The homosexual is half way. Nothing is wrong in it. It is good to go gradually, mature gradually. And it is also possible the homosexual person may be a person that you like, you love, that he deserves your love. His homosexuality may be a secondary thing. If it is a secondary thing, then perhaps you can stay with the homosexual person long enough, but if it is only a passing phase then moving from no sexuality or very little sexuality toward a heterosexual man, a direct jump, will be too much and can be dangerous. It may throw you back into your avoidance.It is perfectly good that you love a homosexual. If he is a worthy person to be loved, that is even better; otherwise even his homosexuality is going to help you tremendously to reach to the heterosexual person.These are the four stages: the auto-sexual person avoids sexuality. He wants to contain his sexuality within himself, he is a kind of miser, and such people suffer from constipation. It is now a well-established psychological fact. There is no medical way to help them get rid of constipation, as their constipation has no cause in the body; their constipation has its cause in their mind.You should be reminded that the sexual center is in the mind, not in the genitals. And strangely enough, by the way, the sexual center and the food center are very close – too close. So a person who stops his sexuality starts eating too much. The energy of the sexual center starts overflowing onto the next center – that is food. He becomes a food addict; he looks at food the way a lover looks at a beloved.The second stage is homosexuality. It is a little better than being auto-sexual, confined to yourself – now at least you are connecting with your same sex. But there is a confinement still – although it is a bigger confinement – man to man, woman to woman.The third stage is heterosexual, which is the maturity of sex – when you go beyond your femaleness or your maleness, where you transcend your class and move to the opposite. And because the tension between the opposite is great, love blossoms on a grander scale. Between two homosexuals, love is – but there is no tension in it. It is not without any reason that homosexuals are called “gay” people, because there is no tension, there is no fight; they are always smiling, always looking happy. The happiness is shallow.Heterosexuals are in a conflict and in love. They laugh deeply, they weep deeply, they fight deeply, they feel for each other deeply; everything is deep because of the tension. They are known as intimate enemies. The intimacy is deep, the enmity is also deep.The fourth state is asexual, when you are fed up and you have seen all that sex can provide – its misery, its pleasure, its fights, its friendship – and slowly, slowly you see the routine, the same wheel moving. To change that boredom of the same wheel moving you may change partners; that gives you a little energy for a few days more, but again the boredom comes back.Once you are utterly bored with sex then the fourth stage is asexual. For the first time you are completely free. The first stage was very much confined to yourself; the second stage was confined to your class – man to man, woman to woman. The third was better, but still it was confined – man to woman, the same species. The fourth stage is completely free from sex: you have known it, you have understood it. Its work is finished. It is no longer a burden on you, no longer a desire in you, no longer a tension. You feel light, and for the first time you can enjoy being alone.To me this is true celibacy, not a practiced celibacy. It is through the experience of all the stages that you come to true celibacy, and the true celibacy has to be understood: it is not anti-sexual, it is only asexual. It has no antagonism, no anti-attitudes. In the fourth stage you can have sex as fun, just a biological game.So it is not that you have to drop sex; you can either drop it or you can keep it. But it has lost all the old meaning and all the old implications, all the old bondage, all the old fights, jealousies – all that is lost. If it drops, it drops; if it continues, then it is just casual friendship, with no strings attached to it, with no conditions attached to it.Osho,There have been very few enlightened women in the world, and none that I know of in this century. Is there hope for us women?It is not hard – but man has not allowed it.Man suffers from a deep inferiority complex, and to keep it repressed he keeps the woman in every possible way inferior to himself; otherwise if she is allowed freedom, allowed all her talents, her genius, the great fear of man is that she can prove superior in many dimensions. And she has many things which man is missing.Naturally the only simple way was to cut all possible ways in which the woman could grow. So all women have been left retarded. Their roots have been cut: don’t give them education, don’t let them have freedom of movement in society, don’t let them have friends of the other sex.For thousands of years it has been going on. Naturally if a woman cannot become a scientist, if a woman cannot become a poet, if a woman cannot become a great architect, a great sculptor, then the question of a woman becoming enlightened becomes very difficult. So many steps in between have been completely removed. My whole vision is to put those steps back.I am trying my best to put those steps back, so any woman of any quality has the full possibility, freedom and support to grow. Some of the women will grow to become enlightened, but no such possibility has ever before existed.So it is true you have not heard of enlightened women, particularly in this century – although there have been a few women who, in spite of all this imprisonment of their being, became enlightened. But they are not the rule, they are the exceptions. They simply prove one thing: that just to be a woman does not mean that the doors of enlightenment are closed to you.One woman was Rabiya al-Adabiya in Arabia. One woman was Meera in India. One woman was in the very ancient times, in the days of the Rig Veda – that may be five thousand years old, or ninety thousand years old, it is undecided by the scholars.These women cannot even be counted on all ten fingers. But it is enough proof that to be a woman does not mean that enlightenment is not for you. As far as I am concerned, I feel that because you have been prevented from being enlightened, or even from moving in that direction, you have more possibility now than man, for the simple reason that just as land that has not been used for many years is more fertile, it just needs seeds…

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 21 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When I sit in front of you and listen to you speak, I feel as if a process of osmosis is happening. I find I don't intellectually listen. Is this the right way or am I missing something?This is the right way. If you listen intellectually you miss, not something, but all. Intellectual listening is a kind of deafness. When I say something, you can listen to the word. You have a mind, a library in the mind of all your prejudices, philosophies, ideologies. The word has to go through all those preconceived patterns, and by the time it reaches to you it is no longer the same.It has changed so many times, passing through the whole process of intellectual listening, that when it comes out it is absolutely something else. And yet it appears to be rationally the right thing; it fits with your mind. The process of listening has managed to cut it here and there, to change it here and there, to color it here and there, to make it what you want it to be, not what it is. And you will agree with it; it is your own idea, it has nothing to do with me.Listening intellectually is not listening at all. It is a way of avoiding. The right way is that you don’t bring your mind in and you let me go into your innermost being without being hindered. Then there will be an understanding. Then there will be a communion, a real listening, because in the very process of listening, you have changed.Now the agreement that arises in your being is not agreeing with your mind, it is agreeing with something new, which your mind knows nothing of. The mind is always old, and the truth is always new; they never meet, they never coexist.You are fortunate that you can listen the right way: putting the mind aside, just allowing me to sink deeper and deeper within you. Then even though words have been used, silence has been conveyed. Even though words have been used, that which cannot be said has been said – at least has been heard. And saying is not important, hearing is important.Right listening means you will never ask how to do it. For example, if I am talking about silence and you are listening the right way, you will never ask how to be silent because in the very listening you would have tasted it. In the very listening you will have experienced it – the window has opened.The people who listen intellectually are bound to ask later on how to do it. Their question about how to do it signifies that they have missed what was conveyed to them.It is not only words that I am saying to you – I am conveying my very heart. The words are only vehicles. Through the intellect the vehicles will reach, but I will be left behind. When you are listening without the mind, the vehicle becomes unimportant; its only use is that it helps me to reach to you. It is my outstretched hand, so that I can touch your heart.Osho,I remember you talking about looking into people's eyes and hiding through not looking directly into someone's eyes. After this discourse I dropped my glasses, which I have had since I was one year old. Not wearing them, I found myself being more open in looking in someone's eyes, and I felt great power in my eyes. Would you please talk about the psychological need to wear glasses?It is something truly significant to understand. No animal needs glasses. It is very strange why man needs glasses. There are two reasons: the first is the physiological reason; and the second is the psychological.The physiological reason is that our process of helping a mother to give birth to a child is basically wrong. For example, the child has been for nine months in deep darkness; his eyes are very delicate, fragile. And in any hospital where he is going to be born, he is going to face glaring lights all around, immediately after birth. That is the first shock to the whole delicate system of his eyes. Eyes are the most delicate part of your body: softer than a rose petal, very fragile and very important, because eighty percent of your life’s experience depends on them. Only twenty percent is contributed by your other senses.That is one of the reasons why a blind man suddenly creates a deep compassion in you. The deaf man does not create the same compassion; he is also missing something – he cannot hear. The dumb cannot speak. In any other way the body may be crippled, but nothing can create more compassion in you than a blind man. Unknowingly, unconsciously, there is an understanding that the blind man is the poorest.Eighty percent of his life experience is cut off; he is living on only twenty percent. His life has no color, his life has no experience of beauty, his life has no experience of proportion. His life has missed the beautiful sunsets and the starry night. His eyes have missed millions of other eyes which are loaded with experience; and to be in contact with them is to be in contact with different worlds.The way the hospitals have decided to give birth to a new child is dangerous. First they spoil the eyes. Second, they destroy the trust of the child. The child has lived for nine months in the mother’s womb with immense trust – the question of doubt does not arise. Everything that he wants he gets; in fact before he wants, he gets it. No responsibility, no worry, no question of time. He does not think of tomorrow, and he has no memories of yesterdays. He lives moment to moment, utterly joyous. There is nothing to make him sad, nothing to make him miserable.But the moment he is born, his whole life goes through a great tragic change. The doctors are in a hurry; they cannot even wait for two minutes. They want to immediately cut the cord that joins the child with the mother – and they cut it immediately, without bothering that the child has not yet breathed on his own, that his own system has not started functioning. They have cut the connection with the life source of the mother. This is one of the deep wounds that will be carried all along through his life.Then to make the child breathe, they will hang it upside down and hit on his buttocks – a great reception! And because of the hit the child starts breathing. But this breathing is not natural and spontaneous. If they had just waited two or three minutes and left the child on his mother’s belly… He was inside for nine months; with just three minutes outside on the belly – the same warmth, the same woman, the same energy – he would have started breathing on his own. Then to cut the cord would have been absolutely logical, rational, scientific.Everything else that is being done takes no account of the implications. The child has been in the mother’s womb in a certain warmth. He has been floating. Once he starts breathing on his own, the best way will be just to put him in a small bathtub of warm water consisting of the same chemicals as the mother’s womb – it is exactly the same as ocean water, and that’s what makes the evolutionists certain that man was born in the ocean.You will be surprised to know that the first incarnation of God in Hinduism is a fish. Just the idea is very strange. But to them God was life. Just a little translation is needed: instead of saying the reincarnation of God was as a fish, all that is needed is to say that life’s beginning was as a fish.Allow the child the same atmosphere so he does not feel in a stranger’s world, afraid, from the very first moment. But we make him afraid. We destroy his delicate eyes, we destroy his spontaneity, we even force his breathing. We don’t give him a natural environment, one to which he is accustomed.All these small things are going to affect his whole life. For example, whenever he is in anxiety, his breathing will become erratic. Whenever he is afraid, his breathing will be immediately affected. And sooner or later – because only man uses his eyes for reading, and his eyes are no longer as powerful as nature had made them – the child finds his eyes are weakening. He cannot see small letters, small figures, or he cannot see faraway things, and then glasses become necessary. If glasses are avoided then his eyes will go on deteriorating. The glasses are simply to help him, just to compensate for the damage that has been done.But glasses have their own psychology. With glasses you are always behind a curtain, in some way hiding – not facing life as it is, trying to avoid this way or that, never being straight, sincere. Glasses help you to protect your eyes, but they bring their own problems with them. And these are the problems: they stand between you and the world, between you and the person you love, between you and the person you are communicating with.Because of the glasses you never come in direct contact with the eyes of other people. That is missing a great experience, because people are basically their eyes. If you can see into a person’s eyes, its depth will be that person’s depth. A cunning person will not allow you to see directly into his eyes, because a cunning person’s eyes reveal his cunningness.The eyes are just an opening – the cunning person is afraid; he will always look sideways. He will be talking to you but looking at something else; his talking and his seeing will not be in the same direction. He will be listening to you but his eyes will not be concentrated on you. The man who wants to deceive you cannot confront you eye to eye. Only a simple, sincere person, a person with a loving heart and with no cunning desire will allow you to look into his eyes because he knows you will find his truth. He has nothing to hide.So if you are using glasses, use them only for particular purposes. If you need them for reading, use them for reading. If you use them continuously it is dangerous – not to your eyes, but to your whole being. If you need them to look far away, you can use them; but don’t make it part of your being.Your glasses should never become part of your being. Use them only when necessary. When you feel they are not necessary, put them away, so at least for long periods you are available to the world in your authenticity, and the world is available to you; there is no barrier.You cannot do anything about the basic harm, but if you give birth to a child, it is better to give birth among your loving friends, with candlelights, with incense burning, with flowers all around. Give the child at least a good welcome to the world.Don’t be technical – man is not a machine – be human. Let him first breathe; then cut the connection with the mother. There is no hurry. He should be given the chance to be spontaneous; otherwise his whole life he will suffer troubles and problems concerned with breathing.There is no need for glaring lights; otherwise you have started already destroying his eyes. Soon he will need glasses. If you have been using them since you were one year old, that shows what we have been doing with children. And nobody tells you to use glasses only when you need them; otherwise don’t let them become an essential habit.It is known about Mulla Nasruddin that one night he woke up and asked his wife, “Where are my glasses?”She said, “What is the need for glasses in the middle of the night? Just go to sleep.”He said, “I don’t want to fight. I am not in a position right now – I will explain everything later on. First, my glasses!”With his glasses on he tried for a few minutes, then he said, “You destroyed it. If you had given them to me immediately, perhaps I may not have missed. I was having such a beautiful dream; just then I remembered, ‘I cannot see without glasses.’ Such a beautiful dream – I must be missing much. And you are so stupid that you started arguing with me.“When I was asking for my glasses, you should have understood there must be some need, and later on you could have discussed it. But at that very time… And the gap became so big that I tried again and again with the glasses, but the dream was broken. And with it broken I could not manage to catch up with it again.“It was not only just a beautiful dream, it had something to do with finances too. A man was promising to give me money, and we were haggling. He wanted to purchase something, and I had brought him up to ninety-nine rupees. But I was stubborn – I was trying to bring him to one hundred rupees; and it was only a question of one rupee. And the thing I was selling was not worth twenty rupees. I would have given it to him for ninety-nine, but I wanted to see the man accurately, and I wanted to count the money accurately. The glasses were needed.“After I put on the glasses, I was saying to the man, ‘Wherever you are, come back! Okay – ninety-nine I will accept, ninety-eight I will accept. I am willing to give it even for ninety.’ But nobody responded. Just because of these glasses the whole profit was lost. And I don’t know if I can ever meet this man again, because in the first place I cannot recognize him without my glasses. Even if I meet him tomorrow on the street, I will not be able to recognize him, because what I was seeing I don’t know whether it was true or not true.”People are so accustomed to their glasses that they become almost their substitute eyes. Then it is dangerous. Your eyes need a little freedom: once in a while take the glasses off. And there are a few exercises available. Do those exercises which will make your eyes stronger, healthier, and perhaps you may not need the glasses at all.Osho,My whole life I have been struggling with two huge desires: the desire to love and be loved, and the desire to understand and be understood. To see how misunderstood you are by the world and by your friends astounds me, and your not being affected by it astounds me even more. For the past ten years I have been consumed with desire to understand you every minute of every day. Today I feel I don't understand anything, and yet my desire to be understood has diminished. When you speak, the joy of being beyond these two dualities is heaven.The desire to love and to be loved, the desire to understand and to be understood are very instinctive, very natural – but very binding, imprisoning. That’s why, if you can forget these two desires, even for a few moments while listening to me, in that transcendence you will find the ultimate in joy.I have been misunderstood perhaps more than anyone else ever, but it has not affected me, for the simple reason that there is no desire to be understood. It is their problem if they don’t understand, it is not my problem. If they misunderstand, it is their problem and their misery. I am not going to waste my sleep because millions of people are misunderstanding me. If I was concerned about being understood they would have driven me mad. But they have not been able to even scratch a little bit.All their misunderstanding is their problem. They are suffering from it, they are paying for it. Why should I be bothered by it? I have said what I felt is true. I have not said it to be understood – I have said it because I wanted to share. If they are not willing, it is up to them; I cannot force them.The desires to understand and to be understood are together: unless you understand, you cannot drop the desire to be understood. Once you understand just the simple existence of your being, both disappear. There is nothing more to understand, and there is no question that anybody should understand you.The same is true about love. The moment you understand what love is, you experience what love is, you become love. Then there is no need in you to be loved, and there is no need in you to love. Loving will be your simple, spontaneous existence, your very breathing. You cannot do anything else; you will simply be loving.Now if in return, love does not come to you, you will not feel hurt, for the simple reason that only a person who has become love can love. You can give only that which you have. Asking people to love you – people who don’t have love in their life, who have not come to the source of their being where love has its shrine – how can they love you? They can pretend. They can say, they can even believe, but sooner or later these things are going to be known as only a pretension, that it is only acting, that it is hypocrisy.There may not be an intention to deceive you, but what can the person do? You ask for love, and the other person also wants love. Both understand that you are expected to love, that only then can you get love – so you both try in every possible way to take the posture of love. But the posture is empty. And both are going to discover it, and both are going to complain about it against the other, that it is not right. From the very beginning it has been two beggars begging from each other, and both have only empty begging bowls.Both are pretending that they can give, but their basic desire is to get. If you don’t have it, you cannot give it. Those who have found the source of love within themselves are no longer in need of being loved – this is to be understood very clearly. They will be loved.They will love for no other reason but simply because they have too much of it – just as a rain cloud wants to rain, just as a flower wants to release its fragrance, with no desire to get anything. The reward of love is in loving, not in getting love.These are the mysteries of life, that if a person is rewarded just in loving people, many will love him – because by being in contact with him, they will slowly start finding the source within themselves. Now they know one person at least who showers love and whose love is not out of need. The more he shares and showers his love, the more it grows.The same is true about understanding. If you are close to a person of understanding you will see that he shares; sharing is his joy, it is not his business. He gives wholeheartedly, knowing perfectly well that he will find many doors closed in his face, but his understanding is deep enough to understand those people who misunderstand him.They are miserable. They are afraid to let his understanding reach them, they are afraid of his light. They start closing their windows and their doors. They are afraid of his presence. They will condemn, they will create confusion, they will create rumors, they will create lies; they will do everything to prevent this man’s light, his understanding, his insight from spreading. The reason is that they are afraid.This man’s presence is a great fear to them. In his presence they become suddenly naked – with all their jealousies, with all their miseries, with all their pain, with all their wounds. In his presence they cannot hide. Before his eyes they are as if before X rays which will penetrate to their deepest core and reveal all they have been somehow hiding from the society and creating a certain good image. They are just the opposite within.I have never been hurt by any misunderstanding. It was part of my understanding that it is going to be so. Once you are free of the desire to love and to be loved, you will love; but it will not be a desire, it will be an overflowing energy. And you will be loved, but it will not be an expectation, it will be a surprise.Once you just understand yourself and have gone beyond all kinds of misunderstandings, your light is so clear and bright, your certainty is so absolute, that the whole world can condemn you, but it will not in any way hurt you. It will simply create more compassion and more effort to make these people somehow come out of their darkness and see the light.One thing that you mention is certain – that once both these desires are calmed down, one feels in heaven. One really is in heaven. One has always been; it was just that one was getting disturbed by small things and forgetting the immense beauty and joy the whole existence is ready to give to you without any price. It is just yours for the asking.Osho,I have too many questions about you because in you I see a part of myself, and in that part I see everyone. Please nudge me if I am in the wrong lane.You are in the wrong space. You see a part of you in me. That is going to create many problems, because I don’t have any part of you in me. That is the beginning of a long journey; then in that part you see everybody else and all their problems. Then the small part you had seen in me becomes so big – because in that small part you are seeing everybody – that you are going to forget me completely. I will be covered all over with other people’s parts – thick, not a thin layer, because everybody’s parts…Just try the other way: see me just as a small corner in you. Give it to me, see me there, and in it see Chuang Tzu, see Gautam Buddha, see Socrates. See all the flowers that humanity has produced, and you will become a totally new person. Just seeing me, and in me bringing all those who can somehow be connected with me, you will be surrounded by the very salt of the earth, by all that is glorious. And you will disappear in it: you will not be able to find yourself, find where you have gone.You will meet Socrates, you will meet Pythagoras, you will meet Heraclitus, you will meet strange but beautiful beings – Bodhidharma or Diogenes or Dionysius – but you will not find yourself. In fact, you do not exist. The meeting of all these people within you will make you a paradise.So please just give it a little turn: rather than seeing yourself in me – if you can do that, why can’t you do this, it is the same – see me in you. I am not asking for your whole being, because I want you to leave it for other guests. Just give me a little corner, just a contact center from where buddhas can enter in you.But we are so accustomed to misery that we can do anything to be miserable. We have forgotten the language of blissfulness, so to make even a small effort seems to be very arduous. I am asking you to do the same – just give it a little turn. It will be far easier, and the reward is going to be enormous. You will be lost, and you will never be found. And that is the most blissful moment – when you cannot find yourself, and there is just utter silence.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 22 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What does it mean when you say, “Just be yourself”? How can I be myself when I don't know who I am? I know many of my preferences, likings, dislikings and tendencies, which seem to be the outcome of a programmed biocomputer called the mind. Does just being oneself mean that one totally lives out the whole content of the mind as watchfully as possible?Yes, it exactly means that – to live as an awareness: awareness of all the programs the mind has been conditioned for, awareness of all the impulses, desires, memories, imaginations, all that the mind can do. One has to be not part of it, but separate; seeing it, but not being it – watching it.This is one of the most essential things to remember, that you cannot watch your watchfulness. If you watch your watchfulness, then the watcher is you, not the watched. So you cannot go beyond watchfulness. The point that you cannot transcend is your being. The point that you cannot go beyond is you. You can watch very easily any thought, any emotion, any sentiment. Just one thing you cannot watch – and that is your watchfulness. If you manage to watch it, that means you have shifted: the first watchfulness has become just a thought; now you are the second watcher.You can go on shifting back, but you cannot get out of watchfulness because it is you: you cannot be otherwise.So when I say, “Just be yourself,” I am saying to you, “Just be unprogrammed, unconditioned awareness.” That’s how you had come into the world, and that’s how the enlightened person leaves the world. He lives in the world but remains totally separate.One of the great mystics, Kabir, has a beautiful poem about it. All his poems are just perfect – nothing can be better. One of his poems says, “I will give back the soul that was given to me at the time of my birth, as pure, as clean as it was given to me. I will give it back that way when I die.” He is talking about awareness, that it has remained unpolluted. The whole world was there to pollute it, but he has remained watchful.All that you need is just to be watchful, and nothing will affect you. This unaffectedness will keep your purity, and this purity has certainly the freshness of life, the joy of existence – all the treasures that you have been endowed with.But you become attached to the small things surrounding you and forget the one that you are. It is the greatest discovery in life and the most ecstatic pilgrimage to truth. You need not be an ascetic, you need not be anti-life; you need not renounce the world and go to the mountains. You can be where you are, you can continue to do what you are doing. Just a new thing has to be evolved: whatever you do, you do with awareness, even the smallest act of the body or the mind. With each act of awareness you will become aware of the beauty and the treasure and the glory and the eternity of your being.Osho,You say freedom is the greatest value for you. You also say your attitude to life is that of let-go. It seems to me that you have used your freedom to choose to give up the freedom to decide anything, in favor of letting existence take care of you. Is the ultimate in freedom actually total enslavement?No, I have not chosen anything. I have not chosen out of my freedom to allow existence to take care of me. Freedom is choiceless. In freedom I have discovered, not chosen.With the eyes free, with the consciousness free, I have discovered that let-go is the way existence functions. There was no question of choice, whether to be with existence or not. It was not either–or, but just the realization that this is the only way existence works. I relaxed with it.The people who are not living a life of let-go are choosers, because they are going against nature, against existence; they have to choose. The ego is a chooser. When you are completely free of ego, of self, when you are simply freedom, you see that the fight is disappearing and let-go is taking its place. You are nothing more than a watcher. If you choose it, then it is not let-go. How can it be let-go if you choose it?It happened that a man came to Gautam Buddha, and he wanted to surrender himself unto Buddha’s feet.Buddha looked at him and said, “You cannot surrender.”He said, “Why? Everybody else is allowed, and I am not allowed – what is my disqualification?”Buddha laughed and he said, “There is no question of disqualification. Just the nature of surrender is such that you cannot do it – it happens. If you do it, it is your doing; it is not surrender. If you do it, you can take it back; it is never total, you are outside of it. It was your action, so you can decide any moment: no more surrender! But if it happens then it takes all of you, the whole of you, leaving nothing behind which can ever do anything against it.”Simple things, but they become complicated because our mind is accustomed only to doing.Surrender, let-go are not mind things – they are not mind things. It is impossible for the mind to think of them. It can agree to surrender, it can agree to let-go, but it has to be the master, doing it, and it has to be an act – and that’s where everything goes wrong.Surrender is once and forever; let-go is once and forever – just as death is once and forever, because nothing is left that can change the course of things. All has been taken in. You are no longer there to have a second thought.Just the other day I was shown a statement of Rajen, one of our therapists, who is doing as much damaging work as possible. His statement was, “Up to now I was helping Osho’s work through surrender; now he has given me freedom. I will still continue to work, but my work will be different. My work will be to help people to be free of Osho.”Now, in the first place if he was really surrendered, then there is no going back: you cannot do anything about it anymore. It has happened, and you are dissolved in it.Secondly, I cannot give you freedom, because if I give you freedom I can take it back. Freedom has to be your realization – and that would have come through surrender, on its own. Surrender flowers into freedom, because in surrender the self is gone and all the hell that the self creates is gone. Your whole energy is now available to blossom.I cannot give freedom to anyone. Freedom is not a commodity that I can hand over to you; it has to happen at the innermost core of your being. Surrender only removes the hindrances. You surrender only that which is blocking the way for freedom to come to you.So on the second point also he is wrong. And then on the third he is really stupid, saying that now his work “…will be to help people to be free of Osho.” The whole world is free of me – that is not helping them! But what he means is he is now persuading sannyasins not to be sannyasins. And he thinks he is helping people to be in a state of freedom.There are things which only happen. Let-go is not an action on your part, but just an understanding of the fact that this is the only way the universe functions, and if you are not functioning in this way, you are going to remain in misery. You are not being punished, you are simply being foolish. The old religions have given the idea to people that if you do wrong, you will be punished; if you do right, you will be rewarded – because they were all dependent on doing, and that’s their basic fallacy.Religion begins when you cross the boundary of doing and enter into the world of happening. Then let-go happens because you see that this is the only way things work. If you go against it, you are miserable.Nobody is punishing you; you are simply being stupid. If you try to get out through the wall and hit your head, do you think it has been a punishment? And there is the door, always available for you to get out. Knowing about the door, you try to get out through the wall and smash your face. Old religions call it punishment. It is not punishment, it is simple foolishness. And the person who goes out of the door into the garden, in the sun, in the air, is not being rewarded; he is just being intelligent.So if you ask me, I will say intelligence is the reward; unintelligence is the punishment. In its ultimate form: unintelligence is hell, intelligence is heaven.Osho,Living decisively, knowing what one wants, seems easy. However, my reality is that I can never make up my mind about anything. I can always see both sides of an argument and can never decide which is right. So I am left hanging between the two. One part of me, listening to you, feels this is okay, but it makes me feel static, as if I am only partially alive. Please comment.Mind is never decisive. It is not a question of your mind or somebody else’s mind; mind is indecisiveness. The functioning of the mind is wavering between two polar opposites and trying to find which is the right way.Mind is the wrong thing, and through the wrong thing you are trying to find the right way. It is as if by closing your eyes you are trying to find the door. Certainly you will feel yourself hanging between the two – to go this way or that; you will be always in a condition of either–or. That’s the nature of mind.Søren Kierkegaard was a great Danish philosopher. He wrote a book, Either–Or. It was his own life’s experience – he could never decide about anything. Everything was always such that if he was deciding this way, then that way seemed to be right. If he was deciding that way, then this way seemed to be right. He remained indecisive.He remained unmarried, although a woman was very much in love with him and had asked him. But he said, “I will have to think about it. Marriage is a big thing, and I cannot say yes or no immediately.” And he died with the question, without getting married. He lived long – perhaps seventy years – and he was continually arguing, discussing. But he found no answer which could be said to be the ultimate answer, which had not its equal opposite.He never could become a professor. He had filled out the form, he had the best qualifications possible – he had many books to his credit, of such immense importance that even after a century they are still contemporary, not old, not out of date. He filled out the form, but could not sign it because of that “either–or” – whether to join the service or not? The form was found when he died, in the small room where he used to live.His father, seeing the situation – and he was his only son – seeing that even going somewhere he would stop at the crossroads to decide to go this way or to go that way, for hours…! The whole of Copenhagen became aware of this man’s strangeness, and children nicknamed him “Either–Or,” so urchins would be following him, shouting, “Either–Or!” wherever he would go.Before he died, his father liquidated all his businesses, collected all the money, deposited it into the post office, and arranged that every month on the first day of the month, Kierkegaard should receive money, so he at least could survive for his whole life. And you will be surprised: when he was coming home after taking out the last installment of the money – the money was finished – he fell on the street and died. With the last installment! That was the right thing to do. What else to do? Because after this month, what would he do?Because of the urchins and other people harassing him and calling him “Either–Or,” he used to come out only once a month, just on the first day, to go to the post office. But now there was nothing left – next month he had nowhere to go.He was writing books, but was not decisive about whether to publish them or not; he left all his books unpublished. They are of tremendous value. Each book has a great penetration into things. On each subject he has written about, he has gone to the very roots, to every minute detail; a genius, but a genius of the mind.That is the problem with the mind – it is not your problem – and the better mind you have, the more will be the problem. Lesser minds don’t come across that problem so much. It is the genius mind that is opposed, with two polarities, and cannot choose. Then he feels in a limbo.What I have been telling you is that it is the nature of the mind to be in a limbo. It is the nature of the mind to be in the middle of polar opposites. Unless you move away from the mind and become a witness to all the games of the mind, you will never be decisive. Even if you sometimes decide in spite of the mind, you will repent because the other half that you have not decided for is going to haunt you: perhaps that was right and what you have chosen is wrong. Now there is no way to know. Perhaps the choice that you had left behind was better. But even if you had chosen it, the situation would not have been different; then this which would have been left behind would haunt you.Mind is basically the beginning of madness. If you are in it too much it will drive you mad.I have told you that in my village I used to live opposite a goldsmith. I used to sit just in front of his house. I became aware at first, and then the whole town became slowly aware that he had a curious habit: he would lock his shop, then pull the lock two, three times to see whether it was really locked or not. And his life became hell…One day I was coming from the river and he had just locked his shop and was going home. I said, “But you have not checked!”He said, “What?”I said, “You have not checked the lock!”He had checked it – I had seen him pulling it three times, but now I had created a suspicion, and the mind is always ready…So he said to me, “Perhaps I forgot – I must go back.” He went back, and checked the lock again. That became my joy: wherever he would go…In the market he would be purchasing vegetables and I would reach there saying, “What are you doing here? You have left the lock unchecked!”He would drop the vegetables and he would say, “I will come back; first I have to go and check the lock.”Even from the railway station: he was purchasing a ticket to go somewhere, and I went and told him, “What are you doing? The lock!”He said, “My God, have I not checked it?” I said, “No!”He said, “Now it is impossible to go to the marriage I was going to.” He returned the ticket, went home, and checked the lock. But then it was too late to go back to the station; the train had already gone.He trusted me because I was always sitting in front of his house. Slowly it became known to everybody, so wherever he would go, people would say, “Where are you going? Have you checked the lock?”Finally he became angry with me. He said, “You must be spreading it, because wherever I go everybody is talking about the lock, and I have to come back home – sometimes so many times that I forget completely for what purpose I had gone in the first place to the market! The whole day I have been checking the lock!”I said, “Don’t listen to them. Let them.”He said, “What do you mean, ‘Don’t listen to them’? If they are right then I am lost forever. I cannot take that chance. So knowing perfectly well that the man may be lying, I have to come back compulsively to check the lock. I know somewhere that I have checked it, but who knows for certain?”Mind has no certainty about anything. If you are between the two polarities of the mind, in a limbo – always to do or not to do, you will go crazy. You are crazy! Before it happens, jump out and have a look from the outside at the mind. And that’s what I am telling you continuously.Be aware of the mind – its bright side, its dark side, its right, its wrong. Whatever polarity it is, just be aware of it. Two things will come out of that awareness: one, that you are not the mind, and two, that awareness has a decisiveness which mind never has. Mind is basically indecisive, and awareness is basically decisive. So any act out of awareness is total, full, without repentance.I have never in my life thought again about anything – whether something else would have been better. I have never repented. I have never thought that I have committed a mistake, because there is nobody else who has been left to say these things. I have been acting out of my awareness – that is my whole being. Now whatever happens is all that is possible. The world may call it right or wrong – that is their business, but it is not my problem.So awareness will take you out of the limbo. Rather than hanging between these two polarities of the mind, you will jump beyond both, and you will be able to see that those two polarities are two polarities only if you are in the mind. If you are outside it, you will be surprised that they are two sides of the same coin – there was no question of decision.With awareness you have the clarity, totality, let-go – existence decides within you. You don’t have to think about what is right and wrong; existence takes your hand in its hand, and you move relaxedly. That’s the only way, the right way. And that is the only way you can be sane; otherwise you will remain muddled.Now, Søren Kierkegaard is a great mind, but being a Christian he has no idea of awareness. He can think, and think very deeply, but he cannot just be silent and watch. That poor fellow had never heard about anything like watching, witnessing, awareness. Thinking was all that he had heard about, and he had put his whole genius into thinking. He had produced great books, but he could not produce a great life for himself. He lived in utter misery.Osho,You spoke the other night about “honest truth.” Mystics have often spoken of the “ultimate truth.” Can the truth be anything other than ultimate?Truth cannot be anything other than the ultimate. But the mystics had to speak about “ultimate truth” for a certain reason. The reason was that philosophers have been speaking of “relative truth,” and they have been emphasizing the fact that every truth is relative. Albert Einstein brought the conception of relativity to scientific truths; otherwise, they used to be ultimate – they became relative. He was right. And Mahavira, Gautam Buddha have both talked about relativity.One thing that is missing is that nobody makes a distinction between truth and fact. Facts are relative, and truth is ultimate, but if you get mixed up and you start thinking of facts as truth, then they will be relative.Facts are relative, and you have to understand exactly what is meant by relative. It means that something can be true in a certain situation, and the same thing can be untrue in some other situation.It was said that while Albert Einstein was alive there were only twelve people in the whole world who understood what he meant by relativity. It is a very delicate and subtle explanation about the universe. Einstein was continually asked – wherever he would go, in a club, in a restaurant – wherever he would go people would ask, “Just say something about what this relativity is and say it so that a layman can understand it.”Finally he found a way: he said that if you are sitting on a hot stove, time will appear to you to be going very slowly; a single minute will look like hours because you are sitting on a hot stove. Your state is changing your conception of time. But if you are sitting with your girlfriend, hours go by and it seems only seconds have passed.He would say, “This is what I mean by relativity: time is relative to a particular situation. There is nothing like “ultimate time’ so that whatever you do it is the same. It has always been known that when you are happy time passes fast, and when you are miserable, time passes very slowly.”He has established relativity so deeply that it has become almost interwoven with all scientific findings. But only one thing I want you to remember: he is talking about facts and calling them truth. Because of that, the mystics had to use the word ultimate. They want to tell you that there is an experience which is beyond relativity. That’s all their meaning is: truth is ultimate.For example, what I have experienced in these thirty-five years in different situations has remained the same, and I know even in my death it will not be different. This is truth: that which remains the same, whatever happens around it, the center of the cyclone.The whole world is full of facts. Facts are relative. Now, it has to be made very clear to the scientists that what Einstein was talking about was not truth, but fact. But for science there is no truth other than what they discover. They don’t accept the mystic’s truth because the mystic cannot put it in front of the scientists so that they can dissect it and find out what constitutes it – its measurement, weight, and things like that. It is an experience, and totally subjective. It cannot be made objective.So let us say it in this way, if they insist on calling it truth: objective truths are all relative, and subjective truth is always ultimate. Just not to get it mixed up, the mystics have been calling it the ultimate truth.All truth is ultimate. But there are scientific truths which are really only facts. For example, if you are sitting on a hot stove the experience of time going very slowly is just a fact of your psychology; it has nothing to do with time. But nobody has pointed that out to Albert Einstein. When you are sitting with your girlfriend and time passes fast, it has nothing to do with time; it has something to do with your mind.Time goes with its own speed. It does not change; otherwise there would be such a difficulty. Somebody is sitting on the hot stove, and somebody is sitting with his girlfriend – what will poor time do? Go slow or go fast? Time remains the same; it is your mind, your concept of time which is relative.All objective truths are relative. You cannot say that somebody is tall; that statement will not be correct, because the tallness of the person has to be relative. Tall in comparison to whom? You have to make it complete. Somebody is fat, but just that much is not right and not complete. You have to make it clear that he is fatter than Avirbhava, or thinner than Anando. Unless you make the comparison, you cannot use relative terms.But we are using them. Because people are using relative words, the mystics have been compelled to say “the ultimate truth”; otherwise, just saying “the truth” would be sufficient because ultimateness is its intrinsic nature. But it has to be repeated; otherwise there are people who will get misguided, confused, because they have heard about relative truths and they will make your truth also into a relative truth. So a distinction has to be made. To draw that distinction, the word ultimate is used – unwillingly.I would not like to use it because it is a repetition, a tautology. “The ultimate” and “the truth” mean the same. You can use either, but to use both is an unnecessary repetition.My father was very insistent that every Monday he had to receive a letter from me while I was in the university. I told him, “If there is something wrong, if there is some problem, if I am sick, I will inform you. But unnecessarily writing the same thing again and again has no justification.”He said, “Justification or not, it is not a question of your arguments. I wait for seven days and I become worried about you. It is not your sickness that I am worried about; I am worried about what you are doing, what is happening to you. You may get into trouble any moment. So every Saturday you have to post a letter so that on Monday I receive it. If I don’t receive it on Monday, then I will unnecessarily have to come two hundred miles to the university.”So, I wrote one letter: “Everything is all right here. I am not in any trouble. You need not be worried.” And on other letters I had just made the sign “ditto.” He was very angry. When he saw me he said, “I feel like beating you! You write ‘ditto’ on the letters!”I said, “That’s exactly the situation, because I have to write the same thing again. And do you think I write every Saturday? I have just asked a typist to type the first letter, and a hundred letters with the ditto. I have given them to one very particular man – because I may forget and unnecessarily you may have to come – and I have told him, ‘You have to post one of these ditto letters every Saturday.’ He is so particular in everything that once you ask him, he will do it.” He was a student, living in the same hostel.My father was very angry, “Have you ever heard of anybody writing in a letter just ‘ditto’? I wait for eight days and then I get a card on which the only message is ‘ditto’! Not even your signature, because in ‘ditto’ everything is implied from the first letter: refer to the first letter. You can read the first letter again when you get the ditto letter.”Life is not mathematics, it is not logic, it is not science. It is something more, and that something more is the most valuable.The mystics have called that something more “the ultimate truth.” They can be forgiven for calling it ultimate. But you have to understand that the reason they are calling it ultimate is because there are people who are calling every truth relative – not only scientists, not only people who are working with matter.Mahavira says that truth itself is relative: he has no ultimate truth. Buddha has no ultimate truth. Again the difficulty is that Mahavira and Buddha can be misunderstood when they say that there is no ultimate truth but that every truth is relative: it can be one thing in one situation, it can be another thing in another situation, and because it is related to situations it cannot have any ultimacy. This goes against all the great mystics.Only Mahavira and Buddha, two persons… But I know both, and I understand both better than their own followers, for the simple reason that none of their followers have been able to make any sense out of it: either all the mystics are wrong, or Buddha and Mahavira are wrong!I say nobody is wrong. What Mahavira says is that truth has seven aspects, and Buddha says that truth has four aspects. They are really referring to the expression of truth. Truth can be said in seven ways according to Mahavira. He is really a logician. But what he is saying is not about truth – there is a misunderstanding. What he is saying is about truth expressed, not experienced. When you experience it, it is always ultimate, but the moment you say it, it becomes relative. The moment you bring it into language it becomes relative, because in language nothing can be ultimate. The whole construction of language is relative. Buddha is not a great logician, so he stops at four, but the situation is the same.They are not speaking of the truth which you experience in silence, beyond mind. Nothing can be said about it. The moment you say something about it, you drag it into the world of relativity, and then all the laws of relativity will be applicable to it.Perhaps Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the best logicians of this age, was right when he said, “That which cannot be said should not be said.” This is a strange statement. It stands out in the whole history of thought, unique and original: “That which cannot be said, should not be said” – because if you say it, you are contradicting yourself. First you say it cannot be said, and then you say it. You may make all kinds of conditions: “When I say it, it is no longer the same; when I say it, it even becomes untrue.” But then, why say it?Wittgenstein’s statement will make it clear that Mahavira and Buddha were both talking about the truth said: then it is relative. The mystics who are talking about the “ultimate truth’ are talking about the truth experienced, yet not brought into the world of language and objects. So I think it is better, although it is a repetition, to allow them to use the word ultimate, because it keeps it separate.Osho,Is it not true to say that because we can even formulate a question that we have an inkling somewhere of the answer – even though we are not aware of it?It seems to me like a doctor looking at a patient: the fact that he asks the patient certain questions and not others indicates he has some idea of what the diagnosis – and hence the answer – is.It is true. Whenever you ask a question, somewhere deep down you have some inkling of the answer, but it is in the darker parts of your consciousness. You yourself cannot pull it out and bring it to your consciousness. The question is in the consciousness; the answer is in the unconscious – vague, a shadow, with no certainty, but the inkling is certainly there.The function of the master is exactly what Socrates has defined it as: the master is only a midwife. He helps to bring everything that is hidden in you to consciousness. When your question disappears, that means your answer from the unconscious has been brought to the conscious.It has to be remembered that this is the distinction between a master and a teacher: a teacher will give you an answer which will not bring your own answer from the unconscious. He will force an answer into your conscious, repressing your question. He will make the situation more complicated. First you had only a question, and if you had silently waited, meditated, perhaps the unconscious answer may have surfaced and the question would have disappeared. Once the question disappears, the answer has no relevance in being there; it disappears also, and a pure emptiness is left.But the teacher forces an answer on your mind, and makes the situation more complicated. Now you have a question and you have an answer which has not been able to dissolve the question, which has only repressed it. And your unconscious answer is still lying down there, to be released so you can be unburdened. The teacher burdens you, complicates you.The master never gives you any answer that is going to burden you. His every answer is an unburdening. He brings your own unconscious answer to the surface, where first the question disappears, then the answer disappears – and not a trace of either remains behind.This is real communion. And this is a clear-cut way, a criterion, to make the distinction between a teacher and a master. In the West there seems to be no distinction. In the East the teacher is simply repeating inherited knowledge; he is not concerned with you, he is concerned with his own knowledge.The master has nothing to impose upon you; he is empty and silent. Your question does not give him a chance to impose something on you, but only gives him a chance to bring your unconscious answer to the surface. So if you go on simply listening to the master, slowly, slowly you will find your questions have disappeared. And strangely, you don’t have any answer.People ordinarily think that when the question disappears you will have the answer in its place. No, when the question really disappears the answer has no relevance. It also disappears. And left without questions and without answers, you have immense freedom; you are unburdened, open sky.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 24 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,For some time now you have been saying that you are our friend and we are friends. I'm having difficulty in truly getting it. To me you are my most beloved master. Please show me where I am missing.The question is from Vivek. I can understand her difficulty. The same will be the difficulty of all those who have come close to me, loved me, received me in their hearts as a master.I have been saying that I am your friend, and you are my friend for a very strange reason that may not be obvious to you. There was another question from Milarepa: “Why are a few sannyasins feeling very resentful toward you, angry with you?”It is one of the historical things that among disciples there are always a few who are accidental. Just the wind was blowing this way and they arrived. They saw a tremendous energy in the disciples, and they became greedy. But it was not a search for truth, it was not a search for love; it was simple greed. They also wanted to be spiritually powerful.They became sannyasins, they became disciples, but the distance between me and them remained the same. They could never become my intimate people. They could never become my people. Even though they were with me, deep down they were resentful, angry. I wanted them to drop their resentfulness, to drop their anger. It was not my problem, it was their problem, and I wanted to help them in every possible way.It was for this simple reason that I had said, “I am your friend, you are my friend.” Those who were not really with me were immensely happy that now their status and my status was the same. And among these were people that you would never have conceived. Just the other day I had a message from a sannyasin that Teertha was saying to people that my state and his state are now the same – we are friends. For this he was hanging around for fifteen years. Rajen is saying to people, “Now I am no longer a disciple but a friend, and I have the same status.”These were the people that I wanted to get rid of as peacefully, as lovingly as possible. But those who had loved me felt hurt – because they have loved me as a disciple, and to be a disciple is something so valuable that who cares to be a friend?There is a story in Gautam Buddha’s life:One of his closest disciples, Sariputra, was found to be not meditating enough. Even people who had come after Sariputra had gone deeper into meditation, people of lesser genius and lesser intelligence. Buddha called Sariputra one morning and said, “What is the matter?”He said, “You know. I never want to be enlightened while you are alive. I simply want to sit at your feet the way I have always been sitting, to be your disciple, to be showered with your love. Who cares about enlightenment? This is my enlightenment!”So I can understand Vivek’s difficulty. She has been with me for sixteen years. When she came she was only twenty years old; now she is thirty-six, almost twice the age. And all these sixteen years, day in, day out, she has been taking care of me with as much love as possible, with a deep devotion. It is difficult for her to think of herself as being a friend. It would not be a gain to her, it would be a loss. Those who have understood the joy and the celebration of being a disciple, of being in love with a master, will all feel the same: that to be a friend is nothing compared to it; everything is lost. To be a friend becomes formal.So those who were really with me have been shaken, hurt, and those who were not really with me have been tremendously happy. Just by me calling you my friend, you do not achieve the state in which I am. If it was so easy I would have called the whole world my friend, and they would all have come to the same state.Milarepa’s question is concerned with it. After the American government destroyed the commune illegally, but systematically – it was a criminal act against human consciousness and its evolution – people had to leave the commune. Now, a few of those people are feeling resentful; that simply means they were around me for a certain reason. There was some greed – although I have been insistently destroying all greed, all ego, all jealousy, all competition, all ambition. But they are so deeply rooted that although you may intellectually feel they have left you, they are there.Those people are now feeling resentful because deep down they had the greed that if they die in the buddhafield they will become enlightened, and now the buddhafield has disappeared. They are angry, and they are angry at me because in spite of me telling them continually that I do not believe in miracles, they continued to believe. So it was a shock to them that I was arrested. They would have loved it if I could have gone out through the walls of the jail, and then a miracle… Those were their desires. The commune had been destroyed and I should have done something to prevent it from being destroyed. Naturally, they are angry.But this is their misunderstanding. They can’t see real miracles; they can’t see how I lived for those twelve days in jail, how the people in the jail – the authorities and the inmates – almost became sannyasins. All the people in the jail were saying that it was absolutely unjust, unfair, against the constitution, and when I left their jail, there were tears in their eyes.One of the jailers said, “This is the first time that I have tears in my eyes when I am releasing a prisoner; otherwise I am always happy to make somebody free. But if you ask me, I really want you to be here always! You have changed the whole atmosphere. How you have done it, I don’t know; perhaps it was just your presence.”I was in the hospital section, and the head nurse told me, “This is the first time that the jailers, the assistant jailer and other officers continually come to this department; otherwise nobody comes here. They come here, they sit with you, they talk with you. They are hurt that you have been harassed, and they are ashamed that they are all instrumental in the harassment.”They made every arrangement for me – they have never done that for anybody else. I call this a miracle, not coming out of the walls or breaking the chains; those are not miracles, but this impact on human consciousness. All the six nurses and the doctor – who was also a woman – were crying when I left. They said, “We know you have to go. We know that you have only been with us for three days, and we have become so attached to you; what must be happening to your people, who have been living with you for years? You have to go, but our personal feelings do not listen to logic – we want you to be here. You have changed the whole atmosphere.”They were trying in every possible way so that the government may think they were harassing me, but I was not harassed. Even the inmates were not smoking so that I was not affected. I was not taking showers – the prisoners’ shower booth was so dirty that it felt cleaner not to have a shower. The nurses found out, and they made their own shower available to me.They made their own place available to me – the nurses’ office, the doctor’s office – so that wherever I wanted to sit, I could sit; wherever I wanted to lie down, I could lie down; I did not need to go to the cell. Whenever I wanted, I had simply to knock and they would open the cell and bring me out. I said, “You need not be worried – I am perfectly good in my cell.”They said, “It is not a question of your being perfectly good in your cell; we love you to be in the office. We will remember forever that this is the place you used to sit.”The same happened in Crete: the chair I was sitting in for almost seven hours… By and by the chief superintendent relaxed, started talking to me, and finally he said, “I am feeling proud that you are sitting in my office. So many of your people come, and I have seen you only in the picture on their lockets. Now I will be able to say to them, ‘This is the chair your master has been sitting in for seven hours with me.’”He phoned his wife, saying, “I will not come until Osho is safely sent to Athens.” He became so concerned that he allowed Devaraj to drive me to the airport. The police officers were sitting at the back, I was sitting in the front and Devaraj was driving! This would have never happened…These people who feel resentment may have other causes also. Just the other day Anando was showing me a book published against me in Australia by a couple who have been sannyasins for three years and have been in the commune. But just looking at their ideas, it seems they have never seen me. They are saying that they were working, working hard, and with their work I was purchasing Rolls Royces. You can see the absurdity: their work was not bringing any money. Their work was making their own houses to live in, the roads – which were needing money, not producing money. But in their minds – and for all those three years also – they must have been resentful.Those Rolls Royces were not produced by the commune. They were presents from outside, from all over the world. And I was not their owner – I had given them to the commune. They were commune property, and I have not brought any of them with me; I have left them with the commune. Everything that I had has been left with the commune. I never owned anything. But there must have been an idea that they are earning money, and I am wasting money. That is their resentment.What money were you earning? In fact you needed money to make houses, to make roads, to make a dam – a dam needed two and a half million dollars to make. You were contributing your labor, but we were not creating money out of it so that I could purchase Rolls Royces, so that I could purchase anything. I have not purchased anything from the money produced by the commune because the commune never produced any money. The commune was absorbing money. In fact all my royalties, all my books, all their profits were going to the commune. The situation is just the opposite – that I had given everything to the commune. Now, four hundred books in different languages were bringing millions of dollars in royalties, and those royalties were going to the commune. If I had wanted to purchase Roll Royces, I could have purchased my own Rolls Royces, as many as I wanted, just out of my royalties.But the resentment, the anger, is blind. In the commune we invested two hundred million dollars. Those sannyasins perhaps think they had brought two hundred million dollars there! Without me and the people who love me around the world, those two hundred million dollars would not have been possible.Now you can see: Sheela is trying hard, but is not getting even enough money to pay her attorneys. No sannyasin is going to see her. Shanti B and Puja have been given bail by the magistrate – ten million dollars each. But they cannot collect even ten dollars, what to say of ten million dollars! Who is going to put up ten million dollars for Puja, ten million dollars for Shanti B? These people played with two hundred million dollars, and they remained in the illusion that this money was coming to them! The money was given to me, but because I don’t receive anything, I had given the whole money to the commune. And still they feel resentful toward me. They are angry at me.Just to pacify these people, before I left I did everything: I dissolved the religion because that gives hope to people – and they had started to believe that the responsibility was mine, that they should be raised in consciousness, awareness, and finally made enlightened.I made them free – saying that you need not wear red clothes, you need not wear a mala, it is not compulsory anymore – simply to drop all the load of responsibility that they were unknowingly putting on me. They were hoping that just by wearing red clothes and putting the mala on, their work was finished, that now it is my responsibility to make them enlightened. I dropped that. They think that I was giving them freedom; in fact I was simply making my own life as light as possible. I was simply dropping unnecessarily imposed responsibilities.And finally, not to let them feel that they were inferior to me in any way, I told them, “I am your friend and you are my friend.” And the people who wanted it, who had been waiting for it, rejoiced. But the people who understood cried and wept.Now in Rajen’s groups even my name is not mentioned. What is the need of mentioning the name of a friend? You have many friends – you don’t mention their names.Teertha has made an academy. Devageet was there; he worked hard to find the place, to arrange it, hoping that it was going to be Osho’s meditation academy. But when he saw the board being put up it said simply “Meditation Academy.”He asked, “But no mention of Osho?”And Teertha and Vedana and others who were involved in it simply said, “We are all friends – why put Osho’s name there?”They printed a brochure, and Devageet was saying to me, “I cried, and I had to fight almost physically because your name was not even mentioned in the brochure. It was not even mentioned that the meditations they will be teaching have something to do with you. They all have their pictures in the brochure, but your picture is not there.” Because he fought so much, finally they agreed to put in a picture of me, a strange picture, an old picture that nobody would recognize – it must be a picture taken by someone in ‘74 – and that too, a small picture, and without mentioning my name or saying anything about who the person is.Devageet simply left the place out of disgust. Now these same people are trying to have a world festival – in which my name is not mentioned. There is no need, naturally, to mention the name of a man who is your friend; you have many friends! But they will be exploiting sannyasins.The strategy is very clear: I have seen that when they advertise their groups in our newspapers, newsletters, magazines, then they are in orange clothes with the mala. None of them is using red clothes or mala, and in the group not even my name is mentioned. But in advertisements, to attract sannyasins to participate in the groups, all of them are publishing their pictures with malas, with orange dress – as if they are old sannyasins.Just to make these people feel at ease, I withdrew myself from their lives. But, Vivek, you need not be worried about it. Those who love me, those who know me, know perfectly well that I am their master, and they have traveled a long way with me, in devotion and love. Of course it is impossible for them at any moment – even if they become enlightened – to call me a friend. That would simply be ungratefulness.Again, I remember Sariputra:One day finally he became enlightened, and Buddha said, “You have to go to preach. Now you are enlightened, there is no need for you to sit here by my feet.”He said, “This was the trouble! I was ready to drop the idea of enlightenment. You forced me to go on deeper into meditation, and now I am in a fix. I knew that this was going to happen – that once I became enlightened you would tell me to go to spread the word. I don’t want to go anywhere. While you are alive, I want to be just your shadow.”Buddha persuaded him. Finally he agreed, when Buddha was so insistent, but he said, “I want one freedom…” Just see the use of the word freedom, and you can see the freedom that your so-called resentful and angry sannyasins have: “I want one freedom, that from a faraway distance, I should be allowed to bow down in your direction and touch your feet, wherever you are.”Buddha said, “You are already enlightened – you need not touch my feet!”He said, “You have to give me that freedom.” Love asks for a freedom which logic cannot understand.Every morning of his journeys, Sariputra would get up, take his bath, and the first thing he would do was bow down on the ground with folded hands toward the direction where he knew Buddha was dwelling.He was asked again and again: “To whom are you praying this way?” – because there is no God in Buddhism.And he would say, “I am not praying to any God, but Buddha is God to me; he is my master.”They would say, “But you are enlightened!”He said, “That does not matter. I am enlightened because of him. Without him I don’t think it would have happened in many lives’ time, I cannot conceive how it could have happened. So he may say he is not responsible for the happening, but I cannot accept the idea. This freedom I have asked from him, and this is a special privilege.”I am feeling very relieved – relieved of all those who were not my people, but somehow were hanging around. Now I want only those who are really with me.Yesterday while Vivek was reading the questions to me, when she read her own question she started crying. I asked, “What is the matter? Whose question is this?” She said, “It is my question.”I know that is the situation of many hearts – but only those hearts who have learned to love a master.All those egoist people were pretending to be disciples. I did not want to hurt them, so the best, the graceful way was that I declared: you are my friends, and I give you total freedom. And they accepted immediately, joyously, not knowing what they were accepting. They were free before they met me; now they are again free, in the same position. They have lost something, but they think their egos have gained something. Whenever the ego gains, you are the loser.It is one of the reasons that I don’t want to have another commune. I want only a mystery school, so those who really are interested can come, learn, go back. It has been a tremendously meaningful experience, but it was not new. At every turn of my life I have had to drop a few people. And I don’t want to say to somebody, “I am dropping you.” I can’t be that unkind, ungraceful. I have managed things so that they drop themselves.It has happened many times – this was not the first time. It is natural that as you go along, you start gathering some junk, some unnecessary luggage, and there comes a point where it has to be dropped. But these are living people. Although they are junk, they are just luggage, useless, I am still respectful toward them. So I have to find a certain device so they can go happily, not feeling that they have been dropped, but on the contrary, that they have gained what they wanted.It was simply hilarious when I read Teertha’s letter. In the end he writes, “I am doing the same work as you are doing; the only difference is that you are doing it on a bigger scale and I am doing it on a personal scale, individual to individual. But the work is the same.” And then came this second news that he told somebody on the phone, who informed me, “I am of the same state.”It is good that they are feeling good. As far as the reality is concerned, those who were real disciples are still disciples – even if they become enlightened, they will not lose their disciplehood. In fact, they have attained to the ultimate of disciplehood. Their gratitude and their love toward the master is not less but more than ever.Osho,Listening to you speak recently, I have had many moments when your words go in and strike a deep chord. When this happens it seems like two opposite phenomena occur simultaneously: on the one hand it's like hearing something for the first time, and on the other, like remembering something just recently forgotten.Could you say something about this?They are not opposite phenomena. My whole work is not to make something of you, but to help you to remember something. Your innermost reality, your truth, has not to be brought to you; it is already there. It just has to be remembered.The word remember is very beautiful. Ordinarily you don’t think about words. Remember means to make it a member again. Its root meaning is that you have forgotten some member of your being. Remember means you suddenly become aware that it is there.My talking to you is not the talking of a teacher because I am not teaching any theology, any doctrine, any cult, any creed. I am speaking to you in a totally different context. I am speaking to you in such a way that it creates inside you a synchronicity, it hits a deep chord in you. In that, simultaneously something is remembered. You feel that you have heard it for the first time and you also feel that it is a truth that has always been with you, you had just forgotten it. Both are true. From the outside you have heard it for the first time. From the inside it is part of your being; you had forgotten it.I know so many people in the world, and so intimately, but still I forget their names sometimes – but I never forget their faces, I never forget their eyes. Even in a crowd of millions of people I can find them. But as far as names are concerned, because deep down I know names are just given to you, they are not part of your reality, so I forget. Then I have a simple technique for remembering. It is strange that there are a few names which I go on forgetting. I will remember and will forget again; there must be something in those names.So what I do is I simply close my eyes and start repeating the alphabet – from A to Z, slowly – and it helps. I go on repeating A and wait for a moment to see if something is remembered, if the A hits something. Then B, then C. And it never fails.For example, Geeta is sitting here. Now Geeta is one of the names that I should not forget; it is the bible of the Hindus – in India the most respected book, the holiest book. But perhaps that is the reason I go on forgetting it! So this poor Geeta suffers.Yesterday I was answering her question, but I could not remember her name, and there was not time while answering to go through the alphabet. Later on, walking up the steps, I went through the alphabet and caught her immediately as G came; I immediately remembered – it is Geeta. And then I was surprised because this is such a common name; it is not uncommon. But perhaps it is the Hindus and their holy book – that seems to be the only reason. I have spoken on it; not in English, so you don’t know about it. I have spoken twelve big volumes on it, twelve thousand pages, although it is a small book.But with Geeta it was not only once. Once I can understand – one can forget. Then the next day I saw her coming to clean my bathroom and I thought, “My God! I have to go through the alphabet again!” And I caught her at G immediately. That G hits some chord, and I remembered “Geeta.” There are many names like that, which I go on forgetting. But they are there, just waiting to be struck rightly, then they become alive.Different people use different techniques for forgotten names; they make associations. For example, if I don’t want to forget Geeta’s name I can simply make it associated with Krishna. That name I never forget, and it is his message – Geeta. So I can simply connect these two, so that whenever I see Geeta I don’t have to bother about her name; I have to think of Krishna, then immediately I will remember Geeta. I have tried it just this morning. Coming in, I said, “Hey Krishna!” I remembered that she is Geeta and no one else.So if it happens when I am speaking that something hits a deep cord in you, then you feel it is something new that you have heard. But suddenly, in an even deeper and darker part of your being, something else is remembered. Suddenly you are in a puzzle: have you heard it anew, or had you just forgotten and hearing this you have remembered?Both are true – there is no need for any puzzle. It is new as far as you are concerned; it is as ancient as existence as far as your being is concerned. For your ego it is new, but for your being it is just a forgotten message.Sometimes you feel you know something, you remember something. You are absolutely certain. In all the languages this kind of phrase is available: “It is almost on the tip of my tongue.” It is, but still you cannot say it. And it feels very, very strange, a little awkward inside, with both things together: you know, you are perfectly certain that it is on the tip of the tongue, but you cannot verbalize it, you cannot simply say it. The more you try, the more you become tense, because it is so close.It is close, but something is hindering the path, something is coming in between – a very thin layer of something, some other word. But because you are becoming tense, it is not possible to remember it.Then different people have different methods. You start smoking a cigarette – you forget all about it. Just smoking a cigarette you relax, and suddenly it is there. Or you go into the garden and start watering the plants – you forget all about it. You are no longer tense, you are no longer worried even about remembering it, and that is the moment you remember it. It seems relaxation plays a great part in letting it come to the surface.Perhaps when I say something it relaxes you deep down, and that helps. Just sitting with me, listening to me, is not a tense affair. It is not the lecture of a professor, where you are taking notes.In India I had to continuously tell people, “Please stop taking notes because you are destroying the whole atmosphere. I am not a professor and this is not a class. When I am speaking and you are taking notes, you can’t hear me. You are concentrating on taking notes; you will miss many significant things.”Listening to me, sitting relaxed, suddenly a deep relaxation happens inside, and something that you have forgotten…Now I would like to again remind you of the meaning of the word sin. The religions have destroyed the beauty of the word – so much so that it has become almost impossible to use it because all the connotations that they have given to it are in everybody’s mind.But in reality the word sin simply means forgotten. In that sense I accept it. Our only sin is that we have forgotten ourselves, and our only enlightenment will be that we remember it again.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 25 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Today is my eighth sannyas birthday. Isn't eight years a very long time to miss the obvious?The obvious has been missed for hundreds of lives, so no time is long enough to miss it. On the other hand, even a single minute is enough to recognize it.In fact, it is a nontemporal phenomenon; time has no concern with it. If you think in terms of years, if you have missed it in the moment when it was possible to get it, you will go on missing. Time cannot help; on the contrary, the longer you have missed it the more is the possibility to miss it again when the moment comes to recognize it.The question is from Devaraj. He should not be worried, because he has not missed it. And it is not the time of eight years that has helped him not to miss. It is his love – not the length of time but the depth of love that he did not miss it.He has loved me immensely and in a very difficult situation. He is my personal physician, and anybody in that situation will be in a very difficult situation. I am a difficult patient. I don’t listen to him or to anybody; I simply tell him to do what he should tell me to do. And he has to manage somehow to do it – and to do it rightly, because he has to take care of medical science and he has to take care of a madman.I won’t listen because I understand my body and its ways. Whatever he, or any doctor in the world has learned about bodies and ways, they have learned about corpses, not real bodies; they have been dissecting dead bodies. Sooner or later medical science will have to accept the fact that their understanding is basically wrong, because a living body functions totally differently; the dead body does not function at all. You study the dead body and you apply your conclusions to the living body. That is one of the greatest flaws in modern medical science.But with me the difficulty is even more; it is not only a question of a living body. Modern medical science has no understanding of a body in which enlightenment has happened – that its functioning changes absolutely, totally.But Devaraj has been able to understand for the simple reason that he has been able to love. His science, his experience, and my body’s different functioning may have created a great problem for him to understand – but love solves everything. He has followed my understanding of my body and its wisdom, still keeping in tune with his scientific medical knowledge and not going against it either. He has done something which has never been done before, and he has done it successfully.He need not worry: eight years or eighty years make no difference. The first moment he saw me the obvious became a reality to him, and not for a single moment has he lost sight of it; otherwise you can live with an awakened person for your whole life and still not see what awakening is, what illumination is.So remember, it is not the length of time but the depth of love that makes the obvious understood. In that very understanding a tremendous transformation takes place. Only such people know intimacy with a master.Osho,What is the nature of this chatterbox mind of mine? It has been going on and on now for as long as I can remember. What are its origins? Is its source somewhere in the vast silence it dissolves into when I am in your presence?The mind is simply a biocomputer. When the child is born he has no mind; there is no chattering going on in him. It takes almost three to four years for his mechanism to start functioning. And you will see that girls start talking earlier than boys. They are bigger chatterboxes. They have a better quality biocomputer.It needs information to be fed into it; that’s why if you try to remember your life backward, you will get stuck somewhere at the age of four if you are a man, or at the age of three if you are a woman. Beyond that is a blank. You were there; many things must have happened, many incidents must have occurred, but there seems to be no memory recorded, so you cannot remember. But you can remember back to the age of four or three very clearly.Mind collects its data from the parents, from the school, from other children, neighbors, relatives, society, churches; all around there are sources. You must have seen little children: when for the first time they start speaking, they will repeat the same word many times. The joy! – a new mechanism has started functioning in them.When they can make sentences they will make sentences so joyously, again and again. When they can start asking questions, then they will ask about each and everything. They are not interested in your answers, remember! Watch a child when he asks a question; he is not interested in your answer, so please don’t give him a long answer from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The child is not interested in your answer; the child is simply enjoying that he can question. A new faculty has come into being in him.This is how he goes on collecting. Then he will start reading and collect more words. In this society, silence does not pay; words pay, and the more articulate you are, the more you will be paid.What are your leaders? What are your politicians? What are your professors? What are your priests, theologians, philosophers, condensed to one thing? They are very articulate. They know how to use words meaningfully, significantly, consistently, so that they can impress people.It is rarely taken note of that our whole society is dominated by verbally articulate people. They may not know anything; they may not be wise, they may not even be intelligent. But one thing is certain: they know how to play with words. It is a game, and they have learned it. It pays in respectability, in money, in power – in every way. So, everybody tries, and the mind becomes filled with many words, many thoughts.You can turn any computer on or off, but you cannot turn the mind off. The switch does not exist. There is no reference about it, that when God made the world, when he made man, he made a switch for the mind so that you could turn it on or turn it off. There is no switch, so from birth to death it continues.You will be surprised that the people who understand computers and who understand the human brain have a very strange idea. If we take out the brain from the skull of a human being and keep it alive mechanically, it goes on chattering in the same way. It does not matter to it that it is now no longer connected to the poor person who was suffering from it; it still dreams. Now that it is connected to machines, it still dreams, it still imagines, it still fears, it still projects, hopes, tries to be this or that. It is completely unaware that now it can do nothing; the person it used to be attached to is no longer there.You can keep this brain alive for thousands of years attached to mechanical devices, and it will go on chattering, round and round, the same things, because we have not yet been able to teach it new things. Once we can teach it new things, it will repeat new things.There is an idea prevalent in scientific circles: it is a great wastage that when a man like Albert Einstein dies, his brain also dies with him. If we could save the brain, implant the brain into somebody else’s body, then the brain would go on functioning. It doesn’t matter whether Albert Einstein is alive or not; that brain will continue to think about the theory of relativity, about stars and about theories. The idea is that just as people donate blood and people donate eyes before they die, people should start donating their brains too so that they can be kept. If we feel that they are special brains, very qualified and it is sheer wastage to let them die, then we can move them to another body.Some idiot can be made an Albert Einstein, and the idiot will never know – because inside the skull of man there is no sensitivity; you can change anything and the person will never know. Just make the person unconscious and change anything you want to change in his brain: you can change the whole brain, and he will wake up with the new chattering and not even suspect what has happened.This chattering is our education, and it is basically wrong because it teaches you only half of the process – how to use the mind. It does not teach you how to stop it so that it can relax – because even when you are asleep it continues. It knows no sleep. Seventy years, eighty years, it works continuously.If we can educate people, and that’s what I am trying to impress on you, that it is possible: it is possible to put a switch on the mind and turn it off when it is not needed – call it meditation. It is helpful in two ways. It will give you a peace, a silence, which you have never known before, and will give you an acquaintance of yourself which, because of the chattering mind has not been possible – it has always kept you engaged. Secondly, it will also give the mind rest. And if we can give the mind rest it will be more capable of doing things more efficiently, more intelligently.So on both sides – on the side of mind and on the side of being – you will be benefited; you just have to learn how to stop the mind from functioning, how to say to it, “It is enough; now go to sleep. I am awake, don’t be worried.”Use the mind when it is needed, and then it is fresh, young, full of energy and juice. Then whatever you say is not just dry bones; it is full of life, full of authority, full of truth, sincerity, and has tremendous meaning. You may be using the same words, but now the mind has collected so much power by resting that each word it uses becomes a fire, becomes power.What is known in the world as charisma is nothing; it is simply a mind which knows how to relax and let energy collect, so when it speaks it is poetry, when it speaks it is gospel, when it speaks, it need not give any evidence or any logic – just its own energy is enough to influence people. And people have always known that there is something that they have called charisma, although they have never been able to exactly pinpoint what it is.Perhaps for the first time I am telling you what charisma is, because I know it by my own experience. A mind that is working day and night is bound to become weak, dull, unimpressive, somehow dragging. At the most it is utilitarian; it is helpful when you go to purchase vegetables. But it has no more power than that. So, millions of people who could have been charismatic remain poor, unimpressive, without any authority and without any power.If it is possible – and it is possible – to put the mind to silence and use it only when it is needed, then it comes with a rushing force. It has gathered so much energy that each word uttered goes directly to your heart. People think that those kinds of charismatic personalities are hypnotic; they are not. They are really so powerful, so fresh that it is always spring.This is for the mind and for the being. The silence opens up a new universe of eternity, of deathlessness, of all that you can think of as blessing, as benediction; hence my insistence that meditation is the essential religion, the only religion. Nothing else is needed. Everything else is nonessential ritual. Meditation is just the essence, the very essence. You cannot cut anything out of it.It gives you both worlds. It gives you the other world – the divine, the world of godliness – and it gives you this world too. Then you are not poor. You have a richness but not of money.There are many kinds of richness, and the man who is rich because of money is the lowest as far as the categories of richness are concerned. Let me say it in this way: the man of wealth is the poorest rich man. Looked at from the side of the poor, he is the richest poor man. Looked at from the side of a creative artist, of a dancer, of a musician, of a scientist, he is the poorest rich man. And as far as the world of ultimate awakening is concerned he cannot even be called rich.Meditation will make you ultimately rich by giving you the world of your innermost being and also relatively rich, because it will release your powers of mind into certain talents that you have. My own experience is that everybody is born with a certain talent, and unless he lives that talent to its fullest, something in him will remain missing. He will go on feeling that somehow something is not there that should be.Give the mind a rest – it needs it! It is so simple: just become a witness to it and it will give you both things.Slowly, slowly mind starts learning to be silent. Once it knows that by being silent it becomes powerful, then its words are not just words; they have a validity and a richness and a quality that they never had before – so much so that they go directly, like arrows. They bypass the logical barriers and reach to the very heart.Then mind is a good servant of immense power in the hands of silence. Then the being is the master, and the master can use the mind whenever it is needed and can switch it off whenever it is not needed.Osho,I remember you once explaining that Tantra means expansion. My moments of greatest joy and my moments of greatest silence are invariably accompanied by an exquisite feeling of expanding. This feeling is also present in the urge to melt into someone or something – like a tree or a sunset – that I love.Where does this desire come from? Is it an innate longing to be reunited with something of which we were once part?Yes, it is not something coming from outside. It is your innate feeling to be one with something with which you were one – and with which you are still one, but you are unaware of it. So it is only a question of awareness, of remembrance. You have never gone anywhere. You are still here; it is just your mind that goes on moving to faraway spaces.If the mind is silent, suddenly you discover this crystal clear moment, now and here, and the feeling of oneness with all. We are one. We cannot be otherwise. There is no other way. Life is one phenomenon, existence is undivided – but mind has the capacity to forget it.The mind has the capacity to dream of faraway things. You sleep at night in your bedroom and you can dream of being on the moon. Do you think if you are suddenly awakened you will ask, “How to get home? – because I am on the moon.” If you are suddenly awakened you will not be on the moon, you will be in your bed. You have never been on the moon. Even when you were dreaming that you were on the moon, you were not on the moon. The moon was a dream, your being on it was a dream; you were on your bed, in your bedroom.The mind has the capacity to go far away. So once in a while when it is not far away, when something very striking brings it back to herenow – a beautiful sunset, a beautiful painting, a great dance, anything that pulls it back because something so enchanting is happening here that it cannot wander out here and there, it has to rush home… That’s why at the moment of seeing a sunset or listening to music, you feel a certain oneness. It is so fulfilling, so satisfying that you would like it to persist every moment, forever. And the joke is that it persists every moment, eternally. You just go on, here and there, again and again forgetting about it. You have to be brought back.Once you have understood the basic situation, then there is no need for anything. Just close your eyes and feel now and here, and suddenly existence opens its doors. You have always been part of it. You are part of it. You cannot be otherwise.Osho,All my life, including my years of being a sannyasin, I have never had a questioning attitude. This has not worried me up to date, but now since you have been inviting us to ask you questions, I wonder if it is okay that I am quite empty?It is absolutely okay.Osho,My love for freedom makes me always give to my beloveds all the freedom I possibly can. So often, I put myself into an uncomfortable situation where I get hurt. Does this mean I don't love myself so much, and that's why I put myself second?It may be much more complicated than you think.First, the very idea that you give freedom to your beloved is wrong. Who are you to give freedom to your beloved? You can love, and your love implies freedom. It is not something that has to be given. If it has to be given, then there will be the problems that you are facing.So in the first place you are doing something wrong. You really don’t want to give freedom; you would love that no such situation arises in which you have to give freedom. But you have heard me saying again and again that love gives freedom, so you force yourself unconsciously to give freedom, because otherwise your love is not love.You are in a troubled situation: if you don’t give freedom you start suspecting your love, but you cannot give freedom. The ego is very jealous. It will raise a thousand and one questions: “Are you not enough for your lover or beloved, that she needs freedom – freedom from you to be with someone else?” It hurts, and that’s why you start feeling, “I am putting myself second.”Giving freedom to her you have put somebody else first, and you have put yourself second. That is against the ego, and it is not going to help in any way, because you will take revenge for the freedom that you have given. You would like the same freedom to be given to you – whether you need it or not, is not the point – just to prove that you are not being cheated.Secondly, because your beloved has been with someone else you will feel a little strange being with her. That stranger will stand between you and her. She has chosen someone else and dropped you; she has insulted you. And you have been doing so much; you have been so generous that you gave her freedom. Because you are feeling hurt, you are going to hurt her in some way or other.But the whole thing arises from a misunderstanding. I have not said that if you love, then you have to give freedom. No, I have said that love is freedom. It is not a question of giving. If you have to give it, then it is better not to give it. Then remain the way everybody is. Why create unnecessary complications? – ordinarily, there are enough.If your love itself has come to that quality that freedom is part of it, that your beloved need not even ask your permission… In fact, if I was in your place and the beloved was asking my permission, I would be hurt. That means she does not trust my love. My love is freedom. I have loved her; that does not mean that I should close all doors and windows so she cannot laugh with somebody else, dance with somebody else, love somebody else – because who are we?That is the basic question that everyone has to ask: “Who are we?” We are all strangers, and on what grounds do we become so authoritative that we can say, “I will give you freedom,” or “I will not give you freedom,” or “If you love me, then you cannot love anybody else”? These are stupid assumptions, but they have dominated humankind since its very beginnings. We are still barbarous; we still don’t know what love is.If I love someone I am grateful that that person allowed me, my love, and did not reject me. This is enough. But I don’t become an imprisonment to her: She loved me, and as a reward I am creating a prison around her; I loved her, and she, as a result, is creating a prison around me. Great rewards we are giving to each other!If I love someone I am grateful and her freedom remains intact. It is not given by me. It is her birthright, and my love cannot take it away. How can love take somebody’s freedom away, particularly the person you love? It is her birthright. You cannot even say, “I give freedom to her.” Who are you in the first place? – just a stranger. You have met on the road, by the way, accidentally, and she was gracious to accept your love. Just be thankful, and let her live the way she wants to live, and live the way you yourself want to live. Your life-style should not be interfered with.This is what freedom is. Then love will help you to be less tense, less full of anxieties, less in anguish, and more in joy. But what goes on happening in the world is just the opposite. Love creates so much misery, so much pain, that there are people who decide finally that it is better not to love anyone. They close the doors of their heart because it is simply hell and nothing else.But closing the door to love is also closing the door to reality, to existence; hence I will not support it. I will say: change the whole pattern of love! You have forced love into an ugly situation – change the situation.Let love become a help for your spiritual growth. Let love become a nourishment to your heart and a courage so that you can open your heart, not only to one individual but to the whole universe.Osho,Do we have to transcend sex before getting enlightened?You don’t have to transcend anything. You have to live everything that is natural to you, and live it fully, without any inhibition – joyously, aesthetically. Transcendence will come just by living it deeply.You are not to transcend anything. Remember my words. Transcendence will come by itself, and when it comes by itself it is such a release and such a freedom. If you try to transcend, you are going to repress, and repression is the sole reason why people cannot transcend; so you are getting into a vicious circle. You want to transcend, so you repress, and because you repress you cannot transcend, so you repress more. As you repress more, you become more incapable of transcendence.Live it out fully, without any condemnation, without any religion interfering with your life. Live it out naturally, intensely, totally – and transcendence comes. It is not your doing, it is a happening. And when it comes by itself, there is no repression, there is no antagonism.You are above all those things that you wanted to transcend – for example, sex. But a real transcendence does not mean that you cannot make love. Of course your love will have a totally different quality. It will not be sexual, it will not be a biological urge, it will not be animalistic; it will be simply a play between two human energies.If transcendence comes by itself, then many things disappear, more or less. But you are not against anything that disappears. You can still enjoy it. For example, in a state of transcendence you are not a food addict, but that does not mean that you cannot enjoy, once in a while, going to a Chinese restaurant.Transcendence makes you free; it does not give you a new bondage: first you were so addicted that you had to go, now you are so addicted that you cannot go. Transcendence means that now all this addiction is gone – you can go, you may not go. You are neither against nor for.You may be smoking. Transcendence does not mean that once in a while with friends you cannot smoke a cigarette. I don’t think that a cigarette, once in a while, will destroy your spirituality. And if it destroys it, then that spirituality is not worthwhile.I cannot smoke – not because of transcendence but because of my breathing trouble. Otherwise I have no antagonism against poor cigarettes; it is just the smell of tobacco I cannot tolerate, the smoke I cannot inhale. But that is a problem with my body; it is my allergy. But when I see somebody smoking I don’t feel that this man is condemned forever, is going to fall into hellfire.No condemnation arises in me, because what he is doing is simply playing a game. Being alone, finding nothing else to do and being told continually by the parents and the society that it is better to do something rather than nothing, the poor man is doing something rather than nothing. He is at least smoking.Transcendence is a very childlike state.My grandfather used to smoke cigars and cheroots, and he would send me to get his cigar and lighter. Rather than bringing both, I would take the cigar in my mouth and light it and bring it to him. He said, “This is not right. I had asked you to bring the cigar and the lighter.”I said, “When I can bring one, which does the work for both… I am not stupid.”He said, “That I know. But remember, don’t learn this habit.”I said, “Don’t be worried. Seeing you cough continually the whole night is enough. I don’t have to go through the experience to learn it. I learn from others’ experience too.”His doctors were saying to him, “Drop those cigars.” But it was impossible for him after a whole life’s addiction. He was ready to suffer, to cough and not to sleep well.I said, “Seeing you is enough prevention for me, and just that one puff that I take when I light your cigar brings tears to my eyes. It is enough just to experience what kind of enjoyment you must be having.”The people you know as saints are not childlike. They are addicted as much as others; their addictions have just become reversed. Somebody is addicted to sex – they are addicted to no-sex. Somebody is addicted to smoking – they are addicted to no-smoking.Transcendence is a state of no-addiction, just a childlike playfulness. There is no sin in sex. Just living it intensely, by and by you transcend, just the way you transcend playing tennis. One day you throw away the whole thing, “Enough is enough!” You transcend football, you transcend all kinds of things, and nobody calls you a saint.To me transcendence comes out of your experience. You see the futility of something and the addiction drops. Then once in a while, just for a change, if you want to smoke I don’t see any harm; if you want to make love I don’t see any harm. The harm is in the addiction – the harm is not in the act. And transcendence is not concerned with the act; transcendence is concerned with the addiction. To be completely unaddicted gives an immense freedom.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 26 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I hear you often say that the politicians and the priests are exploiting and cheating people, as if they are a different race from outer space, forced upon us.My understanding is, rather, that these politicians and priests just come from among us, so we are totally responsible for their doings, and complaining about them seems like complaining about ourselves. Is not a politician and a priest hidden in every one of us? Would you please comment?The politicians and the priests are certainly not coming from outer space; they are growing among us. We also have the same lust for power, the same ambition to be holier than others. They are the most successful people as far as these ambitions and desires are concerned.Certainly we are responsible, but it is a vicious circle so we are not the only ones who are responsible. The successful politicians and priests go on conditioning the new generations for the same ambitions; they make the society, they cultivate its mind and conditioning. They are also responsible – and they are more responsible than the common people, because the common people are victims of all kinds of programs that are being imposed upon them.The child comes into the world without any ambition, without any lust for power, without any idea that he is higher, holier, superior. Certainly he cannot be responsible. Those who bring him up – the parents, the society, the educational system, the politicians, the priests – the same gang goes on spoiling every child. Of course in his own turn, he will spoil his children; it is a vicious circle. From where to break it?I insist on condemning the priests and the politicians, because that is the place from where it can be broken. Condemning the small children coming into the world is not going to help. Condemning the common masses is also not going to help, because they have been already conditioned, they are being exploited. They are suffering, they are miserable. But nothing wakes them up – they are fast asleep. The only point where our condemnations should be concentrated is on those who have the power, because they have the power to contaminate the future generations. If they can be stopped we can have a new man.I know that everybody is responsible. Whatever happens, in some way or other, everybody has his part in it. But to me what is important is who to hit, so that for the new generation of children the vicious circle can be avoided. Humanity has been revolving in it for centuries. That’s why I don’t condemn the common masses, I don’t condemn you. I condemn those who are now in a position that if they just relax a little bit as far as their vested interests are concerned, and look at the miserable mass of humanity, a transformation is possible: the circle can be broken.I purposely choose the politicians and the priests. There are many other things to be remembered. The priest knows perfectly well that there is no God. In this world the priest is the only person who knows there is no God, but his whole profession depends on this non-existential God. He cannot say the truth because all his vested interests will be lost – not only his, but he will be spoiling the whole game for generations to come. He knows the rituals are just hocus-pocus, that the mantras carry no power, that his theology is just a cover-up. Nobody else knows it better; he has studied the scriptures and he knows there is no evidence of God anywhere. He interprets the scriptures in such a way that they help his profession. He goes on making commentaries on the ancient scriptures, adding more and more things that are helpful for his profession.As times change he has to make new additions. For example, Manu, a five thousand year old thinker, priest, the father of priesthood, in his Manusmriti – the memoirs of Manu which Hindus follow word by word – he created the caste system, one of the ugliest things in existence.Because of it, one-fourth of Hindus have suffered a long slavery, exploitation and humiliation. They have been turned almost into subhuman beings – they are called achhoot, untouchables. They have fallen so much that you cannot touch them; otherwise you have to immediately take a bath. Even their shadow touching you is enough to make you impure. Manu reduced one-fourth of the Hindus to eternal slavery it seems.He managed the highest position in the society for the priesthood, but he was really cunning and clever: he has given all the superiority to brahmins, but he has not given them riches, nor material, temporal power. He has divided the castes so there is no conflict. Temporal power he has given to the second highest caste: the warriors, kshatriyas. They are going to be the kings, they are going to be the generals, the soldiers, the fighters, and they will be the second highest class. And money he has given to the third: the businessmen, the vaishyas. To the fourth he has given nothing except slavery.You can see the cunningness: he divides. He does not give money or temporal power to brahmins, because then three-fourths of the society will be against them, and it will not be possible to control. And if they have also spiritual power with material power, money, then there will be resentment, anger, violence; there will be riots. So to brahmins he gives the holy power – they are the highest, the holiest – but he does not give anything temporal to them.He gives the temporal power to the warriors. It is satisfying, because they are going to be the kings; brahmins cannot be the kings. And who cares about spiritual power? So let them have spiritual power; it is almost like having nothing, just a nominal quality of being superior, so the warriors are not angry about it. On the contrary, they are happy that one-fourth of the society will never be in conflict with them – they are already higher, they have nothing more to gain. And the warriors are the most powerful people.To the third he gives money and all other worldly things. These are the people who cannot fight, who are not warriors but they can earn money, they can produce wealth.You will be surprised to know that in India all the kings, before India became a slave country, were indebted to the rich people. From where are they going to get money? – just by borrowing. They can pay when they invade some other country; otherwise they have to borrow from the business people. And the business people are happy; they have all the material things, the money. Not only that, kings are borrowing from them, brahmins have to depend on them for everything – so let them believe that they are higher but basically the business people hold the power, they have the money.Against these three classes the poor fourth has no power to fight. They are deprived of all education, deprived even of living in the city; they have to live outside the town. They cannot take water from the city well – they have to make their own wells or carry water from the river. They are completely cut off from the society. They have just to come and serve, and do all the ugliest things that nobody else wants to do. And three powerful sections are there to go on repressing them: they have money; they have power; they have spiritual heights, they are the representatives of God.For five thousand years they have maintained this. They have made the fourth, the slaves, believe that they are born slaves as a punishment because of their evil acts in the past life. The brahmin is enjoying his position because of his good acts in the past life. And there is no mobility; one cannot move from one caste to another caste.Since Manu, the priests in India have remained the most anti-revolutionary element – naturally, because they will lose their superiority. Kings come to touch their feet, the super-rich come to touch their feet – their egos are fulfilled. The same is the story around the world: everywhere the priesthood has maintained its superiority. It is not so clear-cut as in India, but a subtle division is there. The priest is superior everywhere, the warrior is number two everywhere, and the rich man is number three everywhere. The fourth, the slave, the servant, is the same everywhere.These priests go on preaching to every child a certain kind of mind that keeps the society running – or stuck. The politicians are in a deep conspiracy with the priests. The politicians are full of lust for power, and if they want power, they want blessings from the priests, because the priests have a spiritual hold over humanity. If a politician goes and touches the feet of a priest, the followers of the priest are going to vote for the politician. There is a conspiracy: the politician goes on praising the priest, his religion, his ideology, and the priests go on blessing the politician and his ideology. Between these two powerful groups the whole society is crushed, sucked.I know everybody is responsible, but not everybody is powerful enough to break the circle; hence I am hitting constantly on the priests and the politicians. Now they have become afraid of me – perhaps they have never been afraid of a single man before. All over the world they don’t want me to enter their countries. The priests are behind the politicians who are making rules and laws that I should be prohibited.The commune in America was destroyed by the politicians, but behind the politicians were the fundamentalist Christians, the most orthodox group of Christian priests. Ronald Reagan himself is a fundamentalist Christian. To be a fundamentalist Christian means to be absolutely orthodox. He believes that every single word in the Bible is holy, is from God’s own mouth. They were in conspiracy together to destroy the commune.Just the other day I received the news that now they are making a memorial in The Dalles. Bishops and politicians and all kinds of leading, prominent citizens are contributing money for a big memorial, a memorial that they have become victorious, that they have thrown out the evil forces who had created the commune. They have thrown me out, destroyed my work, and they are not satisfied with that; they want to create a memorial so that the future generations will know.Both the priests and the politicians are very vulnerable; they have no ground beneath their feet. Just a good hit is needed and they will be finished. And once they are finished, society will have a taste of freedom.We can bring up children in a more human way, unconditioned, intelligent, looking at the whole earth as one – not Christians, not Hindus, not Mohammedans, not Indians, not Chinese, not Americans. Nations and religions are creations of the priests and the politicians. Once they are finished, religions and nations are also finished. And a world free of religions, free of nations, will be a human world – without wars, without unnecessarily fighting for things which nobody has seen.It is so stupid that for thousands of years people have been killing each other in the name of God. None of them has seen God, none of them has any proof, none of them has any evidence. They don’t even feel embarrassed because nobody has asked the question looking directly into their eyes. They are going on crusades, jihads, religious wars, destroying all those who do not believe in their dogma, because their dogma is divine and every other dogma is the Devil’s creation.They are trying to serve humanity by killing people. Their intention is to free those people from the clutches of the Devil. But the strangest thing is that every religion thinks that the other religion is created by the Devil. So the fight continues. Politicians are fighting war after war – for what? I don’t see the point. The earth has no lines, so why make these maps and draw lines?One of my teachers was a very intelligent man. One day he brought a few pieces of cardboard; he had cut the whole world map into small pieces, put them on the desk and asked, “Can anybody come and arrange them in the right order?” Many tried and failed.Just one boy, seeing that everybody was failing and they were not making the world map by putting the pieces together, looked at the back of one piece. Then he turned all the pieces over and he found the picture of a man. He arranged the picture of the man, which was very easy, and that was the key. On one side the man was arranged, and on the other side, the world map was arranged.Perhaps the same is true about the real world: if we can arrange man, the world will be arranged. If we can make man silent, peaceful, loving, nations will disappear, wars will disappear, all dirty politics will disappear. And remember, all politics is dirty; there is no other kind.But we have to hit on those who have the power. Hitting the poor common man will not help, because he has no power, he is a victim. Even if we can change him, it won’t be a great change. But if we can abolish the conspiracy between religion and politics, priests and the politicians, it will be really a great change, a revolution – the only revolution that is needed and that has not yet happened.Osho,When you spoke of greed, I was totally horrified. I have finally reached a point where I am willing to see how big a part it plays in my life, and the misery it brings with it. Could you please shed more light on what this thing called greed is, where it comes from? And perhaps offer some tools to help me?Just to understand the nature of greed is enough. You need not do anything else to get rid of it; the very understanding will clarify the whole mess.Man is full if he is in tune with the universe; if he is not in tune with the universe then he is empty, utterly empty. And out of that emptiness comes greed. Greed is to fill it: by money, by houses, by furniture, by friends, by lovers – by anything, because one cannot live as emptiness. It is horrifying, it is a ghost life. If you are empty and there is nothing inside you, it is impossible to live.To have the feeling that you have much inside you, there are only two ways: either you get in tune with the universe… Then you are filled with the whole, with all the flowers and with all the stars; they are within you just as they are without you. That is real fulfillment. But if you don’t do that – and millions of people are not doing that – then the easiest way is to fill it with any junk.I used to live with a rich man who had a beautiful house. Somehow he became interested in my ideas; he listened to a few of my lectures, and he invited me, saying, “Why live far away, out of the city? I have a beautiful house in the city and it is so big; you can have half of the house. I am not going to charge you, I simply want your presence to be there in my house.”I was living outside, in the mountains, but it was difficult to come from there to the university. From his house the university was very close. His house had a beautiful garden and was in the best locality of the city, so I accepted his invitation.But when I went into his house I could not believe it; he had so much junk collected that there was no place to live. The house was big, but his collection was bigger – and a collection which was absolutely stupid. Anything that he could find in the market he would purchase. I asked him, “What are you going to do with all these things?”He said, “One never knows, some day one may need it.”“But,” I said, “where is one going to live in this house?” So much furniture of all ages was there because the Europeans had left the country so they had to sell all their things. He could not have enough; he managed to purchase anything, things which he did not need.There was a car was standing in the porch which always remained standing there because it was too old, broken. I asked him, “Why don’t you throw it away? At least to clean up the place…”He said, “It looks good in the porch.”All the tires were punctured; it was of no use. Whenever you had to move it from here and there, you had to push it, pull it back. And it was rotting there. He said, “I got it at a very reasonable price. It belonged to an old woman who used to be a nurse here and who has gone back to England.”I said, “But if you were interested in purchasing a car then at least you should have purchased a car which moves.”He said, “I am not interested in movement. My bicycle is perfectly good.” And his bicycle was also a marvel. You would know that he was coming from a mile away, the bicycle made so much noise; it had no mudguards, no chain cover – it must have been the oldest bicycle made. It had no horn.He said, “There is no need for a horn. It makes so much noise that at least for one mile ahead people are already giving way. And it is a good thing, because it cannot be stolen.”I said, “That is strange. Why can’t it be stolen?”He said, “Nobody else can ride on it. It has been stolen twice, and the thief was caught immediately – because it makes so much noise, and everybody knows that it is my bicycle, so people caught the thief and asked him, ‘Where are you taking the bicycle?’“I can leave it anywhere. I go to see a movie – I don’t put it on a bicycle stand, because then you have to pay money. I put it anywhere, and it is always there when I come back. Everybody knows that it is a trouble. Even if you can get it to your home you cannot ride on it in the city, you will be caught. So it is better not to bother with it.” He said, “It is a rare specimen.”I said, “The way you describe it, it looks like it.”And he had all kinds of things in his house: broken radios, because he could get them cheap; he was a Jaina and he had a broken statue of Jesus Christ on the cross.I said, “What have you purchased it for?”He said, “The woman gave it to me free when I purchased the car – she offered it to me as a present. I don’t believe in Jesus Christ or anything, but I could not refuse a piece of art.”I said to him, “Today take everything from one half of the house to the other half – my part has to be empty.”He was very happy to take everything. Already his house was so full you could not walk, you could not find your way. He took everything. He had so many kinds of furniture that he had piled sofa upon sofa; they were not used, because you cannot sit on a sofa that is touching the roof. And I asked, “Why?”He said, “You don’t understand – the price! And someday I may get married” – he was not married – “and I may have children and they may need all these things. Don’t be worried, everything will be of some use sometime.”Even on the road, if he could find anything lying there which had been thrown by somebody, he would pick it up. One day he was walking with me from the garden to the house and he found a bicycle handle, and he picked it up. I said, “But what will you do with a bicycle handle?”He said, “You don’t understand. I will show you.”I went with him. In his bathroom he had almost a bicycle – just a few things were missing. He said, “All these things I have picked up from the road. And I go on joining them and putting them together. Now a few things are missing. The chain is not there, the seat is not there, but I will get them. Somebody is going to throw them away someday. Life is long, and what is the harm? It looks perfectly good in the bathroom.”Greed simply means you are feeling a deep emptiness and you want to fill it with anything possible – it doesn’t matter what it is. Once you understand it, then you have nothing to do with greed. You have something to do with your coming into communion with the whole, so the inner emptiness disappears. And with it, all greed disappears. That does not mean that you start living naked; that simply means you do not live just to collect things. Whenever you need something you can have it.But there are mad people all over the world, and they are collecting. Somebody is collecting money although he never uses it – that is strange. In the commune we had made a sticker for cars: Moses Earns, Jesus Saves, Osho Spends.A thing has to be a utility; if it is not a utility then there is no need for it. But this thing can take any direction: people are eating; they are not feeling hungry and still they go on swallowing. They know that it is going to create suffering, they will be sick, but they cannot prevent themselves. This eating is also a filling-up process.So there can be many directions and many ways to fill emptiness, although it is never full – it remains empty, and you remain miserable because it is never enough. More is needed, and the “more” and the demand for more is unending.I don’t take greed as a desire – it is some existential sickness. You are not in tune with the whole, and only that tuning with the whole can make you healthy. That tuning can also make you holy.It is strange that the word health and the word holy both come from wholeness. When you are feeling one with wholeness all greed disappears. Otherwise, what have religions been doing? They have misunderstood greed as a desire, so they try to repress it: “Don’t be greedy.” Then one moves to the other extreme, to renounce. The greedy person collects; and the person who wants to get rid of greed starts renouncing. There too there is no end.Mahavira could never recognize Gautam Buddha as enlightened for the simple reason that he still carried three sets of clothes – just three sets of clothes, which were absolutely necessary. One you are using, one has to be washed, and one for emergency reasons: someday the clothes may not come from being washed or they are not dry, or it is raining the whole day. So three seems to be very essential.Mahavira was absolutely against greed. Now, that was taken to an extreme form – he was naked. Buddha carried a begging bowl. Mahavira could not accept it because even a begging bowl is a possession, and an enlightened man, according to him, should not possess anything. A begging bowl is made of coconut. You cut the coconut in half, you take all of the fruit out, and then two bowls are left, hard shells. That is the cheapest thing because they are thrown away; you cannot eat them. To have a begging bowl and to call it being possessive is not right.But when you take greed as a desire and you become stubborn, going against it, then everything is a possession. Mahavira lived naked, and instead of a begging bowl he used to make a bowl of his hands. Now it was a very difficult thing: his hands were full of the food and he had to eat just like the animals, because he could not use his hands – so he had to use his mouth directly to take the food from the hands.Everybody in the world eats sitting. But Mahavira’s idea is that when you eat sitting, you eat more. Now this is going to the opposite extreme. So he was teaching to eat standing. Standing, with the food in your hands is such a strenuous thing. You can take food only once, so whatever can fit in your hands at one time is a meal. You have to eat it standing, and everything has to be taken together, sweet, salty, and they all get mixed. That is Mahavira’s idea of making it tasteless, because to enjoy taste is to enjoy the body, is to enjoy matter.To me, greed is not a desire at all. So you need not do anything about greed. You have to understand the emptiness that you are trying to fill, and ask the question, “Why am I empty? The whole existence is so full, why am I empty? Perhaps I have lost track: I am no longer moving in the same direction, I am no longer existential. That is the cause of my emptiness.”So be existential. Let go, and move closer to existence in silence and peace, in meditation. One day you will see you are so full – overfull, overflowing – of joy, of blissfulness, of benediction. You have so much of it that you can give it to the whole world and yet it will not be exhausted.That day, for the first time you will not feel any greed for money, for food, for anything. You will live naturally, and whatever is needed you will find it. You will live, not with a constant greed that cannot be fulfilled, a wound that cannot be healed.Osho,Many times I have heard you tell the Zen story that, “If you meet the master on the way, kill him.”Does it really have to be like that? If we meet on the path, can we not just laugh, and chat a little while, and then if we must part, do so gracefully, with a namaste and a smile?The story is not about any actual path, and not about any actual meeting with the master. The story is about when you are meditating and things are disappearing from the mind, the mind is becoming silent. The last to go will be the one you have loved most. That is, the last will be the master. It is in your meditation, when everything else is gone, that you will still see the master. Now, chit-chatting will disturb your meditation, and preparing a cup of coffee will not help.The saying looks hard, but it is true: cut off the head of the master! It is in your imagination that you are cutting it off. By chit-chatting or laughing or talking, you will not get rid of the master. You have to be very simple and straight, you need a sword: cut off the head of the master and pass on. Don’t look back!The master is saying this so that you can enter into shunyata, into nothingness, into nirvana. The master is making you aware that even he should not be a hindrance to you.I will be a hindrance. You have loved me so much that you may be able to drop everything from the mind, but then I will be there – and you have to drop me too. It is not an actual thing, it is just about your imagination, about the last trick of your mind.Your mind will bring in the master because the mind knows you cannot throw away the master. You have thrown away everything else, and that is the last resort of the mind to prevent you from going into meditation. If you are afraid, if you feel that it is being ungrateful, if you feel that to cut off the head of the master is not the right thing to do, then you are playing into the hands of the mind. It has nothing to do with the master, because there is no master; it is just your mind projecting.And don’t ask, “From where am I to get a sword?” It has been asked, down the centuries. Whenever masters have said to their disciples, “If you meet me on the way, cut off my head,” the disciples have asked, “But from where have I to get a sword?”I will tell you a Sufi story:Mulla Nasruddin has applied for a job on a ship. He is being interviewed, and the captain and the high officials of the company are asking questions. The captain asks, “If the waters are in turmoil, and the wind is blowing strongly and there is a danger of the ship being upturned or swayed in a direction it does not want to go, what are you going to do?”He said, “Simple, I will throw out an anchor.”The captain said, “That’s right. But suppose another storm comes up; what are you going to do?He said, “Nothing else; I will throw out another anchor.”The captain said, “It is right, but suppose a third storm comes up. What are you going to do?”He said, “The same! I will throw out an anchor.”And the captain said, “But from where are you getting these anchors?”And Mulla Nasruddin said, “From where are you getting these storms? From the same place!”Just as the master is imagination, your sword is also an imagination. If the mind can provide you with one imagination, it is capable of providing you with the other – and perhaps happily, because you are going to kill the master. The mind is very happy when you are against the master – angry, resentful – and now he will be bursting with joy that you are going to kill the master. He will present you a beautiful sword immediately – just ask.Both are imaginary, the master and the sword. And you have to go beyond imagination. So this must be the last barrier, and once there is nobody, nothingness opens up. You are connected with existence, you are connected with your reality.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 27 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Often joyously I hear you saying contradictory things, and emphasizing that everything just has its polar opposite to be complete. But the other morning I got into trouble when you were talking about offering your friendship to your sannyasins.I understood that some of them have taken this long-wanted opportunity for their self-aggrandizement, and haven't been aware of the fact that they were basically resentful and angry toward you at being mere disciples.My understanding was totally different when you were telling us in Kulu and Kathmandu that as far as you were concerned, you didn't have any disciples anymore, and now it was up to us to drop discipleship. To me your offer of friendship was just overwhelming, and I felt more reverence and love toward you than ever before, and very, very grateful. I felt a very delicate, sensitive and precious kind of intimacy starting to grow between me and you, as my master.Now you say that all this was just a device to get rid of egoists, and that they enjoyed this offer of yours. I don't understand anymore. Did I get it all wrong? Where am I hooked?The question is from Premda. His situation is different from those who were waiting for such an opportunity for their own ego-fulfillment. He is new. He has not known the phase of discipleship at all, so when friendship was offered it was not nourishment to his ego; it went directly to his heart because he has no resentment, no anger at being a disciple.This became a joyous intimacy and a loving growth for him. Now he is feeling more reverence, more love, more respect. This will bring in him the wonderful experience of discipleship. So the situation is so different that there is no question of contradiction.The people who have been with me for ten years, twelve years, and were hankering deep down to become masters themselves were certainly feeling resentful toward me. When I offered friendship, it was not a gratitude or reverence that grew in their hearts but a deep and long-awaiting ego that was fulfilled.Now they could declare that they have the same status as I have, that their experience is the same as my experience. So my declaration of friendship was to them the end of their discipleship – and not the beginning of friendship either; it was simply the end of the road.But to Premda the situation is different. He has not been around me for many years, and he has not for a single moment thought of being a master. His whole desire has been to be closer to me, to be intimate with me. So when I declared, “I am your friend,” this desire was fulfilled, and it has created a loving intimacy and reverence. You can see it from the question. I call myself your friend, but he says he started feeling a reverence toward the master.To those who have been calling me “master,” the declaration of friendship ended their discipleship, and to one who was simply longing for intimacy the same declaration made him a disciple. The people who were longing to be masters were not many; they belonged only in the category of therapists – just a few therapists, not all. And those therapists got this longing because I was sending people to their therapies and they started thinking that they are some kind of masters, and they are helping people to grow.The reality was, I was sending those people to their therapies because those people were so full of rubbish that they needed some dry cleaning, and the therapists were nothing but dry cleaners. But thousands of people passed through their therapies; it was very human and very natural to get the idea, “We can be masters on our own.” They were just waiting for the opportunity.It is not true about all sannyasins; it is only true about a special small group of therapists. Their work destroyed them. They may have helped many people come closer to me, but they themselves went on going farther and farther away.Premda has no desire to be a master, and nobody who has a desire to be a master can ever be a master. Only those who are desireless happen to be masters. It is not something like a goal that you can achieve: it is something that happens by the way, unintentionally, without being sought for. You are doing something else, you are feeling more love, more intimacy, more reverence, and slowly, slowly, in this reverence and love and intimacy, your ego is disappearing. One day, when the ego is not there, you have become a master.You were not seeking it; it is just a by-product. Those poor therapists missed – although they were with me for years – because they remained achievers, climbers. In their minds they were always thinking how to become masters.It is good, Premda, that my offering of friendship created discipleship in you. That’s how it should have been for everyone who is sincerely here for the search of truth, for the search of oneself.You are blessed.Osho,Hearing about the sannyasin therapists who are choosing to do their own thing, reminds me that once I also decided to do my own thing rather than be with you.When I did come back, I judged myself, and felt judged by others – ironically, some of whom are among those of whom you have recently spoken.Because I can alternately view my experience as a going astray or as a constructive learning, I am very cautious about judging others who would appear to have gone off track. Surely only an enlightened seer is in a position to indicate where we are.My question is: What is it to miss? Is it something other than, through our sleepiness, choosing to take a longer, more devious route to that place which we must some day reach; that place which, in fact, you say we have never left?Are we all missing every moment of every day until we are enlightened?Yes, everybody is missing every moment until they are enlightened.Whatever you are doing can either bring you close to the point of explosion or can take you away from the point and make you more closed. These are the two possibilities within you: exploding into a lightning experience or being closed in a dark night of the soul.So which way are you moving?If you are moving toward the dark night of the soul you are missing – and missing more every moment because you are going farther and farther away. There is no end to going farther away. You can go away eternally; there is no time limit.One can remain unenlightened forever – that’s the danger. And one can become enlightened this very moment. The question is, toward what are you moving? If you are coming closer to your center of explosion, then every moment you are nearer and nearer to enlightenment. It depends on your speed. If your understanding is intense enough, it can happen this very moment; you have not to wait for even a single moment more.So you see these are the two possibilities: either now or never. Both are possible, and man’s prerogative is that he has the freedom to go either way.There is no harm in doing your own thing – but you don’t know who you are, how can you do your own thing? It is a dilemma. Those who know cannot do their own thing, because they know there is nobody inside as a self, as a separate entity from existence. Those who do not know themselves cannot do their own thing because they don’t know even their own self.So one possibility is that you are accidental; that’s what you call “doing your own thing.” You are accidental, or you are existential: that’s what I call “doing the thing existence wants you to do.” It is not your own thing. I am not doing my own thing – there is nobody to do such a thing. I am simply available to existence. So whatever and wherever it wants to lead me, I am available, because I am not.Remember, these are the difficulties with language. I say I am available because I am not. Only when I am not, is there availability. If I am, then there is always choice, not availability. Then I will judge whether to go this way or not, whether to do this or not. So whenever you are doing your own thing, one thing is certain: you are not in tune with existence. So what can it be? It can only be accidental.I know people who had come accidentally to me. They had come to meet one of their friends who was a sannyasin; they had not come to meet me or to see me. They were not even remotely interested in me, but then listening to me they became interested, they became curious, they became involved. This is accidental. If I send them away to do something I can be certain some accident is going to happen.I have tried. Seeing some accidental people, I have told them, “Go and open a center in your place,” and they were very happy and they went there and fell in love with a woman, and forgot all about the center – got married and got into the whole mess of marriage.You cannot depend on those people; they are not reliable. It is not their fault. They are just driftwood – any accident and they start doing things they have never thought about, doing things without ever thinking whether they really want to do them. Perhaps others are doing, so they start doing.What you call “doing your own thing” is accidental, because you don’t know yourself yet; you cannot do your own thing. To be accidental is to remain in darkness; being thrown by winds here and there like a dead leaf; having no roots, having no integrity, having no individuality, having no sense of being connected with existence.Doing your own thing, you were wrong – not that the things that you were doing were wrong, but that you were thinking that they were your own. They were only accidental.The people, the therapists, who criticized you were thinking they were doing my thing, not their own and having to do my thing was creating deep resentment in them. They really wanted to do their thing. They criticized you just to strengthen in themselves that the very idea of “doing your own thing” is wrong. To repress their own idea they judged you wrong; they were really judging themselves.Once they got the opportunity… Now they are all doing their own things, and thinking that it is freedom. They are telling people, “Osho has given freedom to us.” Now, this is such a foolish idea. Nobody can give you freedom, and if somebody can give you freedom, he can take it back any moment. Freedom cannot be a gift. You have to grow and be free; freedom has to be something that happens to you – it is not given.Now they are saying, “Osho has given us freedom and now we are doing our own thing.” They are doing the same thing they were doing here; perhaps less efficiently, more superficially, because the people they will get will not be meditators.I used to choose people for their groups; seeing the need of the person, I used to choose which group he should go to. Now these therapists will be doing things to people who don’t need them or which may even harm them. There is every possibility that the people will be harmed through their therapies – because therapy is nothing spiritual. Therapy is only preparing the ground. And if you don’t have the seeds, the ground that you have prepared will simply grow weeds, wild grass. It cannot grow roses.Here I was using their therapy to clean the ground so that seeds of meditation could be sown, and people could blossom.But soon they will understand. Seeing the results, people will start disappearing from their therapy groups. I know perfectly well that people never wanted to do therapy groups; I had to persuade them to go to do it. They had come to listen to me and to meditate.Therapy groups are already out of fashion. Esalen – the original pioneer institution for therapy groups – is dying. Nobody goes anymore. Only on weekends a few old people turn up. When they saw that thousands of people were coming to me and going through me to the therapies, they could not believe it, because they were the original people who had started the therapy movement. It was unbelievable to them why people were not going there.The reason was that people had been there and had seen their therapies and found that they were only games you can play with. It feels good while you are playing them, but after two days all is gone; you are the same person, nothing has changed. Then what is the point of going again and again, giving money and playing the same kind of games?Those therapists who had been working here in the world of the sannyasins will soon feel frustrated, tremendously frustrated. One thing, sannyasins will stop going to them, knowing that it is no longer part of a spiritual movement. Secondly, those who go will see that it is pointless. Just again and again clearing the ground and letting the weeds grow makes no sense.I was using therapy simply as a preparation – it was not the end. Those therapists know nothing of meditation, because they felt that it was below them to go and meditate with the same people who were doing therapies with them; they were great therapists. So they never meditated; they missed meditation. They were so knowledgeable that they thought they knew everything. I don’t think they have listened to me; otherwise the way they have betrayed me would not have been possible.But they will have to come back; they cannot go on existing for long. Soon you will see those faces again, and this time they are not going to be therapists. This time I am going to work in a totally different way. Therapy will not be part of it; perhaps personal counseling may be there, but not therapy.There is nothing wrong in doing your own thing – just remember that it is accidental. First know thyself, and then do anything that happens, that comes up out of your nothingness. And out of nothingness always comes the lotus of nirvana.Osho,In the Hindi incarnations of God there are a woman and a man together – like Vishnu and Laxmi, Shankar and Parvati, Krishna and Radha, Rama and Sita, etc. On the other hand, there are other religions like Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, etcetera, which have no place for women. Please comment.Compared to Hinduism, all these religions – Taoism, Jainism, Buddhism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism – are very new. Hinduism is very old; hence it has some unique characteristics. Because it is the oldest religion in the world, there are a few things in it which you will not find in other religions.For example, you are saying that Hindu incarnations of God are always with a woman consort: Shiva is with Parvati, Krishna is with Radha. In India, Jainism and Buddhism flowered twenty-five centuries ago. They had to fight against Hinduism, which was the only religion.You will be surprised: it was so alone that it had no name. A name is needed when there is more than one thing; if there is only one thing, what is the use of a name? Hinduism was the only religion, so it was simply called “dharma” – religion. There was no need to put an adjective to it. Jainism and Buddhism were born out of Hinduism, offshoots of the old religion, but then they had to make some specialities to stand aloof; otherwise the oceanic Hinduism would have drowned them.Hinduism was very natural, that’s why the incarnations are not celibate. The idea of celibacy had not entered the mind of the Hindus because it is unnatural, so even their incarnations of God have their wives. They are just as natural as you are.Jainism and Buddhism both made it a point that man has to go above nature, beyond nature, only then is he religious – Hinduism is not religion. What kind of a religion is it if just to be natural is to be religious? Then there is no difference between you and animals, because all animals are natural. They had a point there, and they created great logical systems against Hinduism. One of the basic points was that you have to go beyond nature – and that starts from celibacy, because sexuality is the basic nature.So Buddha is alone, Mahavira is alone; and for these twenty-five centuries all their monks and masters have been alone, celibate. You will be surprised to know that their celibacy was such a thing that the common masses became very impressed by their ascetic attitude toward life. Hindus before Buddha and Mahavira were not ascetic – even their seers lived in comfort and luxury. They had their communes in the mountains, in the forests, which their followers went on donating to. The kings, their sons, their daughters all had to go the monasteries of the seers to learn. So they had immense power. Each great Hindu wise man had many kings as his followers, and lived in luxury, comfort. His whole commune of disciples and teachers all lived beautifully. They were not other-worldly people.Jainism and Buddhism are ascetic; they went on point by point against Hinduism, to make a distinct identity. Comfort is not even heard of; discomfort is the way. The more you can keep yourself in discomfort, the more spiritual you are – because the body is the enemy of your soul, so torture the body to find your soul. This world is the hindrance for the other world, so renounce it.Jainism and Buddhism did so many strange things that even the Hindu masses became impressed; even Hindu wise men, brahmins, started thinking how to fight against the rebellious Jainas and Buddhists. The only way was that they also had to be more ascetic than they were. So after Gautam Buddha you will not find any Hindu master with a woman. Shankaracharya, Ramanujacharya, Nimbarkha, Vallabha – great masters, but you will not find them with a woman. What happened?They all had to be celibate. They had to be to fight with the Buddhists and the Jainas; otherwise they were ordinary people, they were not spiritual. They were all ascetic, just like Jainas and Buddhists were; they were ascetic in their own way. They renounced the world, they renounced all comforts, just to counter-attack.Hinduism got spoiled by Hindus themselves; otherwise it was a beautiful religion, very natural, very simple, very innocent. But it became more and more complicated. These three religions have been fighting for twenty-five centuries, arguing, writing treatises against each other. Those treatises have become more and more complicated – to such a point that even to understand them has become a difficult expertise.There are treatises which scholars have been trying for years to translate into English, but have not been able to. Because of the complexities of ideas, language, its nuances, it is difficult to be authentic to the original and to translate it; the translation looks very poor.Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Sikhism are all later additions to human consciousness – after Buddha. In fact Buddha should be the demarcation line, not Jesus. We say, “Before Jesus Christ, after Jesus Christ.” Jesus has become the demarcation line dividing history, but that credit should go to Gautam Buddha, who came five centuries before Jesus and really divided human consciousness and its growth.Jesus himself had traveled to India while he was young. The Bible has no account of him between the age of thirteen to thirty; the Bible has no account of where Jesus had been. This looks strange: he lived a small life, only thirty-three years, and in those thirty-three years the Bible has accounts of only the last three years. About his earlier life there are only two incidents – minor, meaningless. One was of his birth and the coming of the three wise men from the East to pay tribute; and second, his getting lost in the temple of Jerusalem, arguing with rabbis. These are the only two incidents. Then from the age of thirteen to thirty, seventeen years, nothing is mentioned of what happened to this man, of where he was.Those seventeen years he traveled to Egypt, to India, to Ladakh, to Tibet, and all those places were Buddhist at that time. Buddha had died only five centuries before, and his impact was still very alive. Jesus visited Buddhist monasteries. I have been to a Ladakh monastery which Jesus had visited, and I looked in their records of visitors, which they have kept for two thousand years – I asked them if they had a record of all the visitors and their impressions about the monastery.It is one of the most beautiful monasteries, and Jesus stayed there for almost six months, studying Buddhism from the monks. There are, in their official record, the impressions of Jesus, his signature, the date. He became immensely influenced by Buddhism, so his celibacy, his ascetic attitude, his praise for poverty, his condemnation for riches, were all borrowed ideas from Gautam Buddha.Naturally those people followed a certain pattern that Buddha left behind him. They don’t have a woman companion, which would be natural. Hinduism seems to be very natural – even its gods are very natural. There is no desire to be beyond nature; there is only one desire: to be totally natural. But in a way all other religions are reactions, rebellions against Hinduism.It had no name. It was known as the eternal religion because it had always been there. Nobody can say when it was born, who the founder of the Hindu religion was. You can find founders of all other religions except Hinduism. Who was the original man? There seems to be no one. Hindus themselves used to call it sanatan dharma: the eternal religion. How did they become Hindus? Who started calling them Hindus? They got the name Hindus in a very strange way.The name was given by the foreigners who were constantly invading India because every invader had to pass one of the greatest rivers of India, Sindhu. The first invaders, the Hunas, have disappeared from the world now – a wild tribe. In their alphabet they had no sound for sa, for S. The closest sound to S was H – ha. Sa – ha, that was the closest. They could not pronounce the river “Sindhu”; they pronounced it “Hindu.” Because of their language, and because of their pronunciation, they started calling the people who lived beyond this river “Hindus,” the people who live beyond the river Hindu.It is beautiful sometimes to look at the history of how a word evolves, in what phases it moves, what turns it takes, what colors it takes.Because of the word Hindu, the land of the Hindus became Hindustan, and the religion became Hindudharma, the Hindu religion. Invaders from the Hunas used to continually come. The country was so rich that another group of invaders came: the Mongols, from Mongolia, who produced the most terrible invaders, Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, the most terrible of men. Now it had become established because of the Hunas that the name of the Sindhu became Hindu, the land became Hindustan, the people became Hindus. The Mongols did not have any sound in their alphabet for H, for ha. The closest for H was I. They could not pronounce Hindu, they could only pronounce “Indu.”It looks close: Hindu–Indu. Because of the Mongols, the river became Indu and the country became India – from Indu – and the people became Indians. But it all happened because of that river which has a name, accidentally. But Hindus themselves don’t have a name, neither do they have a name for their country. They have been always there, their religion has been always there. They don’t know of any beginning to their religion.So it seems it has grown very naturally with the natural man. Buddhism was the first effort on man’s own part to create a religion. That’s why I say Buddha should be the demarcating line; because what was natural up to then became something man-made, manufactured. Because now religion is manufactured, many religions are manufactured.Nature is one, but once you start manufacturing then you can manufacture as you like: different religions, different creeds, different cults, different philosophies. Buddha certainly stands just in the middle of this change.If you understand me, my whole effort is to reverse the process. Man does not need man-made religions; man simply needs to be natural. Nature should be the only religion, and then there will not be divisions of Hindus and Mohammedans and Christians and Buddhists.Nature does not make any divisions; it is undivided and it is one.Osho,During the time with you in Oregon, I sometimes felt that leaving was an escape, a mistake – like removing the kettle from the fire just before the water boiled. Now look at us: we've all had to leave, and you are continents away. Yet this time seems even richer – a time when you are offering something vital, not to be missed; perhaps the chance to be at home everywhere. How to summon you, and how to slip quietly into our hearts as we drive cabs and bulldozers in the outside world?Love knows no distance in time or in space. So wherever my people are, whatever they are doing, if their hearts beat in tune with me, they are with me. Then all distance of time and space disappears. The question is of the hearts beating in the same rhythm. That is the only closeness.It was easy to miss in the commune because I was so close to you. It was easy to forget me. I was too obvious. It was easy to take me for granted. But now that you are scattered all over the world by the courtesy of the American government, we have made the whole world our commune.There are great distances in space, but this will help you; it will not be a loss. This will make you remember me more. This will remind you of me more. In your silent moments, in your loving moments, just playing on your guitar, you will find me sitting by your side. Just in moments when you are silent, peaceful, you will start hearing my heartbeat too.Everything that happens is good, is for the better, because existence goes on evolving. If we remember that existence is continuously in evolution, then at the time that something is happening it may seem disastrous, but finally you will find that it was not so; it has brought new flowers, it has created new experiences.I know there are continents between me and you, but those continents cannot separate; they only join. They are not walls, they are bridges. And a bridge, however long, is a bridge; and a wall, however short, is a wall.My own experience has always been that everything that has happened has always proved to be good. If we can trust, then even at the time of its happening we will not be sad, we will be celebrating. Our sannyasins did well even though the most powerful government was destroying a small commune of five thousand people – which proves that they were afraid. They were acting out of fear, but our people danced and sang and celebrated, knowing that out of this chaos some beautiful stars will be born.The American government’s fear has now become a world phobia. Now every government is afraid; not of a commune; the question of a commune does not arise. They are afraid of me even landing at their airport. It is not a question of entering in their country! Fear seems to be unlimited. What can I do if I just land at their airport?England would not allow me to rest overnight in the airport, and in the parliament they had to discuss it, my being in the country. That was a lie, because I was only asking to stay overnight in the lounge of the airport – which it is meant for. I had my jet plane standing at the airport so that in the morning we could leave. Thinking that they may say, “The lounge is only for first class passengers; now how can we decide about which class your jet is?” we purchased tickets for first class traveling too, not giving them any chance – and that’s actually what happened.They said, “The jet is okay, it is ready, but how can we be certain…? The lounge is only for first class passengers.” So we produced our first class passenger tickets, saying, “For your satisfaction we have tickets also.”Then they disappeared and came back about half an hour later and said, “There is some bylaw of the airport that we cannot allow you to stay the whole night – a few hours is okay.”I asked the man, “What do you mean by a few hours? How do you decide that three hours is enough, or four hours is enough, or twelve hours is enough? Where is that bylaw of your airport?” The man disappeared and never came back.Another man came and he said, “You have to understand that if you want to wait the whole night you have to wait in the jail. We cannot take the risk of leaving you free in the airport lounge.” I had to stay in the jail. In the parliament, the prime minister answered the questions and said that my being there was dangerous for the country, for the country’s safety.An American establishment for nuclear weapons in England to bomb Libya is not dangerous; my just staying overnight in the airport lounge, from where I cannot go into the country by any way, is dangerous. You can see these politicians are made of straw. And the thing has gone around the world: now the whole European parliament, all the countries of Europe, are deciding together that I cannot land my jet at any airport; they will not refuel it. Then small countries are bound to follow.Now the Bahamas have decided that I cannot enter; other countries – Panama and two or three other countries near Panama – afraid that I may go there, have decided. Strange, that they are so afraid of a single man. Soon I think they will be deciding in the UN that this man should not be allowed to stand on Earth anywhere.But I take it as a good sign. It means they have recognized one fact: that what I am saying they cannot refute, that what I am saying is dangerous to their very roots. If their roots are so weak, do you think they are going to survive? Even without me they will die; even without me they have to die. Their fear shows death.All these governments are lying without any evidence of anything! Now they are spreading the rumor around the world that they have nothing against me, but that three of the people who are with me are criminals. They don’t give the names of the three people who are criminals and what crime they have committed. Some evidence should be proved. Even if they are criminals, I cannot be punished for their crimes. But just because they have traveled with me, I cannot be allowed to remain in a country.In Spain, the government took one month to decide: the parliament discussed, the cabinet meetings went on for seven days, and the president and the prime minister were all involved and finally they decided that I should be allowed in. And then a letter came from the German government that three criminals were traveling with me. They called my secretary, Hasya, and told her, “We don’t have anything against Osho, but from the German government there is tremendous pressure that three criminals are with you.”She asked, “Who are the three criminals, and what crimes have they committed?” By insistently asking, we have come to know only that one is German, one is Canadian, one is American. Strangely enough, there is no German in the group, so one third of the information is absolutely wrong. There are a few Americans, but none of them are criminals, and none of them remembers that he has committed any crime! One is a Canadian: he is shocked by hearing that he is a criminal. There are no charges against him.Just today I have received a letter from the US Supreme Court in Oregon. They could not prove the case for which they were harassing me for twelve days in jail; they failed to prove the case in North Carolina. In the court the US attorney had to accept: “We have not been able to prove anything; still, we want everybody else to be released on bail, but Osho should not be released on bail.”This must be something unprecedented! They have not proved anything against me. Why should I not be granted bail? The reasoning was that I was capable of jumping bail, whatever the bail would be – ten million dollars or twenty million dollars. Does it mean nobody in America who has money will ever be allowed bail?Strange! The people who don’t have money cannot be allowed bail because from where will they get money for bail? And the people who have money cannot be allowed bail because they can jump. So bail is simply out of the question in America.Simple logic can show the stupidities. Then finally they had to drop the case, but they had taken three persons on bail – Jayesh, Devaraj, Vivek – at twenty-five thousand dollars each. But you can see the cunningness! If governments are so cunning then I don’t think criminals are doing anything bad. Governments are criminals.The letter that I have received today says that because these three people have refused to appear as witnesses, we are dropping the case. These three people have never received any summons to appear. Now, this is simply strange! We were waiting for these people to be sent for any day; our attorneys were waiting there. They said, “Give us the time and the date, and we can call our people and they will be here.” But because they had dropped the case, now they were afraid that they would have to return the seventy-five thousand dollars.To keep that money, this letter has been sent: “Because these three people have not appeared, their bail money is to be taken up by the US government.”They have confiscated my things, which they had said would be released when I am released – they were not given back. Then they told my attorneys, “After three days we will be releasing them.” They were not released; then seven days… Months have passed and they go on postponing.Now the case is dropped. Even the bail money has been transferred to the government account. What about my personal things? My attorneys are continually going to them, saying, “Decide something about his personal things.” They want to divide them half and half – half will be taken by the government, and half will be given to me. Strange! For what should the government get half? And we were ready even for that.I told the attorneys, “Let them have half. Take half and then we will fight for the other half.” But they simply say – they don’t do anything. Perhaps some other day I may receive a letter in which all those things are confiscated and taken by the government, for some reason they can find or invent, because my people did not appear in the court on the hearing day.There has never been a hearing, there has never been a hearing day; the case was dropped a few weeks ago. We have been informed by the attorneys that the case has been dropped, knowing that they have nothing to prove in it.With all these things, it seems on the surface that they are destroying my work, destroying my message. But they are wrong. This is not the way of destroying any truth; this is the way the truth enters into people’s minds, gets their sympathy, their hearts.So wherever you are, it does not matter. Just your heart has to beat with me. If it stops beating with me, then there is distance.Now look at Chetana, sitting there in the corner: she is almost sitting on the moon. The reason is that she had asked a question. She herself had asked, “If I am wrong, please nudge me a little.” I nudged her a little and said, “You are wrong,” and that has hurt her so much that since that day she has become a miserable person. I have never seen her in any misery before. She has always been light, joyful. But since that day, because I said, “You are in a wrong space…” She herself had asked, “Nudge me a little.” And I really nudged her a little, just a little. She has gone so far away she is sitting on the moon.Remember one thing, when you ask a question be ready for any answer. Don’t expect a certain answer that you would like; otherwise there is not going to be any learning, there is not going to be any growth. If I say you are not right at a certain point, try to look at it. I will not be saying it just to hurt you. If I am saying it, I mean it.If you start feeling hurt by small things, then it will become impossible for me to work. Then I have to see what you would like. Then I will not be a help, then I will not be a master to you.So you can be here, but if your heart is not beating with me, you are far away. And vice versa.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 28 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I have carried this sutra you spoke on in Pune with me for many years. It reads:The Buddha said,It is better to feed one good manthan to feed one hundred bad men.It is better to feed one who observesthe five precepts of Buddhathan to feed one thousand good men.It is better to feed one srotapannathan to feed ten thousand of thosewho observe the five precepts of Buddha.It is better to feed one skridagaminthan to feed one million of srotapannas.It is better to feed one anagaminthan to feed ten millions of skridagamins.It is better to feed one arhatthan to feed one hundred millionsof anagamins.It is better to feed one pratyak buddhathan to feed one billion of arhats.It is better to feed one of the buddhaseither of the present or of the pastor of the futurethan to feed ten billions of pratyak buddhas.It is better to feed one who is aboveknowledge, one-sidedness, discipline, andenlightenment than to feed one hundred billionsof buddhas of past, present, or future.It says so much about your height and our darkness, and has produced two feelings in me: the blessing and joy of being in your magnificence, and the arduousness of how far we have to travel just to have a taste of your consciousness.Would you please speak on this again?One of the most fundamental things to be understood is that the distances are only dream phenomenon, they do not exist in reality. One may be asleep very lightly, one may be asleep very deeply, one may be almost in a coma. If you want to wake them up, then the first, who is in a very light sleep, half awake, half asleep, can be awakened soon; but every one of them can be awakened. It is only a question of the intensity of the effort needed to awaken from the outside, and the intensity needed to be awake from the inside.You must have all felt moments of nightmare when you want to wake up but you cannot move. Then, in a minute, you wake up. It looks so strange that just a moment before it looked impossible even to open your eyes or move your hands, and after just one minute you are fully awake.The distance between me and you is only a dream distance, so there is no need to feel any sadness, no need to feel that it is going to be a very arduous and long journey. It is a very simple and very natural phenomenon. If you can relax – and nothing can be easier than relaxation – things will start happening on their own.The sutra of Gautam Buddha is symbolic. Feeding somebody means nursing somebody, respecting somebody, loving somebody, doing something for somebody – out of compassion, kindness, or love, or respect. So food has not to be taken literally.The sutra says: It is better to feed one good man than to feed one hundred bad men. Who is the good man? The good man is one who spontaneously acts in the right way. Remember the word spontaneously. The good man is not one who makes efforts to act in a certain way that is accepted as good by the society in which he is born; that may not be good. There are hundreds of societies in the world, hundreds of civilizations have existed, and there is not a single thing that has not been praised as good by someone and condemned as bad by somebody else.Now, the Jainas will say to be naked is a good act – it shows that the man has renounced the world completely. But according to any other society, to be naked will be considered bad, even sick. According to Sigmund Freud, the naked man simply wants to show his naked body to others; it is a very perverted, precarious way of satisfying sexuality – it is perversion. He has given a certain name to this sickness: exhibitionism.So it is not a question to be decided by the outside morality. The decision has to be according to your spontaneity. Whatever you do out of your heart, which is not a reaction but a response, that act is good.Buddha says: It is better to feed one good man… because it is very difficult even to find a good man, a man of spontaneity, a man whose actions arise out of his heart …than to feed one hundred bad men. As far as the bad man is concerned, everybody who is acting in sleep, unconsciously, is bad. Bad and good are not concerned with the act; they are concerned with the consciousness through which they have been done: spontaneous consciousness, a little alertness, or unconsciousness. The act may be perhaps the same, but its quality changes by the touch of the man who is doing it.Buddha is saying that taking care of one hundred sleepy men, unconscious, not knowing who they are, not knowing why they are, not knowing where they are going, for what they are going, they are just part of the crowd, they are not men yet, they are sheep… Buddha says it is better to be respectful to the spontaneous, alert man.I have to emphasize the word respect, because ordinarily it simply means honor. But the root meaning of the word respect is “re-spect” – a man whom you would like to see again and again; a man who somehow touches your heart, has a magnetic impact on you, so that you want to look at him again and again.It is better to feed one who observes the five precepts of Buddha than to feed one thousand good men. Buddha is simply giving you the vast expanse of consciousness, its responses, and how you have to behave – because your behavior is going to be a transformation to you. The five precepts of Buddha are in a way very simple if they are done exactly according to Buddha’s teaching; otherwise they become self-torture. And he says: It is better to respect one who observes the five precepts…than to feed one thousand good men.The good man acts spontaneously, but the man with five precepts has a certain responsibility with his spontaneity, has a certain goal with his spontaneity, has a certain very clear-cut vision with his spontaneity. He knows what he is doing, why he is doing it and he knows what is going to be the result of it. He is acting very consciously. The five precepts are simple, but awareness has to be the base of it. It has to be, because Buddha is saying: It is better to feed one who observes the five precepts of Buddha than to feed one thousand good men. He is comparing one man with one thousand good men, with all their spontaneity.The five precepts: the first is nonviolence; whatever the situation, he should not act in a violent way. His response should always be nonviolent, because we are part of one existence. Whomsoever you are hurting, you are hurting yourself in the long run. Today you may not realize it, but one day when you are more aware, then you will say, “My God! This wound was inflicted by me upon myself.” You had hurt somebody else thinking that people are different. Nobody is different. This whole existence is one cosmic unity. Out of this understanding comes nonviolence.The second is non-possessiveness. If the whole existence is one, and if existence goes on taking care of trees, of animals, of mountains, of oceans – from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest star – then it will take care of you too. Why be possessive? Possessiveness simply shows that you can’t trust existence; you have to arrange separate security for yourself, safety for yourself. You cannot trust existence. Non-possessiveness is basically trust in existence. There is no need to possess, because the whole is already ours.The third is non-stealing. If it is one cosmos, to steal is simply as foolish as… I have heard that one pick-pocket sometimes used to have difficulty in finding people, to pick their pockets. But he was so habituated, and it was so difficult for him to accept the fact that he had not been able to do anything that day, he would pick his own pocket! People can deceive themselves that way.I have heard about one man who went to the fisherman’s shop in the evening and said, “I want that fish. Throw it, and I will catch it.”The man said, “What is the need of throwing it? I can give it to you.”He said, “No, you have to throw it and I will catch it – because I never want to lie. When I go home my wife is going to ask, ‘Where have you been?’ I have been fishing, but I could not catch any. This one I will have certainly caught. I have not purchased it; you have thrown it and I have caught it. So I can say with a straight face, ‘This is my catch – a beautiful fish.’ But I cannot lie. That’s why you have to throw it, and I have to catch it.”In fact that is what we are doing. It is all ours and we are in subtle ways stealing. It does not mean that you have to steal money or you have to steal things; you can steal thoughts, you can steal words. All your knowledge is stolen. It is not something that you have discovered, it is something you have picked up from here, from there. Then, without thinking twice, with a straight face, you say to the world, “This is my opinion.” It is not your opinion! You are not even aware of yourself – what opinion can you have? So all this is part of stealing.The fourth is no-taste. It became a torture, but it was not meant so. A man of the sensibilities of Gautam Buddha cannot make it a self-torture. His idea of no-taste was simply not to hanker after taste. Food is for nourishment of the body; taste is secondary – don’t make it primary. Secondly, his disciples were all monks; they had to beg. And he was a very careful man. He never wanted his people to become a burden on the society. If they start asking, “We want this, we want that… Prepare this dish for tomorrow when I come to beg,” then they will be heavy and burdensome.He made it a rule: don’t ask from just one house. Your meal – and the Buddhist monk was to eat only one meal – your meal has to come from five houses. He was simply trying to spread the burden, otherwise… He was moving with ten thousand bhikkus, his disciples, wherever he was going, and it would have been really troublesome if the ten thousand bhikkus had come into a small town – which may not have had the population of ten thousand – and they started asking for their preferences. The poor people of the town would be in a difficulty.Buddha’s whole effort about no-taste was that you should never be unwelcome wherever you go. People should know that out of compassion you go to five houses – just for a single meal. He denied more than one meal. It looks to us that it is asceticism, that it is self-torture. Even in the poorest countries, people need at least two meals. In richer countries like America people are eating five times or as many times as they go and visit the fridge – the whole day; it is not a question of times.There are thirty million people in America today who are dying because of over-eating. They know that this over-eating is killing them, but they cannot stop. It is just like being an alcoholic; they have become so addicted that they need something. If they have nothing then at least they chew gum, so their mouth goes on and on. In a way it is good; otherwise they would talk – yakkety-yak, yakkety-yak – because somehow they have to go on using their mouths. Their talking is just a substitute. Chewing gum keeps them silent at least!Buddha’s insight is really deep, because modern experiments, particularly by the psychologist Delgado, have proved beyond doubt that with one meal per day man’s life can be doubled. The more you eat the less you will live; the less you eat the longer you will live. He was trying an experiment: he tried thousands of times, then he gave his conclusion…He had two rows of white rats. One row was given as much food as they wanted – the American way. The food was always available; they could eat as much as they want. And the second row, the way of the bhikku, had just one meal – nourishing, complete for the body. And thousands of times the experiment was tried and always the American style rats died half way. The Buddhist bhikkus lived double the time of the Americans.So there Buddha had a deep insight: eat once and don’t hanker for taste; otherwise you would like to eat many times.It is known about Nero that he used to eat so many times that he had to keep four doctors with him; so when he ate they would help him vomit everything, so he could eat again. Just madness. But he was simply hankering for taste and that was the only way; otherwise you cannot go on eating the whole day. He was eating from the morning till night when he went to bed – he was either eating or vomiting. And the doctors’ only purpose was to help him vomit easily so he could eat again.Buddha’s insight is right. It is not self-torture. It is simply a profound insight into health, longevity – and perhaps sooner or later science will like everybody to eat only once. Of course the food should be sufficient, should have all that is needed by the body, but only once. It looks to us a little difficult, but it is only a question of habit. In Africa there are many tribes who, for thousands of years, have never eaten more than once a day. They were simply surprised when Christian missionaries reached Africa. They could not believe it: they start with tea in bed, then breakfast, then lunch, then coffee break, then supper, then dinner, and snacks here and there. They could not believe it. “What are these people doing? Are they living or simply eating?” – because they had eaten only once, and they were far more healthy and they lived longer.They are still eating once. Their bodies are more proportionate, they live longer, they run faster just like animals, they can run like deer. And their bodies have just the proportion that people are trying to get in thousands of gymnasiums around the world. They have it without any effort, just by a single meal.Non-violence, non-possessiveness, non-stealing, no-taste, and the fifth precept is compassion.We live in passion; our lives are passionate. Passion is always turmoil: ups and downs, one day good, another day bad, day follows night. In the same way, the life of passion is continuously going into pleasure, into pain – and they are balancing each other.Compassion is not to live passionately, but to live calmly, quietly, silently. Compassion can be without ups and downs – a deep serenity. Whatever happens on the outside does not matter, but the center of your being remains still, undisturbed.So Buddha says: It is better to feed one who observes the five precepts of Buddha than to feed one thousand good men.It is better to feed one srotapanna than to feed ten thousand of those who observe the five precepts of Buddha.Srotapanna is a very beautiful word. It means who has stepped into the stream. Literally, srot means the source; srotapanna means who has stepped into the stream which leads to the source. He is no longer standing on the bank. The man who follows the five precepts may still be standing on the bank.Before a srotapanna, Buddha says: …ten thousand of those who follow the five precepts of Buddha. One srotapanna is weightier, more valuable. He has risked the journey. He has moved from the bank into the river; he is ready to go to the source. He has taken the most courageous step a man has to take, ever in his life.The bank seems to be so safe, and you can make it so cozy. Stepping into an unknown stream, no one knows where it is going; it is certainly going into the unknown, and perhaps ultimately into the unknowable. It is better to feed that srotapanna who has the courage to step in – just one srotapanna – than to feed ten thousand of those who observe the five precepts of Buddha.It is better to feed one skridagamin than to feed one million of srotapannas. One million of srotapannas are nothing in comparison with one skridagamin: one who has reached the source. One million srotapannas may have stepped – but they may remain stuck there. Their first step may be their last step, because the journey is going to become more and more mysterious, more and more unknowable, more and more beyond their minds and beyond their control.So many will step, but only a few will go to the very end. One who reaches to the end, the skridagamin, is equal to one million of srotapannas.It is better to feed one anagamin than to feed ten millions of skridagamins. Those who have reached the source are not necessarily going to stay there. They may come back. Anagamin means who is not going to look back – coming back is out of the question.The skridagamin may have gone for strange reasons – maybe his ego. He is a strong person; when the weaker ones are stepping down or stopping, he will go to the very end, but he has all the desires in him – which can be fulfilled, or at least you can hope for them to be fulfilled, only on the bank. He will come back. He cannot remain there at the source.Only one who remains at the source and does not come back, the anagamin… These words are from the same root. Gamin means going. The English word, go comes from the same root as the Pali word gamin. Anagamin means one who is not going back. It is better to feed one anagamin than to feed ten millions of skridagamins.It is better to feed one arhat than to feed one hundred millions of anagamins. Now things are a little more subtle. Arhat means the victorious. Now there is nothing for him to achieve; he has come home. The anagamin has come to the source. He is not going back, but there are weaknesses in him which do not allow him to be totally victorious. He has reached the place from where victory is possible. He is not going back – but he is not going ahead either.An arhat is one who goes ahead of the anagamin. The anagamin becomes so happy with the source that he has reached that he feels that this is all there is; he has arrived – and that’s an illusion. There is much more. The arhat is not satisfied, although it is very pleasant, nice. But he has not come on this journey, on this pilgrimage to reach a pleasant state. He wants truth, and he is ready to lose all pleasures – even this spiritual pleasure of being at the source. His search is for truth, not for pleasure. It is better to feed one arhat than to feed one hundred millions of anagamins.It is better to feed one pratyak buddha than to feed one billion of arhats.Pratyak buddha means a man who has attained enlightenment. The arhat is victorious but he is not illuminated. There is still darkness at the very center of his being. A pratyak buddha is one whose whole darkness has disappeared; he is simply light. The arhat has discovered the truth; the pratyak buddha has become it.You have to understand the difference. One has discovered it, but it is still there and he is separate from it. The pratyak buddha has become it. There is no question of victory, because there are not two; hence you can see the difference: It is better to feed one pratyak buddha than to feed one billion of arhats. The distance goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. It is better to feed one of the buddhas, either of the present or of the past or of the future than to feed ten billions of pratyak buddhas.What is the difference between pratyak buddhas and buddhas? The pratyak buddha is one who has become enlightened, but he never becomes a master. He has experienced it, but he cannot explain it. Neither is he interested in anybody else, or in sharing his experience with anybody else. He has the same status as a buddha, but the difference is that the buddha wants to share it, and the pratyak buddha simply keeps it within himself. He becomes the truth, but his great achievement is confined only to himself. A buddha works hard, against all kinds of oppositions, difficulties, to reach people, to reach those who are on the path but are in darkness.The story about Gautam Buddha is that when he reached the gates of nirvana he stood there, his back toward the gates. The gates were opened, and the guards wanted him to enter. They were ready to welcome him – because centuries pass and then once in a while those gates open. They are immensely happy when one man has again become a buddha.But Buddha refused. The story is symbolic. He says, “Unless every living being passes by me into nirvana, I am going to stay here. I will be the last. I cannot go alone, I have to take everybody with me. They are struggling in pain and misery, and do you think I should enjoy nirvana and its tremendous blissfulness? It is not possible. I will wait. You can wait; but waiting here I will try to help those struggling souls, stumbling in darkness, groping in darkness. Unless I am satisfied that everybody has passed in, I will not come in and close the doors.”Buddha is certainly one of the most insightful men. He does not stop at himself. Anybody would have stopped there; it is a natural tendency to put oneself at the highest point and then stop.He says: It is better to feed one who is above knowledge, one-sidedness, discipline, and enlightenment than to feed one hundred billions of buddhas, of past, present or future.The last category is tremendously significant, because it will be the category which will be the most misunderstood. …one who is above knowledge… will not be consistent, he will be self-contradictory. One who is above one-sidedness, who cannot favor one side of the truth, one aspect of the truth. At the risk of being contradictory he will support all the aspects of truth. He will support the opposites, and naturally he will look illogical, he will look absurd. One who is above discipline – who has no discipline, who lives moment to moment, who has no certain order to follow – does not follow anything. Each moment decides what he is going to do.You cannot categorize such a man. You cannot call him good, you cannot call him bad; you cannot call him religious, you cannot call him irreligious, because he follows no discipline. And not only discipline, but he transcends enlightenment.Enlightenment is the ultimate experience, but still it is an experience; the highest, but still part and parcel of all other experiences: they may be lower, this may be the highest. Finally one transcends it too. One simply forgets about it. It becomes one’s nature.In the beginning, when you reach from your ignorance into enlightenment, it is such a difference that you are immensely gratified. But now ignorance is gone. Enlightenment slowly, slowly loses the excitement it had in the beginning. It is no longer ecstasy, it is simply your nature. And nobody remembers one’s nature.This is the ultimate category Buddha manages to talk about: beyond knowledge, beyond discipline, beyond enlightenment. This kind of man will be opposed by all, this kind of man will be condemned by all. This kind of man is bound to stand alone against the whole world, for the simple reason that he has transcended all that they value.In Japan there is a beautiful series of pictures depicting the whole range of the pilgrimage to the truth. In the beginning – the name of the Zen painter who made it is not known – it had ten pictures. But even the Zen masters suppressed the tenth picture, and for centuries it was known only as having nine pictures. It was only later on that it was discovered in some old scripts that the original had ten pictures, and the description of the tenth is the description Buddha is giving of the last.It is a series of pictures: a man loses his bull. In one picture, he looks all around and he cannot see it. There are mountains, there are trees, there is a lake and the man is standing there looking all around – and the bull is nowhere to be seen. In the second picture he finds the foot marks of the bull. He cannot see the bull yet, but foot marks are there and he follows the foot marks.In the third he sees just the back of the bull, which is standing under a tree. In the fourth he finds the bull. In the fifth he tries hard to catch hold of it; it is a bull – it is difficult, he is really powerful. But in the seventh he manages. In the eighth he rides on the bull. The bull won’t allow it, and tries this way and that to throw him off. In the ninth he reaches home with the bull.The tenth was repressed even by the people who can be said to be the most meditative, to be the most alert in the whole world. Perhaps they were afraid that the tenth picture may confuse people or may help them to go astray, because in the tenth – he has got the bull, and the bull is in the shed, tied up – in the tenth he takes a bottle of wine and a flute and goes back near the lake. He is going just with his flute and a bottle of wine. Now this picture was repressed, destroyed; it has been recovered now. But this is the picture of the last state. Now there is no discipline: he can drink wine, he can play the flute.The bull is the self, your inner reality. Finding it represents nirvana. At the ninth, logically it should stop. But existence is not logical, and who will know better than Gautam Buddha that it is not logical? The tenth goes beyond all logic, all comprehension. Even enlightenment is dropped. The man becomes absolutely ordinary, without any discipline – a hobo with a bottle of wine to enjoy under a tree, and playing the flute – utterly ordinary.But his ordinariness is not the ordinariness we are aware of; his ordinariness is something most extraordinary. But he is going to be misunderstood, he is going to be condemned. Now, who is going to accept him as a master? Who is going to accept him as a buddha?But Gautam Buddha has put him above himself. He says: It is better to feed one who is above knowledge, one-sidedness, discipline, and enlightenment, than to feed one hundred billions of buddhas of past, present, or future.This sutra shows the beauty of the man, his grandeur, his greatness.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 29 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In a speech prepared for his followers after his car accident, Gurdjieff said, “Again I repeat that the institute is closed. I died. The reason is that I was disenchanted with people after all that I have done for them; I have seen how well they have paid me for it. Now inside me everything is empty.”Recently, when Krishnamurti died, I felt that somehow he too died disenchanted.Osho, over the years with you, we have built great castles in the sand and have seen them destroyed; yet when I see you these precious mornings and evenings, you seem so genuinely happy to see us. Do you ever get disenchanted with us?It is not only for George Gurdjieff or J. Krishnamurti, it is true for hundreds of masters down the ages, and there are reasons. They all died disenchanted, disappointed, disillusioned.Let us go deeper, first into George Gurdjieff’s last statement. The last statement of anybody is the most significant statement of his whole life; in a certain way his whole life is condensed in his last statement.He was disenchanted because the disciples failed him, betrayed him, went against him, did everything to harm him – and those were the people for whom he had devoted his whole life, each single moment of it. But still in his place I would not be disenchanted. He thought that he was doing a very serious work. That’s where the seed of his disenchantment is.I am not doing any serious work. I am not doing any work at all; it is my joy to share with you. Now what you do with it is your problem, not mine. You cannot disappoint me. You can betray me; there are people who have done that. You can do any kind of harm imaginable – and people have done that. You can go against me, you can tell lies about me; still I will not be disenchanted, because in the first place I have never expected anything from you.The disappointment comes from expectation. The disenchantment comes from a deep hope that, “These people are going to fulfill my work.” I don’t have any expectation, any hope – I am just so blissful that I cannot contain it; I want to share it unconditionally. It is the conditions which create disappointment.Gurdjieff had worked hard with great expectations. And even people like P. D. Ouspensky, who had learned everything from the master, denied him. Ouspensky himself became a master; he even stopped using Gurdjieff’s full name. When he had to mention him at certain points, he would use only “G.” He would not allow his own disciples to go to Gurdjieff, even to see him, and Gurdjieff had worked on this man for years, for decades.Each single word, each single insight that Ouspensky said after separating himself from Gurdjieff was borrowed, was not his own. Certainly he had a great talent; he was one of the best writers I have come across. Gurdjieff was not a writer. Ouspensky was a great logician, a world famous mathematician, a great writer. Gurdjieff was none of these things, he was purely a mystic.Gathering everything from the system of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky was in a position to write beautiful treatises, as if they were his own experience. Gurdjieff could not compete with him in writing, nor in speaking. Ouspensky was a very talented genius, well educated. Gurdjieff was uneducated, coming from a very undeveloped tribe in the Caucasus, in the Soviet Union. He had the whole mine of diamonds, it is just that they were all uncut, unpolished. Only a man who had the eyes of a jeweler would have been able to recognize them; otherwise they were just stones.Ouspensky had the eyes of a jeweler; he recognized that this man had a treasure, but had not the talent to spread it – a great chance for exploitation. He learned everything from Gurdjieff, and the day he felt that it was enough – he could make a system out of it all – he betrayed him. He had to prevent his disciples from going to Gurdjieff because personality-wise Ouspensky was just a schoolteacher; he looked like a schoolteacher. He was a mathematician; even while teaching mysticism there was a blackboard. He would be teaching mysticism and writing on the blackboard; it was like a class, a university class. His students were taking notes.Gurdjieff had a tremendously charismatic personality. Anybody who had seen him once could not forget the man; in a crowd of millions he would still stand out. If you had looked into his eyes once, those eyes would follow you your whole life. He was not a man of words, but a man of a tremendously powerful being.Ouspensky’s fear was that if his disciples went to Gurdjieff, then whatever he had been saying against Gurdjieff would be exposed. If they listened to Gurdjieff… Although Gurdjieff was not articulate, in a way he was the most articulate master ever. He would take hundreds of pages to say a simple thing: you have to find out where what he really wants to say is. He would make up his own words, big long words spreading out over the whole line, a single word that you have never heard before – it was his invention. He knew nothing about how to write; one paragraph would run on for pages. No publisher was ready to publish his books; he had to publish them himself.When his first book was published it had one thousand pages. It is one of the strangest books in the world, All and Everything. He kept nine hundred pages uncut, and only one hundred pages – the preface – were cut, with a note to the customer who purchases it: “Read the preface and if you feel that it is worth reading on, then you can cut the remaining nine hundred pages. But if you feel it is not worth it you can take back your money – return the book – but don’t cut the uncut pages. Those one hundred pages are enough example.”Even to understand those one hundred pages is a strange experience, particularly for those who don’t know anything about mystics and their strange ways. Now, he was not in any way able to compete with his own disciple Ouspensky. Ouspensky’s books are so lucid, so beautifully written, so poetic, that I have not seen any other man who comes even close to him. Kahlil Gibran writes well, Mikhail Naimy writes well, but they don’t even come close to Ouspensky.Gurdjieff had much hope that Ouspensky would carry on his work. Rather than carrying it on, he simply opened his own school against Gurdjieff – teaching everything, because it was impossible to add to it; the system is complete and perfect. You cannot take anything out, you cannot put anything in. Ouspensky was a great teacher but he was not a master. He influenced many people around the world; millions of people came to know of Gurdjieff only through Ouspensky. What a strange fate! He was consistently trying to oppose him.It was very difficult, because his whole teaching was borrowed from the man, but it was a logical necessity. He had to oppose Gurdjieff so nobody would think that he had borrowed all this teaching from him. It is an existential necessity that any disciple who betrays and wants to use the master’s teaching to become a master himself, is bound to oppose his master, to create lies about his master. Naturally it was hurting Gurdjieff – and it was not only Ouspensky, there were many others who were doing the same. Gurdjieff would work on them for years and then one day they turned into his enemies. They had to invent lies to justify why they left Gurdjieff, they had to create a false image of him.Ouspensky had a strategy. He said, “While I was with Gurdjieff he was right, and when I saw that he was going astray, I left him” – Gurdjieff had gone astray, that’s why the disciple had left. Up to that point Gurdjieff was right, and he could use his teachings without any difficulty. But beyond that point, for him Gurdjieff did not exist at all.This was being done by many disciples, and if Gurdjieff was working with great expectations, naturally he was getting wounded, hurt. He could not believe that these were the people for whom he had lived and he had died; he had sacrificed his whole life for these people. That’s why he said, “The institution is closed, is dead.”He was afraid that after his death his institution would be used in the same way. “The institution is dead because I am dead.” This was all the wounds of his life saying it together. This statement is the statement of his whole life: “Man is cunning, cowardly, deceptive, hypocritical. You cannot trust anybody.”This was his whole life’s experience: You cannot trust anybody. He trusted many and he gave everything that he had, and still what had they returned? Not even gratitude – and he was not asking for anything else; no reverence, no gratitude, no respect came. On the contrary came great antagonism, opposition, all kinds of fictions condemning him. Naturally he was disappointed.But my approach is totally different. I trust you, not because of your trustworthiness; otherwise the same will be my experience. I do not have to wait for my death to come; already I have worked with people for years and they have repaid me very well. I trust you because I cannot distrust; so there is no burden on you – you can betray me, but you cannot hurt me. I have trusted you, not because of you, but because of me. I am still there, the same.See the difference. To trust a person is possible in two ways: either because of his trustworthiness – then there is danger, there is risk – or because you enjoy trusting. The trustworthiness or unworthiness has no relevance.Secondly Gurdjieff and all these people took their work about the transformation of man, the transformation of human society very seriously; they took it too seriously. When people did not live up to their seriousness they felt that something was basically wrong with man, that nothing could be done about him. Then a great hopelessness arose in them.It cannot happen to me, because I am not serious at all. I do not think that existence has given me a certain responsibility to transform man or human society. Who am I to bother about all this? One day I was not here – the society was there, man was there, existence was there. One day I will not be here, so just for a few days in between… Existence has not given me any job that has to be done. Why should I be serious? I am simply playful.If everybody betrays me I will have the last laugh; I will enjoy that moment too. I will say to myself, “Great! I love to play; I played well. These people were good; as long as they could continue to be with me, they managed and continued – in difficulties, in troubles. When they found it was too much, they went on their own.”Even if I am left alone I will not be disappointed. I will simply enjoy the moment, that this has been a great life: so many seasons, so many changes, so many people, so much love, so much trust. I am going out of life without leaving any footprints behind. I will not feel that I have wasted my life. I don’t think that there could have been any better way to live, and to love, and to laugh.J. Krishnamurti was very serious – I don’t think he ever smiled. A long life: ninety years. His fame started very early, at thirteen years old; so really he had a very long life of work and disappointments. Even the closest ones betrayed him. His whole life seems to be just a series of betrayals, and those who remained never managed to understand what he was saying. They listened to him for half a century, but still he could not cross their thick minds and reach to their being. If you look at his life, in the beginning he was very hopeful, very excited that man can be changed, that a new man can arrive. But slowly, slowly that hope disappeared, that excitement was no longer there. As he grew older, he became sadder.Just because of his seriousness, he suffered from migraine for twenty years continuously. No medicine could help, no physician; every physician told him, “You are straining your whole brain system too much. You are too serious, you should relax; you have taken too much of a burden on yourself.” Sometimes his migraine was so much that he would like to hit his head against the wall.While speaking he was almost screaming, shouting, hitting his own head, because he could not understand that people were unable to understand such a simple thing. For example, he was explaining the same thing his whole life: that meditation cannot be done, it is a happening. He would talk for one hour about the difference between doing and happening, and then somebody who was just sitting in front of him listening attentively, would stand up and ask, “How can we do meditation?”I would have laughed at the whole thing, but he would hit his head: he was too serious. As death was coming closer he was becoming more and more serious, knowing now that his life had been a failure. He worked hard, immensely hard. His approach was very clean and very clear. His way of working was very logical, very intellectual, absolutely contemporary: an impeccable life of work – he was a perfectionist.But in the end the hands are empty. As far as results are concerned, nothing had happened, as if he had not been here. The world goes on, the old routine, the old rut. Do you see anything that has changed because J. Krishnamurti was born, and lived for ninety years? Has it made even a scratch? Naturally he died in the same state.This has been the case with thousands of masters, because humanity remains unevolving, and they all seriously want man to evolve. Naturally they fail. But I cannot fail, because I am not concerned at all whether humanity evolves or not, whether the new man is born or not. I enjoy these ideas and I enjoy communicating them to people, and there I am perfectly victorious. I don’t need to wait until you have changed to be victorious; that will be your victory. My victory is that I have been able to communicate what I wanted to communicate. Now what you do with it is your freedom.I will not call it betrayal, and I will not call it opposition, and I will not call your things lies. If you are enjoying doing these things it is perfectly good – enjoyment is good. If somebody is creating lies about me and is feeling perfectly happy about it, why should he be stopped? He has all my blessings.In India it happened…A man wrote a book against me and he sent me the proof copy. I looked into it; it was all rubbish, lies, fictitious stories with no evidence. Still, I sent him my blessings and told him to print it on the first page of the book. He could not believe it; he was so disturbed: what kind of man is this?He lived in Baroda, a thousand miles away from me, but he came to see me. He had never seen me; he was just collecting third-rate yellow newspapers and cuttings and gossips, rumors, and managed to make a book. He asked me “Have you looked inside or have you simply sent blessings?”I said, “I have gone through it word for word; it is all bullshit, but you have done so much work collecting bullshit, you need blessings.”He said, “But it looks strange with your blessings. I know this book: even while I was collecting and writing, my purpose was to earn money. This book is going to become a bestseller, but now seeing you and your response, I feel perhaps I should not have done it.”I said, “No, continue. Let this book go into the market. Collect more, because while I am alive more and more lies will be there, more and more gossip, rumors – you can always earn money. It is a good way. It is not doing any harm to me. And the picture you have chosen for the cover is really beautiful.”He said, “My God! I was thinking you would be angry, ferocious.”I said, “Why should I be angry, why should I be ferocious? Life is too short to be angry, to be ferocious. Even if we can manage to be blissful, that’s enough; if we can manage to bless, that’s enough. What you do is your business, but you have done it well. Your writing is good; what you have written is nonsense, but the way you have put it and presented it is really good. And you devoted almost one year to my service. I cannot pay you, but I can give you my blessing.”The book was published with my blessings and every criticism that appeared in newspapers about the book mentioned it: “It is strange that Osho blesses it.” Just that simple blessing cancels the whole book.My whole approach is different, so totally different that it has never been used before. I am enjoying everything that has happened, is happening. Perhaps tomorrow I will be arrested, deported, but I have been enjoying it. Then Hasya has to find a new place, so I can be deported again! We are not going to leave a single country unblessed.In fact I cannot conceive a situation that will be a disappointment to me. You have to forgive me – I am simply so fulfilled and so happy, so centered that nothing can affect me. Any new kind of situation is really a great excitement. To live without any conditions, to live with people who have total freedom to be the way they want to be, is already a transformation. All old approaches have failed. Now let us see what happens to my approach. As far as I am concerned I cannot fail, because I am squeezing the juice of life every moment; I don’t leave it for another moment.What has to be seen is how many people can become as successful, as victorious as I am. I am giving them all the cues, now it is their problem. If they fail they should be disappointed; why should I be disappointed? If they succeed, they should rejoice. I can participate in their rejoicing, but there is no way to disappoint me.Just include me out from that category of Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti and others.Osho,I have tried for so long to write a question to you about money. The question is so complex, I can't even get it on paper. It involves friendships, self-image, integrity, trust, intelligence, identification, letting-go, holding-on, guilt, relationships, and most importantly, my discipleship.Please help me with the question and the answer.Money is a strange thing. If you do not have it, it is a simple matter – you don’t have it. There is no complexity. But if you have it, then it certainly creates complexities.One of the greatest problems that money creates is that you never know whether you are loved or your money is loved, whether you are desirable or your money is desirable. It is so difficult to figure out, that one would have preferred not to have had money; at least life would have been simple.Just a few days before, Hasya was telling me about Aristotle Onassis’ daughter. I remember seeing her picture when Onassis was alive, perhaps ten years ago. She was a beautiful, well-proportioned, charming young girl. But Onassis died and left her with a lot of money, and that created hell for her. Since then she has married three times, and each marriage has failed because she thinks the person loves her money, not her.It starts from the very beginning; the day of her marriage is really the day of divorce. On the marriage day she takes a guarantee from the person – a legal document before the court – that he will not take her money; in case divorce happens, he will not ask for money. Now can you conceive a marriage to be worthwhile, when on the first day the woman is asking you to give in writing before the court that you are interested in her and not in her money, and that in case a divorce happens you will not ask for money? The divorce has already happened.In the fourth marriage she got into more troubled waters. Before I describe the fourth marriage, something else has to be said which was happening on the side. She was becoming fatter, uglier, as if deep down in her psychology she wanted to prove, “You love me whether I am beautiful or ugly, shapely or fat – you don’t love my money.” She has become so ugly now that she avoids photographers, news media: she hides and does not want her picture to be taken. Perhaps it is because she was uncertain whether she or her money was loved. Most probably the people who have been with her were for the money, not for her. She did not receive love. The proof is that she started eating too much. If you are loved, you are so full of love, so filled with love that you don’t eat too much.I have been traveling in India, staying with different families, and I have come across at least three women who told me the same thing, that while I am staying in their homes they cannot eat. When I was told this for the first time I said, “This is strange. Why can’t you eat?”They said, “We don’t know, but we don’t feel hungry either. We feel perfectly good, with more well-being than we have ever felt. You stay three days and we can’t eat. And we wait the whole year again when you will be back in the city for three days; those three days become a beautiful memory.”When I was told by another woman, and then by another woman, I had to look into the fact: what is the matter? They felt so loved, and they loved me so much that there was no need for any food, as if love was enough nourishment. After three days they did not look hungry, they did not look starved.One of the three was a Jaina woman, and she said, “Now I know what a real fast should be.” She had been fasting for almost ten years, long fasts of ten days. In the Jaina tradition, those Jainas who are very orthodox, fast for ten days every year in the rainy season.She had been fasting for ten days for almost ten years, and she said to me, “Now I know that was not fasting, that was simply starving, because I was continuously thinking of food, food and food. I could not sleep in the night because of hunger; even if I fell asleep for a few moments or a few hours I was dreaming of food. I was thinking of food, I was dreaming of food; except food there was nothing in me. For these three days while you stay in my house I know what fasting is. I never think about food at all. It just comes naturally that I don’t feel any hunger; I feel so fulfilled.”Onassis’ immense riches have created a hell for the poor girl, a feeling that she is not loved. She did not come into contact with a man like me who could have told her that the question is not that you should be loved, the question is that you should love. Why bother about why the other loves you? Have you ever thought about why you love the other? For what? Then you will understand the situation. Perhaps it is because of his hair? Then you don’t love the man. Perhaps because of his eyes? Then you don’t love the man. Perhaps because of his nose? Then you don’t love the man. If you have any reason to love, then you don’t love the man. So why are you making so much fuss about money?You should love and you should be loved, and you should be loved more because of your money. There is nothing wrong in it; you have something more than any other woman has. Otherwise, each thing will start creating problems: you have a beautiful face, that’s why this man loves – he does not love you. If you had a face with pockmarks this man would not love you. Because you have eyes, this man loves you; if you were blind, this man would not love you. Then you are creating unnecessary problems for yourself. This man certainly loves you in your totality, and your money is part of you. Why make it separate? You are rich, just as somebody is beautiful; you are rich, just as somebody is a dancer. But the dancer will not ask the question, “Do you love me or my dance?” If she asks the question she will be in trouble.In the fourth marriage Onassis’ daughter found a rich man, just to be certain: “He is so rich that he will love me, he will not love my riches – he is a big industrialist.” Because of this she did not repeat the ritual of going to the court after marriage, and taking a certificate from the man, that in case of divorce he will not ask for money. Seeing that the man is so rich, it looked absurd to ask. But this man proved really cunning, and because there was no certificate he divorced her and took almost half of her fortune.Now, something like money, that could have been a great pleasure, has turned out to be an immense anguish. But it is not money, it is your mind. Money is useful. There is no sin in having money, there is no need to feel guilt; otherwise everybody should feel guilty. I should start feeling guilty – “Why am I enlightened, when there are so many millions of people who are not enlightened? I must commit suicide, because the whole world is full of unenlightened people, and I must be immensely selfish to be enlightened.”I don’t ask you, “Why do you love me? Do you love me or do you love my enlightenment? If you love my enlightenment then – finished! Then you don’t love me.”But why make these divisions? This is how mind creates misery. You have money, enjoy it! If somebody loves you, do not pose this question, because you are putting the person in a really bad situation. If he says he loves you, you are not going to believe it, and if he says he loves your money you are going to believe it. But if he loves your money, then the whole affair is finished. Deep down you will go on suspecting that he loves your money, not you. But there is nothing wrong: the money is yours, just as the nose is yours, and the eyes are yours, and the hair is yours, and this man loves you in your totality. The money is also part of you – don’t separate it, then there is no problem.Try to live a life with as little complexities and as few problems as possible; it is in your hands. We go on creating unnecessary problems. At least being with me, you should learn that all problems are created; there is no real problem.This question is from Avirbhava. She has suffered from this question her whole life, and absolutely unnecessarily. Your money should make your life richer, more lovable, and it is making it difficult.Whenever anybody starts loving you, you are constantly thinking about the money – “this man is interested in the money, not in me.” Even if he is interested in the money… Who is not interested in money? He is simply being human. He is not a Buddhist monk, he is interested in money. But this does not mean that he is not interested in you. He is interested in you more because you are not only a woman, but a rich woman. Enjoy the idea, and drop this problem forever.Osho,How to catch the light from your candle?Just come a little closer. People are afraid of coming closer, particularly to a person like me. The fear is that coming closer to me they may be dissolved. Coming closer to me they may disappear. So they keep a certain distance, they come only so far, so they can remain themselves; if the time comes and their mind decides to move away, they can.But if you come really close, that means you have taken a total jump, a quantum leap; now there is no going away, now there is no possibility of going away. Now you are melting and dissolving into the unknown. People come close, but only so far, so they can escape if they want to, they can turn their back if they want.Do you know the meaning of the word hippie? It simply means showing your hips – turning your back. The hippie is one who is turning his back toward the world, its problems, its challenges; he is running, escaping.Coming close to me, don’t stop until you are, only then your candle will be lit. This is the beauty of candles: you can light one candle in this room or one thousand candles in this room. The candles may be one thousand, but the light will be one. So, when a disciple comes too close to the master, the candles remain two, but the light becomes one. The flames remain two. That’s why I have to say a seemingly contradictory statement: that when you dissolve into the master, for the first time you are not, and for the first time you are. You are not your old self, but now you have a new individuality. What you have lost was never yours; what you have gained was always yours, but was covered with the false.Two lit candles will create only one light in the room. There can be two thousand, there can be two million – it will not make any difference, the light will be one. So in a certain way they will all be individuals, and in a certain way they will all be part of an oceanic existence.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 30 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The other night you spoke of the mystery school. At that moment I thought of Pythagoras. Since you started speaking again, I've wanted to ask questions about him – his name comes to me often. The main part of his teachings I love are the three P's: Preparation, Purification, Perfection. Would you speak on them again?Pythagoras is a link between East and West, between a civilization that disappeared into the Atlantic and a civilization that we are living in; hence he has a significance of his own.He traveled almost all his life in search of fragments of truth. Most of his time he was in Egypt, in Alexandria. In those days Alexandria had the biggest library in the whole world, particularly scriptures containing all the discoveries of consciousness made in the lost civilization of Atlantis – a whole civilization drowned with the continent in the Atlantic ocean. The name Atlantic comes from the continent Atlantis that went down into it. The only fragmentary knowledge available about it was in Alexandria – and perhaps Pythagoras was the first and the last man of such integrity, intelligence, ingenuity, to look into those scriptures.That library no longer exists, so whatever we know about Atlantis we know through Pythagoras. The library was destroyed by Mohammedans. The man who destroyed it, Mahmud Gaznavi, destroyed many beautiful things in India, in Afghanistan, in Egypt. But the most precious was the vast library that contained everything about a whole civilization which had reached to the peaks of consciousness. The day this man destroyed the library, he took Koran Sharif in one of his hands and a burning torch in another, entered the library and asked the learned librarian, “Listen carefully – the existence of your library depends on your answers. My first question is: Is there anything in your whole library which goes against the holy Koran? And my second question is: If there is nothing which goes against the holy Koran, then the holy Koran is enough; why bother about this big library?”The librarian must have been in a dilemma – whatever he says will be dangerous. If he says there are many things in the library which are not in the Koran, Mahmud is going to burn the library, because that which is not in the Koran is untrue – the Koran contains all and ultimate truth. And if he says that everything that is in the library is substantially and essentially contained in the Koran, then too he is going to burn the library, saying, “Then it is useless; the Koran has it all.” The library was so huge and so immense that you cannot conceive: he burned it, and the fire continued for six months. For six months continuously books were burning; perhaps the greatest treasure of humanity was destroyed.Pythagoras studied in that library for many years. He was a Greek, but he found in Greece itself only sophistry. Sophistry is something ugly. It comes from a very beautiful word sophia, which means wisdom, but sophistry is only a pretension of wisdom. The whole of Greece was too interested in sophistry. There were sophist teachers moving all over the country teaching people, and the basic teaching of sophistry was that there is no truth. It is all a question of better argument. Truth as such does not exist, it is a fallacy. When two persons argue, whoever is better in argument seems to have the truth, but it is really the better argument and nothing else.Their teaching was to give you all possible ways of arguing and to make you a great arguer; and then you can argue from any side, it doesn’t matter. When truth does not exist, what side you take and argue for does not matter. It is a question of convenience: which side is going to declare you victorious? Which side do you have more arguments for?I have been interested in sophistry, although the name sophistry has disappeared. Socrates was the cause of its destruction. He emphasized that truth is there, and arguments do not prove it, they only discover it. They do not disprove it either; they can only prevent its discovery. A single man, Socrates, destroyed the hundreds-of-years-old tradition of sophistry. But it has remained running underground. I see it in theologians, in religious philosophies, in political ideologies: no concern for truth, the only concern is to present a very solid argument.There is a story of one very famous sophist teacher, Zeno…He was not just a sophist, he was a genius. It is unfortunate that his genius became associated with sophistry because that was prevalent. You pay him money and he can prove anything – anything in the world. Just say it and he has a price for it. He proved strange things which logicians have not been able to disprove even now, after two thousand years, and whatever he has proved goes against all common sense. But logic listens to the argument, and his arguments are so fine, so refined.For example, he says that when you kill a bird with an arrow, the arrow does not move at all. This is absurd, because if the arrow does not move at all, then how does it reach the bird? From your bow to the bird there is a distance. The arrow reaches, the bird is killed – there is proof. This question was asked by a king, thinking that Zeno would not be able to prove it – and he was ready to give any amount of money if Zeno should prove that the arrow does not move.Zeno proved that the arrow does not move, and even up to now there is no way to disprove him. His argument is that for movement, the arrow has to go from point 1 to point 2 to point 3 to point 4; obviously it has to move from one place to another place, only then will it reach the bird.Moving from A to B or from 1 to 2, it has to pass a passage between A and B; it cannot simply reach from A to B, so you have to make another point between the two. So, where there were two points, now there are three points – and you have got into difficulty. Now he has to reach not only three points but five, because the two gaps are there, and this goes on growing. If you fill these two gaps, then there are five points and there are gaps. And you go on filling ad infinitum: the arrow will never reach the bird.The argument is very solid. What he says makes sense – but it is absolute nonsense: the arrow goes and kills the bird.Zeno is not interested in the arrow or the bird. He says, “My argument proves that nothing moves, nothing can move; there is no movement in the world.”This kind of people were all over Greece. They dominated the mind; they were constantly debating. Pythagoras was not interested at all in this kind of stupid game. It sharpens your intellect, but it does not lead you to any truth, to any discovery, to any realization. Even the greatest sophists were getting into trouble, because Zeno himself – who had many arguments which go against reality, but could not be disproved – was defeated by his own student.This was the routine: he was so confident, and he had the genius to be confident, that he used to take half the fees in the beginning, and half when the student won his first argument. This student was strange: he gave half the fee, but he told him that he would never give him the other half.Zeno said, “How?”He said, “I am never going to argue! I will accept defeat without arguing. I may lose everything that I have, but I am not going to give you the other half of your fee.”Zeno waited, but the man would not even talk about the weather, because some argument may start and there may be trouble. And he was determined not to pay the fees so as to teach Zeno: “You may be a great logician, but there is a possibility of going higher than you.”But Zeno was not going to sit silently. He put a case in the court against the student: “He has not paid me half the fee.” His idea was that if he wins the case, then he will tell the court, “Force that student to pay the fee.” If he loses the case, no harm – outside the court he will catch the student and will say, “You have won your first argument – my fee!” So whether he wins or whether he loses, he is going to get half the fee.But he forgot that it was his own student who knew all his techniques and arguments. From the opposite side the student was thinking, “That’s good: if I win in the court, I will appeal to the court that this man should not bother me outside the court, because that will be a contempt of court. And if I lose the case, then there is no problem. Outside I will catch hold of Zeno and say, “Master, I have lost my first argument – you cannot get the fee.”The whole genius of Greece was involved in that atmosphere. Pythagoras is very unique. He got out of Greece – it was not the right place. People were simply arguing and arguing, but nobody was concerned in evolving consciousness. He was coming to India. On the way he remained a few years in the library of Alexandria, where he picked up knowledge about the lost continent of Atlantis.We have only that proof; no other proof exists – although recently scientists have started looking into the matter. What they have found in the Atlantic ocean suggests that there must have been a great civilization; whole cities are drowned there. The whole continent simply sank, went down into the ocean. Such changes happen on the earth: new islands come up, new mountains come up.The Himalayas are a new mountain range – the newest. It was not there when Rig Veda was written, because it is impossible that Rig Veda should not mention such beautiful mountains – the highest and the most glorious. But there is no mention about them. And the people who wrote Rig Veda had come from Mongolia. Certainly there was no mountain on the way; otherwise to cross the Himalayas and to come to India would have been impossible. Even today, there are only two places from where you can cross the Himalayas; otherwise it is uncrossable. Changes go on happening on the earth.Pythagoras reached India, but he got caught again – in the Buddhist atmosphere. It was so real; although Buddha was dead, the whole country was throbbing. His impression, his impact, had been very deep. When Pythagoras reached India, whatever he learned was learned in Buddhist universities. You will be surprised to know that Buddhist universities are the oldest universities in the world. Oxford is only one thousand years old. Nalanda, a Buddhist university, and Takshila, a Buddhist university, existed twenty-three hundred years ago. They were destroyed by Hindus and Mohammedans.But they were rare universities – they fulfilled the real meaning of the word. Not everybody was allowed to be in the university. Outside the university campus there were places where people could live for preparation. At the gate the gatekeepers were no ordinary people but very qualified Buddhist bikkhus, and they had to give people an examination at the gate. When you had passed those examinations, you could enter the university campus; otherwise it was not even possible to enter. Even just to see it was not possible; it was so sacred. Wisdom was thought so sacred; it was not everybody’s thing, only those who could put their whole life into the search.These three P’s – Purification, Preparation, Perfection – come from the Buddhist sources of wisdom. Of course, Pythagoras made them more logical – he had a Greek mind – made them more systematic. But those words are really significant.Preparation does not mean preparing for a verbal examination or a written examination. Preparation means preparing for an existential examination; it means going deeper into meditation. Unless you were meditative you could not enter those universities. And they had big campuses: Takshila had ten thousand scholars in it, Nalanda had twelve thousand scholars in it. Even today the greatest universities don’t have more than that number, but their quality is very ordinary; students have simply passed the school examinations and they are ready to enter. No existential preparation is needed.Preparation means that you drop all your conditionings, you drop your prejudices, you drop what you think you know and you do not know: you get as innocent as possible. Your innocence will be the preparation – that will allow you to enter into the university campus.Then, purification: in preparation you drop the conditionings which were given by the society, prejudices which were given to you or caught by you from the surroundings; it was borrowed knowledge in some way or other. You go like a child – but even a child is not pure. That is something very significant to understand, because people take it for granted that a child is pure.He is certainly innocent, but his innocence is equivalent to ignorance, and behind his innocence are all his feelings: anger, hatred, greed, jealousy. You can see that children are very jealous. If one child has a doll, the other becomes so jealous that they will start fighting. If some child has something, then the other child also wants to have it. They are very competitive. Even in the family children have a hierarchy, and they are constantly fighting to be higher than others. They do whatever is needed to be done: if obedience makes them the most loved in the family, they will follow obedience. But they are not following obedience; they are really trying a power strategy.So preparation simply takes away the layers that society has put on your mind. But you have brought with nature, with your birth, so many ugly instincts, that purification is needed.You have to understand that competition is meaningless. You have to meditate deeply and recognize that you are not like anybody else. Competition can be only among similar people – and everybody is dissimilar, unique.Once the competitive mind disappears, many things change in you; then you are not jealous. If somebody has a beautiful face and somebody has more money, and somebody has a more powerful body, you simply accept the fact that a few trees are tall and a few trees are small. But existence accepts them all.The disappearance of competitiveness will also help you to get rid of greed. People go on accumulating – they want to be in a better position than you, with more money than you, with everything better than you. Their whole life is wasted in that.Purification is almost going through a fire of understanding in which all that is instinctive and ugly burns down. It is a great experience that only the ugly burns. That which is beautiful blossoms. In purification you lose all trace of hate, and instead, suddenly a spring of love bursts forth – as if the rock of hate was preventing the spring.Children are very cruel. The idea that they are angels is just stupid. They are very cruel; they will beat dogs, they will beat cats. A small insect passing by, and a child will simply kill it for no reason; he just enjoys destruction. There is destructiveness in him. Once that is gone, creativity arises.So purification is a deeper meditation than preparation. Preparation was very simple, but purification is going deeper into meditation – the deepest possible – so everything that is not worthy of human beings is transformed. Everything has energy in it – hate, jealousy, greed – and when these things change, their energy becomes available to you in its purified form. And they can turn: greed can turn into compassion, sharing; hate can turn into love. Everything will turn into something which makes your heart a garden.When the purification is complete, utterly complete, not a corner of your being remains in the dark, everything is light and fragrant, fresh. What we have called the awakened man, the enlightened man, Pythagoras calls perfection. It is simply a different name: the perfect man.The first two you have to do; the third is the ultimate outcome of it. In these three simple words he has condensed the whole alchemy of human transformation.Pythagoras is one of the most important people that Greece has given to the world. But strangely enough, nothing much is said about all the best geniuses that Greece has given to the world. Pythagoras, Socrates, Heraclitus, Epicurus are the ones who should be talked about. But instead of them, in the universities Plato is studied, Aristotle is studied.Plato is simply a record-keeper – he has not a single idea of his own! He is a devoted lover of Socrates, and he goes on recording, writing whatever Socrates says. Socrates has not written anything – just as no great master has ever written anything. Plato is certainly a great writer; perhaps Socrates may not have been able to write so beautifully; Plato has made Socrates’ teachings as beautiful as possible, but he himself is no one. Now the same work can be done by a tape recorder. Aristotle is merely an intellectual, with no understanding of being, or even a desire to search for it. These people are taught in the universities.I was constantly in a fight with my professors. When they started teaching Plato, I said, “This is absolute nonsense because Plato has nothing to say of his own. It is better to teach about Socrates. Plato can be referred to – he has compiled it all.”But Socrates’ name has become almost a fiction, and Plato has become the reality – just the way I was saying to you last night that Ouspensky has become the master, because he has written the books, beautiful books. One day Gurdjieff will be forgotten – he is already forgotten – and Ouspensky will be remembered for centuries. Sooner or later what he has written will be thought to be his own ideas. None of it is his own ideas.Pythagoras is not at all bothered about any university in the world, for the simple reason that he is not a routine scholar; he is an original seeker, and he is ready to go anywhere. He traveled all his life to find people who may have had a little glimpse and may be able to impart something to him. He was collecting pieces, and he managed beautifully.But Greeks don’t talk about him because he is not talking about Greek philosophy; he is bringing foreign ideas, strange ideas from Alexandria, from Nalanda, from Takshila – he is almost not a Greek. They are not interested in what he is bringing, although what he is bringing has nothing to do with Greeks or Indians or Egyptians. But he is ignored – one of the most significant men, utterly ignored.The same has happened to Diogenes. He is ignored because he looks embarrassing to the Greeks. And he is very original – not only in thoughts, but in life. In everything that he does he is original and very sincere – a man of tremendous courage, who could say to Alexander the Great, “You are behaving like a fool. The very idea of conquering the world is nonsense. For what do you want to conquer the world? What will you do after it?”He said, “After it? I am going to relax and enjoy.” And Diogenes looked at his dog – they were friends, they used to live together – and he told the dog, “Did you hear? He is thinking to relax and enjoy after conquering the world, and we are enjoying right now, without conquering anything! Why take so much trouble?” A naked man who can say to Alexander, “You are behaving like a fool,” must have guts – and Alexander had to recognize it. He was a man of tremendous power himself, of great intelligence. He had to recognize that he had never met a man of the quality of Diogenes.But Greeks go on avoiding, the same way they have done with Epicurus. It is very strange, but perhaps this is the way of humanity to behave with its own greatest sons – to ignore them, not to take any note of them.Among all these, Pythagoras has created a complete system to create a buddha. It was not only theoretical: he himself became an enlightened man. When he came back to Greece, he was not the same Pythagoras who had left; he was a new man. That was one of the greatest difficulties – his own country could not recognize him. In fact they had no category of enlightenment, awakening, buddhahood – so where to put Pythagoras? The category just did not exist in their minds, so he remained uncategorized, and for two thousand years nobody has commented upon him.I am the first man to have commented on the great genius and realization of this unique individual. He has a more perfect way of presentation than you will find in Indian scriptures, because Indian scriptures are more poetic, and he is, after all, a Greek! He is very logical and very scientific.Osho,You are famous for your contradictions. But it seems that one of the most powerful confirmations that you are who you are, is that, in all those millions and millions of words spoken spontaneously over several decades, you really never ever contradicted yourself at all.That’s true! I have never contradicted myself. I cannot do it.In the first place I don’t remember anything that I have said before – how to contradict it? Secondly, it is not my thinking, it is my experience. Contradictions happen in thinking, but not in experience. I have said things which may appear to people contradictory, but they are really evolutionary. I have expressed my experience in different ways; that may create the idea that I am contradictory. I was expressing it in different ways so if you have missed one way, perhaps the other way you may get it.I have tried to describe it from all aspects possible, just to help people, because sometimes it happens that one aspect does not reach you but the other aspect is more in tune with you. I have used all possible, multi-dimensional expressions, but there is no way for me to contradict. It is my experience. I am not talking about others’ experience. Even if I am talking about others, it is always according to my experience. They may agree with it, they may not agree with it – but I cannot go against my experience.During the years, talking to you, I have been sharpening my arrows, my words, so that they can penetrate directly to your heart. But contradiction is not there at all. You are right: the day all of my words will be understood, there will be found an undercurrent running through all of them and joining them. They are like flowers of a garland – a thin thread, invisible, is running through all the flowers – and that is my consistency, that is my experience.It is true, I don’t think anybody else has spoken so much. Much of it is lost because it was not recorded; almost half of it is lost, but whatever remains is still more than anyone else has ever tried to convey.The reason is simple: I enjoy it, I love it. When I see a word settling in your heart, my joy knows no bounds. When I see a glimpse in your eyes that you have caught the meaning, I am immensely happy.I had to speak so much because nobody before me has addressed the whole world. They were addressing small fragments of humanity. Jesus remained confined to Judea, Buddha remained confined to Bihar, Socrates remained confined to Athens. Fortunately they don’t let me remain in one place, so I have to be all over the world. I have to speak again and again through different angles about the same experience, because in that also my life has been unique: people have been coming to me and leaving me – new people coming, old people going. It has been beautiful. It has not been like a dead pond where the water only evaporates, and soon there is nothing left but a muddy mess.It is almost as if I have been speaking by the side of a river, which is running so fast that each time I look at it there are new faces to whom I have to speak again. In thirty years so many people have changed. It was not true about Socrates or Buddha or Lao Tzu, they worked with a group their whole life. I have been working with so many new people, and I always have to find a new mode, a new phase, new expressions, new bottles for the old wine. But the wine is old, and it is the same wine that I have been offering to all.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 31 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What are the qualities of the seeker of truth?Every child is born with an innate search for truth. It is not something learned or adopted later on in life. Truth simply means, “I am, but I do not know who I am.” The question is natural – “I must know the reality of my being.” It is not curiosity.These are the three differences, or three categories the world can be divided into: there are things which are, but they do not know that they are, hence there is no opening for any inquiry. They are closed, their existence is windowless. Then there are animals who know that they are, but they don’t have the intelligence to inquire what it is that they are. Their windows are open, but their intelligence is not enough to look out and see the stars and the sky and the birds and the trees. Their windows – whether opened or closed – don’t make much difference.Perhaps once in a while a rare animal uses the window.Shri Ramana Maharshi was one of the most significant people of this century. He was not a master; that’s why people don’t know him as they know George Gurdjieff or J. Krishnamurti. They don’t even know him as they know Sri Aurobindo or P. D. Ouspensky who were only teachers – profound teachers, but not mystics.Ramana Maharshi was a silent pool of energy. Every morning he used to sit for a silent satsang, communion. He never talked much, unless asked something. Then too his answer was very short – having profundity, but you had to look for it. There was no explanation in it. His literature is confined to two, three small booklets.His teaching was mostly to be in silent communion with the disciples. Naturally, very few people were benefited by him. But every morning he was sitting, people were sitting, and a cow would come and stand outside, putting her neck through the window, and she would remain standing there while the satsang lasted. It must have continued for years. People came and went, new people came, but the cow remained constant, coming at the exact time, never late. As the satsang would disperse she would move away.One day she did not appear, and Shri Ramana said, “Today satsang cannot be held, because my real audience is absent. I am afraid either the cow is very sick or she has died, and I have to go and look for her.” He lived on a mountain in the south of India, Arunachal. The cow belonged to a poor woodcutter who lived near the ashram. Ramana left the temple where they used to meet, went to the woodcutter and asked, “What happened? The cow has not come today for satsang.”The woodcutter said, “She is very sick and I am afraid she is dying, but she goes on looking out of the door, as if she is waiting for someone. Perhaps she is waiting for you, to see you for the last time. Perhaps that is why she is hanging around a little longer.”Ramana went in and there were tears in the eyes of the cow. And she died happily, putting her head in the lap of Ramana Maharshi. This happened just in this century. Ramana declared her enlightened, and told his people that a beautiful memorial should be made for her.It is very rare for human beings to be enlightened; it is almost impossibly rare for animals to become enlightened, but the cow attained. She will not be born again. From the body of a cow she has bypassed the whole world of humanity, and she has jumped ahead and joined with the buddhas. So once in a while – there are a few instances only – it has happened. But that cannot be called the rule; it is just the exception.Things are, but they do not know that they are. Animals are, they know that they are, but they don’t have the intelligence to ask who they are. And it is not something to be wondered about. Millions of human beings never ask the question – that is the third category.Man is, is aware that he is, and is capable by birth to inquire who he is. So it is not a question of learning, cultivation, education; you bring the quest with you. You are the quest.Your society destroys you. It has very sophisticated ways and means to destroy your quest, to remove the question from your being, or at least cover it up. The method it uses is this: before the child has even asked who he is, the answer is given. And any answer that has been given before the question has been asked is futile; it is going to be just a burden.He is told that he is a soul, that he is a spirit, that he is not a body, that he is not material. Or, in communist countries he is told that he is a body, just material, and that only in the old days, out of fear and ignorance, did people believe that they have souls – that that is just a superstition. But in both cases the child is being given an answer for which he has not asked. His mind is delicate, pure, and he trusts his mother, his father – there is no reason for him not to trust.He starts a journey of belief, and belief kills the quest. He becomes more and more knowledgeable. Then education is there, religious education is there, and there is no end to collecting knowledge. But all this knowledge is futile – not only futile, but poisonous, because the first step has gone wrong. The question was not asked, and the answer has been implanted in his mind, and since then he has been collecting more and more answers. He has completely forgotten that any answer that is not the finding of a question is meaningless.So the only quality of a seeker of truth is that he does not believe, that he is not a believer, that he is ready to be ignorant rather than to be knowledgeable, because ignorance is at least natural, simple, innocent. Out of ignorance there is a possibility, almost a certainty, that the question will arise, that the journey will begin. But through knowledge you are lost in a jungle of words, theories, doctrines, dogmas. There are so many, and they are so contradictory to each other, that soon you will find yourself more and more confused; more and more knowledgeable and more and more confused.As far as I am concerned the basic quality of a seeker of truth is to cut himself away from all belief systems, from all borrowed knowledge – in other words, to have the courage to be ignorant rather than to have borrowed knowledge. Ignorance has a beauty; it is at least yours, authentic, sincere. It has come with you. It is your blood, it is your bones, it is your marrow.Knowledgeability is ugly, absolute rubbish. It has been poured upon you by others, and you are carrying a load of it. The load is such that it will not give you any opportunity to inquire on your own what truth is. Your collection of knowledge will answer immediately, “This is truth.” If you are filled with the Holy Bible, then the question will be answered by the Holy Bible. If you are filled with the Vedas, then the question will come out of the Vedas. But it will come from some source outside you; it will not be your discovery. And that which is not your discovery is not yours.Truth brings freedom because it is your discovery. It makes you fully man; otherwise you remain on the level of the animals: you are but you don’t know who you are.The search for truth is really the search for the reality of your being. Once you have entered your being, you have entered into the being of the whole, because we are different on the periphery but at the center we meet – we are one. You can draw many lines from the periphery of a circle toward the center; those lines on the periphery have a certain distance from each other. But as they come closer to the center the distance goes on becoming less. When they reach to the center the distance disappears.At the center we are one. At the periphery of existence we appear to be separate; and to know the truth of your being is to know the truth of the whole.There is just one quality, one courage: not to be afraid of being ignorant. On that point there can be no compromise, no cheap borrowed knowledge to decorate yourself with as a wise man. That one quality is enough. Just be pure and natural, and out of that purity, naturalness, ignorance, innocence, the quest is bound to be born.Every human being would be a seeker of truth if the society were not interfering with children. The class of children is the most harmed, oppressed, exploited, distorted class of all classes – and the most helpless. You are taking advantage of the helplessness of small children, but you are also not responsible. The same has been done to you. It is difficult to find out who was responsible in the beginning. But as long as we can look back, this has been the situation: every generation corrupts the new generation, and anybody who wants to prevent this corruption is condemned as corrupting the youth.Socrates was condemned for corrupting the youth, and all that he was doing was the simple process of removing borrowed knowledge and helping his disciples to be themselves and then “to know thyself.” If anybody has served truth the most sincerely it was Socrates. But he was condemned by the court, by the law, by the people who were in power, for corruption, for corrupting young minds.Strangely, in the land of Socrates I was also condemned as corrupting people’s minds. It seems the technology of corrupting the youth has evolved immensely in two thousand years, because it took Socrates his whole life to corrupt, and I was only there for two weeks! And the archbishop was already threatening to burn my house, to stone me to death.Why are they afraid? They know perfectly well that they have no foundations. So if anybody shows the young people that their knowledge is unfounded – that all their answers are bogus because they don’t even have questions, that they are only repeating things parrot-like but they don’t have any understanding of what they are saying – then anybody who has a little intelligence will be able to understand it immediately.Is this corruption of the youth? To bring people to the quest of the truth – is this corruption? It is the greatest crime in the world in which, unfortunately, we are living.Osho,Probably no enlightened master has spoken so many millions of words about the truth as you have. Lao Tzu says, “The truth that can be spoken is not the truth.” Beloved master, what do you say?Lao Tzu is right. The truth that can be spoken is no longer true, because the mechanism of language distorts the experience – which happens beyond mind, beyond words. To pull it down to the darker valleys of language is certainly distorting it.On the one hand it is true that the truth cannot be spoken; on the other hand, because the truth cannot be spoken it has to be spoken in thousands of ways. The problem is not that the truth will reach to you through thousands of ways, but you may become infected with the search. If a man speaks about the truth he may not be able to say it but you can get a glimpse from his eyes, you can get something from his gestures – something not from the words but the way the words are spoken, the emphasis, the gaps. The presence of such a man speaking may be just an excuse to allow you to be showered by his presence.Lao Tzu cannot speak truth, but to be with Lao Tzu you may get the right direction. His presence may prove to you that there exists something that you know nothing about, and that it is so precious that all that you know and all that you have is worth sacrificing…that what you see in the presence of the master, of a realized man, is so precious that it has to be discovered; it has to become your experience too.I have spoken millions of words just in order to give you a taste, a feel. Truth I cannot give to you – nobody can give it to you – but I can open my heart to you, which has known the truth, lived the truth. And that opening may help you in a very indirect way to go on your own pilgrimage. It may give you confidence that all this talk about truth is not just talk, that it changes people, that it changes their very presence, that it gives them a certain fragrance, a certain power, a certain authority. They don’t speak like anybody else. They are not orators, they are not speakers; they simply open their hearts. Perhaps the rhythm of theirs heart will change the rhythm of your heart.Listening to them you may not get the truth, but you may be transported into another world: a world of silence, a world of immense peace, a world of benediction. All those are immensely helpful for the search.So Lao Tzu is both right and wrong: right because what he is saying is exactly so – the spoken truth is no longer true. But that is not all. If the truth is spoken by someone, and if it is out of experience – and it can only be out of experience – then that very person, his every act, radiates something. It is contagious. Hence, whether truth is conveyed to you or not is not important. What is important is that if you become convinced that there is something like truth, there is a certain transformation that brings the full flowering of the being, then the word, the language, has done more than can be expected.So I say again, Lao Tzu is right and not right. And my emphasis on not right is more than on his being right; otherwise I would not have spoken millions of words, I would have remained silent.But I saw that it is not only a question of speaking; much more is involved. It shows why no mystic in the whole history of man has ever written anything. The reason is that the written word will miss all that the spoken word has. It will be the same word – spoken or written makes no difference. It will be the same statement written or spoken, but why has no mystic agreed to write? The reason is that they were all aware that the spoken word has a living quality, because experience is behind it, a heart is beating behind it, a consciousness is making arduous effort to reach to you.The written word is dead, just a corpse. You can worship it but it cannot give you anything. All scriptures are dead. Perhaps when they were spoken it was a different phenomenon. If the man who had spoken them was speaking out of his own realization, then something – the very vibe – is carried away by the word.Truth may not be expressed, but truth becomes a reality. Seeing the master, seeing one who is a realized one, you become certain: if you are groping in the dark, don’t be worried, and don’t feel hopeless. Go on groping! Every night has a morning to it, and sooner or later you will find the door, you will reach to the point. If one man has reached, the whole humanity can reach. He is enough proof.So the question is not whether truth can be spoken or not, the question is whether a presence can create a conviction that there is something that you are missing – and unless you find it your life will not be complete, will not be perfect.Osho,For me you seem to be pointing the way so strongly these days and I've almost become unattached to the finger… But then there is the arm, and the twinkling eyes, the sound of your voice, and the beautiful graceful atmosphere that surrounds you. With you it is so easy to say “mañana” to the moon. What to do?There is nothing to do. Say “mañana” to the moon!Just live the moment with intensity and totality. Live it with as much joy as possible, with as much love as possible, with no fear, no guilt. This existence is yours and this moment is a gift – don’t let it go to waste. And don’t be worried about enlightenment, the moon. This moment, living totally, is enlightenment.Just the other day I was telling you about a Buddhist sutra. Gautam Buddha is really a miracle, because he even puts himself down. He creates a category beyond himself: a man who has gone beyond knowledge, beyond discipline, beyond enlightenment. Then billions of buddhas are not equal to it. That last part of the sutra is so valuable, particularly for you, because here is a man in front of you who has no knowledge, who has no discipline.Just when we came here I was sleeping twenty hours a day. Nobody has done it before, and no religious person will forgive me – twenty hours a day! I was getting up in the morning for two hours to take a bath and take my food and go to sleep again, and two hours in the evening to take my bath, eat my food and go to bed again. And I loved it.I don’t have a discipline; that’s why I don’t impose any discipline on you. When it has to be transcended, why bother in the first place to impose it? I am not telling you to read this holy book or that because finally it has to be transcended – transcend it right now!Even enlightenment has to be transcended. I have never said it to anybody, but I have left enlightenment far behind. I have not said it because you will not understand it. It is difficult to understand enlightenment, and if I start saying that there is something even beyond it, you may lose all hope. You will say, “This is too much! First enlightenment was too much, and we were trying hard and nothing was happening. And now, beyond enlightenment! It is better to be ordinary and not bother about these things.”That’s why I have not said it. But yesterday, I had no desire, but I could not deny the truth of what Buddha is saying in the sutra. Experience, even the highest experience of enlightenment is still a duality: the experiencer and the experienced. And that duality has also to be dropped. But the moment you drop the experience, the experiencer also disappears – they can exist only together. That is the state of nirvana.All has disappeared, the whole drama – the actors, the audience, everything has disappeared. Just an absolute silence prevails.So don’t be worried. Just try to live this moment as sincerely, as totally as possible, without being disturbed by the past or by the future. Undistracted, go deep into it, and that’s enough. It is enlightenment.One day it will explode. You need not wait for it; even your waiting will be a distraction. Forget all about it. That’s why in my presence you feel so good – because there is no yesterday, no tomorrow. Just here; this is our whole world for the moment. One day that atomic explosion within you happens. Finally, one day you go even beyond it – then everything disappears.That’s why I say again and again that what has happened in the East as far as spiritual growth is concerned is incomparable. All other religions are far behind. Now, no religion can say that knowledge disappears, discipline disappears, enlightenment disappears – only then are you at home.Buddha is saying billions of buddhas are not worth it: it is so valuable, the ultimate value and it is available to all, every moment of your life. It is so mysterious how you go on missing it; it is the one thing that should not be missed. But a centuries old wrong upbringing is destroying your small precious moment.It is up to you to throw away all that upbringing and let this small moment be all – and you have attained everything. Then you need not worry. Existence takes care. Existence is very compassionate.Osho,Where is my question disappearing to? It is there one minute, and when I want to write it down it is gone, blank. Is it going into hiding in my subconscious? And why?It is not going into your unconscious. It is coming from your unconscious, but when you start writing it, it becomes conscious. And this is a simple process: anything unconscious becoming conscious starts disappearing; it loses meaning.On this simple principle the whole of psychoanalysis stands. Your dreams are unconscious; tell them to the psychoanalyst. By telling them you will be making them conscious. Once they are conscious, they disappear.Unconsciousness is a kind of basement where you go on throwing things, repressing things. Things that you don’t want to see, things that you don’t want to hear, things that you don’t want to accept, you go on throwing into the unconscious. It is your rejected parts – allow them to surface. That is what is happening while you are asking the question, and why I am insisting that you go on asking.My answer may help you or not, but your asking is certainly going to help you. If it is something unconscious that wants to come into light and you start writing it, you find it is losing meaning. Its whole meaning is in repression. Unrepressed it bursts like a soap bubble.So it is tremendously good. Go on doing it. Only intellectual questions will not disappear; intellectual questions will remain. Intellectual questions are rubbish; they don’t have anything to do with your being and your change. But if a question is coming from the unconscious and is significant, let your unconscious be revealed and you will start seeing changes – not that the questions are disappearing, but your attitudes, your approaches, your behavior, even your dreams are changing.It is a beautiful exercise to write down whatever you feel is somewhere lurking in the darkness of your mind. It is not very clear; it is dark there – bring it into the light. If you can bring all the contents of the unconscious into the conscious mind, your unconscious mind and your conscious mind will become one; they will both be conscious.It is such a gift. Right now one-tenth of the mind is conscious, and nine-tenths is unconscious; naturally it is nine times more powerful. So you decide something by the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind can cancel it – it cancels it! You decide that tomorrow morning you are going to get up at five o’clock – the morning is so beautiful, so healthy, so fresh. Exactly at five the alarm wakes you, and something happens. You don’t want to get up. You say, “We will see it tomorrow. It is so beautiful right now under the blankets, so cozy.” And you take a turn and go to sleep.When you do wake up, you will condemn yourself, you will feel guilty. But you don’t understand what has been happening. Your conscious mind had decided to wake up at five. The unconscious was never in agreement with it. You had never asked for the agreement – there is no way to ask for agreement.If you are hypnotized and your unconscious mind is told, “Wake up at five,” then there will be no change; you will wake up at five, alarm or no alarm. But right now you take the decision with the conscious mind, and when you are asleep the conscious mind is no longer functioning.It is the unconscious mind which is in power and functioning in your deep sleep. So when at five o’clock the alarm goes off, you pick up the alarm clock and throw it away – because the unconscious mind has no idea what the conscious mind has decided, and it looks so foolish to the unconscious mind, an unnecessary disturbance. You simply go back to sleep. But when you wake up, the unconscious mind has gone back; the conscious mind has come into function. It remembers, “I had decided to wake up at five o’clock, and I cheated myself.” It feels guilty, but it has not done anything; it is not responsible for it.You decide not to be angry, you decide not to be tense, you decide a thousand things and the unconscious mind goes on canceling them. It goes on doing the way it has always been doing. But if all the contents of the unconscious mind evaporate, then you have only one mind, the conscious mind, day in, day out. Every decision will be followed, no decision will ever be canceled. Your life will have integrity.That’s what I mean when I use the word integrity. You will have a kind of oneness. You can promise, and you can rely on your promise, because there is nobody in you who can cancel it. It is a decision of your total mind. A decision of a total mind is immensely powerful.It is good – go on doing it. If questions are not enough, then you can make a notebook. Just write anything unconscious, and don’t be worried that anybody will see it, because there will be many things which you don’t want anybody to see – that’s why you are keeping them in the dark. Don’t be worried, just bring them into the open. Nothing is wrong.Keeping it in the dark is wrong. Bringing it into the light changes the whole quality: it disappears.Osho,The silence that happened the other day – was that a taste of where you are pointing your finger?Right!

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 32 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why is it that I feel I need to have approval and be recognized, in my work especially? It puts me in a trap – I cannot do without it. I know I am in this trap, but I am caught in it and I cannot seem to get out of it. Can you help me be able to find the door?The question is from Kendra. It has to be remembered that it is everybody’s question.Our whole life’s structure is such that we are taught that unless there is recognition we are nobody, we are worthless. The work is not important, but the recognition. And this is putting things upside down. The work should be important – a joy in itself. You should work, not to be recognized, but because you enjoy being creative; you love the work for its own sake.There have been very few people who have been able to escape from the trap the society puts you in – like Vincent van Gogh. He went on painting – hungry, without a house, without clothes, without medicine, sick – but he went on painting. Not a single painting was being sold, there was no recognition from anywhere, but the strange thing was that in those conditions he was still happy – happy because what he wanted to paint he was able to paint. Recognition or no recognition, his work was intrinsically valuable.By the age of thirty-three he had committed suicide – not because of any misery, anguish, no, but simply because he had painted his last painting, on which he had been working for almost one year. He tried dozens of times, but it was not up to his standard and he destroyed it. Finally he managed to paint the sun the way he had longed to.He committed suicide, writing a letter to his brother, “I am not committing suicide out of despair. I am committing suicide because now there is no point in living – my work is done. Moreover, it has been difficult to find ways of livelihood. But it was okay because I had some work to do, some potential in me needed to become actual. It has blossomed, so now it is pointless to live like a beggar.“Up to now I had not even thought about it, I had not even looked at it. But now it is the only thing left. I have blossomed to my utmost; I am fulfilled, and now to drag on, finding ways of livelihood, seems to be just stupid. For what? So it is not a suicide according to me, but just that I have come to a fulfillment, a full stop, and joyously I am leaving the world. Joyously I lived, joyously I am leaving the world.”Now, almost a century afterward, each of his paintings is worth millions of dollars. There are only two hundred paintings available. He must have painted thousands, but they have been destroyed; nobody took any note of them.Now to have a van Gogh painting means you have an aesthetic sense. His painting gives you recognition. The world never gave any recognition to his work, but he never cared. And this should be the way to look at things.Work if you love it. Don’t ask for recognition. If it comes, take it easily; if it does not come, do not think about it. Your fulfillment should be in the work itself. If everybody learns this simple art of loving his work, whatever it is, enjoying it without asking for any recognition, we would have a more beautiful and celebrating world. As it is, the world has trapped you in a miserable pattern: what you are doing is not good because you love it, because you do it perfectly, but because the world recognizes it, rewards it, gives you gold medals, Nobel Prizes.They have taken away the whole intrinsic value of creativity and destroyed millions of people – because you cannot give millions of people Nobel Prizes. They have created the desire for recognition in everybody, so nobody can work peacefully, silently, enjoying whatever he is doing. And life consists of small things. For those small things there are no rewards, no titles given by the governments, no honorary degrees given by the universities.One of the great poets of the twentieth century, Rabindranath Tagore, lived in Bengal, India. He had published his poetry, his novels, in Bengali – but no recognition came to him. Then he translated a small book, Gitanjali, Offering of Songs into English. He was aware that the original has a beauty which the translation does not have and cannot have – because these two languages, Bengali and English, have different structures, different ways of expression.Bengali is very sweet. Even if you fight, it seems you are engaged in a nice conversation. It is very musical; each word is musical. That quality is not in English, and cannot be brought to it; it has different qualities. But somehow he managed to translate it, and the translation – which is a poor thing compared to the original – received the Nobel Prize. Then suddenly the whole of India became aware of it. The book had been available in Bengali, in other Indian languages for years and nobody had taken any note of it.Every university wanted to give him a DLitt. Kolkata, where he lived, was the first university, obviously, to offer him an honorary degree. He refused. He said, “You are not giving a degree to me; you are not giving recognition to my work, you are giving recognition to the Nobel Prize, because the book has been here in a far more beautiful way, and nobody has bothered even to write an appraisal.”He refused to take any DLitts. He said, “It is insulting to me.”Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the great novelists, and a man of tremendous insight into human psychology, refused the Nobel Prize. He said, “I have received enough reward while I was creating my work. A Nobel Prize cannot add anything to it – on the contrary, it pulls me down. It is good for amateurs who are in search of recognition; I am old enough, and I have enjoyed enough. I have loved whatever I have done. It was its own reward, and I don’t want any other reward, because nothing can be better than that which I have already received.” And he was right. But the right people are so few in the world, and the world is full of wrong people living in traps.Why should you bother about recognition? Bothering about recognition has meaning only if you don’t love your work; then it is meaningful, then it seems to substitute. You hate the work, you don’t like it, but you are doing it because there will be recognition; you will be appreciated, accepted. Rather than thinking about recognition, reconsider your work. Do you love it? – then that is the end. If you do not love it – then change it!The parents, the teachers are always reinforcing that you should be recognized, you should be accepted. This is a very cunning strategy to keep people under control.I was told again and again in my university, “You should stop doing these things: you go on asking questions which you know perfectly well cannot be answered, and which put the professor in an embarrassing situation. You have to stop it; otherwise these people will take revenge. They have power – they can fail you.”I said, “I don’t bother about it. Right now I am enjoying asking questions and making them feel ignorant. They are not courageous enough simply to say, ‘I do not know.’ Then there would be no embarrassment. But they want to pretend that they know everything. I am enjoying it; my intelligence is being sharpened. Who cares about examinations? They can fail me only when I appear in the examinations – who is going to appear? If they have the idea that they can fail me, I will not enter the examinations, and I will remain in the same class. They will have to pass me just out of fear that again for one year they will have to face me!”They all passed me, and helped me to pass, because they wanted to get rid of me. In their eyes I was also destroying other students, because other students started questioning things which have been accepted for centuries without any question.While I was teaching in the university, the same thing came about from a different angle. Now I was asking the students questions, to bring to their attention that all the knowledge that they have gathered is borrowed, and they know nothing. I told them that I didn’t care about their degrees, I cared about their authentic experience – and they didn’t have any. They were simply repeating books which are out of date; they had been proved wrong long ago. Now the authorities of the university were threatening me, “If you continue in this way, harassing students, you will be thrown out of the university.”I said, “This is strange – I was a student and I could not ask questions to the professors; now I am a professor and I cannot ask questions to the students! So what function is this university fulfilling? It should be a place where questions are asked, quests begin. Answers have to be found not in the books, but in life and in existence.”I said, “You can throw me out of the university, but remember, these same students, because of whom you are throwing me out, will burn down the whole university.” I told the vice-chancellor, “You should come and see my class.”He could not believe it – in my class there were at least two hundred students. There were no spaces, so they were sitting anywhere they could find – on the windows, on the floor. He said, “What is happening, because you have only ten students?”I said, “These people come to listen. They dropped their classes; they love to be here. This class is a dialogue. I am not superior to them, and I cannot refuse anybody who comes to my class. Whether he is my student or not does not matter; if he comes to listen to me, he is my student. In fact you should allow me to have the auditorium. These classrooms are too small for me.”He said, “Auditorium? You mean the whole university to gather in the auditorium? Then what will the other professors do?”I said, “That is for them to think out. They can go and hang themselves! They should have done it long before. Seeing that their students are not going to listen to them was enough indication.”The professors were angry, the authorities were angry. Finally they had to give me the auditorium – but very reluctantly, because the students were forcing them. But they said, “This is strange, why should students who have nothing to do with philosophy, religion or psychology go there?”Many students told the vice-chancellor, “We love it. We never knew that philosophy, religion, psychology can be so interesting, so intriguing; otherwise we would have joined them. We thought that these are dry subjects; only very bookish kinds of people join these subjects. We have never seen any juicy people joining the subjects. But this man has made the subjects so significant that it seems that even if we fail in our own subjects, it does not matter. What we are doing is so right in itself, and we are so clear about it, that there is no question of changing it.”Against recognition, against acceptance, against degrees… Finally I had to leave the university, not because of their threats, but because I recognized that if thousands of students could be helped by me, it was a wastage. I could help millions of people outside in the world. Why should I go on remaining attached to a small university? The whole world can be my university.You can see: I have been condemned. That is the only recognition I have received. I have been in every way misrepresented. Everything that can be said against a man has been said against me; everything that can be done against a man has been done against me. Do you think this is recognition? But I love my work. I love it so much that I don’t even call it work; I simply call it my joy.Everybody who was in some way elder to me, well-recognized, has told me, “What you are doing is not going to give you any respectability in the world.”But I said, “I have never asked for respectability, and I don’t see what I will do with it. I cannot eat it, I cannot drink it.”Learn one basic thing: do whatever you want to do, love to do, and never ask for recognition. That is begging. Why should one ask for recognition? Why should one hanker for acceptance?Look deep down in yourself. Perhaps you don’t like what you are doing, perhaps you are afraid that you are on the wrong track. Acceptance will help you feel that you are right. Recognition will make you feel that you are going toward the right goal.The question is of your own inner feelings; it has nothing to do with the outside world. Why depend on others? All these things depend on others – you yourself are becoming dependent.I would not accept any Nobel Prize. All this condemnation from all the nations around the world, from all the religions, is more valuable to me. Accepting the Nobel Prize means I am becoming dependent – now I will not be proud of myself, but proud of the Nobel Prize. Right now I can only be proud of myself; there is nothing else I can be proud of.This way you become an individual. To be an individual living in total freedom, on your own feet, drinking from your own sources, is what makes a man really centered, rooted. That is the beginning of his ultimate flowering.These so-called recognized people, honored people, are full of rubbish and nothing else. But they are full of the rubbish which the society wants them to be filled with – and the society compensates them by giving them rewards.Any man who has any sense of his own individuality lives by his own love, by his own work, without caring at all what others think of it. The more valuable your work is, the less the possibility is of getting any respect for it. And if your work is the work of a genius then you are not going to see any respect in your life; you will be condemned. Then, after two or three centuries, statues of you will be made, your books will be respected – because it takes almost two or three centuries for humanity to pick up as much intelligence as a genius has today. The gap is vast.Being respected by idiots you have to behave according to their manners, their expectations. To be respected by this sick humanity you have to be sicker than they are. Then they will respect you. But what will you gain? You will lose your soul and you will gain nothing.Osho,Would you talk to us about the difference between love and trust? It seems to me that trust is of greater significance in our relationship to you than love. When I say, “Osho I love you,” I'm speaking of a feeling that is colored and defined by other love relationships, a feeling that is limited by my state of unenlightenment. I speak as if I have some comprehension of what my love toward you implies.When I say, “Osho I trust you,” I am saying, “Do with me whatever needs to be done. Lead me into unimagined and unimaginable places: I am yours.”Trust seems to embrace the understanding that it is available even to things beyond its comprehension. Love, unenlightened love, also seems outgoing, somewhat aggressive; the “I” very conscious of itself as an entity. While trust – even in its unenlightened form – seems to have a quality of utter let-go in it. The “I” is only attached to it for linguistics, because the trusting person acknowledges that he himself may disappear.It is Maneesha’s question. It is not a question at all. She has answered it herself, and beautifully. She has said exactly what I would have said. That’s what I would like for each of you, by and by: to come to an understanding that when you ask a question, you can answer it exactly the way I will be answering it.Trust is certainly a higher value than love. In trust, love is implied; but in love, trust is not implied. When you say, “I trust in you, Osho” it is understood that you love. But when you say you love, trust has nothing to do with it. In fact your love is very suspicious, very untrusting, very much afraid, always on guard, watching the person you love.Lovers almost become detectives. They are spying on each other. Love is beautiful if it comes as a part of trust. And it always comes as a part of trust, because trust cannot be without love. But love can be without trust, and a love without trust is ugly; deep down it has all kinds of jealousies, suspicions, distrust.It is also true that when you say, “I love you,” it is not a surrender; it is not a readiness to be dissolved. It is not a readiness to be taken to unknown and unknowable spaces. When you say, “I love you,” you stand equal, and there is a certain aggressive quality in it. That’s why from the very beginnings of humanity everywhere, and in every time, the woman has not taken the initiative to say “I love you.” She has waited for the man to say, “I love you” – because the heart of the woman feels that aggressiveness. But man has a harder heart; he does not feel that aggressiveness – in fact he enjoys it.But when you say, “I trust you,” it is a deep surrender, an openness, a receptivity, a declaration to yourself and to the universe: “Now if this man takes me even to hell, it is okay with me: I trust him. If it looks like hell to me, it must be a fault of my vision. He cannot take me to hell.”In trust you will always find faults with yourself; in love you will always find faults with the one you are in love with. In trust you are always, without saying it, in a state of apology: “I am ignorant. I am sleepy, unconscious. There is a possibility of saying something wrong, doing something wrong, so be merciful toward me, have compassion on me.” Trust implies so much. It is such a treasure.When you say, “I love you,” there is a subtle current of possessiveness. Without being said, it is understood, “Now you are my possession, nobody else should love you.”In trust there is no question of possessing the person you trust. On the contrary, you are saying, “Please possess me. Destroy me as an ego. Help me to disappear and melt in you, so there is no resistance in going with you.”Love is a constant struggle, a fight; it demands. “I love you,” means, “You have to love me too. In fact, I love you only because I want you to love me.” It is a simple bargain; hence the fear: “You should not love anybody else. Nobody should love you, because I don’t want anybody to be partners in my love, to be sharers in my love.”The unconscious mind of man goes on thinking as if love is a quantity, that there is a certain quantity of love. If I love you, then you should possess the whole quantity. If I love a few other people the quantity will be distributed, you will not get all of it; hence the jealousy, the spying, the fighting, the nagging. All that is ugly goes on behind a beautiful word, love.In trust there is no question of any fighting. It is really a surrender. When you say, “Osho I trust in you,” it means, “From this moment my fight with you stops. Now I am yours; you can do whatever you want. You can kill me, but I will not resist because I am no longer there – I have given myself to you. Now it is up to you: whatsoever you feel right, do it.”Trust is not competitive; hence there is no jealousy. You can trust me, millions of people can trust me. In fact, the more people will trust me, the happier you will be. You will be rejoicing that so many people are trusting. It is not so with love.But in trust, all that is beautiful in love is implied. The moment you say, “I trust in you, Osho,” you have also said, “I love you.” But now, because of the trust, the “I” is no longer existent, only love. And love without the ego creates no problems: “Many people can love you, and the more people love you, the happier I will be.” But this is because of trust.Trust is perhaps the most beautiful word in the human language. Trust is so close to truth that if it is total, then this very moment your trust becomes your truth, a revelation, a revolution.Osho,This weekend there is a big sannyasin festival in Florence with dance and meditation and music. Is your heart with all these thousands of sannyasins?In the first place, there are not going to be thousands of sannyasins there, for the simple reason that the people who are organizing it are no longer with me. They are trying to cheat the sannyasins. Only three hundred sannyasins have booked for it, and the organizers are declaring it to be the first world festival since the last one in the commune in Oregon, America.But my name is not mentioned in it. It is not my festival. It is those few people, those few therapists, who want to exploit the sannyasins. But they are in trouble, because the three hundred sannyasins going will only cover the expenses. They were hoping thousands would go. Also, the three hundred are going because they are not aware that these people have started working against me.My heart will be with my people wherever they are. I will be with my sannyasins, and I have to be, particularly to show to them that this is not my festival, that they have been deceived, that the people on the stage have ugly ideas. They are all pretending to be masters, that they have all become enlightened.But the festival is going to be a fiasco, because my presence is not going to be on the stage, but my utter absence. I will be present in the audience. These three hundred people who are going are going to ask, “By what right have you called the sannyasins for a world festival when you yourselves are no longer sannyasins? On whose authority?” But it is a good chance for sannyasins to see the people who are in the role of Judas, selling their own master for thirty pieces of silver.As far as sannyasins are concerned, I am always with them. In this so-called world festival I will be more strongly there in the audience, to make them feel that the stage is empty, that the stage is dark and there is no light. The people who are pretending are going to be exposed, and they will never try anything like this again.So inform all your friends: go there and ask the people on the stage, “On what authority have you called the sannyasins? You are not sannyasins. You are not masters, you are not enlightened and you had no guts ever to say this in the commune. But now, because Osho is not present, you are trying to play the role of enlightened masters.”In fact, I would have loved to go there and suddenly walk onto the stage and see what happens to those therapists, but I cannot enter Italy. The government is stubborn, although sixty-five very eminent people from different professions, known worldwide, have protested that there is no reason why I should be prevented.But the government is simply silent, because the pope is heavy and the politicians are beggars. They are not afraid of intellectuals, painters, musicians, sculptors, architects, writers – they are not afraid of these people. They are afraid of the pope, because he holds the votes. But more protests are going to be presented to the government, and really eminent people are showing a tremendous interest in why a single individual who has done no harm to the country, who has never been in the country, should be prevented.So I will not be able to go there. But my presence will be with my sannyasins, wherever they are. You have to write to all your friends in Italy: “Make it clear to these people: ‘You cannot exploit sannyasins. If you are no longer sannyasins, then simply get out from here. This is a festival of sannyasins – we will manage it. Leave the stage! The empty stage is far better than a stage full of those who have betrayed.’”Osho,The most painful experience in the world is to be angry with you. This is not a question – only an expression of sheer joy at feeling free again to love you.That’s right! It must be from Chetana! To be angry with me is one of the most difficult things. You can ask Vivek, because she suffers many times for my sake, for my safety. I can understand that if she becomes angry it is not against me, but then she suffers so much because of anger.You love me so much – you cannot conceive of being angry with me. But once in a while, just a taste is good. That will prevent you from going into such spaces in the future.Of course for Vivek it is difficult. Now she has been sad and worried because I have been continuously mistreated by the police, jail authorities, governments, deported from one place to another. And she knows that she cannot do anything to prevent it. This whole sadness sometimes turns into anger. Now she cannot even be angry with those governments; she can only be angry with me. But then to be angry with me is really difficult. It is almost an impossible task! Those who have to pass through it know its hell.But one thing is good about it – there is always something good, even in the worst situation – that nothing remains forever. You come out of it, and then you feel a tremendous freedom and joy and understanding.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 33 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/beyond-psychology-33/

Osho,The other day when you were speaking about coming closer to you, I was aware that I still feel a thin armor around me that keeps me from coming closer. This armor is incongruous with my openness to you. I don't know where it is coming from. Please help me to melt it away.Everybody has that kind of armor. There are reasons for it. First, the child is born so utterly helpless into a world he knows nothing of. Naturally he is afraid of the unknown that faces him. He has not yet forgotten those nine months of absolute security, safety, when there were no problems, no responsibility, no worry for tomorrow.To us, those are nine months, but to the child it is eternity. He knows nothing of the calendar, he knows nothing of minutes, hours, days, months. He has lived an eternity in absolute safety and security, without any responsibility, and then suddenly he is thrown into an unknown world, where he is dependent for everything on others. It is natural that he will feel afraid. Everybody is bigger and more powerful, and he cannot live without the help of others. He knows he is dependent; he has lost his independence, his freedom. And small incidents may give him some taste of the reality he is going to face in the future.Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by Nelson, but in fact the credit should not go to Nelson. Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by a small incident in his childhood. Now history does not look at things in this way, but to me it is absolutely clear.When he was just six months old, a wild cat jumped on him. The maidservant who was looking after him had gone for something in the house; he was in the garden in the early morning sun and the fresh air, lying down, and the wild cat jumped on him. It didn’t harm him – perhaps it was just being playful – but to the child’s mind it was almost death. Since then, he was not afraid of tigers or lions – he could have fought a lion without any weapons, with no fear – but a cat? That was a different affair. He was absolutely helpless. Seeing a cat he was almost frozen; he became again a small six-month-old child, with no defense, with no capacity to fight. In those small child’s eyes that cat must have looked very big – it was a wild cat. The cat may have looked into the eyes of the child.Something in his psyche became so impressed by the incident that Nelson exploited it. Nelson was no comparison to Napoleon, and Napoleon was never defeated in his life; this was his first and last defeat. And he would not have been defeated, but Nelson had brought seventy cats at the front of the army.The moment Napoleon saw those seventy wild cats his mind stopped functioning. His generals could not understand what had happened. He was no longer the same great warrior; he was almost frozen with fear, trembling. He had never allowed any of his generals to arrange the army, but today he said, with tears in his eyes, “I am incapable of thinking – you arrange the army. I will be here, but I am incapable of fighting. Something has gone wrong with me.”He was removed, but without Napoleon his army was not capable of fighting Nelson. And seeing the situation of Napoleon, everybody in his army became a little afraid: something very strange was happening.A child is weak, vulnerable, insecure. Autonomously he starts creating armor, protection, in different ways. For example, he has to sleep alone. It is dark and he is afraid, but he has his teddy bear, and he believes that he is not alone – his friend is with him. You will see children dragging their teddy bears at airports, at railway stations. Do you think it is just a toy? To you it is, but to the child it is a friend; a friend when nobody else is helpful – in the darkness of the night, alone in the bed, still he is with him.He will create psychological teddy bears. You are to be reminded that although a grown-up man may think that he has no teddy bears, he is wrong. What is his God? – just a teddy bear. Out of his childhood fear, man has created a father figure who knows all, who is all-powerful, who is everywhere present; if you have enough faith in him he will protect you. But the very idea of protection, the very idea that a protector is needed, is childish. Then you learn prayer – these are just parts of your psychological armor. Prayer is to remind God that you are here, alone in the night.In my childhood I loved the river, which was just close by, just two minutes walk from my house. Hundreds of people used to take a bath there and I was always wondering: in summer when they take a dip in the river they don’t repeat the name of God – “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama” – no. But in cold winter they repeat, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.” They take a quick dip, repeating, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.” I was wondering, does the season make a difference? I used to ask my parents, “If these are devotees of Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, then summer is as good as winter.”But I don’t think that it was God or prayer or religion; it was simply the cold! They were creating armor with “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.” They were diverting their minds. It was too cold, and a diversion was needed – and it helped. In summer there was no need; they simply forgot all about what they had been doing the whole winter.Our prayers, our chantings, our mantras, our scriptures, our gods, our priests, are all part of our psychological armor. It is very subtle. A Christian believes that he will be saved – nobody else. Now that is his defense arrangement. Everybody is going to fall into hell except him, because he is a Christian. But every religion believes in the same way that only they will be saved.It is not a question of religion. It is a question of fear and being saved from fear, so it is natural in a way. But at a certain point of your maturity, intelligence demands that it should be dropped. It was good when you were a child, but one day you have to leave your teddy bear; just the same way one day you have to leave your God, just the same as one day you have to leave your Christianity, your Hinduism. Finally, the day you drop all your armor means you have dropped living out of fear.What kind of living can be out of fear? Once the armor is dropped you can live out of love, you can live in a mature way. The fully matured man has no fear, no defense; he is psychologically completely open and vulnerable.At one point the armor may be a necessity – perhaps it is. But as you grow, if you are not only growing old but also growing up, growing in maturity, then you will start seeing what you are carrying with you. Why do you believe in God? One day you have to see for yourself that you have not seen God, you haven’t had any contact with God, and to believe in God is to live a lie: you are not being sincere.What kind of religion can there be when there is no sincerity, no authenticity? You cannot even give reasons for your beliefs, and still you go on clinging to them. Look closely and you will find fear behind.A mature person should disconnect himself from anything that is connected with fear. That’s how maturity comes. Just watch all your acts, all your beliefs, and find out whether they are based in reality, in experience, or based in fear. And anything based in fear has to be dropped immediately, without a second thought. It is your armor. I cannot melt it. I can simply show you how you can drop it.It is not a simple thing; there are many things around it. In India there are so many temples. Many people don’t have houses, but there are so many gods – thirty-three million gods – and they all need their temples. In some places, like Varanasi, you will find two houses then one temple, three houses then another temple; the whole city is a city of temples. In Khajuraho, which is a ruined city, still there are one hundred temples, and hundreds of other temples are in ruins. Once it must have been a big city, but looking at the temples, I could not figure out where men were living, because the whole city seems to be composed of temples and temples. There seems to be no space.I used to go for a morning walk in Jabalpur, on a silent street, and a man used to follow me – because we were the only two who used to go for a walk in the morning. His habit was to pay respect to every god on the road, so this temple will come and he will pay respect, and that temple will come and he will pay his respect.I told him, “Just listen, if you have to come with me then you cannot continue this stupidity; otherwise you are free – you can do it, but I cannot wait at every temple. It looks embarrassing: you are doing this idiotic act and I am standing by your side!”But he loved me. He said, “I also think that it is useless. Nobody else does it, but my father used to do it, and because of him it has become almost a heritage: I am doing it, my children are doing it. And now there is great fear; my father has left it with me, perhaps his father had left it with him. The fear is that if you pass the temple of any god without paying respect, he may be angry at you. And gods are very revengeful; they are not going to leave you alone. You will suffer. So the fear is, why unnecessarily make enemies, powerful enemies against whom there is no other defense? It is better to pay respect – it costs nothing.”I said, “Then you can do it, but you cannot come with me.”He loved to come with me, so he said, “Tomorrow I will try – just give me one chance, because I can see that you don’t pay any respect, and nobody takes any revenge. Nobody else is paying respect – thousands of people are passing and only I am. It seems all the gods are waiting for me to pay respect, otherwise I will suffer revenge. They are not concerned with anybody else.”I said, “That’s what I am saying – they are not there. There is nobody in the temple; all temples are empty. There are no gods and there is no need to be afraid. Come with me, but tomorrow this habit has to be stopped; otherwise our friendship for this morning walk is at an end.”He said, “Just one day…” He tried hard, and I could see how psychological chains exist. He had promised me, and I was with him so he could not deceive me. On one side was the god…and he was crushed between the two sides. I could see his feet stopping; I could see his hands getting ready to pay respect, but seeing me he would drop his hands.It took almost double time that day because he was stopping at each, almost an automatic break. I had to stop and look at him severely, so he would say, “Okay, I will not do it. But are you certain there is no god?”I said, “Just forget all about gods. We have come for a morning walk, and this continuous stopping… There are so many temples; I am fed up!”But you will be surprised. In the evening he came to see me. He was looking very happy. He said, “Do you know what? I had to go another time. When I left you I went again to pay respect because I was so disturbed that so many gods would be angry. I am a poor man, how am I going…? But now I am feeling at ease.” So he said, “That’s perfectly good: I will come with you and will not pay respect. But I can go twice – the second time just to pay respect to the gods.”I said, “It seems you are incurable. You see me every day with you – nobody is being angry, nobody is taking any revenge. You see thousands of people passing by.”He said, “I see everything, but what am I to do with my own mind?”I said, “Then it is better you go one time and pay respect, and I will stop going on that street. I will go on another street, because I will not force you to go twice, wasting your time.”When people are psychologically in such bondage they always find reasons. One day he came to me and told me, “Now I go alone, without you, and the whole joy of the morning walk is gone. I know you will not come with me unless I leave these gods; I have to choose. So today I tried it – perhaps you are right. I tried it on my own. I didn’t pay any respect. And when I came home my mother was dead. Now it is absolutely certain that I angered so many gods.”I said, “But everybody’s mother is going to die. Do you think it is because the gods are angry that mothers die and that only your mother is special? Everybody’s father is going to die, everybody is going to fall sick, everybody is going to have accidents!”But he said, “I cannot think of anything: when I had gone for the walk she was perfectly okay and when I came back she was dead. The doctors say she had a heart attack, but I know that really I have killed her by not paying respects.”I said, “If you had not paid respect, you should have died from a heart attack, not your mother. Can’t you see a simple thing – that your mother has nothing to do with it?”But the psychological conditioning makes you almost blind. He said to me, “This is a warning to me: ‘Look, this time we are taking your mother, next time you are gone!’ They have given me an opportunity, a chance – a chance because I have always been respectful. They are being kind toward me, but now I am not going to listen to you.”Your psychological armor cannot be taken away from you. You will fight for it. Only you can do something to drop it, and that is to look at each and every part of it. If it is based in fear, then drop it. If it is based in reason, in experience, in understanding, then it is not something to be dropped, but something to be made part of your being. But you will not find a single thing in your armor which is based on experience. It is all fear, from A to Z.We go on living out of fear – that’s why we go on poisoning every other experience. We love somebody, but out of fear it spoils, it poisons. We seek truth, but if it is out of fear then we are not going to find it. Whatever you do, remember one thing: out of fear you are not going to grow. You will only shrink and die. Fear is in the service of death.Mahavira is right: he makes fearlessness the fundamental of a religious person. And I can understand what he means by fearlessness. He means dropping all armor. A fearless person has everything that life wants to give to you as a gift. Now there is no barrier. You will be showered with gifts, and whatever you do you will have strength, power, certainty, a tremendous feeling of authority.A man living out of fear is always trembling inside. He is continuously on the point of going insane, because life is big, and if you are continuously in fear… There are so many kinds of fear: you can make a big list, and you will be surprised how many fears are there – and still you are alive! There are infections all around, diseases, dangers, kidnapping, terrorists – and such a small life. And finally there is death, which you cannot avoid. Your whole life will become dark.Drop the fear! The fear was taken up unconsciously by you in your childhood; now consciously drop it and be mature. And then life can be a light which goes on deepening as you go on growing.Osho,When you say things like, “Live totally in the moment,” I always think, “Of course! That's it! From now on I am only going to do that.” And of course, a moment later I have forgotten already. In every discourse I decide the time has come to be more meditative, more religious, more loving, more aware – and I immediately forget.Is it possible that just by sitting with you, one of these days I will really get it in spite of myself?It is possible you may get it in spite of yourself. But your question is very significant. If you look at it, you can see what is going wrong. You listen to me talking about living totally, intensively, moment to moment, living now, living here and you say to yourself, “Of course! That is it! I am going to do it.” It is not that later on you forget it; you have already forgotten it. By saying “Of course! This is it!” by deciding that you are going to do it, you have already postponed it for tomorrow; by deciding that you are going to live this way, you have already missed the point. You have missed the point now.You think that later on you find you have forgotten it just a moment afterward. You are not forgetting it just a moment afterward; you have not listened to it at all! Otherwise you would not say, “Of course! This is it!” You would simply understand it nonverbally. You would not verbalize it, because in verbalizing it you are missing the moment; the moment is a very small thing.Your mind is really deceiving you. Your mind is saying, “I have understood it, don’t be worried. Of course, this is it! We are going to live this way.” But when? The question was now, and your mind has already postponed it. The question was here, and the mind has already brought the future in. It is not that you forget later on; later on you only recognize that you have forgotten. But the truth is that you have not even understood, because if you understand it there is no possibility of forgetting it.A truth has a quality: understood, it is impossible to forget it. That’s why if you are a man of truth you need not remember it. But if you are accustomed to lying, then you need a very good memory, because then you have to remember continually what lie you had told this man yesterday, and you have to repeat the same lie – because meanwhile you may have been lying to other people, about other things. A liar has to be very, very alert, and if he is caught, then he has to be very logical, almost a sophist, so he can manage.One Sufi story is that Mulla Nasruddin was chosen by the Shah of Iran to go to the king of India as his messenger, to make a friendship between two great countries. All the other important people in the court of the Shah of Iran were very jealous. They were trying in every way to spoil Nasruddin’s journey, to create in the mind of the king antagonism against Nasruddin, and they were spying on him to find out what he was doing.What Nasruddin did was this: he went to the emperor of India, and before the whole court of the emperor he said, “Seeing you is a great privilege to me. My king, the Shah of Iran is just a young moon – just two days old. You are a full moon.”The emperor was certainly very much impressed – that the ambassador of Iran is comparing him not with a two-day old moon, which is rarely visible for a few minutes, but with the full moon! He gave him many presents to give to his king and said, “Let him know that I am very much pleased with his messenger.”But the spies of the Shah’s court, the conspirators against Nasruddin, had reached the Shah’s court before him. They told everyone that Nasruddin had insulted the Shah of Iran, calling him just a young moon, two days old, and had compared him with the emperor of India by saying that the emperor of India is a full moon, perfect in its glory!Naturally the Shah of Iran was very offended. He said, “Let that Nasruddin come! I used to think that he is a wise man, but he seems to be very cunning.” Nasruddin came with big, valuable presents, but the Shah was angry. He said, “I don’t want any presents. First you have to give an explanation to me: is it right that you compared me with the emperor, saying that I am just a two-day old moon, and he is as the perfect full moon?”Nasruddin said, “Yes, and the emperor is a fool! He did not understand my meaning.”The Shah said, “What is your meaning?”He said, “My meaning is that the full moon is on its deathbed, from tomorrow it will start declining. The two-day old moon is on the increase: tomorrow it will be bigger, the day after tomorrow it will be even bigger! So my Shah of Iran is expanding, becoming bigger and bigger. The emperor does not have any future – my Shah has a future; he has only past, and his future is death.”The Shah of Iran was very impressed. He gave to Nasruddin all the presents that were given by the emperor of India for himself, and he gave many more presents to Nasruddin. He told him, “You are really a wise man.”The whole court was silent, seeing that the whole thing had changed completely: “This Nasruddin is really a strange fellow; we had never thought that he would interpret it in such a way.”That night they went to see him, because now he had become the most important man in the court, second only to the Shah, and they all praised him. He said, “Don’t be bothered – I am just an incurable liar! Whatever the situation is, I manage somehow to interpret it in such a way that it appeals to the party concerned: both the India emperor and the Shah of Iran are idiots! I am just an incurable liar. I don’t mean anything!”Truth has a quality, it has a validity which is intrinsic. You need not prove it; its experience is its proof. No other logic is needed.So just look into your acts, into your thoughts, into your feelings: you will find the armor everywhere. Wherever you see fear, you have created it. It was needed at one time – now it is no longer needed. A simple understanding that it is no longer needed: now it is a barrier, a hindrance, a burden. If you find something truthful, it will have its own validity. But in the armor you will not find anything that has any connection with truth. The whole armor is made of fear – layers and layers of fear.The woodcutters and the scientists who work with wood count the age of the tree from the layers of the bark. When you cut a tree you will see layers of the bark on the trunk. Each year the tree gathers one layer – that’s how they manage to know how old the tree is. There are trees which are four thousand years old; they have four thousand layers.Your armor has also as many layers as you have lived. Not one every year; perhaps one, two, three – it depends on conditions: what kind of upbringing, what kind of education, what kind of people you have lived with. But each year you are collecting layers, and the armor goes on becoming thicker and does not allow you to touch life. There is such a gap between you and life.You are carrying an imprisonment around yourself. But because you yourself have created it, you are capable of dropping it any moment: this very moment. But don’t postpone, don’t say, “I will do it tomorrow.” Tomorrow never comes. And when I am saying, “Do it,” in fact doing is not needed; just seeing is enough. If you have seen it, don’t verbalize it: “This is it,” because in verbalizing it you will miss – the moment is gone. Just see it without verbalization and it will evaporate. It has no substantiality. It is not something real. It is something unreal that you have created.This goes on happening every day. I tell you to live intensely herenow, but the barrier is there which immediately shifts it toward the future and you feel that you have understood it. Right now it will shift it toward the future and give you a feeling of understanding. The next moment you will have forgotten it, because in the first place you had not understood it at all. Understood, it is never forgotten.My professors in the university were very angry with me because I would never take any notes, and every other student was taking notes. They would see me just sitting, and they would ask me, “Don’t you want to take notes?”I said, “There is no need. I am trying to understand, and if I understand it, there is no need of any notes; the understanding will remain with me. Understanding becomes part of your blood, part of your bones, part of your marrow. These people who are taking notes are the ones who do not understand. They think that by taking notes they will be able to remember – but what will they remember? They have not understood in the first place. These notes will be dead. Perhaps they will be able to repeat these notes in the examination papers.“You are responsible – because these people will take these notes into the examination, and then they will be caught. In fact you are responsible; you should have stopped them from taking notes. It is a simple logic: they do not understand and they are trying to take notes. They can’t do two things together. In the end, only the notes are in their hands and no understanding, and in the examination what will they do? They will try to bring in the notes in a thousand different ways.”People would write small notes on their hand, people would write on their clothes – and in India you wear a kurta, a very long robe. On the underside you can write big notes. Nobody can see it; when you want to see it you can just turn it up and look at the note, and you are not carrying any notes or anything. The people who were dangerous types and were known to be dangerous would bring their copies with them, with a knife. They would put the knife on the table with the copy, and they would be copying from the copy before the teacher who is standing there. He would know that the man was dangerous and that the knife was symbolic: “If you prevent me or do anything wrong to me, I can do anything – I can kill you.” But who is responsible?“And you,” I used to tell them, “you are angry at me – who is trying to understand!”In my own class, when I became a professor in my own turn, I prevented it completely: nobody could take notes. I said, “The mind can do only one thing at a time, so try to understand so that you need not sneak notes into the examination.”First my students were very puzzled. They said, “Every professor says, ‘Take notes, so you don’t forget.’”I said, “The question of forgetting arises only when you have not understood. I am saying, ‘Understand, and don’t worry about forgetting.’ Anything understood is never forgotten, and anything not understood is bound to be forgotten.”So that’s what is happening. I say, “Live now.” You say, “This is it! Enough is enough, now I am going to live moment to moment.” But why the decision?Just start! You are listening here, just listen. There is no need to verbalize it. The mind is a commentator – it goes on commenting – but if you try intensely to hear, the commentating mind will stop because it is a question of energy. You have a certain energy. If you stake all the energy in listening, then this continuous commentary in the mind automatically stops. It has no more energy; you are not nourishing it.Yes, it is true: it is going to happen in spite of you. How long are you going to not listen to me? One day, tired, you will say, “Let us listen!”Osho,George Gurdjieff said, “Bravo, America!” After seeing how inhumanely the United States treated you, I say, “To hell with America!” Beloved master, what do you say?I cannot say anything against Gurdjieff. I will still say, “Bravo, America!” for the simple reason that America has not mistreated me. The small group of bureaucrats who mistreated me are not America; they are mistreating America too. Don’t say, “To hell with America!” say, “To hell with the American government!” Make it a clear distinction.America has not much knowledge about me. It was the American government’s behavior, mistreatment, which made me known to every American. Wherever I went in those twelve days as I passed almost all over America, I was greeted with love and respect by strangers. Everybody could see that the American government was behaving like a fascist government; everybody could see that this was religious persecution, that this was not democracy. Even among the inmates and the bureaucrats who came in contact with me – the jailers, the doctors, the nurses, the other attendants in the jail – there was not even a single exception.I was surprised, because those inmates had no way of knowing me. They had just known what was happening with me from the television – small bits and pieces. But they were certain that I was being persecuted by the Christian fanatics and by the bureaucracy; that the government was afraid for some reason and the church was afraid for some reason. They simply wanted some excuse so I could not enter America, because they knew that if I was out of America my people, naturally, would disperse.But from the American people I experienced great love. The first jail I was in, thousands of telegrams and telephone calls came. I asked the jailer, “You must be getting tired?”He said, “No, we have had to appoint three, four more people to receive phone calls, open telegrams.”The first day somebody from Germany phoned and asked the jailer, “Perhaps Osho must be the first in your jail who is a man of international standing?”And the jailer said, “No, we have had cabinet ministers, leaders of political parties, and many celebrities.”I had no idea what had happened, but on the second day flowers started coming; there were so many that in that jail, a big jail – they had six hundred inmates or more – they had no place to keep them. They had only one room empty, a big room, bigger than this room, and it was full of flowers.The jailer came to me, saying, “What to do with the flowers?”I said, “Send them to schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, sick people in the city – wherever you feel to, just send them, from me.”He said, “One thing more, I am sorry and I want to apologize. I don’t know the number of the man who called from Germany; you had come recently and I had no awareness of what kind of man you are. Now, in two days, I have seen that the whole world is interested in you. There is not a single country in the world from where we are not receiving calls and telegrams and flowers. From America everywhere people simply want to know why you have been arrested.“So I cannot phone that man and apologize to him, but I can say to you what I want to say to him: please forgive me. You don’t belong in the category of those cabinet ministers and political leaders. Perhaps we will never have another man like you in this jail. These two days have been my life’s most precious days.”The jailer used to take me to the court every day, and returning he would say, “It is sheer injustice. I have never seen such injustice. They can’t prove a thing against you, and still they are not ready to give bail. This is unprecedented in my whole life – and I have been here for twenty years.”People were standing on both sides of the street whenever I was coming to the court, going back from the court – perhaps for hours, because they did not have any idea at what time I would be taken out – shouting, showing two fingers for victory, throwing flowers on the police cars.No, America has not mistreated me. The government has, and that is a totally different thing. The politicians and the church conspired; both were in danger. Now they are trying to create fear in all the other countries where they can make some pressure. Because they help the poor countries with money, the poor countries are under obligation, so whatever America says to them they have to follow. Their whole effort is not to let me settle again and create a commune, because that commune will be an answer that proves that all their accusations, allegations, are absolutely wrong.But as far as the people of that land are concerned, they are beautiful. And Gurdjieff was right.This government is not going to last long. They have already started doing suicidal acts. With the attack on Libya they have shown their real face. A small country like Libya, and a nuclear power like America – there is no comparison. The only reason for attacking Libya is that the man who leads Libya, Qaddafi, is really a brave man, outspoken, and he says whatever the truth is. He is not a politician. He said that Ronald Reagan is Adolf Hitler Number Two. This statement was the root cause for attacking Libya; all other things were not of any consideration.But Reagan does not know that before attacking Libya he should attack me – fortunately I don’t have any land – because I have immediately corrected Qaddafi: “You are wrong. Ronald Reagan is not Adolf Hitler Number Two; he is Adolf Hitler Number One.”The poor Adolf Hitler of the Second World War cannot be number one. He is now second, for the simple reason that Ronald Reagan has a million times more power than Adolf Hitler had. Now he is calling Qaddafi “the mad dog of the Middle East,” calling him “the bad smell.”Ronald Reagan and his government started dying the day they arrested me. It takes a little time. Let them do a few more stupid things and let the American people understand what kind of a government they have got. It is not a democracy: it is not for the people, it is not of the people, it is not by the people. It is a fascist gang that is ruling America, and it will be good that the American people get rid of it. People naturally think the government and the so-called political leaders are the leaders of the people. That is not so.Just recently I have received news from Crete about a few incidents that happened after they arrested me. Eleven old people – fifty to sixty years old – just as I left the house with the police, reached the house and said, “This should not have happened without us. Why did you not inform us? We have our hunting guns, we would have come and shown those police people what it means to misbehave.”A journalist had asked me, “Any message for the people who live here?”I said, “Just tell them to reach the airport in the night to show that they are with me – not with the church and not with the government.”There were three thousand people at the airport. They had waited for hours to support me, and to say that what the police had done and what the government had done was not right. Fifty people met one sannyasin; they were immensely angry about what had happened and were asking, “What can we do?” Just poor people, simple people. Another group of forty people met another sannyasin, and they were saying, “We want to do something. This thing should not be allowed to happen. Everything that Osho was saying was right about the church; there was nothing wrong in it.”These simple villagers understood that what I was saying about the church is true; nothing was wrong in it. Even when I had left Greece, people from Crete sent a delegation to the president saying, “The behavior of the police and the government has disgraced us.”So always remember to make a differentiation between the government and the people. The government is not necessarily the representative of the people. In most cases it has cheated people, exploited people. It is not for them.The question is from Milarepa. I can understand your anger. Every sannyasin would like to say, “To hell with America!” But just say, “To hell with the American government!” America is far bigger, far more important, and I still hope that the new man will be born in America.These governments come and go; the people remain. The people are the very soul. A country is not made of land, it is made of the people. In those twelve days, moving from one jail to another, I came in contact with the common people and with the lowest of the low – the criminals – and I have seen so much love in their hearts. Whenever I entered a new jail, I did not feel that it was a jail because the reception was so warm.Of course those people were behind bars, but they were shouting, “Osho we know you, and you are right!” in the face of the jailer, the doctor and the other officials. They would line up, and whenever I reached my cell, soon inmates would start coming with fruit, somebody with milk, somebody with soap, somebody with a toothbrush, somebody with toothpaste. They would say, “These people will not give you anything. They want to torture you. But as we had heard just the day before that you will be brought here, we have been saving things; all these things are fresh.”These people are criminals, and Ronald Reagan is not a criminal? He unnecessarily killed Qaddafi’s daughter, bombed his three houses which are in the civilian area. He himself is a mad dog – and he is calling Qaddafi a mad dog!I can understand your anger, but remember always to be careful to draw fine lines so that only the criminal is hit, not the simple, poor, innocent people.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 34 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I heard you say that if a person can remember his birth and being in the womb, then the memory of his last death may come. I have tried to remember, but there is only imagination there. I also heard you say that it is not possible to remember beyond three to four years old because the baby has no mind.Is there a remembrance that is not of the mind?There is no remembrance that is not of the mind, but you don’t know the whole mind. When you are trying to remember, you are using only the conscious mind, and the conscious mind can go only up to the age of four. But below the conscious is the unconscious mind.Sometimes in your dreams you go deeper than the conscious mind can ever lead you. Many of your dreams are memories of your past lives, but you have no way to recognize that they are of a past life. So there is a special method which is something like hypnosis. It can be done by somebody else to you – which is simpler because you can relax completely, and he can lead you deeper into the past life.In Buddhist or Jaina terminology, because they discovered the method first, it is called jati-smaran: remembering the past lives. In hypnosis, you don’t hear anybody else except the person who has hypnotized you. He can talk to you, you can answer him, yet you will remain fast asleep, you will not come to the conscious mind. So only in hypnosis can your unconscious be communicated with, be asked questions. This can be repeated again and again, and if the same fact comes up without exception, the same memory comes up, the same story comes up, then certainly it is not imagination.Through hypnosis the other person can reach you, but not through your conscious mind – because in whatever the conscious mind does there is an effort and tension, and that prevents the unconscious mind from surfacing. The conscious mind has to be completely relaxed so the unconscious can surface. In hypnosis it is better to begin with someone else. It is such a simple method that anyone can do it – it does not need any expertise. I will tell you about the method, how you can help each other.When you have become a good medium, so that you can slip very easily into the unconscious, then finally the unconscious can be told that you are able to reach your past lives. It can be given a certain symbol to avoid the conscious mind completely. For example, it can be told that if you repeat, “Om, om, om,” three times, you will fall into hypnosis. Anything can be used: “One, two, three,” it doesn’t matter, the words are not significant. Before doing it, you have to tell your conscious mind, “Wake me up after ten minutes.” The other person can also do the same, but it is easier for you because you are not doing anything. Once you have been able to go into deeper layers of your past life or past lives, the other person can tell the unconscious, “This is your mantra: one, two, three. And whenever I say it, you will fall into an unconscious state.” But remember to tell the conscious to wake you; otherwise, who will wake you out of unconsciousness? It can become a coma.The unconscious mind is nine times bigger than the conscious; it has tremendous treasures, all the memories of your past. Below the unconscious there is the collective unconscious. One can descend into the collective unconscious also – at first with somebody’s help. That used to be the work of a mystery school: the master would take you slowly toward the unconscious and the collective unconscious. In your collective unconscious you have memories of your past lives as animals, as birds. Below the collective unconscious is the cosmic unconscious. Slowly, slowly one can go deeper and deeper, and the cosmic unconscious has memories of your being trees, rosebushes, stones.So mind is not only that which you know; there is much to be discovered in your own mind. It is yours, it is there – but not easily available. There are reasons why it is not easily available. Nature makes barriers, because it would confuse you if there were no barriers between the conscious and the unconscious, and the collective unconscious, and the cosmic unconscious. Even this small mind – the conscious mind – is so confusing, so disturbing. If you knew all that you have lived for millennia, from the very beginning, naturally you would get into such a mess, into such madness.For example, you love a woman: she may have been your mother in a past life, and if you remember it then you will be in trouble. But she may have been, in your collective unconscious, your murderer; then things become even more complicated. And those realities are as authentic as the realities of your life. You will get mixed up: how are you going to behave with this woman who is your wife, who was your mother, who was your murderer? Whatever you do with this woman will create guilt in you. You will not be at ease. That’s the reason nature goes on putting barriers between your past existences and allows you only this life’s memories.The science of hypnosis has been condemned by all religions, and the reason is that if hypnotism becomes accepted as a scientific inquiry – and once it is explored it has to be accepted, because it fulfills all the criteria of being a science – then there will be trouble: Christians cannot say there is only one life, Mohammedans can’t say there is only one life, Darwin can’t say that man has evolved from the apes. It will depend on the research done through thousands of peoples’ total minds, and what they say.Hindus believe that man’s consciousness has evolved from the consciousness of cows – that’s why they call the cows “mother.” And I think a cow being a mother looks more relevant than a monkey being a father. The Hindus are saying this through a certain research into the mind, which has been available for centuries in the East: how to go into past lives. There has not been a single exception – whenever you cross the border of the collective unconscious mind, you pass from the body of a cow, not from the body of a monkey.It is not a question of hypotheses. With Darwin it is only hypothetical, just a conjecture, and now he is being refuted, even by scientists. Now there are not many Darwinians; they are out of date.The latest research into evolution does not help Darwin and his theory. They say that for thousands of years we have not seen any monkey evolving into a man, and neither have we seen the reverse – that a man reverses into a monkey. Darwin was asked again and again his whole life for the missing link which he could not provide; it was a nightmare for him! It cannot be just a jump from a monkey to a man: this moment you are a monkey and next moment you decide to be a man, and you become a man. There must be a missing link; not only a link, perhaps many links, many steps slowly, slowly, but they should be available.Darwin could not even find dead bodies that would have been a proof of a link. We have been searching for dead bodies and we have found one ninety thousand years old – a human body in China. But it is still human; it is not a monkey. It was preserved by the snow. It is still human, as human as you are.Hindus have a totally different approach. It is to be remembered that this is the only point on which all the three religions that were born in India agree: about everything else they have their own philosophy, but about reincarnation they all agree. That is not just an accident, because all three religions were working on the same lines – looking into the unconscious of man – and they all found the same results. The whole world laughs at the idea of calling the cow mother, but I don’t think anybody understands why Hindus do that. If they are right – the cow has the qualities of a mother, and it is far better to be connected with the cows than with the monkeys.So don’t try to remember. It is not a question of remembering. You cannot cross the barrier with the conscious mind; you can only imagine, and you will know that it is only imagination because it changes every time, so you know perfectly well that you are imagining. Go through a hypnotic process; the hypnotic process is very simple – the simplest.The mind, the conscious mind, has to be focused on something for just a few seconds – for example, on an electric light bulb. Don’t have anything in the room for the mind to wander here and there; just have a bare room with only one thing, an electric light which is on in the night. Lie down, be relaxed, and take the help of a person whom you trust. That is the most important thing, because the conscious mind will not relax unless there is trust. It will keep itself alert, because the man may do something, take you someplace, and you will not be aware of it. That’s why I said hypnosis was part of a mystery school where there were masters whom people trusted, or there was one great master who helped you. You trusted him, and he said to you, “This man is going to take you into hypnosis. Your trust in me should be your trust in him too; I am choosing him.” Or if it was possible for the master himself, if the school was small, then he would do it once in a while, just to show others what happens.The process is very simple. You have to lie down relaxed, the whole body relaxed. Looking inside the body starting from the toe, see if there is any tension. If there is any tension near the knee or near the stomach or anywhere, then relax it there. Bring that relaxation up to your head – and keep your eyes focused on the light.It is easy to recognize when you have come to the point where you are on the border of conscious and unconscious: your face changes; it starts looking sleepy, it loses the quality of awakening, and at that moment the master says, “Sleep is coming… Deep sleep is coming… You are falling into a sleep which you have never fallen into before.” And a moment comes when even if you try to keep your eyes open… You have been told that until your eyes close by themselves, in spite of yourself, go on keeping them open. That keeps the conscious mind engaged.Soon – it takes two minutes, three minutes, at the most five minutes – your eyes start drooping. That means you are just crossing the border. The master says, “You are falling, and I will count up to seven. With each number you will be going deeper.” He starts counting, “One…” and goes on repeating, “The sleep is becoming deeper. Two… The sleep is becoming deeper. Three…” And at seven he stops it. At seven he says, “You have fallen into deep unconsciousness. Now you will be available only to me; you will not hear anything else, anybody else. Now the only communication with the world is through me; you will be able to hear me, you will be able to answer me.”The beauty of the unconscious is that it never lies, because it has never been part of civilization. It has never been educated, it has never been turned into a hypocrite; it is very simple, very innocent. It simply says whatsoever is the case. Then for a few seconds the master leaves you, so that you can settle into that state. And then he starts asking you where you are. Perhaps you are in the womb of your mother, perhaps you have been conceived, perhaps you are dying in a past life somewhere. And you will answer where you are. He asks, “Describe it in detail,” and you will describe it in detail. This can be taped, recorded, so that when you come back you can listen to it.The process has to be repeated many times, because this is the proof: if it is imagination or dream it will go on changing every time you do it, but if it is a reality then nothing can be done about it. Each time you come to that place you will describe exactly what it is. All that you say can be recorded, so that the recordings can be compared later on when you are conscious. If you are saying the same thing again and again it is not a dream, it is not imagination; you are coming across a real memory. You are reliving it; it is not only remembered, but relived.Once you have succeeded in getting one life back, then with the same process you can go on deeper, into other lives. There will come a barrier where human lives stop and animal lives start: that means you have come to the collective unconscious.Now the master needs to put you in an even deeper unconsciousness, and that can be done in your unconscious state. The first thing was done when you were conscious; it brought you to the unconscious. The second step has to be done in the same way: “I will repeat seven times that you are falling deeper into the collective unconscious, and you will start falling.” Giving a little rest, he can again ask where you are, and you may say, “I am a rosebush,” or anything else that you have been. You relive it; you can make every detailed description. Again the barrier will come when you pass from animals, from plants, to what you call matter – because matter is also consciousness, fast asleep.That is the end of the journey in the lower depths of your mind. If this is completed, your consciousness will go on changing. With each new revelation your consciousness will become richer. Then a point comes – when you have traveled all the way down backward, downward – that you can move upward from consciousness to superconsciousness until you reach to the cosmic consciousness. We are exactly in the middle. On both sides of the conscious there are three stages: below it are unconscious, collective unconscious and cosmic unconscious; above it are superconscious, super-superconscious, and cosmic conscious.Our mind has seven worlds. To know the past, to know our background, is to know the whole history of consciousness and its evolution until this moment. But that makes it clear that this is not the last stage – it cannot be. If there is so much behind you, there must be something ahead of you. What Western psychology goes on trying is working only with one thing: unconsciousness, the first lower rung of the ladder. Eastern psychology has worked on all seven.As you move from the conscious mind, hypnosis is the method, and it is not yet recognized by the scientists because they have not even tried it. It is very strange. Perhaps the reason is that science is a development of the West, and because the West has a Christian conditioning it simply denies that there is anything other than this life, so from the very beginning one is prejudiced – why bother about hypnosis?A few people have dared and tried, but they were all badly condemned by society. Mesmer tried it, but was condemned, and there was a tradition of women who Christianity condemned as witches. They were trying hypnosis, and they were closer to the truth than Christianity has ever been. But thousands and thousands of witches were burned alive; their whole tradition was completely erased, all their literature was burned. Only one copy of each book has been preserved in the Vatican.It is the duty of the UN to take over the library of the Vatican. It is underground; it has tremendous treasures that Christianity has destroyed. They are still afraid to bring those books out into the light because then the condemnation for Christianity will be immense, even from Christians: “What you were saying was not true, and what was truth was killed, burned.”But they are keeping at least one copy in their vast library. Nobody is allowed to enter that vast library; only when you become a cardinal are you allowed in the library, but by that time you are so conditioned… Those books are written in a different way, particularly to avoid the attention of Christians. They have used parables, diagrams, and other things, as if they are not about religion, as if they are about something else.It is the duty of all the intelligentsia of the world to force the Vatican: “That library does not belong to you. You have done enough harm; now at least give that library to the UN and let scholars find out what beautiful literature you have destroyed. It should be published and made available to anybody who wants it.”One of the things that got destroyed in this way was hypnosis – the method, the science and the results. It is now simply a condemnatory word. If you love me, if you trust me, anybody can say you are just hypnotized. He does not know even the meaning of the word; he does not know its implications, but he is using it to condemn you. Really, to be hypnotized and to go into the darker realms of your being is the first step of going into the lighter realms of your being.You contain the whole evolution – past, present, future. You have such an enormous being, and only a small window of the conscious mind is allowed: “This is you.” Your vastness is denied. Your universality is denied.So if you really want to remember, not only to remember but to relive, then you will have to use the method of hypnosis. As we settle somewhere, I am going to start a section which will be totally devoted to hypnosis and its implications, and I want every sannyasin to move through it.I am reminded of two incidents; one is in Gautam Buddha’s life, and one is in Vardhaman Mahavira’s life:A man takes sannyas, becomes part of the community of Buddha, but finds it hard, difficult, arduous. He is sad, depressed, and thinks to leave it many times. One day Buddha called him and told him to sit in front of him and go into the method of jati-smaran – that is, hypnosis.He had not yet tried it, so somebody gave him the instructions to go into his past lives. It was an amazing revelation: for almost five lives in the past he had taken sannyas and dropped it. That had become a routine of his consciousness. So Buddha said, “Now you are doing it again. It is up to you, but you have done it five times before. It is simply repetitive; you are wasting time. Either stop taking sannyas and do whatsoever you want, or be courageous; if you have taken it, then go into it this time. This should not be repeated. Five lives have been a waste.”He looked at his own five lives; the same pattern, almost mechanical, the same wheel moving: first getting attracted to a great master, getting initiated with great enthusiasm, and then seeing the arduousness, the difficulties of transforming himself, and escaping, renouncing sannyas itself. He comes back to it again and again.Buddha said, “You can do it as long as you want. In your next life you will do it again. For five lives nobody reminded you, because the masters you were working with were not masters of jati-smaran.”The man remained. It changed his whole attitude: “This is stupid. If it is hard then it has to be faced. If it is a challenge then it has to be taken.” He became one of the enlightened disciples of Buddha.There is a similar story in Mahavira’s life. A prince becomes enchanted with Mahavira’s individuality, but he does not know that Mahavira’s life is really arduous. Nobody has lived the way Mahavira has lived – naked in the winter, in the hot sun, hungry for months, fasting, eating once in a while, barefooted, walking on the burning earth in the hot sun.Mahavira did not use shoes because shoes were made only of leather in those days, and to use shoes meant you were indirectly supporting the industry of violence, because the best leather comes when you kill young calves. If you want really perfect leather, then you have to take the leather from the calf while it is alive; you don’t kill him first. First you take the leather, and in taking the leather of course he dies. That leather is the softest and the best. Mahavira was absolutely against in any way supporting anything which is based on violence.Naturally, you can understand that the prince became impressed by the man, his integrity, his authority, his teaching. He was not aware that life with him is going to be tremendously hard – and he had lived very luxuriously. But in a moment of enthusiasm he took sannyas and entered Mahavira’s commune.Now, ten thousand sannyasins used to move with Mahavira, and they were staying in a big caravanserai. It was the routine that the elder ones – that means those who had been longer in sannyas – should have better places, and the others accordingly. This prince was just a one-day-old sannyasin, so in the night he got a place just near the door, the main door, where people left their shoes, umbrellas and other things. He was the son of a king, and sleeping by that door was impossible; people were continuously coming and going: there are ten thousand sannyasins… He had never slept in such a situation, and he immediately thought, “This is not the life I would like. Next morning I will give my apology, and I will say, ‘This is not the life for me.’”But before he reached Mahavira, Mahavira reached him, and asked him to let himself be taken into jati-smaran – and it was the same process. For three lives he had been doing the same thing: getting impressed by magnetic people, charismatic people, and then finding it difficult over small matters and leaving them. In all those three lives he could have become enlightened, because those three people were capable of triggering the process of enlightenment.Mahavira said, “You have missed three lives, and you are missing the fourth. You can decide. But you are a warrior, not only a prince. Don’t emphasize that you are a prince and you have lived only in luxury; remember that you are a warrior and you have been fighting in wars. There is nobody in this area who is a better swordsman, a better archer. Don’t insult yourself, don’t humiliate yourself. This is escape.” And the man remained.But the factor that helped those two men to remain was their reliving of past experiences. It is of tremendous use, but in the West it is so much condemned that the condemnation has reached to the East too – because now the East is just a parrot. Now the East is not the East it used to be; it is just a shadow of the West. All the Eastern scholars are produced by the West. They learn in Western seats of education – in Paris, in London, in Oxford, in Cambridge, in Harvard.I have been continually fighting in many universities in India, that these scholars should not be called Eastern scholars, because whatsoever they have learned is Western; even though it is about Indian philosophy, they have learned it in Oxford. It is ridiculous, that to understand Indian philosophy you have to go to Oxford. These scholars are not Eastern in any way; their whole approach is Western. So there is no longer East really, now it is all West. The East has become so interested in Western success, in materialism, in technology, that it has forgotten that it has become successful in a different world – the world of the inner – and has reached the highest peaks of illumination.So don’t try to remember, but take the help of someone whom you trust, who can hypnotize you.Soon, as existence allows me to settle somewhere, I will create people who can help everybody to go into the past and experience and relive those moments. They will change your every attitude. They will make you aware that you are moving in a circle and it is time to get out of it, because this is nonsense: each life you are doing the same thing, moving in the same circle. You can go on doing it eternally – nobody is going to prevent you – unless you decide to jump out of this viciousness.Osho,While traveling in Greece with a group of sannyasins we visited Delphi, the place of the ancient oracle, and where it is said Pythagoras once lived. We all felt a peaceful happiness while walking around the ruins, and in the end we all gathered on the top of the stadium and sat silently with each other. What happened to us? Why does one have such different feelings about different places?The people of such state as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plotinus, Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu continuously radiate – not with any effort, but effortlessly and spontaneously. Just as a candle radiates light, so does their experience. Their consciousness has become a light. Their being has attained to a fragrance, to a flowering, and everything around them is going to catch it. For centuries it will continue to vibrate.I have not been to Delphi. I was thinking to go, but before being at Delphi I was arrested and thrown out of Greece. But Delphi was one of the places I would have liked to visit.In India I have visited the place where Gautam Buddha became enlightened, Bodh Gaya. It is a small temple – some follower made the temple as a memorial, by the side of the tree under which Buddha became enlightened. That tree still remembers something, and I came to know later on that the bodhi tree has a certain substance which no other tree has, and that is the substance which makes a man a genius. Only geniuses have that substance in their minds, and in the world of trees only the bodhi tree has that substance. Perhaps it is more perceptive, more receptive; it has a certain genius.Buddha remained under that tree for many years. The whole area is still fragrant, and just by the side of the tree is the place where he used to walk. When he used to get tired of sitting and meditating then he would walk and meditate, so that place is marked by marble stones. But sitting under the tree or walking on those marble stones, you can feel you are not in this world, that this place has something which no other place has. Perhaps the moment Buddha became enlightened something exploded in him and was caught by everything that could catch it. Now it is well proved that trees are very sensitive, more sensitive than man – their sensitivity just has a different level.One scientist was working on trees. He had put a certain mechanism on the tree, just like a cardiogram, that takes the graph of the feelings of the tree. He told the gardener, “Go and cut one of the branches of the tree. I want to see the effect.” But there was no need to cut the branch. As the gardener came with his ax, the graph was already going mad!The scientist said, “Don’t do it – the tree has already caught the idea that you are going to cut and hurt her.” Later on he became more amazed, because when you cut one tree, the graphs of all the other trees in the surrounding area go mad. When the same gardener comes to water the tree, the graph remains perfectly balanced – it becomes even more harmonious. It seems the tree is able to catch your thoughts, your ideas.Perhaps the same may be found about rocks, the earth, because they are all alive. Their life may be on a different level, but they are all alive – and certainly they are simpler and more innocent. In Tibet they have been keeping the bodies of enlightened people, because if the trees and the stones and the earth are impressed by the great experience, then certainly the body of the man, his bones, must be impressed – they are closer.Perhaps Tibetans were the first to understand it: they have covered ninety-nine great masters’ bodies with gold. That used to be the most sacred place in Tibet. If you have seen the picture of the Potala, the palace of the Dalai Lama, it is just underneath it. The Potala is high in the mountains, and underneath there are many basements. One is devoted only to those ninety-nine bodies.Why did they stop at ninety-nine? A strange figure! A hundred would have been more appropriate. They had to stop because the lineage of Dalai Lamas dropped from the height it used to be, and the country could not produce anybody worthy of taking the hundredth seat in the sacred, secret temple.It was opened once a year for the people, and just to pass through it was to pass through another world. Now it is completely closed so that the communists cannot find it – because they will not be interested in the bodies; they will be interested in the gold. They will destroy the bodies and take the gold – and it is a great quantity of gold. So before this Dalai Lama left Lhasa because of the communist invasion of the country, he sealed it in every possible way so that they cannot discover it. And they have not been able yet to discover it.Slowly, slowly in all the countries where spirituality has flowered, people became aware that something happens; so people have preserved things that were used by these people, or just have made memorials of their bodies. In India bodies are burned, but you will be surprised to know that the remains left after burning a body are called “flowers.” Ordinary people’s ashes are thrown into holy rivers, but enlightened people’s “flowers” are preserved in samadhis – in beautiful marble memorials. Just to go and sit there is in itself a meditation.But the trouble is that the world is ruled by those who understand nothing of this. For example, Delphi should not be available for everybody, because they will destroy its subtle vibration. But the government is interested in tourism.Delphi should be available only to a few people who are chosen – chosen by a mystery school that should exist there. Delphi was a mystery school. In the days of Pythagoras and Socrates, Delphi was the most famous temple of wisdom. The priestess used to go into a trance; while praying and dancing and singing in the temple, she would go into a trance, and in her trance she would say things which always proved to be true. She herself could not remember anything when she came back; perhaps the trance was taking her higher into the mind, perhaps to the cosmic mind.In such a trance she declared that Socrates was the wisest man in the world. A few people visiting her from Athens were very happy, because Socrates was an Athenian. They reached Socrates – he was old – before his death, before his murder, and said, “You should be happy; the oracle of Delphi has declared you the wisest man in the world.”Socrates said, “It is too late. When I was very young I used to think that I was very knowledgeable, very wise. The more I came to know, the more I became ignorant: aware that what I know is nothing, and what I do not know is so much. Now, in my old age, I can say without any hesitation that I do not know anything. The oracle, for the first time it seems, has missed.”The people were very surprised, because Socrates should have been happy to hear it. They went back and the priestess again danced, fell into a trance. They asked her in the trance, “You said Socrates is the wisest man in the world, but he denies it. He says, ‘I do not know anything.’”The priestess in her trance said, “That’s why he is the wisest man in the world. Only idiots say that they know. Those who are wise cannot say that.”Places like these, or Bodh Gaya, should not be available to tourists – which is an ugly race with all their cameras, binoculars, and stupid things. They are not interested in the place at all; they are taking photographs and rushing from here to there. Later on, sitting at home, they will look at the photographs and say, “Great! Our tour has been great. You can see that we visited beautiful places.”But they were never there; they were with their cameras. They should sit there, they should allow themselves to absorb the subtle vibe of the place. Something of Gautam Buddha must be there; it has to be there!

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 36 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When you speak about the many states on the way to enlightenment I am not even able to see where I am on the way. I always think I must be thousands of lifetimes away from the highest state. On the other hand, you are saying that it can happen now and here, for all of us. I cannot imagine that a quick change can be possible – from a state of unawareness like my own, to a state of total consciousness. In my reality I often see myself as an idiot, very stupid. I do have a taste of understanding, especially through your so-called contradictions, but this understanding creates in me even more absurdities. For example: “The highest freedom is in the highest slavery.”I am totally confused – and at the same time, I am not. Even when I say that I don't believe in the unexpected happening here and now, I don't believe in my believing, because it might be just the tricky mind which has carried the memory of your saying that enlightenment is the only thing that cannot be desired.So I am here, just enjoying, grateful for your being and your words. To be one of so many people in the world to be allowed to sit by the feet of the most beautiful man in the world gives me the insight that existence takes so much care of me that I cannot really be an idiot; at least I must be a blessed fool.Please help me to know a little bit who I am.A man asleep can dream himself anywhere in the universe. From that point, to be awake will look thousands of lives away. But it is a dream; as far as the real sleep is concerned, awakening is just close by. Any moment you can wake up. Any situation can make you awake.The master’s work is to create devices in which you can become awake. Sometimes very small things – just throwing cold water in your eyes will make you awake. Asleep, you were so far away, but when you wake up you will see that it was a dream that created the distance. Dreaming is the distance. Of course for dreaming, sleep is necessary, but the moment you are awake sleep disappears, and with it the whole world of dreams too.The truth is that awakening is the nearest reality to you, just by the side of you. It is not far away; hence it cannot be made a goal. All goals are dreaming, all achievements are dreaming. Awakening cannot be a goal because the man who is asleep cannot even think of what awakening can be. In his sleep, he cannot make a goal of enlightenment – it is impossible. Or whatever he makes will be totally different from the reality of enlightenment. Enlightenment is part of your waking consciousness.In the East we have divided consciousness into four layers. The first that we know is so-called wakefulness. It is not really wakeful, because just underneath it dreams are floating. Close your eyes and you will have a daydream. Close your eyes and you will immediately see – imagination takes over, and you start going away from this moment, from here. In reality you are going nowhere, but in your mind you can go anywhere.So the first state is the so-called waking state; the second state is called sleep. We are aware of these.The third is called the dreaming state, because sleep can be without dreaming; then it has a different quality. It is very peaceful, very silent, dark and deep, very rejuvenating.So sleep is the second stage, below the so-called waking stage, and then comes the third stage, dreaming. Most of the time in your sleep, you are dreaming. If you sleep eight hours, then six hours you are dreaming. You are asleep just here and there, like small islands; otherwise it is continuous dreaming.You don’t remember it, that’s why people think six hours of dreaming and only two hours of sleep seems too much. You remember only the last dreams when you are waking up, because only with your waking up does your memory start functioning; so it catches only the tail end of your dream world. You don’t remember all the dreams, but only the morning dreams that happen just before you wake up.It was always understood in the East that those six hours of dreaming are as essential as those two hours of silent sleep. But for the first time in the West, within the last ten years, new research has proved the Eastern insight totally right. In fact, the new findings say that dreaming is even more essential than sleep, because in dreaming you are throwing out the rubbish of your mind.The whole day the mind collects all kinds of words, all kinds of desires, ambitions – too much dust! It has to be thrown out. In the day you don’t have any time to throw it out; you are gathering more and more. So in the night when you are asleep the mind has a chance to clean itself up. Dreaming is a kind of spring cleaning. But it is an everyday business: again you will collect, again you will dream, again you will collect.These are the states known to us. The fourth is not named in the East but is simply called “the fourth,” turiya. It is a number, it is not a word. No name is given to it so that you cannot interpret it, so that your mind cannot play with it and deceive you. What can the mind do, just listening to the number four? The mind simply feels paralyzed. Give any name with meaning, then the mind has a way – meaning is its way. But the number four has no meaning.The fourth state is the real awakening. The fourth state has to be understood in reference to the other three states. It has something similar to the first, the so-called waking state. The so-called waking state is very thin, almost negligible, but it has a quality; the fourth consists only of that quality. It is pure awakening; you are fully awake.It also has some similarity to sleep, the second stage. Sleep has silence, depth, peacefulness, relaxation, but in a very small measure – just as much as is needed for day-to-day affairs. But the fourth has its totality: total relaxation, total silence, abysmal depth.It has also some quality of dream. A dream takes you far away from yourself. You may go to the moon in a dream, you may go to some star in a dream, although you remain here, in your bed. In reality you don’t go anywhere, but in imagination – as long as you are dreaming – it looks absolutely real. You cannot think in a dream that it is a dream. If you can think in a dream that it is a dream, the dream will be broken – you are awake, and you cannot catch hold of the dream again.A Sufi story about Mulla Nasruddin…One night he dreams that an angel is giving him some money: “Because you are so virtuous, so wise, God has sent a reward for you.” He gives him ten rupees.But as the mind is, Mulla says, “This is not a reward – don’t insult me.”He slowly, slowly brings the angel up to ninety-nine rupees. But Mulla is stubborn; he says, “I will take a hundred or I won’t take anything. What a miserly approach it is – and from God! You represent God and you cannot make it a hundred?”He shouted so loudly, “Either a hundred or nothing!” that it woke him up. He looked all around – there was nobody, just he was sleeping in his bed. He said, “My God, I lost ninety-nine rupees unnecessarily, just being stubborn for one rupee more.” He closed his eyes, tried hard, “Please come back, wherever you are. Ninety-nine is okay; even ninety-eight will do; ninety-seven is also all right – anything will do. Just come back! Where are you?”He came back to ten rupees, “I will take only ten rupees! Anything from God is great. I was foolish to call God a miser; in fact, I was greedy. Forgive me, and give me just ten rupees.” But the angel was not there.You cannot catch hold of the same dream again; once you are awakened there is no way to catch hold of the same dream.A dream takes you away from yourself; that’s its basic quality. Perhaps that’s why it cleanses you and helps you to have a certain relaxation: you forget your worries. For a few moments at least you can be in paradise, you can be in a situation you always wanted to be in.The fourth stage also has something similar, but just similar. It also takes you away from yourself – but forever. You cannot come back to yourself. In the dream you cannot come back to the same dream; in the fourth stage you cannot come back to the same self. It takes you really so far away that you can be the whole universe. That’s what the Eastern mystics have said: “Aham brahmasmi – I have become the whole.” But you have to lose the self. You cannot come back to it.This fourth stage has been given different names. This is the most mathematical name, the fourth. It was given by Patanjali, who was a very scientific and mathematical mystic. His treatise has remained the only source of Yoga for thousands of years. Nothing has been added, because nothing is needed. It is very rare that one person creates a complete system, so complete and so perfect that it is impossible to change anything in it.In the West it used to be thought that Aristotle was such a person – he created logic, the whole system of logic alone, and for two thousand years it has remained the same. But in this century things have changed, because new discoveries in physics have made it absolutely necessary to find something better than Aristotle. The new findings in physics have created a problem, because if you follow Aristotle’s logic then you cannot accept those findings. The findings are against Aristotle’s logic, but you cannot deny reality. Reality is reality! You can change the logic – which is man-made – but you cannot change the behavior of electrons. It is not in your power, it is existential. So a non-Aristotelean logic has grown up.The second case was geometry. Euclid has reigned for hundreds of years as a perfect master as far as geometry is concerned, but this century that too has got into trouble. Non-Euclidean geometries have evolved. They had to be evolved because of the new discoveries of physics.For example, you have heard that the closest distance between two points makes a straight line, but the discovery of the physicists is that there is no straight line at all. A straight line is impossible, for the simple reason that you are sitting on a global earth. You can draw a straight line here on the floor, but it is not a straight line because it is part of a circle. If you go on drawing it from both ends, one day they will meet somewhere and you will see that it has become a circle. So the small piece that you were thinking was a straight line was not a straight line; it was just such a small part of a circle that you could not see the curve. The curve was so small it was invisible – but it was there.Where are you going to draw a straight line? – because all stars, all planets, everything is global, is round. So wherever you draw a line, howsoever small it is, it looks absolutely straight – even with scientific instruments you can see that it is straight – but go on making it bigger and bigger, and it will become a part of a circle. It was an arc, not a straight line. So, in the same way everything from Euclid has been canceled.Patanjali remains the only person yet, and perhaps may remain the only person, who has created a whole science alone, and has remained for five thousand years without any challenge from any corner. He calls it the turiya, the fourth. He is so scientific a man that one simply feels amazed.Five thousand years ago, he had the courage, the insight, the awareness, to say that God is only a hypothesis. God can help you to become awakened but it is not a reality, it is only a device. There is no God to be achieved; it is only a hypothesis.A few people can be helped by hypothesis – they can use it – but remember, it is not a reality. Once you have become awakened, it disappears, the same as your dreams disappear when you wake up. It was so real in your dream that sometimes it happens that even after you have awakened there is some effect left of the reality of the dream: your heart is beating faster, you are perspiring, trembling, still afraid. Now you know perfectly it was a dream, but you are still crying, your tears are there. The dream was non-existential, but it has affected you because for that period you had taken it to be real.So it is possible. You can see the devotees crying before their gods, emotionally very much affected, dancing, singing, worshipping, and feeling the truth of it, but it is just a hypothesis. There is nothing, no God, but these people are taking the hypothesis as a reality. One day when they will be awake, they will laugh at themselves: “It was only a hypothesis.”But there are other masters who have given different names according to their own philosophical background. A few have called it enlightenment: becoming full of light – all darkness disappears, all unconsciousness disappears – becoming fully conscious.There are others who have called it liberation, freedom – freedom from yourself, remember. All other freedoms are political, social. They are freedom from somebody, from some government, from some country, from some political party; but it is always freedom from. Religious freedom is freedom not from somebody else, but from yourself. You are no more.Because you are no more, a few masters in the East have called it anatta – no-selfness. Buddha called it nirvana – which is very close to anatta, no-selfness, or selflessness – just a zero, a profound nothingness surrounding you. But it is not emptiness, it is fullness: fullness of being, of ultimate joy, fullness of being blessed, fullness of blissfulness. All that you have known before is no longer there; hence it is empty of all that. But something new, absolutely new, something you had not even dreamt about, is discovered.Some have called it universal existence, but what name you give does not matter. I think “the fourth” still remains the best, because it does not lead you into mind trips; otherwise you are going to think about it, “What is emptiness? What is nothingness?” And nothingness can create a fear, emptiness can create fear, anatta, no-selfness, can create fear. The fourth is absolutely right.Three stages you know; the fourth is just below it. It is not far away. The idea of being many lives away from it is a dream. In reality it is just by the side: wake up and you are it.Osho,I heard you saying that enlightenment is the transcendence of mind – conscious, unconscious, sub-conscious – and that one dissolves into the ocean of life, into the universe, into nothingness. I also hear you talking about the individuality of human beings. How can the individuality of an enlightened person manifest itself if he is dissolved in the whole?The ordinary, unconscious human being has no individuality; he has only a personality.Personality is that which is given by others to you – by parents, by teachers, by the priests, by the society – whatever they have said about you. And you have desired to be respectable, to be respected, so you have been doing things which are appreciated, and the society goes on rewarding you, respecting you more and more. This is their method of creating a personality.But personality is very thin, skin-deep. It is not your nature. The child is born without a personality, but he is born with a potential individuality. The potential individuality simply means his uniqueness from anybody else – he is different.So, first remember that individuality is not personality. When you drop personality, you discover your individuality – and only the individual can become enlightened. The false cannot become the ultimate realization of truth. Only the true can meet with the true, only the same can meet the same. Your individuality is existential; hence when your individuality blossoms you become one with the whole. Here is the question: if you become one with the whole, then how can you remain individual?The problem is simply a non-understanding. The experience of becoming the whole is of consciousness, and the expression of it is through the body, through the mind. The experience is beyond the bodymind structure. When one becomes absolutely silent, goes into samadhi, reaches the fourth stage, he is not body, he is not mind. They are all silent – he is far above them. He is pure consciousness.This pure consciousness is universal, just as this light in all these bulbs is one, but it can be expressed differently. The bulb can be blue, the bulb can be green, the bulb can be red; the shape of the bulb can be different. The bodymind is still there, and if the man of experience wants to express his experience, then he has to use the bodymind; there is no other way. His bodymind is unique: only he has that structure, nobody else has that structure.So he has experienced the universal, he has become the universal, but to the world, to the others, he is a unique individual. His expression is going to be different from other realized people. It is not that he wants to be different; he has a different mechanism, and he can only come through that mechanism to you.There have been enlightened painters. They have never spoken because words were not their art, but they have painted. And their paintings are totally different from ordinary paintings, even of the great masters. Even the greatest master painters are unconscious people; what they paint reflects their unconsciousness.But if a realized man paints, then his painting has a totally different beauty. It is not only a painting, it is a message too. It has a meaning to be discovered. The meaning has been given in a code language, because the man was capable only of painting, so his painting is a code. You have to discover the code, and then the painting will reveal immense meanings. The deeper you go into those meanings, the more and more you will find. The other paintings are just flat; they may be made by masters, but they are flat. The paintings made by a realized man are multidimensional, they are not flat. They want to say something to you. If the man is a poet, like Kabir, then he sings, and his poetry is his expression.If the man is articulate in speaking the unspeakable, then he speaks; but his words will have a totally different impact. The same words are used by everybody, but they don’t have that impact because they don’t carry the same energy, they don’t come from the same source. A man of experience brings his words full of his experience – they are not dry, they are not the words of an orator or a speaker. He may not know the art of speaking, but no orator can do what he can do with words. He can transform people just by their hearing him. Just by being in the presence of him, just by letting his words rain over you, you will feel a transformation happening: a new being is born in you, you are reborn.So when I say that even enlightened people have individuality, I mean that they remain unique – for the simple reason that they have a unique bodymind structure, and anything that comes to you has to come through that structure.Buddha speaks in one way, Mahavira speaks in another way. Chuang Tzu speaks in absurd stories – he is a great story-teller – but his stories, side by side, go on playing with your heart. The stories are so absurd that your mind cannot do anything. That’s the reason he has chosen the stories to be absurd, so that your mind cannot come in between. With his absurd stories he stops your mind, and then his presence is available to you and to your heart; you can drink the wine he has brought for you. He has put your mind away by telling you an absurd story. The mind is puzzled and is not functioning.Many people have wondered why Chuang Tzu writes such absurd stories, but nobody has been able to explain the fact for the simple reason that the people who have been thinking about why he is writing the stories have no idea that it is a device to make the mind stop functioning – then you are available, fully available from your heart. He can contact you in that way.But Buddha cannot tell an absurd story. He uses parables, but they are very meaningful. He does not want to avoid the mind; it is the uniqueness of the people. He wants the mind to be convinced and then, through that conviction of the mind, he wants to go to your heart. If the mind is convinced it gives way. Buddha’s parables, his discourses, are all logical; the mind has to give way sooner or later.Different masters speak in different ways. For example, Jalaluddin Rumi did nothing but whirling. He became enlightened after thirty six hours of continuous whirling, non-stop whirling. In fact every child likes to whirl. Parents stop them; they say, “You will fall. You may have a fit or you may get hit by something – don’t do such a thing.” But all children all over the world love whirling, because somehow while the child is whirling he finds his center. Without finding the center you cannot whirl. The body goes on whirling, but the whirling has to happen on a center; so slowly, slowly he becomes aware of the center.After thirty-six hours of continuous whirling, Rumi became absolutely clear about his center. That was his experience of the ultimate, the fourth. Then for his whole life he was not doing anything but teaching whirling to people. It will look absurd to a Buddhist, it will look absurd to any other religion – because what can you get out of whirling? It is a simple method, the simplest method, but it may suit you or it may not.For example, for me it does not suit. I cannot sit on a swing, that is enough to create nausea in me. What to say about sitting myself on a swing? – I cannot see somebody else swinging! That is enough to give me a feeling of nausea. Now, Rumi is not for me, and there may be many people to whom whirling will give nausea, vomiting. That means it is not for them.We are individually different. There is no contradiction. One can experience the universal, and yet when the question of expression arises, he has to be individual.Osho,The other morning I heard you saying that the so-called self is just an idea of the mind, because it seems hard for the mind to accept that our being is just pure nothingness, surprisingly containing the whole. Then who and what is the witness you talk about so much? Is it a masterly device which has to be dropped at some point?It is. Everything is a device because the truth cannot be said. So, only devices can be given. You have to be convinced about the devices, but they will have to be dropped at the last moment. But that does not mean that you have to drop them now! Dropping them now will not help; now you have to use them to their utmost possibility. And then that moment will come by itself. When the device has reached to the peak, it disappears – and you are in the experience of the fourth.The whole problem arises because the truth cannot be said, so something has to be devised which will bring you to truth. The device has to be such that it will not become an obstruction in itself. So the great master is one who gives you a device which is made in such a way that it is going to disappear automatically, autonomously, the moment you come close to truth.There are many devices which are good but dangerous, because they can become obstacles. For example, I told you that Patanjali says, “God is a device.” Nobody before him or after him has ever said that. There have been people who have said God is a truth, and there have been people who have said there is no God, but Patanjali’s attitude is totally different from both. He is not a theist, he is not an atheist, he is simply a scientific mind. He says God is a hypothesis. The fight about its existence or non-existence is baseless – you don’t fight about any other hypothesis. But it is a dangerous hypothesis. Even in the life of a man like Ramakrishna it became an obstacle.So the device is not going to leave you automatically at the right moment. It is dangerous – it will cling, it will obstruct your vision. It will take you to the final step, but it won’t allow you to take it. A great attachment with the device itself will become the barrier.Ramakrishna was a devotee of the mother goddess Kali, and not an ordinary devotee, not formal; he really loved her. Sometimes from the morning till the evening he would go on dancing and singing in the temple. And sometimes he would lock the temple for days together and not even go into it.It was reported, because the temple belonged to a very rich woman, Rani Rasmani. He was a paid servant, he was the priest. People said that it was not right that for a few days the temple was not even open. Other devotees came and had to go back because Ramakrishna was not in the mood to open the doors. And sometimes Ramakrishna was so much in the mood that the devotees got tired. When you go into a temple you wait for prasad – the food that is offered to God has to be distributed to all the worshippers who are there. It is thought – prasad means grace – that it is God’s grace and his gift. So people wait for it; but how long can they wait? He went on dancing, singing, from morning till evening. Worshippers had come and gone, because the prasad could be distributed only when the priest had stopped worshipping.All priests are paid, so they are always in a hurry. In fact one priest will go to many temples, so he can get salaries from all those temples. So he is in such a hurry that he does as short a worship as is possible or acceptable, and immediately distributes the prasad and runs to another temple. There are so many temples in India that a priest can manage five, six temples, very easily. But Ramakrishna was not such a priest; he was really a lover. To him the goddess was not just a statue, and the worship was not just a ritual; it was a reality, not a dream.The owner of the temple, Rasmani, called him and asked him, “What is the matter? I have been hearing different kinds of complaints about you. One is that sometimes you worship the whole day. In what scripture is this written?”Ramakrishna said, “I don’t know any scripture, and I made it clear even before you employed me that I am uneducated. I don’t know any scripture, I know only simple devotional songs – so I sing. To me it is not a question of worshipping for a certain time. Time disappears; I don’t have any idea of time. Once I am in it, I don’t know when the morning has become evening. So if you don’t want me, I can leave. But I am going to be this way.”Rasmani said, “This is not the only complaint. This can be allowed, because there is no harm to worshipping the whole day. But sometimes you don’t open the doors of the temple.”He said, “That’s true. Sometimes I get angry at the goddess. I love her, but she does not listen to me, and once in a while – after all, I am a human being – I get cross, so I say, ‘Okay, remain closed for two, three days. That will bring you to your senses.’ No food, no worship! But if you have any trouble with this, I can leave.”Rasmani could not tell him to leave – the man was so beautiful and so authentic, and what he was saying had a beauty of its own. Even not opening the doors was part of a love affair, just a quarrel of lovers. She said, “Even that can be allowed, because I want you to be here. But one thing is very bad: I hear that before offering the food to the goddess you taste every sweet yourself.”He said, “That’s true, because my mother used to make these sweets” – and Bengalis make the best sweets in India – “she would make them and then she would taste them. If they were really good then she would give some to me, give some to my father; otherwise not – she would make them again. My wife prepares the sweets. She prevents me, ‘This is not right. First they have to be offered to the goddess and then they can be distributed.’ But I cannot offer anything which is tasteless or is not made well; I have to taste them first. If you don’t want it, I am ready to go, but I will continue in the same way.”The man was very simple, and what he was saying was a beautiful thing: he could not offer to the goddess something that may not be the best. Only the best should be offered, but how to find out? – one has to taste it.He worshipped in Dakshineswar, near Kolkata, his whole life. Toward the end of his life, just a few years before he died, he told the goddess one morning, “Now the doctors are saying that I have cancer of the throat. It is not growing, but it can start growing any moment, and before I die I want to experience the truth. I am ready and I will do everything: I will dance today before you, sing before you.” In every temple of mother Kali there always hangs a big sword, because in the past that sword was used – and it is still used in the main temple of Kolkata – to cut off the heads of animals as sacrifice.Ramakrishna was not doing that, but the sword had become part of the temple. He said, “If by the evening I don’t have the experience, I will take the sword and kill myself – the responsibility will be yours.”A few worshippers were there. They rushed out and told everybody, “That madman is going to do something! Now this is too much. All that he was doing before was okay, but now he is going to kill himself!”A great crowd assembled in the temple, and Ramakrishna danced madly, sang madly, the whole day. As the sun was setting he pulled out the sword and said to the goddess, “So I am going to cut off my head as a sacrifice to you. Either the experience – or my head will be at your feet.” As he was going to cut himself with the sword, the sword fell from his hands and he fell down on the floor. He remained there for six hours; to the outside world he was unconscious, but in his own experience he was in samadhi, in a beautiful state, utterly silent and blissful. After six hours when he was woken up, he awoke with tears and he said, “Why have you awoken me? You should have left me in the same state.”Just a few days afterward there was a master passing by who heard about Ramakrishna, that he had a six-hour samadhi. The master came. Ramakrishna was a very humble man; he touched his feet and said, “Help me, because I attained that experience, but it was only for six hours – then I was back to my old stage.”The master said, “You don’t understand, it was not a real experience. You forced that experience upon yourself by your stubbornness because you were going to kill yourself. After dancing the whole day and singing, your mind simply stopped, seeing the situation: ‘The man is going to kill himself!’ It had nothing to do with Kali or anybody; it was simply the stopping of the mind. That was only an experience of when the mind was not chattering, and you felt immense silence and beauty and joy. If you really want the ultimate experience, the fourth, then you will have to do something which is very hard, and that is to cut all attachment with the mother goddess.“That is your problem. You have passed all other barriers, but now this last barrier is the most difficult because you have staked everything on her. So do as I say: sit in meditation, close your eyes, and when you see the mother Kali arising near your third eye – which is going to happen…”He said, “Yes, it happens. Whenever I close my eyes she is there.”So he said, “That’s good. That is the moment: this time you are not to cut your head; take the sword and cut the mother goddess in two pieces.”Ramakrishna said, “My God, that is very difficult! I cannot hurt her – and you are telling me to kill her!”But the man said, “Unless you do it, you will never attain. Try it and see.”He would close his eyes, tears would flow from his eyes, and there was great joy on his face, and radiance. He would open his eyes, and the master would ask, and he would say, “Yes, I saw her, but I forgot all about killing her – she is so beautiful, and the attachment is so long, as long as I can remember.” He was very small when he became the priest. Two or three times he tried.The master said, “This is the last time. If you cannot do it, then I will do it. I have brought this piece of glass. When I see that tears have started flowing from your eyes I will know that you are seeing the mother goddess. I will cut your forehead with the sharp piece of glass to remind you that this is the time: you do the same, cut her in two pieces. It is just your idea – there is nobody else. It is only a hypothesis.”The master had to cut his forehead, and the mark remained for his whole life. Blood started flowing over his face, but deep inside he managed to gather courage and cut the mother goddess in two pieces. And as she fell in two pieces, it was as if a door had opened and the whole universe was his.It took six days for him to come back. The first words that he uttered when he came back are immensely important. He said, “The last barrier has fallen.”Any device can become a barrier too. It may help you to get rid of other things, but finally you have to get rid of it – and that may be a difficult thing. It was so difficult for Ramakrishna. And that was the last day; never again did he go into the temple. Afterward he lived three, four years; he simply forgot all about Kali.But there are devices which will not create such a trouble, and there are devices which will fall automatically. The moment when you are reaching to the climax of your being they will simply fall down.I call a master the great master, the perfect master, who creates devices which are going to fall on their own accord when the moment has come for the person to experience the ultimate. Other devices are created by smaller people. Perhaps they don’t know that these devices can become attachments themselves.So everything I say is a device. My speaking to you is a device so that you can just be here – your mind is engaged, listening to me, and something invisible can go on transpiring between me and your hearts. That’s the real thing.The words will help the mind to remain engaged. They are just like toys. When you are studying and you don’t want children to disturb you, you give them toys and they start playing with them; so you can do your work or study or do anything you want to do, and the children won’t come to you to bother you and ask you questions and this and that.The mind is just like a child. The words are just toys for the mind – not truths, but simply toys. But while the mind is engaged something can happen from my depth to your depth. You may not understand it, but it will start bringing changes in you, transformations in your being.I have tried sitting in silence with you, but then there is always the problem that your mind will disturb you. I have seen that the problem is I can reach your heart less; your mind is disturbing you too much. Speaking seems to be a better device: your mind remains engaged, and once in a while if I give a gap between two words, the mind does not disturb. The mind simply looks and waits: “What is going to happen? What is going to be said?”Meanwhile the real work is happening. The real work is from my heart to your heart.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 37 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,It feels very dangerous to me, the way your therapists are working at the moment: claiming to be on the same level as you are, and to be doing the same work. The “freedom” that they say they have to offer, sounds very appealing to the ego but doesn't seem to have any connection with your work.I'm concerned that innocent people, wanting to be closer to you and wanting spiritual guidance, will put their trust in these people who have authority as your chosen therapists.We saw with Sheela what happens with the misuse of worldly power. The misuse of spiritual power seems a far greater menace as it works with peoples' very beings.You have always said that this is what happens when a master leaves his body. Is there any advice you can give now so that history will not repeat itself this time?The unconscious human mind is the cause of the whole trouble.There have been people around me who were doing all kinds of things; there were doctors, there were dentists, there were plumbers, there were carpenters, but none of them got such an ego as the people who were working as therapists.Therapy basically has nothing to do with spirituality. I was using it just to clean the rubbish that the mind has gathered down the ages. The work of the therapists with me was exactly that of cleaners, nothing superior to them in any way. But in the West therapy has connotations of spirituality because there is nothing in the name of spirituality. There is a vacuum, and therapists seem to fill it.It is only apparently so. They don’t fill the gap, they cannot; they themselves have no spiritual experience. All that they know are certain techniques through which your mind can be cleaned. But even that cleaning of the mind makes you feel fresh only for a few days, because it does not change the base, the foundation of your being; it simply cleans the surface. You remain the same person. You will again collect the same garbage, so therapy will be needed again and again and again.The same is true about every other kind of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, analytical psychology – they are just different names. There is not a single person in the whole world that psychologists can claim as purified, that now there is no need for him to go through analysis, therapy or any kind of processing.Even the psychotherapists, psychoanalysts have to go through therapy, analysis, be under some psychotherapist once in a while, because they are also collecting garbage. In fact they are collecting more, because so many people are unloading themselves in their therapy sessions, and it is bound to affect the therapist. People will become a little lighter, but the therapist will become a little heavier – he will need therapy himself. This is a vicious circle.My effort was to bring the West closer to the East. The East has developed spiritual techniques, but when those techniques were developed, man was not so loaded with knowledge, degrees, and all kinds of meaningless garbage. Those techniques were developed for innocent people. Now the situation is different: if you give those techniques directly to the people, the people are so loaded that your techniques will be lost in their garbage.My understanding was, and still is, that therapy can be a good beginning, but it is not the end, it is not the answer. It can clean the mind only for a short period, but in that short period a spiritual technique can be introduced to you before the mind gets loaded again. If the spiritual technique is introduced to you, then that garbage is not going to disturb you; it cannot create confusion, and you do not need any therapy anymore. You are on the way, now this ordinary garbage cannot prevent you.But if you are loaded already, then to introduce you to a spiritual technique is futile; it is throwing a seed onto stones. The seed is not going to live, to become a plant, to become a tree, to blossom.So I was using these therapies just for the moment to clean the ground and let me put in the seed. Then we are not worried about the garbage that you will be collecting. The seed has enough force; once it has found its soil, there is no problem. It will bring its branches and foliage, its fruits and its flowers, in spite of all the garbage around – that doesn’t matter.But I was aware of the danger: that the therapists themselves have no spirituality, and they will start feeling as if they are guides, spiritual guides; as if they are helping so many people on the path. It is so easy to blow your ego up bigger and bigger.These therapists came to me from the West because in the West therapy was going out of fashion. People were tired, because what was the point? – for a few days you feel great and then come the dumps. You feel worse than before. Then to go again to the therapist becomes a kind of addiction.There is no end to it. People go on moving from one therapy to another therapy their whole life, always feeling, “This is going to work.” It seems to work for a while, but it does not change anything basic, just superficial touches, so you are again back to zero.All those therapists had failed in the West; nobody was going to them. When they came to me they had no need to search for clients: thousands of sannyasins were coming, and I wanted a certain synthesis between Western methods of therapy and spiritual growth, so I allotted them the work.But those therapists forgot completely that the people had not come for their therapies. In fact people were very unwilling to do their therapies; I had to persuade them. But slowly people started understanding the fact that just a little cleaning helps to take a long jump into meditation. So the people who passed through therapies went deeper into meditation than the therapists. The therapists were going deeper into their egos.The therapists were not meditating. They were not asking questions, because to ask a question means that you are ignorant, you do not know the answer to it; they were not even humble enough to ask a question. And they were happy, tremendously happy that now there was no burden on them to find people. People were coming by themselves, and I was sending them to their therapies.I made them great therapists. I tried to refine their methods to make them the best possible therapists. I used to meet every therapy group and ask the people who had participated how they were feeling, what had happened. The therapist was present, and indirectly I was suggesting what more could be done, what should have been done. I was also asking the therapist what difficulties he was finding, what problems were arising with people – in an indirect way, because I don’t want to hurt anybody, even by giving advice.Through the years I had worked on these therapists and their therapies, and they started feeling that they had become kinds of gurus, masters. And deep down there was great competition among them: Somendra left because of his competition with Teertha about who was a better therapist – just a fight of egos.Deep down, unconsciously, they must be thinking that sooner or later I will have to die. Teertha had taken it for granted that he was going to be my successor, without anybody saying it to him. Perhaps he was spreading the idea that he was going to be my successor.The day I announced in the commune that nobody was going to be my successor, only two persons were unhappy – and I looked at both: one was Sheela and the other was Teertha. Everybody was happy, rejoicing, but those two people were sad. That was their aim – perhaps not consciously, but unconsciously. That was the beginning of Sheela trying to destroy the commune in different ways.Now all the governments of the world are together in a conspiracy against a single man; they have made me so important, so powerful. They are just behaving so idiotically. They have all the powers; I have no power, and they are all conspiring against me. Their whole effort is to stop me, my work, not to let me settle anywhere, not to allow another commune to come into existence.Our therapists are immensely happy, seeing the opportunity that now I don’t have a commune, and every government is against me; perhaps I will not find a place anywhere in the world. This is a great chance for them. All the sannyasins are in a state of vacuum, so the therapists are trying to exploit that vacuum. Now they are telling people that they will teach them freedom, they will teach them spirituality, they will teach them this and that; their whole effort is not to miss this opportunity.The people are in a need because they were working, growing, and suddenly the work has stopped. I am being prevented from working from every direction. And the therapists are immensely happy: they have suddenly become spiritual masters. They know nothing about spirituality, not even the ABC.But there is nothing to be worried about. They can only talk about freedom, and that too will be just a repetition of what they have heard me say to you. They don’t have anything original to say, anything coming out of their own experience, so they can only talk. Let them talk – the talk is not going to change people. Soon people will feel that they are just exploiting the situation.Meanwhile, somewhere we are going to create the mystery school. Existence cannot be uncompassionate toward a man who has been working simply for truth, simply for existence. My trust is absolute.These governments and churches don’t matter at all. They may try their best, but the mystery school will be established, although it may take a little time, a little trouble. And this time things will be done in a totally different way so nobody gets this idea of “gurudom.”History will not be repeated, because I am still here. I know all those therapists, and I know their problems. I know they are in the same boat as their clients; they are not in any way of superior consciousness. They can give consultations, they can help people to some clarity, but that is all from their knowledge. In the same situation, they don’t have that clarity.To everybody else they can show the way of clarity: it is very easy when you are not in trouble. You can simply advise anybody, “It is simple. Do it this way.” The real thing is whether you have the clarity, whether you are capable of following your own advice when you are in the same trouble – and those therapists are not capable of that. So there is no harm. Let them enjoy a few days of glory.They are not even mentioning my name. That is enough proof that they know that whatever they are saying and doing is related to me, and if they mention my name they will immediately become secondary. For the first time they have got the chance to be on the top. With me, it was impossible. So I don’t see that there is any problem. It is good; let them enjoy for a few days. Their enjoyment is not going to last long. Soon they will lose the people.Once the mystery school starts functioning nobody is going to bother about them. Even they themselves will have to come to the mystery school, and this time not as therapists, but simply as disciples. There is not going to be any therapy. Now the school will function in a totally different way.Osho,What are the qualities of a mature person?The qualities of a mature person are very strange. First, he is not a person. He is no longer a self. He has a presence, but he is not a person. Second, he is more like a child: simple and innocent.That’s why I said the qualities of a mature person are very strange, because the word maturity gives a sense as if he has experienced, as if he is aged, old. Physically he may be old, but spiritually he is an innocent child. His maturity is not just experience gained through life. Then he would not be a child, then he would not be a presence; he would be an experienced person – knowledgeable, but not mature.Maturity has nothing to do with your life experiences. It has something to do with your inward journey, experiences of the inner.The more he goes deeper into himself, the more mature he is. When he has reached the very center of his being, he is perfectly mature. But at that moment the person disappears, only presence remains. The self disappears, only silence remains. Knowledge disappears, only innocence remains.To me, maturity is another name for realization: you have come to the fulfillment of your potential, it has become actual. The seed has come on a long journey, and has blossomed. Maturity has a fragrance. It gives a tremendous beauty to the individual. It gives intelligence, the sharpest possible intelligence. It makes him nothing but love. His action is love, his inaction is love; his life is love, his death is love. He is just a flower of love.The West has definitions of maturity which are very childish. By maturity, the West means that you are no longer innocent, that you have ripened through life experiences, that you cannot be cheated easily, that you cannot be exploited, that you have within you something like a solid rock – a protection, a security.This definition is very ordinary, very worldly. Yes, in the world you will find mature people of this type. But the way I see maturity is totally different, diametrically opposite to this definition. Maturity will not make you a rock; it will make you so vulnerable, so soft, so simple.I remember…A thief entered a master’s hut. It was a full-moon night, and by mistake he had entered; otherwise, what can you find in a master’s house? The thief was looking, and was amazed that there was nothing. Then suddenly he saw a man coming with a candle in his hand.The man asked, “What are you looking for in the dark? Why did you not wake me up? I was just sleeping near the front door, and I could have showed you the whole house.” The man looked so simple and so innocent, as if he could not conceive that anybody could be a thief.Before this simplicity and innocence, the thief said, “Perhaps you do not know that I am a thief.”The master said, “That doesn’t matter, one has to be someone. The point is that I have been in the house for thirty years and I have not found anything, so let us search together! And if we can find something, we can be partners. I have not found anything in this house – it is just empty.”The thief was a little afraid – the man seemed to be strange. Either he was mad or… Who knows what kind of man he was? He wanted to escape, because he had brought things from two other houses that he had left outside the house.The master had only one blanket – that was all that he had – and it was a cold night, so he told the thief, “Don’t go this way, don’t insult me this way; otherwise I will never be able to forgive myself, that a poor man came to my house in the middle of the night and had to go empty-handed. Just take this blanket. It will be good: outside it is so cold. I am inside the house; it is warmer here.”He covered the thief with his blanket. The thief was just losing his mind! He said, “What are you doing? I am a thief!”The master said, “That does not matter. In this world everybody has to be somebody, has to do something. You may be stealing; that doesn’t matter, a profession is a profession. Just do it well, with all my blessings. Do it perfectly, don’t be caught; otherwise you will be in trouble.”The thief said, “You are strange. You are naked and you don’t have anything!”The master said, “Don’t be worried, because I am coming with you! Only the blanket was keeping me in this house; otherwise in this house there is nothing – and I have given the blanket to you. I am coming with you; we will live together. You seem to have many things; it is a good partnership. I have given my all to you. You can give me a little bit – that will be right.”The thief could not believe it. He just wanted to escape from that place and from that man. He said, “No, I cannot take you with me. I have my wife, I have my children, and my neighbors, what will they say? – ‘You have brought a naked man!’”He said, “That’s right. I will not put you in any embarrassing situation. So you can go, I will remain in this house.” As the thief was going, the master shouted, “Hey! Come back!” The thief had never heard such a strong voice; it went just like a knife. He had to come back. The master said, “Learn some ways of courtesy. I have given you the blanket and you have not even thanked me. So first, thank me – it will help you a long way. Secondly, going out – you opened the door when you came in – close the door! Can’t you see the night is so cold, and can’t you see that I have given you the blanket and I am naked? Your being a thief is okay, but as far as manners are concerned, I am a difficult man. I cannot tolerate this kind of behavior. Say thank you!”The thief had to say, “Thank you, sir,” and he closed the door and escaped. He could not believe what had happened! He could not sleep the whole night; again and again he remembered. He had never heard such a strong voice, such power. And the man had nothing!He inquired the next day and he found out that this was a great master. He had not done well – it was absolutely ugly to go to that poor man; he had nothing. But he was a great master.The thief said, “I can understand that he is a very strange kind of man. In my whole life I have been coming in contact with different kinds of people, from the poorest to the richest, but never… Even remembering him, a shivering goes through my body.“When he called me back I could not run away. I was absolutely free, I could have taken the things and run away, but I could not. There was something in his voice that pulled me back.”After a few months the thief was caught, and in the court the magistrate asked him, “Can you name a person who knows you in this vicinity?”He said, “Yes, one person knows me” – and he named the master.The magistrate said, “That’s enough – call the master. His testimony is worth that of ten thousand people. What he says about you will be enough to give judgment.”The magistrate asked the master, “Do you know this man?”He said, “Know him? We are partners. He is my friend. He even visited me one night in the middle of the night. It was so cold that I gave him my blanket. He is using it, you can see. That blanket is famous all over the country; everybody knows it is mine.”The magistrate said, “He is your friend? Does he steal?”The master said, “Never! He can never steal. He is such a gentleman that when I gave him my blanket he said to me, ‘Thank you, sir.’ When he went out of the house, he silently closed the doors. He is a very polite, nice fellow.”The magistrate said, “If you say so, then all the witnesses who have said that he is a thief are canceled. He is freed.” The master went out and the thief followed him.The master said, “What are you doing? Why are you coming with me?”He said, “Now I can never leave you. You have called me your friend, you have called me your partner. Nobody has ever given me any respect. You are the first person who has said that I am a gentleman, a nice person. I am going to sit at your feet and learn how to be like you. From where have you got this maturity, this power, this strength, this seeing of things in a totally different way?”The master said, “Do you know that night how bad I felt? You had gone; it was so cold. Without a blanket sleep was not possible. I was just sitting by the window seeing the full moon, and I wrote a poem: ‘If I was rich enough I would have given this perfect moon to that poor fellow, who had come in the dark to search for something in a poor man’s house. I would have given the moon if I had been rich enough, but I am poor myself.’ I will show you the poem, come with me.“I wept that night, that thieves should learn a few things. At least they should inform a day or two ahead when they come to a man like me, so we can arrange something, so they don’t have to go empty-handed.“It is good that you remembered me in the court; otherwise those fellows are dangerous, they may have mistreated you. I offered that very night to come with you and be partners with you, but you refused. Now you want it. There is no problem, you can come. Whatever I have I will share with you. But it is not material: it is something invisible.”The thief said, “I can feel that it is something invisible. But you have saved my life, and now it is yours. Make whatever you want to make of it. I have been simply wasting it. Seeing you, looking into your eyes, one thing is certain: you can transform me. I have fallen in love from that very night.”Maturity to me is a spiritual phenomenon.Osho,Often I hear you saying that we can wake up any moment. Your words, and how you say them, thrill me so much that I often start shaking. What is really preventing me from waking up? Is the unconscious really so mighty? Do I need more and more dry cleaning?The unconscious is certainly very powerful and immense. It is your whole past, from the very beginning. All that has happened in existence is part of your unconscious. It is as long and infinite as your past – but so is your superconscious. It is as long and as infinite as your future. You are just in the middle; you are always in the middle.The past is very powerful because it has already happened, so it has left its marks on you. The future is not so powerful because it has not happened yet; it is only a possibility. The past is a reality; it is a history. Your unconscious is your history, and tremendously vast; your superconscious, which means awakening, is only a probability. You can go on postponing it.That’s what your past manages to do. It goes on telling you: “The idea is good – one has to wake up, you have to try it” but all these are the ways of postponing. The past goes on questioning how to wake up: “The idea is appealing, but how to wake up?” That “how” is also a way of postponing. So when I say, “Wake up!” something in your superconscious gets stirred and a thrill goes through you.The unconscious is a very thick wall, but it cannot prevent you from waking; it can only postpone it – and that too depends how deeply you are listening to me, whether you are only hearing or listening. And remember the distinction between these two words.Hearing is simple, everybody who has ears can hear, but listening is something more than hearing. Listening means hearing without your mind coming in between, interpreting, meddling, giving colors of its own to what you have listened to, bringing connotations, associations from your past – that is, from your unconscious.When I say, “Wake up!” I have one meaning. When you hear it you may have a different meaning, but if you listen to it then you will have the same meaning as I have. Listening means putting the mind aside, so what is being transferred to you goes directly to your very heart, to your very being.Then perhaps you can wake up any moment. Any small thing may trigger it. It is unpredictable; one cannot say when, one cannot say what will help. I can only go on explaining in different ways so the meaning of waking gathers around you. Then anything can wake you up.People have become enlightened, awakened, in strange situations – there is no causal relationship. Lao Tzu became enlightened when he was sitting under a tree and a dry leaf started falling from the tree. There was no strong wind so the leaf was falling very slowly, like a feather, and he simply watched it falling. As it rested on the ground, something happened in him which had nothing to do with the leaf.He simply saw the way of the leaf, its let-go – no effort to cling a little longer with the tree. It had been with the tree its whole life, but not even a look back, no hurry to reach anywhere, just a tremendous let-go, that wherever the wind takes it… A great trust. All these things, with the dropping of the dry leaf, happened in Lao Tzu. From that day he was a different man.The master can only do one thing: he can go on spinning around you meanings of a thousand kinds. Perhaps one of them may trigger the process, but nothing can be said about what was the trigger; it depends on so many things that it is unpredictable.But howsoever big the unconscious may be, its value is nothing. Waking up, even for a single moment, has tremendous value, and remaining awakened, you have become an emperor in existence. To live unconsciously is to be just a beggar.Osho,There is an old saying, “You are what you eat.” But in California it's, “You are what you drive,” in Italy it's, “You are what you wear,” and in France, “You are what you drink.”The other day someone said, “You are what you are,” and then I thought, “You aren't who you think you are.” Osho, I'm getting confused – who are I?You simply are not!Don’t get confused because there is nobody. All these definitions are a futile exercise because it is defining something which does not exist. You are not, so no definition can define you. Your nothingness is your indefinability. It makes you infinite, it makes you eternal, it makes you part of the unknowable mystery of existence.Anything that can be defined is worthless.Osho,Those of us who have the good fortune to be with you on your visits to various countries over the past few months have had with us constantly the reminder of how precious our time with you is. It has been impossible to slip into complacency and imagine that you will be with us indefinitely.Living in such insecurity could send us into a panic – a self-defeating reaction because it renders us unavailable to those moments we do have with you. The alternative is to ride on the uncertainty we live with to sharpen our awareness and soften our hearts, and thus be more open to you than we have ever been.I see you – who represent everything of value to be contributed to the world, who are the most magnificent expression of existence's fulfillment – accept with grace and dignity and humor whatever that same existence ordains.Then how can I be anything but gracious, and grateful for what has been, for what is right now, and for what might be in the future, even if it is not of our choosing?It is a great opportunity for you all. I have been saying my whole life that we are all living in insecurity. You have listened to it, you thought you had understood it, but it was not the case.Now it is the reality. I need not even say to you that each moment is insecure.In fact that’s how it is always. All these stupid governments have just made it clearer to you that each moment is uncertain, insecure; you cannot take me for granted. But this has not to make you afraid, to panic, to be sad, to be worried, because all those things will not change the insecurity. All those things will simply make you forget the insecurity, and they will help you to miss the present moment – which you have got already, which is secure. The next moment may be insecure.So I would like to say to you: use the moment that is secure to the fullest, and don’t be bothered with the next moment; it is always insecure. In our situation it has become more apparent and it is good that it has become more apparent. That will throw you into the present moment; otherwise one can be sleepy. One knows tomorrow is there.But in the situation in which we are, tomorrow is not certain; anything can happen tomorrow. But don’t panic, because that is not going to change the situation. That is simply missing the opportunity.I can understand, it is difficult to live in such insecurity. But this is the reality, it is not a special case. The whole world is living in the same insecurity, only they are not in such a situation where the insecurity is so clear that there is no need to say anything about it. It is there; it is everywhere. There is no distinction at all, no differentiation, only you are fortunate because you cannot miss this moment. You know tomorrow I may be taken away from you. You cannot afford to miss this moment; this is all you have got, so you have to drink me.Coming here and going from here I pass a room in which there is a beautiful carving of “The Last Supper.” Jesus and his followers must be in a deep insecurity: “Tomorrow anything is possible.” But you are even more in insecurity, because they knew what was going to happen tomorrow. It was well known that Jesus would be crucified; hence this was the last supper with the master. They would not be eating with him again. So in a way it was not so insecure; it was certain – tomorrow he was going to be crucified. There was a certainty.Even that certainty is not here. Anything can happen tomorrow – to me, to you. As far as I am concerned, I know that this is something that was bound to happen. Sooner or later the whole world was going to be against me, because I was fighting against the whole rotten world.It is a wonder that they tolerated so much. They can destroy me very easily, they can shoot me, but they are afraid: if they kill me then they will make the biggest ever religion in the world. Jesus had only a dozen followers, but his crucifixion gained so many sympathizers – if they kill me it will go against them, so they cannot kill me.All they want is to cripple me, to create such a situation that I cannot enter any country, that people cannot come to meet me, that I am isolated from the news media, that the people who are working for me get tired, harassed so much so that they start thinking, “This is too much,” so the whole work stops – because I cannot do the whole work. The work can stop, and I can be isolated if they close the doors of all the countries wherever I go, if they start closing the doors there.Now they are doing it here. And I am amazed: I had never thought that even departments of justice are nothing but cunning politicians. They arrested me in North Carolina without any arrest warrant. They would not tell me even the reason they were arresting me, which is absolutely illegal. They would not allow me to inform my attorney, which is unheard of in a democracy. And finally they could not prove the case; they could not prove anything against me. They released the people who were with me – three were simply dismissed because they were in a different plane, and the three who were with me were released on bail for seventy-five thousand dollars.Just yesterday we received a letter from the attorney general’s office, with the seal of the department of justice, and it is such a cunning letter – one cannot imagine! Seeing that they are going to fail completely, they have nothing to prove, they want to drop the case. They harassed me for twelve days; they took the personal things of all the people who were on the plane and they have not released those things. Seeing that they cannot prove anything – they don’t have anything – they want to drop the case. But dropping the case meant that they would have to return the seventy-five thousand dollars deposited for bail for three persons – because if there is not going to be any trial and you are dropping the case, then that money should be returned. Why should that money be kept?But you can see the greed and cunningness. They did not want to return the money and they wanted to drop the case. So with the magistrate’s seal, what they did was they claimed that they had called the three witnesses and they did not appear in the court; hence their deposits of seventy-five thousand dollars are confiscated by the government, and the case is dropped.They never informed us that there was any hearing, and they don’t have any proof that we have refused. Our people were ready to go and we were asking, our attorneys were asking continually, “When is the date?” They never told our attorneys, never informed us. Even federal courts are lying that they informed us, and that because we did not appear in the court we have lost the money. They don’t even mention the personal effects which are worth nearabout three million dollars. They have not returned them either.They have sent the letter here. About me, they say that they don’t have any charges against me, but for the future they cannot say anything. If I assassinate any US official, then there will be charges against me. They say because one of my sannyasins has attempted murder or assassination, then there is a possibility. They don’t name the person. It is Sheela.I exposed her. I invited the government, I told the government all the crimes that she had committed, and now they are associating her with me – as if one Christian murders and that means the pope is responsible. Out of five thousand sannyasins in a commune, if one sannyasin commits a crime, that does not mean that I become a possible candidate for doing the same thing.Strangely enough, it simply says, “US official.” If I kill some US citizen, then what? According to that letter I am free to kill US citizens – that will not be a charge against me – only it should not be a US official!It seems so stupid: either you should state a whole list of all possible crimes that a man can commit, or you should not state even a single crime. You don’t have any charges against me right now. You could have simply said, “We don’t have any pending charges against him.” That’s enough. Who is saying that this means that in the future if I murder your president you will not have charges against me?But now that you have said that if I assassinate some US official then there will be charges, it means I can assassinate anybody else – he should just not be a US official. Including this one class makes me free to commit any crime, and you cannot put any charges against me; otherwise, why did you not include it in the letter?But it is just to create a fear, paranoia. Before the letter reached us, it went to the president of Uruguay, and he has become shaky, afraid. These people belong to the same race of politicians. They think in the same way. Their parties may be different, their countries may be different, but their basic reasoning is the same. If they see that America is afraid, being such a big power, then a small country like this should not take the risk.Germany is insisting to this government, to every government, that I am a dangerous man. It is not wrong, but the meaning they give to “dangerous man” is that perhaps I will kill their president or create a terrorist movement or start throwing bombs on people and hijacking their airplanes. What do they mean by “dangerous man”?A man in Spain, a famous novelist, was very interested in me because he has read a few of my books which have been translated into Spanish. He was working for one month continuously for me to go to Spain, and he is well known in the whole Spanish speaking world, well respected, even by the politicians. He was talking to the president, to the prime minister, to the royal family, and they were all willing for me to go there. Then these letters from America, from Germany, from Greece, from Italy, started pouring in.Just yesterday he informed me, “Now it has become difficult. Even the president has told me, ‘Don’t get involved in it. That man is very dangerous. Even your association with that man may bring difficulties to you; just keep out, don’t mention his name!’”But he asked, “What danger is there?”He said, “Don’t ask! It is a very dangerous situation.”So, the European parliament is passing a bill that I should not be allowed in any airport in Europe. Countries like the Bahamas, and the parliaments of other countries – Panama, and a few islands near Panama, I have not even heard their names – have started discussing and deciding that I should not be allowed into their countries.Every man’s life is in insecurity, but you are not so aware of it. You go on, sleepily. Yes, people die, people are murdered, everything happens, cancer and AIDS and everything, but still you go on thinking that it is not going to happen to you. But with me it is not a question that it is not going to happen: it is already happening. So each moment is insecure.You have to be courageous, alert and capable of using the opportunity that may be cut any moment. Make it a point that it is good that reality, which is hidden to others, is no longer hidden to us; it is clear and open. Face it! The only way to face it is to live moment to moment as totally and intensively as possible.You cannot afford to be sleepy and unconscious, just dragging on. You have to become alert. You have to become a flame so that whatsoever happens the next moment does not matter: you have lived my presence, my love, as totally as possible.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 38 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Your vision is so beautiful, and most of all, so simple. But when I think about what man has to cleanse himself of, it seems to get complicated. I think the thing hardest for man to drop, for your vision ever to be, is his so-called power – worldly and spiritual. To me, such people would rather see their world blow up than to give up their precious power. Is this so?It is so. People are so unconscious that they can do anything to keep their power, their respectability – even if it means blowing up the whole world. They can risk anything to save their egos. These are the people who naturally reach the positions of power because they are the only seekers of power.No creative, intelligent person seeks power. No intelligent person is interested in dominating others. His first interest is to know himself. So the people with the highest quality of intelligence go toward mysticism, and the most mediocre go after power. That power can be worldly, political; it can be of money, it can be of holding spiritual domination over millions of people, but the basic urge is to dominate more and more people.This urge arises because you don’t know yourself, and you don’t want to know that you don’t know yourself. You are so afraid of becoming aware of the ignorance that prevails in the very center of your being. You escape from this darkness through these methods: lust for money, lust for power, lust for respectability, honor. And a man who has darkness within himself can do anything destructive.Creativity is impossible from such a person, because creativity comes from your being conscious, a little alert; from light, from love. Creativity is not at all interested in dominating anyone – for what? The other is the other; neither do you want to dominate anyone, nor do you want to be dominated by anyone. Freedom is the very taste of being just a little alert.But these people are completely asleep. In their sleep they are making atomic bombs, nuclear weapons, not knowing what they are doing. Only one thing keeps them moving, and that is more power, more power. And whoever comes in their way has to be destroyed. They don’t know anything else. They are barbarians who have not evolved into human beings. Yes, they can destroy the whole world; they are already prepared to do so. They are all against me because I am exposing them.I am surprised: in this big world nobody else is there to join hands with me, because people are afraid of the powerful ones – they can destroy them. One is fearless only when he knows that he is indestructible; you can kill him, but you cannot destroy his being. But such people have slowly disappeared from the earth. We have not nourished them. We kill them and then worship them.This also has to be understood, why all the people that we have killed like Jesus, Socrates, al-Hillaj Mansoor, Sarmad, are immensely respectable after they have been killed. When they were alive they were condemned by everybody, not only by those who were in power but even by those who were not in power. Those who were not in power condemned them to show to the powerful, “We are with you.” And the powerful condemned them because these people were bringing a vision. If it succeeds, then there will be no domination in the world; then there will be human beings – everybody unique, flowering in his own way.But all these people are worshipped when they were dead. That comes out of guilt. First people kill them. It is the powerful who kill them, and it is the powerless, the dominated, who support the powerful – unwillingly, but very fanatically, because they want to show to everybody, “We are more against them than you are, and we are more in favor of the powerful than you are.”But once the man has been killed, crucified, poisoned, these are the people who start feeling guilty because from the very beginning they were not ready to kill the man. They had no problem with him; he was not destroying any of their vested interests. They simply supported the powerful because they were afraid that if they didn’t support, if they remained silent, they would be suspected of supporting the person who has been killed.A disciple of Jesus was in the crowd when Jesus was crucified, and he was asked again and again, “Who are you? Do you know this man who is being crucified?” because he looked different from others, was not from the same place, was a foreigner, and nobody recognized him.He said, “No, I have never heard of him. Just seeing that so many people are going this way, I have come just to see what is happening.” Even he could not admit that he was a follower of Jesus, because he knew the result would be another cross.So finally, when these people are crucified, the people who had supported it unwillingly start feeling very guilty, “What have we done against an innocent man? He has done no harm to anybody. He was right in whatever he was saying.” They can understand that these people in power are exploiting everybody.It is a strange world. You know people now as kings and queens, and if you follow their ancestors, in the beginning, they were robbers. From where did they get their kingdoms? They were great robbers who had killed many people, accumulated money, land, declared themselves as lords of the land, and now they have royal blood. They are in the lineage of criminals – and not ordinary criminals, big criminals. But they have power, they have money – naturally their blood is special.The ordinary people have known all along that they are slowly being crushed, murdered. They labor hard and they cannot manage even one meal a day. They produce, but all that goes to those people who are in power. So when they support these people, it is unwillingly. That’s why, when the man is dead, the unwillingness turns into guilt; they start feeling that they have been participants in a criminal act. They have not done anything, but they were participants in a way; they were showing that they were in support of the powerful people.To remove that guilt, worship arises. Worship is simply a removal of the guilt, to wash away the guilt. That’s how such big religions like Christianity are created. Otherwise Jesus had not the genius to produce such a big religion. There were hundreds of rabbis far more intelligent, far more scholarly than him. He was just an uneducated young man, but the crucifixion changed the whole situation. Once they crucified him, they made him a God – a God to all those millions of people who had supported the crucifixion. They started feeling guilty.You can see it if you look deeply. Jesus was killed by the order of the Roman emperor, by his viceroy, Pontius Pilate in Judea, with the agreement of the high priest of the temple of the Jews. Today Rome has been the citadel of Christianity for twenty centuries, but the order to kill that man had come from Rome. There was a day when the whole Roman civilization turned into a Christian civilization. Today the pope has only a small piece of land – eight square miles – but it is an independent country. It has been shrinking slowly; once he had the whole of Italy. He was higher than the state.Most people were killed in Rome for being Christians: Christ was the first one, then whosoever turned Christian was killed in the same way; hundreds of people were crucified. And all this crucifixion created so much guilt in people that a great religion came out of it. But such a religion can only be a psychological cover-up; it cannot be a true religion. It is simply covering up your guilt. You can measure by how fanatic a religious person is, how guilty he is feeling, what he is hiding behind it.But Christianity became the world’s biggest religion for the simple reason that not only Christ, but many other people who had turned Christian, were crucified without any trial. And the masses were supporting the powerful people, but deep down feeling hurt: “What is happening is simply inhuman, should not happen.” But they were poor, they had no power; they could not do anything except worship.A real religion is always of meditation. A false religion is always of worship.Worship is a psychological method of washing away the blood that you can see on your hands. The first thing Pontius Pilate did after ordering the crucifixion of Jesus was to wash his hands, because he was not willing to kill this innocent man. He had talked to him, he had listened in disguise where he was talking to his disciples, and he had started loving something in that man: “He is innocent. He says some crazy things, but the way he says them is beautiful. He is uneducated, but he speaks poetry. He does not know much, but whatever he knows he presents with tremendous authority. And he is not doing any harm to anybody. If you don’t want to listen to him, don’t listen. If you don’t want to follow him, don’t follow. He is not preaching any dangerous ideas to people.”Pontius Pilate wanted him to be freed. He tried to persuade the priests that he should be freed because he seemed innocent. But Jews were not ready to free him – and they committed a great mistake. They are responsible for creating Christianity. So all the bloodshed that Christianity has done, deep down, Jews are responsible for, and Christianity has taken revenge, tortured Jews, killed Jews, made them homeless. For centuries it has been going on.Who are the people who became Christians? – a few Jews who felt the innocence of the person, but were afraid of the priesthood, the religious hierarchy in power. But many more people were crucified in Rome – and many more Romans became Christians.It was a convention that every year the Jews were allowed to ask Pontius Pilate to save one life, because it was just before their religious day of Sabbath that the crucifixion used to happen. So, one man could be saved each year. It was a religious mercy and compassion.Pontius Pilate was hoping that they would ask for Jesus to be released because there were three people who were going to be crucified and the other two were great criminals. But the priests and the hierarchy of the rabbis shouted, “We want Barabbas!” – a criminal who had committed seven murders. Even Barabbas could not believe that he was being released, and this poor guy, Jesus – he knew him – they were not asking for him to be released, and he had not done anything!Barabbas was saved. Christians don’t talk much about Barabbas, but he is a tremendously powerful character, and very important, because the miracle happened to him, not to Jesus. It was expected that God would save Jesus. God missed his target. Barabbas could not believe it. When they released him he looked back again and again – there must be some mistake. He was such a criminal; there was no crime that he had not done – rape, murder – and he was always drunk, he was a drunkard.But the face of Jesus remained in his mind and tortured him. He also started feeling guilty, “I should not have been released. It was perfectly right for me to be on the cross. That poor man: I have taken his place and he has taken my place.” He felt a soft corner for Jesus. Within six months he committed a rape, he committed a murder, and he was caught again.But this was the rule, that once the Roman emperor releases somebody from crucifixion, he could not be crucified again. So they had to find an alternative for such people, because those people are bound to do something if they are such diehard criminals. In Rome they had a dangerous coal mine; they used to send those people to that coal mine to dig coal. It had reached to such places that once in a while it used to collapse, and thousands of the people who were working under it would be killed. That was their way of avoiding crucifixion.Barabbas was sent to the coal mines in Rome. Within three months the coal mine collapsed. There were at least three thousand people; only Barabbas remained alive, everybody else died. That was the second miracle. He could not believe what was happening! He had been hanged on the cross and then brought down. He could not believe it that day; he was completely ready to be crucified, and he knew that he had done so many criminal things that it was perfectly right; there was no question of his being released.Now what had happened? Three thousand people had died and only he was saved. Even the emperor of Rome, the empress of Rome, became aware that this man seemed to be a man of God – twice he had returned from death. So he was called to Rome. He had become so famous that people started touching him. He had become almost divine; just to touch him was a great experience. Even the empress wanted to touch Barabbas.But the emperor said, “One more test; these two things may have been just accidental.”Every year they had games in which criminals were thrown before hungry lions, to fight with them without any weapons. Barabbas was thrown before a hungry lion, and he managed a third time: he killed the hungry lion.Then even the emperor thought, “Now it cannot be an accident.” All the criminals were eaten by the lions! This was the first time that a man had killed the lion; unscratched, he was victorious.He was freed, he was given citizenship. He was no longer a slave – because in those days there were two categories of people, slaves and citizens. He was given citizenship. That was a great honor, and especially for a criminal, but he had proved three times that he can come back from death.Christians have so much difficulty in proving that Jesus was a man of miracles. Barabbas was a man of miracles. They prove hard that Jesus was the only begotten son of God. It seems there is some mistake – Barabbas seems to be the only begotten son of God!But all these years he was carrying the innocent Jesus’ face, and feeling guilty that he had been saved: “There has been some mistake. And I have been saved thrice!” He started meeting Christians in underground caves, where they used to meet so that nobody would know. He listened for the first time to what Jesus used to say – and he became a Christian. The day he became a Christian he was caught and crucified, and then no miracle happened! It is a very strange story.But the Roman people, who are now Italians, started feeling: “Thousands of people are being crucified just because they are getting involved with Jesus and his teachings.” The Roman Empire disappeared, and all the land of the Romans became Christian. From there Christianity started moving all over the world.A guilt feeling is very basic for being a Christian, for being a false religious person. Real religiousness arises not out of guilt, but out of silence, out of love, out of meditativeness.The people who are in power are almost on the brink of destroying the world, rather than lose their power. I can understand their logic; they may not be aware of it. Their logic is: “We are going to die anyway, so what if the whole world dies? Our death is certain, so why should we bother about whether the world lives after us or not? We should live in power as long as we are here, and there is no need to be bothered about what will happen if the world explodes into a Third World War.”The inner logic is: the day one is dead, the whole world is dead for you. You were not here one day; whether the world was here or not would not have made any difference to you. You will not be here one day; whether the world is there or has been blown up by nuclear weapons will not make any difference to you.What makes the difference to them is that they are in power, and they want to prove to the whole world that they are the most powerful people.Now the competition has reached to a suicidal point, and America is in a hurry for the Third World War to happen. The Soviet Union wants to delay it a little, because America has put billions of dollars into evolving certain microwave patterns around the whole country. You cannot see it, it does not obstruct anything; it only obstructs nuclear weapons. If a nuclear weapon is fired at America, if a missile comes to America, it will be returned; it cannot enter the country. So America is feeling safe. That’s why this Libya episode happened.The Soviet Union is working hard to create a protective armor around the country. Their country is big, vast; their finances are not as great as American finances, but still they are preparing – there is no other way.Those two nuclear powers are preparing their protection. Then America can send missiles to the Soviet Union, and they will also be returned. Now, where they will fall, nobody knows – they will fall somewhere. But those two countries are protected, and the whole world is unprotected. So the whole world is in danger. Right now the Soviet Union is not ready with its protection; Libya was just a way to check whether Russia is ready or not. If they had been ready, the Third World War would have been on.The Soviet Union is ready to support Libya, but is afraid to, for the simple reason that it does not yet have any protection for its own country; it needs some time. That’s why the Soviet leaders are talking about cutting the production of nuclear weapons in such a way, step by step, that by the end of this century all production completely stops – and the whole world is impressed by it.America cannot accept it because it has put billions of dollars into the protective armor that will be useless, billions of dollars into nuclear weapons, and no chance to use them. America is in a hurry; it wants any excuse. The gap is not big; perhaps within one year the Soviet Union will be ready. So if the war has to happen, America wants it quickly.Qaddafi’s daughter died because America bombed his houses – they did not leave even his tent in the desert – and Qaddafi was silent, taking no action. On the contrary, he said that if America bombs anywhere else, their whole strategy will be to bomb the place and blame Libya for it. Libya is a small country, but Libya is just an excuse to provoke the Soviet Union. Qaddafi said, “Next time Libya is bombed, be certain that will be the beginning of the Third World War.” But why next time? The Soviet Union needs a little time.If the world has some intelligent people in it, they should protest together to the UN: “Now it is intolerable. Patience has a limit. All nuclear weapons should be banned, should be thrown in the oceans, or some way should be found that they are made useless or turned into some creative force.”Perhaps we are not far away now, not even ten, fifteen years. America is in such a hurry, and the hurry has a reason: before the Soviet Union completes its project of protection. After that protection, only those two countries will be safe. Then everybody else will be killed – those who are not fighting, who have nothing to do with the fight, who are out of the war but don’t have any protection – because the returning nuclear missiles will fall all over the world.The intelligentsia of the world has to create an atmosphere in the world that now it is a question not of the Soviet Union and America; it is a question of the whole world. Because the whole world is going to suffer, the whole world should unite against both these nations and force both these nations to stop this mad race of nuclear weapons and power. But there seems to be no protest, there seems to be no worry. The world goes on in a routine rut. It seems people don’t have any alertness, don’t have any clarity about the problem.I can see clearly that there is more possibility of the world blowing up than being saved, because nothing is being done to save it and everything is being done to blow it up. Because I speak against it, America is against me, the Soviet Union is against me. This is a rare phenomenon; otherwise it happens that if America is against me, the Soviet Union will be favorable to me. And vice versa too is true. But both are against me, because I am not really against America or the Soviet Union; I am against this game of power, which is simply idiotic.Osho,We have experimented with communes in both the East and the West that did not last. Buddha and other enlightened masters created communes that did last. What is the difference?Gautam Buddha and other masters never created communes the way we have created them. Buddha had followers, but not staying in one place, they moved continuously. Mahavira had followers, but not staying in one place, they moved continuously. So nobody has created communes the way we created. Five thousand people living together is a totally different experience than five thousand Buddhist monks moving from one place to another place, only staying three days at one place. Even in that, man’s cunningness comes in.Jaina monks have to move continuously, except during the rainy season. In India, before atomic experiments started, the seasons used to be very fixed. Even dates and days were fixed: on what day the rains would begin and on what day the rains would stop, and there were three clear-cut seasons, four months each. So for four months in the rainy season they had to stop. But that did not mean that thousands of sannyasins would stop all in one place, but wherever they were.But the cunningness of man’s mind is such that I have seen Jaina monks who have lived their whole life in Mumbai – somebody was there for fifty years. I inquired, “How is it being managed? – because it is against their basic rule and discipline. After three days they have to move.”And I was told that in Mahavira’s time there were not such big cities as Mumbai. Now the Jaina monk moves from one part of Mumbai to another part of Mumbai, and in this way he goes on moving around Mumbai, inside Mumbai, from one place to another place. But he remains in Mumbai; he never leaves Mumbai. Clever idea! From one suburb he will move to another suburb; that is another place. Because in Mahavira’s time there were no such big cities, these suburbs would have been different cities, different towns, so: “We are moving!” And they go on circling.Mumbai has a daily population of nearabout fourteen million people. Forty million people come every day to work from nearby towns, and they return in the evening. Over fifty million people are living in the town. They are logically right, that there was no city in Mahavira’s time of such population. But the whole point is missed. The point was simply that you don’t become attached to a certain place, that you don’t start having friendships, likes, dislikes. In three days you cannot do much. One day you come, just one day you really stay, and the third day you have to move. It is not enough time to get into any politics, or any local problems. To avoid power politics, to avoid local problems, attachments, the device was created that you move after three days.But after three days they go on moving in the same city – for fifty years, sixty years. They have immense contact with people. They are almost residents of Mumbai! The people who like them come to listen to them wherever they are.Nobody has had any commune the way we tried, and both the experiments have given great insights into human nature, so nothing has been a failure. We have learned much. So now I am not going to create a commune. I am going to create a totally different thing, a mystery school: forty, fifty people will be there to take care of the school, and two hundred, three hundred, five hundred people can come for a one-month course, or a two-month course, or a three-month course, and move on. Slowly, slowly we can train people so that they can open mystery schools around the world. A school is a different thing. You come for three months to learn something, to go through some experiences, and then you are back in the world, to your work, to your job.The commune experiment has made it clear that if five thousand people are living in a commune, they will have to do many things: make roads, make houses, make other facilities for five thousand people, and for the guests who will be coming for festivals. These people will not have any time left for the real search they had come for in the first place. They will not have time for meditation. They will not have time to go within themselves, to find techniques and work upon them, because the work is such that you cannot just work five hours a day, five days a week; it will never be completed. You have to work ten, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. You are tired – and moreover, what you are doing is only the necessary facilities for yourself. Soon you will have to start production; otherwise from where are you going to get your food, your clothes? So this is a vicious circle.When five thousand people are there, then there is bound to be power politics. Then you have to find group leaders, coordinators. It is not possible to give freedom to five thousand people: “Do whatsoever you like” – because they will all go swimming and trekking and playing their guitars, but then who will make the roads and the houses and do the farming? How are your food and your clothes to be arranged? How long can you depend on donations? Sooner or later you will have to make factories and you will have to create something. Then the commune becomes just an ordinary world – so why make so much unnecessary trouble? Our basic reason was to give you an insight into yourself. That is completely forgotten in unnecessary trivia.So my new phase of work is a mystery school. You work in the world, where roads are already there, houses are already there, you need not make them. Factories are already there. In thousands of years the world has created all that. So you can manage – five hours work, five days a week is enough. On the weekend you can meditate, you can go into silence or you can go to some isolated spot and just relax. In a year you will be able to earn so much money, save so much money, that you can come here for one month, two months, three months, as much as you can manage.Then being with me has no connotations of work. Then being with me is simply joy, celebration, meditation, singing, dancing. Those three months are simply holiday. You forget the world for those three months. They are pure search for the truth. After three months, continue whatever you have learned at home; there you have time. You work five hours, you have enough time; you can get at least two hours for yourself.Not only this: when you start living with me there is a possibility that you may start taking me for granted, that I am always here. Nine months of being away will bring you closer to me, because distance creates longing, creates love, creates understanding. So each year you will be coming, then going. Whatever you can manage: you can come twice. You will not be a burden on anybody, and there is no need for anybody to dominate you; there is no need for any strict discipline – work needs that. There is no need for coordinators, so we can avoid the power trip.But both our communes have helped to bring us to this point where we can start a mystery school. Without those two communes it would have been impossible. This is my way of looking at things. Even failures bring you closer to success, because each failure gives you insight into what went wrong, how it went wrong. So both the experiments have been immensely significant.Now we are in a position to create a totally different kind of place, which is simply a festival all the year round. People will come and go. They will take whatever they learn and they will practice it in the world, and they will come again to renew, to refresh, to go further, deeper. Only a skeleton crew will be here to take care of you.Osho,I've been here with you now for two weeks, and find myself not thinking or talking about the place and the people where I was living before. It feels as if I have been here for three months or more, so many things have happened. How come that time loses all its meaning when we are with you?Time is a relative phenomenon. It is nothing absolute, so in different contexts it will have different meanings. You are in pain – time will look longer. Your tooth is hurting – seconds will look like minutes, minutes will look like hours. It depends how much the tooth is hurting! In pain you want to finish it, finish this pain, somehow to get rid of it. You don’t want to prolong it, so time seems to be long.Christians have never been able to explain why their hell is eternal, and they cannot explain it because the grounds on which they have made it eternal are foolish. If it is punishment, then it is absolutely impossible to prove that somebody has committed so many sins that his punishment is going to be eternal.Bertrand Russell, one of the genius minds of our times, wrote a book, Why I Am Not a Christian, and this is one of the points that he makes clear, “I am absolutely against the idea of eternal hell, because as far as I know, if all my sins in my long life” – and he lived long, almost a century – “can be accumulated, and even those sins which I have not committed but only contemplated, those sins which I have dreamed of but I have not really committed… Combine all of them and the hardest judge cannot give me more than four to five years in jail. Now, eternal hell? It is so absurd and illogical – that puts me off.” And he recounts other points. The Christians have not been able to answer, for the simple reason that they have based their argument on wrong things.My answer would have been that because hell is the idea of suffering, immense suffering, it may be only for a single moment, but it will appear as eternal, unending. It is a relative concept. And Bertrand Russell would have immediately understood it, because he wrote a book, The ABC of Relativity. He understands the idea of relativity: when you are joyous and happy with a friend, with a lover, time becomes short; it seems to go faster. Hours pass, and suddenly you see that so many hours have passed but it seems only a few minutes have passed. In pain time becomes long – it is very elastic. In pleasure it becomes very short.But to be with me is something more than pleasure; it is peace, it is silence. It is something that is beyond words. But my presence can make you feel it: time can disappear completely. It can be felt as if time has stopped. This is a beautiful experience. Time stopping means you are entering into a world beyond time.That’s what I am trying to do. To be available to you, to call you here to be with me, simply means that I want to give you some taste of that which is higher than pleasure. In that moment, time comes to a standstill.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 39 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why is it that Western society reacts so strongly to any individual deviating from the norm, particularly as far as his mental state is concerned? It looks on those who have fallen below the mind in such a way as to cast a stigma on them, and regards the possibility of going beyond the mind – enlightenment – with skepticism. It does allow a slight margin of deviation in its creative people and geniuses; hence such people are excused for their “eccentricities.”It is as if the mind is the touchstone of one's adjustment to society, and any aberration that might threaten the status quo is regarded with fear. What is that fear? – both of the sick mind and the enlightened no-mind?The mind is within you, but it is really a projection of the society inside you. It is not yours.No child is born with a mind. He is born with a brain. The brain is the mechanism; the mind is the ideology. The brain is fed by the society, and every society creates a mind according to its own conditionings. That’s why there are so many minds in the world. The Hindu mind is certainly separate from the Christian mind, and the Communist mind is certainly separate from the Buddhist mind.But a fallacy is created in the individual that the mind is yours, so the individual starts acting according to the society, following the society, but feeling as if he is functioning on his own. This is a very cunning device.George Gurdjieff used to tell a story:A magician deep in the mountains had many sheep. To avoid having servants, or looking after the sheep and going in search of them every day when they were lost in the forest, he hypnotized them, and told each sheep a different story. He gave a different mind to each sheep.To one he said, “You are not a sheep, you are a man, so you need not be afraid that one day you will be killed, sacrificed, like other sheep – they are only sheep. You need not be worried as far as returning home is concerned.” To some he said, “You are a lion, not a sheep,” and to some, “You are a tiger.” Since that day the magician was at ease: the sheep started behaving according to the mind that was given to them.He could kill a sheep – every day he used to kill sheep for his own food, his family’s food – and the sheep who believed that they were lions or men or tigers would simply look and giggle, “This is what happens to sheep.” But they were not afraid, not like in the old days.When he killed a sheep before, all the sheep were trembling, afraid, “Tomorrow is going to be my day. How long can I live?” And that’s why they used to escape in the forest – to avoid the magician. But now nobody was escaping. They were tigers, they were lions; all kinds of minds had been implanted in them.Your mind is not your mind – this is something basic to be remembered. Your mind is an implantation of the society in which you have accidentally been born. If you were born in a Christian home, but immediately transferred to a Mohammedan family and brought up by the Mohammedans, you would not have the same mind; you would have a totally different mind, one that you cannot conceive of.Bertrand Russell, one of the geniuses of our times, tried hard to get rid of the Christian mind, not because it was Christian, but simply because it was given to him by others. He wanted his own fresh outlook about things. He did not want to see things through somebody else’s glasses; he wanted to come in contact with reality immediately, and directly. He wanted his own mind.So it was not a question of being against the Christian mind; if he had been a Hindu he would have done the same, if he had been a Mohammedan he would have done the same, if he had been a Communist he would have done the same.The question is whether the mind is your own or implanted by others – because the others implant a mind in you which does not serve you, but serves their purposes. Now in the whole Soviet Union, each child is being brought up with a Communist mind.One of my friends, Rahul Sankritayana, was visiting the Soviet Union. He went to see a school and he asked a small boy, “Do you believe in God?” The small boy looked at him in shock and he said, “At your age, in this century, you ask such a question! In the past when people were ignorant they used to believe in God. There is no God.” Now this child will believe for his whole life that this is his voice. It is not so. It is the voice of the society, and it serves the purposes of the vested interests of the society.You are prepared by your parents, the teachers, the priests, your educational system to have a certain kind of mind, and your whole life you go on living through that certain kind of mind. That is a borrowed life. And that is why there is so much misery in the world: because nobody is living authentically, nobody is living his own self; he is simply following orders implanted in him.Bertrand Russell tried hard and wrote a book, Why I Am Not a Christian. But in a letter to a friend he wrote, “Although I have written the book, although I do not believe that I am a Christian, I have dropped that mind, still, deep down… One day I asked myself, ‘Who is the greatest man in history?’ Rationally I know it is Gautam Buddha, but I could not put Gautam Buddha above Jesus Christ.“That day I felt that all my efforts have been futile. I am still a Christian. I know rationally that Jesus Christ stands no comparison with Gautam Buddha – but it is only rational. Emotionally, sentimentally I cannot put Gautam Buddha above Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ remains in my unconscious, still affecting my attitudes, my approaches, my behavior. The world thinks I am no longer a Christian, but I know different. It seems difficult to get rid of this mind! They have cultivated it with such acumen, with such craftsmanship.”And it is a long process. You never think about it: a man lives at the most seventy-five years, and for twenty-five years he has to be in schools, colleges, university; one third of life is devoted to cultivating a certain mind. Bertrand Russell failed because he had no knowledge of how to get rid of it. He was fighting, but groping in the dark.There are absolutely certain methods of meditation which can take you away from the mind, and then it is very easy if you want to drop it. But without first becoming separate from the mind it is impossible to drop it – who is going to drop whom? Bertrand Russell is fighting with one half of his mind against the other half, and both are Christian – it is impossible.Now it has been proved scientifically. One of the most important scientific contributions is from Delgado. He has found seven hundred centers in the brain. Each center is capable of containing an immense quantity of knowledge; it is just like a recording. His experiments are shocking: he touches a certain center in the brain with an electrode, and the man starts speaking. He takes away the electrode and the man stops. He puts the electrode back on the same center, and the man starts speaking again, from the very beginning.Delgado himself has not yet been able to figure out how the tape gets rewound – because the man always starts from the beginning; wherever you leave him makes no difference. It is not that he starts where you left him. Some automatic process in the mind, which will be discovered…An electrode can be permanently implanted in the brain and it can be controlled from far away by remote control. Delgado exhibited it in Spain, in a bullfight. He planted an electrode in the brain of the toughest bull, and he stood in the field showing a red flag. The bull rushed toward him ferociously, and the people almost stopped breathing: “The bull is going to kill one of our best geniuses!” But they did not know that he had a remote control switch in his pocket: just a small box with a switch.Just when the bull was about to attack, from one foot away, he pushed the button and the bull stopped, just frozen. And he did it many times. Again and again the bull came with the same ferocity, and again and again he stopped whenever Delgado pushed the button.Delgado says, “Sooner or later, this discovery can either become a blessing to humanity, or it can become a curse.”Every child’s brain can be easily implanted with an electrode. You will have very obedient people; you will not have any rebels, you will not have any revolutionaries, but the whole charm of life will be gone. People will be simply vegetables, enslaved scientifically. And they will not know, because the remote control unit may be in the capital, in the hands of the government.It can be useful – criminals can be prevented, murderers can be prevented, thieves can be changed, rapists can be transformed – but it is dangerous also. Anybody who is in power can make the whole country just a crowd of slaves, and you cannot do anything, because you don’t know. Remember one thing, inside the skull, where the brain is, you don’t have any sensitivity. Even if a stone is put inside your skull, you will never know; you just don’t have sensitive nerves there which can inform you.This came to be known in the Second World War. A man was shot with a bullet, and somehow the doctors thought that the bullet was not inside him, but had missed, just touching his head. So they treated the wound, it healed and the bullet remained inside his head for ten years – and he was never aware of it. It was for some other reason that he was being x-rayed, and they were surprised to find that there was a bullet inside him. Then the wound was opened and the bullet was found. That made it clear that anything can be planted in the brain.Delgado’s mechanism is scientific, but society has been doing the same by planting ideas. It is an old bullock cart method. It takes so long, twenty-five years, and it is not foolproof, because a few revolutionaries escape, a few rebels are still born. It is good that there are people who escape from the enslaving structure of the society, because these are the people who have advanced knowledge, who have given all scientific progress, who have changed all superstitions. But society wants you simply to be a carbon copy, never an original.The strategy to create a mind in you is to go on repeating certain things continuously. Even if a lie is repeated continuously it starts becoming a truth; you forget that it was a lie in the beginning.Adolf Hitler started lying to the German people that all the misery of their country was because of the Jews. Now this was such an absurd thing – like somebody saying that all the misery of the country is because of bicycles, so if we destroy all the bicycles all the misery will disappear.In fact the Jews were the very backbone of Germany, they had created all the wealth of Germany. And they had no other nation, so wherever they were was their nation. They had no other alternative in their minds; they could not betray, and they had been doing everything that any other German was doing for the welfare of the country.But Adolf Hitler in his autobiography writes, “It doesn’t matter what you say, because there is no such thing as truth. Truth is a lie that has been repeated so often that you have forgotten that it is a lie.” So the only difference, according to him, between truth and a lie is that the lie is fresh and truth is old; otherwise there is no difference. He seems to have some insight in it.For example, Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism repeat to their children, “There is a God.” Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, three other religions, say “There is no God.” The first group of three religions has a certain mind. Their whole life is filled with the idea of God, hell, heaven, prayer. The second group of three religions has no prayer because there is nobody to pray to, there is no God. The very question does not arise.Now, half of the world is Communist. They don’t believe even in the soul of man, and every child is continuously told that man is matter, that when man dies he simply dies, nothing remains; there is no soul – consciousness is a by-product. Now half of the humanity repeats this as the truth.Adolf Hitler cannot be accused of being absolutely absurd. It seems to be the case that if you repeat anything to people, they will slowly, slowly start believing it. And if it has been repeated for centuries, it has become a heritage.Your mind is not yours. And your mind is not young; it is centuries old – three thousand years old, five thousand years old. That’s why every society is afraid of anybody creating a doubt about the mind.That’s my crime: I create a doubt in you about your mind. I want you to understand that it is not your mind, and your search should be to find your own mind. To be under somebody else’s impact is to remain psychologically a slave. And life is not for slavery. It is to taste freedom.There is something like truth, but with this mind you can never know it, because this mind is full of lies, repeated century after century. You can find the truth when you put this mind completely aside and look at existence with fresh eyes, like a newborn child; then whatever you experience is truth. If you remain constantly alert not to allow others to interfere with your inner growth, there comes a moment when you become so attuned with existence, so one with existence…Only this experience is religious experience. It is not Jewish, it is not Christian, it is not Hindu. How can any experience be Jewish, Hindu? You never see its ridiculousness. You eat something and you say it is delicious, but is it Christian, or Hindu, or Buddhist? You taste something and you say it is sweet, but is it Communist? – is it materialist or spiritualist? These questions are nonsense. It is simply sweet, it is simply delicious.When you feel existence immediately, without any mediator, with no mind given by anybody else to you, you taste something which transforms you, which makes you enlightened, awakened, which brings you to the highest peak of consciousness.There is no greater fulfillment. There is no higher contentment. There is no deeper relaxation. You have come home. Life becomes a joy, a song, a dance, a celebration. And I call this life religious.I want everybody to be religious, but I don’t want anybody to be Christian, Hindu, because those are the barriers which will never allow you to become religious. You can see it clearly: Gautam Buddha is not a Buddhist, he never heard the word Buddhist; Jesus Christ is not a Christian, he never heard the word Christian and certainly he is not a Jew; otherwise the Jews would not have crucified him.If the Jews decided to crucify Jesus, that simply means he has dropped the mind that they gave him to carry his whole life, that he is saying things that are not part of their given mind. Jesus continuously reminded them of it. He said, “It has been said by the old prophets” – and who were those old prophets? all Jews – “It has been said, ‘An eye for an eye is the law.’ But I say unto you that if somebody slaps you on one cheek, give him the other cheek too.”This was not part of the Jewish mind. The Jewish God declares, “I am not a nice person! I am a very angry God, I am very jealous. Remember that I am not your uncle.” These are actually the words: “I am not your uncle, I am not nice, I am jealous, I am angry.” And Jesus says, “God is love.”I am trying to show you that he has dropped the Jewish mind, and crucifixion is the reward he got. The crucifixion was the reward for dropping the Jewish mind. He was dangerous in the sense that he would create doubt in other people’s minds: “Our God says he is angry, jealous, he will destroy those who are against him, and Jesus is saying that God is love. He is going against our vested interest.”He was killed – he was not a Jew; he was not Christian because the word Christian does not exist in the Hebrew language, the word Christ does not exist in the Hebrew language. He was called “the messiah” – that is equivalent to Christ. Christ is a Greek word. It was three hundred years later that Jesus’ sayings were translated into Greek; then messiah became Christ, and the followers became Christians.What I am trying to say to you is that Gautam Buddha was not a Hindu. He was born into a Hindu family, but he had renounced it; he renounced it the very day he started his search for truth. See the simple point: the Hindu need not search for the truth; the Hindu has already got it ready-made. It has been given by the tradition, by the religion, by the scriptures; he need not go in search.The day Gautam Buddha went in search of truth, he dropped the Hindu mind. And of course he was not a Buddhist; that was a name his followers were given later on by Hindus, to keep a distinction. But he had his own mind.To have one’s own mind in the world is the richest thing possible. But no society allows it. Every society keeps you poor; every society, and particularly those who are in power – either through money or through politics or through religion or through knowledge, or for any reason. Those who are in power don’t want people to have their own minds. It is dangerous to their interests. They want not men but sheep, not individuals but crowds who are always in need of being led, who are always in need of being told what to do, what not to do; who don’t have their own minds, their own insights, their own consciousness. They are always dependent.The fear of anybody being different, being a stranger, being an outsider, is always the same for the simple reason that no society will have the courage to accept you – because that society has not made your mind, and that society cannot trust that you will always be obedient to it, that you will never object to anything, or create doubt about anything, or be skeptical about anything.For example, in India the cow is worshipped as the mother. Anybody who has not been brought up as a Hindu is simply going to be skeptical, “This is nonsense!” This is not all; Hindus do things that nobody can even conceive of: they drink the urine of the cow because it is holy, they eat cow dung because it is holy. It is not only the villagers or the uneducated, or the uncultured. In Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram there was a man, a professor, who lived for six months only on the urine of cows and cow dung – not eating anything else, not drinking anything else. And Mahatma Gandhi praised him, saying that he was a saint.Now, Hindus are angry at me because I cannot accept this kind of stupidity, that it can make somebody a saint. It simply proves that man was an idiot! But Mahatma Gandhi is a politician; he is also not a saint. If he was a saint he would also have said, “This is nonsense. You cannot become holy by eating cow dung.” But he is a politician par excellence, in the garb of a religious saint. Saying that this man is a saint, he has satisfied the whole Hindu community; now he is the whole and sole leader of all the Hindus. Anybody who has not been brought up by the Hindus will not be able to accept it.So any deviation from the norm in any society… There are many people who you call mad, but they are not mad. They are simply not agreeing with your madness; they have a private madness of their own. You have a collective madness.Now, for example, if all four hundred million Hindus accept without any question the idea that drinking the urine of cows makes you holy, and somebody starts drinking the urine of a horse, they say he is mad. I simply say that he is privately mad, you are collectively mad. But you are both mad! I would like that man more than this collective madness; at least he has the courage to do something private, individual. It will look foolish to all the Hindus, but they will not look foolish to themselves, to their own mind.No society wants strangers, outsiders. Why is the whole world afraid of me? I am not a terrorist; I am not making bombs and killing people. I am a nonviolent person. But they can accept terrorists.In Germany they prevented me from entering the country, passed a resolution in the Parliament that I am a dangerous man and I should not be allowed any entry into Germany, and at the same time they allowed all the terrorist groups of Europe to have a world conference.I was simply amazed! An international conference of the terrorist groups that have been murdering people, that have hijacked airplanes, that have bombed embassies, that have kidnapped people is allowed, but I cannot be allowed four weeks of being a tourist. Those terrorists are not of a different mind than the people in the country.It is a very strange phenomenon. Three people were being crucified the same day as Jesus, and it was the convention that one can be forgiven – and it was the people’s decision. Pontius Pilate was absolutely certain that they would ask, “Release Jesus.” He was innocent; he had done no harm to anybody. But the Jews shouted, the high priests shouted, “We want Barabbas” – and Barabbas was a confirmed criminal. He had committed seven murders, rapes, any kind of crime you name and he had done it.But you should not be surprised, because Barabbas belongs to the Jews. He may be a murderer, but his mind was still that of a Jew. This Jesus may be innocent, but his mind was no longer that of the Jews; he was an outsider, he was dangerous. Barabbas was not dangerous. What could he do? A few more murders at the most. But this Jesus could destroy the whole structure of the society, because it was standing only on superstitions.Even Barabbas could not believe it. He thought something must have gone wrong: “There is not another criminal in the whole country who can compete with me, and nobody is asking for this poor Jesus, who has never done anything except talk to a few people here and there.” Not a single voice shouted for Jesus to be released, and thousands of people shouted, “Barabbas! We want Barabbas!”If you go into the psychology of it, it is very simple. All those terrorists having a conference in Germany are acceptable: they have the same mind, the same politics. They belong to the same rotten society.But I cannot be allowed. Against me they have the idea that I will corrupt people. The same was their condemnation of Socrates – that he corrupts people – and all that Socrates was doing was teaching people to have their own minds.All the great masters in the world have been saying only one thing down the centuries, “Have your own mind and have your own individuality. Don’t be a part of the crowd; don’t be a wheel in the whole mechanism of a vast society. Be individual, on your own. Live life with your own eyes; listen to music with your own ears.”But we are not doing anything with our own ears, with our own eyes, with our own minds; everything is being taught, and we are following it.Deviation is dangerous to the rotten societies. Particularly in the West, where no idea of enlightenment has ever existed, it is more so, because enlightenment simply means going beyond the mind. Going beyond the mind you will be yourself. The West has never nourished the idea of enlightenment. It is against the society, against the religion; they have never bothered about it.Thinking about truth is allowed! That’s why in the West philosophy has grown to great heights and depths. But it is always thinking about truth. It is like madmen thinking about sanity, blind men thinking about light. However the blind man tries to think about light, he may create a big system of thought about what light is, it is not going to be anything like light. For light, you need eyes.You cannot think about truth, because thinking will be done by your mind, which is full of lies, nothing but lies. How are you going to think about truth? Truth can be found only when you have put the mind aside.In the East we say truth is the experience that happens in the state of no-mind or in the state of beyond mind. But in the West the very idea has not existed. That will make one thing clear to you: philosophy is a Western thing. In the East there is nothing like philosophy.It is very strange: the East is far older, at least ten thousand years old, but there is nothing like philosophy in the East. What is called Eastern philosophy is a wrong name. In the East it is called darshan. Darshan means to see; it has nothing to do with thinking. The very word darshan means to see.I had to coin my own word for it: I call it philosia, as against philosophy, because philosophy means to think, and philosia means the love of seeing. Philosophy means the love of thinking – but what can you think? Just to avoid the danger of people going beyond mind, and becoming dangerous to the society, a substitute, a toy has been created. That is philosophy. No philosopher comes to experience anything. No philosopher becomes enlightened or awakened; he remains on the same ground as you are, as unconscious as you are.Darshan – philosia – is a totally different approach. It is by witnessing your mind, not by thinking, but just becoming a watcher of your mind and creating a distance between you and your thoughts. Just seeing them, as if you are on a hill and the whole mind and its traffic is going on down in the valley, a moment comes when thoughts start disappearing because their life is in the identity. Their life is the life of a parasite; they suck your blood.If you are far away and you are not giving any juice to your thoughts, they start shrinking and dying. When there are no thoughts around you but immense silence, tremendous nothingness, just a watcher and nothing to watch – this is the moment you are freed from the fetters of the mind. This is the moment of the beginning of a new life.But you may look mad to people, because from this moment your behavior will be different. From this moment you will have an originality; you cannot be part of the crowd. People will think you have gone wrong somewhere. It is strange – the people are wrong! But in a way it is not strange. If you go with eyes into a society of blind people, nobody is going to believe that you have eyes. You must be having some mad illusion – eyes don’t exist. Nobody has eyes, how can you have?The enlightened person in the West will be condemned as mad. The people who are mad in the West are mad because you have created so much tension and anxiety and anguish, and you have given them such a rotten mind, that it cannot manage. A point comes when it breaks down. When the mind breaks down, the person falls below the mind; hence psychoanalysis is a Western phenomenon. In the East there is nothing parallel to psychoanalysis.In the East we have tried for a breakthrough, not for a breakdown. The breakthrough takes you above the mind, and the breakdown simply pulls you to a subhuman level. But for that too society is responsible. It gives you too much ambition, which it cannot fulfill. It gives you too much desire – for money, for power – which it cannot fulfill. It only teaches you how to go on climbing the ladder of success, higher and higher, and tells you to be quick, because you only have a small life, and so much has to be done. There is no time for living, no time for loving, no time for rejoicing.People go on postponing everything that is meaningful. Tomorrow they will laugh; today, money has to be gathered: more money, more power, more things, more gadgets. Tomorrow they will love; today there is no time. But tomorrow never comes, and one day they find themselves burdened with all kinds of gadgets, burdened with money. They have come to the top of the ladder – and there is nowhere to go except to jump in a lake.But they cannot even say to other people, “Don’t bother to come here, there is nothing,” because that will make them look stupid. You have become the president of the country and you are saying, “There is nothing here, don’t bother. This is simply a ladder which leads nowhere.” You will feel stupid.So they go on pretending that they have achieved, that they have found; and deep down they are empty, meaningless, and they have wasted their whole life. If they break down under such pressure, the society is responsible. The society is driving people mad.In the East you will not find so many mad people, so many people committing suicide. The East is poor, so poor that people can’t manage to have one meal a day; logically there should be more people committing suicide, more people going mad. But no, they are not going mad, they are not committing suicide. They seem to be in contentment, because ambition is not being part of the mind given by the society. Their society also gives them ambition, but for the other world, not for this world. This world is condemned.Try to understand. Their society also gives them ambition – ambition to reach to paradise, to realize godliness – but that ambition is against the ambitions of this world. “Renounce this world! Here there is nothing but shadows; it is illusory.” For thousands of years they have thought it is illusory, it is worthless to bother about it. Why not look for the real thing? So they don’t go mad. They may be in utter poverty, in sickness, in death, but you will not find them tense, anxious, and they don’t need any psychotherapy.Psychotherapy is absolutely Western; it is the need of the Western mind. First the Western mind creates all kinds of desires and ambitions, which are going to create a breakdown sooner or later; then psychotherapy comes in. It is now the most highly-paid profession, but the strangest thing is that psychotherapists commit suicide more than people from any other profession, twice as much as any other profession, and psychotherapists go mad twice as much as any other profession. And they are the people who are helping other people to be sane! It is really a mess.It can be cleaned up. It is simply a question of understanding that the mind that we have is not capable of encountering reality, because reality is contemporary, and the mind is two thousand years old. The gap is big, and the mind fails to encounter reality. The mind has to go with reality, step by step; it has not to lag behind. That is possible only if each individual has his own mind, his own individuality.I am basically an individualist, because only the individual has a soul. No group can claim a soul – they are all dead arrangements. Only the individual is a living phenomenon. We have to help the living phenomenon to be contemporary, and to remain contemporary, because what is contemporary today will not be contemporary tomorrow, so you have to learn the methods of flowing like a river with existence, each moment. Die each moment to the past, and be born each moment to the new.Unless that becomes your religion, you are going to be in trouble, and your society is going to be in trouble.Osho,Why is it that in spite of the vast range of subjects that you cover in your talks – perhaps a wider range than any man who has ever lived – whenever I discuss you with the press and any other interested parties, they seem preoccupied with only one subject: sex?I am reminded of Doctor Johnson:He had made one of the best dictionaries of his times. It was a very big, voluminous book – more than one thousand pages. Three old ladies came to him, very angry; they must have been seventy, seventy-five, eighty, they all had glasses. They said, “Are you not ashamed of your book? There are three words in it which are obscene!”Doctor Johnson said, “My God, in a book of one thousand pages, in which there are thousands of words, how could you manage at your age, with such thick glasses, to find three obscene words? You are great researchers. You must have been looking for them. Nobody else has objected to me; nobody has even mentioned them.”I have almost four hundred books in my name. I have not written anything, but these are a collection of my talks. Out of four hundred books there is only one book on sex, and that too is not really on sex; it is basically on how to transcend sex, how to bring the energy of sex to a sublimated state, because it is our basic energy.It can produce life: that is only one thing that we know about it, but that even animals manage. Scientists say even trees have their own kind of sexuality, so the whole of existence manages some kind of sexual energy. It is only man who has the privilege to change the character and the quality of sexual energy.The name of the book is From Sex to Superconsciousness – but nobody talks about superconsciousness. The book is about superconsciousness; sex is only to be the beginning, where everybody is. There are methods that can start the energy moving upward, and in the East, for at least ten thousand years, there has developed a special science, Tantra. There is no parallel in the West of such a science.For ten thousand years, people have experimented with how sexual energy can become your spirituality, how your sexuality can become your spirituality. It is proved beyond doubt – thousands of people have gone through the transformation. Tantra seems to be the science that is, sooner or later, going to be accepted in the whole world, because people are suffering from all kinds of perversions. That’s why they go on talking about sex as if that is my work, as if twenty-four hours a day I am talking about sex. Their repressed sexuality is the problem.A great poet, Heinrich Heine, once got lost in the forest. For three days he could not find the way out. He was hungry, tired, worried about wild animals the whole night, sitting in the trees, and the whole day stumbling, trying to find a human being. But for three days he could not meet anyone to show him the way. The third night was a full-moon night. He was sitting in a tree, utterly exhausted. He looked at the moon, and suddenly he laughed.He laughed because he had written so many poems about the moon and he has read so many poems about the moon. The moon is such a romantic phenomenon that no poet of any standing can leave it out, no painter can leave it out. Its impact is deep, its beauty is great. So why did he laugh? He laughed because when he looked at the moon, he didn’t see all those romantic things that he was talking of in his poems; he saw a round loaf of bread floating in the sky.He said, “My God! What has happened to me?” After three days of hunger and tiredness it is natural, but perhaps his experience was unique: nobody else has ever seen a round loaf of bread floating in the sky! He laughed at himself, and for the first time he understood that whatever he had been saying about the moon had nothing to do with the moon; it had something to do with himself.So the people who talk about sex, and condemn me, don’t understand that it is their repression. I have been speaking on thousands of subjects, but they are not concerned with them because that is not their repression. Sex has been repressed traditionally all over the world. Naturally it is bound to come up in some way or other. You cannot avoid it.Even the Holy Bible has five hundred pages of pure pornography. And it is not an exception – all other religious scriptures… Hindu scriptures are the worst. They go into such details that you will be worried: “Are these people talking about spirituality, or what?” They have even made temples like Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri. Each temple has thousands of naked women, naked men, in different sexual postures – temples! If you suppress something in man it is going to come up somewhere or other, in some way or other.This repression of sex by all the religions has helped the pornographic literature of the world – magazines like Playboy – to be read more than anything else. Now Playboy is published in almost all languages, and there are many magazines of the same kind.When I was in jail in America, in the first jail I was surprised: every inmate had a Bible, and one inmate who was just next to me, every day ritually in the morning, in the evening, would put his head on the Bible, kneel down on the floor – the Bible on the bed, his head on the Bible – and pray. He looked really pious.But I asked him, “This is very beautiful, you are doing good, but why do you have these pictures of naked women that you have cut from magazines all over the room? And not a single picture of Jesus Christ? Jesus Christ among all these nudes would have looked very beautiful.”He was shocked he said, “I never thought about it. I am a very devoted Christian, a fundamentalist.”I said, “You must be a fundamentalist; otherwise how to explain all these pictures? For these pictures to exist, a fundamentalist Christian is absolutely necessary. Don’t be worried! They are not contradictory, they are complementary. It is a conspiracy between the churches and the people who are exploiting your mind.”My whole effort has been how to make your sex a natural, accepted phenomenon, so there is no repression – and then you don’t need any pornography. So that there is no repression – and then you don’t dream of sex. Then the energy can be transformed. There are valid methods available through which the same energy that brings life to the world can bring a new life to you. That was the whole theme of the book. But nobody bothered about the theme, nobody bothered about why I have spoken on it. Just the word sex was in the title, and that was enough.That word has created so many rumors that I am really amused! People think that we have sexual orgies the whole day. People really have imagination! Just because out of four hundred books, on one book the word sex has appeared in the title, their imagination has moved so far away. But it reflects their mind; it has nothing to do with me.In the Indian temples at Khajuraho, the most famous temples in the world, there are thirty temples; perhaps it would have taken thousands of years to make those temples. As sculptures they are just the best; you cannot create better.But the sexual postures are so absurd that you cannot even imagine. Perhaps all the kinds of postures that man – sane and insane, whoever! – has imagined are there: men are making love to animals, a man and a woman are standing on their heads and making love. Have you ever imagined…? But why has this happened? These people must have worked hard! Repress anything and it will take pervert proportions.Now there is homosexuality, lesbianism, sodomy, and all kinds of other perversions, and nobody ever thinks about who is responsible. Animals in the wild are never homosexual, but in a zoo, if females are not available, then animals turn homosexual. That gives a clue. It seems we have made our society a zoo, not a natural phenomenon. We have repressed sex so much that now it goes on taking strange shapes.For example, homosexuality must have been born in monasteries, so I call it a religious thing. In monasteries men are kept separate – no woman is available. In nunneries women are separate – no men are available. In Athos, in Europe, there is a monastery, a thousand years old, which you can enter, but you cannot get out alive. You renounce the world forever: Enter the monastery and the world is finished. In this monastery, not even a six-month-old baby girl is allowed. I sometimes wonder: are monks living inside, or monsters? A six-month-old baby girl is not allowed; no woman of any age has ever entered there, dead or alive.Now, you are forcing people. These people will become homosexuals, the nuns will become lesbians, and you go on preaching celibacy! You still go on preaching that monks should be celibate, nuns should be celibate, and they are all reading pornographic literature – of course, hiding it in the Bible!We are living in a very sick society, which could have been very healthy, and can be healthy immediately. It is just a question of understanding.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 40 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Hearing you talk about hypnosis the other morning, I reached into a very quiet, relaxed state. I felt totally safe and wrapped in a wonderful softness.When I did a three-month dehypnotherapy with Santosh at the ranch, however, I often found myself in total horror and fear, regressing into my early childhood. What did I experience with you?Hypnosis is such a simple, innocent experience, that even hearing about it can give you a taste of it. And that’s what happened. Even when I am not talking about hypnosis, the same is happening to those who are really listening to me. A softness, a calmness, a silence starts surrounding them. That is a signal that whatever is being said is being heard too, that I am not talking to the walls.About your experience with Santosh and his dehypnotherapy, I can only say one thing: Santosh knows nothing about dehypnotherapy. He himself is so tense, so continuously worried, has so many problems. But he had studied hypnosis as a student for years in Germany so he knows the technique; but he has never been in those spaces himself.It is just like you can read the map of the whole world and you have never been to those places, ever. Knowing where Constantinople is does not mean that you have been there. Knowing about it is one thing; being there is a totally different phenomenon. And in the schools only the technique, the know-how, is being taught.So when Santosh came to me he had the know-how of hypnosis. I engaged him in hypnotherapy, and I tried my best for him to understand that we have first to create a state of dehypnotherapy – because every child is being hypnotized, from the very childhood. That’s how conditioning happens; that’s how you get your mind. Your parents may not know, your teachers may not know, your priests may not know what they are doing: they are practicing hypnotic techniques. By the time you leave the university, you know all the techniques for conditioning others. So whoever comes to me is already conditioned.I was trying for Santosh to understand, “First dehypnotize these people, let them get rid of what society has forced upon them, and only then will hypnosis be clean, young, fresh, just born.” He was only a student, so he changed the name of his therapy to dehypnotherapy on my suggestion. But what he has been doing is still the same techniques that he had learned in Germany. Those techniques can create horror, because first you are filled with social conditionings, and on top of it you are hypnotized.In hypnosis you reach your unconscious mind, where all conditionings exist. You are in a volcanic state. There are going to be horrors, because you may remember your childhood and all that has happened to you since your childhood, which you have repressed. Remember, nobody represses any pleasant experience – why should one repress a pleasant experience? In fact one tries to exaggerate it, to himself and to others, as much as he can. One represses only things which are unpleasant.So your unconscious is full of serpents and scorpions and dragons that you have repressed because you did not want to know about them and you did not want others to know about them. If you are led into hypnosis directly, without unconditioning you, you will reach a hell of your own creation: whatever is repressed will show its true face – and it is natural that you will become terrified.The problem with the therapists like Santosh is that they have never gone through the process themselves; they have simply studied from a teacher. They have never been part of a mystery school, which would have cleaned them. In a mystery school the technique is given to you only when you are able to use it, and not get into dark spots, horror spaces, terrible states. They are all imaginary, but when you are in them they are real.So what happened with you with Santosh was a nightmare that was repressed, and he opened the bottle and the genie came out. These kinds of people are dangerous. I told him again and again, to the point that he was angry with me – because he used to think that he was a hypnotist, and he had studied for twelve years in Germany, what more could anybody teach him? I said, “It is not a question of teaching. You have not gone through the spaces into which you are leading other people, and you don’t know what will happen to them.”Now all those therapists are befooling themselves. The commune being destroyed by the American government has been a tremendous blessing to the therapists.We had a property of the commune in Laguna Beach in America, and our sannyasins were running it; we had made a board of directors. It was a three million dollar property. Santosh took three hundred sannyasins from the ranch to Laguna Beach, and all the sannyasins became members of the Laguna Beach commune – and of course they changed the board of directors. Santosh brought his own directors, his own board, and he opened a dehypnotherapy institute in Laguna Beach. My name is not mentioned. He has appropriated the property without thinking of its legal implications. We had been fighting for years, four years, to win the case…It was a strange case. There used to be a Christian Church, but of a very independent character. The man who was leading the church, the priest, did not belong to any organization; it was independent, it had four hundred members. But the priest became interested in me. He and his wife came to Pune and became sannyasins, and then he went back. He started teaching through my books instead of the Bible. His congregation could not believe what had happened.But many of his congregation were thrilled – they were tired of listening to the Bible, bored. Many of his congregation came to Pune and became sannyasins, almost thirty persons became sannyasins. And then there was a conflict; the non-sannyasins left the congregation because it was no longer Christian, and they had joined it because it was Christian. So they left and it became purely a sannyasin commune.Then the old priest retired. He used to come to festivals in the commune with his wife – he was still alive and still had love for me – but he wanted to retire, he was old. So he retired, appointing sannyasins as the priests of the congregation. When he retired, the people who had left the congregation went to the court, saying that the buildings and the grounds – and it is a beautiful place, Laguna Beach – belonged to them, and those people were not the owners of it. We had to fight the case for four years continually.The case was decided in our favor for the simple reason that those people had left the congregation; they were no longer members of it, and they had no rights. They should have remained part of the congregation and appealed to the court, then the situation would have been different. They were the majority, but they had left, and now seeing that sannyasins had captured the whole property and the church, they wanted it back. The court dismissed the case because they no longer had any rights. The moment you leave the congregation, you have no rights.So we were keeping that property, fourteen sannyasins were there. We wanted to sell it – for the new mystery school you will need money!Santosh has done a great service to us. Now he is the head priest and he knows nothing as far as experience is concerned, and he will destroy many people. So I have informed our people that something has to be done and Santosh has to be removed from there; or he has to pay three million dollars, and then he can do whatever he wants to do on the property. And our sannyasins have to be informed that his hypnotherapy is not going to help them.I told you about a world festival that Teertha, Rajen, Poonam and others were arranging in Italy. Just yesterday the news came that very few people went there; they have made a great loss of fifteen thousand dollars, and the whole thing was absolutely dead and flat. All those great therapists were on stage, but there was no celebration, there was no feeling that they were in the presence of someone who was enlightened. People left disappointed, disgusted with the whole thing.I told you just a few days ago that they will soon be in trouble. People will desert them, because people were not coming for them – those therapists had got a wrong idea. But in fifteen years, one can easily get into a wrong idea, that people were coming for them. Soon they will be lost in the crowd and it is good that they should be lost; otherwise they will play with people’s psychology, no knowing what they are doing and what is going to happen.Hypnosis is really a very soft method, very mellow music. It can happen just sitting by my side in silence. It can happen just by listening so intently that all your worries, tensions disappear, and you start moving deeper into your being. But those worries, tensions, anguishes, anxieties should disappear first.Hypnotherapy is an old word; dehypnotherapy is my construction. I told Santosh to make it dehypnotherapy, and he never asked, “What will be the difference between dehypnotherapy and hypnotherapy?” He simply made it dehypnotherapy. Now he has become the director of a dehypnotherapy institute, and he does not know what the difference is between dehypnotherapy and hypnotherapy.The process is going to be totally opposite. Hypnotherapy can take you into a deliberate sleep; dehypnotherapy can take you into a deliberate awakening. But I was puzzled: he did not even ask what the difference between the two will be.It is unfortunate, but I will have to make my people aware of the dangers of those therapists because they will exaggerate their claims, saying that they have been with me for fifteen years. But they have not been with me for fifteen seconds. They were playing their own small role of being a guru to a small group of people. They had come for themselves, but they forgot completely. This is what happens to accidental people: they come for one thing and buy something else.I have heard about a real estate agent who was thought to be the top man in that profession in a big city. He was part of a big company. The boss was very angry that day and was waiting for him. When the man came the boss burst out in anger and said, “This is too much. A man to whom you have sold land at double the price has just gone. That we can understand; you are clever and intelligent and you managed it, and that’s why we pay you so much. But the man had come to say, ‘It has rained, and now the land you have sold me is under eight feet of water. What kind of company is this? This is really cheating!’”The salesman said, “Don’t be worried boss, I will take care of him. I am going.” After an hour he came back, smiling, and he said, “You have to give me some reward today.”He said, “First tell me what happened to that man and his land.”He said, “Nothing happened. We have had two rotten boats for many days; I have sold them to that man. I told him, ‘You are a fool. Such beautiful land, which becomes a lake in the rainy season. Have these two boats. Make a house high enough so you will have both things together: when it is the rainy season enjoy the lake – and the boats I have brought with me.’ Those boats are so rotten that they will drown the man the first time he sits in them. Don’t be worried. They had been lying with the company for no one knows how many years. And we got a good price for them.”The boss said, “This is too much! You have still cheated that man – and now you have put him in a dangerous situation. Those boats will kill him.”The man said, “This world goes on this way. You don’t have to think about what happens to others; you have to just think about your own pockets.”That seems to be the state of those therapists: they are thinking about their own pockets. They are not worried about what happens to the people. What they are suggesting, they themselves have not lived; it is not their experience. And it is dishonest to tell somebody something that is not your experience, and put him into a state which can drive him crazy.Hypnosis can be dangerous too. In the wrong hands anything can be dangerous; otherwise hypnosis is a simple form of relaxation. But it can be dangerous because if the man is bent upon cheating you, in those states when you are under hypnosis he can suggest to you things that you don’t want to do. But you will have to do them when you wake up.I used to work with one of my students. I lived in his house for six months. His brother was my friend, and I was alone and there was no point in getting a house – and who was going to take care of it? So he said, “You’d better stay with me.”I discovered really a beautiful medium in his younger brother and I started hypnotizing him. Just to give an example to you: one day I told him, “Tomorrow, exactly at twelve o’clock, you will kiss your pillow madly.” The second day, nearabout quarter to twelve, he started looking a little strange, afraid, watching everybody, everywhere, and just in front of him I took his pillow and locked it in my suitcase. I could see tears coming into his eyes. I said, “What is the matter? Why are you crying?”He said, “I don’t know, but something like this has never happened to me. It is so strange I cannot describe it.” And exactly at twelve he came to me and he said, “Please return my pillow.”I said, “What will you do at twelve? In the evening I will return it.”He said, “You have to return it to me right now.”I gave him the pillow and before six other people he started kissing the pillow madly, and looking at people thinking that he must look mad. He himself was thinking that he was mad – what was he doing?I said, “Don’t be worried, that’s what everybody is doing. When a man is kissing a woman, a woman is kissing a man, that is a natural hypnosis, a biological hypnosis; the biology has hypnotized your chromosomes. It is not that you are doing it – and feeling so awkward, you don’t want to do it before others, you want some lonely place of your own. Don’t be worried! It makes no difference whether it is a pillow or a woman. What you are doing, you are not doing: it is your unconscious which is forcing you to do it.”He said, “That is the trouble. That’s what I feel. Something in me says, ‘Kiss,’ and I know that this is stupid. This is only a pillow. Why should I kiss it?”You can, under hypnosis, manage anything if you are a person who is just trying to cheat people. You can even tell the person to murder someone and he will murder – and he will be punished. He may be sentenced to death, and he will not have any explanation to give. Nobody can touch you who hypnotized him, because nobody will ever know what you did in hypnosis, while he was asleep.Hypnosis can be misused. Everything great can be misused. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why most of the countries and cultures have tried to avoid any entanglement with hypnosis. And the word hypnotism has become a condemnatory word. But that is not right; it can do immense good too. Somebody who has some difficulty in any subject can be simply hypnotized and told, “You don’t have that difficulty. That subject is simple, and you have enough intelligence to understand it.” He will start behaving differently from the next day – his unconscious got it. There is no need to fear.People can be helped with diseases, because almost seventy percent of diseases are mental. They may be expressed through the body, but their origin is in the mind. If you can put in the mind the idea that the disease has disappeared, that you need not worry about it, it no longer exists, the disease will disappear.I have tried very strange experiments with it. My work was concerned with something else. For example in Sri Lanka, Buddhist monks every year on the birthday of Gautam Buddha, dance on red-hot burning coal – and they don’t burn. A professor from Cambridge University, a professor of psychology, had gone especially to see it, because he could not believe that it was possible. But when he saw twenty monks just dancing in the flames, and that they were not burned, he thought, “If these people can do it, why cannot I do it?” So he tried: just coming a little closer, it was so hot that he ran away. He would have died if he had jumped into the pit where the fire was burning and the monks were dancing. Now, it needs a tremendous effort of hypnosis.I tried it on the same boy, because he was a good medium. Thirty-three percent of the whole population are good mediums. You should remember this thirty-three percent. Thirty-three percent of the people are the most intelligent too, and this thirty-three percent are the more creative, most innovative people too. These are the same people who can go into deep hypnosis; it needs immense intelligence. People with greater intelligence, if they are ready to go into it, can go to very deep layers. Then things can be done which look almost miraculous.With this boy – his name was Manoj – I tried putting a hot burning piece of coal on his hand and telling him that it was a beautiful roseflower. He saw it and he said, “So beautiful, and so fragrant,” and it did not burn. I tried otherwise also: putting a roseflower on his hand and telling him it was a burning hot piece of coal. He threw it away immediately, but it burned his whole hand.Mind has tremendous power over your body. The mind directs everything in your body. Seventy percent of your diseases can be changed by changing the mind, because they start from there; only thirty percent of diseases start from the body. You fall down, and you have a fracture – that fracture cannot be helped by hypnosis saying that you don’t have any fracture. You will still have the fracture. The fracture has started from the body and the body cannot be hypnotized. The body has its own way of functioning.But if the process starts from the mind and extends to some point in the body, then it can be easily changed. Religions have exploited it. There are many religions in India where people dance in the fire without being burned – Mohammedans do it, Tibetans do it, Burmese do it. But these are not ordinary people, they are monks. For years they have been hypnotized, and this thing has settled in their unconscious – that fire cannot burn them.But remember, only seventy percent of diseases can be changed. That reminds me of a strange phenomenon that physiologists, medical people, and others who are concerned with man’s body, are very much disturbed about and have no answer. Allopathy succeeds only in seventy percent of cases; homeopathy succeeds only in seventy percent of cases; ayurvedic medicine succeeds only in seventy percent of cases; Greek medicine succeeds only in seventy percent of cases; Tibetan medicine succeeds only in seventy percent of cases; Chinese acupuncture succeeds only in seventy percent of cases – all the methods for curing the body succeed only in seventy percent of cases. This is a very strange coincidence.Looked at from the outside it is a mystery. Homeopathy has nothing in it – just small sugar pills – but it succeeds, and succeeds to the same percentage. The only question is: it succeeds if the person believes in homeopathy. The only difference in allopathy is that you need not believe in it and still it succeeds. Naturopathy, homeopathy, ayurveda – their basic need is that you should believe.I had an ayurvedic physician, a man of rare intelligence, a nice man. He used to take care of me, and he was very famous in that area. But he became a victim of tuberculosis. When I heard it, I went to his house and there I found out he was in the hospital. I said, “This is strange. He is such a great ayurvedic physician, why should he go to allopathy?”I went to the hospital; I asked the physician, “This is strange behavior. You have helped so many people through your medicines, can you not help yourself with your tuberculosis?”He laughed and he said, “No, I cannot, because the basic thing in ayurvedic medicine is that you have to have faith in it. I don’t have faith in it. I know all about it – it is nonsense. But if people are healed, I keep my mouth shut. I don’t say anything to anybody, but one thing is certain, it won’t help me. I will die if I take those medicines – which cured innumerable people, even of tuberculosis! So don’t be surprised, and don’t tell anybody anything, because if I survive I will have to continue my practice. If I die then you can tell the truth.”But the truth is, you need faith. It is the faith that changes the mind and affects the body – but not vice versa. The body is not superstitious, nor is it faithful; it is simply natural. It doesn’t care about anything else.There used to be a sect in America: I think it still survives in a few places, but in the beginning of the century it was very prominent. It was a Christian group, they used to call themselves Christian Scientists. They believed that everything can be cured, you just have to believe in Jesus Christ, and that your diseases are nothing but your beliefs – you believe that you have tuberculosis, so you have tuberculosis.A young man met on the road with an old woman and she said, “I don’t see your father in the meetings.” They used to have meetings every Sunday.He said, “He’s sick, very badly sick.”The old woman said, “Nonsense, because we are Christian Scientists. He is a Christian Scientist; he only believes that he is sick.”The young man said, “If you say so, perhaps he only believes that he is sick.”After two, three days, he came across the same woman again and she asked, “What happened?”The young man said, “Now he believes he is dead, so we had to take him to the graveyard. We tried to shake him and shouted, ‘Don’t believe such a thing. You are a Christian Scientist. Believe that you are alive!’ But nothing happened and the whole neighborhood laughed. Now the poor man is in a grave, still believing that he is dead.”The body does not have beliefs or disbeliefs, but the mind has. And mind has immense control over the body.One of the greatest sincerities in working with people is to take care that what you are saying or what you are doing is not going to destroy them. I am afraid all those therapists… While they were working in the commune in my presence there was no danger. I could have put anybody back into his right position. But now they are working without any understanding, they can prove to be very dangerous.All the sannyasins all over the world have to be informed: beware of the therapists. In my presence I allowed them to do anything because there was no problem; if something had gone wrong I would have taken care. But now if something goes wrong – and it is bound to go wrong because they themselves are wrong – then who is going to take care?The master’s work is not easy. He has to change you, he has to transform you. But he has not to cripple you, he has not to destroy you. It is almost like walking on a razor’s edge, because anything that can be helpful can also be used in such a way that it can be disastrous.Osho,Traveling with you over the past few months and seeing the hardness of the world, instead of being hardened in response I find myself only becoming softer and softer. Would you please comment?The ordinary response would be to become even harder, but you are not in an ordinary situation. Even a small touch of meditativeness, of silence, of love, of compassion, a small touch of the master’s presence, will mean you have totally different responses. Seeing the hardness of the world, you will feel more compassionate toward them, you will feel softer. You will not react violently because that would be joining them in their same stupidity. Being with me, whether you know it or not, you are learning thousands of things. One of them is that you cannot react.The world may be hard – that hurts. It makes one sad that unfortunately man is still barbarous, but it does not give you the idea to curse them. On the contrary, it gives you the idea to help them, to be compassionate to them, so they can come out of their hard shells. Perhaps they are also suffering in their hardness, and there is nobody to tell them how to get out of this hardness. They are also miserable. It is out of their misery that they misbehave, because they have been mistreated. They know only that violence is power.Seeing the world you will see that violence is not the real power. The real power is love, and that love will make you softer, forgiving, without any anger; in fact laughing at the whole hilarious situation that this world believes that it is civilized, that Charles Darwin thought that we have evolved from animals. But our behavior shows that we are still animalistic. There has been no evolution at all. Perhaps we have lost the tail, but that is not evolution; perhaps we can stand on two feet, but that is not evolution. We are still behaving so crudely, so cruelly. And nobody is there to say it, because whoever is going to say it will be crushed, will be killed.You have chosen to be with a man who is saying it, and who is going to say it to the very last breath.But as far as you are concerned, this whole experience of world travel, and finding the politicians the same everywhere, finding the nations, governments, the police behaving in the same manner, it seems that we are living in a nightmare. Only someone who is out of it can say, “This is a nightmare!” But when somebody in a nightmare is shouting and screaming, you don’t feel hard toward him; you feel soft, you want to help him.It has been a good experience. Later on when you will recapitulate, you will see it has given you a maturity which takes lives to gain.Osho,It seems that masters have always been betrayed by their chief disciples. The same has happened to you, with those to whom you have given so much love and attention, and on whom you have worked so hard. Osho, is it that people who have more potential go higher and then can fall even lower than the ordinary human being? You have been harassed by the police and the bureaucracy. I feel they are not doing right, but they can't do otherwise; but when I hear about old sannyasins' behavior, my heart cries and it hurts me deeply.The sannyasins I have worked harder on are not the ones who have the best potential – they were the worst; hence they needed hard work. Those who are the best I have not worked on at all. Just my presence has been enough for them, just my love has been enough for them.So it is not that I worked hard on them because they had more potential to go high, and then to fall even below the ordinary. I worked on them because they had no possibility to go high. Even with hard work, at the most I could bring them to the normal. And they are behaving normally – I am not disappointed in them.Whenever a person of higher potential has come to me, he has received my love, but there has been no need to work on him. He needs just a slight push, and he will be flying in the sky. None of those people have fallen, or will fall down, because one who has known the freedom of the sky cannot go back to the state where he was not even aware of his wings, and he cannot be disgraceful toward the master who helped him. It is impossible, simply impossible.His gratitude will grow more and more because the master has not only made him aware of his wings but has pushed him into the sky and has given him total freedom. How can you be ungrateful to a person who has given you total freedom to be yourself, who has not tried in any way to impose any image, any ideal on you? Most of the sannyasins are feeling more loving than ever, more grateful than ever – and it is really a time of difficulties, when your mettle is tested.Those who have fallen from grace were expected to. They never reached to the point where they could open their wings. If they are not grateful toward me, the simple reason is that they have not experienced anything that would make them grateful toward me. They have remained closed in their own darkness, in their own egos.Vivek goes on asking me again and again, “Why don’t you work on me?” It is difficult to explain that there is no need of any work on her. She has to work for me, and in that work, in that care, she is growing, she is maturing.It is a very complicated situation. I have to choose to work on the worst; they need the attention. Even if they can grow a little bit it will be good. I don’t hope that they will become enlightened. Even with hard work they will not become enlightened, because the work on the worst people has a difficulty: they fight with you. While working on them, they are continually fighting you! On each single step they don’t want to grow; you are doing something against them. With the best quality people it is different. They want to grow.You need not do any hard work. Just looking in their eyes is enough, just being with them is enough; it is nourishment. It is nourishment to open their wings – and they will be grateful.The people on whom one has to work hard are not going to be grateful; they will be revengeful, because you were working against them. They never wanted to fly.I remember an old story:A man who loved freedom immensely, who had made his country free from foreign rule, was so much in love with freedom that he would not take the reins of the government in his own hands. Once the country became free, he left the country and went toward the mountains. He said, “My work is done.”The last stop was a caravanserai. It had a beautiful parrot, and the owner of the serai was also in love with the idea of freedom. If he had really been a lover of freedom he would have made the parrot free, but the parrot was in a golden cage. His idea of freedom was just a mental luxury. Because he loved the idea of freedom so much he had taught the parrot to repeat the word, “Freedom, freedom, freedom.” The whole day, the parrot would suddenly burst into shouting, “Freedom, freedom!” He knew only one word. This man who had fought for the freedom of his country, had been in jails, had been in dangers, was staying there.He thought, “This poor parrot wants freedom. He is not happy in this golden cage, nobody listens to him. The whole day he is shouting ‘Freedom!’” He decided that in the night he would open the cage and let him be free, so in the middle of the night he went to the cage, opened the door and tried to pull the parrot out. But the parrot was hitting the man with his beak, and with one of his legs he was holding onto the cage.The man could not understand: the door was open, and he was still shouting, “Freedom!” But the man was also a strong fighter for freedom; he somehow pulled the parrot out of the cage and threw it into the sky. He had damaged both of his hands; there was blood on both of his hands where the parrot had scratched. But he was happy that the poor parrot who longed so much for freedom was at last free.He went to his room, went to sleep, but in the morning he woke up with the sound of the parrot who was shouting, “Freedom!” He said, “Strange! Where is the parrot?” He opened the window: the parrot was sitting in the cage and the door was open, and he was repeating his routine: “Freedom, freedom!” It was just a word.The owner came out; he knew this famous man. He looked at his hands, he looked at the open cage. He said, “You don’t understand, he is only a parrot. I have taught him the word freedom because I like the idea of freedom. He is a parrot; he does not even know the meaning of freedom. You should not have unnecessarily tried and been harmed. A few other people have tried it before, but he always comes back. Who wants to leave the golden cage?“As far as I am concerned, it is only an idea; otherwise I would have thrown him out of the cage and removed the cage. But I love to hear the word freedom. It is my idea; I don’t want to do anything about it, it is simply philosophical – neither does the parrot want to do anything about it. For him it is not even philosophical, for him it is simply a recording, memory, not even mind. You are a man who has sacrificed his whole life for freedom. You are in a different category. You should not have bothered about this parrot – he is an idiot. It is just that he has learned the word.”The sannyasins who think they have betrayed me have not betrayed me: they have betrayed themselves. How can they betray me? I had no involvement of any kind. I was not in any way expecting anything from them. I worked because I enjoyed, loved it.They cannot betray me, they can only betray themselves. It does not affect me, it will only affect their lives. They will again get into their cages and start shouting, “Freedom, freedom!” and the door will remain open.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 41 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,As society's hold on people's minds begins to disintegrate, in times of social crisis such as now there seems to be a tendency for an increasing number of people to fall below the mind into madness. Also, is it true that this is paralleled by a tendency for people to look at the possibility of going beyond the mind into enlightenment?Times of crisis are both dangerous and immensely important. They are dangerous for those who have no courage to explore new dimensions of life. They are bound to disintegrate into different kinds of madness, because their minds were made by the society. Now the society is disintegrating, the mind cannot remain; its roots are in the society. It is constantly nourished by the society. Now that nourishment is disappearing.Because the society is disintegrating, a great suspicion, a doubt that was never there before, is bound to arise in the individuals. If they were just obedient people who have never gone beyond any limit that society has decided, who have always been respected, honorable citizens – in other words, just mediocre – they will immediately go mad.They will start committing suicide, they will start jumping from high buildings; or even if they live, now they don’t have a mind which can help them to figure out the situation for their lives. They will become retarded, stupid, idiotic, may become schizophrenic, split into two persons – or perhaps a crowd.In times of crisis, the danger is for those who have enjoyed the times when the society was settled, when there were no problems, everything was at ease, they were honored, respected. These were the people who had enjoyed the obedience of the mind, and they are going to be the sufferers. It is a simple arithmetic. They will go psychotic, they will go neurotic. And these words don’t make much difference; I have heard a definition:A psychoanalyst was asked, “What is the difference between psychosis and neurosis?”The psychoanalyst said, “The psychotic person believes that two and two are five. And the neurotic person knows that two and two are four, but is not at ease with the fact that two and two are four.”So the difference is very fine. Both are in trouble.But times of crisis are of tremendous significance for those daring souls who have never bothered about society’s respectability, its honors; who have never bothered about what others think about them, but have done only that which they felt right to do; who have in a certain way always been rebellious, individualistic. For those people the times of crisis are just golden, because the society is disintegrating. Now it cannot condemn anybody – it is itself condemned, cursed. It cannot say to others that they are wrong. It is itself proving wrong; its whole wisdom is proving just foolish, superstitious.The daring individual can use this opportunity to go beyond mind, because now the society cannot prevent him, cannot hinder him. Now he is free.It is almost like a situation in a jail when the doors are open, the guards have disappeared and the jailer is nowhere to be found. The people who have some sense, some intelligence, will use it for freedom. But those who have become so enslaved that they cannot think of freedom – imprisonment has become their home – will simply panic, “What is going to happen today? No guards? No jailer? The doors are open! Who will take care of us? Who will provide food for us?”There will be people whose slavery has penetrated to their very soul; those people will go berserk. But the people who were always in search of a moment when they can escape from the prison will be immensely happy. This was the time they have been waiting and praying for. They will escape out of the prison into the open sky. Going beyond the mind is going into the open sky, full of stars, the moon, the sun, the immensity of it. It becomes yours; the whole existence becomes yours. The mind is a small cage.So moments of crisis are both, and that is what is happening all around the world. There has never been so intense a search for spiritual growth, for meditation. But there has never been so much madness either. Both are happening because the status quo is no longer powerful; it has lost control.When Galileo found that the earth moves around the sun, not vice versa as the Bible says, the pope asked him to be present in his court. Many things happened that day. One was very important. Galileo asked, “What does it matter if one statement in the Bible is proved wrong? It does not prove the whole Bible wrong. I am a devout Christian, a practicing Christian, and I don’t see that if one statement is wrong that it makes any difference.”But the pope said, “You don’t understand” – and the pope was right. He said, “When one statement is proved wrong, then thousands of problems will arise. One: that God can be wrong. And if he is wrong about one statement, what is the certainty about other statements?” Just one brick taken out of the palace, and the whole palace may collapse.“I cannot allow,” the pope said, “any statement in the Bible to be wrong.”His argument is significant. Today not only one thing about the old mind, the old society, is wrong, but so many things are wrong that it needs an absolute idiot to still believe in it. Just a little intelligence and it is impossible to be part of the old mind. It has lost credibility – and not in one place, but all over the world. There are different kinds of old traditions, but they all have come to a point where so many things are scientifically proved wrong.You will be surprised to know:A Jaina monk had come to see me; he had collected millions of rupees to make a lab to prove that man has not reached the moon. He wanted my support, that I should be the director of his lab. He would give any finance that was needed, but it had to be proved that no man has stepped on the moon.I said, “Why are you so worried about it?”He said, “You don’t understand. In Jainism, the moon is a god, not a planet. You cannot walk on a god. They have not only walked on a god, they have brought stones and other things from the moon to be studied on the earth. It has to be proved that they are deceiving the whole world, that they had taken all these things from the earth, and they have brought them back. Nobody has been to the moon; nobody can have been, otherwise the whole system of Jainism will collapse.”I said, “Just for a single thing, that the moon proves to be a planet not a god?”He said, “If one thing is wrong, then everything becomes suspicious. We cannot afford anything to be wrong.”I said, “You are too late! Many things have already been proved wrong. You are not very knowledgeable. You have simply been reading the newspapers, and because it is a recent event, man landing on the moon… Otherwise in three hundred years science has destroyed much that all the religions have believed in for centuries.”That man was really in tremendous anguish. I said, “For you, being a monk, it does not matter whether anything is wrong or right – your search is for the truth, for peace and silence. You are getting so upset; your very anguish shows that your own mind is shattered. It is not a question of Jaina scriptures, or the Jaina tradition, it is a question of your mind.“You are collecting all this money, not for Jaina scriptures but to save your sanity; otherwise you would go insane. You have sacrificed your whole life, and now you find that the gods you have been worshipping are not gods but just planets, as ordinary as the earth, and very poor – no water, no plants, no life. It is your mind that is going to be shattered. How will you account for your whole life?”This is the situation of many people of intelligence. Either they are going insane – you can see that psychotherapy and other schools of therapies are growing fast, and they are the most highly paid people. People are going through psychoanalysis for years. In fact people have started boasting. In women’s clubs you can hear it, that one woman will be saying, “How many years have you been in psychoanalysis? – just seven years? I have been in psychoanalysis for fifteen years.” It has become something of pride. But to be in psychoanalysis simply means you are insane; otherwise why are you taking the treatment? And it is spreading.But the most intelligent people are rushing toward the East to find some way, some method, some meditation – Yoga, Zen, Sufism, Hasidism. Somewhere somebody must know how to get over this critical stage, how to go beyond the traditional mind and still remain centered, sane, and intelligent. Thousands of people are moving toward the East.It is very hilarious because thousands of people are coming from the East to the West to study science, medicine, engineering, electronics, and the people who know all these are going to the East, just to learn how to sit silently and do nothing.But it is a beautiful time. The grip of society is lost. Yes, the mediocre will suffer, but anyway they were not enjoying, they were not really living; they were simply being hypocrites. By being insane at least they will be real, authentic. They won’t lose anything – of course they won’t gain much.The people who will go beyond mind will create the new man, the new mind. And the most special thing to be remembered about the new mind is that it will never become a tradition, that it will be constantly renewed. If it becomes a tradition it will be again the same thing.The new mind has to become continuously new, every day new, ready to accept any unexpected experience, any unexpected truth – just available, vulnerable. It will be a tremendous excitement, a great ecstasy, a great challenge.So I don’t think this crisis is bad; it is good. A few people will lose their masks, and will be actually what they are – neurotic, psychotic – but at least they will be true and they will be honest. You may think they are mad; they are not mad, they are simply in a state of very great surprise. They have believed in the old mind too much, and it betrayed them.But the best of the intelligence will reach to heights unknown before. If even in a traditional world, a man like Gautam Buddha or Chuang Tzu or Pythagoras is possible, we can conceive that in the atmosphere that the new mind will create, a thousandfold more awakened people, enlightened people will become easily possible.If the new mind can prevail then life can become an enlightening process. Enlightenment will not be something rare, that happens once in a while to somebody very special; it will become a very ordinary human experience, that only once in a while some really idiotic person misses.Osho,I have hesitated for long to ask this question because it seems to reach deep down into my unconscious, and there is a lot of fear connected with it.For the past fifteen years I have experienced tension of varying degrees in my heart area, for which there has been no physical explanation. It can vary from sharp, breath-taking pain, which can last for hours, to a slight feeling of pressure. It disappears when I love, melt, let-go, and when I am in harmony with my body. Does it have something to do with the name you gave me? Do I hold back? I would be grateful if you could throw some light on this.The question is from Premda, and his name has certainly something to do with the problem.It is not physical; it is certainly concerned with relaxation, total melting, forgetting oneself completely. In those moments it disappears, so certainly it is not physical. You have to learn to give more love. This is not only your problem; in varying degrees it is the problem of everybody.Everybody wants to be loved; that is a wrong beginning. It starts because the child, the small child, cannot love, cannot say anything, cannot do anything, cannot give anything; he can only get. A small child’s experience of love is of getting: getting from the mother, getting from the father, getting from brothers, sisters, getting from guests, strangers – but always getting. So the first experience that settles deep in his unconscious is that he has to get love. But the trouble arises because everybody has been a child, and everybody has the same urge to get love; nobody is born in any other way. So all are asking, “Give us love,” and there is nobody to give because the other person was also brought up in the same way.So, one has to be alert and aware that just an incident of birth should not remain a constant prevailing state of your mind. Rather than asking, “Give me love,” start giving love. Forget about getting, simply give – and I guarantee you, you will get much. But you are not to think about getting. You are not even indirectly, by the side, to watch whether you are getting it or not. That much will be enough disturbance. Simply give, because to give love is so beautiful that getting love is not so great. This is one of the secrets.Giving love is the really beautiful experience, because then you are an emperor. Getting love is a very small experience, and it is the experience of a beggar. Don’t be a beggar. At least as far as love is concerned, be an emperor, because it is an inexhaustible quality in you. You can go on giving as much as you like. Don’t be worried that it will be exhausted, that one day you will suddenly find, “My God! I don’t have any love to give anymore.”Love is not a quantity; it is a quality, and a quality of a certain category that grows by giving and dies if you hold it. If you are miserly about it, it dies. So be really spendthrift. Don’t bother to whom – that is really the idea of a miserly mind: I will give love to certain persons with certain qualities.You don’t understand that you have so much, you are a rain cloud. The rain cloud does not bother where it rains – on the rocks, in the gardens, in the ocean – it doesn’t matter. It wants to unburden itself. And that unburdening is a tremendous relief.So the first secret is: don’t ask for it, and don’t wait, thinking that you will give if somebody asks you. Give it!The founder of the theosophical movement, Madame Blavatsky had a strange habit her whole life. And she lived long, and traveled all over the world and created a world movement. In fact no other woman has been so powerful in the whole history of man, has had influence worldwide.She used to carry many bags with her, full of flower seeds. Her whole luggage was of nothing but flower seeds. Sitting in the train by the side of the window she would go on throwing seeds out of the window, and people would ask, “What are you doing? You carry so much unnecessary luggage, and then you go on throwing those seeds out of the window for thousands of miles.”She said, “These are seeds of flowers, beautiful flowers. When the summer goes and the rains come, these seeds will become plants. Soon there will be millions of flowers. I will not be coming back on the route and I will never see them, but thousands of people will see them, thousands of people will enjoy their fragrance.”She actually made almost all the railroad lines in India full of flowers, and people said, “When you will not see them again, what is your joy?”She said, “My joy is that so many people will be joyful. I am not a miser. Whatever I can do to make people joyful, happy, I will do; it is part of my love.” She really loved humanity, and did everything that she felt was right.Just give your love to anybody – a stranger. It is not a question that you have to give something very valuable, just a helping hand and that will be enough. In twenty-four hours, whatever you do should be done with love, and the pain in your heart will disappear. And because you will be so loving, people will love you. It is a natural law. You get what you give. In fact you get more than you give.Learn giving, and you will find so many people being loving toward you who had never looked at you, who had never bothered about you.Your problem is that you have a heart full of love but you have been a miser; that love has become a burden on the heart. Rather than making the heart blossom you have been hoarding it, so once in a while when you are in a moment of love you feel it disappearing. But why one moment? Why not every moment? It is not even a question of a living being. You can touch this chair with a loving hand. The thing depends on you, not on the object.Then you will find a great relaxation and a great disappearance of your self – which is a burden – and a melting into the whole.This is certainly a disease, in the literal meaning of the word: it is a dis-ease. It is not sickness, so no physician can help you. It is simply a tense state of your heart which simply wants to give more and more. Perhaps you have more love than other people, perhaps you are more fortunate, and you are making out of your fortune a great misery for yourself. Share it, without bothering to whom you are giving. Just give it, and you will find tremendous peace and silence. This will become your meditation.One can come to meditation through many directions; perhaps this is going to be your direction.Osho,What I find really amazing about your childhood is that, unlike most of us as children, you seem to have an intrinsic and undeniable understanding that your parents' interpretation of reality and your experience of reality were often two different things. You insist that you are no different from us, yet this facet of your childhood alone is more than enough evidence that you house the most unique sort of intelligence.I would be grateful for your comment.Every child understands that he sees the world in a different way than his parents. As far as seeing is concerned, it is absolutely certain. His values are different. He may collect sea shells on the beach and his parents will say, “Throw them away. Why are you wasting your time?” And for him they were so beautiful. He can see the difference; he can see that their values are different. The parents are running after money – he wants to collect butterflies. He can’t see why you are so interested in money; what you are going to do with it? His parents cannot see what he is going to do with those butterflies, or those flowers.Every child comes to know that there are differences. The only question is: he is afraid to assert that he is right. As far as he is concerned, he should be left alone. It is a question of just a little courage, which is also not missing in children. But the whole society is managed in such a way that even a beautiful quality like courage in a child will be condemned.I was not willing to bow down in the temple to a stone statue. And I said to my parents, “If you want, you can force me. You have more physical force than me. I am small; you can force me, but remember you are doing an ugly act. It will not be my prayer, and it will destroy even your prayer, because you are doing violence to a little child who cannot resist physically.”One day while they were inside praying in the temple, I climbed on the top of the temple, which was dangerous. Only once a year a painter used to climb it, but I had seen the painter and how he had managed. He had put nails at the back as steps. I followed him and I was sitting on the top of the temple. When they came out they saw me sitting there and they said, “What are you doing there? In the first place, do you want to commit suicide?”I said, “No, I simply want to make you alert that if you force me, I can do anything that is within my power. This is the answer, for you to remember that you cannot force me to do anything.”They begged me, “Be quiet. We will arrange for somebody to bring you down.”I said, “Don’t be worried. If I can come up, I can come down.” They had no idea about those nails. I had been particularly watching the painter, how he managed, because everybody thought that this painter was really great. He was painting all the temples.I came down. They said, “We will never force you about anything, but don’t do such a thing! You could have killed yourself.”I said, “The responsibility would have been on you.”It is not a question that intelligence is not in the children. It is. They just don’t use their assertiveness because it is condemned by everybody. Now, everybody condemned my family because I had gone up on top of the temple – that means beyond their god. That was insulting to their god.And I said, “If a painter can go… Do you know the painter is a Mohammedan? I am at least not a Mohammedan yet.”My father said, “What do you mean, that you are not a Mohammedan yet?”I said, “Exactly what I have said. If you torture me too much I can become a Mohammedan.”I had even asked the malvi of the mosque nearby, “Are you willing to initiate me into Mohammedanism?”He said, “You want to be initiated? Your parents… There will be trouble in the town.”I said, “Don’t be worried, because you are not forcing me. I am accepting Mohammedanism. I will stand in front of the mosque and tell my parents and the whole town that I have not been forced.”He said, “This is dangerous. It may create a riot in the city and a few people may be killed.”I said, “Don’t be worried, I am not going to be a Mohammedan. Just remember, if my father asks you, say to him, ‘Yes, he has come, and if he wants to become a Mohammedan we cannot refuse.’ I am not going to come, but this much you have to tell him.”My father asked him, “Has he come to you?”He said, “He has come, and he is very insistent.”My father said, “It is better to leave him alone!”They had a meeting of the whole family, “Leave him alone; he is really dangerous. If he becomes a Mohammedan we will be condemned by the whole city. He really has gone there, and he is insisting, ‘If anything happens again to force me, then I am going to change my religion.’”That was the last time! They remained silent; they never told me to come to the temple. I never went to the temple. Slowly they learned one thing, that I am not dangerous, they should just not force me into a corner.Each child has to be assertive, that’s the only thing. What is there to lose? But children are so dependent, and I don’t see that they have to be so dependent. They told me many times, “We will stop giving you food.”I said, “Do it. I can start begging – in this very city. I have to survive, I have to do something. You can stop giving me food, but you cannot stop me from begging. Begging is everybody’s birthright.”There is no difference of intelligence, but I see differences of assertiveness because children who are obedient are honored.In my family, my other brothers would be called when guests were there, my uncles would be called: “He has come first class. He has come this, he has done this…”I would introduce myself, “I have done nothing, and all these people are just at a loss what to do with me. They never wanted me to be introduced to you, so I thought I should introduce myself!”This happened… A member of parliament was visiting the house – he was a friend of my father. They were introducing everybody, and I was not called; I was simply ignored. When I came in and I introduced myself to him he said, “But this is strange. Nobody called you.”I said, “Nothing is strange. These are all obedient people. I am disobedient – and you will have some taste of it soon.”My father said, “Leave him alone. Why should he have a taste?”I said, “He is going to speak in my school” – I was in the ninth class – “he is going to address my high school, and I am going to create trouble. I am just informing him beforehand that I am going to ask questions, and he should not think that because he is a great orator and a parliamentarian that I will be impressed by these things. Nothing impresses me.”My father told him, “Be aware of him. He will ask something, something that you cannot answer, because he is continuously harassing us. He will never ask anything that you can answer, and he has a capacity for finding things you can’t answer. How he finds, we don’t know. He asks questions that you cannot answer, and in a public meeting where you are addressing hundreds of people he can make you look a fool.”That man became really afraid. He asked me, “It will be good if you come with me, in the car” – just to persuade me not to create any trouble.I said, “Nothing will help. I can come in your car. That will simply shock my headmaster, my masters, and the whole school. But there is no way of giving me any bribe.”He said, “You look to be so strong – at this age?”I said, “I am not strong, I simply ask simple questions and I want their answers. When you come to address the school, I have every right to ask you a few things. You are continually asking in the parliament: I see your name in the newspapers everyday – questions to the prime minister, to this minister, to that minister – you should not be so much afraid of a small child. What can I ask?”But he said, “Your father is so afraid, and we have been colleagues, we have studied together; I trust in his judgment. You also look dangerous.”We went to the school. He started speaking; I stood up and asked him, “Be honest and tell everybody why you brought me in your car. Just be sincere!”He said, “Your father was right. You ask questions which cannot be answered.”I said, “This is a simple question. If you cannot answer it I can answer. You know the answer, I know the answer, I want everybody else also to know the answer.”My principal tried to settle the matter saying, “Sit down. He is our guest, and much depends on him for grants and this…”I said, “That is not my business. I am not the principal of this school, I am simply a student. I am not asking a very complicated question or any question which is dangerous to the security of the country or anything. I am just asking him why he has brought me in his car. If he accepts it sincerely I will not ask another question.”He said, “I am sorry, but it is true. What he is saying is right – it was a bribe. I thought that sitting in my car he would feel good and he would not harass me.” But he looked so embarrassed saying such small things.When I came back home, my father said, “Did you create any trouble?”I said, “I did not create any trouble, he himself created it. He asked me to sit in his car. I was going myself, walking to school. He created the trouble.”Each child, if supported by the parents to be courageous, has the intelligence to make clear that his values are different, his perceptions are different. But nobody supports, everybody tries to repress the child. The only difference you can make is in that. To me anything that was repressive was a challenge. Then I was provoked to do something – and they had to learn a lesson.The next time, I was the first to be called to be introduced, because they knew that I would come by myself and then it would become more difficult. It was better to introduce me. But they had nothing to say about me – what to say about me?So I told them, “You can say exactly the truth: ‘He is disobedient; he is a problem. He is continuously creating trouble for the family, for the neighborhood, for the whole town, teachers, students. The whole day we are tired of listening to complaints coming.’ You can simply introduce me the way I am. Why are you so afraid, when I am not afraid? These are true things.”A situation was created that instead of my being afraid, my whole family was afraid of me. Each child can do that, just a little courage is needed.One day my father said, “You have to be back in the house before nine o’clock in the night.”I said, “If I don’t come – then?”He said, “Then the door will not be open.”I said, “Then keep your door closed. I will not even knock on the door, and I am not going to come before nine. I will sit outside, and tell everybody. Whoever will be passing will ask, ‘Why are you sitting in darkness in this cold night?’ And I will tell them, ‘This is the situation…’”He said, “That means you will create trouble for me.”I said, “I am not creating it. You are giving this order. I have never thought about it, but when you say, ‘Nine is the deadline,’ then I cannot come before nine. It simply is against my intelligence. I am not doing anything; I will be simply sitting outside. If somebody asks, ‘Why are you sitting…?’ Everybody is going to ask: if you are sitting in the road, everybody who will pass is going to ask, ‘Why are you sitting here in the cold?’ Then I will have to explain, ‘This is the situation…’”He said, “Forget about that limit. Come whenever you want.”I said, “I am not going to knock. The door has to remain open. Why should the door be closed – just to harass me? There is no reason to close the door.” In my part of India the town is awake up to twelve, because it is so hot that only after twelve it starts cooling down. So people remain awake, work continues. The day is so hot that they may rest in the day and work in the night. I said, “There is no reason to close the doors when you are sitting inside and working. Leave the door open. Why should I knock?”He said, “Okay, the door will remain open. It was my fault to say to you, ‘Come before nine,’ because everybody comes before nine.”I said, “I am not everybody. If it is suitable for them to come before nine they can come. If it is suitable for me, I will come. But don’t cut my freedom, don’t destroy my individuality. Just let me be myself.”It is a simple question of asserting yourself against those who have power. But you also have subtle powers that you can use against them. For example, if I said, “I will simply sit in the road,” I am also using power. If I am sitting on top of the temple, I am also using power. If they can threaten me, I can also threaten them. But children simply fall in line just to be respectable, just to be obedient, just to be on the right path. And the right path means whatsoever their parents are showing them.You are right, I was a little different. But I don’t think it is any superiority, just a little bit of difference. And once I learned the art, then I refined it. Once I knew how to fight with people who have power – and you don’t have – then I refined it, and managed perfectly well. I always found some way. They were always surprised because they thought, “Now he cannot do anything against this” – because they were always thinking rationally.I have no devotion to reason. My devotion is basically toward freedom. By what means it is achieved does not matter. Every means becomes good if it brings freedom to you, individuality to you, and you are not enslaved. Children just don’t have the idea. They think that their parents are doing everything good for them.I always made it clear to my parents, “I don’t suspect your intentions, and I hope you don’t suspect my intentions either. But there are things on which we disagree. Do you want me to agree on everything with you? – whether you are right or wrong? Are you absolutely certain, that you are right? If you are not so absolutely certain, then give me the freedom to decide for myself. At least I will have the pleasure of going wrong on my own decision, and I will not make you feel guilty and responsible.”One just has to be alert about one thing: whatsoever your parents say, they cannot do. They cannot harm you, they cannot kill you, they can only threaten you. Once you know they can only threaten you, their threats don’t make any difference; you can also threaten them. And you can threaten them in such a way that they will have to accept your right to choose what you want to do.I made it absolutely clear to them, “If you can convince me that what you are saying is right, I will do it. But if you cannot convince me then please don’t dictate. Then you are teaching me to be a fascist; you are not helping me to be a liberated man, but somebody imprisoned.”So there are differences, but nothing that is special or superior. And children can be taught; they can all do the same, because I have tried that too, even in my childhood. Students were puzzled: I harassed the teachers, I harassed the principal, and still they could not do anything against me. And they would do something wrong and immediately they were in trouble. They started asking me, “What is the secret?”I said, “There is no secret. You have to be very clear that you are right and that you have a reason to support it. Then whoever is against you will see that. Whether he is a teacher or the principal does not matter.”One of my teachers went in great anger to the office of the principal and fined me ten rupees for my misbehavior. I just went behind him, and while he was fining me I was standing by his side. As he moved away, with the same pen I fined him twenty rupees for his misbehavior.He said, “What are you doing? That register is for teachers to fine the students.”I asked, “Where is it written? It is nowhere written in this register that only teachers can fine the students. I think this register is to fine anybody who misbehaves. If there is anywhere else where it is written, I would like to see it.”Meanwhile the principal came in. He said, “What is the matter?”The teacher said, “He has spoiled the register. He has fined me twenty rupees for misbehavior.”The principal said, “That is not right.”I said, “Do you have any written document that says that no student can fine a teacher, even if the teacher is misbehaving?”The principal said, “This is a difficult matter. We don’t have any document, it is just a convention that teachers punish.”I said, “It has to be changed. Punishment is perfectly right, but it should not be one sided. I will pay those ten rupees only if this man pays twenty rupees.” Because the principal could not ask him for twenty rupees, he could not ask me for those ten rupees, and it is still there! When after a few years I visited the school, he showed me, “Your fine is still there.”I said, “Leave it there for other students to know.”One just has to find ways…!So there must be some difference, but it is not of superiority. It is just a question of using your courage, your intelligence, and risking. What is the danger? What could those people have destroyed? At the most they could have failed me in their class – of which they were afraid, because that meant I would again be in their class the next year! – so it was really favorable to me. They wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible. That was the only power in the teacher’s hands, to fail a student.I had made it clear to every teacher, “You can fail me, it doesn’t matter. Whether I pass a class in two years or three years does not matter. This whole life is so useless – I have to pass my life somewhere. I can pass my whole life in this school, but I will make your life hell, because once the fear of failing disappears then I can do anything.” So even the teachers who were against me were giving me more marks than needed just to help me move into another class, so I was no longer a burden to them.If parents really love children, they will help them to be courageous – courageous even against themselves. They will help them to be courageous against teachers, against society, against anybody who is going to destroy their individuality.That’s what I mean: the new mind will have these different qualities. The children born under the new mind and the new man will not be treated the way they have been treated down the centuries. They will be encouraged to be themselves, to be assertive, to be self-respectful. And that will change the whole quality of life. It will become more shiny, alive, and more juicy.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 42 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The gift of being here with you is overshadowed by a sense of unworthiness. It troubles me because I don't feel as available to you as I could be. Can you help me to dissolve this?It is something very essential to understand, that people who are really worthy always feel unworthiness, and the people who are really unworthy never feel it. Not feeling it is part of unworthiness; feeling it is part of worthiness.The question is from Kirtan.It is good that one feels it, because there are no limits to unworthiness – you can go as high as you desire; it is just like the sky. And to feel it means the ego is dissolving. The ego never feels unworthy; it wants to prove that everybody else is unworthy and only it is worthy. It is humbleness that feels unworthiness and a pain which can give birth to a new life.So don’t take it as a problem. Accept it as a blessing. Let the ego completely dissolve. It cannot stand the feeling of unworthiness. There are a few things in life which function in a strange way. A real lover never feels that he loves as much as he should. He is always feeling something more can be done, something better can be done. Those feelings are part of real love. A hypocritical lover always feels that he is the biggest lover in the world. He is fake, he has no love; hence the feeling that more can be done does not arise in him. On the contrary he will try to prove that the other does not love enough.Life in one sense is very simple, and in another sense, very complex. Don’t take it at its face value. It is perfectly good to feel unworthy on the way. It will create humbleness, egolessness, gratitude, selflessness. Once you have understood that this feeling of unworthiness is one of the most beautiful gifts of life, once you start enjoying it, then it goes on opening the doors of more mysteries. A point comes when you disappear, and with your disappearance unworthiness also disappears, because it cannot hang on without you.So go on keeping it as a religious phenomenon, as part of your meditation, and it will lead you to the right place, where the last trace of your self disappears. With it, unworthiness also disappears. That does not mean you start feeling worthy; it simply means that worthiness and unworthiness become irrelevant. You are beyond both.So what is happening to you is perfectly right. Go deeply into it, and go on rejoicing – not with sadness: “I am unworthy.” That sadness will prevent. Not taking it as a problem that has to be solved, no. It has not to be solved, it has to be dissolved, but the dissolution is not in your hands. When it reaches to its ripeness, it dissolves itself. And when one does not think in terms of worth, one becomes part of the vast isness that surrounds one.There are millions of flowers. No flower feels unworthy – it may be just a grass flower – but neither does the lotus feel worthy. Those qualities don’t exist in nature because the ego does not exist there. All our problems are somehow or other related with the ego.If you were feeling worthy then it would be dangerous: that would feed the ego, nourish the ego. But you are feeling unworthy. That is perfectly the right thing to go deeply into.Osho,In discourse the other morning I had a realization that was so obvious I cannot believe I just got it: I've been dehypnotized.The process started the moment I heard your voice ten years ago. Today I felt so close to something. You could have said, “Count to three and you will be awake.”I can't believe how deeply programmed we are against hypnosis, and how ever so gently you have been pointing that out to us – so much so that we even think it is an insult when people say, “Osho has hypnotized you,” when in fact it's the greatest gift on the earth.Your patience, brilliance, compassion, mastery and wisdom has me in constant awe.I was really going to say, “Kaveesha, one… Two… Three!” But I thought, “Dehypnotizing Kaveesha before everybody else is not good manners!” so I remained silent. But she heard it anyway.What she is saying is exactly true. My talking to you has not the ordinary purpose that talking serves: indoctrination – that is not the purpose of my talks. I don’t have any doctrine; my talking is really a process of dehypnotization. Just listening to me, slowly, slowly you will be free of all the programs that the society has forced you to believe in. Just by listening with an open heart, with a receiving gratefulness, it is bound to happen.There have been hypnotists, but nobody has ever tried speaking itself as a method of dehypnotizing. It can become a music in you; it can relax you, can make you silent, can give a new rhythm to your heart, a new feeling of my presence, a new perception of reality.I may be talking about anything: it is not a question that I am talking about these things; these are by-products. I may be talking about A or B or C – which are absolutely unrelated to dehypnosis. The question is your way of listening. If it is right, then whatever I am saying will relax your being totally, and slowly, slowly your conditionings will start falling apart.I want to do it this way; I don’t want to hypnotize you – that means to make you first unconscious. This way there is no need to make you unconscious. You become more conscious, more alert. You are becoming conscious and alert in order to listen to me. But my purpose is not to teach you something, but to use teaching as an excuse to make you conscious, alert, so you can start touching the superconsciousness in you.From superconsciousness a higher quality of hypnosis arises.The ordinary methods of hypnosis can be dangerous; you can be in the hands of a person who can use you against yourself, because you are unconscious. You are not in a better state than your normal consciousness.Nobody before has used speaking to help you to become superconscious, so I need not say to you, “Drop this, drop that” – I do not have to give you post-hypnotic suggestions. Everything will be happening herenow, and it will be happening in your fully alert state, so you cannot be used, cannot be misused; you cannot be exploited.Hypnotism became condemned because people started exploiting it. Anybody who is as unconscious as you are can use the technique of hypnotism. That’s why it became condemned; otherwise such a beautiful phenomenon which can help you toward meditation would not have been condemned.My way cannot be misused. When people say to you that you are hypnotized, don’t feel hurt. Tell them, “Yes, we have been hypnotized to wake up. We have been hypnotized to enter into superconsciousness. We have not been hypnotized to go into lower realms of the mind, but to the higher superconscious or collective superconscious” – and finally if you simply go on listening to me, doing nothing, the cosmic consciousness is going to be your experience.But I have never said it before, and people have always wondered: if I don’t have a religion, don’t have a doctrine, don’t have a teaching, then why do I go on talking to people? I could not tell them; they would not understand. Only those who will experience the relaxation of superconsciousness will be able to see the point. Then certainly, as Kaveesha says, they will understand how long I have been waiting, and how long I have been patient, and how I have been condemned for things which have nothing to do with me.But I have remained silent because it does not bother me. The only thing that I am interested in is that my people should attain to the state from where they cannot fall before I leave the body.I cannot give you anything more precious.Osho,How might we sannyasins best relate with one another? We are such an amazing assortment of unique individuals – all determined to be ourselves and avoid society's impositions. Yet we are all joined by a common thread: love – our love for you – and we all long for the moment when we can melt into you, when we can finally come home.It is not difficult. Only individuals can relate; personalities cannot. Personalities are like shadows. They cannot meet, they cannot merge, because they don’t exist. Personalities are fake. That’s why in the whole world people are talking of love, but there is no love. They are talking of friendship, but there is no friendship. They are even talking of trust, but for that a tremendously powerful individuality is needed. Personalities cannot trust; they are always afraid – afraid that their reality may be exposed, may be known.As far as my people are concerned, there is no problem; it is not a question of fighting for individuality. I declare you individuals, so your individuality is not a problem, you do not have to protect it. You can mix and merge, you can be friends, you can be lovers. You can work together; you can work under each other without any fear because you have dropped the personality which was always afraid. Now you have individuality, a solid rock which is fearless.I have told you the story of Diogenes, that he was caught by four thieves. They wanted to sell him in a slave market. They were very happy to find such a beautiful, healthy individual. First they were afraid and they were hiding behind the trees near where Diogenes was sitting, thinking “He alone is enough to finish all four of us!” He was a strong man.Diogenes was listening to their whispers, “What to do? We are four, but he alone is enough…”Finally Diogenes said, “Don’t bother – just come and take me where you want.”They were very afraid: what kind of man was this? They said, “We are thieves and we want to take you to the slave market, because for you we can get the highest price anybody has ever got. We cannot normally find slaves of your individuality, beauty, proportion, strength.”Diogenes said, “Don’t be worried.” They started trying to tie him up; he said, “Stop, there is no need to bind me. Come behind me, I know the way.”They could not believe it: “This man is mad or what?” And he started moving toward the slave market. Everybody who saw them on the way thought that he was the master and they were the slaves. Those four poor thieves were so afraid: “This man can do anything. We got unnecessarily involved with this man!”He stood on the pulpit where the slaves have to stand so every buyer can see them, go around and look at them, and he shouted, “Listen, all you slaves who are here! For the first time a master is for sale. If any one of you has guts, you can purchase me. These poor fellows, four fellows you see – they need money. It does not matter to me where I am. My individuality cannot be destroyed.”There was great silence. The whole marketplace became utterly silent, because he had said, “A master is for sale.” A king who had come to look for a few slaves became interested, and he was ready to pay any price. Diogenes asked the thieves, “How much do you want? Don’t be shy – just ask it. Get the money and get lost!”They got the money. Diogenes sat on the chariot with the king, and the king said, “This is strange. You should not have done that.”Diogenes said, “Those poor fellows were in need, and as far as I am concerned, wherever I am I will remain myself.” Even the king became afraid, because only those two were in the chariot, and the man was so strong: grabbing the neck of the king, he could have simply finished him.Diogenes said, “But don’t be worried. I could finish you right now, but I will not. You have helped those four poor men. I will come with you, and I will serve as a slave, because even in slavery my freedom is intact. I am choosing it; nobody is imposing it upon me.”Do you see the difference? Only a slavery imposed is slavery; a slavery accepted, chosen, is the highest expression of freedom. You are so certain of your being, of your individuality, that you are not worried, even of becoming a slave. The king was happy. He said, “No, I will not make you a slave, but a friend. As far as I understand you must be Diogenes. I have heard about the man, and I feel that there cannot be many Diogeneses. You must be Diogenes.”Diogenes said, “I am,” and he lived with the king in the palace, naked, as he used to live in his own way. The king told him, “In the palace it looks odd, embarrassing. You should use clothes.”Diogenes said, “Then it is better you don’t make me a friend; make me a slave. If friendship cannot allow freedom, what kind of friendship is this? Make me a slave, then whatever you say I will do.” But the king had started loving the man. His sincerity, his authority, his power was magnetic. He freed him.He said, “I cannot make you a slave and I know I cannot make you a friend. In the palace, living naked, where other kings come and stay, it will be always a problem.”Diogenes said, “This is your decision. I am simply your slave. If you make me free, that’s perfectly okay. I am happy that those four poor people have been helped. I have found a beautiful way to help poor people: if sometimes somebody is poor I can tell him, ‘Take me to the slave market and sell me.’”Here with me your individuality is accepted, declared, so you need not be worried that it will be taken away, that it can be crushed by others, that somebody may enslave you, force you to do things.Don’t be worried; nobody can force you. You always have the choice. Ultimately, you are to decide, and it is good to decide in a way so the people who are with me don’t feel any antagonism between them. They love me – that is a joining thread. There is no organization. Each sannyasin is connected to me individually, but because he is my sannyasin… Other sannyasins who are joined with me have to be respectful of each other, because each of my sannyasins somehow represents me. Your love for me must be shared with my people too.Osho,I understand you to have said that in hypnosis one's problems can be worked out on an unconscious level, and that this method has the advantage over psychotherapy in that it can cover a lot more ground in a far shorter time.Is it necessary merely for the contents of the unconscious to surface during hypnosis, or does the conscious mind need to be made aware of those contents for the clearing to be complete?The conscious mind has to be made aware; otherwise there will be no change. The contents of the unconscious mind are repressed by the conscious mind. To reverse the process, they have to be brought back to the conscious mind, and the conscious mind has to express them instead of repressing them.They had gone into the unconscious because of repression; unless the reverse process of expression is there, they will remain. They can be available to the hypnotists, but the conscious mind does not know about it. For the conscious mind they are still repressed, and it is only through the conscious mind that they have a way to go out of your being.There is no door directly from the unconscious mind. A contact can be made, but there is no way for any content to go out of the unconscious mind directly; first it has to come to the conscious mind. It is just like your main gate. You have entered from the main gate. If you want to go out you will have to go to the main gate; otherwise you will remain confined.The deeper you go into the unconscious mind, the thicker the walls become. The collective unconscious mind has even thicker walls, and the cosmic unconscious mind is almost unapproachable. It is very difficult even for the hypnotist to find out what is hidden there. For the first time the unconscious mind’s contents are released through the conscious mind, bringing them to the notice of the conscious mind – not only to the notice, but the recognition, acceptance and expression. That’s why I said it should be recorded as a proof; otherwise the conscious mind will deny it.If you say to somebody, “You want to marry your mother,” the conscious mind will simply deny it, “It is all nonsense – what are you saying? I have never thought about it.” And he is right, he has never thought about it. But his mother was the first woman in his life, and he loved her and he got her love, and he has been jealous of his father since then. That’s why every society has made it a discipline to respect your father. That is just to prevent the natural tendency of being jealous and disrespectful.Every society has made it a point that you cannot even be allowed to think that you would like to love your mother; even to think of it, you will feel that you are just being mad. But there was a day in your childhood when you had longed for it. Slowly, slowly you repressed it; it was not allowable.If the hypnotist just tells you that this thing is in your unconsciousness, you are not going to accept it. So it should be recorded, and not one time but many times so that you can be made clearly alert that this content is there. Then you can relax and let that content come directly to your conscious mind – not through the information from the hypnotist.You follow me? He is telling you, but that will not help. His telling can only do one thing: if he can convince you that such a content exists in your unconscious mind, and you allow it in your silence to surface to the conscious mind, from there it can be released. You know that it is absurd; it has no meaning.Perhaps in your childhood you had the desire, but now you can understand it is meaningless and you can release it; rather than repressing it inside, you can throw it out. Only as the unconscious becomes empty does the collective unconscious start to speak. As the collective unconscious becomes empty then there is a possibility for the cosmic unconscious to speak. Once the whole lower part of your mind, the depth of your mind, is cleaned away, it is such a freshening experience, as if you are taking a shower twenty-four hours a day. Once this lower part is unburdened, then you are ready to move upward very easily.But the conscious mind is the only door for the higher, for the lower. So anything that is going to happen has to happen through the conscious mind.Sigmund Freud and his school have not been very successful for the simple reason… You will be surprised to know that first he had been an apprentice of a hypnotist, a very famous hypnotist in France. It is only there that he developed the idea of psychoanalysis: that what comes up in deep hypnosis can be brought up through dreams. But he forgot one thing, and that’s what is missing in psychotherapy.First, you cannot remember all your dreams. For six hours you are dreaming; you can remember perhaps one dream – the last, when you were just waking up. Secondly, you cannot be convinced that a dream is a reality. Thirdly, the dream is not going to repeat itself; and for any scientific work, repeated experimentation is absolutely necessary, so that you can come to a conclusion without exceptions. A dream may come once and may not come again, because there are so many dreams. So the person’s conscious mind is never convinced that this dream content has any reality.Fourthly, the dream is a different language. It is not the language of the conscious mind, it is pictorial, it is not alphabetical. That is one of the greatest troubles, and because of it, psychoanalysis has to disappear; it cannot continue. So the whole thing depends on the psychoanalyst interpreting. You can tell him the dream, but the dream says nothing unless he interprets it.Now that interpretation may be just his personal prejudice. That’s how, if you go to Freud, everything comes to sex. Whatever you dream, you cannot dream anything which he will not conclude is sexual repression. Take the same dream to Jung and it will be from the collective unconscious – a myth, a mythology from your past lives. Take the same dream to Adler and it is nothing but ambition, will to power. So if there are thousands of interpreters, there will be thousands of meanings to the dream.In hypnosis, it is not a pictorial language that the unconscious uses. It uses the same language as the conscious mind, because it is talking to a person’s conscious mind – the hypnotist’s. So it is very simple and very clear.Sigmund Freud thought that he had developed a better method, for the simple reason that it discarded hypnotism – because it was condemned, condemned by the society. But psychoanalysis has not helped.What I am doing here is: if you are just listening to me and your conscious mind becomes silent, the unconscious mind itself starts releasing its vapor. No language is needed, neither of dream nor ordinary language; it is just a repressed energy that starts coming up to the conscious and is released through the conscious. Once we have cleaned the lower side, then we can easily move to the upper realm. But for that too, one has to go through the conscious mind.The upper wing does not have anything; nothing is repressed there. So there is no question of psychoanalysis ever discovering it, or any other school of psychology ever discovering it, because it has no dreams, it has no repressions. It is utter purity.Clean the lower mind and just a simple method of meditation will give you the wings to move upward. There is no barrier. You get more and more into light, deeper and deeper into bliss, and finally you come to a point where even you are no more: nirvana.Osho,Why is it that we are never quite satisfied with who we are, and what existence has given us? We are always looking for something better to do, looking for someone else to be, always wanting what the other one has, more than what we have been given. Like the saying goes, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” Why is this?It is because you have been distracted. You have been directed where nature has not meant you to be. You are not moving toward your own potential. You are trying to be what others wanted you to be, but it cannot be satisfying. When it is not satisfying, the logic says, “Perhaps it is not enough – have more of it.” Then you go after more; then you start looking around. Everybody is coming out with a mask which is smiling, happy looking, so everybody is deceiving everybody else. You also come with a mask, so others think you are happier. You think others are happier.The grass looks greener on the other side of the fence – but from both sides. The people who are living on the other side of the fence see your grass and it looks greener. It really looks greener, thicker, better. That is the illusion that distance creates. When you come close, then you start seeing that it is not so. But people keep each other at a distance. Even friends, even lovers keep each other at a distance; too much closeness will be dangerous, they may see your reality.You have been misguided from the very beginning, so whatever you do you will remain miserable. Nature has no idea of money, otherwise dollars would have been growing on the trees. Nature has no idea of money; money is a pure invention of man – useful, but dangerous too. You see somebody with much money, and you think perhaps money brings joy: look at that person, how joyous he seems to be, so run after money. Somebody is healthier – run after health. Somebody is doing something else and looks very contented – follow him.But it is always the others, and the society has managed it so that you will never think about your own potential. The whole misery is that you are not being yourself. Just be yourself, and then there is no misery and no competition and no botheration that others have more, that you don’t have more.If you would like the grass to be greener there is no need to look at the other side of the fence; you can make the grass greener on your side of the fence. It is such a simple thing to make the grass greener. But you are just looking everywhere else, and all the lawns are looking so beautiful – except yours.Man has to be rooted in his own potential, whatever it is, and nobody should give him directions, guidance. They should help him, wherever he is going, whatever he is becoming. The world will be so contented that you cannot believe it.I have never felt any discontent, even from my childhood, for the simple reason that I never allowed anybody to distract me from what I was doing or what I was trying to be. That helped me immensely. It was difficult, and the difficulties went on growing, and now the whole world is against me. But it does not disturb me. I am perfectly happy, perfectly content. I can’t think that I could have been otherwise. In any other position I would have been miserable.I don’t have a home, I don’t have a place to live, I don’t have any money. Still, I have something that gives me absolute contentment. I have lived according to my potential, and even if death comes it will not upset me. I have lived my way. The whole world may be against me – it does not upset me. People get upset even if one person is against them. They get so upset; I cannot even understand it.Hasya was saying, “Osho, soon we will be running out of countries.”I said, “That does not matter. First we will run out of countries, then we will find something else. We can have a big boat and live on the boat.” Because I said in Crete, “If you don’t allow me any land anywhere, I will have a jet plane and I will be living on that,” they immediately started a movement that I cannot land at any airport in Europe.I am really enjoying that a single person who has no power can make these pygmy politicians just go out of their minds! I had just mentioned it, and immediately the European parliament tabled a resolution, which they will be discussing soon and passing, that I cannot land at any airport in Europe.But we will find a way. In Europe there are Communist countries – Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia – we can land at their airports. They cannot prevent me just landing. But we can have a big ship with thousands of sannyasins on it, and just live on the ship. Let them do what they can do – bomb the ship or do whatsoever they want to do – but one thing is certain, they cannot upset me.They tried in the American jails to upset me in such ways that anybody would have been upset. They would wake me up at four o’clock; sleep was impossible, so it was not a problem to me because I was just lying down with closed eyes. They would wake me at four o’clock, saying, “Get ready. At five o’clock the US marshal is coming and he will be taking you to the airport.” So I would get ready and wait. From five o’clock in the morning till five o’clock in the evening I was just sitting, waiting, and the man would appear at five o’clock in the evening.I said to him, “You must have got into some trouble – twelve hours late, and you just live three blocks away.” As we became friendly, after three days he said, “These are the tactics used to harass people. Forgive me. I was going to come at five in the evening but I said that I would come at five in the morning, so the whole day you would be sitting and waiting.”But I said, “What is upsetting in it? Anyway I would have been sitting. There is nothing else to do.”The world is against individuality. It is against your being just your natural self. It wants you just to be a robot, and because you have agreed to be a robot you are in trouble. You are not a robot. That was not the intention of nature, to make a robot of you. So because you are not what you were meant to be, what you were destined to be, you are constantly looking: “What is missing? Perhaps better furniture, better curtains, a better house, a better husband, a better wife, a better job…” Your whole life you are trying and rushing from one place to another. But the society has distracted you from the very beginning.My effort is to bring you back to yourself, and you will suddenly find all that discontent has disappeared. There is no need to be more – you are enough. Everybody is enough.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 43 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You told a story about ten years ago that I have not been able to understand:A seeker is lost in the mountains; he is tired and thirsty. It is night and he sees a silver bowl with crystal clear water which he drinks, and then he sleeps. In the morning light he sees that the bowl was in fact a dirty old skull. He laughed and became enlightened.What did he see, Osho?The story is simple, but with immense meaning. The seeker saw in the skull the whole reality, and our illusions about it. He saw what we think is, and what really is – and the difference is tremendous.He would not have taken that water, drunk that water, if he had known that it was in a dirty old skull. He thought it was a beautiful bowl with crystal clear water.Our life is lived in illusions of crystal clear water, but reality is totally different. Seeing the difference he laughed at himself. And to be able to laugh at oneself can become a breakthrough – one can become enlightened.People laugh at others, and people feel hurt if somebody laughs at them, but to come to an understanding where you see your own stupidity… Your whole life is full of it; we live in dreams, illusions, hallucinations. They do not correspond to reality at all. The reality is the dirty old skull. He laughed at himself, and in that very laughter he became a different man. Now he will live with reality, whatever it is. Now no illusions will be needed, no hallucinations will be needed to cover it, to hide it. He has seen the point.The story is simple, but it is the story of the whole pilgrimage from darkness to light, from illusions to reality.Just watch your mind, how it creates illusions about everything and then gets disillusioned and disturbed. You love a man, you love a woman – you create a certain illusion about the man or the woman. It is not the truth. Deep down you know it too. You are imposing an image. Soon it will be shattered, because no illusion can last long against reality. Soon you will find a dirty old skull. Then ordinarily you will be disappointed, miserable, and you will miss the point. If you could have laughed you would not have missed it.Even when you understand that things are not the way you had imagined them to be, you dump the whole responsibility on the other person. A woman who was beautiful turns out to be a bitch. A man you had thought to be a hero turns out to be just a henpecked husband. You are not going to laugh at yourselves. You will throw the whole responsibility on the other person: that he deceived you, that he pretended to be something that he was not, that she was not as beautiful as she was pretending – with all the make-up she deceived you. But no make-up is needed. Your illusions, your hallucinations, your lust is enough – the greatest make-up in the world.So whatever you want, whatever you desire, you project, and when that projection proves wrong, there are two possibilities. One is to dump the whole responsibility on the other person, who is simply innocent of what you were seeing in her.In fact, when you say to a woman, “You are beautiful” and this and that, she wonders, because she also looks in the mirror and she does not find anything that you are talking about. But why disturb yourself unnecessarily? Why not enjoy? It fulfills her ego. Even the ugliest woman will not object, say that you are wrong. She will smile and accept all your compliments. Standing before a mirror she may think that perhaps she is wrong. How can that man be wrong? Why should he be wrong?In each love affair both the persons are innocent, as far as they are concerned. But both are responsible for projecting upon the other something which the other is not.A Sufi story tells that Mulla Nasruddin had a beautiful house in the hills and once in a while he used to go there. Sometimes he would say it would take three weeks for him to rest, or two weeks, or four weeks, but he never managed to keep the date that he had given for his return; he would always come sooner. If he had gone for three weeks, within two weeks he would be back.His friends started asking, “You plan for three weeks, then you come back in two weeks, sometimes even in one week. What is the matter?”He said, “You don’t know. I have an old woman servant.”They said, “What has that to do with your remaining in the hills and relaxing?”He said, “First listen to the whole thing. She is so ugly. That’s why I have chosen her – she is my criterion. When she starts looking beautiful to me, then I escape, then I know: ‘Now, Mulla, this is not a safe place, and you have lost your mind.’ So I go for three weeks, but what can I do? In three days she starts looking beautiful. If I stay one day more I may propose. And she is really ugly. It is difficult to tolerate her, but I have kept her specially for this purpose, so that when I start losing my mind I will know it is the exact time to leave and come back home into the world.”You project; the projection fails. If you could laugh at yourself – that is the message of this story.The man was thirsty in the night. It was a projection. Even in the full-moon night a skull is a skull and the dirty water is dirty water. But he was thirsty; it was his thirst that projected clean, crystal clear water in a beautiful bowl. He drank with joy. In the morning he was not thirsty and there was sunlight. He looked at the bowl; it was a dirty old skull – and he had drunk from it! If he had known that it was a skull filled with dirty water, he would have rather suffered thirst than drink from it. But his thirst projected an illusion.We are doing it every moment of our lives, projecting illusions – about people, about things – and getting frustrated continuously, disgusted. The story is saying to you: these are the moments; if you can understand that it was your projection, this is the time to laugh at yourself, at your own stupidity, at your own foolishness. That will be an act of tremendous intelligence. It will free you from that constant projection, frustration – that whole vicious circle.An old monk with his young disciple was passing through the forest, going to another town. But the young man was very puzzled, because the old man had never walked like that – he was almost running and clutching his bag. Once in a while he would feel something inside the bag. The young man could not imagine what he had in the bag. The old monk was again and again asking, “Will we be able to reach the town before sunset?”The young man said, “Even if we don’t, we have nothing to fear. We can stay in the forest. We have stayed here many times, so it is not new. But today you seem to be strange.”The old man said, “We will discuss it later on. First, be fast. I don’t want to stay in the forest tonight.”By the side of the road was a well, and the sun was just setting. Before the sun set they washed themselves. They were really tired. They drank, and while the old man was washing his face he gave his bag to the young man and told him, “Be careful.”The young man said to himself, “He has never been this way before.” Out of curiosity he looked into the bag. In the bag he was carrying two bricks of gold. Now everything was clear: why the monk could not stay in the forest, why for the first time he was so afraid.While the old monk was washing his face and doing his evening prayer, the young man threw those two bricks into the forest, found two stones weighing almost the same as the bricks, and put them in the bag. The old man finished his prayer in half the time – he was in such a hurry! He immediately took the bag from the young man and the weight showed him that everything was okay. They rushed on. After a mile, it was getting dark. The old man said, “It seems to be difficult to reach to the town, and this place is dangerous.”But the young man said, “Don’t be afraid. As far as the danger is concerned, I have thrown it by the side of the well.”He said, “What do you mean, you have thrown the danger by the side of the well?”He said, “Look into your bag and you will know.”He looked into the bag and he said, “My God!” The old man laughed, threw the bag, and sat under a tree; he could not stop laughing.The young man said, “Why are you laughing so much?”He said, “I am laughing because you have done the right thing, and for almost a mile I have still been befooling myself with those stones, thinking they were gold. Now we can sleep under this tree. It is good. There is no fear and there is no hurry.”He could have been angry at the young man and missed the point. But he laughed, laughed madly, because he could see the point: “It was so stupid of me. The young man has proved far more intelligent than me. My own disciple had to teach me a lesson.”They slept the whole night, and in the morning the old man touched the feet of the young man and thanked him, “Although I am your master, you helped free me from an illusion. I slept so deeply the whole night. I had not slept for a few nights because of that bag; those golden bricks would not let me sleep. Even in the night I was groping in the bed and trying to find out whether they were there or not. Those bricks had become so important that I lost my joy, I abridged my prayers, I abridged my meditation.”As far as existence is concerned, gold and rocks are not different – it is human illusion, we have projected it. If man is no longer in this world, gold will not be gold; although it will still be itself, there will be no difference in the valuation between it and a rock. The valuation and the difference is our projection – and then we suffer.So the insight in that small anecdote is great. If you can laugh at yourself when any of your illusions fall away, soon you will be able to live without illusions, to live without hallucinations, to live without projections. And to live without all these things means to live in peace, and to live in silence, and to celebrate the small things of life.Osho,I remember once hearing you tell us that Buddha's definition of truth was: that which works. It struck me as almost audacious, and yet totally pragmatic, and for both reasons I loved it.My understanding is that your definition of truth is probably the same, that you will do and say anything at all, in the name of truth, that might prod us in the right direction. I would love to hear you speak to us on this.It is true. I can say anything if it directs you toward truth. Of course truth cannot be said, it can only be pointed at. I can use anything that points toward it. Perhaps for different people different pointers are needed. To me it does not matter what I say. What matters is whether it leads you in the right direction: toward your illumination.Yes, my definition is exactly the same: truth is that which works. It is pragmatic, and Gautam Buddha was a very pragmatic man, very scientific. This definition can be called scientific too.All the definitions of science are nothing but proof for this definition. We don’t know what electricity is, we only know how it works. We don’t know anything about atomic energy, what it is, but we know how it works. The knowledge of how it works is the whole science of it.The ultimate truth is not different. And the master’s function is to lead you, to direct you, to push you in a direction where you will find the truth. He cannot give it to you, but he can create devices which will lead you to it. In a very subtle way what the master says is not meant to be understood; it is meant to be drunk so that it reaches your blood, your bones, your marrow, and you start moving in a certain direction – not knowing where you are going, but the master knows where you are going.If you are going on the right track, you will find his blessings and his love showering on you. That will be the only indication that you are on the right path. One day you will find the truth and then you will laugh, because what was said had nothing to do with it. But it certainly turned your attention toward it.I have always told this story:A house is on fire and small children are in the house playing. They are so involved in their play that the whole neighborhood is shouting, “Come out! The house is on fire!” But they are enjoying that too. The flames are all around and the children are in the middle of the house – they have never seen such fireworks.They are not listening to the crowd. Then the father, who had gone to the market, comes and people say, “Now do something. All your children will be dead. The house is almost going to collapse.”The father went close and shouted, “I have brought your toys – all the toys that you have asked for. Come out.” Just the back door of the house was not burning yet.They all rushed out and asked the father, “Where are the toys?”The father said, “You will have to forgive me. I have not brought them today, but tomorrow I will bring them certainly.”They said, “Why did you unnecessarily disturb our game?”He said, “I have not disturbed your game. You do not understand. The house is on fire; you would have died. I simply lied to you about the toys, because I knew that it was the only thing that could bring you out.”Now, toys and fire seem to have no connection, but in that particular situation the father functioned as a master. He gave the children an indication that saved their lives. Although now they are aware he lied, they will not complain about it. He lied out of compassion. He lied because he loved them; he lied because he wanted to save their lives.Truth cannot be said, so whatever can be said is going to be a beautiful lie – beautiful because it can lead toward truth. So I make a demarcation between lies: beautiful lies and ugly lies. Ugly lies are those which take you away from truth, and beautiful lies are those which take you close toward truth. But as far as their quality is concerned, both are lies. But those beautiful lies work; hence in some way they partake in the flavor of truth.Osho,A question I have had since I was a kid and started seeing the ways of the world is: Why do people treat each other like they do? Where is the love, the compassion and the respect for each other? I think that everybody is longing to live in love and harmony with himself and all the human beings around. And I don't think there is any longing for hate, violence, and power over other people – but this is what I see happening.What is it that makes people live this unnatural and miserable life? Is it all conditioning, or is there something in man that makes him willing to go astray?It is both. First, there is something in man that leads him astray. And secondly, there are people whose interest it is to lead human beings astray. Both together create a false, fake human being. His heart longs for love, but his conditioned mind prevents him from love.You will be surprised to know that Adolf Hitler never allowed his girlfriends to sleep in his room for one simple reason: how can you trust? The woman may shoot you in the night, mix poison in your water. What is the guarantee? She may be just pretending that she loves you. It may be just a conspiracy. There was no way to find out whether it was a conspiracy or true love for him. To be on the safe side he never allowed any woman with whom he had been in contact to sleep in his room.He never allowed anyone to be friendly with him; he always kept Goebbels, or any of his other close associates at a distance. It was said that there was not a single person who could put his hand on his shoulder, like a friend. His conditioning was that too much closeness was dangerous. The other may do harm to you. He may come to know something about you which he may use against you. It is better to keep him at a distance. Everybody is ambitious, everybody wanted to be in his place, so although they were looking very friendly, deep down they were all enemies, competitors; they could kill him. He had no friends. And what kind of love was this, that he could not trust the woman in his room?One of his women remained for many years in love with him, and there was no reason to suspect her. But suspicion needs no reason. One day she wanted to go and see her mother who was ill, in the same town. Adolf Hitler said no; yes was very difficult for him to pronounce, for anything.There is a deep psychological meaning in it. No gives you power. Yes does not give you power. Whenever you say no, you can feel power; whenever you say yes, you can feel love, you can feel compassion, but not power. Words have their own qualities. Those qualities you cannot find in the dictionaries. But in actual life if you go into the psychology of words, each word has its unique individuality. No is not simply a denial; it is an assertion of power.There was no need to say no. She was going just to see her sick mother, and she would be back before he returned from the office. But yes was not his word. He only knew how to order, how not to accept anybody else’s idea. Even such a small thing, which had nothing to do with power…He went to the office and the woman thought that she could manage: she could go and see her mother and return – he would not be back yet. She went, came back, and certainly she managed. But the first thing he inquired from the guard of the house was, “Has she been out? – how long?”Hitler loaded his gun and just went in and shot her – he did not even ask, he did not even give her an opportunity to say anything. That was enough. It had to be a proof for everybody else, that not to follow his order meant death. Hitler longed for love, but his mind longed for power – and you cannot ask for both.This is the problem. The child is born with a heart which longs for love, but he is also born with a brain which can be conditioned. And the society has to condition it against the heart, because the heart will be always rebellious against the society, it will always follow its own way. It cannot be made into a soldier. It can become a poet, it can become a singer, it can become a dancer, but it cannot become a soldier. It can suffer for its individuality, it can die for its individuality and freedom, but it cannot be enslaved. That is the state of the heart.But the child comes with an empty brain, just a mechanism, which you can arrange the way you want. It will learn the language you teach, it will learn the religion you teach, it will learn the morality you teach. It is simply a computer; you just feed it with information.Every society takes care to make the mind stronger and stronger so that if there is any conflict between heart and mind, the mind is going to win. But every victory of the mind over the heart is a misery. It is a victory over your nature, over your being – over you – by others. They have cultivated your mind to serve their purposes.For example, the British government ruled in India for three hundred years, and it created a certain kind of education that only produces clerks, postmasters, stationmasters. The whole program is such that it does not produce great intellectuals, geniuses, scientists – no. So if a person studies for one third of his life, he comes out of the factory of the university just a clerk. But the British government needed clerks.By the way, because the capital of India at the beginning of the British Empire was Kolkata, Bengalis were the first to be indoctrinated by the British education system. They were the first to become mediators between the land and its people, and the rulers. The rulers did not know the language of the people; the people did not know the language of the rulers. These mediators knew both.They were respected by the masses because they were so close to the rulers – second only to the rulers. But the rulers hated them. It was just a necessity to create an army of mediators; otherwise they could not rule such a huge country – there would be no understanding, no communication.But they hated these people. They called those Bengalis “babus” and the word babu became respectful all over India. Because the rulers were calling the Bengalis “babus,” the word babu became very important – so significant that even the first president of India was called Babu Rajendra Prasad. And nobody ever thought about what this word means.I told Rajendra Prasad, “You should drop it and you should make it known to the country that nobody should use this word, because it is condemnatory.” It means a man with a bad smell. Bengalis eat fish – fish and rice is their only food – and they smell of fish, from continually eating fish.Bengal is a beautiful place, and there you will find a beautiful thing: next to every house you will find a small lake. The richer people have big lakes with their palaces. The lakes are there simply to produce fish, the kind of fish the people like. Every house, even a poor man’s house has a small pond – it looks very beautiful, because a small hut may have a small pond with palm trees.But the smell is too much. I have traveled only once in Bengal and then I said, “I cannot go further than Kolkata.” It stinks – everybody stinks of fish, every house stinks of fish. That is their main diet.Babu is a Persian word. Bu means smell and ba means with. The British got India from the Mohammedans, whose languages were Persian, Arabic and Urdu, and it was from them that they got this idea of babu. It was a condemnation, but to the masses it became the most respectful word.India must have more universities than any other country – one hundred universities and thousands of colleges – and the whole purpose was just to serve the Empire. The whole education was to be obedient, not to be rebellious. It was absolutely against any idea of revolution.India would have remained a slave country for centuries, but Britain committed just one mistake: it allowed a few rich people’s sons and daughters to be educated in England, and that was the trouble. These were the people who brought the idea of freedom to India. No Indian educated in India had any idea of freedom, but a few rich people sent their sons, their daughters, to be educated in England – because if they were educated in England then they would be given the highest posts in India. A holder of the same degree from an Indian university would never reach that post, but from England he came qualified for the highest post.Britain unknowingly created its own enemies. They were the people who found in Britain a different kind of education, who learned about democracy, who learned about freedom, who learned about individual rights, who learned about freedom of expression. And they came back to their country full of utopian ideas about how India could become independent. So, all the fighters against the British regime were basically educated in England. And I don’t think the British have even realized the fact, because nobody has noted it anywhere.One man who was very influential in India, Subash Chandra, was educated in Britain. Anybody who was educated in Britain was immediately absorbed in the highest government service, the Indian Civil Service – ICS. Every student coming back from England had to give an interview to the governor of his state. Subash had come with the full desire to fight the British Empire, not to serve it, but still he went to give his interview. And Bengalis have a certain habit: they always carry their umbrellas. Nobody knows why. I have asked many people because it is not raining, it is not hot… But traditionally it is part of them. Without an umbrella a Bengali is not a full Bengali; his umbrella is absolutely necessary. And they give reasons, because they are intellectual people.They say, “The rains can come at any time, it is unpredictable. One should always be prepared for anything. Right now it is cloudy, but the sun can come out and it will be hot. Moreover, there are so many dogs, and for this and that you can use your umbrella. Even if you have to fight with someone, the umbrella is handy.”So Subash went with his umbrella and his hat into the governor’s office, and the governor was very much annoyed that an Indian should behave in this way. He should remove his hat, to be respectful – and he had come to give an interview. So the governor said, “First remove your hat. You don’t know even how to be respectful.”Subash took his umbrella out, and on the other side of the table was the governor. He hooked his neck with his umbrella and said, “If you want respect, then you should be respectful too. You should have stood. If you cannot stand, you should not expect any respect from me. And I am not interested in your ICS. I have just come to see how you behave with people. But don’t think that you can misbehave with me. People like you used to polish my shoes in England” – naturally in England a white man will polish the shoes – “so just because you are white does not mean anything. Keep your service to yourself.”These were the people who created the whole freedom movement. The British government forgot completely: if you have created a certain educational system in India to produce only clerks, servants, slaves, then you should not allow Indians to be educated in England, because those people will be dangerous to the Empire. And they proved dangerous – they destroyed the Empire – but the whole credit goes to the British universities.So the mind is empty, it is the brain; you can put anything in it. With twenty-five years of education you can make it so strong that you forget your heart; you will always remain miserable. The misery is that your heart can only give you joy, can only give you happiness, can only make you dance. The mind can do arithmetic, but it cannot sing a song. Those are just not the capacities of the mind. So you are torn apart between your nature, which is your heart, and the society that is in your head. Certainly you are born – everybody is born – with these two centers; that is the difficulty.One center is empty. In a better society it will be used in accordance with the heart, to serve the heart. Then it will be a great life, full of rejoicings. But up to now we have lived in an ugly society, with rotten ideas. They have used the mind. And that vulnerability is there – mind can be used.Now the Communists are using it in one way; the Fascists used it in Germany in one way; all the other religions are using it in different ways. But that vulnerability, that you have a mind which you bring empty, is with every individual. In fact it is a blessing of existence – but misused, exploited. It is given to you empty so that you can make it perfectly subservient to your heart, to your longings, to your potential. Nothing is wrong in it. But the vested interests all over the world have found it a beautiful opportunity for them – to use the mind against the heart. So you remain miserable and they can exploit you in whatever way they want.That’s why the whole world is miserable. Everybody wants to be loved, everybody wants to love; but the mind is such a barrier that neither does it allow you to love, nor does it allow you to be loved. In both cases the mind comes in the way and starts distorting everything. Even if by chance you meet a person you feel love for and the person feels love for you, your minds are not going to settle. They have been trained by different systems, different religions, different societies.One of my friends married an American girl. He was a professor of physics, and while studying in America he fell in love with a girl, a beautiful girl, and he married her against his parents’ wishes. So they became enemies. His parents did not receive them in their home when they came back to India.I had to give a party, a reception for their marriage. But in a month I saw that it could not last. One of my friends was staying with me and he is a very beautiful person – jack of all trades, master of none – but he knows everything. So he is very interesting and very influential. Superficially he will impress you on any subject, on anything. You will find out later on that it is just superficial, but by that time he has done his work.All that he does is borrow money. He is a PhD, he could have been a professor, but he says, “I don’t want to bother with all this. I enjoy borrowing.”I said, “You should think about how long this can last.”He said, “You don’t see. I never borrow from the same person again. And the world is so big and life is so short. I will manage.”So he started flirting with the American girl. She was very much impressed – he is a very impressive person – and the professor who had married her was feeling so jealous. He had just an Indian mind. The Indian mind cannot conceive that his wife can go with somebody else to a swimming pool. In the first place no Indian woman will go to a swimming pool and even if she goes, she will go with her husband. But she was going with some stranger.She was going out bicycling with him; they were playing cards. The husband was in the university, but he was continually worried about his wife and that fellow – because he was completely free; he did nothing.Soon the marriage broke up. They were fighting continuously. I told them, “You love each other, but you don’t understand the situation. Your minds are cultivated very differently. She can’t see that there is anything wrong if she goes to the swimming pool with a friend. She has been doing that from her childhood. You cannot conceive of the very idea. Your idea is what you have seen in your family, in your society – that the wife should not even open the cover over her face.” The sari that is used by the Indian women is pulled down to make a cover over the face. She should not take the cover off before strangers. “You have been brought up with such people; you cannot understand your wife holding hands with some stranger. They are enjoying and playing tennis and going for a walk, and you are just sitting and boiling up unnecessarily. You should have thought. Your parents were right – this kind of marriage is not going to succeed.”I have not seen any marriage between Indians and foreigners succeeding. They always fail, for the simple reason that the two minds are brought up with different ideas, filled with different programs.It is everybody’s birthright to be happy, but unfortunately the society, the people with whom we have been living, who have brought us into the world, have not thought anything about it. They have just been reproducing human beings like animals – even worse, because at least animals are not conditioned.This conditioning process should be completely changed. The mind should be trained to be a servant of the heart. Logic should serve love. And then life can become a festival of lights.

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Beyond Psychology 01-44Category: THE WORLD TOUR

Beyond Psychology 44 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When I go to sleep at night, I am swept away by such incredibly surreal dreams that I wake up in the morning surprised I am in my same bed.Osho, is there a way to channel this phenomenal energy that goes into dreaming at night, into watchfulness?The phenomenon of dreaming and watchfulness are totally different things. Just try one thing: every night, going to sleep, while you are just half awake, half asleep, slowly going deeper into sleep, repeat to yourself, “I will be able to remember that it is a dream.”Go on repeating it till you fall asleep. It will take a few days, but one day you will be surprised: once this idea sinks deep into the unconscious, you can watch the dream as a dream. Then it has no grip over you. Then slowly, as your watchfulness becomes more sharp, dreams will disappear. They are very shy; they don’t want to be watched.They exist only in the darkness of the unconscious. As watchfulness brings light in, they start disappearing. So go on doing the same exercise, and you can get rid of dreams. You will be surprised. Getting rid of dreams has many implications. If the dreams disappear then in the daytime your mind-chattering will not be as much as it used to be. Secondly, you will be more in the moment – not in the future, not in the past. Thirdly, your intensity and totality of action will increase.Dreaming is a disease. It is needed because man is sick. But if dreams can be completely dropped you will attain a new kind of health, a new vision, and part of your unconscious mind will become conscious. So you will have a stronger individuality. Whatever you do, you will never repent, because you will have done it with such consciousness that repentance has no relevance.Watchfulness is the greatest magic that one can learn, because it can begin the transformation of your whole being. It is only through watchfulness that resurrection happens: you are reborn.Osho,Why is it difficult for some people to be hypnotized? Is it because we do not trust the person who is doing it to us, or are we not as receptive as those who can be?There are many reasons possible. The most important is, if the person’s intelligence quotient is very low he will not be able to understand what hypnosis is, and what he is supposed to do. Idiots cannot be hypnotized. It is something to be remembered, that animals can be hypnotized, but idiots cannot be hypnotized. Animals may not have our kind of intelligence, but they have their kind of intelligence, they are not idiots.The idiot is one whose mind has not grown at all, who is zero. He cannot understand what is being said, where it is going to lead him, and why he should do it. Intelligent conversation is impossible. The idiot looks like man, but inside he is far behind even the animals.First, the idiot cannot be hypnotized. Second, the man who is always suspicious of everything, who has an ingrained suspicion, cannot be hypnotized. His suspicion will not allow him to go with the hypnotist. Thirdly, the people who think they are intellectuals, who are full of borrowed knowledge, but don’t have any intelligence of their own, cannot be hypnotized, because they have an idea that intellectuals cannot be hypnotized – and they are intellectuals. Finally and basically, a man who cannot trust cannot be hypnotized.It needs total trust, because you are going into darkness, the unknown, and you don’t know what the intentions of the man are, and you don’t know what he can make you do while you are under hypnosis.Once I was in Mumbai, staying with a very rich family, and they insisted to me, “You are always working, involved with people, meetings, committees; keep this evening free. We are going to invite a great hypnotist and he is going to show us a few tricks of hypnotism – you will enjoy it.”Not for entertainment, but just to see what kind of person this great hypnotist was, I remained. They had a small auditorium in the house and they had invited their rich friends, so there were at least two hundred people. The hypnotist called for five people – “Anybody can come.”Five people went up. He hypnotized them and then told them, “Just in front of you cows are standing. Now start milking them.” They immediately sat in the Indian way and started milking the cows. There were no cows, and people were laughing and enjoying, but the hypnotized person could not hear anybody. Things like this he did.After the show he was introduced to me. I told him, “Stop this nonsense. Hypnotism is condemned because of people like you. Now the people who have seen how you befooled the ones who had come to be hypnotized will never be able to be hypnotized. They have lost trust. You will make a laughingstock of them. You are not doing a service to the science of hypnosis. You are an enemy. Find some other job. You don’t see the simple point that two hundred people are seeing you befooling five people. Now these people will carry this idea in their minds.”All the intellectuals all over the world have the idea that intellectuals cannot be hypnotized. But the real reason is because they cannot trust. Trust needs a man of heart, of feelings, not of thoughts. And all the people who are using hypnotism as an entertainment should be stopped by law – it is a crime. They are spoiling a tremendously valuable science.Only a master should be allowed – and then too, he should hypnotize only his own disciples; not to make a mockery of it, but to increase the consciousness of the disciples, to increase the intelligence of the disciples, to change their wrong habits to make them more integrated, more consolidated, to give them more courage and stamina.When other students, other disciples see that hypnotism can be a blessing – the same man who was so much afraid has lost all fear, even the fear of death; the same man who was always miserable has lost his misery and is always in a state of joy – more trust will be created, more and more people will be ready to be hypnotized. That readiness, that trust, that receptivity is missing because for centuries hypnotism has been misused. People like magicians, showmen, entertainers – the wrong kind of people – have made hypnosis condemned.It can become such a great benediction to humanity. You need trust, you need receptivity, you need intelligence to go into it. All these things will be strengthened when you attain new dimensions, new talents, new genius. Then you will be more able to go back into it.Soon everybody who has had a few sessions of being hypnotized by a loving compassionate master, who cannot harm you, who cannot imagine hurting you, can start in new phase: self-hypnosis.In deep hypnotic states the master will tell you, “Now you are able to hypnotize yourself – you don’t need me, you don’t need anyone else.” So he is not going to use hypnosis to create a spiritual slavery. He will use it to give you more spiritual freedom than you ever had before. The day you can hypnotize yourself is a great day; something valuable has been achieved.Then you can do miracles with it, upon yourself. You can change things that you have always been trying to change; but the more you try to change them, the more difficult it becomes.I used to stay in Kolkata with an old man, Sonalal. He was famous all over India as the greatest gambler. He never paid a single cent to the government in taxation because he never kept any books. I was surprised at how he maintained all his businesses – gambling winnings of millions – how he kept the accounts. And when I stayed in his house, I asked him. He took me to his bathroom: all over his bathroom were his books, on the walls.No income tax officer could conceive that on his walls in the bathroom he kept all the accounts from different countries, of different people: where, in which bank, what number, telephone numbers, everything. He said, “This is my accounts office.”He even had six telephones in his bathroom. He was continuously on the phone: two phones were always in his hands. You could not talk with him easily; it was so difficult.He told me that he belonged to a certain religion which values celibacy as the greatest spiritual thing. He had taken the vow of celibacy three times. One man was with me and he was very much impressed. When Sonalal had gone for some work inside the house he said, “This is a great man – three times!”I said, “You are an idiot. When he is saying he took a vow of celibacy three times, it simply means that the fourth time he never took it. He understood that it was impossible.”He said, “But I never thought about it. I simply thought, ‘Three times!’”Sonalal came back and I asked him, “What happened the fourth time?”He said, “I could not gather the courage, because three times I failed, and each time I became more guilty, ashamed of myself. And I am old.” He was at that time seventy years old. “In the first place, to stand up in the congregation and take the vow of celibacy, people laugh – they see this seventy year old, and that too for the fourth time.”I said, “There is no need. Your religion and your religious leaders don’t know. Celibacy is possible without repression, and at such a stage I will not call it a crime, but it has to be done through self-hypnosis. There is no need for any vow to be taken.”He was immensely excited. He said, “Do whatever… But I want to be celibate before I die, because this is the only thing in which I have failed in my life. I have never failed in anything.” He gave millions of dollars to the freedom movement. So, all the leaders who became prime ministers, and presidents and cabinet ministers looked to him as a father figure.Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the prime minister, told him, “It was okay not to give taxes to the British government, but now it is your own government.”He said, “Remember, it does not matter to me which government it is. I can donate twice the amount that you think I should pay in taxation, but taxation? – that I cannot do. And you cannot catch hold of me, because I don’t have any books. Except for me, nobody knows how much money I have, how much money is invested, where it is invested, how it is invested. I don’t even have a secretary. So never ask for any tax.“You can always ask for a donation. If your government needs a donation, I am ready. Just as I was giving to you when you were fighting for freedom, I can give to you now, when your government needs it.” And he never gave any tax, even to the independent Indian government.He said, “I have my own principles. I am nobody’s servant. But about the celibacy there is a wound in me. Three times I have failed. And I don’t want to die a failure in anything.” He was a man of rare courage. I have seen people of different kinds, but I have never found any man of that courage.When he had met me first in Jaipur – that was his home town – listening to me, he came, touched my feet and gave me ten thousand rupees. But I said, “I don’t need rupees, because I am simply traveling alone and my friends can take care of my expenses, traveling, food, accommodation. There is no need.”Tears came to his eyes, and he said, “Don’t refuse. Don’t hurt me, because I am a poor man. I don’t have anything I can give to you – I have only money. You can’t find a more poor man than me – just money and nothing else. So when somebody refuses money, he is refusing me, because I don’t have anything else. Don’t refuse. If you want to throw it away you can throw it away; once I have given it to you, it is none of my concern.”I gave that money to the institution that was organizing my lectures in Jaipur, and from that day – he was very old – he became very friendly to me, and he said, “I have houses in all the big cities of India. So wherever you go, you can stay in my house. Just inform me so I will be there.”He had beautiful mansions everywhere – Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Simla, Kolkata. He said, “I have earned enough, just this celibacy is heavy on me.”I said, “That’s a very simple matter. At this age it is perfectly right.” I hypnotized him two, three times while I was with him. Then I gave him a posthypnotic suggestion: now you will be able to hypnotize yourself.Once that posthypnotic suggestion is given, the person becomes able to hypnotize himself. Any strategy can be used: count from one to seven, or one to ten, and tell yourself, “I will be back in ten minutes” – never forget that, because otherwise there is nobody to wake you up. You will not die, but you may spend almost the same period under hypnosis as in sleep – six to eight hours. If you have time then there is no need to say that, because the hypnotic sleep has a totally different beauty: it is so soft, so silent; it is as if you are no more. And suddenly you come back.I said, “Before going into hypnosis, repeat three times, ‘I want to remain celibate,’ and that’s enough.”After six months I met him again in Chennai, and I asked him, “What about celibacy?”He said, “This is a wonder. Without any vow, without going to a spiritual head, confessing, it has simply disappeared. I simply wonder why sex so dominated me. I don’t even remember it.”You will be surprised to know that in hypnosis even operations can be done; big, dangerous operations can be done without any anesthesia. It is an unexplored science, unnecessarily condemned by a few idiots who have been making an entertainment of it.Trust is the foundation to begin with. You can even start by yourself, but the problem is, you don’t trust yourself; otherwise there is no problem, there is no need for anybody else to hypnotize you. You can hypnotize yourself. But that is the difficulty: nobody trusts himself. You know yourself, you know how deceptive you are, you know how cunning you are, you know you say one thing and you don’t mean it. You know that you decide that tomorrow morning you will get up early, and when you are deciding it, even at that time you know that it is not going to happen.So you cannot trust yourself – that is the problem. That’s why somebody else’s help is needed, somebody you can trust, somebody in whose hands you can leave yourself without any fear. And the person who hypnotizes you, if he really loves you, would like you to get into self-hypnosis as soon as possible, because then you are totally free. Then you can do whatsoever you want to do with it.If you want to stop smoking you can do it so easily. If you want to change anything in you which you think is impossible, you can give it a try – nothing is impossible. You have decided many times to change this, to change that, but you have always failed, because the decision remains in the conscious and the action comes from the unconscious – they don’t meet.The unconscious never hears anything that the conscious is deciding, and the conscious cannot control the unconscious – the unconscious is so vast. The secret of hypnosis is that it takes you to the unconscious, and then you can put the seed of anything in the unconscious, and it will grow, blossom. The blossoming will happen in the conscious, but the roots will remain in the unconscious.As far as I am concerned, hypnosis is going to be one of the most significant parts of the mystery school. Such a simple method, which only demands a little trust, a little innocence, can bring miraculous changes in your life – and not in ordinary things only. Slowly it can become the path of your meditation.You meditate, but you don’t succeed. You don’t succeed in watching; you get mixed up with thoughts, you forget watching. You remember later on, “I was going to watch, but I am thinking.” Hypnosis can help you; it can make the watcher and the thoughts separate.For spiritual growth I don’t think there is anything more important than hypnosis.Osho,As you have announced each new phase of your work, I have been immensely excited and said to myself, “Great! Now we are really going to begin the work.” And each phase in its turn has been more amazing than the one before it.Now you speak of a mystery school. My mind shouts out, “Hey, that sounds esoteric, and Osho always insists that truth is not esoteric, but absolutely pragmatic, an open secret.” That's what my mind says.If things are otherwise though, then count me in. I am coming with you all the way. Also, the mystery school has begun already, has it not?”It has begun. And truth is both: it is pragmatic and it is esoteric.I was emphasizing that it was pragmatic, because in those phases I did not want my people to be involved in any esoteric work. The pragmatic work is the right foundation. Without that foundation, esoteric work is just dreaming. So I was continuously against esoteric work.I am a very mathematical person, in the sense that when the foundation is being laid, you should not talk about the temple that is going to be built upon it, and how it is going to be, what kind of architecture – because all that will disturb the work on the foundation. I wanted you to be totally concerned only with the foundation, so that later on we can forget the foundation and we can start building the temple.Truth is a mystery, and it can be discovered only in a mystery school. This phase is going to be the most valuable; all that we have done before was a preparation. The mystery school will create the purification, and the outcome will be perfection.That’s why people who look at me only intellectually will find contradictions. But those who have a more comprehensive view of life will not find any contradiction. I have denied esoteric work, knowing perfectly well that one day I will have to introduce you to the esoteric work. But everything in its time, not before; otherwise it can simply create confusion.If esoteric work is introduced to you without any foundation, you are not going to work for the foundation, because that is not interesting. The esoteric work is really very interesting, but I don’t want you to make a temple without a foundation. It has happened many times; then the temple falls and destroys those who were building it.The word esoteric simply means you cannot put it objectively, scientifically. It is something inner, something subjective, something so mysterious, so miraculous that you can experience it but you cannot explain it. You can have it, but still you cannot explain it. It remains beyond explanation. It is good that there is something in life which you cannot bring down to language, which you cannot bring down to the objective world, something which remains always beyond. You can become one with it – and that is going to be the work of the school.I have been spontaneous in my work, but these are the mysteries of life, that existence itself has taken care. I have left it to existence, “Whatever you want me to do, I will do.” I am not the doer; I am just a passage for existence to reach people. So I have never planned, but existence functions in a very planned way. So all the phases that have passed were necessary, and now we are ready to enter into the last phase – the ultimate ecstasy.Ecstasy cannot be pragmatic. Love cannot be pragmatic. Trust cannot be pragmatic. All that is valuable is esoteric.Osho,In last night's discourse, listening to you, I went into a state where your words became sounds, your voice became music, and in the gaps between your words, it felt as if I found myself rising up into the sky. At first I thought I was going to fall asleep, but it turned out not to be like that. Would you please help me in understanding this?I have told you the story of the Sufi mystic who was thought to be a little eccentric. Even his disciples were afraid that he could create a situation which would be very embarrassing to them.Once it happened…He was going to the mosque to deliver a religious discourse and he sat on his donkey in such a way that the whole city laughed. The disciples were just feeling ashamed, because he was not facing the way the donkey was going; he was sitting with his back toward the mosque where the donkey was going and he was facing his students who were following him.Naturally people came out of the shops, out of their houses and laughed and they said, “This man is really mad. It is strange that a few people think he is a master. Now look at what nonsense he is doing. Is this the way to sit on a donkey?”All the students were feeling very bad: to go with the master anywhere is a trouble. When they had reached the mosque the students asked, “Before we enter we want some explanation: Why did you do this?”He said, “I thought over it very much, meditated over it. If I sit the way people sit on their animals then my back will be toward you, and that is insulting; that is not being respectful toward you.”One student said, “Then you should have told us. We could have been ahead of you.”He said, “Then it would have been insulting toward me. Your back toward me? – that would be even worse. So finally I figured out that the best way is that I sit facing you, and you follow me. There is no religious scripture in which it is written that you should always sit on the donkey in such a way. It is not irreligious. There is no book of etiquette in which it is written how to sit on a donkey.“It is our donkey and nobody has the right to be bothered about it. And I have found absolutely the right way: I am facing you, you are facing me; nobody is being disrespectful toward anybody else. What is wrong in it?”This master was staying with a devotee, and they were worried that he may do something: “He is bound to do something to create a scene, and the neighbors will gather. It is good that he has come in the night. We should put him in the basement and lock it so no problem arises, at least in the night: so we can sleep silently and the neighbors can sleep silently.”But in the middle of the night they heard roaring laughter coming from the roof. They said, “My God, how has he managed to reach the roof?”They rushed up, and he was laughing and rolling around, and he said, “It is such a great experience. You did well to put me in the basement, otherwise I would have missed.”They said, “Please tell us, what has happened?”He said, “I started falling upward. The whole credit goes to the roof. Somehow I clung to the roof, otherwise you would not have found me. I was falling upward so fast. I have heard that things only fall downward – this is a new experience of falling upward.”The whole neighborhood was there and everybody was coming with lamps, and they started asking, “What has happened?” And the people of the house could not even say what had happened.The master said, “Don’t be worried, I will explain; these people cannot. I started falling upward.”They all laughed and they said, “We have been telling these people, ‘Don’t get involved with that madman. He can create any situation and make you all look foolish.’”But it is a famous Sufi statement that one can fall upward. The state you are asking about, when you found that my words became sound, that my voice became music, that in the gaps between, you felt you were rising upward, this is what the Sufis mean by falling upward. The story is just symbolic – nobody can fall from the basement to the roof, but it says much.Just look at what you felt: my words became sound. Sound is the source. Sound is meaningless; when a sound is given meaning then it becomes a word. Words are secondary; sound is the source.That is why I have criticized the Biblical story that there was word in the beginning. That is impossible, because word cannot be in the beginning. Word means it has to be meaningful. But who will give it meaning? There was nobody else.In the East they are far more profound. Each ancient Hindu scripture begins with om. That is a sound; it is not a word. Om does not mean anything. It would have been better to say, “In the beginning there was sound.”You say, “Then your voice became music.” That means you are listening totally, so totally that you are not even thinking about what is being said. Naturally meaning will disappear, words will become sound. And if meaning disappears, then the voice will become music. In the gaps between the sound and the music, the silent gaps, you felt you were rising upward.In the East we have the opposite idea to gravitation and science has to accept it sooner or later. It is called levitation: just as things fall downward, things can rise upward. Gravitation is a way downward; levitation is a way upward. In utter silence you are no longer confined to your body. Your body is under the impact of gravitation; it cannot fall upward.But you are not the body, you are pure consciousness. In fact it is a miracle that you are in the body. Because of the gravitation that affects the body, you remain attached to the earth. But in absolute silence, suddenly all your attachment to the body disappears, your attachment to the mind disappears – because now words have become sound. The mind cannot conceive it. The voice has become music. For the mind to figure it out is not possible, and because the mind is in a state where it cannot control, your connections with the body become loose.Mind is your connection, and in that looseness you can feel as if you are floating upward. Your body is still sitting on the ground, so if you open your eyes you will be puzzled. But what you have experienced is not imagination; it is as true as gravitation, it is just invisible. You can feel it, but you cannot see it. Don’t be afraid of it. Let it happen more and more. Suddenly one day you will find you are close to the stars and not to the earth.The same thing can be possible through hypnosis. If a person is deeply hypnotized – that means he has been hypnotized many times and has become more and more trusting… And there are ways to check whether he has come to the point where you can experiment. You can simply say to him, “Come out of the body. You will be able to remember whatever you see.”Your consciousness, your soul, or whatever name you give to it, will float above you like a balloon, still attached to your navel with a very shiny cord, looking like silver. And you can see your body lying on the bed.In a mystery school we will need places where nobody disturbs. If such an experiment is being done, any disturbance can be dangerous. The cord can be broken – then the soul cannot enter the body again; then the person is dead. No harm to the soul, but to the world you have killed a person. There should be no disturbance of any kind.The soul can see everything from above, and then you can say, “Now slowly come back to the body.” You can feel that you are settling back into the body, slowly spreading into different parts of the body. Because you are told that you will remember everything, you will be able to talk about it when you wake up and you are asked – you will tell the whole thing, what has happened.This has been experimented with for at least ten thousand years, and it has been always the same. That’s why I say it is the science of the interior, of your inner being, because there has been no exception. All the reports from people who have gone out of the body are exactly the same. For example, they all feel that they are connected by a silver cord to the navel.Scientists may think that life is centered in the heart, that if the heart stops you are dead. It is not true. There have been experiments proving certainly that the heart can be stopped and the person does not die. After ten minutes he comes back, and the heart starts again. According to the spiritual science, life is just two inches below the navel. The child was joined by the navel to the mother. And the navel was nursing the source inside, two inches below. It has been cut from the mother’s life, but it is still joined with the universe from the same place. It is not in the heart, it is just two inches below the navel.Because of this experience, in Japan a certain thing developed: harakiri. Harakiri is a special kind of suicide. Hara is the name of the center below the navel, where life is. Only in Japan has it been possible to locate it exactly. A certain development in Japanese tradition led to this point: if you want to kill yourself, the best, the quickest, and the most comfortable way is just to put a knife in the center of the hara, so the cord is cut. That happens within seconds, and the person is dead, but he does not suffer any agony.The science of health, medicine, has to take note of it, because if it is the real center of life, then it should be nourished when a person is dying or sick. Rather than working on other places which are only offshoots, work at the center. Perhaps a totally new science of medicine and health can come out of it.The hara has not been recognized anywhere except Japan. But Japan has proved it, that there is the center of life, because within a second the person is finished – and with no agony, no anguish. His face is as it was when he was alive – not even any tension.Harakiri developed for a strange reason. It is part of the samurai training in Japan. The samurai is a special kind of warrior. He is a meditative warrior. Life and death are equal to him, but honor, respectability, dignity, are higher than anything else. So if anything happens that he feels is humiliating, then it is not worth living, and he commits harakiri. It is not good to translate it as “suicide,” but there is no other way.Thousands of samurai have committed harakiri. You cannot hurt the integrity of any samurai. It is dangerous – he will not kill you, he will kill himself. Life has lost meaning; if people cannot respect him, there is no reason why he should live. He lives with dignity. The samurai is a special development of human individuality, and utterly devoted to freedom. Anything hurting him, or anything destroying his freedom or his honor…In the Second World War it was a danger: you could destroy Japan but you could not win. It was the atomic bombs which changed the situation; otherwise the ordinary war…A few years ago, thirteen years after the Second World War, a man was found hiding in a forest, still fighting. Whenever he could find an opportunity, he would kill an American and then go back to the forest. He was caught thirteen years after the Second World War, and when he was told that Japan had been defeated, he could not believe it.He said, “That is impossible. Japan can be destroyed, but cannot be defeated. It is a land of samurais. We live with dignity, we die with dignity.” He could not believe it – thirteen years had passed, and he was still fighting for Japan, alone.Meditation and swordsmanship, or archery, or other ways of the warrior, have been joined together. To us it seems too much, that a person should destroy himself, but to those thousands who have committed harakiri it is not the case. They are not destroying themselves, they are simply leaving this life – this life is not worth living, something has gone wrong. It is against their honor to be here.Through hypnosis we can make a person aware of how this rising upward happens, and how he can enter the body again. Once you have done it, a posthypnotic suggestion can be given: you can do it on your own, any time you want. And it is a tremendously beautiful experience, for the simple reason that for the first time you find that the prison is not you. Your body is one thing; you are totally different: you are eternal, immortal.Bodies have come and gone; you have been here since eternity, and you will be here until eternity.

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The Beloved Vol 1 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 1 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Only a connoisseur of the flavors of lovecan comprehend the language of a lover’s heart,others have no clue.The taste of lime rests in the core of the fruit,and even experts know of no easy way to reach it.Honey is hidden within the lotus bloombut the bee knows it.Dung beetles nestle in dung,discounting honey.Submission is the secret of knowledge.I am tremendously happy to introduce you to the world of the Bauls. I hope you will be nourished by it, enriched by it. It is a very bizarre world, eccentric, insane. It has to be so. It is unfortunate but it has to be so, because the world of the so-called sane people is so insane that if you really want to be sane in it you will have to be insane. You will have to choose a path of your own. It is going to be diametrically opposite to the ordinary path of the world.The Bauls are called Bauls because they are mad people. The word baul comes from the Sanskrit root vatul. It means mad, affected by wind. The Baul belongs to no religion. He is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian nor Buddhist. He is a simple human being. His rebellion is total. He does not belong to anybody; he only belongs to himself. He lives in the no man’s land: no country is his, no religion is his, no scripture is his. His rebellion goes even deeper than the rebellion of the Zen masters – because at least formally they belong to Buddhism, at least formally they worship Buddha. Formally they have scriptures – scriptures denouncing scriptures, of course – but still they have them. At least they have a few scriptures to burn.Bauls have nothing – no scripture, not even to burn; no church, no temple, no mosque – nothing whatsoever. A Baul is a man always on the road. He has no house, no abode. God is his only abode, and the whole sky is his shelter. He possesses nothing except a poor man’s quilt, a small, handmade one-stringed instrument called an ektara, and a small drum, a kettledrum. That’s all that he possesses. He possesses only a musical instrument and a drum. He plays with one hand on the instrument and he goes on beating the drum with the other. The drum hangs by the side of his body and he dances. That is all of his religion.Dance is his religion, singing is his worship. He does not even use the word god. The Baul word for God is adhar manush, the essential man. He worships man. He says, inside you and me, inside everybody, there is an essential being. That essential being is all. To find that adhar manush, that essential man, is the whole search.So there is no God somewhere outside you, and there is no need to create any temple because you are his temple already. The whole search is withinwards. And on the waves of songs and on the waves of dancing, he moves withinwards. He goes on moving like a beggar, singing songs. He has nothing to preach; his whole preaching is his poetry. And his poetry is also not ordinary poetry, not mere poetry. He is not consciously a poet, he sings because his heart is singing. Poetry follows him like a shadow, hence it is tremendously beautiful. He’s not calculating it, he’s not making it. He lives his poetry. That is his passion and his very life. His dance is almost insane. He has never been trained to dance, he does not know anything about the art of dancing. He dances like a madman, like a whirlwind. And he lives very spontaneously, because the Baul says, “If you want to reach to the adhar manush, the essential man, then the ways, the way goes through sahaj manush, the spontaneous man.”To reach to the essential man, you have to go through the spontaneous man. Spontaneity is the only way to reach to the essence…so he cries when he feels like crying. You can find him standing in a village street crying, for nothing. If you ask, “Why are you crying?” he will laugh. He will say, “There is no why. I felt like…I felt like crying, so I cried.” If he feels like laughing, he laughs; if he feels like singing, he sings – but everything has to come out of deep feeling. He’s not mind-oriented, not in any way controlled and disciplined. He knows no rituals. He’s absolutely against rituals because he says, “A ritualized person is a dead person. He cannot be spontaneous.” And a person who follows rituals and formalities too much creates so many habits around him that there is no need to be alert. Alertness is lost, habits are formed. Then the man of rituals lives through habits. If he goes to the temple he bows down, not in any way conscious and alert of what he is doing, but just because he has been taught to do so, he has learned to do so. It has become a conditioning.So they don’t follow any ritual, they don’t have any technique, they don’t have any habit. So you cannot find two Bauls that are similar, they are individuals. Their rebellion leads them to become authentic individuals.This has to be understood: the more you become a part of a society, the less and less you are an individual, the less and less you are spontaneous – because the very membership of the society will not allow you to be spontaneous. You will have to follow the rules of the game. If you enter a society, you accept to follow those rules that the society is playing or has decided to play. That’s what membership means: you enter into a certain organization, you have to play the game. Bauls have no organization, so each Baul is individual.And that’s what religion really is: it is an individual approach towards truth. One has to go alone, one has to go in his own way; one has to find one’s own way. You cannot follow another, you cannot move on a ready-made track. The more you search your own way, the closer you will be to God, or to truth, or to reality. In fact, the way is created by walking. You create it as you walk. It is not ready there for you, waiting to be walked on. You walk and you create it.It is as if you are lost in a forest. What do you do? You have no map and there is no way leading anywhere – trees and trees and trees all around, and you are lost. What do you do? You start walking, searching, seeking. By your very walk, by your very search, a path is created.Life is wild, and it is good that it is wild. It is good that it has no map, that it is not charted, that it is still unknown. And its unknowability is such that there is no way to make it known; otherwise all charm will be lost, all beauty will be lost. Then life will not surprise you – and if surprise is lost, all is lost. Then there will be no wonder, no wondering. Then your eyes will go dead and your heart will stop beating, the passion will disappear. Love will not be possible. Awe, wonder, surprise: these are the ingredients of the charisma, of the mystery of life. So it is good that there are no scriptures, it is good that there are no ritualized religions, it is good that you are not on a superhighway.The Baul is a rebellious person, and I say “rebellious” with great consideration. He is not a revolutionary. A revolutionary is still thinking in terms of the society. “How to change the society?” – that is the revolutionary’s continuous brooding. But he remains society-focused, society-oriented: “How to change the world?” A rebellious person does not bother about the world because he understands “The world cannot be changed by me, and who am I to change the world? What’s my authority to change the world? And if the world decides to be the way it is, who am I to interfere with it?” He leaves the world to itself. He does not interfere, he does not meddle with it. He starts changing himself. His revolution is inward – his revolution is absolutely inner.A rebellious person is a drop-out. He simply drops out of that society which doesn’t suit him. He does not wait for it to be transformed so that he can fit with it. That desire is foolish, stupid. Then you will be lost. And that day, that utopia will never happen – when the society has changed so much that you can fit with it and the society can fit with you. It has never happened. Revolutionaries have lived down through the centuries, and died. The world has remained the same, more or less, but the lives of those revolutionaries were wasted in changing it.Just think of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, coming back and looking at the world – they will start crying. This is the world for which they wasted their whole lives? This is the world for which they hoped and staked their whole lives, gambled with their lives? They could not live their lives because they were trying to change the world. They were trying to change the world because they thought that only when the world had changed according to their wishes would they be able to live – otherwise, how could they live? “How can you live happily in an unhappy world?” – that is the revolutionary’s question. Very significant: “How can you be happy in an unhappy world?” – so he tries to make the world happy.The rebellious person says, “Leave the world to itself. Nobody has ever changed it.” He is more practical and down to earth: “I can live my own way. I can create my own world within me.” He is a drop-out. Bauls are drop-outs. They don’t belong to any religion, to any society, to any nation. They are beggars, wanderers, vagabonds, hippies, gypsies, moving from one village to another, singing their song, dancing their dance, living their lives in their own way, doing their thing.A rebellious person is one who says, “I’m not going to wait, I’m going to live right now.” The revolutionary hopes for the future. He says, “I am going to wait. I will wait for the right moment.” The rebellious person says, “The right moment is herenow, and I’m not going to wait for anybody, I’m going to live right now.” A rebellious person lives in the present.And one thing more to be understood: a rebellious person is not against anybody. He may appear against because he is trying to live his own life, but he is not really against anybody. He may not go to the mosque but he is not against Mohammedans. He may not go to the temple but he is not against Hindus. He simply says, “I am not concerned; it is irrelevant.” He simply says, “Please leave me alone. You do your thing and let me do my thing. Don’t interfere with me and I will not interfere with you.”The vision of the rebellious mind is very realistic. Life is short. Nobody knows whether tomorrow will come or not. The future is not certain, and this is the only moment one can live. Why waste it in fighting with others? Why waste it in trying to convince others? Enjoy it, delight in it. A Baul is a hedonist, he is an Epicurean – he starts living: he loves, he lives, he delights.When a Baul dies, he is not afraid of death – he is ready. He has lived his life. He is ripe. The fruit is ripe and ready to fall to the ground with no hesitation. You will be afraid. You are already afraid of death because you have not been able to live. You have not lived yet and death has come or is coming. You have not yet had time to live and death has knocked at the door. How can you accept death? How can you welcome it?A Baul is ready to die any moment because he has not wasted a single moment of life. He has lived it as deeply as it was possible to live. He has no complaint, no grudge against life and he has nothing to wait for. So if death comes he is ready to live death also. He embraces death. He says, “Come in.” He becomes a host to death also.If you live rightly, you will be ready to die peacefully, blissfully. If you are not living rightly, if you are postponing, if you are simply putting aside your life and doing other things rather than enjoying life and doing a thousand and one things rather than delighting in life, then of course, naturally, you will be afraid of death. And when death comes, you will be a coward in front of death.A Baul dies dancing, a Baul dies singing, a Baul dies playing his ektara and his duggi. He knows how to live and how to die. And he is not worried about God; he is only worried about the adhar manush, the essential man that resides in him. His whole search is to find this essential man that he is. “Who am I?” is his essential search. And he’s very respectful about other human beings because they all belong to that essential nature. All other forms are of that formless essential nature; all the waves belong to the ocean. He’s very respectful, tremendously respectful. A Baul never condemns anything.To me, that is the very criterion of a religious man: he has no condemnatory attitude. He accepts everything, his world includes everything. It does not exclude anything. Sex is accepted, samadhi also. His world is very rich because nothing is excluded from it. He says, “Everything comes from that essential core of your being, so why deny it? And if you deny it, how will you be able to reach to the source?” Wherever you deny something, you cling there, you stop there. Then the journey cannot move to the very core.Life, as it is, is totally accepted. That does not mean that a Baul is a man of mere indulgence, no. He knows the alchemy of how to transform the baser into the higher. He knows how to transform iron into gold. He knows how to transform sex into samadhi; he knows the secret. And what is the secret of transforming life into eternal life, time into eternity? The secret is love. Between sex and samadhi, the bridge is love. Love is participated in by both: on the one hand sex, on the other hand samadhi. It is the bridge. One bank is sex, the other bank is samadhi. Love includes both, comprehends both. “Through love,” the Bauls say, “one reaches to the eternal home.”So that is the only provision for the path: love. Love is their worship, love is their prayer, love is their meditation. The path of the Baul is the path of love. He loves tremendously.There are two traditions in India: one is the tradition of the Vedas and the other is the tradition of Tantra. The Vedas are more formal, more of the nature of rituals. The Vedas are more social, organizational. Tantra is more individual – less concerned with rituals, forms, habits and more concerned with the essential; less concerned with the forms and more concerned with the soul.The Vedas are not all-inclusive, much is excluded; it is more puritan, more moralistic. Tantra is non-puritan, all-inclusive, more human, more earthly. Tantra says that everything has to be used and nothing is to be denied.Bauls belong more to Tantra than to the Vedas. There is only one improvement on Tantra and that is the only difference. Tantra is all-inclusive, more feminine than male; the Vedas are more male-oriented, Tantra is more feminine. Of course, woman is more inclusive than man. Man is included in woman, but woman is not included in man. Man seems to be a sort of specialization. Woman seems to be more general, more fluid, more round. Tantra is the way of the feminine, just like Tao.But the Bauls have improved upon Tantra also. Tantra is too technical. The very word tantra means technique. It is a little harsh, more scientific. Bauls are more poetic; Bauls are more soft – singers and dancers.Tantra uses sex to rise higher than it, but it uses it. Sex becomes instrumental. Bauls say that is not very respectful: “How can you use some energy? How can you use some energy as a means?” They don’t use sex as a means; they delight in it, they enjoy it. They make a worship out of it, but without any technique. It is not technological. They love it, and through love the transformation happens on its own accord.In Tantra, you are to remain unattached. Even while using sex as a means to go towards samadhi, you have to remain unattached to sex, absolutely neutral, absolutely like an observer, a witness, just like a scientist working in his lab. In fact, the tantrikas say that Tantra techniques cannot be used with the woman you love, because love will be a disturbance. You will be too attached. You will not be able to remain detached and outside it. So tantrikas will find women with whom they are not in love at all so the attitude can remain absolutely of the observer.That is where Bauls differ. They say it is too cruel, this passionless attitude is too cruel. There is no need to be so hard and so harsh. Through love, the transformation is possible. That’s why I call their attitude more poetic, more human, and more worthy. The Bauls say you can live attached in the world and yet be unattached; you can love a woman and yet be a witness; you can be in the marketplace and yet be beyond it. You can live in the world and be not of it.This vision is my vision also. That is the meaning of my sannyas: be in the world but don’t be of it. And nothing is of worth if it is not done through love.That’s where Tantra lacks something; it lacks humanity. If you love a woman, Tantra is not possible. If you love a man, Tantra is not possible. You should be completely aloof. Then sex becomes very scientific. It becomes a technique – something to be manipulated, something to be done; not something to be in, not something that absorbs you, not something oceanic, orgasmic, but something you are doing. The very idea of doing something to a man or to a woman because you want to achieve samadhi, the very idea of using the other as an instrument, as a means, is ugly and immoral.That’s where Bauls have a totally different fragrance. They say, “There is no need to be so hard. There is no need to be so means-oriented. Love will do.” And we will try to understand what they mean by love.The first poem…. These poems belong to different Bauls, but I’m not going to use their names. That is irrelevant. They all belong to the same vision. Different poems, but they remain, deep down, as the same poem; different words, different forms, but running through them is the same current. It is just like in a garland, many flowers are held together, but only one thread runs inside and holds them all. We will insist on that thread. We will not be bothered about who has written this poem. In fact, many of the poems are anonymous. Nobody has ever known who wrote them, because in fact, they were never written.Bauls are illiterate; maybe that’s why they have such purity. They are not very cultured people, educated in the ways of the world. Maybe that’s why there is such innocence. They are children of the earth: uneducated, poor, humble, but very sincere. So I will not be telling you who has sung this song, or the other songs that will follow in the coming twenty days. That is irrelevant.They come out of the same vision. They have a certain melody, so individual that it is called Baulsur, the melody of the Baul; so special, the taste is so special and the fragrance is so individual that whenever you hear a song from the Bauls, you will immediately recognize it. It has its own individuality, its own style: wild, illiterate, uncultured, but very individualistic. Just as the ocean tastes the same – from anywhere you taste it, it is salty – in these songs, immediately you will feel that they come from one vision, one attitude, one passion, one experience.And they were never written. Bauls have been singing them down through the centuries. Each Baul has dropped something, added something, made his own songs or used the old songs that he had heard from his masters, but the vision is so clear that you can never miss when you hear a Baul song.The first song:Only a connoisseur of the flavors of lovecan comprehend the language of a lover’s heart,others have no clue.The taste of lime rests in the core of the fruitand even experts know of no easy way to reach it.Honey is hidden within the lotus bloombut the bee knows it.Dung beetles nestle in dungdiscounting honey.Submission is the secret of knowledge.The first thing is that love can be known only by loving. It is not something that can be made comprehensible by intellectual discussion about it. Love is not a theory. If you try to make a theory out of it, it remains incomprehensible. That is the first Baul standpoint: there are things which you can know only by doing them, by being them.If you don’t know swimming you don’t know what it is, and there is no way to know about it. You may go and hear a thousand and one swimmers talking about it, but still you will never know it, what it is. It is incomprehensible in every other way; you will have to learn swimming. You will have to go down to the river; you will have to take the risk, the danger of being drowned. If you are very, very clever you may say, “I will not step into the river unless I know swimming first.” It is logical: How can I step into the river when I don’t know swimming? So first I must know swimming, only then can I step into the river. But then you will never be able to know swimming, because even to learn swimming you will have to step into the river.Swimming is known only by swimming, love is known only by loving, prayer is known only by praying – there is no other way. There are things which can be known without moving into them – those are the futile things, those are the intellectual things: philosophies, dogmas, creeds. But all that is real has to be lived, and all that is existential has to be penetrated, and the risk has to be taken. One has to be courageous, one has to be daring. And it is a great daring, because when you love somebody you start losing yourself. To love somebody is to lose the ego, to love somebody is to be lost, to love somebody is to give power to somebody over you, to love somebody is to be possessed. To love somebody means surrendering….Submission is the secret of knowledge.…Because to the Baul, love is the only knowledge there is. You can read the Vedas; there is no need to submit, there is no need to surrender. You can read the Bible; there is no need to surrender. You can become very proficient, very skilled, very learned, but there is no need to surrender. If there is no need to surrender, it is not knowledge for the Baul.The Baul criterion is this: that when something demands surrender, only then is there a possibility of real knowledge, otherwise not. If you come to me and I just impart knowledge to you….Many people come to me and they say, “Is there any difficulty if we don’t become sannyasins, if we are not surrendered to you? And still, we love what you say. Still we want to listen to it. Is there any problem? Can’t we do that?”I say, “You can do that; there is no problem. But then you will only collect the superficial, you will collect the words. Then you will collect only the fallen dregs from the table. You will not really be a guest to me. You will miss all that is essential; only the nonessential will be your fate. You have to decide.”Once you are surrendered a totally different world opens between me and you: the heart-to-heart communication starts. Then you can listen to my words, but you listen in such a different way, with such deep sympathy and love, with such gratitude and receptivity, that those words are no longer words; they start becoming alive. You have made them alive with your receptivity. You become pregnant with what I’m saying to you, with what I’m communicating to you. Then there happens a transfer, then words are just excuses. Hanging around the word, I send you something which cannot be managed in the word. Then not only is the word reaching you, but the climate that it carries through my heart.If you are in love with me, then there is a totally different kind of understanding between me and you. If you are not in love with me, then we are far apart. Then you are on some other planet, thousands and thousands of miles away from me: I may shout, you may hear a few words, but nothing special is going to happen that way. You may become more knowledgeable, but that is not the point; you should have more being, not more knowledge. If you are really becoming richer, here in close contact with me, then your being is growing. Then you are becoming more and more crystallized, more and more authentic, more and more alive, more and more divine. That is not possible without love.And what is surrender? Surrender means surrendering the ego, surrender means surrendering all that you know. Surrender means surrendering your knowledge, your mind, your intellect. Surrender is a suicide, a suicide of the past. If you carry your past within you in a secret way, then your gesture of sannyas is impotent. You can take sannyas and still go on carrying your past, hiding and guarding it like a treasure. Then just on the surface you will be a sannyasin, but not surrendered to me. And then if you are not fulfilled, nobody else is responsible but you.The first Baul standpoint is that existential things can be known only through existential ways. Love can be known only by loving.Somebody asked Jesus, “How to pray?”And he said, “Pray.”But the man said, “That’s what I am asking. I don’t know how to pray.”So Jesus said, “I will pray. You sit by my side and you also try.”How to teach prayer? It can be caught but it cannot be taught. If you are open to me, you can catch many things. If you are not open to me, nothing can be taught.A prayer is like an infection. Love is also like an infection: it can be caught but not taught. You can catch it. It is flowing all around you, but if you remain like an island, closed, then there is no way to teach it to you.The Bauls say:God is deserting your templeas you amuse yourself by blowingconch shells and ringing bells.The road to you is blockedby temples and mosques.I hear you call, my Lord,but I cannot advance.Masters and teachers bar the way.God is all around you, but you are so full of scriptures, knowledge, so full of your own ego that there is no space left inside you where God can penetrate and enter into you. It has become impossible. It is becoming impossible only because of you.Jesus is right when he says, “Pray, if you want to know what prayer is.” And the man is also right. He says, “How to pray? That is my problem. You have not answered it.” And Jesus says, “The only way is, I will pray. I will kneel down in prayer. You just sit by my side, open, vulnerable; you may catch it.”That’s what I’m trying to do here. Just be open to me, you may catch it – there is every possibility – once you are not barring your own path, once you start getting out of your own way. There is no problem, because the essential man that is speaking to you is also hearing through you. Then the essential can meet with the essential. The adhar manush can meet with the adhar manush. Just put your ego aside because that is the nonessential. Face me with your essence, encounter me with your essence, then suddenly you will see a new fire arising in you, a new love is born.Yes, submission is the secret of knowledge, surrender is the secret of knowledge. It is not an intellectual effort, but a total submersion, a merging of the self. That’s why Bauls talk more about love and less about knowledge, because love is the only thing in the world which cannot be attained in any other way than by loving.Now it is possible some day that even swimming can be taught to you without taking you to the river. They have invented ways to teach driving without ever taking you to the road. You simply sit in a car in a room: nothing moves, because there is nowhere, no place to move. You simply sit in the car behind the wheel and a film is shown on the walls. The road moves, so you feel as if you are moving on the road. On both sides, the street is moving. A movie is shown fast, it goes on moving fast. There are turns and things, and you have to do the right things at the wheel. The teacher can show you whether you are doing wrong or right, and you are simply sitting in the car. The car is not moving, the road is moving in the movie, just on the sides. You can learn it. It seems to be safer. I think someday or other you can just lie down on your mattress and a movie of a river will be all around, and you can start. It is possible. At least a rudimentary knowledge may become possible.But love? – there seems to be no way. Many people are trying movies to learn about love. Many people go on trying pornographic literature to know about love. Many people go on reading novels and poetry and others’ love letters in order to know about love. Yes, there is a danger that you may come to know many things about love, but to know about love is not to know love. In fact, the more you know about love, the less will be the possibility to know love. You will be lost in your knowledge. You will start thinking that you know.Have you observed the fact that movie actors who are in the business of love are almost always failures in their own love lives? They never succeed. Even a Marilyn Monroe commits suicide. She was at the top; even President Kennedy was in love with her. The whole world was in love with her. But somehow, her whole life was empty. She committed suicide at the very peak of her career, of her fame – such a beautiful woman.What happened? Why are actors and actresses always failures in their real love lives? They have learned so much about love that they cannot be real about love. They go on acting the same roles, they go on playing the same games. As they are playing on the stage, they go on playing in life. On the stage it is okay because nothing is involved. But in real life, it is empty. So they go on making empty gestures.Remember, you can know much about love, but that cannot help to know love. Love can be known only by loving. It means you have to move into love without knowing anything about it. That is why it needs courage. You have to move in the dark, with no map, nobody to guide, not even a torch. You have to move in the dark not knowing where you are moving, not knowing whether you are on the right track or not, not knowing whether you will find the path or you will fall in a ditch and be lost forever.This is the courage.Bauls are very courageous people. They say:Only a connoisseur of the flavors of love…Love has many flavors…. Love has many dimensions, many nuances. Love is not one single thing. It is very rich, tremendously rich. It has many aspects to it, it is multifaceted. It is like a diamond: it has many facets and every facet gives it richness.“Only a connoisseur” – one who has loved in many ways, one who has loved, lived courageously, dangerously, one who knows all the flavors of love….Have you watched? – love does not express all. It is a single word. All the ancient languages had many words for love, because there are so many loves. The English language is poor in that way, hmm? – because you also love a car and you love your woman and you love your house and you love your country and you love your child and you love your mother. Only one word! You love a particular brand of cigarettes. It is very poor, because love has so many facets.When you love a child, you love differently. It is not the same love as when you love a woman. It has no passion. It has compassion, but it has no passion. When you love your mother, it is totally different: it has reverence, it has deep gratitude. But when you love a woman it is totally different: it has great intensity, almost maddening – but it is not the way you love your mother. You love your friend: that is totally different. It is affection, but not in the same way.If you watch, you will find many nuances of love. The single word love has many worlds hidden in it. And one has to know all about love by moving in all the dimensions. If you have not known any facet of love, your understanding about love will lack that much. One has to know all the aspects and all the subtle differences. That’s what the Bauls mean when they say:Only a connoisseur of the flavors of lovecan comprehend the language of a lover’s heart,others have no clue.Yes, it is a language. A single word will not do, it is a complete language. And once you know, you will be simply surprised: you can touch somebody’s hand like a friend and then the touch has a different flavor. And you can touch somebody’s hand like a lover and then the touch has again a different flavor.A connoisseur, with closed eyes, can just feel your hand and see…and understand the language.Have you not watched it sometimes? – you can immediately feel when somebody looks at you with a deep lust in his eyes. When somebody looks with deep love, you can see the difference. When somebody looks with affection, you can feel the difference. But these are very rudimentary things because compassion also has many layers.When a buddha is there, his compassion has a totally different quality. When you have compassion it is more like sympathy, less like compassion. When a buddha has compassion, it has nothing of sympathy in it. It is pure.When a buddha has love showering on you, it has nothing that you have known about love up to now. Only a buddha can know that. It has no passion in it, it is very cool. It is not hot – not that it has no warmth; it has warmth, but still it is very cool. It will cool you down if you come close to a buddha. It will help you to become less excited, more collected. It will not create a turmoil within you. It will subside all turmoil, it will be a soothing force. It will surround you like a subtle climate and soothe you. It will be like a lullaby. You will start feeling, falling asleep, as if just close to your mother’s heart. It has something of the mother, something of the father, something of the beloved, something of the child. It has every subtle nuance in it. It has all the dimensions of love in a great harmony.When you come around a buddha, it is an orchestra of all the flavors of love.Sometimes he looks like a child; you can play with him. His smile or his being simply gives you a feeling that he is just a child – you can mother him. Sometimes he is like a mother and you are like a small child. Sometimes he looks like a beloved – you can love him, only him, and nobody else. But sometimes he is just like a friend. He is all.These changes happen because of you: your outlook changes, your vision changes. Your eyes are not yet clear and fixed. You cannot see his totality. You “circum-locate” him. At one time you see one aspect, at another time you see another aspect – because you cannot comprehend the whole.Only a connoisseur of the flavors of lovecan comprehend the language of a lover’s heart,others have no clue.Not even a clue is possible for others. You will have to move into the world of love, and don’t ask how. You will have to move into the dark, and don’t ask for a map – because that very asking is against love. That is why trust is needed, shraddha. If you trust a person, you say, “Okay. If you send me in the dark, I will go. If you send me into death, I will go.”On the path of love, trust is the most essential thing. On the path of meditation, you can move without trust. On the path of meditation you can move without surrender, but on the path of love, without surrender, without trust, there is no go because it is the very first door. Love demands so much, it demands almost the impossible – and on the first step. Love is easy but very demanding. That’s why even though the path is so easy, very few people travel it. The path of meditation is very difficult but not so demanding. That’s why the path is difficult and arduous, yet still, many people travel it.When you hear about love it seems very simple and easy; but look at the demands. On the path of meditation, that which will be demanded on the last step, is demanded on the first step on the path of love.The meditator will be asked to surrender his ego only at the last step: when he moves from savikalpa samadhi to nirvikalpa samadhi – when he moves from the mind to no-mind – only at the last step. First he goes on purifying his mind, he goes on purifying his ego. He goes on making it more and more subtle, more and more subtle, refined, cultured. Then just a trace remains. On the last step, he has to drop that trace.Love demands the impossible. It says: On the first step you have to drop the ego. There is no need to refine it and there is no need to work on it. Because one has to drop it, so why bother carrying it? Drop it here, now.Trust arises on the path of meditation at the last stage. Trust arises only when you are arriving home. When the arrival is so close and when you are almost approaching, and you can see the door and you can see the house and you can see that you have reached, then trust arises – you say, “Yes.”But on the path of love, trust is asked on the first step. The first step of love is the same as the last step of meditation. The path is very easy if you are daring, if you are almost a daredevil. If you are almost mad and ready to risk all without any condition, the path is very easy – because it completes on the first step. The first step becomes the last step. Here you surrender, and not even a split second is lost and you have arrived.…the language of a lover’s heart,others have no clue.People who are very learned in the ways of meditation, in the ways of intellectual comprehension, contemplation, concentration, have no clue about love. They simply don’t know that language.The taste of lime rests in the core of the fruit,and even experts know of no easy way to reach it.And this love the Bauls talk about, or rather sing about, dance about, is just hidden inside you at the very core of your being. It is already there. You have just to find a way to reach to your own innermost core – the adhar manush, the essential man. It is not something that has to be achieved, it is already there. It is not something that has to be earned, it is a gift of God.The moment you were created, that very same moment that treasure was handed over to you – because who has ever known somebody to live without love? Have you known anybody to live without breathing? Love is the very breath of the soul.Bauls say, “As the body cannot exist without breathing, the soul cannot exist without love.” So you may know it, you may not know it, but continuously love is happening inside. It is throbbing there, it is your very beat. You just have to find a way to reach there, because you have gone out in search of other treasures that don’t belong to you, in search of other treasures that can never belong to you.That’s why a Baul lives like a beggar. That is simply symbolic. He says, “I am not searching for any other treasure. I am enough unto myself – my treasure is too much. I am a king already. I don’t need any other kingdom – my kingdom is already here.” He lives like a beggar, but if you come across a Baul you will see that he lives like a king. Even kings are not so kingly, even kings are not so blissful as a Baul is. His whole life consists of bliss, he knows no other taste. He knows no anxiety, he knows no worry. He lives in some unknown dimension with tremendous grace. Having nothing, he has everything. Possessing nothing, he possesses the whole world.The Bauls sing:The mirror of the sky reflects my soul.O Baul of the road, O Baul, my heart!The mirror of the sky reflects my soul.O, my senseless heart,you have failed to cultivate the human land.Cultivated, it could have yielded a harvest of gold.When the life, the mindand the eyes are in agreement,the target is within your reach.You can see the formless one with bare eyes.When the life, the mind and the eyes are in agreement – hmm? – that is the way to find the inside. When you are in agreement, when there is no conflict inside you, that is the way. That is why Bauls insist on being without conflict, on being natural, spontaneous. Don’t create any division within yourself, otherwise you will never be able to reach – because a tremendous quality of agreement is needed. When you fall into a harmony, the door is open. When the life, the mind and the eyes are in agreement, the target is within your reach, You can see the formless one with bare eyes.The Bauls sing:Forget not, that your body containsthe whole of existence.I am fulfilled,being a blow of your own breath on your flute.What more can I wish for methan to be blown away with such melody?A Baul is fulfilled the moment he comes to a deep agreement within himself. His singing and his dancing is nothing but an effort to fall into agreement with himself.Have you watched somebody dancing? What happens? Have you observed yourself sometimes dancing? What happens? Dance seems to be one of the most penetrating things, in which one falls into a harmony. Your body, your mind, your soul all fall into a harmony in dancing. Dancing is one of the most spiritual things there is. If you really dance, you cannot think. If you really dance, the body is used so deeply that the whole energy becomes fluid. A dancer loses shape, fixity. A dancer becomes a movement, a process. A dancer is not an entity: he is movement, he is energy – he melts.Great dancers, by and by, melt. And a dancer cannot retain his ego because if he retains the ego, that will be a jarring note in his dance. A real dancer loses his ego in it. He forgets that he is. The dancer is lost, only the dance remains. Then the door opens because you are one unity. Now the soul is not separate, the mind is not separate, the body is not separate. All have fallen in one line, all have become one – melting into each other, merging into each other.It is said about Nijinsky, one of the greatest dancers in the world, that there were moments when he would take jumps and he would come back so slowly that it was almost impossible. He would fall back feather-like, as if gravitation had lost its power over him. Scientists were worried: “This should not happen, it cannot happen” – but it was happening. No other dancer has been capable in that way.And of course, Nijinsky went mad; he became a Baul. His is one of the madnesses which has not yet been understood. And because he was in the West, it was impossible to comprehend what had happened to him. He was confined to a psychiatric hospital, forced, given electric shocks, insulin shots. Had he been in the East he would have become one of the greatest Bauls. His madness was nothing to be treated, it was something to be revered.But how did he become mad? He became mad through his dancing. When he was asked what happens to him, he said, “It happens only when I am lost, so I cannot say anything about it. If I am, then it never happens. I have tried it. If I am there, deliberately trying it, consciously trying, it never happens. But there are moments when I am lost. Then simply, I don’t know who jumps – and then it happens. I am also surprised. I have no explanation for it, but it happens only when I am lost.”That is what Bauls say: when you dance and you become a whirlwind and by and by, you are completely lost in your dancing, it happens – something breaks down inside you, the barriers are lost – you become one unity. A great orgasm spreads all over your being. You are in tune with existence in those moments. These moments are the satoris of Zen, but Bauls have a better way to attain them. Zen has to be worked on for twelve, fifteen, twenty, thirty years. It is a very slow process. It is the path of meditation.Bauls can attain to it more easily. Just the day you decide that “I am ready to drop my ego,” you become available to God and God becomes available to you. The essential man suddenly arises over the non-essential, there is a mutation. And this is the moment when you are full of love, when you are love, when your energy is love. This is the moment when you can bless the whole existence. When there is no conflict within you, there cannot be any conflict between you and the existence.That is the secret: drop all conflict within you, and your conflict with the existence is also dropped simultaneously, become one within you and you have become one with the existence.The taste of lime rests in the core of the fruit,and even experts know of no easy way to reach it.In fact, there is no easy way to reach it, because it is hard to drop the ego…and that is the only way.Honey is hidden within the lotus bloombut the bee knows it.Dung beetles nestle in dung,discounting honey.Bauls say that intellectuals are dung beetles. The pundits, the scholars, are dung beetles: they will never find the way to the lotus…only the bee.Become a bee, become a lover. Because the bee loves honey, it finds the way. Why cannot the dung beetle find the way? It finds a certain way; it finds the way to the dung. Because love is the way.Bauls say:Whatsoever you love you become,and whatsoever is your love you will find.So be alert about your love: don’t love a car, don’t love a house, don’t love a bank balance – because you will become like that. You will become a dung beetle. Don’t love dung.If you are to love, then love something of the divine, something…something that transcends things, something that transcends forms, something for which you will have to raise your eyes to the sky. Love a Gourishankar, love the Himalayan peaks. If you love something like dung, you will move into dung, because we always find the way. Wherever our love moves, we move behind it. The bee loves the lotus; it finds it. The very love is the path. Howsoever the lotus is hiding, the bee will find it.There is a story about Solomon:A woman came; the woman was the queen of Ethiopia. She wanted to love Solomon, she wanted to become his beloved. She was very beautiful, but she wanted to love the wisest man in the world. So she tried a few tests on Solomon, about whether he was really as wise as he was said to be. She did many experiments; one of the experiments was this…. She brought one false flower made of paper, but made so beautifully that it was almost impossible to detect that it was false. She went into the court of Solomon, she stood far away from Solomon, and she said, “I have a flower in my hand. Can you say from that far away whether it is real or unreal?”Solomon said, “Light is not enough, and I’m an old man, and I cannot see rightly. Please open the windows.” The windows were opened. He waited for two minutes and said, “No, it is false.”Then the woman brought another flower from her bag and she said, “What about this?” It was exactly like the first, but it was real.Solomon pretended to look at it and then he said, “Yes, this is a real flower.”The woman was astounded. The whole court was astounded: “What has happened?” They asked him, “How could you find it?”He said, “Easy – I opened the windows for the bees to come in. They decided. For the first flower, no bee came in; for the second they immediately rushed in.”When you love something, you have a supra-sense about where it is. Your love monitors you, it leads you, it becomes your guide.A bee can smell from miles far away where the flowers are. Much experiment and research has been done with bees about how they find their way. The flowers have bloomed miles away, and bees will come rushing. Almost a supra-sense exists in them; that supra-sense is nothing but love.You will find your way to the object you love, so be very cautious about your object of love because that is going to decide your destiny. Your love is your destiny. Love something superb, love something of the supra-existence, love something of the divine, and you will find your way.Bauls say:When there is no fear, just the love is enough;it will monitor you and it will guide you.Honey is hidden within the lotus bloombut the bee knows it.Dung beetles nestle in dung,discounting honey.Submission is the secret of knowledge.Surrender is the secret of knowledge, because surrender is the secret of love and love is the only knowledge of worth.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 1 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 1 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I always yearn to be here, but why, on seeing you, am I filled with awe?That’s how it should be. One should feel blessed, because awe is the only quality that can make man religious – that is the only door. Through awe, you start feeling the divine around you. Eyes filled with awe cannot deny God, it is impossible. And people who have forgotten how to be filled with awe cannot accept God. God is not the question. If you are still capable of being in a tremendous state of wonder, so tremendous, so penetrating that thinking stops, everything stops – suddenly time is not there, space is not there and you cannot figure it out, what it is – some sublime presence is felt in those moments.But man has become afraid of awe. That’s why in language, in the ancient days, awful was a religious word, very sacred. Now, when you are feeling terrible you say you are feeling awful. Even the word has changed its meaning. People used to be awful when they were deep in prayer, when they were in close contact with the divine. When the divine was revealed to them, then they used to be awful. Now when they are feeling terrible, horrible, very bad, they say, “I am feeling awful.” The word has completely been destroyed. It used to be at the peak, now it is at the bottom. It used to be the most positive feeling, now it is the most negative feeling. How has it happened? There are some reasons for it.Whenever people used to feel awe, they also used to feel fear. That is natural because through awe you come in contact with the unknown, unfamiliar, the strange, the mysterious. You cannot control it, you cannot manipulate it, you cannot possess it. Suddenly, something bigger than you, something vaster than you surrounds you and you are at a loss. Fear arises – you start feeling afraid.All the old religions describe God as both “the mysterium” and “the tremendum” – mysterium because he is the mystery, a mystery that can never be solved, and tremendum because one feels terrible before him. These two feelings arise together, but you should pay attention to the first feeling more; otherwise the doors of the temple will be closed for you. Emphasize the positivity of it and learn how to be in the presence of the unknown, how to be in the presence of something that you cannot manipulate, how to be in the presence of something where you have to surrender, where surrender is the only thing that you can do, that can be done…that is all that is possible.You should feel blessed; but you must be feeling afraid, hence the question. You must be paying more attention to the negative part, to the shadow part. If you do that, by and by you will become closed. Then you will not feel awe and if you cannot feel awe you cannot feel God.They say philosophy arises out of wonder. It is right, absolutely right. Philosophy arises out of wonder. And religion? – religion arises out of awe. And what is the difference between wonder and awe?When you are full of wonder, you try to find a clue – how to dissolve that wonder? You try to think about it, figure it out – what it is. Wonder creates a question mark in you and you start struggling with it – so philosophy is a fight with wonder. It arises out of wonder, then it tries to dissolve the wonder, to dissolve the inexpressible, the unexplainable, to find an explanation so the wonder can be dropped. Wonder is felt like a “disease,” a tension. So the philosopher is continuously trying ways and means how to be again at ease. He is trying to find some answer so the questions can be dropped, so the mystery is no longer a mystery. Philosophy is against wonder.Religion arises out of awe. Awe is also wonder with one different quality: that is, it does not create a question mark in you. Rather, it creates deep love, it creates deep gratitude, it creates humbleness. It creates such a state in your consciousness that you would like to bow down before it. It is not a question to be solved, but a deep mystery to be respected. You would like to kneel down and pray. You would not like to think about it, because it is so vast it is impossible to think about it. You would like to pray, you would like to fall into it in deep love.Wonder becomes awe when it does not create a question mark in you; awe becomes wonder if it creates a question mark in you. That’s the difference between philosophy and religion, and then the paths go in a diametrically opposite direction. A philosopher goes on thinking and thinking, and a religious person goes on dropping thinking.God enters into you through awe.“I always yearn to be here, but why, on seeing you, am I filled with awe?”That’s how it should be. If you are not filled with awe, then your coming to me is pointless. If you don’t feel like praying, if you don’t feel like bowing down, surrendering, then you have not come to me. Physically you may be here; spiritually we exist far apart.It happens many times: every day I watch many people who still have a living heart in them and start feeling awe – but they start repressing it. It feels as if it is a kind of weakness and they are not to show it. If they want to cry, they stop their tears. They have come with many questions to ask and suddenly those questions are not there – because in an “awe” mood, questioning stops. They forget their questions. And they are very worried about where their questions have gone, and they start searching hectically inside to find something to cling to – so that awe does not become too overpowering. Sometimes they ask foolish questions, just to ask, so that nobody becomes aware that they have lost their grounding, that they have fallen into something deep, that they have not been strong enough to resist – but then they miss. Then they come to me, and yet they come not.Coming to me – be ready. It is not a question of asking questions. In fact, there is no need. Just being with me, just being close with me…. Fall in line with me, breathe with me, let your heart beat with me a little while so that you can see through my eyes, so that you can taste a little of that with which I am completely overtaken and possessed by.But fear will arise because whenever there is something bigger than your mind, the mind says “Don’t move; there can be danger. You may not be able to come back.” And the mind says “It is almost mad; retain your intelligence, retain your thinking capacity, retain your logic.” What are you going to do? And you all have been trained for logic and nobody has been in any way trained for love. That feeling of awe is simply trying to assert something from your heart that has been repressed by the society, by the forces that are trying to control you, by the mind.Mind is nothing but society inside you: the priest, the politicians, the power-mad people – they have become your mind. They are trying to manipulate you from within. When awe arises, you are falling into an infinite ocean, not knowing what will happen next. In that moment you would like to escape, you would like to close your eyes, you would like to somehow control yourself because you have always been told that control is a great value. So you go on controlling everywhere – where it is not needed at all, where it is a hindrance to life. Where it is almost a suicide – there too you go on controlling. You cannot trust, because trust means losing your controlling to somebody else’s hands. You cannot surrender, you cannot love, you cannot pray. Even people making love cannot surrender, they go on controlling deep down. Hence, the real peak is missed. They learn techniques of how to make love. They can become very efficient lovemakers, but love is missed because it has nothing to do with you.Love happens only when you are not there. Love happens only when you are surrendered to existence. Then there is a great orgasmic experience. Then you reach to the very peak of your being and you look at existence from the topmost peak of the Himalayas, you look from the Gourishankar. Then a totally different vision arises and that vision transforms your life.So when you come to me, be ready to lose control, be ready to lose yourself. That is the whole purpose of coming; otherwise, don’t come. Even if you ask something, don’t ask out of your knowledge. Your asking should also be out of your love. Your asking should also be “How to go deeper in the mystery?” – not how to demystify it, not how to explain it, but how to move deeper and deeper into the eternally unexplained – because that is what God is.So have a little taste of God with me. Allow me to be a door.It will be difficult for you to face God directly, the Whole, because it will be too much, too dazzling. You cannot look at the sun directly; it will destroy your eyes. That is the meaning of a master: he gives you God in quantities that you can bear. He gives you God in homeopathic doses, and he goes on increasing the dosage by and by. The more you become capable of absorbing, the more he gives to you. One day, when you are ready to face the sun directly, he simply disappears. He is no longer between you and God.It is just like when you start learning swimming: first you learn in shallow water, just on the bank. It’s natural, it is intelligible, it is practical. Then as you are becoming more and more capable, you start moving towards the deeper parts of the river. One day you are ready to go into the ocean.When you come to me, allow me to be there rather than insisting for your own presence. You dissolve; let me be there. You open your doors and windows and allow me to pass through you. Much will happen that way. Nothing is going to happen by your questions because they are nothing but irritations in the mind. But I always see that whenever people feel full of awe, they start defending themselves. Then they undo the whole purpose. Don’t defend. If you defend, then how am I going to help you? There is no way – I cannot help you against you. I can help you only with your deep cooperation. If you participate, only then can the journey start.But many times I have felt it – many people would like to go on the journey, but when it starts, they start clinging to the place where they are standing, they don’t want to lose their ground. But then how can the journey start? You have to go on losing that which you have to attain to, that which you don’t have.Jesus has said, “Those who want to follow me, they should deny everything, including themselves – they should deny themselves.” And he is right, but it takes a long time. Between a master and a disciple, that which can happen right this moment takes much time because the disciple goes on defending in many ways, rationalizing in many ways.The Bauls say:Look…look for him in the temple of your limbs;He is there as the lord of the world –speaking, singing in enchanting tunes.He is an expert at hide-and-seek;no one can see him.Do not try to catch him, O my heart!He can never be caught.You can only hope for himin whole faith.When you are deep in awe – and if you are courageous enough to remain in it – soon your consciousness will have a tremendous shift, a one hundred-eighty-degree turn. If you can remain in awe for a few moments without disrupting it, without corrupting it with your thoughts, your defenses, your rationalizations; if you can remain purely in it – not doing anything about it, just being in it – there will be a turn. That’s what Christians call “conversion.” It doesn’t mean that a Hindu becomes a Christian, that is foolish. It doesn’t mean that a Christian becomes a Hindu. Conversion means a great turning in your consciousness.If you can remain with me for a few moments, just in pure awe, not corrupting it in any way, not doing anything whatsoever – just being in it, allowing it to be – there will be a shift, a one hundred-eighty-degree turn, a conversion. Suddenly I will disappear and you will be face to face with your own being. The god is hiding within you.Look…look for him in the temple of your limbs;He is there as the lord of the world,speaking, singing in enchanting tunes.He is an expert at hide-and-seek;no one can see him……Because the very effort to see him separates you from him, the very effort to see him makes him an object – and he is not an object, he is your subjectivity. He cannot be reduced to being a thing – he is not. He is not the sought, he is the seeker. He is your consciousness, your purity of consciousness. He is your inner sky. You cannot see him because he is hiding within you.There is a beautiful parable….When God created the world, he used to live here on this Earth, but there was great trouble for him. He was not even able to sleep because of complaints and complaints. And the whole day he was trying to solve people’s problems, and in the night also they were knocking on his door. And there were so many suggestions to improve upon the world that he started becoming almost insane. It looked as if nothing was going right – millions of advisers – and he was fed up. If he listens to one man’s advice, there are a thousand and one against it. It was very difficult to do anything. He asked his counselors, his advisers, “What to do?” He said, “I would like to hide somewhere.”Somebody suggested, “Why don’t you go to Gourishankar, Everest. Nobody will ever be able to come there; you can make your abode there.”He said, “You don’t know the future. Just within a few minutes” – for God it is only few minutes, our centuries are seconds for him – “just within a few minutes, this man Hillary will reach and then the same trouble will start.”And somebody said, “Why not the moon?”He said, “That too is only a question of a few minutes. Soon, man will be walking on the moon. It will not solve anything. It will at the most postpone a little.”Then one old counselor came close to him and told him something in his ear, and he was very happy and he said, “Right! This appears to be the perfect solution.”The old man suggested, “Hide in man himself. There he will never find you. And even if he finds you, a man who is so wise as to find you within himself will not create any trouble for you. Hillarys can create trouble, but buddhas cannot because by the time they find you inside themselves they will be almost like you. They will not have any complaints, they will not have any question. They will be as silent as you are, they will be as deep as you are. By the time they reach you inside themselves, they will have been transformed. The very journey will become a mutation.”God is hiding within you, but you cannot see God there directly because you don’t know how to go there.One method, one way is of meditation: start dropping your thoughts. One day when there is no thinking, no ripple, and you are a no-mind you will reach there, the conversion will happen. Another way is of prayer.The sannyasin who has asked is Rama Bharti. Her path is going to be that of prayer and love. That’s why she feels so much awe when she comes close to me. I have seen her almost tremble, as if some unknown breeze is passing through her. I have seen her throbbing with an unknown rhythm. Love is her path. She has to use this quality of awe – it is rare. Very few people have it. It is disappearing from the world.People have become much too intellectual, much too hung-up in their heads. They have forgotten the language of the heart. Awe is the script, the very script of that language. Feel it, allow it to possess you, be possessed by it. It will lead you to the innermost temple of your own being. There will be a conversion, and in that moment your consciousness will have a great shift. Suddenly, it will not be looking at me, it will start looking at itself. That is the only way to know God.The second question:Osho,When you are a Zen master telling us to choose our path and stick to it, I felt sure that my path was of the head, that I would never be able to surrender to anyone. Now, after one lecture on the Baul mystics, I feel like a lovesick schoolgirl. How to choose a path when you have none? How to be a light unto myself when your light dazzles me every morning?I can understand your difficulty but it is being created knowingly. I will throw you from one path to another many times because that is the only way for you to find out which is your path. Sometimes I will push you, pull you towards meditation; sometimes I will force you towards love, prayer. You will need the taste of both. Only then can you be decisive about it, otherwise not. Just by listening to me you cannot decide because while you are listening to me you are too much impressed by me.So this is part of the device: that one day I am speaking on meditation, another day I am speaking on love. I would like you to taste both because that taste will be decisive. Only that will decide which your path is – where you feel really flowing, where you feel really spontaneous. Where things happen on their own accord and you need not force them – that is your path. But how to know it?When you listen to me when I am talking about love, you will be impressed by it, but that is not going to decide it. Just being impressed is not going to help. It is a sort of hypnosis. When I am chanting and singing about love you will be hypnotized by it. You will start thinking, “Yes, this is my path.” But this is just a wave created by me. It may be your wave, it may not be your wave – and you cannot know it.And your whole life has been conditioned so much by others that you have become very impressionable. You immediately take the imprint from the outside. If you listen to me on meditation, you will be impressed by that. That is why ordinarily masters have not done that which I am doing here. They continually only insist on one path for their whole lives. But then many people follow that path only because their master has continually and consistently impressed them so much about it that they follow. That may not be their path. Hence, my absolutely new effort.I will be talking on all sorts of paths and all sorts of methods. In the beginning it will be very confusing but that is meant to be so. I would like to confuse you so much that you forget all about being impressed by somebody. My whole effort is to throw you back to yourself. How long can you go on doing this? One day you are thinking of meditation and then I talk about love; you start thinking about love. Again I will talk about meditation and again the problem will arise. How long are you going to be impressed by me? One day or other you will say, “Now I have to decide. This man will drive me crazy!”J. Krishnamurti says, “Don’t be impressed by anybody,” but he is a very consistent man, very consistent. And his consistency becomes a deep imprint on his followers. He goes on saying, “Don’t be impressed by anybody” – but he has been saying that for forty years so consistently that people have even become impressed about it. They say, “Because Krishnamurti says, ‘Don’t be impressed by anybody,’ we are not going to be impressed by anybody” – but this is the impression.What I am doing is exactly what Krishnamurti is saying. I am doing it; he is simply saying it.I will not allow you to be impressed. Even if you want to, there is no way – I will change continuously. I will plant a few seeds today, tomorrow I will take them back; I will plant something today, tomorrow it will be gone – how long are you going to wait for me? One day you will say, “Wait! Now let me decide. Enough is enough!” But by that time you will have been shifted and shunted from this to that so much that you will have had glimpses of both. You must have tasted a little of love, prayer, a little of meditation, a little of yoga; a little of Meera and Chaitanya, and a little of Buddha and Mahavira. You will have tasted both and then a decision will arise in you. And that will not be because of me, that will be because of you. And when something is because of you it is real, it is authentic; it transforms, it transfigures, it transports you into another world. If it is just an impression because I have been consistently telling you about something again and again and again, then it becomes just a suggestion deeply implanted within your mind. You may think that you have decided, but it is not your decision.Krishnamurti has never asserted a single contradiction. He simply goes on repeating the same thing. His note is simple, clear – there is nothing confusing about him. Either you agree with him or you don’t agree with him – that is another thing – but there is nothing to be confused about. Nobody can say that he is confusing. You can say he is right or you can say he is wrong – but not that he is confusing.You cannot say about me whether I am right or whether I am wrong. At the most, you can say that I am confusing. But that is my whole device: to confuse you so much. How long can you allow me to shift from this to that, from that to this? One day you are going to shout, “Keep your hands away! Now I want to decide” – and that decision will come out of you. And that will come not only because of intellectual conviction, it will come because of real experiences on both the paths. When you have tasted all, you can decide easily, and then you can remain with that decision for your whole life.If you are impressed by me and then you decide, you can be impressed by somebody else tomorrow, and then you will decide that. And if you are impressionable with me, you are impressionable with anybody else. That is how people go from one master to another.Here there is no need to go anywhere because I am all the masters together. You can just remain here and the master changes; there is no need to go anywhere. I consistently contradict myself, so there is no problem. You need not go anywhere; you can just remain where you are.People go on changing masters because one day something impresses you and you are overenthusiastic about it, and then there is a honeymoon – but honeymoons end. Anything that begins has to end. After a few days the enthusiasm is gone. Now the thing seems to be familiar. The enthusiasm was because of the unfamiliar, because it was new. Try to understand this mechanism.You fall in love with a woman because she is so new: the physiology, the proportions of her body, the face, the eyes, the eyebrows, the color of her hair, the way she walks, the way she turns, the way she says hello, the way she looks. Everything is new, the whole territory unknown. You would like to investigate this territory; it is inviting, it is very inviting. You are caught, hypnotized. And when you start approaching, she starts to run away – that is part of the game. The more she runs, the more enchanting she becomes. If she simply says, “Yes, I am ready,” half of the enthusiasm will be dead that very moment. In fact, you will start thinking how to run away. So she gives you a chance to chase her. People are never as happy as while the courting is going on – very happy – because it is a chase.Man is basically a hunter, so when the woman is chased, running away, trying to hide here and there, avoiding, saying no, the man gets more and more hot. The challenge becomes intense – the woman has to be conquered. Now he is ready to die for her, or do whatsoever is needed, but the woman has to be conquered. He has to prove that he is no ordinary man. But once they are married, then everything…. Because the whole interest was in the chase, the whole interest was in the unfamiliar, the whole interest was that the woman was apparently unconquerable. But now she is conquered – now how can that old interest remain? At the most one can pretend but the old interest cannot remain. Things start becoming cold. They start getting bored with each other because now there are other women who are again new territories: they attract, they invoke, they call forth.The same happens with thoughts: you are enchanted with one sort of thinking, but by the time you become acquainted with it, the honeymoon is over, the love is over. Now you would like to be interested in something else, something new that again gives you a thrill, a kick. This way one goes from one woman to another, from one man to another, from one thinking to another thinking, from one path to another path, from one master to another master. This sort of searching will never allow you time enough to create trust.In one aboriginal community of India, in the very primitive parts of Madhya Pradesh, in Bastar, there lives a tribe – aboriginals, very old people, primitive, almost three or four thousand years old. They are not contemporaries at all but something can be learned from them. One thing has happened in that community that has never happened before anywhere else, and that is: once a man marries a woman there is never any divorce. Divorce is allowed but divorce has never happened. And once a man marries a woman, he remains truly with her and the woman remains truly with him. He never again becomes interested in any other woman in any other way and the woman never becomes interested in any other man. How have they managed this miracle? They have managed it very psychologically.The structure of their society is such that every boy and every girl is allowed to meet and mix with every other boy and girl. So every boy comes to know each girl of the community, and each girl comes to know each boy of the community. In fact, by the time boys and girls are getting interested in the other sex, they don’t stay in their homes in the night. They have a small temple-like thing just in the middle of the village; they call it a ghotul – a youth house.Once a boy becomes interested in girls he has to go to stay in the ghotul; once a girl starts becoming interested in the boys, she has to go to live in the ghotul. They live in the ghotul, all the boys of the village and all the girls of the village, and they make love to each other. Only one thing is insisted upon: the superintendent of the ghotul insists that no boy and girl should remain with each other more than three days. They should change so that before their marriage time comes they have known everybody; then they can decide.When you know all the women of your community and decide, that decision is totally different than the decision that is taken in civilized societies. You don’t know other women; a better woman, a better man is always possible. Then what will you do? A more interesting personality can always be there; then there will be disruption, there will be distraction, there will be problems. These are small village communities: not many people – two hundred, three hundred people at the most in one community. Every boy is allowed to know each girl. When he has known all the girls and all the girls have known all the boys, and then one girl and one boy decide to get married, before marriage happens they are given one more year to be together, to finally decide – because to decide before knowing each other well is dangerous. The decision may be only because they want to know each other well. But once they have known each other well, then what will happen to their decision? So they have to know each other well for one year, two years; whatsoever time they need, they can be together. There is no interference on them by the society.But once they decide to get married, of course that decision is very, very solid, absolute, unconditional – because all conquering is gone, hunting is gone, chasing is gone. The honeymoon is before marriage in that community and that seems to be more logical, psychological, more true to the human mind. The honeymoon is before the marriage. Marriage has to happen only when the honeymoon is over. When two persons, knowing each other well, decide to be together, now it is not a question of conquering. It is not a question of novelty, it is not that they decide for marriage because they want to know each other; they decide for marriage because they know each other. This is totally different.But that ghotul and the system of those communities is disappearing. They are being civilized by us, forced, because this seems to be immoral. At least for Christians, Hindus, Jainas, it seems immoral. Their community is being destroyed; their ghotul is thought to be like a house of prostitution. So they are being taught against their experience: they are being taught to destroy ghotuls and to stop this “immoral” situation.But man seems to be absolutely foolish. They are not immoral people; they are very moral people, very natural people. But Christians are working there and trying to convert them into Christians. They have converted many of those poor people into Christians. Now ghotuls are disappearing and there, one of the most solid systems is being destroyed.In fact, we should learn something from them.My whole device is to give you all the chances possible for spiritual growth so that you can have a feel for the right path. And that feel has to come through you. It has not to come through me, it has not to come through my influence.There are two ways not to influence you: one way is not to speak, to disappear somewhere so nobody can come close. Many people have done that too, but that doesn’t seem to work – it has no compassion in it. The other way is to communicate to you, to say to you what I have attained, what I have known, what I have tasted. That has been done, but then people become impressed. They become so impressed that they are almost dragged out of their nature. That too is dangerous. Maybe a hundred persons are influenced – then ten, fifteen, at the most twenty, will reach to the goal; eighty will be going against their nature.My effort is to make you available to all possibilities and to make all possibilities available to you so you can move, you can change, you can have your own time, at your own pace. And then one day a feeling will arise and that feeling will be totally yours – it will have nothing to do with me. Then you have come to a point where marriage happens: then you are married to a particular path.I will continue talking about other paths, but from that moment you will listen to me, you will love me, you will be grateful to me. But if I am saying something which goes against your path you will not choose it, you will not be impressed by it. If something fits on your path you will choose, but the decision will be your chosen path. Now anything that fits with it you will take in; anything that doesn’t fit, you will not take in. And you will not say, “That is wrong” – you know that on some other path it fits, so it may be right for somebody else.But once you have chosen your path, whatsoever I say, you will be able to choose. You will become a chooser, you will have an inner criterion – what fits, what does not fit.I am here for many sorts of people. I am not one-dimensional. I am here for all sorts of people and I am speaking to all of them. By and by, listening to me, being attentive to me, you will go on deciding by your feeling. But I will continue to speak; you will love to listen, you will love to understand, but you will not be distracted. Once you are married you will not be distracted, then there is no divorce.“When you were a Zen master telling us to choose our path and stick to it, I felt sure that my path was of the head, that I would never be able to surrender to anyone. Now, after one lecture on the Baul mystics, I feel like a lovesick schoolgirl. How to choose a path when you have none? How to be a light unto myself when your light dazzles me every morning?”One day you will be saturated with it. One day, one morning you will arise in your own being, alert to your needs, alert to your direction. Once that direction is understood, recognized, then there will be no problem. But one has to wait for it, it takes time – and before it happens I will have to shift you, turn you, shunt you from here and there.Sorry…but I have to do it.The Bauls say:Blind one,how can you stumble on a straight, spontaneous path?Be spontaneous in your own self,and find the way that is born in you.That is what I am trying to do here – I am a midwife. I’m not going to create something for you, it is already being created in your womb. It is already being created in your innermost shrine. At the most, I can help it to be born smoothly. At the most, if something goes wrong I can help you to remove the obstacle. But the child has been getting ready in you – I am just a midwife….Once you have found your child, your direction, then the path is very spontaneous.Blind one,how can you stumbleon a straight, spontaneous path?Be spontaneous in your own self,and find the way that is born in you.Words of wisdom describing Godcan reveal no riches in a darkened room.Seeking in darkness is confusing.Break the barriers and look at the sky;the formless is held as a beautiful formin the arms of the moon.I go on describing about the wealth, the treasures – but your eyes are full of darkness. My description impresses you, greed arises in you. You would also like to become a possessor of great treasures but your eyes are full of darkness. Even if the treasure is right in front of you and I am describing it to you, you are impressed by my description but you are not aware of the treasure lying just in front of you. My description is not going to help.Words of wisdom describing Godcan reveal no riches in a darkened room.Seeking in darkness is confusing.Break the barriers and look at the sky;the formless is held as a beautiful formin the arms of the moon.So don’t be too impressed by my words and don’t start feeling very sure while listening to me. But I know it is natural, it is human. Many times you will feel sure: “This is my path” – but the next day it will change. So become a little unsure about your sureness, hesitate a little.When I was talking on Zen you felt sure: “This is my path.” Now I am talking about the Bauls. Remember, tomorrow I may be talking about something else, so this time at least don’t feel so sure. Listen to me, but don’t give surety to what is heard. Wait, there is no hurry. Be patient, go on listening and trying but don’t feel sure because your surety is dangerous. Feel sure only when your own child is born, when you have a sense of direction.And you will be able to see the difference because it is so tremendously different. It will not be because of me, you will be able to see now that it is not that you are impressed by me, there is nothing like impression. Suddenly a great upsurge, a great energy has happened in you and it is absolutely certain. But you will be able to see that it is not because of any influence from my side. Sometimes it may even happen contrary to what I am saying. Sometimes – it is possible if you have been shifted too many times from one path to another – I am talking about love and listening to me about love a great certainty will arise in you that, “This is not my path; my path is meditation,” or vice versa. It is difficult to say how you will be able to make sure that this is not the surety coming by influence, but your own. But I know that you will be able to do it.It is exactly like when you have a headache – you know. You don’t ask anybody, “Please tell me when I have a headache. How am I going to know that it is a headache, that I am really having it?” No – you will know. When the real certainty arises, it is so clear, so crystal-clear – like a pillar of light – and just by its arising you are washed clean. Just by its arising you feel a new being, altogether new, a new birth. It is not intellectual, it is not in the head; you will feel it all over your body, all over your mind, all over your heart – your totality will feel it. When that certainty arises, then it is faith, then it is trust. By being influenced, whatsoever you get is nothing but a belief. A belief is a very impotent thing; it never changes anybody.The third question:Osho,What is the difference between the following: thinking and understanding, reaction and response, belief and faith, sympathy and compassion, communication and communion?Thinking is the absence of understanding. You think because you don’t understand. When understanding arises, thinking disappears. It is like a blind man groping his way: when eyes are there you don’t grope for the way, you see it. Understanding is like eyes: you see it, you don’t grope. Thinking is groping. Not knowing what is what, you go on thinking, guessing. Thinking cannot give you the right answer because thinking can only repeat that which is known. Thinking has no vision for the unknown.Have you ever tried thinking about the unknown? How will you think? You can think only that which you know; it is repetitive. You can go on thinking it again and again, you can make new combinations of old thoughts but nothing really is new. Understanding is fresh, new. It has nothing to do with the past. Understanding is here, now. It is an insight into reality.With thinking there are questions and questions and no answers. Even sometimes when you feel that you have found an answer, it is just because one has to decide some way or other. It is not really the answer but you have to decide for action so some answer has to be clung to. And if you look deeply into your answer, you will see a thousand and one questions arising out of it. Understanding has no questions but only answers – because it has eyes.Thinking is borrowed. All your thoughts are given to you by others. Watch – can you find a single thought that is yours, authentically yours, that you have given birth to? They are all borrowed. The sources may be known or not known, but they are all borrowed. The mind functions like a computer, but before the computer can give you any answer you have to feed it. You have to supply all the information, then it will give you the answer. That is what mind has been doing.Mind is a biocomputer. You go on collecting data, knowledge, information, and then when a certain question arises, your mind supplies the answer out of that collection. It is not a real response, it is just out of the dead past.What is understanding? – understanding is pure intelligence. That pure intelligence is originally yours, you are born with it. Nobody can give you intelligence. Knowledge can be given to you, not intelligence. Intelligence is your own sharpened being. Through deep meditation one sharpens one’s being; through meditation one drops borrowed thoughts, reclaims one’s own being, reclaims one’s originality, reclaims one’s childhood, innocence, freshness. Out of that freshness, when you act, you act out of understanding. And then the response is total, herenow, and the response is because of the challenge, not because of the past.For example: somebody asks you a question – what do you do? You immediately go inside the mind and find out the answer. You immediately go into the basement of the mind where you have collected all knowledge and find the answer there – then it is thinking. Somebody asks a question and you become silent: you look into the question with penetrating eyes, not into the memory but into the question, you face the question, you encounter the question; if you don’t know, you say you don’t know.For example; somebody asks whether God exists or not: you immediately say, “Yes, God exists.” Where is this answer coming from – from your memory – Christian memory, Hindu memory, Muslim memory? Then it is almost useless, futile. If you have a communist memory you will say, “No, there is no God.” If you have a Catholic memory you will say, “Yes, there is God.” If you have a Buddhist memory you will say, “There is no God.” But these answers are coming from the memory. If you are a man of understanding you will simply listen to the question, you will go deep into the question, you will simply watch. If you don’t know, you will say, “I don’t know.” If you know, only then will you say you know. And when I say, “If you know,” I mean if you have realized.A man of understanding is true. Even if he says, “I don’t know,” his ignorance is more valuable than the knowledge of the mind because at least his ignorance, his acceptance of the ignorance, is closer to truth. At least he is not trying to pretend, he is not a hypocrite.Watch, and you will see that all your answers come from your memory. Then try to find out a way where memory does not function and pure consciousness functions. That is what understanding is.I have heard:A doctor stepped into the patient’s room. Five minutes later he came out and asked for a corkscrew, then he went back to his patient. In another five minutes he was out again and demanded a chisel and hammer.The distraught husband couldn’t stand it any longer. He pleaded, “For heaven’s sake, doctor, what is wrong with my wife?”“I don’t know yet,” the doctor replied. “I can’t get my bag opened.”Even sometimes when you say, “I don’t know,” it may not necessarily be coming out of understanding. It may be simply that you can’t open your bag. It may be that you cannot open your memories, or you are not able to find something in the memory – you need time. You say, “I don’t know” – you say, “Give me time, let me think about it.” What will you do by thinking? If you know, you know; if you don’t know, you don’t know. What are you going to think about? But you say, “Give me time, I will think about it.”What are you saying? You are saying, “Give me a little time; I will have to go into the basement of my mind and search. And there is such rubbish accumulated through the years that it is difficult to find, but I will try.”Meditate and become free from this basement. It is not that the basement is not useful, it can be used, but it should not become a substitute for your understanding. A man of understanding looks into things directly. His insight is direct, but he can use all his accumulation to help the insight to reach you. He can use all his accumulation to make everything that he is trying to convey to you clear, but that which he is trying to convey is his own. Words may be borrowed, language may be borrowed – has to be borrowed – concepts may be borrowed but not what he is trying to convey to you. The container will come from the memory but the contents will be his insight.And of course, a man who has no understanding is continuously a victim of so many thoughts, because he has no one insight to give him a center. He has a crowd of thoughts – unrelated to each other, even diametrically opposite to each other, contradicting each other, with deep antagonism towards each other. He has a crowd – not even a group, not even a society, but a mob of thoughts buzzing inside the mind. So if you go on with your thinking too far, one day you will become mad. Too much thought can create insanity.In primitive societies madness is rare. The more civilized a society is, the more people go insane. And in civilized societies, more people go insane who work with their intellects. This is unfortunate but this is a fact: that more psychoanalysts go mad than any other profession. Why? – too much thinking. It is very difficult to manage so many contradictory thoughts together. In managing them, your whole being becomes unmanaged, becomes a chaos.Understanding is single, understanding is central. It is simple; thoughts are very complex.A henpecked husband visited a psychiatrist and said he had a recurring nightmare. “Every night,” he said. “I dream I am shipwrecked with twelve beautiful women.”“What is so terrible about that?” asked the psychiatrist.“Have you ever tried cooing to twelve women?”That was his problem: how to “coo” to twelve women. Even to coo to one woman is difficult.Thinking is like cooing to thousands and thousands of women around you. One naturally goes mad. Understanding is very simple: you are married to one insight, but that insight works like a light, a torch: wherever you focus your torch, mysteries are revealed, wherever you focus your torch, darkness disappears.Try to find your hidden understanding – the way is to drop thinking. And to drop thinking there are two possibilities: either meditation or love.The second: reaction and response.Reaction is from the thoughts and response is understanding. Reaction comes from the past, response is always in the present. But ordinarily we react – we have everything already ready inside.Somebody is doing something and we react as if a button has been pushed. Somebody insults you – you become angry. That has happened before – it has been happening the same all the while. It has become almost like a button: somebody pushes it – you become angry. There is not a single moment of waiting, not a single moment where you look at the situation – because the situation may be different.The person who is insulting you may be right, he may have simply revealed a truth to you – that’s why you feel insulted. Or, he may be absolutely wrong, or he may be nasty person – but you have to look into the person. If he is right, you have to thank him because he has shown something to you – he has shown compassion towards you, he has been friendly by bringing a truth to your heart. Maybe it hurts, but that is not his fault. Or, he is simply stupid, ignorant: not knowing anything about you he has blurted something out. Then there is no need to be angry, he is simply wrong. Nobody is worried about something which is absolutely wrong. Unless it has some truth in it, you are never irritated by it. You can laugh at it, at the whole absurdity of it – it is ridiculous. Or, the person is nasty and that is his way. He is being insulting to everybody. So he is not doing anything to you in particular, he is simply being himself – that’s all. So in fact nothing is needed to be done; that man is that type.Somebody insulted Buddha. His disciple Ananda said, “I was getting very angry and you kept quiet. You should have at least allowed me; I would have put him right.”Buddha said, “You surprise me. First he surprised me, now you surprise me. Whatsoever he was saying is simply irrelevant. It is unconnected with us, so why get into it? But you surprise me more: you have become very annoyed, you look angry. This is foolish. To punish oneself for somebody else’s error is foolish. You are punishing yourself. Cool down. There is no need to be angry because anger is fire. Why are you burning your own soul? If he has committed some mistake, why do you punish yourself? It is stupid.” But we react….I have heard:One man was saying to one of his friends, “To please my wife, I have given up smoking, drinking, and playing cards.”“That must make her very happy,” said his friend.“No, it has not. Now, every time she begins to talk to me, she can’t think of anything to say.”People live mechanical, robot-like lives. If your wife has been continuously nagging you to stop smoking and you think that she will be happy if you stop, you are wrong. If you smoke, she is unhappy; if you stop smoking, she will be unhappy – because then she will not find any excuse to nag you.One woman has said to me that she doesn’t want her husband to be perfect.I asked, “Why?”She said, “Because I love nagging.”If the husband is perfect what are you going to do? You will be simply at a loss.Watch yourself, watch others and see how they are behaving in a mechanical way: unconscious, like somnambulists, sleepwalkers.Reaction is of the mind; response is of the no-mind.Belief and faith? – again the same: belief is of the mind, of thinking; faith is of no-mind, of awareness, understanding.It happened in a hillside village: the hunter said to his guide, “This seems to be a very dangerous cliff. It is a wonder they don’t put up a warning sign.”“They had one up for two years,” the native guide admitted, “but no one fell over, so they took it down.”Belief is blind. You believe because you have been taught to believe, but it never goes very deep because it has no understanding of the situation. It is just a superfluous tag, just something added to you. It has not grown from you, it has not been a growth. It is just borrowed so it never penetrates your being. A few days you carry it and then seeing that it is useless, nothing is happening, you put it aside. There are Christians who are not Christians, there are Hindus who are not Hindus. They are Hindus only because of those beliefs that they have never used, those beliefs that have never been given any respect by them. They think they are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans – but how can you be a Mohammedan if you have not lived your belief?But belief cannot be lived. If one starts becoming more alert, watching life, responding, then by and by a faith arises. Faith is yours, belief is somebody else’s. Drop beliefs so that faith can arise. And don’t be satisfied with beliefs, otherwise faith will never arise.Sympathy and compassion….The same; the questioner has asked the same thing again and again.Sympathy is of the mind: you feel somebody is in trouble, somebody is in misery; you think somebody is in misery and you have to help. You have been taught to help, to be of service, to be dutiful, to be a good human being, to be a good citizen, to be this and that. You have been taught, you feel sympathy. Compassion has nothing to do with your teachings. Compassion arises as an empathy, not as a sympathy. Compassion arises when you can see the other person as he is. And when you can see him so totally that you start feeling him, you start feeling in the same situation.It happened….A few people were beating a fisherman. Ramakrishna was moving from one bank to another of the Ganges, near Dakshineshwar. On the other shore a few people were beating a man. Ramakrishna was in the middle of the stream. He started crying and weeping and he started shouting, “Stop, don’t beat me!”People who were sitting around him, his disciples, could not believe what was happening: “Who is beating you? Who can beat him?”They said, “What are you saying, paramahansadeva? Have you gone mad?”He said, “Look! They are beating me there on the other side.” Then they looked; a few persons were beating a man and Ramakrishna said, “Look at my back.” He uncovered his back – there were marks, blood was coming out. It was impossible to believe. They went, they rushed to the other shore, caught hold of the man who was beaten. They uncovered his back: exactly the same marks.This is empathy – putting oneself into somebody else’s place so totally that what is happening to him starts happening to you. Then compassion arises. But these states are all of no-mind.Communication and communion….Communication is of the mind: verbal, intellectual, conceptual. Communion is of no-mind, of deep silence – a transfer of energy, nonverbal, a jump from one heart to another – immediate, without any medium.The basic, most essential thing to remember is – because it divides your life, it divides the whole world into two worlds – the essential thing is if you are looking through a screen of thoughts, then you live in one world: the world of belief, thinking, sympathy. If you are looking with clean eyes, unclouded eyes, your perception has a clarity: pure, just seeing into things as they are, not projecting anything upon them. Then you have understanding, then you have meditation. Then the whole world changes.And the problem is that mind can deceive you: it creates sympathy – it creates pseudo coins. For compassion it creates sympathy – sympathy is a pseudo coin; for communion, it has only communication, which is a pseudo coin; for faith, it has belief, which is a pseudo coin.Remember it, mind tries to substitute. You are lacking something? – mind tries to substitute it. Be very alert, because whatsoever mind can do is going to be false. Mind is the great falsifier, the greatest deceiver there is. It helps, it tries to console you, it gives you something.For example, if in the day you have fasted, in the night you dream of foods, resting in great hotels, or being invited to the palaces of the kings and eating beautiful food. Why? – the whole day you have been hungry, now it is difficult to sleep because of hunger; the mind creates a substitute, a dream.Have you not watched? In the night your bladder is full and you would like to go to the bathroom, but your sleep will be disturbed. The mind immediately creates a dream that you are in the bathroom – then you can go on sleeping. It gives you a substitute. The substitute is conciliatory, it is not real – but for the time being it helps.So beware of mind’s consolations. Seek reality, because only reality can fulfill. Consolations will only postpone; they can never be fulfilling. You can eat as much food as you like in the night in your dream – you can enjoy the fragrance of it, the taste of it, the color of it, everything – but it is not going to be nourishing. This is one thing that is not going to happen: it cannot nourish. Belief can give you the whole fragrance of faith, the taste, the color. You can enjoy it but it will not nourish you. Only faith can nourish.Always remember, that which nourishes you is real and that which simply gives you a consolation is very dangerous. Because of this consolation you will not seek the real food. If you start living in dreams and you don’t eat real food, then by and by you will dissipate, disappear, become dry and you will be dead.So take immediate action: whenever mind is trying to give you a substitute, don’t listen to it. It is a great salesman, a great seducer. It convinces you and it says, “These things are very cheap. Faith is very difficult to find because you will have to risk your life; belief is very easy, very cheap – you can get it for nothing.”In fact, so many people are ready – if you accept their belief they are ready to give you something more with it. Become a Christian, become a Hindu, become a Mohammedan – people are ready to give you a great welcome and respect, respectability. Everything is available – just accept their belief. Belief is not only cheap, it can even bring many more things with it.Faith is dangerous, never cheap. You will have to put your whole life at stake. It needs courage, but only a courageous person can be religious.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 1 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 1 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Nothing has happenedand nothing will happen.What is there, is there.I became a king in my dreamand my subjects occupied the entire earth.I sat on the throne ruling like a lion,living a happy life.The world obeyed me.As I turned in my bed, all was clear:I was not a lion but a lion’s uncle,a jackass, the village idiot….Nothing has happened and nothing will happen. What is there, is there.This is one of the most significant assertions ever made. It is so: the reality remains in its suchness. Nothing changes, nothing can change. But we see many changes happening all around. For us, everything is changing. Life is a flux.Then something is wrong with us. Then the change appears not because it is there, but because we cannot see the eternal. Our inability to see the real, the eternal, creates a flux-like phenomenon all around us. It is our flickering consciousness.Have you watched sometimes in a dark room? A small candle burns, and it goes on flickering. Because of its flickering the whole room seems to be moving, waving, changing. If the flame is constant, the room stops changing – it becomes constant.Our consciousness creates the mirage, the illusion, the dream-like world that surrounds us. This has to be understood very deeply because this is the very base of all essential religions.It is true as far as ordinary understanding goes: everything seems to be changing, nothing seems to be permanent. Nothing seems to be the same even for two moments, two consecutive moments. Nothing seems to be the same, everything goes on like a river. To think of anything permanent is almost impossible. To think of anything that has remained the same for ever and ever is incomprehensible to the mind. The mind knows only the world of change. The mind knows only the dream, the illusion. A life lived through the mind is a life of dreams. That is the meaning of the concept of maya. It does not say anything about the reality. Remember: it does not say that the reality is not real, it does not say that existence is a dream. It simply says that the way you look at it is so unconscious, the way you look at it is so wavering, unstable, that your inner wavering gives you a world of flux, dreams. Attain to inner integrity, attain to inner crystallization and suddenly all flux-like phenomena disappear, and suddenly you are face to face with the real, the substantial, the permanent – call it God. The world and God are not two things but the same reality looked at in two ways. One is through the mind, the other is through no-mind – because if mind is there, there is going to remain, more or less, the flickering.The mind cannot be constant. Have you watched? Even for a few seconds the mind cannot be constant. Just look at your watch someday; just remember that you are looking at the watch, and you will not be able to retain this remembrance, that you are looking at the watch, even for a few seconds. Your mind will slip somewhere else: some memory, some imagination, some work that is incomplete, some worry, some plan; you must go somewhere. Again you will realize and you will see that for a few seconds you have not been here.Try again, again the mind will go away. Mind cannot be stable, so all efforts to make mind stable are impossible. That is not in the nature of the mind. The only way to be stable is to drop the whole mind as such; to look into reality without any thinking, to look so directly that the medium of the mind is not there. Look immediately – then suddenly God is revealed. Then, in all the forms the formless is revealed. Then, you see that which the Bauls say:Nothing has happenedand nothing will happen.What is there, is there.And what is not there, is not there. But the mind goes on seeing that which is not there, and because of that which is not there, we cannot see that which is there. Because of the false, because of the projected, because of the dreamed, we cannot see the real, we cannot see the true. When the false is dropped, reality is revealed. There is no other way to seek reality. One has to drop the very mechanism that creates falseness.Mind is a projector. You sit in a movie house and you see a thousand and one things passing on the screen – and the screen is empty, nothing is really passing except shadows. You go on looking at the screen and there is every possibility that you may not even think of the projector behind you which is projecting all those shadows, those pictures. You can start fighting with those shadows but that is not the way to stop them. The way is to look back, to make a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and go and stop the projector. Once the projector is stopped, the screen is empty. Suddenly there is nothing, or only the whiteness of the screen is left. Only the eternal is there and the changing has disappeared. But one has to stop the projector.There are many people who become interested in meditation, but in a wrong way. They start fighting with the mind, they start struggling and wrestling with the mind. Then they are not ever going to be victorious. Then they are fighting a losing battle. It is not possible because they have forgotten the projector. Where is the projector? One has to find the projector hidden behind your back. The projector is hidden deep in the unconscious, hidden in the unconscious: becoming, desiring. It is what Buddhists call trishna. The constant desire to be somebody, to be someone, to be somewhere else is the cause of the mind; then the mind continues.How to stop the projector? Be herenow. Don’t try in any way to become somebody else; accept that which you are. Drop all ideas of improvement. Drop all ideas of bettering yourself. Drop all ideas of achieving something; there is nothing to be achieved. Empty-handed we come, empty-handed we go, and in the meanwhile, empty-handed we remain. And if you think your hands are full then you are befooling yourself, then you are taking dreams as reality. Your hands may be full of dreams.You must have heard about the Japanese discipline of karate. The word karate is very meaningful. It comes from a root which means empty-hand. It says: a man can become a great warrior if he understands totally the meaning of being empty. If somebody understands that “Empty-handed I have come, empty-handed I will go, and empty-handed I am here,” then there is nothing to lose. Who can conquer a person who has nothing to lose? Who can defeat a person who has nothing to lose? Who can frighten a person who has nothing to lose? By understanding this emptiness he becomes a great warrior. It is impossible to defeat him, it is impossible to rob him, it is impossible to kill him – because he is already empty. He holds nothing in his hands. By not holding anything, he goes beyond life and death.That is Jesus’ meaning when he says again and again, “Lose yourself.” And those who are not going to lose themselves, they will lose; and those who are ready to lose, they will gain. The losers will become winners, and the winners will become losers. Those who are empty will be fulfilled, and those who are trying to fulfill themselves will remain empty. This is the paradox.Understand the very motivation of all ideas, thoughts, desires. It is a seed-like thing. Watch inside: why can’t you be herenow? Why is it that you are always thinking of somewhere else? Why can’t you be happy as you are? Why are you thinking that tomorrow you will be happy? How can you be happy tomorrow if you are not happy today? – because tomorrow is going to be born out of this moment. Out of this moment the next moment is going to be born. Today is going to become the parent of tomorrow. If you are unhappy today, you will be more unhappy tomorrow. By that time you will have learned many more tricks to be unhappy. You are practicing them, and you hope to be happy tomorrow? – then you are in a hopeless rut! You desire for tomorrow? – then you are continuously missing all that is here, and that is the only reality there is. If even for a single moment you can put aside desiring, then the projector stops and the dreaming stops and you are able to face reality.Nothing has happened. Reality is as it has always been from the very beginning. Nothing has happened and nothing will happen, so all your desiring is futile because you are trying for something to happen. Your whole effort is to make something happen: riches, wealth, power, prestige. Your whole effort is for something to happen, but:Nothing has happenedand nothing will happen.What is there, is there.This is a tremendously significant sutra. All the scriptures can be condensed into such a sutra. If you can understand only these three lines, there is no need to understand anything else. Look at your life from your childhood up to now. What has happened? Many things appear to happen, but what has really happened? You remain the same, your consciousness remains the same, and all that happens is just superficial, like a dream. If it has not happened up to now, how is it going to happen in the future? Only the present is; past and future are dreams. If even for a single moment you can penetrate into reality and you can see what is, face to face, you will laugh at the whole absurdity of your efforts. What are you trying to do? – you are trying something impossible: you are fighting against reality. Reality is; it knows no becoming, it is being. It knows no future; it is already here. It has always been already here. You have just to see it – and once you can see it, all worry, all anxiety disappears. Then, you stop trying, pulling yourself up by your shoestrings. Then, you simply relax. Then, there is no tension. Then, rather, you start delighting, you start being blissful as you are.Before we can understand it, a few things will be helpful.One: ordinarily, Eastern psychology divides the human mind into three divisions. The first is deep sleep, very deep sleep, when there are no more dreams – sushupti, dreamless sleep. In this state, ninety-nine percent unconsciousness and only one percent consciousness exists. A very small fragment of consciousness exists – the whole continent is dark, just one ray. Because of that ray, in the morning you can say, “I had a very good sleep. It was absolutely silent and peaceful. There was not a single dream.” Because of that one ray of consciousness, you can say this in the morning. If there were no consciousness at all, then who would remember? Then who would say that the sleep was beautiful, nourishing?Just a small ray, a very small ray exists in dreams. That is the second stage – dreaming – a little more consciousness comes into existence. You remember in a general way that you slept well. You can even remember dreams, details of the dreams. You can remember even the colors, the story, the pattern, the motif of the dream. You can relate the whole dream. You were a little more conscious.Then you are awake in the morning; that is the third stage: wakefulness, a little more consciousness. But the greater continent of your soul remains dark. Even while you are awake, you are not totally awake. Just deep down in your wakefulness, dreams are floating. You can watch that.Any moment close your eyes, rest for a single minute, and you will see that dreams are floating there. So just underneath your consciousness a great world of dreams continues, and that goes on affecting your consciousness. Dreams are powerful things. They are projections; they go on shadowing your consciousness. And deep down in your dreams you will again find a sort of sleep. That’s what happens when you fall asleep in the night. When you have fallen asleep, first dreams start. That is the second stage. Then only rarely do you go deep. Then dreams stop and you are in deep sleep. Again you start floating towards the surface, and this goes on continuously, the whole night – you move up and down, up and down. If you can touch the deep layer of sleep for only fifteen minutes in the whole night, that will be enough rest. That is why people who meditate do not need much sleep, because in deep meditation they can easily move into the depth of their beings. The rest of the night is wasted in dreaming. These three states are the ordinary states.The East says “Unless you attain to a greater awareness, your life will never know what the reality is, what God is.” That greater awareness means becoming totally aware, not leaving a single corner of your consciousness dark, dropping all unconsciousness – what the Freudians call the unconscious disappears by and by. By methods of meditation, prayer, love, it disappears; more and more, you become conscious. One moment comes when your whole being is conscious, full of light, luminous. Then there is no dreaming and no sleep. Just awareness is the stuff you are made of. In that moment you will become able to know what this Baul is singing:Nothing has happenedand nothing will happen.What is there, is there.And if you understand this, even a glimpse of it, then how can you remain in an agonized existence, how can you worry and how can you remain tense and feeding illnesses?Henry Thoreau used to say that what man thinks is wealth – when man thinks that he is becoming by and by wealthy – is more like “illth” than wealth. We become more and more ill. Well-being does not happen through it, so why call it wealth? Man thinks he is becoming more and more powerful, and deep down, more and more impotence happens. On the outside you think you are achieving many things, but deep down you remain empty, hollow. The sooner you realize this hollowness the better, because then you will not waste your time and energy. Then, your whole life will be of a totally different quality: the search will begin. Then you will not be chasing dreams.And dreams look very real. They are not, but they look very real. To an unconscious mind, dreams look as if they are the only reality. Have you not watched that deep in sleep, dreaming, every night you again become a victim? You again start thinking that this is real. In the morning you realize it was false, just a dream, but in the night, again and again you are a victim and you start thinking it is real.Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples, “Unless you realize in your dreams that they are dreams, you will not be able to awaken.” So he used to give them techniques of how to realize while dreaming that it is a dream, how to recognize that it is a dream. But the moment you recognize a dream as a dream, it stops – it immediately stops. Then it cannot be there. With your recognition of the dream as dream, the dream dies. It exists only through your cooperation and recognition; you give it reality. Pull your hands away and it drops flat, and it has nothing in it. The dream has power only because you impart power to it.Watch people on the street, in the marketplace. Just stand by the side and just look at people – you will be surprised. It is so obvious that they are sleepwalkers. They are walking like somnambulists. Somehow, they are managing, but they are walking fast asleep. You can watch their lips moving as if they are talking with somebody, and there is nobody. They can even be found making gestures to somebody who is not present. Watch their faces; their faces have not the aura of awareness – a dullness, a dark shadow, as if somehow they are pulling themselves together to be aware, ready to fall any moment into dreaming, into sleep. Drunk with their dreams, people go on moving.First watch others, because it will be easy for you to watch others. Then start watching yourself. Then start catching yourself red-handed. Then sometimes, just walking on the road, suddenly stop and see whether you are here or you are moving somewhere in a dream.The more you become alert about your dreams, the more you will see gaps arising in your consciousness when dreams are not there and reality can be approached. But we have great investments in our dreams. We may be afraid of nightmares, but we are not yet fed-up with dreaming. We still go on cherishing sweet dreams.I have heard:A man was talking to one of his friends. “I had a dream the other night,” said Casey to his pal McGinn, “and it taught me a great lesson.”“What was it?” asked McGinn.“I dreamed I was in Rome and I had an audience with the Pope. ‘Would I have a drink,’ he asked me. Thinks I, ‘Would a duck swim?’ And seein’ the whisky and lemons and sugar on the sideboard, I told him that I wouldn’t mind a drop of punch.‘Cold or hot?’ he asked me. ‘Hot, Your Holiness,’ said I, an’ that’s where I made me mistake!”“I don’t see anything wrong,” said the friend.“His Holiness stepped toward the kitchen to boil the water, and before he got back I woke up.”“What lesson did you learn?” asked McGinn.“Next time,” swore Casey, “I will say, ‘I will take it cold, Your Holiness, while the water is getting hot.’”We have investments in our dreams. They don’t exist without our help; we make them exist. Sweet dreams, golden dreams – we have a romance with them, a very long romance of many lives. We go on courting dreams, and of course when we court them they are there and they bring nothing but frustration. Because they are against reality, they can never bring fulfillment. There is no way to make two plus two equal five – there is no way. Whatsoever you do, two plus two will always be four and you go on hoping that someday it is going to be five. Then you are simply in a mathematical error. Dreams can never be real, your thoughts can never be real, your hopes can never be realized, your desires can never be fulfilled. The only outcome can be more and more frustration.That’s why children look so beautiful: because they are yet full of hope, full of dreams, and they have not yet known frustration. Old people start looking very, very dead. Hopes have leaked out, by and by, and there is only frustration – a very bad taste on the tongue. Experience makes people bitter. Experience makes people lose their innocence, lose their hope, lose their trust. But it is not experience really – because they wanted to make their dreams real, that’s why. Otherwise you can remain as innocent to the very end of your life as in the beginning – in fact, even more – because the innocence that happens in childhood is just natural. It has not been tested against fire; it is very fragile. It has no crystallization in it. It is just a gift; it has not been earned. But when an old man is childlike and innocent, then nothing can destroy it. Then it has a solidity to it, then it is substantial; he has earned it.But how does one earn innocence? – by learning from frustrations, by going deep into frustrations and realizing the fact that each frustration is an outcome of a certain dream. If you don’t want frustrations, drop dreaming. Life is not frustrating, dreaming is frustrating.I have heard Mulla Nasruddin say to his son, “It is none of your business to know or inquire how I first met your mother, but I can tell you one thing: it sure cured me of whistling.”If your life can cure you of whistling and dreaming, it will be enough, more than enough, more than life can give to you. It will be a great realization.But what happens? The moment one dream is frustrated, we immediately replace it, substitute it with another dream, maybe an even bigger dream. We never look into the reality. We go on saying that man proposes and God disposes. God has never disposed of anything. It is you, in your very dream, who both proposes and disposes. It is your own proposal that carries the seeds of disposal because it is not in tune with reality. It is your expectation that carries the seeds of frustration.God, or call it reality, has never frustrated anybody. It is always showering on you; it is always ready to fulfill you to the deepest core of your being. But you won’t listen to reality. You are too much with dreams.This is what I call religious conversion: listening to reality and dropping the dreams is religious conversion. It will be difficult, hard, arduous in the beginning, because the dreams persuade you so easily and they show you such wonderful visions, fantasies. Dreams are great poets: they paint, they poetize, they fantasize; they create such beautiful hopes in you, paradises, heavens. They are all dreams. But you can live hoping, and today’s misery can be tolerated because of tomorrow’s dream.It is very difficult to drop tomorrow’s dream because then suddenly you become aware of the misery that is here today. But remember, that misery is created by yesterday’s dream. It has nothing to do with today. Yesterday’s dream has created the misery today; tomorrow’s dream will create misery again. So when you drop tomorrow’s dream, you will not suddenly become happy, because yesterday’s dream will still linger on. You have sown the seeds – who is going to cut the crop? But half is done when you drop tomorrow’s dream. Yesterday’s dream, its frustration, has to be passed through. That’s what in India we call tapas, austerity. “Yesterday’s dream was my dream. I have sown it, so l have to go through the suffering. I have to pass through the frustration. I accept it; it is my own doing. Nobody else is responsible, but now I am not going to sow any more seeds.”First, drop tomorrow’s dream. Then by and by yesterday’s dream and its hang-ups and hangovers disappear. Then a man becomes aware. When your eyes are not full of dreams, your eyes are full of awareness.It happened: MacGonigal was staggering up the street from telephone pole to lamppost and back again. Father Daly stopped him and said, “Drunk again?”“Are you?” said MacGonigal. “So am I, Father.”“This is no time for levity,” admonished the priest. “After taking the pledge and promising me two weeks ago that you would never drink again! It is a sin against God and the church, and I am sorry to be saying so.”“You are sorry to see me so?”“Indeed I am!”“Are you sure you are sorry?”“Yes, very, very sorry.”“Then if you are so sorry,” said the drunkard, “I will forgive you Father.”Drunk, in our dreams, we go on interpreting in our own ways. We go on seeing things which are not. We go on listening to things which have not been said. We go on pretending what we are not, and we go on holding a dreamworld around ourselves.The befuddled group was hanging around a bar when the door opened and a voice shouted, “McGuire, your house is on fire!”One fellow rushed out, and after running a block at breakneck speed, suddenly skidded to a halt. “Hell,” he said to nobody in particular, “my name isn’t McGuire.”This is what is happening to everybody: you don’t know your name, you don’t know your essence, you don’t know who you are, you don’t know why you are here, you don’t know why you are running so fast. Where are you going? Why are you in such a hurry? Reality is here. Where are you going? But some conditioning – what Hindus call sanskar – from many lives of dreaming, desiring: that has become your only reality. You go on after it, not knowing why. It has become a habit. You cannot resist it; you are always on the move. The reality is here and you are always on the move; hence there happens no meeting. Unless that meeting happens, you will never be happy.Happiness is when you are in tune with reality. Happiness is a harmony between you and the real. Unhappiness is a disharmony between you and the real. So if you are unhappy, remember – you must be going away from reality. Be aware that somehow you must not be falling in line with reality. There must be a conflict between you and the real, and of course you cannot win against the real; there is no way. You have tried all the ways. The whole humanity has tried all the ways possible, but there is no way to win over reality and against reality.You have to follow reality, you have to come into a deep accordance with reality, in tune with it. You have to become a note in the great orchestra that reality is – not fighting but surrendering, submitting to it, ready to dissolve into it. That is what Bauls call love: the readiness to dissolve into reality, the readiness to merge, melt, the readiness to be one with reality. You will be losing something – your dreams, your individuality, your ego; you will be losing that separation. You will disappear as a drop of water, but it is nothing to be worried about because you will become the ocean. You will not be what you have been up to now: your ego, confined in a form, in a name. Your fences will disappear. You will not be an island, you will become part of the continent – but you will become the continent.Nothing is lost by losing yourself; everything is lost by resisting. But we go on misunderstanding reality. If reality tries to absorb us, it looks like death.So many times, almost every day, somebody or other comes to me. Meditating deeply, when reality starts absorbing you, you become frightened because it looks like death. It is like death, but it is not death. It is the door to life more abundant, to life infinite and eternal. But yes, in a way it is death – death to the past, death to you, death to you as you are. But then, what are you? Why are you so afraid of dying? You have nothing to lose – only a miserable self, only an imprisonment will be burned down, only the structure of misery and agony will be burned down. You have nothing to lose. Why do you go on clinging to it? But you have become very familiar with it and you become afraid. Whenever in deep meditation sometimes, by chance, coincidence, you come close to reality and the reality starts spreading in you, you become afraid and you escape.Your interpretation has to be dropped. You have to learn how to listen to the real – so when reality approaches you, welcome it. If God comes towards you, if you cannot move towards him, at least don’t run away. And he is coming towards you in millions of ways. He wants to overpower you, to reclaim you. It is not only that you are seeking him, he is also seeking you. In fact, your seeking is just pseudo. You talk about seeking God but you don’t really mean it. You would like to find him by the way. You don’t want to stake anything. You don’t want to pay for it. You don’t want to earn him. You would like to get him for free; that is not the way.You will have to lose yourself; you will have to lose all. People don’t mean it, and when God approaches them – and he approaches you, I have seen his hands many times coming close to you – I have seen you running away. And again, when you are far away you start seeking him and you say, “How to find God?” Now this game has continued for too long, and it has become almost a habit that when he is far away you seek, when he comes close you escape. This pattern has to be broken.I have heard:It was a Sunday morning when the clarinet player who had recently moved next to the small church started practicing some hot licks that brought the minister over on a run.“See here,” said the minister, “did you ever hear ‘keep thy sabbath holy’?”“Nope,” said the cat, “but if you whistle a few notes, I will do my best.”Our understanding is our understanding; our interpretation is our interpretation. Beware – when reality approaches you, don’t try to interpret. Just wait, be patient; the reality that is coming closer to you will reveal itself to you. But before it reveals itself, if you take some interpretation to your heart, then you are again closed. You close your doors and then there is no way to know what was really going to happen.Just the other night a sannyasin was crying, weeping: she had become so afraid of Dynamic Meditation because she saw one sannyasin almost going mad in it. So she became very afraid. The fear arose in her that if this could happen to one person, this could happen to her also. She could not utter the very words dynamic meditation, because the moment she would say “dynamic meditation” she would start shaking and crying. She could not relate it accurately, what had happened – because the very words dynamic meditation. She became so much afraid of the very word that she was not able to relate the whole thing, what had happened. Only in fragments could she say that somebody was becoming almost mad, and not only that, but the one who was becoming mad just by her side also started pulling her hand. That became very symbolic. This madman was going mad himself, and trying to pull her in also. But a deep fear of madness is in everybody.If you are too afraid of madness you cannot be in love, you cannot meditate, you cannot pray, because all of these dimensions are, in a way, mad dimensions – you will be going beyond the normal boundary of humanity. The normal, routine, workaday world; the normal logic, reason; the so-called normal humanity – you will be going beyond it, you will be transcending it. It will look like madness.Bauls say:Mad, mad, we are all mad!Why is this word so derogatory then?Diving deep into the heart’s stream,you will find that no one is betterthan the one who is mad.Madness is possible in two ways: either you fall below the normal or you go above the normal. In both ways you become mad. If you fall below the normal you are ill; you need psychiatric treatment to be pulled back to normality. If you go beyond the normal you are not ill. For the first time you are becoming really healthy because for the first time you are filled with wholeness. Then don’t be afraid. If your madness brings you more sanity in life, then don’t be afraid. And remember, the madness that is below the normal is always nonvoluntary; that is the symptom – it is nonvoluntary. You cannot do it, it happens; you are pulled into it. And the madness that is above the normal is voluntary – you can do it – and because you can do it, you remain the master of it. You can stop it at any moment. If you don’t want to go further, you can stop it; if you want to go further, you can go on – but you remain always in control.In these meditations here, our whole effort is to give you a taste of the madness that is beyond the normal but you remain the master. Any moment you want to come back, you can come back. This is the indication that you don’t need any psychiatric help. This is totally different from ordinary madness: you are going on your own. And remember, if you go on your own, you will never be neurotic because you will release all possibilities of madness. You will not go on accumulating them. Ordinarily, we go on repressing.The sannyasin who was so afraid had repressed much madness in herself. Now she was afraid to do the meditation. That can create trouble someday. One day, the cup can be too full and overflowing; then she will not be able to control it. Right now is the moment to allow it, to move into catharsis, to throw it out, to act it out so she is cleaned of it and her system is cleaned of it. But then she interprets and fear arises.Whenever God approaches you, you will see that you are going mad. You will vibrate into a new rhythm; your whole body will be full of shivering, shaking; you will feel a new energy pouring into you, and the energy is so tremendous that your capacity is not that much. By and by, your capacity will grow. By and by, you will be able to absorb it. By and by, the shaking and trembling will disappear. By and by, you will become perfectly silent – but it takes time.The Bauls say:This enchanting river reflects the very formof the formless one.Sense the essence of matter….You see only a little bit of lifeand remain involved in it, in a drunken stupor.You are satisfied with very, very little, with a very small fragment. While you could have been a king, you are content with being a beggar. You are born to be a king, but you have become habituated to being a beggar – and you think this is your vocation, to be a beggar. In sleep, we are dreaming something which we are not.Today’s poem says:Nothing has happenedand nothing will happen.What is there, is there.I became a king in my dreamand my subjects occupied the entire earth.I sat on the throne ruling like a lion,living a happy life.The world obeyed me.As I turned in my bed all was clear:I was not a lion, but a lion’s uncle,a jackass, the village idiot….Turn in your sleep and you will see: immediately the dream changes. That is what I call sannyas – turning in your sleep. Take a turn and you will see the dream changes. Just a small turn from this side to that, and you can never catch hold of the same dream again – because dreams are not real. You cannot re-continue a broken dream. Once broken, it is broken forever. It is…there is no way to catch hold of it. You cannot re-connect yourself with the dream. And in dreams we are many things.Chuang Tzu says, “In a dream I saw myself becoming a butterfly. In the morning I was very worried because a great problem arose: if I can become a butterfly in the dream, if Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly in the dream, then the reverse is also possible. Now the butterfly may be dreaming, and dreaming that she has become a Chuang Tzu. If Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly, why can’t a butterfly become a Chuang Tzu?”Chuang Tzu gathered together his disciples and asked, “Please tell me, who am I? – the butterfly dreaming?”In fact, he was giving a koan to his disciples. I know that he had never dreamed. Men like Chuang Tzu don’t dream. When dreaming stops, then a man becomes like Chuang Tzu. He was giving a koan, and a very beautiful koan, a great puzzle to be solved and meditated over. Those who meditate over it will find: you are neither Chuang Tzu nor a butterfly – both are dreams. You are neither the lion nor the lion’s uncle – both are dreams. You are the one who recognizes the dream, you are the witness.Only the witness is the real.In the day, you are awake, doing a thousand and one things. In the night, you fall asleep and you forget all about the day: your wife, your husband, your children – so close to you – even they are no longer there. You forget all about the world. You enter into a totally different dimension. You forget your degrees, your riches, your bank balance; you forget everything, even your name. Another world opens. You take another name, another identity, another wife, other children, another profession. In the morning again you are back in the old dream – and this goes on. If a person lives ninety years, he will dream for thirty years. It is not a small time. One-third of the time you are dreaming – in sleep. Thirty years out of ninety years is as big as your so-called world. The world is also a dream, maybe a common dream – we dream together. And in the night the dream is private – you dream alone but it makes no difference: private or common, a dream is a dream.But what then is the definition of a dream? How to define “dream,” how to make it distinct, and how to distinguish it from reality? The Eastern definition is: if in your mind there is any thought, then it is dream. If the mind is thoughtless, then whatsoever is, is real – because the thought process creates the flux-like life. It gives an appearance to the permanent, as if it is momentary.The Bauls say:A man unknown to me, and I,we both live together,but with a gap of millions of miles between us.That is what they call the essential man.You are two: one is the essential man at the center, and one is the acquired man at the periphery. And these two exist far apart – and you have become too identified with the periphery. How to fall back to the center, to the essential man, the adhar manush? Witnessing is the way. Do whatsoever you are doing but remain a witness. Watch it, observe it, continue to remember yourself. Walking on the road, remember that there is a point inside you which is not walking, which has never walked, which cannot walk with you. It has no legs to walk. That point is your center. Through that center you will come to know the reality, the reality that Bauls sing of:Nothing has happened,and nothing will happen.What is there, is there.Once you touch your source of permanence, your eternity, you have touched the eternity of life also. Parallel to you, things happen. If you are at the center, you are capable of looking into the very center of life. If you are on the periphery, you are capable of only looking at the periphery of life. The periphery goes on changing.Have you seen a bullock-cart moving? The wheel moves, and goes on moving, but at the center of the wheel something remains permanent. The wheel moves on that permanent hub. The wheel’s movement exists on that unmoving hub. Exactly like that, you have a hub – that hub is unmoving; and you have a wheel-like personality that goes on moving. You have traveled far, thousands of miles and thousands of lives, and the wheel knows many roads and many paths but the hub has remained where it is. Now you can look at reality in two ways: either from the wheel – then everything is changing every moment; or from the hub – then nothing is changing.Nothing has happened,and nothing will happen.What is there, is there.How to find this hub of life? One finds it by becoming a witness. Eating, eat – but remember that there is a point inside you which has never eaten. Food goes into the body; your consciousness remains watching. Somebody insults you, anger arises; you remain a witness. The insult comes from outside, the anger arises on the periphery and you remain at the center, watching. Yes, somebody has done something, provoked your periphery and there is anger on the periphery, and the anger is surrounding you like a smoke cloud, but you are at the hub, watching. You are not identified with the periphery. Then the insult is outside and the anger is also outside of you. Both are separate and far away. Both are different from you.When this awareness grows, dreaming stops, by and by. When this awareness grows, the wheel moves slower and slower because there is no point. You never move, so what is the point of traveling the whole earth? You remain the same; then desires slow down. One day it happens: the wheel is as silent, as unmoving as the hub. That is the point when enlightenment happens.The Bauls say:Scanning the cosmos, you waste your hours.He is present in this little vessel.In this little body he has made his abode.He is here in this little vessel; in you.He is there, the God of Gods,the King of Kings, the Beloved.“Scanning the cosmos you waste your hours.” Moving from this point to that you are unnecessarily troubling yourself, creating misery. Look, see into your being, penetrate into the hub. And the Bauls say this is possible only if you become very humble.That’s why they say:I became a king in my dream,and my subjects occupied the entire earth.The dream is always egoistic; the ego is the dream.I became a king in my dreamand my subjects occupied the entire earth.I sat on the throne ruling like a lion,living a happy life.The world obeyed me.This is what ego is….As I turned in my bed all was clear:I was not a lion but a lion’s uncle,a jackass, the village idiot….When one understands, one becomes humble. Then one says, “I am just an idiot, a jackass.’’ One laughs at one’s own ridiculousness.The Bauls sing:The act of finding is not for the highest.By being humble you can reach life’s goal.Clouds pour down on the hollow of the earth,but the lowest of the wells guards the wateras a blessing.Become humble. If you start becoming humble, dreams will start disappearing because dreams are possible only with the ego. The ego is the dreamer, the creator of the dreams, the projector. That’s why all the religions insist on humbleness. Jesus goes on saying to his disciples, “Be poor in spirit…blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Nobody has ever seen the poor inheriting the earth. Nobody has ever seen the meek inheriting the earth. Then why does Jesus go on repeating it? He himself was crucified; even he was not able to inherit the earth. But he is talking about some other earth, about some other reality – a separate reality. He is not talking about this earth. This earth is the battlefield of the egos, great competition of the egos: struggle, fight, war. But when he says, “Blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth,” he means they shall inherit the real. People who are in their egos may inherit kingdoms in dreams, but their kingdoms are futile because they are just their own dreams, nothing else.The act of finding is not for the highest.By being humble you can reach life’s goal.Clouds pour down on the hollow of the earth,but the lowest of the wells guards the wateras a blessing.I have heard a story: Willy Jones dreamed that he had died. After the funeral, he found himself in a gigantic room, lavishly furnished. He rested on an overstuffed couch for a while but after an hour or so he began to get bored. “Is there anybody here?” he shouted. In a minute, a white-robed attendant appeared.“What do you want?” he asked.“What can I have?” Willy asked.The attendant shrugged, “Anything you want.” Willy asked for something to eat.“What do you want to eat?” the attendant asked. “You can have anything you want.” And so they brought him just what he wanted, and he went on eating and sleeping and having a fine time.He began to feel bored after a while and finally he shouted for the attendant and insisted, “I want something to do!”“I’m sorry,” the attendant told him, “but that is the one thing that we can’t provide.”Willy looked around him. “I am sick and tired of it,” he said. “I would rather go to hell.”“Well,” said the attendant, “where do you think you are?”The hell is a place where you cannot do anything because doing is possible only in reality. Dreaming is possible in hell, doing is not possible. If you are living in your dreaming, you are living in a hell. You may dream a thousand and one things but you cannot do anything.Watch…you want to be happy, but why can’t you be happy? Suddenly, you are impotent. You want to be happy, you dream about it but who is preventing you? Be happy? – then suddenly you feel impotent. You want peace, silence; you desire your dream. But who is preventing you? – just be silent; then suddenly you feel powerless. Doing is possible only when you are in contact with reality. Dreaming is possible on your own – you can go on dreaming.So let this be your criterion: if you really want to be happy, then find out a way to be in contact with reality and you will be happy. Just go on dreaming and don’t try to find a way to reality. Then you will be dreaming and you will become more and more unhappy, because again and again you will find that happiness is not happening.Doing is a function of the real; dreaming is the function of the unreal.The Bauls say:You must be single-minded to visit the courtof my beloved.If your mind is torn in two,you will swim in a quandaryand never reach the shore.The dreamer’s mind is divided in two: in witnessing and dreaming. Then you are not one, you are split. While you are simply witnessing you are one. There is no duality in you. You are – that’s all. So try to become one, single-minded. Whatsoever you are doing, try to become one. To say that you are dual is not true – you are many, you are a crowd. It is not only that you are two, you are many. Bring these fragments together. Any one thing, continuously followed, will help you to crystallize.For example: meditators try to meditate continuously. They do a thousand and one things, other things, but one thing continues as a current, as a thread running underground. They eat, but they make a meditation out of eating. They walk, but they make a meditation out of walking. They talk, but they make a meditation out of talking. They listen, but they listen meditatively. They do many things, but they connect everything with meditation. That becomes their one-mindedness.Lovers, the followers of the path of love, Bauls, make love their undercurrent. They eat, but they eat with love. They walk, but they walk with love – because the earth is holy ground. They sit under a tree, they sit with love – because the tree is divine. They look at somebody, they look with love – because there also is divinity. Everywhere they see their beloved, in each movement they remember their beloved. It becomes their constant remembrance.But whether on the path of meditation or on the path of love, one thing has to be done. Doing a thousand and one things, you have to connect them with one thing. That connection, that running thread will make you one-pointed, one-minded. It will give you integration. In that integration, dreams dissolve. It is the crowd within you which dreams, it is the split that dreams. When the split is bridged, dreams disappear – because then you start enjoying being herenow so tremendously that who bothers to desire? Who has time to think about the tomorrow? Today is more than enough. A single moment of undivided being is so big, bigger than eternity.Then nobody thinks about the past – the gone is gone. And nobody thinks about the future – that which has not come yet, has not come yet. One simply goes deeper and deeper into the present, and that is the door of God.The present is the door and your single-mindedness is the key.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 1 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 1 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,How to start the journey? What does it exactly mean to transcend sex?The journey has already started; you are not to start it. Everybody is already in the journey. We have found ourselves in the middle of it. There is no beginning to it and no end to it. Life is journey. The first thing to be understood is that it has not to be started now. It has always been going on. You are in the journey. This has to be recognized. Unconsciously, you are in the journey: that’s why it feels as if you have to start it. Recognize it, become conscious about it; the very recognition becomes the beginning. The moment you recognize that you are always moving, going somewhere – knowingly, unknowingly, willingly, unwillingly – but you are going … some great force is constantly working within you: God is evolving. He is constantly creating something within you, so it is not how to start it. The right question will be: How to recognize it? It is there, but recognition is not there.For example, trees die, but they don’t know; birds and animals die, but they don’t know. Only man knows that he has to die. That knowledge is also very cloudy, not clear – and the same is so with life. The birds are alive, but they don’t know that they are alive – because how can you know life if you don’t know death? How can you know that you are alive if you don’t know that you are going to die? Both recognitions come together. They are alive, but they don’t recognize that they are alive. Man recognizes a little that he is going to die, but that recognition remains very cloudy, hidden in deep smoke. And the same is true about life: you are alive, but you don’t know exactly what being alive means. That too is cloudy, not clear.When I say recognition, I mean becoming alert to what this life energy is, that is already on the way. To become aware of one’s own being is the beginning of the journey. To come to a point where you are so absolutely alert that not even a fragment of darkness exists around you is the end of the journey. But in fact, the journey never starts and never ends. You will continue even after that but then the journey will have a totally different meaning, a totally different quality to it – it will be sheer delight. Right now it is near misery.“How to start the journey?” – become more alert about your actions, about your relationships, about your movements. Whatsoever you do – even an ordinary thing like walking on the street – try to become alert, try to take steps with full awareness.Buddha used to say to his disciples, “When you take a step with the right foot, remember, now this is the right foot; when you take a step with the left, remember, now this is the left. When you breathe in, remember, “Now I am breathing in,” when you breathe out, remember, “Now I am breathing out.” Not that you have to verbalize it. Not that you have to say in words, “I am breathing in,” but just becoming alert that now the breath is going in. I am saying it to you so I have to use words, but when you are becoming alert you need not use words because words are like smoke. Don’t use words – just feel the breath going in and filling your lungs then being emptied. Just watch, and soon you will come to a recognition, a great recognition that it is not simply breathing that goes in and out, it is life itself. Each breath in is life infusing its energy into you. Each breath out is a short death. With each breath, you die and you are reborn. Each breath is a crucifixion and a resurrection.And when you watch it, you will come to know a beautiful feeling of trust. When you breathe out, there is no certainty that you will ever be able to breathe in again. What is the certainty? Who has guaranteed it? Who can guarantee that you will be able to breathe in again? But somehow, a deep trust; you know that “I will breathe again.” Otherwise breathing would become impossible. If you become so afraid that “Who knows if I let my breath out, and if I go through this small death, what is the certainty that I will be able to breathe in again? – if I can’t breathe then, then it is better not to breathe out,” you will die immediately. If you stop breathing out, you will die. But a deep trust exists – that trust is part of life. Nobody has taught you.When the child starts walking for the first time, a tremendous trust exists in him that he will be able to walk. Nobody has taught him. He has just seen other people walk, that’s all. But how can he come to a conclusion that “I will be able to walk”? He is so tiny. People are so big, giants compared to him, and he knows that whenever he stands, he falls down. But still he tries. Trust is inbuilt. It is in your every cell of life. He tries. Many times he will fall; he will try again and again and again. And one day, trust wins over and he starts walking.If you watch your breath you will become aware of a deep layer of trust, a subtle trust in life – no doubt, no hesitation. If you walk, and walk alertly, by and by you will become aware that you are not walking, you are “being walked by.” That’s a very subtle feeling: that life is moving through you, not that you are moving. When you feel hungry, if you are aware you will see life is feeling hungry within you – not you.Becoming more alert will make you conscious of the fact that there is only one thing you have got that you can call yours and that is witnessing. Everything else belongs to the universe; only witnessing belongs to you. But when you become aware of witnessing, even the idea of being “I” is dissolved. That too does not belong to you. That was part of darkness, part of the clouds that had gathered around you. In the clear light, when the sky is open and the clouds have disappeared and the sun is bright, there is no possibility of any idea of being “I.” Then, simply witnessing is; nothing belongs to you. That witnessing is the goal of the journey.How to start the journey? Start becoming more and more a witness. Whatsoever you do, do it with deep alertness; then even small things become sacred. Then cooking or cleaning become sacred, they become worship. It is not a question of what you are doing, the question is how you are doing it. You can clean the floor like a robot, a mechanical thing; you have to clean it, so you clean it. Then you miss something beautiful. Then you wasted those moments in only cleaning the floor. Cleaning the floor could have been a great experience; you missed it. The floor is cleaned but something that could have happened within you has not happened. If you were aware, not only the floor but you would have felt a deep cleansing. Clean the floor full of awareness, luminous with awareness. Work or sit or walk – but one thing has to be a continuous thread: make more and more moments of your life luminous with awareness. Let the candle of awareness burn in each moment, in each act.The cumulative effect is what enlightenment is. The cumulative effect, all the moments together, all small candles together become a great source of light.And the second part of the question is: “What does it exactly mean to transcend sex?”Sex is a subtle subject, delicate because centuries of exploitation, corruption, centuries of perverted ideas, conditioning are associated with the word sex. The word is very loaded. It is one of the most loaded words in existence. You say God – it seems empty. You say sex – it seems too loaded. A thousand and one things arise in the mind: fear, perversion, attraction, a tremendous desire, and a tremendous anti-desire also. They all arise together. Sex – the very word creates a confusion, a chaos. It is as if somebody has thrown a rock in a silent pool; millions of ripples arise – just the word sex! Humanity has lived under very wrong ideas.So the first thing: Why do you ask how to transcend sex? Why do you want to transcend sex in the first place? You are using a beautiful word, transcend, but out of a hundred, ninety-nine are the possibilities that you mean, “How to repress sex?”…Because a person who has understood that sex has to be transcended is not even worried about transcending it, because transcendence comes through experience. You cannot manage it. It is not something that you have to do. You simply pass through many experiences and those experiences make you more and more mature.Have you watched that, at a certain age, sex becomes important? Not that you make it important. It is not something that you make happen; it happens. At the age of fourteen, somewhere near there, suddenly the energy is flooded with sex. It happens as if the floodgates have been opened in you. Subtle sources of energy which were not yet open have become open and your whole energy becomes sexual, colored with sex. You think sex, you sing sex, you walk sex – everything becomes sexual. Every act is colored. This happens; you have not done anything about it. It is natural.Transcendence is also natural. If sex is lived totally, with no condemnation, with no idea of getting rid of it, then at the age of forty-two…just as at the age of fourteen, sex gets opened and the whole energy becomes sexual. At the age of forty-two, or nearabout, those floodgates close again. And that too is as natural as sex becoming alive; it starts disappearing.Sex is transcended not by any effort on your part. If you make any effort that will be repressive because it has nothing to do with you. It is inbuilt in your body, in your biology. You are born as sexual beings; nothing is wrong in it. That is the only way to be born. To be human is to be sexual.When you were conceived, your mother and your father were not praying, they were not listening to a priest’s sermon. They were not in the church, they were making love. Even to think that your father and mother were making love when you were conceived seems to be difficult. They were making love; those sexual energies were meeting and merging into each other. Then you were conceived; in a deep sexual act you were conceived. The first cell was a sex cell and then out of that cell other cells have arisen. But each cell remains sexual, basically. Your whole body is sexual, made of sex cells. Now they are millions.Remember it: you exist as a sexual being. Once you accept it, the conflict that has been created down through the centuries dissolves. Once you accept it deeply, with no ideas in between…. When sex is thought of as simply natural, you live it. You don’t ask me how to transcend eating, you don’t ask me how to transcend breathing – because no religion has taught you to transcend breathing, that’s why. Otherwise, you would be asking, “How to transcend breathing?” You breathe! You are a breathing animal; you are a sexual animal also. But there is a difference. Fourteen years of your life in the beginning are almost non-sexual, or at the most just rudimentary sexual play which is not really sexual – just preparing, rehearsing, that’s all. At the age of fourteen, suddenly the energy is ripe.Watch. A child is born…immediately, within three seconds, the child has to breathe – otherwise he will die. Then breathing remains the whole of his life because it has come at the first step of life. It cannot be transcended. Maybe before you die, then just three seconds before, it will stop – but not before it. Always remember: both ends of life, the beginning and end, are exactly similar, symmetrical. The child is born, he starts breathing within three seconds. When the child is old and dying, the moment he stops breathing, within three seconds he will be dead.Sex enters at a very late stage: for fourteen years the child has lived without sex. And if the society is not too much repressed and hence obsessed with sex, a child can live completely oblivious to the fact that sex, or that anything like sex, exists. The child can remain absolutely innocent. That innocence is also not possible because people are so repressed. When repression happens, then side by side, obsession also happens.So priests go on repressing; and there are anti-priests – Hefners and others – they go on creating more and more pornography. So on one side there are priests who go on repressing, and then there are others, anti-priests, who go on making sexuality more and more glamorous. They both exist together – aspects of the same coin. When churches disappear, only then Playboy magazines will disappear, not before it. They are partners in the business. They look like enemies, but don’t be deceived by that. They talk against each other, but that’s how things work.I have heard about two men who were out of business, who had gone broke, so they decided on a business, a very simple business. They started journeying, touring from one town to another town. First one would enter, and in the night he would throw coal tar on people’s windows and doors. After two or three days, the other would come to clean. He would advise that he could clean any coal tar or anything that had gone wrong, and he would clean the windows. In that time the other would be doing half of the business in another town. This way, they started earning much money.This is what is happening between the church and the Hugh Hefners and people who are continuously creating pornography.I have heard:Pretty Miss Keneen sat in the confessional. “Father,” she said, “I want to confess that I let my boyfriend kiss me.”“Is that all you did?” asked the priest, very interested.“Well, no. I let him put his hand on my leg too.”“And then what?”“And then I let him pull down my panties.”“And then, and then…?”“And then me mother walked into the room.”“Ah shit!” sighed the priest.It is together; they are partners in a conspiracy. Whenever you are too repressed, you start finding a perverse interest. A perverted interest is the problem, not sex. Now this priest is neurotic. Sex is not the problem, but this man is in trouble.Sisters Margaret Alice and Francis Catherine were out walking along a side street. Suddenly they were grabbed by two men, dragged into a dark alley and raped.“Father, forgive them,” said Sister Margaret Alice, “for they know not what they do.”“Shut up!” cried Sister Catherine,” this one does.”This is bound to be so. So never carry a single idea against sex in your mind, otherwise you will never be able to transcend it. People who transcend sex are people who accept it very naturally. It is difficult, I know, because you are born into a society which is neurotic about sex – either this way or that – but it is neurotic all the same. It is very difficult to get out of this neurosis, but if you are a little alert, you can get out of it. So the real thing is not how to transcend sex, but how to transcend this perverted ideology of the society; this fear of sex, this repression of sex, this obsession with sex.Sex is beautiful. Sex in itself is a natural rhythmic phenomenon. It happens when the child is ready to be conceived and it is good that it happens – otherwise life would not exist. Life exists through sex, sex is its medium. If you understand life, if you love life, you will know sex is sacred, holy. Then you live it, then you delight in it; and as naturally as it has come, it goes – on its own accord. By the age of forty-two, or somewhere near there, sex starts disappearing as naturally as it had come into being. But it doesn’t go that way.You will be surprised when I say nearabout forty-two. You know people who are seventy, eighty, and yet they have not gone beyond. You know “dirty old people.” They are victims of the society because they could not be natural. It is a hangover because they repressed when they should have enjoyed and delighted. In those moments of delight they were not totally in it. They were not orgasmic, they were half-hearted.So whenever you are half-hearted in anything, it lingers longer. If you are sitting at your table and eating and if you eat only half-heartedly and your hunger remains, then you will continue to think about food the whole day. You can try fasting and you will see: you will continuously think about food. But if you have eaten well…. And when I say eaten well, I don’t only mean that you have stuffed your stomach. Then it is not necessarily so when you have eaten well. You could have stuffed yourself, but eating well is an art. It is not just stuffing. It is great art: to taste the food, to smell the food, to touch the food, to chew the food, to digest the food and to digest it as divine. It is divine, it is God’s gift.Hindus say, “Annam brahman” – Food is divine. So with deep respect you eat, and while eating you forget everything because it is prayer. It is existential prayer. You are eating God and God is going to give you nourishment. It is a gift to be accepted with deep love and gratitude. And you don’t stuff the body because stuffing the body is being anti-body. It is the other pole.There are people who are obsessed with fasting and there are people who are obsessed with stuffing themselves. Both are wrong because in both the ways the body loses balance. A real lover of the body eats only to the point where the body feels perfectly quiet, balanced, tranquil; where the body feels to be neither leaning to the left nor to the right but just in the middle. It is an art to understand the language of the body, to understand the language of your stomach, to understand what is needed, to give only that which is needed and to give that in an artistic way, in an aesthetic way.Animals eat, man eats. Then what is the difference? Man makes a great aesthetic experience out of eating. What is the point of having a beautiful dining table? What is the point of having candles burning there? What is the point of incense? What is the point of asking friends to come and participate? It is to make it an art, not just stuffing. But these are the outward signs of the art. The inward signs are to understand the language of your body, to listen to it, to be sensitive to its needs. And then you eat, and then the whole day you will not remember food at all. Only when the body is hungry again will the remembrance come. Then it is natural. The same happens with sex. If you have no anti-attitude about it, you take it as a natural, divine gift, with great gratitude. You enjoy it, with prayer you enjoy it.Tantra says that before you make love to a woman or to a man, first pray – because it is going to be a divine meeting of energies. God will surround you. Wherever two lovers are, there is God. Wherever two lovers’ energies are meeting and mingling, there is life, alive, at its best – God surrounds you. Churches are empty; love-chambers are full of God. If you have tasted love the way Tantra says to taste it, if you have known love the way Tao says to know it, then by the time you reach forty-two, love starts disappearing on its own accord. And you say good-bye to it with deep gratitude because you are fulfilled. It has been delightful, it has been a blessing. You say good-bye to it.And forty-two is the age for meditation, the right age. Sex disappears, that overflooding energy is no longer there. One becomes more tranquil. Passion has gone, compassion arises. Now there is no more fever; now one is not interested in the other. With sex disappearing, the other is no longer the focus. One starts returning towards one’s own source – the returning journey starts.Sex is transcended not by your effort. It happens if you have lived it totally. So my suggestion is, drop all anti-attitudes, anti-life attitudes and accept the facticity: sex is, so who are you to drop it? And who is trying to drop it? – it is just the ego. Remember, sex creates the greatest problem for the ego.So there are two types of people: very egoistic people are always against sex; humble people are never against sex. But who listens to humble people? In fact, humble people don’t go preaching, only egoists. Why is there a conflict between sex and ego? – because sex is something in your life where you cannot be egoistic, where the other becomes more important than you. Your woman, your man, becomes more important than you. In every other case, you remain the most important. In a love relationship the other becomes very, very important, tremendously important. You become a satellite and the other becomes the nucleus; and the same is happening for the other: you become the nucleus and he becomes a satellite. It is a reciprocal surrender. Both are surrendering to the God of love, and both become humble.Sex is the only energy that gives you hints that there is something which you cannot control. Money you can control, politics you can control, the market you can control, knowledge you can control, science you can control, morality you can control. Somewhere, sex brings in a totally different world: you cannot control it. And the ego is the great controller. It is happy if it can control, it is unhappy if it cannot control. So there starts a conflict between ego and sex. Remember, it is a losing battle. The ego cannot win it because ego is just superficial. Sex is very deep-rooted. Sex is your life; ego is just your mind, your head. Sex has roots all over you; ego has roots only in your ideas – very superficial, just in the head.So who is trying to transcend sex? – the head is trying to transcend sex. If you are too much in the head then you want to transcend sex because sex brings you down to the guts. It does not allow you to remain hanging in the head. You can manage everything else from there; you cannot manage sex from there. You cannot make love with your heads. You have to come down, you have to descend from your heights, you have to come closer to earth. Sex is humiliating to the ego, so egoistic people are against, always against sex. They go on finding ways and means how to transcend it. They can never transcend it. They can, at the most, become perverted. Their whole effort from the very beginning is doomed to failure.I have heard:A boss was interviewing applicants to replace his private secretary who was resigning because of expectant motherhood. The boss’s right-hand man sat with him as he looked the applicants over. The first girl was a beautiful buxom blond. She turned out to be intelligent and had excellent secretarial skills. The second was a dark-haired beauty who was even more intelligent and proficient than the first. The third one was cross-eyed, had buck teeth and weighed one hundred and ninety pounds. After interviewing all three candidates, the boss informed his associate that he was hiring the third applicant.“But why?” asked the astonished employee.“Well,” boomed the boss, “in the first place, she looks very intelligent to me! In the second place, it is none of your damned business, and in the third place, she is my wife’s sister.”So you may pretend that you have won over sex but an undercurrent…. You may rationalize, you may find reasons, you may pretend, you may create a very hard shell around you but deep down the real reason, the reality, will stand untouched: “She is my wife’s sister” – that is the real reason. “She looks intelligent” – that is just a rationalization. “And it is none of your damned business” – that too is getting annoyed and irritated because the person is afraid that the other is poking his nose and may find the real cause. But the real cause will explode; you cannot hide it, it is not possible.So you can try to control sex but an undercurrent of sexuality will run and it will show itself in many ways. Out of all your rationalizations, it will again and again raise its head.I will not suggest that you make any effort to transcend it. What I suggest is just the contrary: forget about transcending it. Move into it as deeply as you can. While the energy is there, move as deeply as you can, love as deeply as you can and make an art of it. It is not just to be done.That is the whole meaning of Tantra: making an art of lovemaking. There are subtle nuances which only people who enter with a great aesthetic sense will be able to know. Otherwise, you can make love for your whole life and still remain unsatisfied because you don’t know that satisfaction is something very aesthetic. It is like a subtle music arising in your soul. If through sex you fall into harmony, if through love you become non-tense and relaxed, if love is not just throwing energy because you don’t know what to do with it, if it is not just a relief but a relaxation, if you relax into your woman and your woman relaxes into you, if for a few seconds, for a few moments or a few hours you forget who you are and you are completely lost in oblivion, you will come out of it purer, more innocent, more virgin. And you will have a different type of being – at ease, centered, rooted.If this happens, suddenly one day you will see that the flood has gone and it has left you very, very rich. You will not be sorry that it has gone. You will be thankful because now richer worlds open. When sex leaves you, the doors of meditation open. When sex leaves you, then you are not trying to lose yourself in the other. You become capable of losing yourself in yourself.Now another world of orgasm, inner orgasm, of being with oneself, arises. But that arises only through being with the other; one grows, matures through the other. Then a moment comes when you can be alone, tremendously happy. There is no need for any other. The need has disappeared but you have learned much through it – you have learned much about yourself. The other became the mirror and you have not broken the mirror. You have learned so much about yourself. Now there is no need to look into the mirror. You can close your eyes and you can see your face there. But you would not be able to see that face if there had been no mirror from the very beginning.Let your woman be your mirror; let your man be your mirror. Look into her eyes and see your face, move into her to know yourself. Then one day the mirror will not be needed. But you will not be against the mirror; you will be so grateful to it – how can you be against it? You will be so thankful – how can you be against it? Then, transcendence.Transcendence is not repression. Transcendence is a natural outgrowing – you grow above, you go beyond – just as a seed breaks and a sprout starts rising above the ground. When sex disappears, the seed disappears. In sex, you were able to give birth to somebody else, a child. When sex disappears, the whole energy starts giving birth to yourself. This is what Hindus have called dwij, the twice-born. One birth has been given to you by your parents, the other birth is waiting. It has to be given to you by yourself. You have to father and mother yourself. Then your whole energy is turning in – it becomes an inner circle.Right now it will be difficult for you to make an inner circle. It will be easier to connect it with another pole – a woman or a man – and then the circle becomes complete. Then you can enjoy the blessings of the circle. But by and by you will be able to make the inner circle, because inside you also you are man and woman, woman and man. Nobody is just man and nobody is just woman – because you come from man and woman’s communion. Both have participated; your mother has given something to you, your father has given something to you. Fifty-fifty, they have contributed to you. Both are there. There is a possibility that both can meet inside you. Again your father and mother can love inside you. Then your reality will be born. Once they met when your body was born. Now if they can meet inside you, your soul will be born. That’s what transcendence of sex is: it is a higher sex.Let me tell you this: when you transcend sex, you reach to a higher sex. Ordinary sex is gross, higher sex is not gross at all. Ordinary sex is outward-moving, higher sex is inward-moving. In ordinary sex, two bodies meet and the meeting happens on the outside. In higher sex, your own inner energies meet. It is not physical, it is spiritual – it is Tantra. Tantra is transcendence. If you don’t understand this and you go on fighting with sex….The question has been asked by Prageeta. I know she is passing through some critical moments in her mind. She would like to be independent, but it is too early. She would like not to be bothered by anybody else, but it is too early, and it is too egoistic. Right now transcendence is not possible, repression is possible. And if you repress now, in your old age you will repent because then things become very messed up. Each thing has its own right time. Each thing has to be done in its moment. While young, don’t be afraid of love. If you are afraid of love while young, in old age you will become obsessed; and then it will be difficult to move deeply in love, and the mind will be obsessed.This is my understanding: that people, if they have lived rightly, lovingly, naturally, then by the forty-second year they start transcending sex. If they have not lived naturally and they have been fighting with sex, then forty-two becomes their most dangerous time – because by the time they are forty-two their energies are declining. When you are young you can repress something because you are very energetic. Look at the irony of the fact: a young man can repress sexuality very easily because he has energy to repress it. He can just put it down and sit upon it. When the energies are going, declining, then sex will assert itself and you will not be able to control it.I have heard an anecdote:Stein, aged sixty-five, visited the office of his son, Dr. Stein, and asked for something that would increase his sexual potential. The MD gave his father a shot and then refused to accept a fee. Nevertheless, Stein insisted on giving him ten dollars. A week later Stein was back for another injection, and this time handed his son twenty dollars.“But Pop, shots are only ten dollars.”“Take it!” said Stein, “the extra ten is from Momma.”That will continue…so before you become a poppa or a momma, please be finished with it. Don’t wait for old age because then things become ugly – then everything goes out of season.The second question:Osho,It is said that unless one is in contact with one who is awakened, it is impossible to come out of one's ignorance or deep sleep. How to find out that one is awakened?It is a difficult question. Not that it is difficult to find out – the question is difficult because if you don’t yet have the urge to find out, then there is no way to help you to find. If you have the urge, that very urge helps. There is no other help needed. Your very urge becomes your path.How do you find if you are thirsty in a desert – how will you find water, how will you find an oasis? You will run hither and thither, you will do all that you can do because thirst will be killing. And your thirst will decide whether you have come across real water or not, because your thirst will be quenched whenever you come across real water. If it is a mirage and from far away it looked like water and you ran to it, when you come face to face with it you will know it is not water.But the only criterion is your thirst.How do you know that something is food? – if you are hungry and it satisfies you, you know. It is very difficult for a man who has no appetite to find out what food is.Psychologists have come across a very significant fact: that if small children are left to themselves, they always choose the right thing to eat. You put everything out, you leave it on the dining table. Don’t force anything and don’t say what to eat and what not to eat. It has been a tremendous discovery that children eat only the right thing in the right time. If a child is suffering from something and a certain thing is needed which will be helpful for it, he will choose to eat it. By the time that suffering disappears he will stop eating that. We confuse them. We tell them to eat this and don’t eat that. Then by and by, their natural instinct functions no more.Have you seen animals eating? They are not dieticians and they never go to any dietician, but a buffalo or a cow just chooses the right grass for itself, instinctively. They will leave other grasses; they will eat only the grass that is right for them. You cannot deceive. Somehow their inner nature, their appetite, decides.The problem arises: how to find out whether someone is enlightened, awakened, or not? If you have an appetite there will be no problem. If you don’t have an appetite then I say the problem is very difficult, almost impossible to solve. If you have appetite and hunger, then something around an enlightened person will start fulfilling your desire. Something will start being satisfied and you will feel contented. Something will start falling in harmony and in line. Your chaos will start subsiding. You will see a silence arising – a new being is born. That is the only way. But if you don’t have a real thirst, or if you have been confused by the society and if you cling to outer symptoms….For example, a Jaina thinks an enlightened person should be naked. Now if you come across a person who is not naked, even Buddha or Jesus, the Jaina will not be satisfied. He will say, “He is not an enlightened person because an enlightened person is always naked.” This is foolish. He has no appetite. He has learned only through scriptures, he has learned only through tradition. Now if you have been a Christian, brought up as a Christian and you know only that a Christ is one who is crucified, then what will you do if you come across Krishna playing on his flute? You will say, “This man looks like a clown. How can he be an enlightened person? An enlightened person is always on the cross suffering for others, trying to take everybody’s sin on his own head – and this man is singing and dancing.” No, with the mind that is too conditioned by the cross, a flute will not suit. It will be simply impossible to believe that a flute can also be a symbol of enlightenment. A cross, of course, is.And the same happens with the follower of Krishna. He knows the flute, singing, dancing. He cannot believe for what Jesus is on the cross. If you ask him he will say, “He must have done some very wrong deeds in his past life. Otherwise, why is he crucified? Crucifixion happens only to great sinners. He must have done something great, a very great sin. That is why he is suffering – because no Hindu avatar has ever suffered like this. This is not possible.”Hindus have the theory of karma. Whatsoever happens is your karma: Krishna is playing on the flute because he has beautiful karmas which sing in him and Jesus must have been a sinner. It is not a question that others have forced him on the cross. Nobody can force anybody except your karmas. It is not that Judas has betrayed him – it is his own past. Nobody can betray anybody. If your karmas are good, nobody can make you suffer.Now this is problematic. These people listen only to the scriptures, the tradition, the society they were born into – accidental things. They don’t have real thirst.If you have real thirst, you will find that where Krishna is playing on his flute, you will be satisfied. And if you have real thirst, you will find the same satisfaction near Jesus also. Maybe he is on the cross and Krishna is playing on his flute but you will find that both are food. Jesus says so many times to his disciples, “Eat me, make me your food. Drink my blood and eat my body.” He is food; that’s what he is saying.The questioner asked, “It is said that unless one is in contact with one who is awakened, it is impossible to come out of one’s ignorance and deep sleep. How to find out that one is awakened?”I have heard:A man walked into the police station to report that his wife was missing. The sergeant began writing up the case.“How tall is she?”“About so high, give or take a little.”“How much does she weigh?”“About average, I guess.”“Color of eyes?”“I would say they were neutral. I’m not too sure.”“Color of hair?”“I don’t know, it changes.”“What was she wearing?”“I suppose a hat and coat.”“Was she carrying anything?”“Yes, she had a dog on a leash.”“What kind of dog?”“A pedigreed brindle-and-white German shepherd, weighing forty pounds, six hands high, license No. 401278976 CD7, wearing a brown collar, slightly deaf in the right ear, and answers to the name Rover.”When it was a question of the dog, then the man came alive. When it was a question of his wife: how tall is she? – “About so high, give or take a little.” And how much does she weigh? – “About average, I guess.” And color of eyes? – “I would say they were neutral. I’m not too sure.”Whenever it is your desire, you know. If it is not your desire, then it is difficult. So the person who has asked the question may be greedy, but he has no desire yet.And I know the man, and he has been to Sivananda Ashram, to the Aurobindo Ashram, to Shri Ramana Maharishi’s Ashram, to Satya Sai Baba, and to this and that; he has been everywhere. Now I am his last victim – and he cannot find anything anywhere that is satisfying.He has not asked the basic question: “Are you hungry?” Just by going to this restaurant and that is not going to help; appetite is needed. The man is greedy but he has no appetite. The man is very learned but is not very aware. He knows the scriptures, he can repeat them parrot-like, but he has no understanding. He goes on asking such questions again and again. This is for the first time that I am answering because when the appetite is not there it is futile to talk about. It is better that he should go and live in the world and forget all about religionLet the appetite come, this life or next. There is no hurry, God can wait – but let it come. It should be authentic. His appetite is just false. He has listened to talks about food, or he has listened to advertisements on the TV about food and he has become greedy. But he never looks inside to see that he has no appetite, so nothing happens.Once he came to me and he said, “I have been to Shri Aurobindo Ashram, I have been to Ramana Ashram, to Sivananda, to Rishikesh, to Arunachal, to here and there, and nothing happens. Now I am here.”I said, “Before you say about me also that nothing happens, let me say to you that nothing will happen – because I don’t see any desire in you. I don’t see any flicker, any passionate urge.”He has money so he can go anywhere. He is fed up with his life, bored with his life, so he goes on finding, trying to find at least some thrill, some kick somewhere. And he is a very egotistical man, so he cannot try to find non-spiritual kicks. He tries to find spiritual kicks and nothing happens.Watch…the basic thing to be remembered is whether you have an appetite. If you don’t have, why bother? It is not for you. Let these people talk about God; it is not for you. You don’t go to a musical concert if you don’t have an ear for music, and you don’t get bothered about it. You don’t go to listen to some musician, you don’t go to see a dancer, you don’t go to visit an art gallery to look at paintings if you don’t have any sense, artistic sense – you don’t go there.But this is one of the problems about religion: people who don’t have any sense of religiousness – they also become greedy about religion. And now he is getting old and death is approaching. Now he wants to achieve something which he can carry beyond death. He is simply afraid. He has not lived his life – and unless you have lived your life, you cannot move into religion.Only one who lives his life truly, one day comes to the point where a new desire for life beyond arises. See the difference between the two. You can be afraid of death; then your desire will be false. If you have lived life and loved life, and loved it so much that you would now like to know the unknown life also – it is not out of fear of death, it is out of love for life – then you will recognize immediately whenever you come across an enlightened person. It is impossible to miss. You will recognize immediately. This recognition needs no knowledge. It will simply happen.How do you recognize when a beautiful woman passes by? Have you any criterion? But if you have desire, suddenly you recognize that the woman is beautiful. If somebody asks you and tries to force you to confess to exactly what beauty is, you will be in trouble. You will not be able to define. Nobody has yet been able to define. Centuries and centuries of philosophers have been working on it, trying to define what beauty is and ultimately they decide that it is indefinable. But still you feel beauty. If you talk to a small child whose desire has not yet ripened and you say, “This woman is beautiful,” he will look at you surprised, shrug his shoulders and go on his way – “Gone mad. All women are alike.” For a small child, it makes no difference. He cannot see why one woman should be thought beautiful and another not.In fact, he knows only one woman who is beautiful: she is his mother – and that too, for some other reasons, not for beauty. She is his nourishment, his life, so she is beautiful. But one day when his desire arises and his love ripens, he will start looking with different eyes. Then all women are not alike. Then certainly there are women who are beautiful; then certainly there are men who are tremendously appealing and magnetic. But one day again, when one becomes very alert, understanding, again all men and women are alike. Then again, beauty or ugliness does not matter. Then again, duality is transcended.When you come across an enlightened man, if you don’t have desire, nothing will happen. You will just shrug your shoulders – “Why are people so attracted to this man?” You can’t see anything; there is nothing. He is as ordinary as you, or maybe even more ordinary than you. You can’t see why people are mad. But if the desire is there, if the search has started, if you have lived this life rightly and deeply, then you have earned that desire for another life. Then immediately, when you come across such a one, you will start feeling.It is said – a beautiful myth about Mahavira – that people who had desire would become aware of Mahavira from a very faraway distance, twenty-four miles. The area of twenty-four miles around Mahavira was so filled with his being that people who would come into that area, if they had some desire, would be pulled by Mahavira, against themselves. They might have been going somewhere else but they would not be able to go. They would be pulled. They would have to come; they would find this man in some unknown way.And he would be sitting under some tree or hiding in a cave and they would find him. And there were people who would pass just in front of him and would be thinking that he was mad – not only mad, but like a criminal, standing there naked. Either he was a criminal or he was a fool and they would beat him, they would throw him out of their town, they would force him to leave their place. And both were people: one sort of person throws him away, beats him; the other sort of person is pulled. It depends on you.I have heard one anecdote:“Well my man, what is on your mind?” the worldly matron asked the marriage broker.“I have picked out a wife for your son,” he announced triumphantly. “She is the Princess Sessusi Wilnanee, the richest young woman in the world,” said the marriage broker.“So she’s the richest young woman in the whole world?” snapped the mother. “ Then why have I never even heard of her?”“But she is a wonderful girl,” insisted the marriage broker. “She is gorgeous, a terrific skin diver and skier, and golfs in the low seventies. She is royalty all the way.”“It does not make sense to me, but all right, I will give you my consent. I will let my son marry the princess,” agreed the mother.“Well,” sighed the marriage broker, “that’s half the battle.”Half the battle about religion starts with you. If you have the desire, that is half the battle – and the other half is very easy. Then you have the eyes. But if you don’t have an appetite, then it is almost impossible to recognize: you are blind, you cannot see. If a blind man comes and asks, “When I come across light, how am l to recognize it?” What to say to him? How can he recognize it? – he will need eyes.You always find that which you really desire; it never happens otherwise. In fact, let me tell you: whatsoever you have found is that which you had desired passionately. Maybe it is hell, but you desired it – and whatsoever you have not found, you have not desired passionately.Every time Mulla Nasruddin came home drunk, his wife would bawl the daylights out of him. One day a kindly neighbor gave her some advice: “You should not do that. You should not call attention to his drinking. Be lovable, be kind, and you will find he is a new man. Tonight when he comes home, give him a great big kiss.”That night Mulla staggered in, but the wife remembered the advice and puckered her lips: “Darling, give me a kiss.”He puckered his lips, staggered to her, and kissed her on the forehead. He tried again, missed, and kissed her on the ear. The third time he missed again, landing his lips on her cheek.“You bum,” she said, pointing to her mouth, “if this were a saloon you would find it.”You always find that which you really want to find. Whatsoever you desire happens. If it is not happening, look inside; somewhere you must be missing in your desire.There is a beautiful story in Hindu annals about a great saint, Valmiki. He was a robber, a murderer. He has written the story of Rama, one of the most beautiful epics in the world. He became converted. His conversion happened in such a way that it is almost unbelievable. He was a great sinner, but he went to a great teacher and asked him how he could purify himself of his sins. “Chant ‘Rama’ a thousand times a day,” advised the great teacher.The sinner went to a solitary mountain and chanted and chanted but in spite of his good will, he made a mistake and chanted “Mara” instead of “Rama.”It happens that if you chant “Rama, Rama, Rama,” fast, you can get messed up; it can become “Mara, Mara, Mara.” That’s how it happened: he was chanting so fast, and he had never heard this name. It was almost an unknown language to him. He tried hard to remember but somehow he forgot, and for years he chanted “Mara, Mara, Mara.”After years of chanting he went back to the great teacher who immediately realized that the man was now pure – not only pure, he was enlightened. “Did you sing the sacred name?” the teacher asked.“Yes, great one,” the ex-sinner answered, “for ten years every single day, thousands of times I have chanted ‘Mara, Mara, Mara.’”The teacher burst into a laughter that shook the mountains. As his laughter, like a pebble in the lake, vibrated farther and wider into the cosmos, the great teacher took the ex-sinner into his arms. “Your will to good, to do good, has saved you,” he said, “even though you chanted ‘Mara, Mara, Mara,’ millions of times: the name of the devil.”Rama is the name of God; Mara is the name of the devil – but if the desire is there, the thirst is there, then everything is okay. Even the name of the devil will do. Just his intention, just his tremendous passion for God, to purify himself for ten years, day in and day out, thousands of times he was continuously chanting “Mara, Mara, Mara.” Even a wrong technique will help if the desire is intense, and even a right technique will not be of much help if the desire is impotent.Remember it: if you can’t recognize enlightened people when you come across them, don’t throw the responsibility on them. Watch inside – are you ready yet? It has happened that people who were not enlightened have sometimes helped people to become enlightened. If the desire of the seeker is tremendous, then even an unenlightened master is enough.It is reported about one great mystic, Milarepa:When he went to his master in Tibet, he was so humble, so pure, so authentic, that other disciples became jealous of him. It was certain that he would be the successor. And of course there was politics, so they tried to kill him.One day they said to him, “If you really believe in the master, can you jump from the hill? If you really believe, if the trust is there, then nothing, no harm is going to happen.” And Milarepa jumped without even hesitating for a single moment. They rushed down, because it was almost a three-thousand-foot deep valley. They went down to find his scattered bones but he was sitting there in a lotus posture, very happy, tremendously happy.He opened his eyes and said, “You are right; trust saves.”They thought it must be some coincidence, so when the house was on fire one day, they told him, “If you love your master and you trust, you can go in.”He rushed in to save the woman and the child who were left inside. He came, and the fire was too great and they were hoping that he would die but he was not burned at all. And he became more and more radiant, because the trust….One day they were going somewhere, they were to cross a river and they told him, “You need not go in the boat. You have such great trust, you can walk on the river” – and he walked.That was the first time the master saw him. He was not aware that he had been told to jump into the valley and told to go into the burning house; he was not aware. But that time he was there on the bank and he saw him walking. He said, “What are you doing? It is impossible!”And Milarepa said, “Not impossible at all! I am doing it by your power, sir.”Now the master thought, “If my name and my power can do this to this ignorant, stupid man…. I have never tried it myself.”So he tried: he drowned. Nothing has been heard about him after that.Even an unenlightened master, with deep trust, can revolutionize your life. And the reverse is also true: even an enlightened master may not be of any help. It depends on you, it depends totally on you.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 1 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 1 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Come, if you wish to meet the novel man.He has abandoned his worldly possessionsfor the beggar’s sack that hangs from his shoulder.He speaks of the eternal mother, Kali, the goddess of timeeven as he enters the Ganges.Simple words can overcome ignorance and disbelief:Kali and Krishna are one.The words may differ, the meaning is precisely the same.He who has broken the barrier of words,has conquered limits:Allah or Jesus, Moses or Kali,the rich or the poor,sage or fool,all are one and the same to him.Lost in his own thoughts, he seems insane to others.He opens his arms to welcome the world,calling all to the ferryboat tied to the coast of life.Come if you wish to meet the novel man.The whole Baul search is the search for the novel man, the new man. Who is this new man?You can live your life in two ways. Either you can become a man of being or you can become a man of having. Either you can have yourself or you can have many worldly things instead. Either you can possess many things and be possessed by them, or you can possess yourself and be not possessed by anything.The man of having has a totally different direction. That’s what Bauls call “the worldly man.” He thinks in terms of money, in terms of commodities, in terms of bank balances; he thinks in terms of things. And he thinks that the more he has, the more he is. That is one of the most fundamental fallacies.You can have the whole world and you can remain a beggar. You can have all that the world can give and yet remain empty.The great Alexander died. He is the very symbol of the worldly man. He wanted to conquer the whole world and he had done it, almost. But before he died, he told his generals, “Then let both my hands hang out of the coffin.”They said, “We have never heard…it is not traditionally done. And why do you want to do such an absurd thing?”Alexander said, “It is not absurd. It has a certain relevance with my life. I want people to see that I am going with empty hands. So let both my hands hang out of the coffin, so everybody can see that even Alexander is going with empty hands. I came with empty hands, I am going with empty hands, and the whole life has been a wastage.”He must have been very perceptive, because many more die still clinging, still not aware that their hands are empty, still not aware that their hearts are empty, still not aware that they have wasted their whole lives, that it has been just a nightmare.The man of having continues to accumulate more and more. What he accumulates is not the point; his emphasis is on accumulation. His soul exists in his accumulations.What he accumulates is not important. He may accumulate money, he may accumulate knowledge, he may accumulate ego or he may accumulate humility. He may accumulate things of this world, or he may start accumulating virtues, things of the other world, but he accumulates. He exists through things.He feels good when he has much, when he feels his hands are full, at least apparently full. He feels good, he feels he is achieving, he is being successful. This is “the old man” – in the terminology of the Bauls, this is the old man. It has always existed. This is the rotten man, this is the diseased man.It is a sort of illness, this very idea of having too many things, wasting your time and energy and not knowing at all who you are. The Bauls call that direction noble in which you start thinking in terms of being, in terms of a certain inner solidity, of a certain inner consciousness, of a certain rootedness, centering, of a certain realization of who you are.Have you watched it; that sometimes you come across a person who may not have anything visible, but still you feel a tremendous energy surrounding him? His impact is almost magnetic, mesmeric. He looks into your eyes and you cannot see into his eyes – a great power. It is not the power of things; he may not have any. He may be just a beggar on the road. It is not the power that comes through politics. He may not be a prime minister or a president because that power is bogus. That power belongs to the chair, not to the man. It belongs to the chair and not to the chairman. Once he is out of the chair, he is as powerless as you.Look at Richard Nixon: a tremendous power was there when he was the president. Now, he is just simply Citizen Nixon. All power has disappeared. That power was not his; it was a reflected glory.And you can see it, it is not very difficult. You know men who have much power – the power of things, the power of big palaces, the power of politics, money, prestige, heritage – but you can see that they are poor people. They don’t have any personal power. They don’t have any magnetism in their souls. If you put their things aside, they are more ordinary than ordinary. All extraordinariness disappears. Kings and queens, once they are not kings and queens, are simply ordinary human beings – almost empty, nothing in them.But you sometimes come across a person whose power is not derived from the outside, whose power comes from some inner spring, some inner source. He is a reservoir of power. Wherever he sits, the place becomes sacred; wherever he sits, the place becomes a throne; wherever he moves, he moves like a king amongst men. But his kingdom is of the within.That’s what Jesus goes on talking about: the kingdom of God is within you. He knows his within, he has come to face his own within-ness. His eyes are turned within. He is no longer dependent on the outside world. His glory is not a reflected glory, it is his own, authentic. He can be thrown into imprisonment, but there he will remain a king.It is said about Diogenes, one of the contemporaries of Alexander the Great, that even Alexander the Great became jealous of Diogenes.He was just a naked fakir: he had nothing. He had renounced everything; he was searching his own inner world. It is said about him that when he renounced the world, he used to carry a small begging-bowl. But then one day he saw a dog drinking water from a river. He threw away that begging-bowl. He said, “If the dog can do without it, then am I worse than the dog?” Then everything was thrown away. He remained naked.Many stories, rumors, were coming to Alexander that this man had something in him. Finally, fascinated, Alexander came to see him and he could see that the man had something that he had not. He was just lying down – it was a winter morning, it was cool and the sun was rising. He was lying down by the side of a river, bathing himself in the early sun, naked. Alexander said, “Can I do something for you, sir? I have much, and whatsoever you desire, I will be happy to do it for you.”Diogenes laughed and said, “The only thing that you can do is to please stand by the side. Don’t prevent the sun from coming to me. Nothing else do I need. And remember it, because you seem to be dangerous: never stand between the sun and anybody else. Don’t disturb anybody else’s life. That’s enough; nothing else do I want from you – because all that I want is within me.”And Alexander could feel that the man was true, literally true – the solidity, the crystallized being, the “vibe” of one who has attained, the surround, the climate of the person who is filled with inner light, inner realization, inner riches. He could see it. He bowed down and he said, “If next time I am to come into the world, I would ask God not to make me Alexander, but Diogenes.”Diogenes laughed and said, “There is no need to wait that long. You can become a Diogenes just now! What are you struggling and conquering people and moving continuously and warring for? For what?”Said Alexander, “First I want to conquer Middle Asia, then India, then the Far East….”And Diogenes went on asking, “Then what? Then what?”Finally, when Alexander said he had conquered the whole world, he said he would then like to rest.And Diogenes said, “To me you look almost stupid, because I am resting without conquering the world. You can rest by my side. See, the bank is so big; we can share it. And nobody comes here. You can rest to your heart’s desire. Who is preventing you? And I don’t see the point – that one needs to conquer the world first just to rest in the end. You can rest any moment.”In that moment Alexander must have felt his poverty. He said, “You are right. I am mad, but now it is difficult for me to come back. I have to conquer, only then can I come.”And when he was leaving, Diogenes said, “Remember, nobody can come back unless he is aware. And if you are aware right this moment, the journey stops. If you are not aware, you will never come back.” And Alexander never could come back. He died before he reached back home.The man of being is called “the novel man,” the new man. Why call him new? – because in a sense he is as old as humanity. But he is so rare that whenever he comes he is always new – there is rarely a Buddha, rarely a Jesus, a Krishna – very rarely. In this rotten mass of humanity, very rarely does somebody arise with an authentic being and declare that his kingdom is of the within. It happens so rarely that Bauls are right to call him “the novel man,” the new man.So this is the distinction to be understood: the man who is after having more and more will go on losing his being – because the only way to have more is to pay with being. Then you have to cut your being and throw it away. Everything has to be paid for, nothing is free. Even futile things have to be paid for.One day the man of having is almost gone. He has much but he is no more. He has bargained with his soul. He has exchanged: he has dollars, rupees, pounds, but no soul in him. Just a negative emptiness exists. He is the beggar, but he may look to you like a king. Don’t be deceived by the appearances. Those who look like kings are not kings. Look deeply, watch deeply. They may have achieved much which can be counted, which can be shown and exhibited, but they have lost something of the invisible, something of their being.Have you not observed it? – whenever you purchase something you have to pay. If you want to compete with people you will have to pay. You will become less and less loving. A man who is a competitor cannot be loving simultaneously – it is impossible. A man who is trying to compete, a man who is ambitious, has to be non-loving. Then he is paying with love.Politicians cannot be loving, they know only war. That’s natural; they exist through conflict. So they may talk about peace, but their whole talk is just nonsense, just gibberish. They talk about peace and they prepare for war. They never prepare for peace. They prepare for war and they never talk about war, they talk about peace. And when the time comes, they even go to war and fight for peace! They say it has to be done to save peace. But basically, the mind of the competitor is violent. One who is ambitious is violent and cannot be loving.The hippie slogan “Make love not war” is very, very meaningful. If the world were more loving, war would disappear automatically because who would be ready to fight? For what?No country wants its people to be very loving. No country wants its people to be deep in love – because if they are deep in love they become incapable of war. Their sex, their love, has to be repressed. When love and sex are repressed, people are ready to jump out of their skins. They are so boiling, they are always ready to fight. That’s why a poor country can fight better than a rich country. That is the story of Vietnam.The American soldier knows a little of love – he has the facility, he is not so repressed. That is the problem with America now: America is not so repressed. It has tasted of love. But when you fight with a small country like Vietnam you cannot win, because their soldiers are very repressed. It has always happened in the past: a richer country is always in danger of being invaded by a poorer country.It has happened in India many times. For two, three thousand years, India had been continually conquered by barbarians who were not rich, who were not affluent, who were not cultured at all. But India was defeated continually. People were loving – they had forgotten how to fight, they were not interested in fighting. There was no need inside for them to be continually at war. Whenever a civilization reaches to the point where it becomes affluent, it is in danger of being invaded by barbarians. This is unfortunate, but this is so.So every country and every politician tries not to allow love too much. It has to be given only in small quantities. If love is free, and people are very loving and they exist in an ocean of love, war is not possible. Without war, politics is not possible; without politics, presidents and premiers are not possible. They will simply disappear.The hippie is the greatest danger signal yet to politicians. In the whole of history, for the first time a new sort of generation is arising. If this generation goes on flowering, spreading, politics is going to be just out of date. The days of presidents and premiers are gone! And the whole thing depends on love, because love is a quality of being. Competition is for things, ambition is for things, ambition is for the kingdom without. The inner kingdom knows no competition. You can simply delight in it this very moment. It needs no future, it needs no achievement on your part. Already, as you are, you are ready to enjoy and delight and celebrate. Nothing is missing. Everything is absolutely available; as it should be, it is. You just have to drop your ambitious mind and the celebration starts. Can you see this? If you can see this you will be able to understand the novel man.The Bauls say, “The man who has understood the futility of things becomes religious.” If you are running after having, you will become a manipulator: constantly in conflict with others, constantly trying to crush others by any way and any means, trying to reach to the top. You will lose all spontaneity.The man of being, the novel man, is spontaneous. He lives in the moment, he lives herenow. He knows no other way to live, he is unpredictable. You can predict a man of competition. You can predict because the mind of the competitor runs like a mathematical formula. It has a logical syllogism in it. But the mind of one who is moving inwards, the man of being, is almost dissolving. The mind of the inward traveler is dissolving, you cannot predict him. He has no mathematical formula about him – he simply lives in the moment, he responds to the moment.Now let me tell you one thing: the man of having is very clear. The man of having has a destination, very clear-cut. If he wants to become the president of the United States or the premier of India, he has a clear-cut destination.What about the man of being? – he has a direction, but he has no destination. He has a very subtle direction, but no destination. He has a quality: he has a light inside, and wherever he moves that light falls on his path. He has eyes to see, a direction, but no destination. He is enjoying and he is moving but his movement is not prefabricated. He has no plan. He is like a river, not like a railway train. There is direction, but not like a railway train, not running in a fixed pattern. His life will be zigzag. Sometimes he will be moving towards the north and sometimes he will be moving towards the south. He cannot be very consistent because consistency is part of the logical mind, it is not part of the being. He will be found many times to be inconsistent, even contradictory; but those contradictions are just on the surface. If you look deep you will find a subtle direction. Even in contradictions the direction is there.But to know the man of being you need very deep eyes, penetrating eyes. To know the man of having, nothing is needed – just a little mind will do, a mediocre mind will do – because the man of having is also of the category of mediocre minds. But when you move into the inner world, all surfaces are lost and the depth is infinite.The Bauls call this spontaneous man, sahaj manush – the novel man – he’s the new man. He is the man as everyone should be. And unless you become the novel man, you will miss – you will miss treasures, blessings, benedictions which were showering all around you, but you were blind and you could not see it.I have heard:Mulla Nasruddin was in love with a woman.“Look darling,” he said to her, “here is a diamond engagement ring for you.”“Oh, it is beautiful!” she claimed. “But honey, the diamond has a flaw in it.”“You should not notice that,” said the Mulla. “Why, you are in love and you know what they say – ‘love is blind.’”“Blind, yes,” she said, “but not stone blind.”Even in love you continue to remain the man of the outside. Even in love you continue to think in terms of money, prestige, power. Even in love you don’t allow the unpredictable to assert, you don’t allow your innermost being to have its say. Even then you remain a manipulator.Our minds are almost always interested in the very ordinary. It has to be so, because mind is outward oriented. The very orientation is towards the without. That’s how Jesus was not understood; he was a Baul, the novel man. If he had been born in Bengal, the land of the Bauls, he would have been understood better. They would not have crucified him. For centuries they have known mad people of God. They would have understood his language.Jews could not understand his language. His language was not of the mind, his language was not of money, of the outside. He talked about the kingdom and they asked, “Where is your kingdom? What kingdom are you talking about?” – because they thought he was talking about the kingdom which is outside.He said, “I am the king,” and they were worried. And they suspected that he was trying to sabotage the society, or that he was trying to conquer the society and become the king. They thought that he was a revolutionary. He was a rebellious man, not a revolutionary at all. He was not planning for a revolution, he was not a politician.But the Jews were afraid: they thought that he was trying to conquer this world. And the Romans were afraid. They were afraid because it was thought that he was the king of men – the king is born. When the king of the Romans heard that a child was going to be born who would become the king of men, he became so afraid that he ordered a massacre: to kill all the children below the age of two years. When the three wise men of the East reached the capital in search of the child Jesus, the king heard of it. He invited them to the palace, and he asked them what they had come for. They said they were looking for the king who had been born in his country: “You should be happy that a king is born in your country, and the greatest king will walk on your earth.”But the king was very afraid because he thought, “How can there exist two kings in one country? – then I will be dethroned.” But he played the diplomat. He said to the wise men, “I am very happy, so if you succeed in finding him please come and inform me.”But he was planning to kill the boy, and the three wise men understood it because they could see in his eyes. He was a cunning man. Politicians are cunning.After they had met Jesus and worshipped Jesus, they had to find another route because they were afraid that the king would be waiting, and they didn’t want to become a part of this catastrophe. They didn’t want to become a part of killing and murdering Jesus.So they had to travel very far. They had to go on a long journey because the shortcut was the one they had come by. And they were very old men, but still they took a very long route through deserts and mountains to reach back to their country. They didn’t want to go back by the same route because it would pass through the capital, and the king would be waiting.Jesus was crucified because of his terminology, but he was talking about the inner kingdom. He was not talking about the kingdom of the outside, and he was not talking about the treasures that you know, but the treasures of the unknown.As far as the outside world is concerned, all treasures are just false.I have heard a beautiful anecdote:A man walking along a city street fell through an open sewer hole and broke his leg. He engaged a famous attorney, brought suit against the city for ten thousand dollars, and won the case. The city appealed the decision right up to the Supreme Court, but again the lawyer won the decision. After the claim was settled, the lawyer sent for his client and handed him a dollar bill.“What is this?” inquired the man, looking at the dollar.“That’s your damages after deducting my fee, the cost of appeals and other expenses,” replied the attorney.Out of ten thousand dollars, only one dollar!The man looked at the dollar again, turned it over and scanned it carefully. “What is the matter with this dollar?” he said. “Is it counterfeit?”But all money outside is counterfeit: all dollars are counterfeit, all rupees are counterfeit. The real money does not exist that way; the real money does not exist outside. This conversion from the counterfeit to the real is what Bauls call the birth of the novel man.Come if you wish to meet the novel man.He has abandoned his worldly possessionsfor the beggar’s sack that hangs from his shoulders.He has abandoned worldly possessions to become a beggar. Why abandon worldly possessions? The worldly possessions can be abandoned in two ways. Again you have to understand: the man who has lived his whole life collecting possessions can abandon them out of greed. Then the novel man is not born. He can abandon them in order to get some advance booking in heaven, paradise. He can abandon his worldly possessions seeing that death will take them away. If that is the case, then the old man remains old, even if he abandons all.In India it happens many times, more often than not: people abandon their possessions, they renounce, but if you watch them you will see they have not abandoned their greed. In fact, they have renounced because of their greed.I know one man who renounced almost a million rupees many years ago, but he still goes on talking about it. Thirty years have passed and whenever I meet him, he will bring up the subject again and again – that he has renounced a million rupees. And you can see the light that starts shining in his eyes – a million rupees!The last time I saw him I asked him, “If you have really renounced, then why talk about it? What is the point? As far as I can see, you have not renounced at all. The novel man is not born. You are as much attached to those one million rupees, or maybe even more than you were before. Now the very idea that ‘I have renounced a million rupees’ has become your bank balance. Now you are living on it.’’ I told him that if he went to God, the first thing he would relate to him would be his million rupees, “…Do you know that I have renounced one million rupees?” and he will be expecting something special for himself. This man is the same; the novel man is not born. It has been a miscarriage.You can renounce, but if you enjoy the ego through it, if you feel that you are a great man of renunciation, a mahatma, a great soul because you have renounced; you are not an ordinary man, you are not worldly – then your renunciation is not true.When is the renunciation true? – when you understand the futility. Not out of greed, not because you have to earn something in the other world, but just seeing the futility of it all, you renounce. This renunciation has no effort in it, just a deep insight. Every morning you clean your house and throw the rubbish on the rubbish heap, but you don’t go declaring and advertising to the whole town that again you have renounced much rubbish, again this morning you have done a great deed of renunciation. No, you know that it is rubbish – finished. What is there to tell about it?The novel man is born when you have a deep insight that worldly things have no value; they are all counterfeit. Unreal diamonds or unreal real diamonds are also so. Real dollars are also as unreal as unreal dollars. When the whole outside world has no value for you – that is a real renunciation. Then you are not attached at all.And Bauls say,My plaited hair is still intact and dry.Though I stand in the streamand splash and swim about the river,I cannot be touched by the water.Keep your soles dry as you coast the sea.Let attachments share the same home,but live unattached.Groping for the river,O my senseless heart!In vain do you wander from place to place.The ocean of your heart bears a priceless gem.What good is life if you fail to contactthe spontaneous man who dwells in your own body?Your destiny is shamed.Do not give up gold for a piece of glass,nor leave heaven for a visit to hell.What good is there in rushing round the world?The eternal hero lives in your own little room.Who is there for you to call your own, my heart?For whom do you shed your futile tears?Brothers and friends – let them be;the world is there.Your own dear life is hardly your own.You have come alone,you will go alone.The whole idea of renunciation is of a vision, of a great understanding, of looking into things in their reality. You need not escape from the world. You can remain in the world and become absolutely unattached. But if you feel, “Why carry the burden unnecessarily?” you can also leave the world. But remember, the world has no value this way or that. If it has no value, its renunciation also cannot have any value. If it is valuable, only then can its renunciation be valuable. But then there is no point in renouncing it; it is simply valueless. It is like a dream. When you awake, everything disappears.You have come alone, you will go alone, and between these two exists the dream. To understand the dream, to become alert to it, is the birth of the novel man. “Come, if you wish to meet the novel man,” says the Baul. He invites the whole world: Come to see me; the novel man is born. “He has abandoned his worldly possessions for the beggar’s sack that hangs from his shoulder.”He speaks of the eternal mother, Kali, the goddess of timeeven as he enters the Ganges.The novel man lives in eternity, the ordinary man lives in time.This word Kali has to be understood. Kali is the mother of time. In Sanskrit time is called kala, and the mother of kala is Kali, mother of time. But the mother of time is beyond time. Time is born out of it, but the womb out of which time is born is eternity. Eternity is the mother of time. Time is just a reflection of the eternal. The Bauls worship Kali, the mother of time; they worship eternity. They seek and search eternity – not that which changes but that which remains always and always, that which is beyond all flux, absolutely permanent, unmoving. They seek that hub of existence. Symbolically it is called Kali.This word kala is very meaningful: one meaning is time, another meaning is death. The same word means time and the same word means death. It is beautiful because time is death. The moment you enter into time you are ready to die. With birth, death has entered into you. When the child is born, he has entered into the realm of death. The birthday is also the deathday. Now only one thing is certain: that he will have to die. Everything else is just uncertain; it may happen, it may not happen. But the moment a child is born, the moment the child has taken his first breath, one thing is absolutely certain – that he will die.Entering into life is entering into death; entering into time is entering into death. Time is death, hence the Sanskrit word kala is very beautiful. It means both time and death. And Kali means beyond time and beyond death. Eternity is deathlessness. How to find eternity? What is the way? One has to understand the process of time.The process of time is horizontal: one moment passes, then comes another moment. That passes, then another moment – a procession of moments, a queue of moments – one passes, then another comes; another passes, then another comes. It is horizontal.Eternity is vertical: you go deep into the moment, not moving in a line but into depth. You drown yourself in the moment. If you stand on the bank, then the river goes on passing. Ordinarily we are standing on the bank of time. The river goes on moving; one moment, another moment, and another, and the sequence of moments continues. This is how we ordinarily live, this is how we live in time.Then there is another way – take a jump into the river, drown in the moment, the herenow. Then suddenly, time stops. Then you are moving in an altogether different dimension; the vertical dimension is eternity. That is the meaning of Jesus’ cross.The cross is a time symbol. It is made of two lines: one vertical, one horizontal. On the horizontal line are the hands of Christ and on the vertical line is his whole being. Hands are symbolic of action: doing, having. Having is in time – being is in eternity. So whatsoever you do is in time, whatsoever you are is in eternity; whatsoever you achieve is in time, whatsoever is your nature is in eternity. Change from having, doing, towards being. This moment, the turning can happen. This very moment, if you forget past and future, then time stops. Then nothing moves, then everything is absolutely silent and you start drowning in the herenow. That “now” is eternity.Kali is a symbol of now, of the eternal, of the absolutely real. To live moment to moment and not to bother about past and future is the way towards becoming the novel man.Simple words can overcome ignorance and disbelief:Kali and Krishna are one.The words may differ, the meaning is precisely the same.He who has broken the barrier of wordshas conquered limits:Allah or Jesus, Moses or Kali,the rich or the poor,sage or fool,all are one and the same to him.Very significant sentences: “Simple words can overcome ignorance and disbelief.” If you can listen, then very simple words are enough. If you are capable of being receptive, just simple words uttered by one who knows are enough. But if you don’t understand, then things become very complex. Your non-understanding or non-receptivity makes things complex. It creates confusion, it puzzles you, it creates a chaos in your being. If you can listen silently without your mind interfering, then simple words can overcome ignorance and disbelief.The Bauls say,Even if you forbid, dear friend,I am helpless.My songs contain my prayers.Some flowers praythrough the glamor of colors,and others, being dark, with fragrance.As the veena prayswith its vibrating strings,do I with my songs.Bauls don’t know much philosophy; they are not philosophers. They are simple people of the earth. They are very simple people who can sing and dance. Their words are simple. If you love, if you trust, their small gestures can reveal much.And it is always a question of love and trust.It is not a question of great metaphysical skill, because the more metaphysics you know, the more you will be puzzled. And the more you are acquainted with philosophy, the less is the possibility to come to an understanding. The more you are full of knowledge, the less will be your understanding. You will be too clouded, and too many thoughts will not allow you vision or clarity. Your mirror will be full of dust.Simple words can overcome ignorance and disbelief:Kali and Krishna are one.Bauls say, “We don’t make any distinction between a Hindu and a Mohammedan and a Christian…Kali and Krishna are one.” They say, “We don’t even make any distinction between male and female – Kali and Krishna are one, male and female are one.”That is one of their great insights: that if you really dance and sing in deep trust and love, you will come to feel that man and woman are not two things, are not two beings. Inside you, a new alchemy starts, and your inside man melts with the inside woman…and Kali and Krishna become one.They sing:As the man and the woman in meunite in love,the brilliance of beauty,balanced on the bi-petalled lotusblooms in me,dazzles my eyes.The rays outshine the moon,and the jewelsglowing on the hoods of snakes.My skin and bone are turned to goldwhen the inner man and woman meet,when Krishna and Kali become one.My skin and bone are turned to gold,I am the reservoir of love,alive as the waves.A single drop of waterhas grown into a sea,unnavigable.The whole problem of man is how to meet with woman, and the whole problem of woman is how to meet with man.In one ancient myth prevalent in many countries of the Far East, they say God created man and woman together, not as two beings – they were joined in one body. But then it became difficult. There were conflicts and problems. The woman wanted to go to the east and the man was not willing. Or the man was ready to do something and the woman wanted to rest. But they were together, their bodies were joined. So they complained and God cut their bodies separate.Since then, every man is searching for the woman, his woman, and every woman is searching for her man. Now it is such a big crowd that it is very difficult to find who is your woman, who is your man. So much misery, and one goes on stumbling and groping in the dark. It is almost impossible to find your woman. How will you find her?The myth says that if you can find her everything fits – you again become one. But it is very difficult to find.But there is a way to find your woman, because the woman is not outside. Outside, at the most, are parallel similarities.When you fall in love with a woman, what really happens? This is what happens: somehow the outside woman fulfills your inner woman’s image, fits with that image – maybe not a hundred percent, but enough to fall in love. When you fall in love with a man, what happens? Something inside you clicks and says, “Yes, this is the man, the right man.” It is not a logical conclusion, it is not a syllogism. It is not that you find out all the pros and cons about the man and then you decide, or you compare the man with all the other men in the world, then you decide. No, something happens out of the blue. Suddenly you see that this is the man for whom you were waiting, for whom you were waiting for lives.What happens? You carry an image of man, you carry an image of woman inside. You are both, and you go on looking outside. Nobody is going to fit one hundred percent, because the woman that you find outside has her own images about you; you have your own images. It is very difficult to fit with each other. So all marriages are always on the rocks, and people, by and by, learn how to carry on peacefully. They learn not to rock the boat. But nothing more can happen outside.Bauls say, “Deep inside you, both exist – Krishna and Kali. Let them meet there.” That is the whole Tantra method: how to allow your inner man to meet with the inner woman. And when this becomes a circle, when this meeting, when this inner copulation happens, a great orgasm, a great explosive orgasm begins which knows a beginning but knows no end.Then you live an orgasmic life:A single drop of waterhas grown into a sea,unnavigable.Then you are no longer finite, you become infinite.Simple words can overcome ignorance and disbelief:Kali and Krishna are one.The words may differ, the meaning is precisely the same.He who has broken the barrier of words,has conquered limits…Break the barrier of words. Now I am talking to you. I am using words. You can listen to my words – then you have not listened to me. You can listen in such a way that the words are no longer a barrier, but become vehicles. They no longer create problems, but you listen exactly between the words, between two words, in the gaps. You listen to my silence. Then words and their barriers are broken, then limits are conquered.…Allah or Jesus, Moses or Kali,the rich or the poor,sage or fool,all are one and the same to him.This is the novel man.Now he knows no duality. He does not make any distinction between the sage and the fool. He makes no distinction between the man and the woman. All dualities have come to be united, all dualities have dissolved. Once you drop the words, dualities drop.Language creates duality, language exists through duality. It cannot indicate the non-dual. If I say day, immediately I create night. If I say life, immediately I create death. If I say good, immediately bad is created. If I say no, just by the side of the no, yes is existing. Language can exist only through the opposite.That’s why we see life as always divided – God and Devil. Drop language, drop this linguistic pattern. Once language is no longer on your mind and you look directly into reality, day is night. Suddenly you will start laughing at why you missed it for so long! Day – every day turns into night; night turns into day again every morning, and you have been missing. Life is always turning into death, death always turns again into life, and you have been missing. They are not two, they are one whole. This is the non-dual, advait. This is the most essential religion.Lost in his own thoughts, he seems insane to others.Because his consciousness is no longer divided by language, he is no longer looking at the world through words. He looks insane: he is absorbed in his own being, he is lost in his own vision. And the vision is so vast, as if a thousand and one suns have risen together. It is so dazzling.Lost in his own thoughts, he seems insane to others.He opens his arms to welcome the world,calling all to the ferryboat tied to the coast of life.And he goes on calling, “Come to me, come, if you wish to meet the novel man,” and the boat is ready. And his boat is not against life, it is tied to the coast of the life. He is not negative. And he says, “Come, and I can take you to the other shore. Come, and I can make you new. Come, and I can take you into eternity.”Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 1 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 1 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Yesterday you said that an inward traveler has only direction and not destination. Will you please further clarify the distinction between the two?The distinction is very subtle, but it is the same distinction as there is between the mind and the heart, as there is between logic and love, or even more appropriate, as there is between prose and poetry.A destination is a very clear-cut thing; direction is very intuitive. A destination is something outside you, more like a thing. A direction is an inner feeling; not an object, but your very subjectivity. You can feel direction, you cannot know it. You can know the destination, you cannot feel it. Destination is in the future. Once decided, you start manipulating your life towards it, steering your life towards it.How can you decide the future? Who are you to decide the unknown? How is it possible to fix the future? Future is that which is not yet known, future is an open possibility. By fixing a destination your future is no longer a future, because it is no longer open. Now you have chosen one alternative out of many – because when all the alternatives were open it was future. Now, all alternatives have been dropped; only one alternative has been chosen. It is no longer future, it is your past.The past decides when you decide a destination. Your experience of the past, your knowledge of the past decides. You kill the future. Then you go on repeating your own past – maybe a little modified, a little changed here and there according to your comfort or your convenience; repainted, renovated – but still it comes out of the past. This is the way one loses track of future: by deciding a destination one loses track of future. One becomes dead. One starts functioning like a mechanism.Direction is something alive, in the moment. It knows nothing of the future, it knows nothing of the past, but it throbs, it pulsates, but here and now. And out of this pulsating moment, the next moment is created. Not by any decision on your part – but just because you live this moment and you live it so totally, and you love this moment so wholly, out of this wholeness the next moment is born. It is going to have a direction. That direction is not given by you, it is not imposed by you; it is spontaneous. That’s what the Bauls call sahaj manush, the spontaneous man.The spontaneous man is the way to the real man, to the essential man, to the God within. You cannot decide direction, you can only live this moment that is available to you. By living it, direction arises. If you dance, the next moment is going to be of a deeper dance. Not that you decide, but you simply dance this moment. You have created a direction: you are not manipulating it. The next moment will be more full of dancing, and still more will be following.Destination is fixed by the mind; direction is earned by living. Destination is logical: one wants to be a doctor, one wants to be an engineer, one wants to be a scientist or one wants to be a politician, one wants to be a rich man, a famous man – these are destinations. Direction? – one simply lives the moment in deep trust that life will decide. One lives this moment so totally that out of this totality a freshness is born. Out of this totality the past dissolves and the future starts taking shape. But this shape is not given by you, this shape is earned by you.One Zen master, Rinzai, was dying; he was on his deathbed. Somebody asked, “Master, people will ask after you are gone, what was your essential teaching? You have said many things, you have talked about many things – it will be difficult for us to condense it. Before you leave, please, you yourself condense it into a single sentence, so we can treasure it. And whenever people who have not known you desire, we can give them your essential teaching.”Dying, Rinzai opened his eyes, gave a great Zen shout, a lion’s roar! They were all shocked! They couldn’t believe that this dying man could have so much energy, and they were not expecting it. The man was unpredictable; he had always been so. But even with this unpredictable man they were not in any way expecting that dying, at the last moment, he would give such a lion’s roar. And when they were shocked – and of course their minds stopped, they were surprised, taken aback – Rinzai said, “This is it!” closed his eyes, and died.This is it….This moment, this silent moment, this moment uncorrupted by thought, this silence that was all around, this surprise, this last lion’s roar over death; this is it.Yes, direction comes out of living this moment. It is not something that you manage and plan. It happens, it is very subtle – and you will never be certain about it, you can only feel it. That’s why I say it is more like poetry not like prose; more like love not like logic; more like art than like science. Vague…and that’s its beauty – hesitant, as hesitant as a dewdrop on a grass leaf – slipping, not knowing where, not knowing why; in the morning sun, just slipping on a leaf of grass.Direction is very subtle, delicate, fragile. That’s why everybody has chosen destination. Society tries to fix a destination for you. Parents, teachers, culture, religion, government: they all try to give you a fixed pattern of life. They don’t want you to be free, left alone, moving into the unknown. But that’s how they have created boredom. If you know your future beforehand, it is already boring. If you know that you are going to be this, it is already boring.Future should be a direction, not a destination. It should be more like nirvana. The word Buddha uses means all that you know will not be there. That’s his definition of nirvana: all that you know will not be there, all that you have experienced will not be there, all that you are will not be there – something totally new, something that you cannot understand because you don’t have the language to understand it, you don’t have the experience to understand it. Something absolutely new – it cannot be talked about. Nirvana is a direction. Firdaus and paradise – Mohammedan and Christian – are destinations, very clear-cut.The mediocre mind demands clear-cut goals because he is so insecure – he cannot trust his own awareness, and he cannot trust life. The mediocre mind is very afraid of discovery, and discovery is the greatest secret in life. To be ready to be surprised, to be always ready to be surprised means that one is innocent; trying to discover. And life is such that you can go on discovering. The more you discover it, the more you come to know – that much more is still left. It is a nonending process. Direction is a nonending process. Remember, it is a process, movement; destination is a dead thing.Destination belongs to the ego; direction belongs to life, to being. To move in the world of direction one needs tremendous trust, because one is moving in insecurity, one is moving in darkness. But the darkness has a thrill in it: without any map, without any guide you are moving into the unknown. Each step is a discovery, and it is not only a discovery of the outside world. Simultaneously, something is discovered in you also. A discoverer not only discovers things. As he goes on discovering more and more unknown worlds, he goes on discovering himself also, simultaneously. Each discovery is also an inner discovery. The more you know, the more you know about the knower. The more you love, the more you know about the lover.I am not going to give you a destination. I can only give you a direction – awake, throbbing with life and unknown, always surprising, unpredictable. I’m not going to give you a map. I can give you only a great passion to discover. Yes, a map is not needed; great passion, great desire to discover is needed. Then I leave you alone. Then you go on your own. Move into the vast, into the infinite, and by and by learn to trust it. Leave yourself in the hands of life, because life is God. When Jesus says, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done,” he is saying this…a great trust. Even if God brings death, there is nothing to be afraid of. It is he who is bringing death, so there must be a reason in it, there must be a hidden secret in it, there must be a teaching in it. He’s opening a door.The man who trusts, the man who is religious is thrilled even at the gate of death – he can give a lion’s roar. Even dying – because he knows nothing dies – at the very moment of death he can say, “This is it!” Because each moment, this is it. It may be life, it may be death; it may be success, it may be failure; it may be happiness, it may be unhappiness. Each moment…this is it.This is what I call the real prayer. And then you will have direction. You need not worry about it, you need not fix it – you can move with trust.The second question:Osho,How is it that the inscription on the Greek temple to Delphi says, “Know thyself,” and not “Love thyself”?The Greek mind has an obsession with knowledge. The Greek mind thinks in terms of knowledge, how to know. That’s why Greeks produced the greatest tradition of philosophers, great thinkers, logicians, great rational minds. But the passion is to know.In the world, as I see it, there are only two types of minds: the Greek and the Hindu. The Greek mind has a passion to know, and the Hindu mind has a passion to be. The Hindu passion is not too concerned about knowing, but about being. Sat, being, is the very search – who am I? – not to know it in a logical way, but to drown in one’s own existence so one can taste it, so one can be it – because there is no other way to know, really. If you ask Hindus, they will say there is no other way to know than to be. How can you know love? The only way is to become a lover. Be a lover and you will know. And if you are trying to stand outside the experience and just be an observer, then you may know about love, but you will never know love.The Greek mind has produced the whole scientific growth. Modern science is a by-product of the Greek mind. Modern science insists on being dispassionate, standing outside, watching, unprejudiced. Be objective, be impersonal. These are the basic requirements if you want to become a scientist: be impersonal, don’t allow your emotions to color anything; be dispassionate, almost not interested in any hypothesis in whatsoever way. Just watch the fact. Don’t get involved in it, remain outside. Don’t be a participant. This is the Greek passion: a dispassionate search for knowledge.It has helped, but it has helped only in one direction: that is the direction of matter. That is the way to know matter. You can never come to know mind that way, only matter. You can never come to know consciousness that way. You can know the outside, you can never know the inside – because in the inside you are already involved. There is no way to stand out of it. You are already there. The inside is you – how can you get out of it? I can watch a stone, a rock, a river dispassionately because I am separate. How can I watch myself dispassionately? I am involved in it. I cannot be outside it. I cannot reduce myself to being an object. I will remain the subject. And I will remain the subject – whatsoever I do, I am the knower, I’m not the known.So the Greek mind shifted, by and by, towards matter. The motto, the inscription at Delphi’s temple “Know thyself” became the source of the whole scientific progress. But by and by, the very idea of dispassionate knowledge led the Western mind away from its own being.The Hindu mind, the other type of mind in the world, has another direction: the direction is of being. In the Upanishads, the great master Uddalak says to his son and his disciple Svetketu, “That art thou” – Tattvamasi, Svetketu. That art thou – there is no distinction between that and thou. That is your reality; thou is the reality – there is no distinction. There is no possibility to know it as you know a rock. There is no possibility to know it as you know other things; you can only be it.On the temple of Delphi, of course, it was written “Know thyself.” It is expressive of the Greek mind, because the temple is in Greece and the inscription is Greek. If the temple had been in India then the inscription would have been “Be thyself” – because that art thou. The Hindu mind moved closer and closer to one’s own being – that’s why it became non-scientific. It became religious but non-scientific. It became introvert, but then it lost all moorings in the outside world. The Hindu mind became very rich inside, but the outside became very poor.A great synthesis is needed, a great synthesis between the Hindu and the Greek mind. It can be the greatest blessing for the earth. Up to now it has not been possible, but now the basic requirements are there and a synthesis is possible. The East and West are meeting in a very subtle way. The Eastern people are going to the West to learn science, to become scientists, and the Western seekers are going, moving towards the East to learn what religion is. A great mingling and merging is happening.In the future, the East is not going to be East and the West is not going to be West. The earth is going to become a global village – a small place where all distinctions will disappear. And then for the first time the great synthesis will arise, the greatest ever – which will not think in extremes, which will not think that if you go outside, if you are a searcher after knowledge then you lose your roots in being; or if you search in your being you lose your roots in the world, in the scientific realm. Both can be together – and whenever this happens a man has both wings and he can fly to the highest sky possible. Otherwise you have only one wing.As I see it, Hindus are lopsided as much as the Greek mind is lopsided. Both are half of the reality. Religion is half, science is half. Something has to happen which can bring religion and science together in a greater whole, where science does not deny religion and where religion does not condemn science.“How is it that the inscription on the Greek temple to Delphi says ‘Know thyself,’ and not ‘Love thyself’?”Love thyself is possible only if you “become thyself,” if you “be thyself.” Otherwise it is not possible. Otherwise the only possibility is to go on trying to know who you are, and that too from the outside; watching from the outside who you are, and that too in an objective way, not in an intuitive way.The Greek mind developed a tremendous logical capacity. Aristotle became the father of all logic and all philosophy. The Eastern mind looks illogical – it is. The very insistence on meditation is illogical because meditation says: you can know only when the mind is dropped, when thinking is dropped and you merge yourself into your being so totally that not even a single thought is there to distract you – only then can you know. And the Greek mind says: you can know only when thinking is clear, logical, rational, systematic. The Hindu mind says: when thinking disappears completely, only then is there any possibility to know. They are totally different, moving in diametrically opposite directions; but there is a possibility to synthesize both.A person can use his mind when working on matter, then logic is a great instrument. And the same person can put aside the mind when he moves into his meditation chamber and moves into the no-mind. Because mind is not you – it is just an instrument just like my hand, just like my legs. If I want to walk I use my legs, if I don’t want to walk I don’t use my legs. In exactly the same way you can use the mind logically if you are trying to know about matter. It is perfectly right, it fits there. And when you are moving inwards, put it aside. Now legs are not needed, thinking is not needed. Now you need a deep silent state of no-thought.And this can happen in one person. And when I say it, I say it from my own experience. I have been doing both. When it is needed, I can become as logical as any Greek. When it is not needed, I can become as absurd, as illogical as any Hindu. So when I say it I mean it, and it is not a hypothesis. I have experienced it that way. The mind can be used and it can be put aside. It is an instrument, a very beautiful instrument – no need to be so obsessed with it, no need to be so fixed, fixated with it. Then it becomes a disease. Just think of a man who wants to sit but cannot sit because he says, “I have legs – how can I sit?” Or, think of a man who wants to keep quiet and silent and cannot keep quiet and silent because he says, “I have a mind.” It is the same.One should become so capable that even the closest instrument of mind can be put aside and can be put off. It can be done, it has been done, but it has not been done on a great scale. But it will be done more and more. This is what I am trying to do here with you.I talk to you, I discuss problems with you; that’s logical, that is using the mind. And then I say to you, “Drop the mind and move into deep meditation. If you dance, dance so totally that there is not a single thought inside, your whole energy becomes dance. Or sing, then just sing. Or sit, then just sit – be in zazen, don’t do anything else. Don’t allow a single thought to pass through. Just be quiet, absolutely quiet.” These are contradictory things.Every morning you meditate and every morning you come and listen to me. Every morning you listen to me and then you go and meditate. This is contradictory. If I were just Greek, I would talk to you, I would make a logical communication with you, but then I would not say to meditate. That is foolish. If I were just a Hindu, there would be no need to talk to you. I could say, “Just go and meditate because what is the point of talking? One has to become silent.” I am both. And this is my hope: that you will also become both – because then life is very enriched, tremendously enriched. Then you don’t lose anything. Then everything is absorbed; then you become a great orchestra. Then all polarities meet in you.For the Greeks, the very idea of “love thyself” would have been absurd because they would say, and they would say logically, that love is possible only between two persons. You can love somebody else, you can even love your enemy, but how can you love yourself? Only you are there, alone. Love can exist between a duality, a polarity; how can you love yourself? For the Greek mind, the very idea of loving oneself is absurd: for love, the other is needed.For the Hindu mind…. In the Upanishads they say: you love your wife not for your wife’s sake; you love your wife just for your own sake. You love yourself through her because she gives you pleasure – that’s why you love her – but deep down you love your own pleasure. You love your son, you love your friend, not because of them but because of you. Deep down your son makes you happy, your friend gives you solace. That’s what you are hankering for. So the Upanishads say: really you love yourself. Even if you say that you love others, that is just a via media to love yourself, a long roundabout way to love yourself.Hindus say that there is no other possibility: you can love only yourself. And Greeks say there is no possibility to love oneself because at least two are needed.If you ask me, I’m both Hindu and Greek. If you ask me, I will say love is a paradox. It is a very paradoxical phenomenon. Don’t try to reduce it to one pole; both polarities are needed. The other is needed, but in deep love the other disappears. If you watch two lovers, they are two and one together. That’s the paradox of love and that’s the beauty of it. They are two, yes, they are two; and yet they are not two, they are one. If this oneness has not happened then love is not possible. They may be doing something else in the name of love. If they are still two and not one also, then love has not happened. And if you are just alone and there is nobody else, then too love is not possible. Love is a paradoxical phenomenon. It needs two in the first place, and in the last place it needs two to exist as one. It is the greatest enigma – it is the greatest puzzle.If you have loved somebody, you will understand what I mean. You know that the other is other, and yet deep down you feel something has been bridged. It is as if traveling in a sea you come across an island. It is separate from the continent, yes. But deep down, underneath the sea, the land is one. It is joined with the continent – it is not really separate. It is separate yet not separate; that is what love is.So if you ask me, I will say it is possible to love yourself, but then you will have to divide yourself in two. Then you will have to become the lover and the beloved both. And it is also possible to love somebody else, but then you will have to become one. Love is something that happens between two persons, but when it happens they are no longer two, they become one.The third question:Osho,The same dawn, the same dusk, the same chasing, the same thought of awareness, the same talk of awareness, the same and the same….It depends…In a way it is the same. How can it be otherwise? The same sun, the same sun rising every morning, and the same sunset, yes – but if you watch closely, have you ever seen two sunrises exactly the same? Have you watched the colors in the sky? Have you seen the cloud formations around the sun?No two sunrises are the same; no two sunsets are the same. The world is a discontinuous continuity – discontinuous because every moment something new is happening, and yet continuous because it is not absolutely new. It is connected. So both proverbs are right. There is a proverb which says: There is nothing new under the sun; and the other proverb which seems contradictory to it which says: There is nothing old under the sun. Both are true.Nothing is new and nothing is old. Everything goes on changing and yet somehow remains the same, somehow remains the same and yet goes on changing. That’s the beauty, the mystery, the secret. You cannot reduce it to any category: you cannot say it is the same, you cannot say it is not the same. You cannot reduce life into your categories – your pigeonholes are just worthless. When it comes to life, you have to drop all your pigeon-holes, your categories. It is bigger than your categories, transcendental to all categories. It is so vast that you cannot find its beginning or its end.The questioner says, “The same dawn, the same dusk, the same chasing, the same thought of awareness, the same talk of awareness, the same and again the same.”Yes, in a way it is the same; and in another way, nothing is the same. Yesterday also I was here, but I am not the same. How can I be? – so much water has flowed down the Ganges. I am twenty-four hours older, twenty-four hours of experience are added to me, twenty-four hours of intense awareness. I am richer; I’m not the same – death has come a little closer. You are also not the same, and yet I look the same and you look the same.You have to see the point. This is what I mean when I say life is a mystery: you cannot classify it, you cannot say definitely that this is so. The moment you say, immediately you will become aware that life has falsified you.Are these trees the same as they were yesterday? Many leaves have fallen, many new leaves have come up, many flowers are gone. They have risen higher. How can they be the same? See, today the cuckoo is not singing. It is so silent. Yesterday the cuckoo was singing. It was a different silence: it was full of song. Today’s silence is different; it is not full of song. Even the wind is not blowing – everything has stopped. Yesterday there was great wind. Trees are meditating today – yesterday they were dancing. It cannot be the same and yet, it is the same.It depends on you – how you look at life. If you look as if it is the same, you will be bored. Then don’t throw your responsibility on somebody else. It is your outlook. If you say it is the same, then you will be bored. If you see the constant change, flux-like, the great whirlwind-like movement all around you, the dynamism of life, each moment the old disappearing and the new coming in. If you can see the continuous birth, if you can see God’s hand continuously creating, then you will be enchanted, thrilled. Your life will not be bored. You will be continuously wondering, “What next…?” You will not be dull. Your intelligence will remain sharp, alive and young.Now it depends on what you want. If you want to become like a dead man, stupid, dull, gloomy, sad and bored, then you believe that life is the same. If you want to become very young and alive, fresh, radiant, then believe that life is new each moment.Says old Heraclitus, “You cannot step twice into the same river.” You cannot meet the same person twice and you cannot see the same sunrise twice. It is up to you. And if you understand me, I will say, don’t choose. If you choose the idea that everything is old, you become old. If you choose that everything is young and new, you become young. If you understand me, I say don’t choose; see that both are true. Then you transcend all categories. You are neither old nor young. Then you become eternal, then you become God-like, then you become life-like.I have heard an anecdote:Judge Dunne was seated in court in New York, or rather in Brooklyn, while a very, very stupid witness was being interrogated. The attorney said, “Were you at the corner of Fourth and Elm the day of the accident?”The witness said, “Who? Me?”“Yes, you,” said the attorney. “Did you notice whether or not the ambulance came to care for the wounded woman?”“Who? Me?”“Yes, you! Did you notice whether or not the woman was seriously injured?”“Who? Me?”By this time, the Prosecuting Attorney was exasperated. He said, “Certainly you! Why do you think you are here?”The witness said, “I came here to see justice done.”Judge Dunne said, “Who? Me?”If you believe that everything is the same, then this will be a constant thing – Who? Me? – and you are going to be bored. The repetition will kill you. To be sharp and alive one needs something which is not repetitive. Something new, constantly happening, makes you alive, keeps you alive, keeps you alert.Have you watched a dog sitting silently? A rock is lying down just in front of him – he will not be worried. But let the rock start moving. Just have a small thread connected to the rock and pull it, and the dog will jump. He will start barking. Movement makes him sharp; then all dullness is gone. Then he is no longer sleepy. Then he is no longer dreaming about flies and other things. Then he will simply jump out of his slumber. Something has changed.Change gives you movement, but constant change also can be very uprooting. As constant no-change can be very deadening, constant change can also be very uprooting.That is happening in the West; people are changing. The statisticians say that in America the average limit of a person doing a job is three years. People are changing their jobs, changing their towns, changing their spouses, trying to change everything – changing their car every year, their house – the whole value has changed. In England they make Rolls Royce. Their idea is so that it lasts forever, lifelong at least. In America they make beautiful cars, but stability is not the quality to be bothered about – because who is going to keep a car for his whole life? If it lasts for one year – enough. When the American goes to purchase a car, he does not bother about stability; he asks about exchangeability. The English still ask about durability, stability, whether the car will be durable because he purchases once, and finished. He’s very old-fashioned. He does not know any divorce, even with a car. Once married, married. He’s very monogamous even with a car. He’s very sincere. The American lives in a world of change – everything is changing – but then the American has lost the roots.In my old village, where I used to go sometimes, I was surprised. Everything remains the same. The same coolie would greet me at the station because there is only one coolie, and the same tonga, and the same road, and I would see the same people moving around. Everything remains almost the same. Rarely somebody dies, rarely somebody is born – otherwise everything remains almost the same. And even when people die, they are replaced by their sons and they look almost the same. Nothing has changed. The houses are the same, the gossip is the same. It seems time does not exist.I was always surprised going back to my town. That was the first thing that I would see: that in this town time does not exist. Everything seems to be eternally the same. But then people have roots. They are dull but they are very rooted. They are very comfortable, happy. They are not alienated. They don’t feel strangers. How can they feel strangers? – everything is so similar. When they were born it was the same; when they die it will be the same. Everything is so stable. How can you feel a stranger? The whole town is like a small family.In America everything is uprooted. Nobody knows where he belongs. The very sense of belonging is lost. If you ask somebody, “Where do you belong?” he will shrug his shoulders – because he has been to so many towns, to so many colleges, to so many universities. He cannot even be certain of who he is because the identity is very loose, fluid. In a way it is good because the man remains sharp and alive, but roots are gone.For me, both things have been tried: stability, rootedness, nothing new under the sun – we have tried it in the past, for many centuries. It rusted the human mind. People were comfortable but not very alive.Then in America, something new has happened and it is spreading all over the world – because America is the future of the world. Whatsoever is happening there is going to happen everywhere sooner or later. America sets the trend. Now people are very alive but unrooted, they don’t know where they belong. A great desire to belong has arisen. A great desire to be rooted somewhere, to possess someone and to be possessed by someone: something durable, something stable, something like a center – because people are moving like wheels and there seems to be no rest. And it is great stress: continuously changing, continuously changing. And change is accelerating every day, becoming faster and faster.Now they say that big books cannot be written because by the time you write a big book it is out of date. Knowledge is changing so fast, so only small booklets are possible so they reach – they reach to people before knowledge changes. Otherwise, before they reach the market, the books will already be out of date and useless, rubbish.Everything is in such a great change and turmoil and chaos, and man feels deeply stressed – great strain and tension. Both have their benefits and both have their curses.To me, a synthesis has to be made between these two orientations. One should be aware that life is both the old and new together, simultaneously – old, because the whole past is present in the present moment; new, because the whole future is potentially present in the present moment. The present moment is a culmination of the whole past and the beginning of the whole future. In this moment, all that has happened is hidden, and all that is going to happen is also hidden. Each moment is past and future both, a convergence of past and future. So something is old and something is new, and if you can become aware of both together, you will have sharpness and roots both together. You will be at ease, without any stress. You will not become dull, and you will be very conscious and alert.I have heard:Mistress MacMahon went berserk one afternoon. She broke every dish and cup and reduced her usually spotless kitchen to shambles. The police arrived and took her to the city’s mental institution. The head psychiatrist sent for her husband.“Do you know any reason,” asked the shrink, “why your wife should suddenly lose her mind?”“I’m just as surprised as you are,” answered Mr. MacMahon. “I can’t imagine what got into her. She has always been such a quiet, hardworking woman. Why, she hasn’t been out of the kitchen in twenty years!”Now then, one is going to go mad. It is as simple as two plus two make four. If one has not been out of the kitchen for twenty years, it is maddening. But the opposite is always maddening. If you have never been to your home for twenty years and have just become a vagabond – always arriving and never arriving anywhere – always moving and never reaching anywhere; if you have become a gypsy and you don’t have any home, then too you will start going mad.Both are dangerous taken separately. Taken together, they make life very rich. All polarities make life rich: yin and yang, man and woman, dark and light, life and death, god and devil, saint and sinner. All polarities taken together make life rich. Otherwise life becomes monotonous. Don’t choose a monotonous life. Become richer.The fourth question:Osho,After each camp, I am left deeply frustrated and anxious, as if I have been waiting for something to happen that never happens, and I say to myself, “Heera, you are back in the same boat again.” Please comment.Let me first tell you one anecdote.The newly arrived convict was complaining to the warden, “I don’t like the food here, I don’t like the quarters, and I don’t like your face.”“Well,” said the warden, “is there anything else you don’t like?”“That’s all for the time being,” said the convict. “I don’t want you to think that I am unreasonable.”Heera, you are very unreasonable.First, for hundreds and hundreds of lives you have never meditated. Not to meditate has gone deep into your bones, into your very heart – it has become a hard pattern. Now, suddenly you meditate and you start expecting too much. It is unreasonable.In fact, all expectations are unreasonable, but when one expects something out of meditation it is absolutely unreasonable. Because the very basis of meditation, the very foundation of meditation is to understand that expectation has to be dropped; otherwise meditation never starts. It is expectation that keeps your mind continuously spinning thoughts. It is expectation that keeps you tense. It is expectation, when not fulfilled, that makes you feel frustrated, miserable. Drop expectation and meditation will flower, but it can flower only when you are not expecting. You can go on expecting for many lives – you will not allow meditation to flower. That is not the way.I have heard:Lanahan’s hair kept falling out and he complained to his barber. “That stuff you gave me,” he cried, “is terrible. You said two bottles of it would make me hair grow, but nothing has happened.”“I don’t understand,” said the barber, “that is the best hair restorer made.”“Well,” said Lanahan, “I don’t mind drinking another bottle, but it had better work!”Now with expectation, doing meditation is like drinking a bottle of hair restorer. It is not going to work. It can even be destructive, it can be dangerous.It is better not to meditate than to meditate with expectation, because at least you will not suffer the frustration. Don’t meditate. But if you have decided to meditate, then be clear. Meditation does not guarantee anything to you. Not that nothing happens out of it; it happens, but there is no guarantee. Tremendous possibilities open but you cannot expect them. If you expect, doors remain closed. It is your expectation that blocks the way.Two friends met on the street.“I’m so unhappy I could cry,” said the first.“Why?”“Two weeks ago, my uncle died and left me one million dollars.”“That’s no reason to cry,” said the second.“That would make you happy, that’s true,” said the first, “but last week another uncle died and left me two million dollars.”“But why are you so unhappy then?”The man said, “I only had two uncles!”Expectation is very, very dangerous. With expectation, even if something happens you will not feel fulfilled, because expectation is almost insanity. You go on expecting more and more – now the man is miserable because he had only two uncles. Whatsoever happens is not going to make you happy if you start with expectations. Drop expectation – that is not the right thing to bring into meditation – and immediately things will start happening.Next camp, or from tomorrow, just meditate. Enjoy it intrinsically. There is no need to look for any result. Let it happen. Let the future come of its own accord. Don’t make a destination out of meditation – just simple direction will do. Enjoy it, celebrate it, be festive about it.The very act of meditation is a great joy. Just to be able to dance, just to be able to sing, just to be able to sit silently and breathe and be, is more than enough. Don’t ask for anything else. Because of your asking you are corrupting your being. You have tried that way, now listen to me and try my way. You simply meditate.“After each camp, I am left deeply frustrated and anxious…”The problem does not arise after the camp, it arises before the camp. First you sow the seeds of expectation…then who is going to suffer? You will suffer. You will have to reap the crop.“…as if I have been waiting for something to happen that never happens…”That is never going to happen. Whatsoever you are waiting for, you are waiting in vain. It is not going to happen, and what is going to happen has nothing to do with your expectations and your desires. You just let it come in; don’t block the way. Remove yourself out of your own way. This time, with no expectations, no desires, no hopes – just meditate.“…and I say to myself: Heera, you are back in the same boat again.”If you listen to me you will never again be in the same boat. It is the boat of expectation. Frustration is a by-product. You want to get rid of the frustration but you don’t want to get rid of the expectation. Then it is impossible.Buddha is reported to have said, “If you want to get rid of death, get rid of birth.” There is no other way. If you want to get rid of misery, get rid of the lust for happiness. And when there is no misery, there is happiness. But it is not because you desire it; it is because you don’t have any desire. In a deep desireless state, you are full of bliss.The last question:Osho,It is from Parijat.Your contradictions used to throw me into such unhappy emotional states. Now I listen to you but without thinking, remaining tranquil. Have I escaped before the pot came to the boil?First, one anecdote:A mother was examining a new mechanical toy at the corner shop and wondered if it were not too complicated for a small boy.“Oh, no,” the salesman beamed, “it is an educational toy. It is especially designed to teach the child something about our current civilization: no matter how he puts it together, he’s wrong.”Don’t try to put me together, otherwise you will be wrong. It is designed that way. To contradict myself is my way. To never allow you to settle anywhere is my way. To go on goading you on and on is my way.But now, Parijat has learned the trick: listen in deep tranquillity. Don’t be bothered about whether I am contradicting something that I have said before. Listen to me this moment – don’t bring the past in. If you don’t bring the past in there is no contradiction. If you bring the past in, then there is contradiction. Just don’t bring the past in: that is what tranquillity is. You just listen to me this moment; then where is the contradiction? And that’s my whole effort – to go on contradicting. One day or other you will decide that if you have to listen to this man, you have to forget all about what he has said before. That’s a way to make you alert, that the past has not to be brought in. If I go on saying very consistent things you will stop listening to me – because there is no need: “He is saying the same thing.” Even if you sleep you will not miss anything. But I will not allow you to sleep because you can miss, you can never rely on me.There was one advertisement in a newspaper: a night guard was needed by a rich man. He had three conditions: one, he should be very tall, strong, violent-looking; second, he should not be addicted to any sort of alcoholic beverages, he should be alert; and third, he should be reliable.Mulla Nasruddin applied. He was called, but the rich man was surprised because he is a very small man, not tall at all, and not violent-looking – a very meek fellow.The rich man said, “I am surprised why you troubled yourself to come here, and why you answered my advertisement. Can’t you see? These are the three conditions: first, that the man should be tall, at least six feet. You don’t seem to be more than five. The man should be violent-looking; I have not seen such a simple, almost simpleton-type man. You look so meek. Why have you come? Do you drink or not?”Nasruddin said, “I drink too much.’’“Then why are you wasting my time? Why have you come?”Nasruddin said, “I have only come to say that I am not reliable either.”I also am not reliable. I go on completely forgetting what I have said to you yesterday. I am a drunkard. That’s why I can contradict so easily, otherwise it would be very difficult. It never comes to my mind that I am contradictory. Whatsoever I am saying, this is it! I don’t bother about what I have said before. I’m not concerned with it. That was the truth of that moment, this is the truth of this moment, and I’m not reliable. I am not saying anything that I am going to say again tomorrow. Who knows? I don’t know myself. If you really listen to me, by and by you will listen to the moment. That’s the whole effort.I am not trying to give you a philosophy, a doctrine, a dogma. A dogma has to be consistent, a creed has to be consistent. I am not trying to convert you to a certain belief; a belief has to be consistent. I am trying to give you a vision, not a belief. I am trying to help you to come to my window to see the sky, to see the truth. That truth cannot be described. And that truth cannot be made a dogma, and that truth contains all contradictions – because it is so vast. So I go on giving you glimpses, aspects of it: one aspect is contradictory to another aspect. But in the whole truth, all aspects meet and mingle and are one.The right way to listen to me is like this – where Parijat has arrived. Everybody has to arrive if you want to listen to me. If you want to be with me, you have to arrive to that tranquillity where you don’t pay any attention to the past. You forget what I have said as deeply as I go on forgetting. You are simply to listen to this moment. Then there is no contradiction because there is no comparison. And then you don’t cling to what I say. It becomes just a direction and not a destination. It just helps you to become more alert and aware. It does not give you a philosophy. Rather, it gives you a very subtle milieu, a totally different vision of life. It imparts my eyes to you.A salesman walked into a busy executive’s office and asked, “How about buying some of the latest styles in ties?”“I don’t need any,” said the executive. “Scram!”“They are pure silk,” continued the salesman.“Look, I said beat it, and I mean it.” Then, his patience exhausted, the executive picked up the salesman and tossed him out. Sample cases were scattered all over the place. The salesman, undaunted, picked up his wares, brushed off his clothes, and walked back into the office.“Now that you have got that off your chest,” he said, “I am ready to take down your order.”The same I say to Parijat: now that you have got that off your chest, those contradictions, and getting troubled by them and emotionally disturbed about them – because you were seeking a philosophy, you were seeking a mental belief, you were trying to find something to cling to and I will not allow – now that it is off your chest, I am ready to take down your order.Now, the really last question:Osho,I want to tell you, to thank you for all the miracles and blessings, but I can't find a way big enough. It is all so overwhelming.A little anecdote:A hippie-type hobo wandered into a church and on the way out told the vicar, “Man, you were swinging, daddy, like way out, man.”“I beg your pardon?” said the vicar.“I mean, man,” said the hippie hobo, “I really dig your jive, man. I read you loud and clear. I put a little cash in your old plate there, daddy-o.”“Aha!” beamed the vicar, grasping the down-and-out’s hand. “Cool man, cool!”That’s what I say to you – cool man, cool. There is no need to express your gratitude; it will be difficult. If you can express it, it is not of worth. If it is of worth, you cannot express it. If you are just giving me a formal thank-you, then you can express it. But I know, I know the person who has said this. Something is really happening. It is overwhelming, but there is no need to express it. I will know it.In fact, I know it before you come to know it. Whenever it is happening to somebody, I am the first to know here. You will be the second, even if it is happening to you – because it will take a little time to reach your mind. It has to travel a little longer. It travels to me faster. I know it is overwhelming, but there is no need; just cool down. Become more cool. And I will know it, and everybody else will know it, and the whole world – even the trees and the rocks and the rivers will know it.When it really happens, there is no need to say it. The whole existence immediately feels it: something has happened. Somebody has opened, some flower flowered, a lotus bloomed.Enough for today.

https://oshoworld.com/osho-audio-discourse-english-b/

The Beloved Vol 1 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 1 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Commit yourself to the earth while on the earth,my heart,if you wish to attain the unattainable man.Place at his feet your flowers of feelingsand the prayers of tearsflooding your eyes.The man you seek is earthedin the earth,deceased while being.Dying with death,you must live to seek.The religion of the Bauls is the religion of the earth. It’s radical, because it pertains to the very roots of being. When I say it is the religion of the earth, I mean many things: it is the religion of the body, it is the religion of nature, it is the religion of reality.The Bauls don’t believe in fantasy and they don’t believe in some heavenly paradise. They don’t believe in faraway goals, they are not utopians – they are very realistic people, down to earth. This is something very special in the world of religions, because ordinarily religions are nothing but wish-fulfillments, dreams of a suffering humanity. Because humanity is suffering, it substitutes for reality by dreaming. A poor man can console himself that at least in the kingdom of God he will be the first. He can console himself with sayings like: Blessed are the meek because they shall inherit the earth; the poor in spirit are the people of God; those who are last will be the first in my kingdom of God. The poor man needs all these consolations.Man is afraid of death. He needs to be reassured again and again that “You are a soul, deathless, immortal – only the body dies, not you.” Man is suffering a thousand and one complexities. The whole life is almost an oceanic sadness, suffering, sorrow. It is difficult to bear it. Dreams are needed, hopes are needed of a better future, of a better world. Maybe it is beyond death, but just the idea that it is there waiting for you…. And the suffering is only for today – pass it somehow, believe in tomorrow. Sooner or later you will be relieved of it. Ordinary religions are the religions of tomorrow. They simply indicate that because man lives in suffering, man needs dreaming.The religion of the Bauls is very down to earth; it believes in the herenow. It does not say that paradise is somewhere else – it is here and you cannot postpone it – and all postponement is dangerous, suicidal. If you cannot discover it herenow, you will never discover it anywhere else because you will remain the same. And whenever you will be, life will always come in the form of herenow. So the only door to reality is here, this very moment.The Bauls say, “This is the reality and there is no that.” They don’t divide reality into two: they don’t say illusory and the real, they don’t say maya and brahman, they don’t say this and that. They say, “This is all.” This moment is total, and all division is dangerous because reality is nowhere divided; it is indivisible.Hence they don’t talk about a God somewhere sitting in the seventh heaven. They talk about a totally different God – rooted in you, rooted here in the earth, rooted in this body, rooted in these emotions – lust and love, rooted here in tension and stress. The God of the Bauls is a very real god. You can touch him, you can love him, you can embrace him, you live with him, you can live him. It is not far away, it is very close; closer than close, because it is you. They don’t use the word god at all. Their word for god is adhar manush, the essential man. Man himself is divine. If you enter yourself you will be entering God. If you enter this world you will be entering God.This does not mean that there is no God. This is a radical standpoint, but not negation. It is a very revolutionary attitude, but not negative. It does not mean that God does not exist. In fact, it means that God exists herenow, and the responsibility is yours to discover him. And there is no alibi, there is no excuse to postpone.In China, Taoists have reached to the same viewpoint: they dropped the very word god. They started using the word chi’lan. Chi’lan means nature; that is God. Chi’lan means that which happens of itself, that which is already happening, that which has always been happening and will go on happening. That is the meaning of the word tao also. In the Vedas, Hindus have a beautiful word: they call it ritam. That is exactly what Tao or chi’lan is. Ritam means nature, not God – because whenever you say “God,” somehow it is always somewhere else, not here; at least not in you, not in your neighbor. The earth seems to be not worthy enough for God to be here.Jainas and Buddhists use the word dhamma – that exactly means nature. The Sanskrit word dharma also means nature. It is not equivalent to the English word religion – no, not at all. In fact, both are polar opposites. Religion means that which binds you, gives you a certain organization, a church, gives you a certain belonging. Dharma means that which frees you from all churches, from all organizations. Dharma is individual, religion is social. Religion belongs to the collective crowd, religion does not belong to the individual. Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism are all religions; they are not dharmas. Dharma has no adjective to it. Everybody has to discover his own dharma, everybody has to discover his own nature.The Bauls’ attitude that God is here in you has to be understood as deeply as possible, because there is no other God. In fact, because religions have been talking about a God somewhere else, that’s why the world has become more and more godless. Because the God that is not here and cannot be touched and cannot be seen and cannot be lived with, cannot be very appealing. As man grows to be mature, that God will start disappearing, withering away. Whenever man becomes very mature, those gods of the dreams will disappear and man will be left without God. That’s what has happened to this age. It is not because of atheists that man has become godless, it is because of a wrong notion of God.Marx could condemn the God of the Christians, Marx cannot condemn the God of the Bauls. Scientists can deny the God of the so-called religious, but scientists cannot deny the God of the Baul – because he never proposes anything dreamlike. He is simply realistic.I have heard a beautiful anecdote:A commissar in Russia asked a peasant how the new potato crop production plan was coming along under their glorious leader.Said the peasant, “Our potato crop has been miraculous. If we were to put all the potatoes in a pile, they would make a mountain reaching to the feet of God.”‘‘But you know that there is not any God,” said the commissar.“I know,” said the peasant, “there are not any potatoes either.”A god in the sky is a false god. Not that the sky is without God, no – the sky is as full of God as the earth. But the first understanding of God is going to be rooted in the earth. The first understanding has to be of the roots, and out of those roots your understanding will grow and spread to the farther corners of existence.But the journey starts at home. It starts deep within you. The first glimpse of God has to be in the innermost shrine of your heart. If you have not seen him there, you can go on talking about him, but you will not ever be able to see him anywhere. The first encounter has to happen within you. Once it happens, you will be surprised that you start seeing God everywhere. Once you have seen him within your heart, how can you miss him – because everywhere the heart is throbbing with him. The tree is full of him and the rock also, and the river and the ocean, and the animals and the birds – everywhere. Once you have felt his pulse, once you have felt him circulating in your own blood, once you have had an experience in your own marrow, then everywhere, wherever you look, you will find him. But it cannot happen otherwise. If you are empty of his experience, you can go to the farthest corner of the world; your traveling will be in vain. You will never reach his temple because you missed the very root of it. You missed him at home. If your own house does not become his temple, then no temple can be his abode. If your own house has become his temple, then all houses are his abode.When the Bauls say that one has to be very earth-oriented, they don’t mean that the sky is empty of God. But they say, “If the earth is not full, then the sky is absolutely empty. If even the earth is not full, how can the sky be full of him? If he is not here, how can he be there? If he is not this, how can he be that? If he is not today, how can he be tomorrow? If he is not in this life, how can he be in the next?” Their logic is simple and irrefutable.But man has created a God in the skies. Why? This God is not a real God, it is a substitute – because you are missing him here, and you are missing him so tremendously that you have to put him somewhere or other, otherwise you will feel very alone. You will feel so lonely that you will miss the meaning of life. And it is good to put him very far away, because then there is no hurry. The journey is so far that you cannot complete it today. Even this life is not enough. So there is enough space to postpone, enough space to say, “Yes, one day I will do it,” enough space to pretend that you are interested in him and continue to be of the world and going on talking at the same time about God. This is the double-talk, the double bind of ordinary humanity. People talk about God and live according to the Devil. They go to the temple but they never reach. They read the Bible, they read the Koran, but they never listen. These are pretensions, only on the surface. This is how the hypocritical humanity is born – a false, pseudo-humanity.I have heard:Mulla Nasruddin went to his psychiatrist once and said, “Doctor, I wonder if you can split my personality for me?”“Why? Why would you want to do that?” asked the doctor, surprised.“Because,” said the Mulla, “I am so lonesome.”Man feels very alone without God, and to find the real God is arduous. It is very easy to create a pseudo-God which looks like God, which appears like God. It at least gives consolation that you are not alone. Have you watched your concept of God? Has it arisen out of the experience of your own being, or has it arisen out of your experience of your loneliness? This is the criterion: if you believe in God because you feel lonely, your God is going to be false; if you believe in God because you have experienced him in your aloneness, if it has come out of your own being, then the God is real. Then let Nietzsche declare that God is dead – your God can never be dead, your God is alive in you. How can Nietzsche declare that God is dead? But he could declare it, and not only declare; his declaration became a prophecy. Within a hundred years, his declaration has become a reality. The God of the churches is dead, the God of the temples is dead, the God of the books is dead. Nobody has ever been so prophetic as Nietzsche has been. God is disappearing; the very word has become ugly.Just the other day I was reading a Christian priest’s book. I was surprised, because I have heard about cases, particularly in India, in which people, if they want to read Playboy, hide it in their Gita or in their Bible and read it. That I have heard. But that Christian says that he was so afraid to read the Bible that he was hiding his Bible behind the cover of a Playboy magazine! It has come to happen in the West. So when he would go every Sunday to his beauty parlor, he would take his Bible. But afraid that others might see that he was reading the Bible, so out of date, he would hide it in a Playboy magazine and would read his Bible there.One day in the Bible he came across Jesus’ saying, “If you deny me, remember, at the last day of judgment I will also deny you.” So he became afraid because this was a sort of denial – reading the Bible behind the cover of Playboy. He became so afraid that he started perspiring, because Jesus says, “If you deny me, then before God I will not recognize you.” So he threw away the Playboy magazine and he felt so good. He went to his priest and said, “Today I have done a great deed. I gathered courage to let people know that I read the Bible.”God is dead, must be dead. Have you watched yourself? – if you are carrying a Bible you feel a little awkward. Or if you are going to the temple you start finding excuses: that you are going because your wife has gone and there is some work to be done, or your father is there, or you are just going for formality’s sake; it is just social. Have you watched how things change?I was reminded of this when I was reading a beautiful story:One dacoit, a great robber, became interested in the American ways of dacoitry. Everybody has to be interested now, because everybody in his own profession is trying to go to America. Doctors are going, engineers are going, so the dacoit thought, “Why not us? We can also learn the modern techniques.” So he went to America, he joined a gang, and he was watching and observing what they were doing, the modern techniques. He was surprised, because first they kidnapped a beautiful woman, and then they wrote…. But he said, “This is okay because we also do the same in India: we kidnap a woman and then we write a letter to the husband that if within three days he doesn’t give fifty thousand rupees, then we will kill his wife.” So he wondered, “But what is new in it?” Then he looked at what they were writing in the letter. He was surprised. He said, “What are you doing?” – because in the letter they were writing, “If within three days you don’t send us fifty thousand dollars, we will send your wife back.”The world has changed tremendously. People used to read Playboys hiding them in their Bible covers, but now they are hiding their Bibles in Playboy covers. Nietzsche was right – God is dead. But the real God cannot die; that is impossible. To say that God is dead is to say that life is dead. If God means life, then the statement “God is dead” is simply stupid, meaningless, contradictory – because life is that which lives, that which goes on living.The Bauls would laugh. They would say, “Then you have not understood the real God. Yes, your God is dead because he was false, but the God of the Bauls is not dead, cannot be dead, because we never talked about God – we talk about life, love. If all the temples were destroyed and all the mosques and gurudwaras were burned, nothing would happen to God. Because the God enshrined there is not the real God. The God enshrined in you is the real God, and that cannot be destroyed. Life cannot be destroyed; life goes on. It is an eternal river.”But man feels lonely. In his loneliness he creates fantasies, dreams. Man has become so lonely that he finds solace in any way, anywhere. It is unfortunate. But this is no way to find the real.I was reading one anecdote:Ira quit college, got himself a backpack and began hitchhiking around the United States. After he had been gone more than a year he telephoned home. “Hello, Ma, how are you?”“Just fine, son. When are you coming home? I will fix you some chopped liver and chicken soup and a beautiful pot roast.”“I’m still pretty far away.”“Oh, son!” cried the desperate woman. “Just come home, and I will fix your favorite – oatmeal cookies.”“I don’t like oatmeal cookies,” said the boy.“You don’t?” asked the woman.“Say,” said Ira, “is this Century 5-7682?”“No.”“Then I must have the wrong number.”“Does that mean you are not coming home, boy?” asked the woman.People are really lonely. Even if it is not your son, at least somebody is coming. You can pretend, you can believe, you can console.The God that exists in the temples is not a real God. That God that exists in the sky is your projection; the real God is within you. That which you are seeking is not somewhere else, it is in your very seeking. It is in the very seeker – the sought is in the seeker. You are the truth, alive, in flesh. God is reborn in you, God is incarnated in you, God has taken a body in you. Where are you seeking, where are you going? The Bauls say, “Wait, listen, go within.”They sing:The God is living in man, wholly intermingled.Oh, my unseeing heart,your eyes are unwise!How then can you locate the treasured man?The unseen man,dwelling in the brilliance of light,hides his identity from those blinded by stupor.He is stationed in man,appearing and vanishingas the eyelids blink.They go on singing again and again:All of us in our different ways think of Godbeyond senses and feelings.And yet it is only in the essence of lovingthat God is found.On the other shore of the ocean of one’s own selfquivers a drop of fluidas the origin of all.The root of all is based in you.Explore the base to reach the essence,release the sensation of taste on your tongue,open the doors of feelingfor the Beloved.Nectar, showering on the lotus of spontaneity,lust and love are housedin one single place,where sorrows and joys do not exist.They believe in man. They believe in the tremendous potentiality of man. They believe that man is the shrine of God. They believe in the body. No religion except Tantra has ever endeavored to understand this miraculous happening of consciousness located in the body, of consciousness residing in the body. All the other religions have remained anti-body, anti-life, life-negative, body-negative – as if the more you destroy your body, the more you become divine, or the more you come closer to God.Bauls say, “If you destroy the body, you destroy the very base. If you destroy sensation, you destroy sensitivity. If you destroy your senses, then how will you taste him, how will you hear him, how will you see him? If you destroy your love, how will you love him? If you destroy your passion, then you will be impotent.”They have a really revolutionary religion to preach to the world. They are very illiterate people, but of great insight. Maybe that’s why they are so full of insight, because they are illiterate…because they don’t know much about scriptures, and they don’t know much about philosophy and metaphysics. Because they cannot read books they read their own bodies; because they cannot understand conceptualizations they try to find out who they are; because they cannot be very learned – poor beggars moving from one village to another, singing and dancing, enjoying – they have come very close to reality.They are very authentic, uncorrupted by culture, society, education. They are very innocent people. And this is their understanding: that body is divine. The body is sacred, because everything is sacred. But this word sacred is not very good. In the Old Testament, the word sacred comes from a root which means “the separate.” God is called sacred in the Old Testament because he is a separate reality from this reality.Bauls will laugh. They will say, “You have gone insane! There is no separate reality. God is this reality.” Bauls make the whole reality sacred, holy, divine. Their vision is so vast that even matter is no longer thought of as matter. Even matter, in their vision, becomes luminous. Even body is not just body – it is of the earth, but it carries the divine within it.I have heard about a Hasid rabbi: Rabbi Bonum was his name. When he was dying he left this last message for his disciples.He said, “Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into one or the other according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words: For my sake was the world created; and in his left: I am nothing but earth.”Beautiful. He is saying: Man is nothing but earth – keep this message in one pocket; and in the other: The whole world is created for me. I am the God of the whole world – keep this message in the other pocket. Both messages are true because one shows the reality, the other shows the potentiality. One shows the fact, the other shows the truth.The fact is that we are made of earth; the truth is that we are made in his image. We are both – God enshrined in earth. We are of the earth, and yet there is a great passion inside us to rise to the highest sky. Look at the trees – what are they doing? They come from the earth, they belong to the earth, they are rooted in the earth, and they are trying to reach to the sun, trying to reach to the stars. Rooted in the earth, they move towards heaven. That is the Baul symbol: the tree rooted in the earth, reaching towards heaven – rooted in the body, reaching towards the soul. Then these two are not contraries; they are both of one process, of one dynamic force.Just before the Zen Master Basho was dying at the age of sixty, he sat up in the lotus posture, and to those gathered around him said, “Don’t be misled. Look directly. What is this?” He repeated it loudly, and calmly died.Let me repeat what he said: “Don’t be misled. Look directly. What is this?” He repeated it loudly, then calmly died. This conveys the whole meaning – the very directness of it. There is no that. This is the that! This is so vast, there is no need for any that to exist. This implies all that.“Don’t be misled,” he said – because the greatest misguidance comes from people who separate God from reality, who separate truth from fact, who separate spirit from body, who separate lust from love, who separate mud from the lotus. They are the great misguiders of the world.They are the poisoners, because once they have made it clear to your mind, conditioned your mind that the lotus can never be of the mud, they have destroyed the very possibility of the lotus. Then you can have a plastic lotus; but a real lotus, never – because the real lotus is always rooted in the mud, it is part of the mud, it is a flowering of the mud. It is earth come to its glory; it is earth’s essence. Once you can see lust and love as one, passion and compassion as one, body and soul as one – maybe two rhythms of the same energy, two formations of the same force, two concretizations of the same stuff…but the stuff is the same. If you can see the world and God just like mud and the lotus, lust and love, you have the vision of the Baul.If you don’t have that vision, there is every possibility that you will be misled. And the misguiders are very cunning; they are great rationalizers. They can convince you, they can argue for their standpoint.I have heard:Mistress Goldfarb walked into a kosher butcher shop, asked the owner for a fresh chicken, and immediately began inspecting it. She lifted the wing, stuck her nose underneath and declared, “Phew! It smells!” Then she pulled up a leg, sniffed and said, “Phaugh!” After smelling the hind end, Mistress Goldfarb held her nose and exclaimed, “It stinks! Do you call this a fresh chicken?”“Tell me, lady,” said the butcher, “Could you stand such an inspection?”These people who go on condemning the world, condemning the body, condemning everything – just ask them, “Will your God be able to stand all this inspection?” Then nothing is left because all reality is condemned. Then just a concept, an abstraction is left. Yes, abstraction cannot be condemned because then God will not stink. Then he will not perspire because he will have nothing to do with the earth. Then his hands will not be muddy – then he will be just an abstraction.Have you noticed the fact that all religions have tried to convince the world that their founders were almost unreal? Jainas say Mahavira never perspired – because how can a man of god perspire? Ordinary humanity perspires, not Mahavira. They say that Mahavira was hit, but blood never came out of his body. What came out of his body? – milk! How could blood have come out Mahavira’s body, like ordinary humanity? Now they are trying to put Mahavira on such a pedestal that he is bound to become unreal. Then if people come and they say, “We don’t believe in your Mahavira, he seems just a myth,” they are right. How can he be real? You deny reality, you condemn it.The same has happened with all the great masters of the world: followers try to make them unreal. Followers are always afraid because if the hands of their masters look dirty…. Dirty is not a dirty word, remember; it comes from “dirt.” It simply says earthly, earthy. A gardener works in the garden; his hands are dirty – not dirty, just dirt is there – but dirt is good. We are made of dirt, we are made of dust. The word human comes from humus; humus means the earth. The word adam also comes from adamus; adamus means the earth. “We are made of earth” – that’s what Bauls say. We are made of earth but not made only of earth. We are made of earth, but deep inside is enshrined the divine.You must have seen earthen lamps in India. They are made of earth but the flame is not of the earth. The lamp is of the earth, the lamp belongs to the earth – and the flame is continuously running upwards, upwards and upwards, towards the divine. Man is an earthen lamp – made of earth, yet enshrining the divine flame.The Bauls are very down to earth realists. They have a beauty in their great vision. They are not deniers, they don’t say no to the world. Remember, if you say no to the world too much, sooner or later your God will be just an abstraction – because the very no to the world will go on reducing God’s reality. Whatsoever you say no to will be a reduction of your God. By and by, when you have said no to the whole world, God is nothing but a concept, a word: empty, impotent, just a container without any content. The reality is earthly.The world has been denied and God has been put as if he is an opposite force, as if he is against the world. Now look at the absurdity: these same people go on saying, “God created the world.” He cannot be against it, otherwise why should he create it? The creator cannot be against his own creation. The very creation is a proof that God loves it – the creation is his appreciation, the creation is his play, the creation is his love, his vocation. God creates the world because he loves it.Gurdjieff used to say that all the religions are against God because they are against his creation. How can you be for the poet if you are against his poetry? How can you be for the man if you are against his character? How can you be for the painter if you are against his painting? Gurdjieff seems to be very logical, absolutely right: religions seem to be against God. They talk about God, but they are against him because they are against his world. They teach you to deny the world – but you cannot deny it because you are rooted in it. Then what happens? – you become pseudo, you become false, you become a pretender, you become double-faced. You have one face to show to the world and another face to live with. This is an emergency measure; man could not do anything else.What to do? You cannot deny the reality and you cannot allow it and you cannot accept it – because your religions teach you to be against it. So man has found the golden mean: don’t deny it in reality, just go on denying it in words. Show that you deny it, that’s all. Pay your respects to God and go on living reality.Religions have not helped man to become sane. They have helped man to become insane, neurotic, split.It happened in a church: a man was confessing. “And how much of that stack of hay did you steal, Kavanagh?” the priest asked at confession.“I might just as well confess to the whole stack, Your Reverence,” said Kavanagh. “I am going after the rest of it tonight.”He’s confessing, and yet he’s planning to do the same thing again this night. Then why confess? No, he is putting himself at ease because people say “this is bad” and “this is sin” – and people have made a virtue of confession, as if confession in itself is a virtue. Unless it is authentic, it is meaningless.It happened on a road:A Protestant minister was given a brand new car by his congregation and he was driving it through downtown Dublin. Suddenly the car in front of him came to a screeching stop, and the minister crashed into it.The furious clergyman climbed out and stormed up to the car in front of him with murder in his eyes. Then he noticed that the driver of the other vehicle was a Catholic priest. “Your Reverence,” said the minister through clenched teeth, “were it not for the fact that I am a man of the cloth, I would be tempted to thrash you within an inch of your life.”“Your Reverence,” said the priest, sticking his head out the window, “were it not that I too am a man of the cloth, and that it happens to be a Friday, I would be tempted to bite your balls.”This is how the whole effort of all the religions has made man just pretentious, hypocritical. Their reality is something different – their masks are absolutely different. Bauls are against it. They say, “Love the world and find your God through that love, so that there is no division created in you.”Man had to become a hypocrite; it became just a safety measure. Religions have not left any possibility, any way for him to be real. Now look at the absurdity: they go on teaching “be true” and their whole teaching creates untruth. On the one hand they teach you to be true, to be authentic, and on the other hand their whole teaching creates such a situation that if you want to be true you will have to commit suicide – you cannot live. Either commit suicide if you want to be true, but then what is the point of being true if you commit suicide? You will not be here to be true. If you want to live, you will have to be untrue. But the fault is not with you – the fault is in the whole program that has been fed into your brain. The whole program is faulty.Man has to be real, real to reality. Whatsoever the reality, man has to accept it and live it in deep gratitude, and live it with such reverence, respect – because it is God’s reality. It is his temple.When Moses arrived on the mount where he encountered God, he saw a fire burning under a bush. And the bush was not burned, the bush was as green as ever and flames were coming out of it. He could not believe his eyes. He started moving towards the bush. He was almost magnetized by what he saw. Then suddenly God shouted, “Moses! Take your shoes off! You are walking on holy ground.”I have always loved that parable. But I say to you, not only on Mount Sinai, but wherever you are walking, you are walking on holy ground – because all is his ground, because all is he.The Beloved is present in so many forms. Lust is also his, love is also his. Bauls say, “Don’t deny anything because denial is an irreverence. It is a rejection of God.”One day I saw that Mulla Nasruddin was teaching his son to be able to defend himself, so he taught him the finer points of boxing.I asked him, “But suppose, Mulla, he comes up against a bigger kid who also knows how to box? Then what?”“I have already thought of that,” said Nasruddin, “so I am teaching him how to run too.”On one hand we go on teaching people to be true, and on the other hand, in a subtle way, we go on teaching them not to be true. Each child is made neurotic by the parents, by the society – and we know that we are doing it, and we know that others have done the same to us. Stop doing it to yourself and stop doing it to others. Become alert. Just be real. I emphasize reality more than truth. Because truth has been used by the anti-life people so much, it has wrong associations. Be real. If you are real, one thing will start disappearing from your heart, and that is guilt.One psychoanalyst and therapist, Shepard, has coined a word: unguilting. I like the word. Real religion is always a process of unguilting. False religions are always a process of guilting. They try to make you more and more guilty: anger is there, lust is there, sex is there, greed is there, attachment is there, hate is there, love is there – and everything is condemned. You become guilty, you start feeling wrong – you are wrong, you start feeling condemned, you start hating yourself. If you start hating yourself you will never be able to find God, because he is hiding in you.Unguilt: drop all guilt! Whatsoever you are, whosoever you are, wheresoever you are, God has accepted you. When God has accepted you, why be worried? Accept yourself. Start living your life not through concepts; start living your life through your feelings, emotions, your body. Start living life as if you were never corrupted by any society, as if you have just come new into the world directly from God’s hands and nobody has taught you anything.Start living. That life is the real life. Then you listen to your own heart, you listen to your body. You don’t repress, you try to understand; and through understanding is transformation.The Bauls sing the song for today:Commit yourself to the earth while on the earth,my heart,if you wish to attain the unattainable man.“Commit yourself to the earth” – don’t be committed to some heaven somewhere else, be committed to the here and now, to the reality that is your surround. Be committed to your humanity, to the earth that is just below you. Commit yourself to the earth while on the earth.Bauls say, “We will think – when we have moved to heaven and gone to the other world, then we will see.” Once you have learned how to be committed to the here and now, there also you will be committed. Because whenever the future comes, it always comes as the present. Even the other world will come as this world. Have you seen that you move from one shore of a river to the other, and when you reach closer to the other shore, the other shore becomes this shore – and the first shore that used to be this shore becomes that shore? So wherever you are, you are surrounded by “thisness.”I have heard:Once Mulla Nasruddin drank too much, and was walking on a road, zigzagging from this side to that. He was asking people, “Where is the other side of the road?”Somebody said, “The other side is there.”He went there and he asked people, “Where is the other side of the road?”They said, “The other side is there.”He said, “These people seem very foolish. When I go to that side, people say the other side is there. When I come here, people say the other side is there. Are they mad?”The other side is always there. And wherever you are, you are always here; thisness surrounds you.Just the other day I quoted one very great saying of Udallak to his son, Svetketu: “That art thou” – Tattvamasi Svetketu. The Bauls would like to make a little change in it. They would say, “This art thou,” not that, because that gives a faraway idea of God. This is more earthly.Commit yourself to the earth while on the earth,my heart,if you wish to attain the unattainable man.That unattainable man, the adhar manush, the essential man; if you want to attain it, then be committed to the here and now.Be committed to the present, be committed to the reality that is available to you in this moment. There is no other commitment.Place at his feet your flowers of feelingsand the prayers of tearsflooding your eyes.They are very real people. They say the “flowers of feelings.” Ordinary flowers won’t do. You can pick flowers from the trees and go to the god of your temple and put those flowers there, but the god is abstract, the flowers borrowed. In fact, the flowers were more in tune with God on the trees. They were more in tune with God on the trees…at least they were alive. You have not made them closer to God, you have killed them.When I used to live in Jabalpur I had a very beautiful garden and I was a victim, a continuous victim of religious people. Because there used to be two temples just close by, so any worshippers would come, and without asking they would start picking flowers. In that part of the country it is thought that if somebody is picking flowers for his God, it is not good to prevent it. So I had to put up a notice, because if I prevented them they would say, “These are for religious purposes.” I had to put up a notice: “You can pick for any other purpose, but not for religious purposes” – because, as I see it, the flowers are more surrendered to God on the plants, alive. You will kill them. Your God is bogus and you will kill the flowers. This whole worship is pseudo.The Bauls say “…your flowers of feelings place at his feet” – your love, your compassion, your understanding, your lived experiences, your visions, your taste, your richness. “Place at his feet your flowers of feelings and the prayers of tears” – because words won’t do. How can words become prayers? Words are dead things: they don’t mean much. Yes, there is much noise in them, but they don’t mean much. Silent tears would be better. So you can find Bauls standing by the side of the road crying, and if you ask, “What are you doing?” they will say, “Praying.” And you don’t see any shrine, no temple, not even a tree-god. They are just standing on the road, crying. You will ask, “Where is your God?” and they will say, “He is everything, everywhere! Whenever the right moment is available to pray, whenever I feel in a receptive moment, that is the right moment to pray. I’m praying.” With tears they pray, with dance they pray, with singing they pray, but their prayer is very alive.The Bauls say:With a beggar’s humilityI have come to your doors.No one is ever turned awayfrom your home of unending stores.You have all the riches,and so much have you givenwithout my demand.No more do I need any wealth.Oh my master,give me your feet!“No more do I need any wealth. Oh my master, give me your feet – just your feet are enough, so I can cry, so my tears can wash your feet.”Place at his feet your flowers of feelingsand the prayers of tearsflooding your eyes.The man you seek is earthedin the earth,deceased while being.Dying with death,you must live to seek.The man you seek is earthed, is incarnated in the body. The body is your earth. And the man you seek is here, enshrined in the earth, enshrined in death. The flame of life is enshrined in death…so don’t be afraid of the earth, and don’t be afraid of death – they make it possible for you to live.Life is possible only because of death, the soul is possible only because of the body. The tree is possible only because of the roots, so don’t be afraid of the roots, and don’t be afraid of death. Don’t be afraid of the body. Accept this reality.Dying with death,you must live to seek.Live when life is there. Be committed to the earth while on the earth; die when death comes. Move with life and move with death. Dying, don’t cling to life. Dying, don’t resist death – dying, die. Living, live – dying, die. Let the moment be total. Float with it, be committed to it. When death comes, then don’t be sad. Then accept death. Then accept it with such totality that even death cannot kill you.A total person cannot be killed, and a divided person never lives. A total person is already beyond death. Totality is beyond death. Divided, separated, falling into parts, not together, you just look alive but you are not alive. Dying, die – surrender to death. Now it is God who has come as death.For the Baul everything is divine – life, death. Nothing is undivine. The devil does not exist.You must have heard the parable in Jesus’ life that when Mary Magdalene came to see him, she was possessed by seven demons. He touched her and all the seven demons rushed, ran towards the sea and drowned themselves there. Now this parable is very significant. The word demon comes from a root which means division. If you translate this parable into psychological terms, it simply means Mary Magdalene was divided into seven parts. Jesus touched her, she became total, unpossessed; the demons disappeared. Demons mean divisions.The Baul lives an undivided life, he never divides. He is not against anything, he is not for anything – he simply lives. Whatsoever comes in the moment, he lives it. He is surrendered to reality; that is his prayer. Death comes: he yields beautifully, gracefully. He dies. He cooperates with death. There is not a little bit of resistance, not even a little bit. He is not fighting – he embraces death.Dying with death,you must live to seek.And then he goes on and on. His search is unending. God can never be totally known because he is infinite. We can go on knowing him more and more and more. We go on coming closer and closer and closer, but God is not a goal. Nobody can say, “I have arrived.” If somebody says it, then something is wrong.The Upanishads say the one who says “I have known God” has not known – because how can you know the eternal? Yes, you can live him, you can love him, you can be in him, but you cannot know him – because knowledge will become a definition, knowledge will make him finite. That which is known totally becomes finite, but God remains unknowable. The more you know, the more doors open, the more mysteries open. Then each death is a closing of the past and a new vision of the future.“Dying with death, you must live to seek.” And one goes on seeking. The pilgrimage is eternal.The Bauls sing:Shut the doors on the face of lust,attain the greatest, the unattainable man,and act as the lovers act:meet the death before you die.To die with death is possible only if you have met death before you die. Otherwise it will be difficult. You need some acquaintance. If death comes and you are not acquainted with it, it will be difficult for you to surrender. That is what meditation is all about: meeting death before you die, making a few acquaintances, a few encounters with death – so you start loving the beauty of it, so you start falling in love with it, so you can see the divine face even in death.Only a meditator can die without fighting, otherwise fight is unconscious. It is not that you will fight; you will find yourself fighting, and it will be almost impossible for you not to fight. Resistance is unconscious, it is inbuilt.Meditate or love, because these are the two ways to be acquainted with death. If you love, it is a small death. If you love very deeply, it is a great death. If you are really in love, you are no longer the same as you were before. Something has disappeared – you are reborn. Love is a rebirth.So, many times in life, through meditation and love, you should become acquainted with death so that when death really comes you know the guest so well that you are not afraid. You can welcome the guest, you can receive the guest with great love, with great rejoicing, celebration.The Bauls say about the adhar manush, the essential man:Poison and ambrosiaare one and the same to him.He is dead while wholly living.If you become acquainted with death through love and meditation, by and by you will see that life and death are two aspects of the same coin; poison and ambrosia are two aspects of the same coin; matter and mind are two aspects of the same coin; good and bad, all dualities are two aspects of the same coin. Then you are not worried, then you don’t choose, then you live a life of choiceless awareness, then all is the same. If you choose life you have chosen death. If you avoid death you will avoid life – so there is no point in choosing, and there is no point in avoiding. One simply waits and accepts whatsoever gift comes from God’s grace.This is what Bauls call, “He is dead while wholly living.” He is absolutely alive and yet, in a sense, dead because all dualities have come into him and become a synthesis. He is wholly dead and wholly alive. You are neither alive nor dead; you are in a limbo.The perfect man is both together. In him, all dualities are transcended. He is tremendously enriched because life goes on pouring into him, death also goes on pouring into him. Whatsoever life can give, he accepts; whatsoever death can give, he accepts. Whatsoever happiness gives, he accepts and whatsoever unhappiness gives, he accepts.And remember, there are treasures hidden in unhappiness also, as there are treasures hidden in happiness. If you have known only treasures of happiness, then you have not known much. If you have known only treasures of joy you have not known much. There are treasures of sadness also. There are a few treasures which only sadness can give to you. There are treasures of laughter and treasures of tears.The Bauls say that one should be so capable that one allows all dualities to merge and come into oneself. Only then is the essential man revealed. And the essential man is the God of the Bauls.Commit yourself to the earth while on the earth,my heart,if you wish to attain the unattainable man.Place at his feet your flowers of feelingsand the prayers of tearsflooding your eyes.The man you seek is earthedin the earth,deceased while being.Dying with death,you must live to seek.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 1 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 1 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,The Bauls celebrate their lives in their bodies. Could you say more about this? Americans cherish their bodies with health food, Rolfing, massage, etc. But I don't think this is the same as the Bauls. Could you please comment?There is a lot of difference, and the difference is not only quantitative, it is qualitative. The modern world, the modern mind, knows only the empty temple. It has completely forgotten about the one who is enshrined in the temple. So we go on worshipping the temple, but godliness is forgotten. Not knowing anything about the center of life, we go on moving and indulging on the periphery.The American cherishes his body as the body, the Baul worships his body as the shrine of godliness. The body in itself is nothing. It is luminous because of something that is beyond the body. The glory of the body is not in the body itself – it is a host – the glory is because of the guest. If you forget the guest, then it is sheer indulgence. If you remember the guest, then loving the body, celebrating the body is part of worship.The Baul has a great vision. In that vision, the body is the lowest part, the most visible part, the most tangible. But it is not the all, it is just the beginning. You have to enter through the body; it is just a gate. It leads to deeper mysteries. The Baul cherishes the body because the body is a vehicle, and through the body one can know that which is embodied, that which is not the body itself. The body is the earthen lamp and God is the flame. The lamp is worshipped because of the flame. Once the flame is gone, who worships the body, who celebrates the body? Then it is nothing, then dust unto dust, it returns back to the earth.The body is throbbing with God, pulsating with God. If you can see that pulsation, then even dust becomes divine. If you cannot see that pulsation, then it is simply dust. Then there is no meaning in it.The American worship of the body is meaningless. Hence, people go after health food, massage, Rolfing, and in a thousand and one ways they somehow try to create meaning in their lives. But look into their eyes; a great emptiness exists. You can see they have missed. The fragrance is not there, the flower has not flowered. Deep inside, they are just desert-like, lost, not knowing what to do. They go on doing many things for the body, but it is missing the target.I have heard an anecdote:Rosenfeld walked into the house with a grin on his face. “You will never guess what a bargain I just got,” he told his wife. “I bought four polyester, steel-belted, radial wide-tread, white-walled, heavy-duty tires – on sale yet!”“Are you nuts?” said Mistress Rosenfeld. “What did you buy tires for? You don’t even have a car.”“So,” said Rosenfeld, “you buy brassieres, don’t you?”If the center is missing, then you can go on decorating the periphery. It may deceive others but it cannot fulfill you. It may even deceive you sometimes, because even one’s own lie repeated too many times starts appearing like a truth. But it cannot fulfill you, it cannot give contentment. The American is trying hard to enjoy life, but there seems to be no rejoicing. The Baul is not trying to enjoy life at all. There is no effort in it; he is simply enjoying it. And he has nothing to enjoy – he is just a beggar on the road, but he has something of the inner, some glow of the unknown surrounds him. His songs are not only songs – something from the beyond descends in them. When he dances, it is not only that his body is moving; something deeper has moved. He’s not trying to enjoy.Remember it: whenever you are trying to enjoy you will miss. When you are trying to achieve happiness you will miss. The very effort to achieve happiness is absurd because happiness is here: you cannot achieve it. Nothing has to be done about it, you have simply to allow it. It is happening, it is all around you – within, without – only happiness is. Nothing else is real. Watch, look deep into the world, into trees, birds, rocks, rivers, into the stars, moon and sun, into people, animals – look deep: existence is made out of the stuff of happiness, joy, sat-chit-ananda. It is made of bliss. There is nothing to be done about it. Your very doing may be the barrier. Relax and it fulfills you, relax and it rushes into you, relax, it overflows you.The Baul is relaxed, the American is tense. Tension arises when you are chasing something, relaxation arises when you are allowing something. That is why I say there is a great difference, and the difference is qualitative. It is not a question of quantity – that Bauls have more than Americans, or Americans have less than the Bauls. No, the Americans have nothing of happiness that the Bauls have; and what the Americans have – the misery, the tension, the anguish, the neurosis – the Bauls don’t have. They exist in a totally different dimension.The dimension of the Baul is herenow; the dimension of the American is somewhere else – then-there, but never herenow. The American is chasing, chasing hard, trying to get something out of life, trying to squeeze life. Nothing comes out of it because that is not the way.You cannot squeeze life; you have to surrender to it. You cannot conquer life. You have to be courageous enough to be defeated by life. Defeat is victory there, and the effort to be victorious is going to prove to be nothing but your final, utter failure.Life cannot be conquered because the part cannot conquer the whole. It is as if a small drop of water is trying to conquer the ocean. Yes, the small drop can fall into the ocean and become the ocean, but it cannot conquer the ocean. In fact, dropping into the ocean, slipping into the ocean is the way to conquer.Dissolve yourself.The Baul is one who is dissolved in life. He has said an absolute yes to life. He’s not trying to squeeze anything. He simply waits – passive, alert, available. When God knocks on his door the doors are always open, that’s all.He is not chasing God. How can he chase? Where, in what ways, on what paths can we find him? Either he is everywhere or he is nowhere. You cannot address your life towards God, you cannot make a target out of him. He is the total. The total cannot be made a target. Wherever you look, he is. Whatsoever you do, you do in him. Even when you are miserable, you are miserable in him. Even in your misery you don’t lose him. He cannot be lost. That which can be lost is not God.That is why Bauls call God adhar manush – the essential man, the essential consciousness. It is so essential you cannot lose it. It is your very ground, it is your being. He celebrates his body because he knows that someone who is of the beyond, the stranger, is residing in the body. The body is an abode. It is a temple, but not empty. It is full of light, it is full of life – God is there. Realizing this, he dances; realizing this, he sings; realizing this, he smiles and cries and weeps, and tears roll down his face. Seeing the miracle: “I have not earned him and he is here, I have not even sought him and he is here, I have not even begged and he is here” – a great, tremendous gratitude arises. The Baul dances because of it.Now let me say this: the American is trying to find happiness, hence his overconcern with the body. It is almost an obsession. It has gone beyond the limits of concern, it has become obsessive: continuously thinking about the body, doing this and that and all sorts of things. He is making an effort to have some contact with happiness through the body. That is not possible.The Baul has attained it. He has already seen it inside himself. He has looked deep into his body, not through massage, not through Rolfing, not through a sauna bath. He has looked into it through love and meditation and he has found that it is there, the treasure is there. Hence he worships his body; hence he is careful about his body because the body is carrying the divine.Have you watched how a woman walks when she is pregnant? – so careful, because a new life is enshrined in her. Have you seen the transfiguration that comes to the face of a woman when she becomes pregnant? Her face is luminous, hopeful, throbbing with new life, new possibility.Look at Prafulla; she is pregnant now. Look at her face – how transfigured, how happy she looks. She is carrying a treasure, a great treasure. A new life is going to be created through her. She walks carefully, moves carefully. A grace has arisen in her because she is pregnant. She is no longer alone – her body has become a temple. This is just to make you understand.What to say about a Baul? God is there. He is pregnant with the divine. He glows, he is luminous, he dances and sings. Possessing nothing, he possesses all; having nothing, he is the richest man in the world. In one way he is just a beggar on the road, and in another way, the emperor. Because of this – that has happened inside, that he has become aware – he is happy with his body, he takes care of his body, he loves his body. This love is totally different.And secondly: the American mind is competitive. You may not necessarily be really in love with your body – you may just be competing with others. Because others are doing things, you have to do them. The American mind is the most shallow, ambitious mind that has ever existed in the world. It is the very basic worldly mind. That’s why the businessman has become the top-most reality in America. Everything else has faded into the background; the businessman, the man who controls money is the top-most reality.In India, brahmins were the top-most reality – the seekers of God. In Europe, the aristocrats were the top-most reality – well-cultured, educated, alert, in tune with subtle nuances of life: music, art, poetry, sculpture, architecture, classical dances, languages, Greek and Latin. The aristocrat, who had been conditioned for the higher values of life for centuries, was the top-most reality in Europe. In Russia, the proletariat, the downtrodden, the oppressed, the laborer is the top-most reality. In America, it is the businessman, vaishya, the one who controls money.Money is the most competitive realm. You need not have culture, you need only have money. You need not know anything about music, anything about poetry. You need not know anything about ancient literature, history, religion, philosophy – no, you need not know. If you have a big bank balance, you are important. That’s why I say this is the most shallow mind that has ever existed.And this mind has turned everything into commerce. This mind is continuously in competition. Even if you purchase a van Gogh or a Picasso, you don’t purchase it for Picasso. You purchase because the neighbors have purchased. They have a Picasso painting in their drawing room, so how can you afford not to have it? You have to have it.You may not know anything – you may not know even how to hang it, which side is which. Because it is difficult to know, as far as a Picasso is concerned, whether the picture is hanging upside down or right-side up. You may not know at all whether it is authentically a Picasso or not. You may not look at it at all, but because others have it and they are talking about Picasso, you have to show your culture. But you simply show your money. So whatsoever is costly becomes significant; whatsoever is costly is thought to be significant.Money and the neighbors seem to be the only criterion to decide everything: their cars, their houses, their paintings, their decorations. People are having sauna baths in their bathrooms not because they love their bodies, not necessarily, but because it is the “in” thing – everybody has it. If you don’t have it you look poor. If everybody has a house in the hills, you have to have it. You may not know how to enjoy the hills – you may be simply bored there. Or you may take your TV and your radio there and just listen to the same radio you were listening to at home, and watch the same TV program as you were watching at home. What difference does it make where you are sitting, the hills or in your own room? But others have it. A four-car garage is needed – others have it. You may not need four cars.The American mind is continuously competing with others. The Baul is a non-competitor. He is a drop-out. He says, “I am no longer concerned with what others are doing, I am only concerned with what I am. I am not concerned with what others have, I am only concerned with what I have.” Once you see the fact, that life can be tremendously blissful without having many things, then who bothers?That is one of the basic differences between other renunciates in India and the Bauls. Bauls are beggars, Jaina monks are also beggars, but there is a great difference: Jaina monks have the American mind. They have left the world with great effort, they have renounced the world with great effort – because they think this is the only way to achieve the other world, to earn virtue. But they remain businessmen. The Jainas are the top-most businessmen in India. That is why I say they have the American mind. Their sannyasins remain the same.The Baul’s renunciation is totally different. He has not renounced for any other world. He has renounced seeing the foolishness of possessions, seeing the unnecessary burdening. He has renounced seeing the fact that you can be so happy without many things. Then why carry them? Carrying them creates anxiety, burdens you and destroys your blissfulness. The Jaina monk is thinking of another world: his moksha, his heaven.The Baul is not worried about any other world. He says, “This is the only world.” But he has come to see the fact, a simple truth: that the more you have, the less you enjoy. Can’t you see it? It is a simple arithmetic of life – the more you have, the less you enjoy, because you don’t have any time to enjoy. The whole time is occupied by having. If you have too many things, you are occupied by that many things. Your inner space is occupied. To enjoy, you need a little space; to enjoy, you need a little unburdening; to enjoy, you need to forget your possessions and just be.The Baul loves life, hence he renounces. The Jaina monk hates life, hence he renounces. So sometimes the gesture may appear the same, but it need not be the same. The inner significance may be totally different.I have heard:Old Luke and his wife were known as the stingiest couple in the valley. Luke died and a few months later his wife lay dying. She called in a neighbor and said weakly, “Ruthie, bury me in my black silk dress, but before you do, cut the back out and make a new dress out of it. It is good material and I hate to waste it.”“Could not do that,” said Ruthie. “When you and Luke walk up them golden stairs, what would them angels say if your dress ain’t got a back in it?”“They won’t be looking at me,” she said. “I buried Luke without his pants.”The concern is always the other – Luke will be without pants so everybody will be looking at him. The American concern is with the other.The Baul’s concern is simply with himself. The Baul is very selfish. He is not worried about you, and he is not worried about anything that you have or anything that you have done. He is not concerned at all with your biography. He lives on this earth as if he were alone. Of course, he has a tremendous space all around him – because he lives on this earth as if he were alone. He moves on this earth without being concerned with others’ opinions. He lives his life, he is doing his thing, and he is doing his being. Of course, he is happy like a child. His happiness is very simple, innocent. It is not manipulated, it is not manufactured. It is very simple, essential, basic, like a child’s.Have you watched a child just running, shouting, dancing for nothing at all – because he has nothing? If you ask him, “Why are you so happy?” he will not be able to answer you. He will really think that you are mad. Is there any need for any cause to be happy? He will simply be shocked that the “why” can be raised. He will shrug his shoulders and will go on his way and start singing and dancing again. The child has nothing. He is not a prime minister yet, he is not a president of the United States, he is not a Rockefeller. He owns nothing – maybe a few shells or a few stones that he has collected on the seashore, that’s all.That’s all that Bauls own: a few seashells, a few stones – they will make a mala of those stones, they will wear the mala; a little instrument to sing, bells to ring for their innermost God, a small ektara, a one-stringed instrument – that too one-stringed, because that is enough – a small duggi, a small drum; that’s all.A Baul sleeps unconcerned with the world. He lives, moves unconcerned with the world. And his God is always within him so wherever he is is his shrine. He never goes to the temple – not that he is against it; he never goes to the mosque – not that he is against it. He has come to the real temple, and now there is no need to go anywhere. He worships, he prays, he loves – but his love, his prayer, his worship is of the essential reality that he is.The Baul’s life does not end when life ends; the American’s life ends when life ends. When the body ends, the American ends. Hence the American is very afraid of death. Because of the fear of death, the American goes on trying in any way to prolong his life, sometimes to absurd lengths. Now there are many Americans who are just vegetating in hospitals, in mental asylums. They are not living – they are long since dead. They are just managed by the physicians, medicines, modern equipment. Somehow they go on hanging on.The fear of death is so tremendous: once gone you are gone forever and nothing will survive – because the American knows only the body and nothing else.If you know only the body you are going to be very poor. First, you will always be afraid of death, and one who is afraid to die will be afraid to live – because life and death are so together that if you are afraid to die you will become afraid to live.It is life that brings death, so if you are afraid of death, how can you really love life? The fear will be there. It is life that brings death; you cannot live it totally. If death ends everything, if that is your idea and understanding, then your life will be a life of rushing and chasing. Because death is coming, you cannot be patient. Hence the American mania for speed: everything has to be done fast because death is approaching, so try to manage as many more things as possible before you die. Try to stuff your being with as many experiences as possible before you die because once you are dead, you are dead.This creates a great meaninglessness and, of course, anguish, anxiety. If there is nothing which is going to survive the body, then whatsoever you do cannot be very deep. Then whatsoever you do cannot satisfy you. If death is the end and nothing survives, then life cannot have any meaning and significance. Then it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.The Baul knows that he is in the body, but he is not the body. He loves the body; it is his abode, his house, his home. He is not against the body because it is foolish to be against your own home, but he is not a materialist. He is earthly, but not a materialist. He is very realistic, but not a materialist. He knows that dying, nothing dies. Death comes but life continues.I have heard:The funeral service was over and Desmond, the undertaker, found himself standing beside an elderly gent.“One of the relatives?” asked the mortician.“Yes, I am,” answered the senior citizen.“How old are you?”“Ninety-four.”“Hmm,” said Desmond, “hardly pays you to make the trip home.”The whole idea is of bodily life: if you are ninety-four, finished. Then it hardly pays to go back home – then better to die. What is the point of going back? – you will have to come again. It hardly pays…if death is the only reality, then whether you are ninety-four or twenty-four, how much difference does it make? Then the difference is of only a few years. Then the very young start feeling old, and the child starts feeling already dead. Once you understand that this body is the only life, then what is the point of it all? Then why carry it on?Camus has written that the only basic metaphysical problem for man is suicide. I agree with him. If body is the only reality and there is nothing within you that is beyond body, then of course that is the most important thing to consider, brood and meditate on. Why not commit suicide? Why wait until ninety-four? And why suffer all sorts of problems and miseries on the way? If one is going to die, then why not die today? Why get up again tomorrow morning? It seems futile.So on the one hand the American is constantly running from one place to another to somehow grab the experience, somehow not to miss the experience. He’s running all around the world, from one town to another, from one country to another, from one hotel to another. He’s running from one guru to another, from one church to another, in search – because death is coming. On the one hand a constant, mad chasing, and on the other hand a deep-down apprehension that everything is useless – because death will end all. So whether you lived a rich life or you lived a poor life, whether you were intelligent or unintelligent, whether you were a great lover or missed, what difference does it make?Finally death comes, and it equalizes everybody: the wise and the foolish, the sages and the sinners, the enlightened people and the stupid people – all go down into the earth and disappear. So what is the point of it all? Whether it be a Buddha or a Jesus or a Judas; what difference does it make? Jesus dies on the cross, Judas commits suicide the next day – both disappear into the earth.So on one hand there is a fear that you may miss and others may attain, and on the other hand a deep apprehension that even if you get, nothing is got. Even if you arrive, you arrive nowhere because death comes and destroys everything.The Baul lives in the body, loves his body, celebrates it – but he is not the body. He knows the essential man, the adhar manush. He knows that there is something in him which will survive all deaths. He knows that there is something in him which is eternal and time cannot destroy it. This he has come to feel through meditation, love, prayer. This he has come to feel inside his own being. He is unafraid. He is unafraid of death because he knows what life is. And he is not chasing happiness, because he knows God is sending him millions of opportunities. He has just to allow.Can’t you see the trees are rooted in the ground? They cannot go anywhere, and still they are happy. They cannot chase happiness, certainly; they cannot go and seek happiness. They are rooted in the ground, they cannot move – but can’t you see the happiness? Can’t you see their joy when it is raining, their great contentment when winds are running hither and thither? Can’t you feel their dance?Now researchers say that when the gardener comes and the gardener loves the tree, the tree feels happy and rejoices. If you love the tree and you come close to it, it rejoices, as if a great friend is coming close. Now there are scientific instruments to check whether the tree is happy or not. It vibrates in a different rhythm. When the enemy comes – the woodcutter, the carpenter – the tree is simply in a turmoil, anxious, afraid. And when you cut one tree, now the scientists say the other trees all cry and weep. It is not only that when you cut one tree that tree weeps and cries; other trees, all the surrounding trees, cry and weep. And not only with trees, but if you kill a bird, all the trees start weeping – subtle tears, great anguish, agony spreads. But they are rooted – they go nowhere. Still, life comes to them.This is the understanding of the Baul: that there is no need to go anywhere.Even if you go on sitting under a tree, as it happened to Buddha; God himself came to him. He was not going anywhere – just sitting under his tree.All comes – you just create the capacity; all comes – you just allow it. Life is ready to happen to you. You are creating so many barriers, and the greatest barrier that you can create is chasing. Because of your chasing and running, whenever life comes and knocks at your door she never finds you there. You are always somewhere else. When life reaches there you have moved.You were in Kathmandu, when life reaches Kathmandu you are in Goa. When you are in Goa and life somehow reaches Goa, you are in Pune. And by the time life reaches Pune, you will be in Philadelphia. So you go on chasing life and life goes on chasing you, and the meeting never happens.Be…just be, and wait, and be patient.The second question:Osho,Before coming to you I used to do a Buddhist meditation called maitri bhavana. It starts by saying to oneself: may I be well, may I be happy, may I be free from enmity, may I be free from ill-will against myself. After being penetrated by the feeling these thoughts generate, the next phase of the meditation consists in extending it to others: to start with, visualizing people you love and giving out this good feeling to them; then doing the same with people you love less, until you might even feel compassion for people you hate.I used to feel this meditation was pretty good. It somehow opened me to others. And I still feel there is something really deep and basic to it. But I dropped it when I came to you because I saw in it the danger of it being some kind of self-hypnosis.I still feel for this meditation but I am confused as to whether I should take it up again, maybe with a different attitude, or just drop it.Can you please speak about this meditation? I would be grateful.Maitri bhavana is one of the most penetrating meditations. You need not be afraid of getting into some sort of self-hypnosis; it is not. In fact, it is a sort of de-hypnosis. It looks like hypnosis because it is the reverse process: you have come to me from your home, you walked the way. Now going back you will walk the same way. The only difference will be that now your back will be towards me. The way will be the same, you will be the same, but your face was towards me while you were coming towards me. Now your back will be towards me.Man is already hypnotized. It is not a question now of being hypnotized or not hypnotized. You are already hypnotized. The whole process of society is a sort of hypnosis.Somebody is told that he is a Christian, and it is repeated so continually that his mind is conditioned and he thinks himself a Christian. Somebody is Hindu, somebody is a Mohammedan – these are all hypnoses. You are already hypnotized. If you think you are miserable, this is a hypnosis. If you think you have too many problems, this is a hypnosis.Whatsoever you are is a sort of hypnosis. The society has given you those ideas, and now you are too full of those ideas and conditionings.Maitri bhavana is a de-hypnosis: it is an effort to bring back your natural mind; it is an effort to give you back your original face. It is an effort to bring you to the point where you were when you were born and the society had not yet corrupted you. When a child is born he is in maitri bhavana. Maitri bhavana means a great feeling of friendship, love, compassion. When a child is born, he knows no hatred, he knows only love. Love is intrinsic – hatred he will learn later on. Love is intrinsic anger – he will learn later on. Jealousy, possessiveness, envy, he will learn later on. These will be the things the society will teach: how to be jealous, how to be full of hatred, how to be full of anger or violence. These things will be taught by the society.When the child is born he is simple love. He has to be so because he has not known anything else. In the mother’s womb he has not come across any enemy. He has lived in deep love for nine months, surrounded by love, nourished by love. He knows nobody who is inimical to him. He knows only the mother, he knows the mother’s love.When he is born his whole experience is of love, so how can you expect him to know anything about hatred? This love he brings with himself; this is the original face. Then there will be trouble, then there will be many other experiences. He will start distrusting people. A newborn child is simply born with trust.I have heard:A man and a little boy entered a barber shop together. After the man received the full treatment – shave, shampoo, manicure, haircut, etcetera, he placed the boy in the chair.“I’m going to buy a green tie to wear for the parade. I will be back in a few minutes.”When the boy’s haircut was completed and the man still had not returned, the barber said, “Looks like your daddy has forgotten all about you.”“That was not my daddy,” said the boy. “He just walked up, took me by the hand and said, ‘Come on, son, we are gonna get a free haircut!’”Children are trusting, but by and by there will be experiences in which they will be deceived, in which they will get into trouble, in which they will be opposed, in which they will become afraid. By and by they will learn all the tricks of the world. That’s what has happened to everybody, more or less.Now maitri bhavana is again creating the same situation: it is a de-hypnosis. It is an effort to drop hatred, anger, jealousy, envy and come back to the world as you had come in the first place. If you go on doing this meditation, first you start loving yourself – because you are the closest to you than anybody else. Then you spread your love, your friendship, your compassion, your feeling, your well-wishing, your benediction, your blessings, you spread these to people you love – friends, lovers. Then by and by, you spread these to more people that you don’t love so much, then people to whom you are indifferent – you neither love nor hate – then by and by to people you hate. Slowly, you are de-hypnotizing yourself. Slowly, you are again creating a womb of love around yourself.When a buddha sits, he sits in existence as if the whole existence has again become his mother’s womb. There is no enmity. He has attained to his original nature, swabhav. He has come to know the essential man. Now you can even kill him but you cannot destroy his compassion.Even dying, he will remain full of compassion towards you. You can kill him but you cannot destroy his trust. Now he knows that trust is something so basic that once you lose trust you lose all. And if you don’t lose trust and everything is lost, nothing is lost. You can take everything from him but you cannot take his trust.Maitri bhavana is beautiful – you can do it. There is no need to drop it. It will be tremendously helpful. It is a de-structuring.The ego is made with hate, enmity, struggle. If you want to drop the ego, you will have to create more love feelings. When you love, ego disappears. If you love tremendously and you love unconditionally and you love all, then the ego cannot exist. The ego is the most stupid thing that can happen to a man or to a woman. Once it has happened it is very difficult even to see it because it clouds your eyes.I have heard:Mulla Nasruddin and his two friends were talking about their resemblances.The first friend said, “My face resembles that of Winston Churchill. I have often been mistaken for him.”The second said, “In my case, people think I am President Nixon and ask me for my autograph.”Mulla said, “That’s nothing. Well, in my case, I have been mistaken for God himself.”The first and second asked together, “How?”Mulla Nasruddin said, “Well, when I was convicted and sent to jail for the fourth time, on seeing me the jailer exclaimed, ‘Ah God, you have come again!’”Once the ego has happened it goes on collecting from everywhere – sense, nonsense – but it goes on feeling itself important. In love you say, “You are also important, not only I.” When you love somebody, what are you saying? You may be speaking or not, but what is really deep in your heart? You are saying, whether in words or in silence, “You are also important, as much as I am.” If love grows deeper, you will say, “You are even more important than me. If there arises a situation where only one can survive, I would like to die for you and I would like you to survive.” The other has become more important.That is the meaning of “beloved” – you are even ready to sacrifice yourself for the one you love. And if this goes on spreading, as it goes on spreading in maitri bhavana, then by and by you start disappearing.Many moments will come when you will not be there – absolutely silent, not any ego at all, no center, just pure space. Buddha says, “When this is attained permanently, and you have become integrated to this pure space, then you are enlightened.”When the ego is completely lost you are enlightened; when you have become so egoless that you cannot even say “I am,” you cannot even say that “I am a self.” The word Buddha uses for that state is anatta: no-being, non-being, no-self. You cannot even utter the word I – the very word becomes profane. In deep love I disappears. You are destructured.When the child is born he comes without any “I,” he simply is – a blank sheet, nothing is written on him. Now the society will start writing, and the society will start narrowing down his consciousness. The society will, by and by, fix a role for him: “This is your role; this is you” – and he will stick to that role. That role will never allow him to be happy because happiness is possible only when you are infinite. When you are narrow, you cannot be happy.Happiness is not a function of narrowness; happiness is a function of infinite space.When you are so spacious that the whole can enter into you, then only can you be happy.Maitri bhavana can be a tremendous help.The third question:Osho,The other day you said that belief was like a lantern in the hands of the blind. May I know what faith is?Faith is like eyes: you see yourself. Belief is like a lantern in a blind man’s hand: he cannot see, he cannot even use the lighted lantern. Even that lighted lantern will be just a burden to him, to be carried. And if the light goes off he will never become aware of it. Belief is just believing what others say. It is not faith – faith is knowing, faith is existential – belief is intellectual.Buddha says something, or I say something; you listen to me, it appeals to your intellect. It seems to be convincing to your reason and you start believing in it. Then it will be a lantern in a blind man’s hand. But if you listen to me, something appeals to you and you don’t stay with the intellectual understanding but you try to make that your own experience….If I talk about love, and listening to me you don’t cling to my words but you move into love, you take the risk of love, you move into the danger of love, then you will come to an understanding which will be like eyes. If you just listen to me, it is very cheap. Just listening to me you can collect information and you can say, “Yes, I know much about love.”Your knowing will be a deception.I have heard:Mulla Nasruddin and his wife went to Israel for their holidays and visited a nightclub in Tel Aviv. A comedian was on the bill who did his whole act in Hebrew. Nasruddin’s wife sat through the comic’s act in silence but Nasruddin roared with laughter at the end of each joke.“I did not know you understood Hebrew,” she said to the Mulla when the comedian had concluded his act.“I don’t,” replied Nasruddin.“Well, how come you laughed so much at his jokes?”“Oh,” said Nasruddin, “I trusted him.”You can laugh at a joke without understanding it, but what sort of laughter will that be? It will not arise in you, it will be just a painted laughter. It will be just like an exercise of the lips and the face. It will not have any center in your being. It will not be coming from anywhere – because you can’t understand the joke, you can’t understand the language – how can you laugh? But Mulla says, “I just trusted him. He must be saying something beautiful; others are laughing.”Buddha must be saying something beautiful – so many people believe in him, so you believe. But you have not understood the joke, the laughter is not yours. It will tire you, it will not refresh you. When laughter happens to you it spreads from your very being, from your innermost core of being to the surface. Your whole body ripples with it, pulsates, throbs. It gives you a sort of bath – you are new after it. But if you simply trust, believe, that is not going to help. Many people have just been deceived by their beliefs about many beautiful things.You think you believe in God, you think you believe in soul, you think you believe in this and that, and you have not known anything by your own experience. Then it is better not to believe – because if you don’t believe, if you know that you don’t know, there is a possibility that you may seek and search. Your belief will not allow you even to seek and search because you already think you know.Belief is dangerous. Even to be a skeptic, to be an agnostic, is better. To be true when you don’t know is better because this honesty of accepting that you don’t know will help. This honesty will grow. One day or other you will start seeking, because nobody can remain in deep ignorance for long. Everybody wants to know. To know is such an intrinsic desire in man that you cannot avoid it if you are true.Please drop your beliefs so your mind is not clogged with rotten furniture, and you can see what you know and what you don’t know.To know exactly what one knows and what one does not know is the basic step towards knowledge. To be absolutely clear-cut that this is all that you know and this is all that you don’t know. You cannot remain in this state. You will start moving towards the unknown, because it is human to seek to know.Every child is born with infinite curiosity; that’s why children bore you to death with their questions. They go on asking and asking. They don’t bother whether you are interested in answering them or not – they go on asking. You want to keep them quiet but they go on bubbling again and again with new questions. What is happening? From where do so many questions come? – a deep desire to know. But this desire is crippled by your beliefs.Beliefs give you an appearance as if you know. That “as if” is very costly.I have heard:The nervous passenger was standing with the pilot of the river steamboat as he twisted and turned the wheel.“Don’t you worry none,” said the pilot. “I have been running boats on this river so long, I know where every snag and sandbar is.”Just then the boat struck a submerged snag with such force that the whole boat shivered from stem to stern. “There,” said the pilot triumphantly, “that is one of them now.”What type of knowledge is this? How is it going to help? Your whole so-called knowledge is only like this – it does not help. It simply gives you a certain egoistic idea that you know, but it doesn’t help in life, it does not help you on the path, it does not help you to avoid ditches and pitfalls, it does not help you to move towards the right direction, it does not help you in any way to avoid calamities. Still you go on thinking that you know. Drop this so-called knowledge. This burden is useless, don’t carry it on your head anymore. Once you drop it you will feel clean, fresh.I have heard:Aldous Huxley had a very great library, his whole life’s efforts. He had collected many rare books. And one day it caught fire. The whole library burned; his many valuable manuscripts were burned, many valuable art pieces, statues, paintings. He had really been a great seeker of beautiful things; they were all burned down to zero. He was standing in front of the fire, and nothing could be done.Somebody asked him, “You must be feeling very, very sad.”He said, “I am surprised at what I am feeling. I myself am surprised. I am simply feeling very clean, as if the whole burden is gone. I have never felt so clean and unburdened. I am surprised myself because I was thinking I would feel sorry, I would feel tremendously miserable – for years I would not be able to forget my library and all these things I have collected – but suddenly, seeing everything going into flames, I am feeling very unburdened, weightless, clean.”When you throw your beliefs to the fire, you will feel very clean. It is just a burden. It is not yours, it cannot help.We know what is right but we do what is wrong. We know anger is bad and we go on being angry again and again. We know what should be done but we never do it – we do just the opposite. What type of knowledge is this? We know where the door is and we always go on trying to get out through the wall. We stumble and we are knocked down, and we hurt our own being, but again and again we try to get out through the wall. We say we know the door; is it possible that you know the door and still you try to get out through the wall, and you get hurt and hit on the head? It is not possible. You have simply heard about the door. That door exists only in your fantasy, not in reality.You always behave according to whatsoever you know. That’s why Socrates’ famous dictum: Knowledge is virtue – but it is not your knowledge. He says, “Once one knows something is right, one does it. There is no other way.”When you know two plus two is four, you cannot make it five, can you? Try one day – just sit, write two plus two, and then try to write five. It will be impossible. Even if you write it you will laugh; you are joking, befooling. Once you know two plus two is four, there is no way to forget it. The basic thing is to have known it, and the knowledge should be your experience. Otherwise you can always find rationalizations.I have heard a small anecdote.A small town chorus girl had theatrical ambitions. Her parents finally agreed to allow her to try New York City, but on two conditions: first, no men were allowed in her apartment and second, she had to call home at least once a week. “Remember,” said her mother, “I will worry about you, so please don’t forget to call.”Armed with a letter of introduction, she went to see an agent. He agreed to help her and started squiring her about town. At the end of the week she called home. It was late and mama was perturbed.“Honey,” she said, “you know the bargain we made about no men allowed in your apartment, and I hear a man’s voice in the background.”“Oh,” said the future actress, “that’s my boyfriend. But don’t worry,” she hastened to assure her mother, “we are in his apartment. Let his mother worry.’’We can always find ways, rationalizations to avoid that which we want to avoid, and to do that which we want to do. And if your knowledge is just intellectual, just verbal, then it is not going to help in actual life. Actual life needs actual knowledge. If you want to write a book, it will be okay. If you want to give a lecture, it will be okay. If you want to discuss with your friends, it will be okay – because verbal knowledge is enough for writing a book, for giving a lecture, for discussing with your friends. But if you want to translate it into your life, it will be impossible.Life does not believe in that which you have accumulated very cheaply. Life believes only in that which has been earned the hard way.I have heard about a Sufi mystic, Bayazid. He meditated for years, and it is said God was very, very compassionate towards him. He had made such great effort – his search was arduous, his prayer was intense. So God sent an angel and the angel came and said to Bayazid, “God is happy, and whatsoever you want he is ready to give to you. You just ask. Your days of seeking and inquiry are finished.”But Bayazid said, “But no, that is not the way. I don’t want to get it so cheaply because I know well…I was also deceived in life because of this cheap possibility. Now you cannot deceive me. Tell God that I will earn the hard way.”But the angel said, “You are foolish! He is ready to burn the innermost light of your being. Just ask!”But Bayazid said, “Thank-you, and give him also my thanks, but I am not going to do that because it will be borrowed; even if borrowed from God, it will be borrowed. Let me seek and search.”The angel said, “God will feel offended. It has never happened – his offer has to be accepted.”Then Bayazid looked around – he had a small lamp and the oil was almost finished. He said, “If he really wants to light something, tell him to light my lamp because the oil is almost finished and the night is dark, and I have still to meditate. Just this will do. You just tell him to give me one blessing: that my oil should never finish so I can meditate the whole night.”That’s all he asked for, and it is said that God was very happy and he said, “This is the right way.”If he had asked he would have missed; if he had accepted he would have missed – because whatsoever comes to you without your earning it is never yours. You possess only that which you have lived. You possess only that which you have known. You possess only that which you have earned.A young boy had been taking swimming lessons. He rushed home one afternoon and breathlessly announced that he had gone off the diving board by himself.“That’s fine, Johnny,” said his father. “But I thought you told me you went off the board last week.”“I know,” said the boy, “but last week somebody shoved.”Going by yourself is really totally different. When somebody shoves you, it is qualitatively different. When I give something to you, it is not the same as when you earn it. Remember it: many will be the temptations on the way. When things are available very cheaply, avoid them. Always remember that one has to go the hard way because that is the only way.All shortcuts are false, and belief is a shortcut. Faith is a hard way.The last question:Osho,This morning I sit before you flooded with orgasm – light and feathery, deep and overwhelming. I hardly notice you. The inner is more, because of you.Paras, good, tremendously good. That’s how it should be. A Baul is born in Paras, and I hope that a Baul will be born in each of you. God is available each moment. Just allow him, don’t prevent him, don’t bar the way. Just get out of your own way and this will start happening to each and everybody.“This morning I sit before you flooded with orgasm – light and feathery, deep and overwhelming. I hardly notice you. The inner is more, because of you.”Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 1 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 1 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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What dealings can you ever concludewith someone who is unawareof the feelings in loving?The owl stares at the sky,sitting blind to the rays of the sun.Man is a quest, an eternal inquiry, a perennial question. The quest is for the energy that holds existence together – call it God, call it truth, or whatsoever you like to call it. Who holds this infinite existence together? What is the center of it all, the core of it all?Science, philosophy, religion, all ask the same question. Their answers may differ but their question is the same. Religions call it God. Scientists will not agree with the word God – it looks too personal. It looks too anthropomorphic, man-oriented. They call it electricity, magnetism, energy fields, but only the name is different. God is an energy field.Philosophers go on giving different names to it: the ultimate stratum, the absolute, the brahman. From Thales to Bertrand Russell, they have supplied many answers. Sometimes some philosopher says it is water, liquidity; sometimes somebody else says it is fire – but the quest has been eternal. What holds this infinite universe together?Bauls call it love, and to me, their answer seems to be the most pertinent. It is neither personal nor impersonal. It has something of God in it, and something of magnetism in it also; something of the divine, and something of the earth.Love has two faces. It is Janus-like: one face looks to-wards the earth, the other face looks towards the sky. It is the greatest synthesis conceivable: it comes out of lust and moves towards prayer; it comes out of mud and becomes a lotus facing the sun.This word love has to be understood. What do we mean by the word love? One thing we certainly all mean is that it has a pull in it, great energy. When you fall in love, it is not that you do something – you are pulled in. It has a magnetic force. You gravitate towards the object of your love, you gravitate almost helplessly, you gravitate even against your will. It has a pull, a magnetic field – that’s why we call it “falling in love.” Who wants to fall? But who can avoid it? When the energy calls you, suddenly you are no longer your old self. Something bigger than you is pulling you, something greater than you is invoking you. The challenge is such that one simply runs into it headlong.So the first thing to understand is: love is a great energy pull. The second thing: whenever you fall in love, suddenly you are no longer ordinary – something miraculously changes in your consciousness. Love transforms you. Falling in love, a violent man becomes kind and tender. A murderer can become so compassionate, it is almost impossible to believe. Love is miraculous – it transforms the baser metal into gold.Have you watched people’s faces and eyes when they fall in love? – you cannot believe that they are the same persons. When love takes possession of their souls they are transfigured, transported into another dimension; and suddenly…and with no effort of their own. As if they are caught in the net of God. Love transforms the baser into the higher, transforms earth into sky, transforms the human into the divine.These two things: first, love is an energy field – scientists will agree. Second, love is a transforming force – it helps you to become weightless, it puts wings on you. You can move towards the beyond. Religious thinkers will agree that love is both God and electricity; love is divine energy. Bauls have chosen love because this is the most significant experience in man’s life. Whether you are religious or not makes no difference – love remains the central experience of human life. It is the most common and the most uncommon. It happens to everybody, more or less, and whenever it happens it transmutes you. It is common and uncommon. It is the bridge between you and the ultimate.Remember the three L’s: life, love, light.Life is given to you, you are alive. Light is present, but you have to make a bridge between life and light. That bridge is love. With these three L’s you can make a total way of life, a way of being, a new way of being.Bauls are not philosophers. They are more like poets – they sing, they dance, they don’t philosophize. In fact, they are almost anti-philosophical, because they have come to see that whenever a man becomes too head-oriented he becomes incapable of love – and love is going to be the bridge. A man who becomes too head-oriented goes farther away from the heart, and the heart is the center which responds to the call of love.A head-oriented man is cut off from the universe. He lives in the universe, but he lives as if in a deep stupor. He lives in the universe, but he lives as a tree that has lost its roots. He lives only in name: the sap of life is no longer flowing. He has lost contact, he’s unconnected. That’s what alienation is.The modern man feels too alienated, feels too much an outsider, does not feel at home, at ease with life, existence, the world. He feels almost as if he has been thrown into it, and it is a curse rather than a blessing.Why has this happened? – too much head orientation, too much training of the head has cut all the roots from the heart. There are many people…I have observed thousands of people who don’t know what the heart is – they bypass it. The heart is throbbing, but their energy no longer moves via it. They bypass it, they go directly to the head. Even when they love, they think that they love. Even when they feel, they think that they feel. Even feeling is via thinking. Of course, it has to be false.Thinking is the great falsifier, because thinking is man’s effort to understand the universe, and love is God’s effort to understand man. Let me repeat it: when you try to understand God, or existence, or truth, it is your effort – a part, a very tiny part trying to grasp the whole, the infinite whole. The effort is bound to be doomed. It’s impossible. It cannot happen in the nature of things.Love is when God has found you. Love is when God’s hand is searching for you, groping for you. Love is when you are allowing God to find you. Hence, you cannot manage love. You can manage logic; you can be very, very efficient as far as logic is concerned. The moment love arises, you become absolutely inefficient. Then you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know what you are doing, then you don’t know where you are moving, then you don’t know any control. Logic is controlled, love is uncontrolled. Logic is manipulated, love is a happening. Logic gives you a feeling that you are somebody, love gives you a feeling that you are nobody.Love arises in you when you allow God to enter you. When you are trying on your own, then the whole effort is absurd.I have heard:Mulla Nasruddin sidled up to a guest at one of his daughter’s social evenings. He had heard him addressed as doctor and now he said diffidently, “Doctor, may I ask a question?”“Certainly,” he said.“Lately,” said Mulla Nasruddin, “I have been having a funny pain right here under the heart….”The guest interrupted uncomfortably and said, “I am terribly sorry Mulla, but the truth is I am a Doctor of Philosophy.”“Oh,” said Nasruddin, “I’m sorry.” He turned away, but then, overcome with curiosity, he turned back. “Just one more question doctor. Tell me, what kind of disease is philosophy?”Yes, philosophy is a kind of disease – and not just an ordinary kind of disease; it is more cancerous than cancer, more dangerous than all the diseases put together. A disease can cut only one root. Even all the diseases put together cannot cut you completely from existence. Philosophy cuts you, uproots you utterly.What is disease? When one connection is loose with existence, you feel ill. When the head is unconnected, then there is headache. When the stomach is unconnected, then there is stomachache. Somewhere, you have become autonomous; you are no longer in the ocean of the interdependence of existence. There exists disease. Disease has a certain autonomy, independence. When you have a cancerous growth inside you, that growth becomes a universe unto itself. It is unconnected with existence.An ill person is one who is unconnected in many ways. When a certain disease becomes chronic, it simply means that that root is completely destroyed. Even the possibility to replant it in the earth no longer exists. You will have to remain alive only partially; a part of you will remain dead. Somebody is paralyzed – what does it mean? The body has lost contact with the universal energy. Now it is almost a dead thing – hanging, unconnected. The sap of life no longer flows in it.If this is what disease is, then philosophy really is the greatest disease there can be – because it disconnects you utterly. And not only that – it disconnects you with such logic that you never become aware that you are ill. It disconnects you with such justifications and rationalizations that you never become aware that you are missing. It is a very self-justificatory illness, it goes on supporting itself. Philosophy means that a man has become completely head-oriented. He looks towards existence through the eyes of logic and not through the eyes of love.When you look through the eyes of logic, you will know a few things, but those few things will not give you the vision of reality. They will be only abstractions.When you look through love, then you know the reality as it is. Love is falling together with the universe, falling in a togetherness. It is orgasmic: you are streaming, and the existence has always been streaming, and both streamings meet and mingle and are infused in each other. A higher synthesis arises: the part is meeting in the whole and the whole is meeting in the part. Then something arises which is more than the part and the whole together – that is what love is. Love is one of the most significant words in human languages because love is existential language.But somehow, from the very childhood, we are being crippled. Our roots with the heart are cut. We are forced towards the head and we are not allowed to move towards the heart. It is something humanity has suffered for long, a calamity – that man has not yet become capable of living with love.There are reasons. Love is risky. To love is to move into danger – because you cannot control it, it is not safe. It is not within your hands. It is unpredictable: where it will lead nobody knows. Whether it will lead anywhere, that too nobody knows. One is moving into utter darkness, but roots grow only in darkness. If the roots of a tree become afraid of darkness and don’t move underground, the tree will die. They have to move into darkness. They have to find their way towards the deepest layers of the earth where they can find sources of water, nourishment.The heart is the darkest part of your being, it is like a dark night. It is your very womb, it is your earth. So people are afraid to move into darkness, they would like to remain in light. At least you can see where you are and what is going to happen. You are safe, secure. When you move in love you cannot calculate the possibilities, you cannot calculate the results. You cannot be result-oriented. For love, future does not exist, only the present exists. You can be in this moment but you cannot think anything about the next moment. No planning is possible in love.The society, civilization, culture, church – all force a small child to be more logical. They try to focus his energies in the head. Once the energies are focused in the head, it becomes very difficult to fall towards the heart. In fact, every child is born with great love energy. The child is born out of love energy. The child is full of love, trust. Have you looked into the eyes of a small child? How trusting! The child can trust anything: the child can play with a snake, the child can go with anybody. The child can move so close to a fire that it can become dangerous – because the child has not yet learned how to doubt. So we teach doubt, we teach skepticism, we teach logic. These seem to be measures for survival. We teach fear, we teach caution, we teach prudence – and all these together kill the possibility of love.I have heard:Doctor Abrams was called to Mulla Nasruddin’s shop where the Mulla was lying unconscious. Doctor Abrams worked on him for a long time and finally revived him.“How did you happen to drink that stuff, Nasruddin?” he asked the Mulla. “Didn’t you see the label on the bottle? It said ‘poison.’”Nasruddin said, “Yes Doctor, but I didn’t believe it.”Doctor Abrams asked, “Why not?”Nasruddin said, “Because whenever I believe someone, I am deceived.”By and by people learn how not to believe, how not to trust, how to become chronic doubters. And this happens so slowly, in such small doses, that you are never alert to what is happening to you. By the time it has happened, it is too late. This is what people call experience. They call a person experienced if he has lost his contact with his heart; they say that he is a very experienced man, very clever, very cunning – nobody can deceive him.Maybe nobody can deceive him, but he has deceived himself. He has lost all that was worthy, he has lost all. And what is he saving?Then a very peculiar phenomenon happens: people cannot love people because people can be deceptive. They start loving things. Because there is a great need to love, they go on finding substitutes. Somebody loves his house, somebody loves his car, somebody loves his clothes, somebody loves money. Of course, the house cannot deceive you, the love is not risky. You can love the car – a car is more reliable than a real person. You can love money – money is dead, it is always under your control. Why do so many people love things rather than persons? And even if they sometimes love a person, they try to reduce the person to being a thing.If you love a woman, you are immediately ready to reduce her to being your wife, that is, you are ready to reduce her to a certain role: the role of a wife – which is more predictable than the reality of a beloved. If you love a man you are ready to possess him like a thing. You would like him to be your husband, because a lover is more liquid, one never knows…. A husband seems to be more solid. At least the law is there, the court is there, the police are there, the state government is there to give a certain solidity to the husband. A lover seems to be like a dream, not so substantial. Immediately people fall in love they are ready to get married – such fear of love! And whomsoever we love, we start trying to control. That’s the conflict that goes on between wives and husbands, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, friends – who is going to possess whom? That means: who is going to define whom, who is going to reduce whom to a thing? Who will be the master and who will be the slave?Mulla Nasruddin sat moodily over his drink and his friend said, “You look pretty down in the mouth, Mulla. What is the matter?”Nasruddin said, “My psychiatrist says I am in love with my umbrella and that is the source of my troubles.”“In love with your umbrella?”“Yes, isn’t that ridiculous? Ah, I like and respect my umbrella, and enjoy its company – but love?”But what else is love? If you enjoy the company of your umbrella, and if you respect and like your umbrella, what else is love? Love is respect, tremendous respect. Love is a deep liking, and love is sheer joy in the presence of the one you love. What else is love? But people love things – a deep need is somehow fulfilled by substitutes.Remember, the first calamity is that one becomes head-oriented. The second calamity is that one starts substituting love-needs with things. Then you are lost, lost in the desert land. Then you will never reach to the ocean. Then you will simply dissipate and evaporate. Then your whole life will be a sheer wastage.The moment you become aware that this is what is happening, turn the tide, make all efforts to again contact the heart. That’s what Bauls call love – to make contact with the heart again, to undo that which has been done to you by the society. Undoing that which has been done by the society is true religion, undoing all the nonsense that has been done by your well-wishers. They may be thinking that they are helping you, and they may not be knowingly destroying you. They may themselves be victims of their parents and their society. I’m not saying anything against them. Great compassion is needed for them.Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples that a man only becomes religious when he is able to forgive his parents.Forgive? Yes, that’s how it is. It is very difficult. The moment you become aware, it is very difficult, almost impossible to forgive your parents because they have done so many things to you – unknowingly of course, behaving unconsciously of course, but still they have done. They have destroyed your love and they have handed you dead logic. They have destroyed your intelligence and they have given you, as a substitute, intellect. They have destroyed your life and aliveness, and they have given you a fixed pattern to live, a plan to live by. They have destroyed your direction and have given you a destination. They have destroyed your celebration and they have made you commodities in the marketplace. It is very difficult to forgive them. Hence all the old traditions say: respect your parents.It is difficult to forgive them; it is very, very difficult to respect them. But if you understand, you will forgive them. You will say the same as Jesus said on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Yes, those are exactly the words. And everybody is on the cross – and the cross is not prepared by your enemies, but by your parents, by your society…and everybody is crucified.The head has become so dominant that it does not allow any spontaneity. It has become dictatorial. It does not allow the heart even to utter a single word, it has forced the heart to be completely quiet. You will have to listen again to the heart. You will have to start dropping logic a little. You will have to take a few risks. You will have to live dangerously. You will have to move towards the unknown, and you will have to love persons and not things. You will have to be ready not to possess anybody because the moment you possess, the person is not there. Only a thing can be possessed.Try to understand it as deeply as possible: the moment you fall in love with somebody, immediately your whole conditioning starts trying to possess him. Resist that temptation; the devil is tempting you – the devil of the society, the devil of civilization and the church. The devil stands in a very religious garb, and the devil goes on quoting scriptures. Beware!Whenever you start possessing you are killing love. So either you can possess the person or you can love the person – both together are not possible.So this is the alternative: a man who wants to become a Baul, a lover, has to drop all possessiveness. Resist all temptation to being possessive because that temptation comes from the ego.Once Mulla Nasruddin said to me, “It is remarkable sir, how congenial we are. After all, we have practically nothing in common.”“Oh yes we have,” I replied. “We have one very important thing in common: I think you are wonderful and you agree with me.”The ego goes on agreeing for wrong things, because the ego can exist only with the wrong. It feeds on the wrong. So whenever you feel that your ego is fulfilled, beware! – you have eaten something wrong, you have swallowed something wrong. Whenever you feel egoless, relax. Now you have eaten the right, something which is in tune with your nature.Ego arises out of disturbance, but ego has its own logic. It goes on saying that you are important, that you are the most important man in the world, and you have to prove it. And we are all trying to do this one way or the other – somebody by possessing more money, somebody by possessing a beautiful woman, somebody by possessing prestige, power, somebody by becoming a president or a premier, somebody by becoming an artist, a poet, somebody by becoming a mahatma – but we are all trying in some way or other to prove our innermost fantasy, that we are the most important person in the world. Then you cannot be a lover.Ambition is poison for love. A lover is not in any need to prove. In fact, he knows that he is loved, and that’s enough.Try to diagnose it very carefully. When you are not loved – and how can you be loved if you don’t love? – when you are not loved and you don’t love, suddenly a great need arises to perform, to do something to show the world that you are important, that you are needed. There is a great need to be needed. You feel futile, impotent, useless, if you are not needed. The need in itself is not wrong; it is a love-need to be needed. If a woman loves you, you are fulfilled – somebody needs you, you are significant. Then you don’t bother about the crowd. You don’t go into the marketplace and shout, “I am important!” Then you are not ambitious, you don’t collect money like an obsession.If somebody loves you, in that love you are dignified, in that love you become a sovereign. Love makes you an emperor, a sovereign. Love fulfills you so deeply and so greatly – then there is no need to perform or do anything. Ego simply does not exist with love. But if that need is unfulfilled, then you will try to fulfill it somehow: you would like to become a very famous man so many people need you.But remember, to be loved by one and to be needed by millions is not the same. Even a single person’s love, even a single glance of love is enough; and you can collect millions of people and they can all look towards you, but that will not be satisfying. That’s what politics is, and what the politician is trying to do.I have never come across a politician whose heart is functioning. The heart is totally dead – but the need is there to be loved, to be needed, somebody to look to. Where to fulfill it? He gathers crowds. Through the crowds he tries somehow to fulfill the love-need. But that crowd does not love him, that crowd is not bothered by him, that crowd is after its own needs. Because he’s in power he seems to be important. They pay their respects to the chair, and the chairman is deceived. Once the chairman is not in the chair, they don’t bother about him.Have you ever observed that once a politician is out of power he is simply forgotten? Nobody remembers him. He may live for thirty or forty years, nobody will know about him. By and by, he will recede into darkness. Only once, when he dies, will there be a small notice in the newspapers, that the ex-president or ex-premier is dead.The man who ruled over Russia before Lenin, Kerensky, lived for fifty years after it like a small New York grocer, and nobody knew about him. He was the prime minister of Russia, the most important man – the revolution happened and he was thrown out of power. He escaped. He lived for fifty years. Only when he died did people become aware that Kerensky had been alive for all those fifty years.Power cannot fulfill a love-need. You can possess great kingdoms – that will not fulfill your love-need. But if you possess one heart which throbs in tune with you, then you are fulfilled.The Bauls sing:O my heart,let us go then on a promenadeto the grove of Krishna’s love.The breeze of joy will calm your life.In that woodland,eternally bloom five scented flowers.Their fragrance will enchantyour life and soul,giving them sovereign dignity.Enter the temple of love, and you always enter it as a sovereign. Enter into the world, the world of things, and you always enter as a beggar. The world reduces everybody to be a beggar, love raises everybody to be an emperor. Love is an alchemical phenomenon. Even if one heart has flowed towards you, God has reached through that heart. Somebody looked towards you with love; in that moment God looked at you. Watch the eye full of love, the hand full of love, and you will find God throbbing there – because it is always God who loves. To love is to become God, to allow love to happen is to become God.Whenever you fall from the peak of love, then it is something else: you become possessive, you become a husband and a wife. Then you are no longer in the grip of God. But whenever you reach to the peak – maybe for a single moment sometimes it happens: when two persons are in absolute harmony, no barrier, no fence even exists between them; they are not throbbing as two centers, they become one center – in that moment, God happens. When love happens, God happens. When God descends on earth, his name is love.Each fruit is open to two frontiers,and borne on a pair of trees.Listen carefully….Each fruit is open to two frontiers,and borne on a pair of trees.Have you ever seen one fruit born on a pair of trees? One fruit is born on one tree; two trees are not needed for one fruit. Love is that fruit which is born on two trees, never on one tree.Each fruit is open to two frontiers,and borne on a pair of trees.Deep meditation reveals the knowledgebeyond any doubt.When you love somebody and somebody loves you, then there comes a moment when these two trees are not two trees; then they become one tree. That tree is the tree of love, and on that tree of love is fulfillment, is fruition, is flowering.The two who are wholly presentcan bring forth a fruitto offer the master.They are conscious and fruitful.Let me repeat: “The two who are wholly present….” In love, two persons are simply present to each other, doing nothing. Love knows nothing of doing. When two persons are deep in love, they are simply present to each other. They face each other, just present, as if two lamps are burning, illuminating each other, or two mirrors are facing each other, reflecting each other in a millionfold ways. Two lovers are just in each other’s presence, saturated by the other, penetrated by the other. In that state a moment arises – the climax, the peak moment – when the fruit is born: when they are no more two, when all distinction is lost, when the egos don’t exist, when they have become pure presences.Then, the fruit is born.The two who are wholly presentcan bring forth a fruitto offer the master.…And that is the fruit to be offered to the master, to God. “They are conscious and fruitful.”In that peak of love, they are totally conscious and fruitful. Remember, love is not something like unconsciousness. Ordinarily, when you are in love, you become more unconscious. Then it is lust. Then it is the very lowest denominator. Then it is the lowest rung of the ladder. Of course it belongs to the ladder, but it is the lowest rung. At the highest rung there is tremendous consciousness – and if you cannot be conscious in the presence of your lover, where else are you going to be conscious? If the presence of your lover is not worth being conscious, then where else will you find the treasure to be conscious? If you love the person, if you really love, a peak of consciousness arises. You would just like to observe, to see your beloved or your lover; you would like to be with a pure presence. And they help each other to be more and more conscious – because when the one becomes more conscious, it is immediately reflected in the other. The other becomes more conscious, and it works like a chain reaction. Higher and higher they go, and then there comes a moment when the fruit is born. That fruit is called love. That love you can offer to the master of the world. No other fruit will do.“They are conscious and fruitful.” And in that peak of consciousness they are fruitful. Otherwise, people live a fruitless life. People live an unfruitful life, people live without fruition. Nothing is born out of them; they simply live and die. There is no meaning and no significance in their lives. The significance arises only when two trees have become one tree, and when on that one tree the fruit of love is born.…conscious and fruitful.The well never sinks into the water.The Bauls say, “You see? Go and see a well full of water – but it never sinks into the water.’’ This is very mysterious. When you are absolutely drowned in oneness, for the first time you are. You never sink into it. You are merged, all boundaries lost, but then happens a paradox: the paradox of being lost completely and yet being, for the first time, yourself. When you are lost completely, you are for the first time your reality. You are full, surrounded by tremendous force, but you are not sunk in it. You are one with it, but for the first time your flame burns. Without any ego, your being is revealed.Bauls sing:Let ripeness appear in its own timefor the full flavor of the fruit.A green jackfruit can be softened by blows,but not made sweet.And they say, this love you cannot force. There is no way to manipulate it. There is nothing that you can do about it. All that you can do is to allow.Let ripeness appear in its own time…It will come in its own time. What do you do when you watch over a tree, an apple tree? What do you do? You don’t pull the fruits, you don’t force, you just watch over it. You take care, every care that is needed – you protect the tree, you water the tree, you provide fertilizers and manure. Everything that you can do, you do; but what can you do to force it? That is just helping the tree to ripen in its own time. Then the fruit comes, then you watch. One day it is ripe, sweet.Let ripeness appear in its own time……So Bauls are not for any sort of yoga. They are against yoga. That’s why I told you in the beginning that they belong to the tradition of Tantra, not to the tradition of Veda, yoga – no. In fact, the Bauls’ tradition is more ancient than the tradition of Veda and yoga.Historians say that Tantra is pre-Aryan. When the Aryans came to India, Tantra was in existence here and Shiva was their God. When the Aryans came to India they overran India, they defeated the people who were living here. Their religion was crushed, their scriptures destroyed, and by and by even their gods were absorbed into the pantheon of the Aryans. Shiva was their God. It took a very long time for him to be absorbed. He was alien, but he had to be absorbed because he was very influential. And when all his followers were absorbed into the world of the Aryans, they brought their gods also.Tantra belongs to Shiva, and the Baul is an offshoot of the same tree. Tantra says, “Everything happens in its own right time, you need not force it. Your force will not help, it will be a disturbance. It may destroy, but it can never be creative. One has to be very effortless, spontaneous. One has to be in a let-go.”Let ripeness appear in its own timefor the full flavor of the fruit.A green jackfruit can be softened by blows,but not made sweet.The Bauls say, “We are not searching for liberation.” A lover, a seeker of love, never talks in terms of liberation. He says, “It is tremendously beautiful. All that is, is already beautiful. There is no need to be liberated from it. All that is needed is how to be in it, totally absorbed.” The world is not a bondage for the Baul, and there is no need to struggle against it. In fact, the Baul says, “We love the bondage of the world because these fetters are also created by you, my Lord.”The heart, a lotus, continue flowering,age after age, you are bound to it,and so am I…The Baul says to his God,You are bound to it, and so am I,and with no escape.The lotus blossoms, blossoms, blossoms;there is no end to it.But all these lotuses have one type of honey,with one particular taste.The bee is avid and unable to leave,so, you are bound and I am bound.Where is freedom then?It is a great play of hide and seek between the energy that God is and the energy that you are. It is the same energy in a great hide and seek. It is a great play. There is no need to end it. Let lotuses flower and blossom for ever and ever. The world is beautiful: that is the basic Tantra attitude. Yoga says: one needs to be liberated. Tantra says: for what, from whom? The bondage is beautiful because it is God’s. Yoga will say: drop, by and by, all your attachments and finally, one has to go beyond love. The Bauls say: all attachments are beautiful. Go deeper into them so you don’t remain with the periphery but you reach to the center. On the periphery is attachment, at the center is love.The bee is avid and unable to leave,so you are bound and I am bound.Where is freedom then?For the Baul, life is not a serious thing. It is fun, it is laughter, it is joy. So you will not find anything like the seriousness of a churchgoer, or the long faces of so-called religious people in the world of the Bauls. They love laughter, they love fun. They enjoy small things with tremendous respect. Ordinarily, religions are very long-faced, very somber, serious, because they have to be – they are against life.I have heard:One friend of Mulla Nasruddin was amazed to see that the Mulla had hitched his prize-winning possession, his prize-winning bull to the plow and was guiding it across his fields.He said, “Mulla, have you gone crazy? That bull is worth twenty-five thousand rupees! Why are you letting him pull a plow?”“That bull,” said the Mulla grimly, “has got to learn that life is not all play.”There are people who become disturbed the moment you laugh; they would like to teach you that life is not all play. These people are themselves ill. They have missed life and they would not like anybody else to enjoy it. The priests are ill people – they would not like you to enjoy. They have missed and they are jealous of you. And they have staked too much: their egos are fulfilled only because they have been against life. They have chosen ego against life. If you choose life they will be against you. They will go on curbing you, they will go on condemning you, they will go on creating guilt in you. No greater calamity, no bigger calamity can happen to humanity than has happened through religions. The calamity is that they have created a guilty conscience. So whenever you are enjoying, deep down somewhere you start feeling guilty, as if you are doing something wrong. Whenever you are healthy, you start feeling something is wrong. Whenever you are dancing, you start feeling something is wrong. Whenever you laugh, you can never laugh totally because deep down something goes on pulling you back: “What are you doing?”From the very childhood, whenever you were happy there was somebody to teach you that life is not all play: “Stop laughing! Be serious! When will you be mature? Be grown up! Enough is enough! Drop all this nonsense of childhood.” Somebody was always round the corner to teach you. They have lost. They could not enjoy so they cannot allow others to enjoy. This is how, from generation to generation, diseases are being transferred.Take hold of your own life. See that the whole existence is celebrating. These trees are not serious, these birds are not serious. The rivers and the oceans are wild, and everywhere there is fun, everywhere there is joy and delight. Watch existence, listen to the existence and become part of it. Then you become a Baul, then you become a lover – because love can exist only with a deep respect for fun, with a deep respect for delight. Love cannot exist with a serious mind. With a serious mind, logic is in tune. Be non-serious. I’m not saying not to be sincere. Be sincere, but be non-serious. Sincerity is something else; seriousness is totally different. Be sincere with existence, then you will be true; you will become part of this cosmic leela, this cosmic play.The Bauls sing:How can you walk the ways of lovecarrying stolen loot with impunity?In the forest of Brinda,loving is worshipping.The forest of Brinda, where Krishna played with his lovers, friends, girlfriends; where he danced, where the raas happened…. This word raas is very beautiful: it means the divine celebration, the divine dance.How can you walk the ways of love,carrying stolen loot with impunity?In the forest of Brinda,loving is worshipping.As the essence of purity in the brilliance of the sky,love transcends lust, evolving ecstasy.The bellows breathe into the fire of lifeand stabilize mercury.Beautiful – the saying is very beautiful.The bellows breathe into the fire of lifeand stabilize mercury.Even mercury becomes stabilized. So what about lust? Don’t be worried. Let there be a goal to your love, a center to your love, a target for your arrow – and love transcends lust. Yoga will say: transcend lust, fight with lust. It is a negative approach. The Bauls say: love, and love transcends lust. It is a positive approach.Tell me, my silent master,O my lord,what worship may open meto my beloved’s lotus bloom?The stars and the moon eternally movewith no sound at all.Each cycle of the universe in silence prays,welling up with the essence of love.It is what physicists call electricity, gravitation, energy field. What religious people call God, Bauls call love.Each cycle of the universe in silence prays,welling up with the essence of love.Trees are in love with the earth, the earth is in love with the trees. The birds are in love with the trees, the trees are in love with the birds. The earth is in love with the sky, the sky is in love with the earth. The whole existence exists in a great ocean of love. Let love be your worship, let love be your prayer.The song for today is very small, but a diamond – very precious. And Bauls know how to be precise. Just the other night I was reading De Gaulle’s life, and he had a motto on his table. I loved it; Bauls would also appreciate it. The motto is: Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.What dealings can you ever concludewith someone who is unawareof the feelings in loving?The owl stares at the sky,sitting blind to the rays of the sun.The Bauls say it is impossible to communicate:What dealings can you ever concludewith someone who is unawareof the feelings in loving?It is impossible to commune with someone who has not known love. How can we talk about God? How can we talk meaningfully about prayer? How can we say anything about the truth? – because he’s completely unaware of his own heart. He does not know the language; he has lived in the head. He’s like the owl: “stares at the sky, sitting blind to the rays of the sun.”In Indian mythology the owl is a symbol of knowledge, learning, learnedness. People who are too learned, too much in their heads, accumulating information and data, are like owls. They cannot see that the sun has risen. They can go on looking and staring at the sun, and still they remain oblivious to the rays of the light.The Bauls say: a man who lives in the head – a pundit, a scholar – a man who thinks only in terms of concepts, abstract theories, doctrines, dogmas, who has memorized the Vedas, the Koran, the Bible, will not be able to understand anything about love. Even if you speak, he will immediately misunderstand. If you talk about love he will make a theory out of it, and love cannot be managed in a theory. If you say something about prayer he will try to make that prayer look like a hypothesis, and prayer is not a hypothesis. A man of logic always reduces everything to his logic.I have heard:A devout clergyman making a tour of the Holy Land arrived at the Sea of Galilee. His heart thrilled: “Perhaps one of these very wavelets had touched the feet of the master himself….” A boatman approached. The clergyman addressed him in choicest Arabic, a pocket dictionary of Arabic terms in his hand.“What is the matter?” complained the ferryman. “Can’t you talk United States?” He was an American making his living boating tourists.“So,” exclaimed the clergyman, “this is the Sea of Galilee where our savior walked upon the waters.”“It is.”“How much will you charge me to take me to the exact spot?”“Well, seeing as you look like a clergyman, I won’t charge you anything.”After reaching the place, the clergyman glanced around with great satisfaction, consulted his texts and commentaries, and at last signaled that he was ready to return to shore.“Cost you twenty dollars to take you back.”“But you said you would charge nothing!”“That was to bring you here.”“And you charge everybody twenty dollars to take them back?”“That, or more.”“Well then,” said the devout one, reaching for his pocketbook, “no wonder our savior got out and walked.”Everybody goes on interpreting everything according to his own way. Our interpretations are our interpretations.It happened one day: Mulla Nasruddin hailed a taxi just outside the ashram. “Take me to the ashram, driver,” he demanded, hopping into the cab.The disgusted hackie got out, opened the door and snapped, “You are in front of the ashram, fellow!”“Okay,” grumbled the Mulla as he got out, “but next time, don’t drive so fast.”If you are drunk, then you are going to interpret everything through your drunkenness. If you are drunk with logic, love cannot penetrate your skull. Then you have a very thick head, dense – it is impossible for love to penetrate. Then you are like the owl.The Bauls say communication is possible only when there exists a common language. So if you want to understand the Bauls, you will have to love – because there is no other way to understand love than to love. If you want to understand the man of prayer, pray. Move into prayer, have a taste of it. Put aside all your logic. Don’t try first to be logically convinced, then you will pray; then nobody has ever prayed – because the first thing is that it is impossible, it cannot be done.Nobody can logically convince you that prayer is meaningful. The very logical framework of your mind prohibits it. So you are asking the impossible. If you say, “First it has to be proved that love is God, then I will love,” then you will have to wait, and you will have to wait for eternity – it is not going to happen. The day it happens, it will happen in the only way it can happen, and the way for it to happen is to put aside your logic. Logic is irrelevant. You just love, have a taste of it. Move into the world of the lover. Let his singing surround you. Have a feel, and that will become the proof, and that will become the conviction. Then you can bring your logic in and your logic will start proving it, but not before. First the taste, the experience; then the logic. Logic is a good servant but a bad master.What dealings can you ever concludewith someone who is unawareof the feelings in loving?The owl stares at the sky,sitting blind to the rays of the sun.Love is a radical change in your innermost core of being. The head is just on the periphery. The head is just like waves on the ocean; love is like the depth. In the depth there are no waves, and in the waves there is no depth. Thoughts are like waves just on the surface. There is no way for a wave to know the depth while remaining the wave. The wave can know the depth, but then it has to disappear in the depth. It will no longer be a wave, but then it can come back to the surface. But then that wave will itself become a Baul; no other wave will listen to it. Other waves will call that wave mad because she will talk about depths, and waves only know shallowness, they don’t know depths.Love is an experience – existential, like taste. If you have not tasted salt, there is no way to explain it to you. If you have tasted it, there is no way to forget it. If you have tasted it, then too there is no way to explain it to somebody else who has not tasted it.How to explain to somebody else who has never known anything salty? What to say? It is not that you don’t know – you know, it is just on the tip of your tongue. You know what saltiness is, but how to say it to somebody else? The only thing is to offer him a little salt. But if he says, “First let me be convinced that there exists something like salt, then only will I take it” – if he is that cautious, it is impossible. Then he will have to remain without any experience of salt.And to remain without experiencing love is to remain dead – because only a lover goes on dropping his dead selves, because only a lover moves, because only a lover is dynamic. Logic is dead, love is alive.I am reminded of a saying of Browning. He used to say, “The life process is to rise on the stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things.”…The life process is to rise on the stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things….Logic belongs to the past; love belongs to the future. Logic is just moving in the old circle again and again and again. Love moves into new territory. Being yourself is never static, being in love is also never static. It is always ecstatic – not static but ecstatic: out of stasis, out of standing still.Be moving. One never arrives, though one is always arriving.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 1 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 1 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Who has originated the Bauls? Please explain.People like Bauls never originated. Religions like the Baul religion are more like happenings.Who originated the roses? Who originated the songs that the birds go on singing every morning? No, we never ask that question. It has always been there.Philosophies are originated; you can find the originator. “Isms,” dogmas, creeds are originated. The Baul is not a creed, it is a spontaneous way of life. People have always lived that way. People who have really lived have always lived that way. People who have been alive have been alive in no other way. Whether they were known as Bauls or not is immaterial. The name may have some origin somewhere, but I’m not concerned with it.The word simply means “the madman” – madly in love with existence, madly in love with life – but this madness has always been there. And it is good that a few people have always been so mad that we have not lost contact with the roots of existence. It is because of them that we haven’t. They could sing and dance and live and love – real people, authentic to the very core.So I don’t know when they started. They must have started from the very beginning, if there was any beginning. They must have started with the first man, because their whole teaching is about the essential man. In fact, by and by, they have disappeared. They must have been more in the beginning. By and by they have lessened. Their numbers have become less and less and less every day, because the world has become too worldly, and the world has become too cunning and clever – it does not allow the simplicity of the heart to exist. The world has become too competitive and too ambitious. It has forgotten all that is beautiful, it has forgotten all that cannot be manufactured, it has forgotten how to surrender, to allow the eternal to happen in time. It has forgotten the language of ecstasy.The more we move back, the more and more Bauls you will find. In the beginning the whole humanity must have been like the Bauls. Even now you can watch it: every child is born as a Baul, then later on he is corrupted. Every child is again born as madly in love with life, but we cultivate him, we prune him, we don’t allow him spontaneity of being. We condition him, we give him a certain character.The Bauls have no character. They are men of consciousness, but not of character. In fact, a man of consciousness never has a character. Character is a fixity, character is an obsession, character is an armor. You have to do only that which your character allows. Character can never be spontaneous. Character is always imposed by the past on the present. You are not free to be, you are not free to respond – you can only react.The Baul believes in the sahaja manush, the spontaneous man. The Baul says the spontaneous man is the way to the essential man. To be spontaneous is to be on the way towards being essential. Every child is a Baul. So as I see it, in the beginning, if there was any beginning, the whole humanity must have been like Bauls: true, authentic, sincere, mad, deep in love, rejoicing – rejoicing the opportunity that God has given, rejoicing the gift.We don’t have any claim on life. Have you ever noticed it, that we don’t have any claim? If we were not, there would be no way to be and there would be no way to appeal it. There would be no way to complain against it. If you are not, you are not. The next moment you can disappear. Life is fragile, and without any claim. We have not earned it! That is the meaning when we say it is a gift. A gift is something that you have not earned: you don’t have any claim over it. You cannot say that you have some right to get it. A gift is something that is given to you.Life is a gift. It has been given to you for no reason at all. You cannot have earned it, because how can you earn it if you were not? Life is a gift, but we go on forgetting it, we are not even thankful. We don’t have any gratitude. We certainly complain for a thousand and one things which we may think we are missing in life, but we never feel grateful for life itself.You may complain that your house is not good: the rains have come and it is leaking. You may complain that your salary is not enough. You may complain that you don’t have a beautiful body. You may complain that this is not happening and that is not happening – a thousand and one complaints. But have you ever seen that the whole life, the very possibility that you can be, breathe, look, see, hear, touch, love and be loved, is a gift? It has been given to you because God has so much to give, not because you have earned it.The Baul lives in tremendous gratitude. He sings and dances – that is his prayer. He cries. He simply wonders why, for what has life been given to him, for what has he been allowed to see the rainbows in the sky, for what has he been allowed to see flowers, butterflies, people, rivers and rocks? For what? Because life is so obvious you tend to forget the tremendous gift hidden in it.In the beginning, everybody must have been a Baul, because civilization was not there to corrupt, society was not there to destroy. Priests and churches were not there to give you a character, to give you a narrow passage. In the beginning, life must have been overflowing. Everybody must have lived out of their own beings – not because of any commandments, not because of scripture. There was no scripture and there was no commandment. Moses had not appeared yet. Everybody must have been a Baul in the beginning – and every child, when he is born, is a Baul. Watch a child to understand what this phenomenon of being a Baul is. See children delighting for nothing – just shouting out of joy, just running here and there out of overflowing energy. When you become a Baul you again become a child.To become a Baul is to become a primitive. To become a Baul is to reclaim one’s primitiveness, one’s primalness. One is reborn; it is a rebirth – the child happens again. Your body may be old, your mind may be old, but your consciousness is released from the bondage of the body and the mind. You have a past, you have many experiences, but they no longer burden you. You put them aside. You use them when needed. Otherwise, you don’t carry them continuously on your head for twenty-four hours. This is what liberation is: it does not liberate you from existence or from life or from flowers and love, it simply liberates you from your past. In fact, the more you are liberated, the more you fall in love with God. The more you are liberated, the more you become capable of rejoicing and loving.So don’t ask me who originated Bauls. Nobody has ever originated things like that. The whole emphasis is on spontaneity. Of course, to have a theory like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, an Einstein is needed. Without him it cannot be originated, without him it would not be in existence. A very complicated mind is needed to discover the complicated Theory of Relativity.Bauls don’t give any theories. They simply say, “All that you need be, you are already.” It is not a question of being very clever, it is a question of just being simple. No talent is needed to become a Baul. That’s the beauty of it: no genius is needed. What genius is needed to be a child? Every child is born as a child. The sages and the fools – all are born as children. No talent is needed. Childhood is simply everybody’s nature.To be a Baul nothing is needed. In fact, the moment you need nothing, you become a Baul. The moment you are unburdened and you don’t possess anything, any past, you are a Baul. No, things like that are never originated. Nobody creates them; they happen. They are part of nature.The second question:Osho,So many times I can't understand your words because the sound of your words showers on me – your sound strikes me with energy, filling me, and as a shock, I feel in my spinal cord thrills, waves and vibrations. Should I be carefully aware for the meaning of your words?Then there is no need to be careful about the meaning of the words; that will be a disturbance. If you feel in tune with my sound, there is the meaning. If you feel you are being showered with a new energy, if you feel thrilled, pulsating in a new way you never knew before, if you feel a sort of new dimension arising in your being because of the sound of my words – then forget all about me. Then there is no need; you have got the meaning already.That showering is the meaning, that thrill in the spine is the meaning, that vibration that cleanses you is the meaning. Then there is no need to worry about the ordinary meaning of the words. Then you are getting a higher meaning, then you are reaching a higher altitude of meaning. Then you are really getting the content and not the container. The meaning of my words is just the container.If this is happening to you, then my words are no longer words to you; they have become existential. Then they are alive, then they have become a transfer. Then something is transpiring between my energy and your energy. Then there is happening something like what Bauls call love.Allow it. Forget all about the words and their meaning. Leave it for foolish people who only collect words and are never in contact with the content. The words are just like shells: hidden behind them, I am sending you great messages. Those messages cannot be understood by the intellect, those messages have to be decoded by your total being. That is what is happening – the vibration, the pulsation, the thrill, the showering of a new energy – your total being is decoding. This is real listening. This is really to be in contact with me, to be in my presence.Once I stayed with a friend. He had a big cage in his garden and he had one eagle in that cage. He took me to the cage and he said, “See, what a beautiful eagle.” The eagle was beautiful, but I felt sorry for her.I told the friend that this was not an eagle.He said, “What do you mean? This is an eagle. Don’t you know eagles?”I said, “I know them, but I have known them only against the wind in the sky, in the high heavens, free; almost not of this world and not in this world, weighing themselves floating on the winds, in deep love with the free sky. I have known them as freedom. This eagle is no eagle. Because an eagle in a cage without the openness, the wideness of sky, without those high heavens, without weighing herself in freedom on the winds, is no eagle. Where is the background? – because this is only the figure.“In a cage, the real eagle has disappeared. You cannot find a real eagle in a cage because a real eagle is tremendous freedom. Where is the freedom? The soul has disappeared. The essential has disappeared; only the nonessential is here. This is just a dead eagle, more dead than any dead eagle. Release it from the cage, let it become real.”When I talk to you my words are like caged eagles, my words are in a prison. If you really listen to me, you will drop the cage and you will release the eagle.That is what is happening…the thrill. Then the freedom is released, then you become the eagle – and higher and higher you rise. The earth is left very far behind. You can forget all about it. The ordinary is left very far behind. The shell is left, the container is left, and you have the whole sky open to you; you, your wings, and the sky, and there is no end to it. The eternal pilgrimage has started.Forget all about words and their meanings, otherwise you will be more concerned with the cage and you will not be able to release the eagle within you.The third question:Osho,Every time I have loved someone and afterwards dug into it, I have found that it was no love at all. It was something else in the name of love. Thus I now have no faith in love. I just cannot believe that we can love as we are.The questioner says, and rightly so, that whenever he has been in love he has found something else masquerading as love, so he has lost faith in love.The first part is absolutely right: if you observe deeply, you will find something else always hiding behind love, something counterfeit. But the counterfeits can exist only because real coins exist. If there were no real coin, how could a counterfeit exist? Sometimes it is possessiveness which hides itself behind love, sometimes it is lust, sometimes something else – jealousy.But why do they hide behind love? – because they feel love is a real coin, and you can pretend and hide behind it. You can be safe behind love. Whenever you hide yourself somewhere, it simply shows that somewhere that place is protective; it can become an armor around you.Why does everything seek to hide behind love? – because love is the greatest protection in the world, the greatest reality in the world, the only energy. Everything else is false, love is true. All that is not love is false, and whatsoever you are doing which is not love is a sheer wastage. All that is love is true, and whatsoever you do on the path of love increases your being, gives you more truth, makes you more true. Knowing this, everything hides behind love because love can give protection. Love is so beautiful that even ugly things can hide behind it and pretend to be beautiful.I was reading Shepard’s book, Beyond Sex Therapy. He relates one incident.He was in love with a woman, a young woman. A few friends had come to see him, but the whole time he remained with the woman, talking to her, as if he was not interested in the friends. They felt a little offended, and they told the woman, “We know Shepard better than you. He has been in love with many women, and this comes and goes. So remember it: sooner or later he will get interested in some other woman. What are you going to do then?”The woman said, “I will feel jealous, but that is my problem. But I would like my man to know every sort of love, to know all that is possible before he dies. I will feel jealous, but that is my problem. That I have to tackle, and I have to get over it. That has nothing to do with him. As far as he’s concerned, this is my desire: that he should know all that he wants to know before he dies, because once gone, one is gone forever. I would like him to live as richly as possible. If problems arise, like jealousy, then they are my problems.”This is what love is. It knows the distinction between jealousy and love. It is not confused about it. The jealousy cannot hide behind it; it cannot pretend to be love.So the first thing is right, the questioner is absolutely right: “Every time I have loved someone and afterwards dug into it, I have found that it was no love at all. It was something else…” perfectly true “…in the name of love. Thus I now have no faith….” That is wrong – because you have not known love yet. How can you lose your faith in love, which you have not yet known? You can lose your faith in jealousy, you can lose your faith in possessiveness, you can lose your faith in anger, you can lose your faith in lust, but you have not come across love at all so how can you lose faith in it? To lose faith or to have faith, at least some experience of love is essential – and you have not come across it.Dig a little more and you will be able to sort it out now. What is jealousy? – you know; what is possessiveness? – you know. This is good, you are evolving. This is how everybody has to evolve. In the beginning, everything is mixed – as if mud is mixed in gold. Then one has to put the gold into fire: all that is not gold is burned, drops out of it. Only pure gold comes out of the fire. Awareness is the fire, love is the gold; jealousy, possessiveness, hatred, anger, lust are the impurities. You are becoming more aware. Now you see what jealousy is, and you can see it is not love. Half the battle is won, fifty percent of the battle is over – you can recognize jealousy. But you have not yet known what love is. You are on the right track. But don’t become hopeless, don’t lose courage, don’t lose faith because sooner or later you will be able to know what love is. You are coming closer to home.Don’t be in such a hurry. Truth tends to reveal itself. Truth is revelatory, truth is revelation. You just go on seeking, searching, finding. There may be many errors, but there is no other way to grow. Trial and error is the only way. By and by, you go on eliminating the errors. Less and less errors happen, and more and more purity becomes available. Don’t stop in the middle.I have heard:Mulla Nasruddin got a job in a bank. The cashier tossed him a packet of one-rupee notes and said, “Check them to make sure there are one hundred.”Mulla started counting. Finally he got to fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight, then he threw the packet in the drawer.“If it is right this far,” remarked Nasruddin to the man next to him, “it is probably right all the way.”Don’t be in such a hurry. If it has been wrong so far, don’t think it will be wrong all the way. At a hundred degrees, suddenly it turns right. One has to penetrate all the impurities. But you are on the right track, so be happy.And it is because of a deep desire for love that you have been able to recognize what is not love. Otherwise, how would you recognize? You can recognize that this is not gold because gold exists. Otherwise, what is the criterion to know that this is not love? You have some tacit understanding; it is not conscious yet, it is tacit, deep down. That is the meaning of understanding, understood. You have a tacit understanding, some deep undercurrent which knows what love is. That’s why you can find “this is not love, that is not love.” Good, you are on the right track. Go on to the very end, all the way.It is because of the possibility of love that you have become aware of jealousy, of possessiveness, of anger, of lust, of greed, of indulgence, of gratification, and a thousand and one things. But the central core is dependent on a tacit understanding of love. Truth tends to reveal itself.Let me tell you a few anecdotes.The funeral cortege was being set up for the wife of Mulla Nasruddin. He was dressed somberly in the appropriate black. The funeral director said to the Mulla in a respectful whisper, “And you will be sitting in the head car with your mother-in-law.”Nasruddin frowned, “With my mother-in-law?”“Yes, of course.”“Is it necessary?”“It is essential – the bereaved husband and the bereaved mother, the two closest survivors, together.”Mulla Nasruddin turned to look at the large and sobbing figure of his mother-in-law and said, “Well, all right then. But I tell you right now that it is going to spoil the pleasure of the occasion.”Your black dress cannot hide the truth, your tears cannot hide the truth. Deep down he is feeling happy that now he is freed, now he is no longer in bondage with this woman. Just on the surface he is showing his bereavement.Truth has a tendency to reveal itself. If you just become a little alert, you will always know what is true. Truth need not be learned; one needs just to be a little alert, and then the truth reveals itself. Revelation is intrinsic to truth. And when truth is revealed, a thousand and one lies are also revealed simultaneously, all the lies that were pretending to be truth when the truth was not known.It happened: Abdul Rehman was very sick, a friend of Mulla Nasruddin. Everybody was worried about the sick man. He was very sick indeed, and his friends took turns visiting him to keep up his spirits.The night Mulla Nasruddin went he was warned in advance that Abdul Rehman was very low and he must be extremely careful to say nothing discouraging. Nasruddin was doing beautifully, and actually had Rehman chuckling over a number of funny stories. But suddenly however, the Mulla stopped and began to shake his head.“What is that? What is the matter, Mulla?” said Rehman anxiously.“I was just thinking,” said Nasruddin, “how in the name of the Holy Prophet are they going to get a coffin down the crooked stairs in this house?”Now on the surface he was trying to encourage the man, but deep down he knew that he was going to die, and deep down an undercurrent: how are they going to get the coffin down? – the staircase is so crooked.Truth has a tendency to reveal itself. Just be a little alert and your heart will show you the path. And then nothing will be able to hide behind love. Things can hide behind love because you are unconscious. It is not a fault of love, it is your unconsciousness. So don’t distrust love, distrust unconsciousness. Don’t lose faith in love – love has not done anything to you. Love has done nothing wrong to you. In fact, in spite of you, it is love that is keeping you alive. I repeat: in spite of you, it is love that is keeping you alive. Lose faith in unconsciousness. If you are conscious, then nothing can hide behind love. Then no counterfeit can deceive you.“It was something else, always in the name of love. Thus I now have no faith in love.”That is absurd. The logic is incorrect. You have not come across love; how can you lose faith in love? Dig a little more, go to the very end of it: you will always find purer gold, the deeper you go into yourself.It is just like digging a well: you dig a well, first you just get stones, rocks, rubbish; after that layer – more pure soil; after that layer – wet soil; after that – muddy water; after that – purer water. The deeper you go, purer springs become available. And this is so inside your heart also. On the surface there is just dirt, dust, rocks, then dry earth, then wet earth – but don’t lose faith; then muddy water – don’t lose faith, you are coming closer to home; then, pure water.“I just cannot believe that we can love as we are.” That’s true – you cannot love the way you are. But there is no need to choose to remain the way you are. You can change. There is no need to cling to your structure. You can destructure it.That’s what I’m doing here; that’s all that we are trying to do together: to destructure you so that you can be realigned, so that you can be rearranged, so that the old disappears and the new is born.This is true – that the way you are you cannot love. But there is no reason to lose faith in love. Lose faith in yourself, lose faith in your ego. If it is you who is preventing you from loving, then drop this you – because love is worth it. Millions of yous are not as valuable as a single moment of love. Drop this structure. Choose the sky, don’t choose the cage. The “you” you are feeling you are, is nothing but the cage given by the society. Choose the sky, drop the cage.The fourth question:Osho,Two mornings ago I slept through the lecture and woke up at the end with the word single-mindedness on my mind. So what to do?Be single-minded. The message is so clear – what is there to ask? Your being has given you a great message.Sometimes it happens after deep sleep that you have messages from your deepest core of being. Start listening to your first thoughts in the morning; out of sleep you are very close to your being. There is more possibility, within two or three seconds of waking, to have some glimpses of your deepest being, some messages. After two, three seconds, the contact will be lost. You will again be in the world, thrown into the world. But sometimes it happens, as it happens to a few people: listening to me they fall asleep. There are different types of people.For example, just now Sheela is fast asleep, but her sleep is really beautiful: it is a sort of trance, not sleep. She is not just asleep; her sleep is luminous. She has simply relaxed. Listening to me deeply she could not remain tense. All tension is gone, so she simply relaxed, relaxed into a deeper layer of her own being. To all people from the outside she will look fast asleep. When she is back, even she may not be able to understand what has happened because to her also it may look like sleep. It is not sleep, it is a certain stage: in yoga we call it tandra. It is a midway point between waking and sleep, and without dreams.So there are two midway stages between deep sleep and waking. The ordinary stage is dreaming: if you are just in between, then you dream. Either you are awake, or you are fast asleep, or you are dreaming. And dreaming is just in the middle of waking and sleeping; it is the middle passage. This is ordinarily so.But if your meditation goes deeper, or if your love goes deeper, the first change that happens in consciousness is a change in the middle stage – dreaming stops. Now it is very difficult to say what it is. You can think about it as sleep, or you can think about it as waking; it is both together – just a balance between the two, a very balanced state.Tandra is the first glimpse, the beginning of satori. Dreams disappear first. Then in the next step, sleep disappears; and in the third step, what you call waking, that disappears. And when all three have disappeared, then arises what we call real waking. Then one becomes enlightened. Tandra is the first step – dreams are disappearing.So sometimes it happens that people fall asleep here – they are in a state of trance. Tandra can be translated as trance. For all practical purposes they are asleep, they will not be able to remember my words. But after they are back, they will remember that something very deep and silent has happened, something in their energy has changed. It is a deep relaxation. In this relaxation if some message arises, listen to it very carefully.“Two mornings ago I slept through the lecture and woke up at the end with the word single-mindedness on my mind.” That morning I had been talking about single-mindedness.The question is old. The question is concerned with the series of Zen stories.I was talking that morning about single-mindedness. You may not have heard. You were in tandra, in trance to what I was saying. But what I wanted to deliver to you has been delivered. Your being listened, your body listened, your totality drank out of me, absorbed what I was saying, what I was being here. And when you came back, as a condensed message, a gift from your deepest core to your periphery, from your center to your circumference, the word single-mindedness arose in your consciousness. Now you ask what to do? – be single-minded!And what do I mean when I say “be single-minded”? In fact, to say “be single-minded” is almost to say “be without mind” – because the mind exists only in conflict. Mind exists only as many. When the manyness has disappeared and the crowd is no longer there, we call it single-minded – or you can call it no-mind, because the mind has disappeared. Mind is many; single mind is no-mind. When you are one, together – no conflict inside, no division, all demons gone, you have become indivisible, everything joined together in a deep coherence and harmony, a single orchestra – then there is no-mind.Single-mindedness is a term from yoga tradition. No-mind means the same, but the term belongs to another tradition, Zen. But they both mean the same: don’t be a crowd, don’t be poly-psychic. Become uni-psychic, become one.The fifth question:Osho,How can I distinguish between enlightened self-love and egomania?The distinction is subtle but very clear, not difficult; subtle, but not difficult. If you have egomania, it will create more and more misery for you. Misery will indicate that you are ill. Egomania is a disease, a cancer of the soul. Egomania will make you more and more tense, will make you more and more up-tight, will not allow you to relax at all. It will drive you towards insanity.Self-love is just the opposite of egomania. In self-love there is no self, only love. In egomania there is no love, only self. In self-love you will start becoming more and more relaxed. A person who loves himself is totally relaxed. To love somebody else may create a little tension, because the other need not be always in tune with you. The other may have his or her own ideas. The other is a different world. There is every possibility of collision, clash. There is every possibility of storm and thunder because the other is a different world. There is always a subtle struggle going on. But when you love yourself, there is nobody else. There is no conflict – it is pure silence, it is tremendous delight. You are alone, nobody disturbs you. The other is not needed at all. And to me, a person who has become capable of such deep love towards himself becomes capable of loving others. If you cannot love yourself, how can you love others? It must first happen at close quarters, it must first happen within you, to spread towards others.People try to love others, not being at all aware that they have not even loved themselves. How can you love others? That which you don’t have you cannot share. You can give to others only that which you already have with you.So the first and the most basic step towards love is love of oneself; but it has no self in it. Let me explain it to you.The “I” arises only as a contrast to the “thou.” “I” and “thou” exist together. The “I” can exist in two dimensions. One dimension is “I-it”: you, your house; you, your car; you, your money – “I-it.” When there is this “I,” this “I” of “I-it,” your “I” is almost like a thing. It is not consciousness; it is fast asleep, snoring. Your consciousness is not there. You are just like things, a thing amidst things: part of your house, part of your furniture, part of your money.Have you watched it? A man who is too greedy about money, by and by starts having the qualities of money. He becomes just money. He loses spirituality, he is no longer a spirit. He is reduced to a thing. If you love money, you will become like money. If you love your house, by and by you will become material. Whatsoever you love, you become. Love is alchemical. Never love the wrong thing, because it will transform you. Nothing is so transforming as love. Love something which can raise you higher, to higher altitudes. Love something beyond you. That is the whole effort of religion: to give you a love-object like God so that there is no way to fall down. One has to rise.One sort of “I” exists as “I-it,” another sort of “I” exists as “I-thou.” When you love a person, another type of “I” arises in you: “I-thou.” You love a person, you become a person.But what about self-love? – there is no “it” and there is no “thou.” “I” disappears, because “I” can exist only in two contexts: “it” and “thou.” “I” is the figure, “it” and “thou” function as the field. When the field disappears the “I” disappears. When you are left alone, you are, but you don’t have an “I,” you don’t feel any “I.” You are simply a deep amness. Ordinarily we say “I am.” In that state, when you are deep in love with yourself, “I” disappears. Only amness, pure existence, pure being remains. It will fill you with tremendous bliss. It will make you a celebration, a rejoicing. There will be no problem in distinguishing between them.If you are getting more and more miserable, then you are on the trip of being an egomaniac. If you are becoming more and more tranquil, silent, happy, together, then you are on another trip – the trip of self-love. If you are on the trip of ego you will become destructive to others – because the ego tries to destroy the “thou.” If you are moving towards self-love, the ego will disappear. And when the ego disappears, you allow the other to be himself or herself – you give total freedom. If you don’t have any ego you cannot create an imprisonment for the other you love, you cannot create a cage. You allow the other to be an eagle in the high heavens. You allow the other to be himself or herself – you give total freedom.Love gives total freedom. Love is freedom – freedom for you and freedom for the object of your love. Ego is bondage – bondage for you and bondage for your victim. But ego can play very deep tricks with you. It is very cunning, and subtle are its ways: it can pretend to be self-love.Let me tell you one anecdote:Mulla Nasruddin’s face lit up as he recognized the man walking ahead of him down the subway stairs.He slapped the man so heartily on the back that the man nearly collapsed, and cried, “Goldberg, I hardly recognized you! Why, you have gained thirty pounds since I saw you last. And you have had your nose fixed, and I swear you are about two feet taller.”The man looked at him angrily. “I beg your pardon,” he said in icy tones, “but I don’t happen to be Goldberg.”“Aha!” said Mulla Nasruddin, “so you have even changed your name?”The ego is very cunning and very self-justifying, very self-rationalizing. If you are not very alert it can start hiding itself behind self-love. The very word self will become a protection for it. It can say, “I am your self.” It can change its weight, it can change its height, it can change its name. And because it is just an idea, there is no problem about it: it can become small, it can become big. It is just your fantasy.Be very careful. If you really want to grow in love, much carefulness will be needed. Each step has to be taken in deep alertness so ego cannot find any loophole to hide behind.Your real self is neither “I” nor “thou”; it is neither you nor the other. Your real self is altogether transcendental. What you call “I” is not your real self. “I” is imposed on reality. When you call somebody “you,” you are not addressing the real self of the other. Again, you have imposed a label on it. When all the labels are taken away, the real self remains – and the real self is as much yours as it is others. The real self is one.That’s why we go on saying that we participate in each other’s beings, we are members of each other. Our real reality is God. We may be like icebergs floating in the ocean – they appear to be separate – but once we melt, nothing will be left. Definition will disappear, limitation will disappear, and the iceberg will not be there. It will become part of the ocean.The ego is an iceberg. Melt it. Melt it in deep love, so it disappears and you become part of the ocean.I have heard:The Judge looked very severe. “Mulla,” he said, “your wife says you hit her over the head with a baseball bat and threw her down a flight of stairs. What have you got to say for yourself?”Mulla Nasruddin rubbed the side of his nose with his hand, and meditated. Finally he said, “Your Honor, I guess there are three sides to this case – my wife’s story, my story, and the truth.”Yes, he is perfectly right.“You have heard about two sides of a truth,” he said, “but there are three sides” – and he is exactly right. There is your story, my story, and the truth; I and you and the truth.The truth is neither “I” nor “you.” “I’ and “you” are impositions on the vastness of the truth. “I” is false, “you” is false; utilitarian, useful in the world. It will be difficult to manage the world without “I” and “you.” Good, use them – but they are just devices of the world. In reality, there is neither “you” nor “I.” Something, someone, some energy exists with no limitations, with no boundaries. Out of it we come, and into it we disappear again.The sixth question:Osho,Even if sometimes love-like feelings arise in my heart, immediately the next moment I start feeling “This is not love, this is not love at all: it is all my hidden cravings for sex and all that.”So what is wrong in it? Love has to arise out of lust. If you avoid lust, you will be avoiding the whole possibility of love itself. Love is not lust, true; but love is not without lust – that too is true. Love is higher than lust, yes, but if you destroy lust completely, you destroy the very possibility of the flower arising out of the mud.Love is the lotus, lust is the mud the lotus arises out of. Remember it; otherwise you will never attain to love. At the most, you can pretend that you have transcended lust. Because without love, nobody can transcend lust – you can repress it. Repressed, it becomes more poisonous. It spreads into your whole system, it becomes toxic, it destroys you. Lust transformed into love gives you a glow, a radiance. You start feeling light, as if you can fly. You start gaining wings. With lust repressed you become heavy, as if you are carrying a weight, as if a big rock is hanging around your neck. With lust repressed, you lose all opportunities to fly in the sky. With lust transformed into love, you have passed the test of existence. You have been given a raw material to work with, to be creative. Lust is the raw material.I have heard:Berkowitz and Michaelson, who were not only business partners but lifelong friends, made a pact: that whichever one died first would come back and tell the other what it was like in heaven.Six months later, Berkowitz died. He was a very moral man, almost saint-like, a puritan who had never done anything wrong, who had always remained afraid of lust and sex. Michaelson waited for his dear departed holy friend to show some sign that he had returned to earth. Michaelson passed the time impatiently hoping for and eagerly awaiting a message from Berkowitz.Then one year after his death, Berkowitz spoke to Michaelson. It was late at night; Michaelson was in bed.“Michaelson, Michaelson,” echoed the voice.“Is that you, Berkowitz?”“Yes.”“What is it like where you are?”“We have breakfast, then we make love, we eat lunch then we make love, we have dinner, then we make love.”“Is that what heaven is like?” asked Michaelson.“Who said anything about heaven?” said Berkowitz. “I am in Wisconsin, and I am a bull.”Remember, this happens to people who repress sex. Nothing else can happen because that whole energy repressed becomes a load and pulls you down. You move towards lower stages of being. If love arises out of lust, you start rising towards higher being.So remember, what you want to become – a buddha or a bull – depends on you. If you want to become a buddha, then don’t be afraid of sex. Move into it, know it well, become more and more alert about it. Be careful; it is tremendously valuable energy. Make it a meditation and transform it, by and by, into love. It is raw material, like a raw diamond: you have to cut it and polish it. Then it becomes of tremendous value. If somebody gives you an unpolished, raw, uncut diamond, you may not even recognize that it is a diamond. Even the Kohinoor in its raw state is worthless. Lust is a Kohinoor: it has to be polished, it has to be understood.The questioner seems to be afraid and antagonistic: “It is all my hidden cravings for sex and all that.” There is a condemnation in it. Nothing is wrong; man is a sexual animal. That’s how we are. That’s the way life means us to be. That’s how we have found ourselves here.Go into it. Without going, you will never be able to transform it. I’m not speaking for mere indulgence. I’m saying move into it with deep meditative energy to understand what it is. It must be something tremendously valuable because you have come out of it, because the whole existence enjoys it, because the whole existence is sexual. Sex is the way God has chosen to be in the world, notwithstanding what Christians go on saying – that Jesus was born out of a virgin woman. All foolishness. They pretend that sex was not involved in Jesus’ birth. They are so afraid of sex that they create foolish stories like this: that Jesus is born out of a virgin, Mary. Mary must have been very pure, that’s true – she must have been spiritually virgin, that is true. But there is no way to enter into life without passing through the energy that sex is. The body knows no other law. And nature is all-inclusive: it believes in no exceptions, it allows no exceptions. You are born out of sex, you are full of sex energy. But this is not the end; this may be the beginning. Sex is the beginning but not the end.There are three types of people. One thinks that sex is the end also. They are the people who live a life of indulgence. They miss, because sex is the beginning but not the end. Then there are people who are against indulgence. They take the other, the opposite extreme: they don’t want sex even to be the beginning, so they start cutting it. Cutting it, they cut themselves. Destroying it, they destroy themselves, they wither away. Both are foolish attitudes.There is the third possibility: the possibility of the wise man who looks at life, who has no theories to enforce on life, who just tries to understand. He comes to see that sex is the beginning but not the end. Sex is just an opportunity to grow beyond it, but one has to pass through it.The last question:Osho,I used to think I knew what submission was. Now I see it – it was a political mind-trip to buy relations. Now that there is no place to stand but where I am, bliss has entered. Thank you for turning me on myself.It is significant to have come to an understanding of what surrender or submission is. It is one of the keys, but people are very afraid to use it – because if you surrender, submit, you are lost. It is death-like. It is as if one is committing suicide. So people go on doing other things and they call it submission, surrender.To have this understanding, this glimpse that all that you have been thinking of up to now as surrender, as submission, is not the real thing, is a great step towards transformation. Once you understand the false as the false, you are becoming capable to know the real as the real. To understand the false as the false is the beginning of understanding the real as the real. The lies have to be exposed. Once lies are exposed, truth stands nude, naked, revealed.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 2 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 2 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The milk of the lioness is seen at its bestwhen stored in a golden cup.Worshipping prospers in a proper container.The lover who wholly loves,can reach reality,comprehending the unattainable man.The secrets of deathare revealed to himwhile he is fully alive.What does he careFor other shores of life?Humanity is split. The very human mind is split because of two extremist life philosophies. Both are exaggerations, both are logical extremes.One is what people call the philosophy of ‘eat, drink and be merry’, the materialist standpoint that life is just an accident – it is not going anywhere. There isn’t any meaning in it, no significance, no coherence. You are not preparing for something. Nothing is going to happen, so you are left in the moment; make the most of it. Death is going to destroy utterly, nothing will survive, so don’t be bothered about the other shore. Don’t think in terms of goals. Don’t think that God, truth, liberation, moksha, nirvana have to be achieved. These are all just illusions; they don’t exist – empty dreams of the human mind. They are not substantial, so squeeze out of the moment whatsoever you can. But there is no undercurrent of meaning in life. Life is accidental: you are not created for any purpose.Many live that way and miss much – because there is purpose, because life is not an accident, because there is a running thread in each moment of eternity, because life is an unfoldment. Something is going to happen. The future is not barren, it is going to be creative. Preparation is needed so that you can unfold, so that your seed can become manifested, so that your essence is achieved, so you can know who you are and what this existence is.Life is not just madman’s thinking. It is very systematic. It is not chaos, it is a cosmos. There is order. Even behind disorder there is order; only eyes are needed to penetrate to that depth. On the surface maybe you can see only a sequence of moments and you cannot see eternity. On the surface maybe you can see only the body and nothing more. Just as when you go to the ocean, standing on the beach you cannot see the depth of the ocean, only the waves. But the ocean is not just waves. In fact, waves cannot exist without the ocean; the ocean can exist without the waves. Waves are not separate from the ocean. Waves are nothing but ocean waving, and ocean has tremendous depth. But to know that depth one has to go into that depth, one has to dive deep.The materialist standpoint makes life absolutely empty of meaning. Then whether you live or you commit suicide makes no difference, because life and death are just the same. Life is nothing but a way of dying. You are going to die; how you die does not matter, when you die does not matter. How long you live and then die does not matter. Nothing matters.This standpoint is a half-truth – and half-truths are dangerous, more dangerous than lies because they have something of truth in them. That something can be very, very deceiving. A complete lie is not so dangerous because it cannot deceive for long. Sooner or later you will come to know that it is a lie. Half-truths are very dangerous be-cause something is true, and that something true may keep you hooked and you may never be able to know the lie.The other extreme is that of the spiritualist. He says, “This moment is useless. Time is useless, only eternity has meaning. So don’t waste this moment in rejoicing, delighting. Don’t waste this moment, prepare for the future. Sacrifice the present for the future. Sacrifice all that you have for that which the future holds in itself as a promise. Make life a constant approach towards truth. Make life a constant effort to realize oneself, or God, or nirvana. This is not significant, but that. Here is not significant but there. The other shore is significant. This shore is to be used only as a jumping board. But you have to go to the other shore. Real life is on the other shore. On this shore there is only illusion, maya, so don’t waste your time in anything that keeps you on this shore.“Don’t be happy on this shore, because if you are happy on this shore, how will you be able to leave it? Become sad, become serious. This shore is the shore of sorrow. This shore is not the shore of life, but death. This shore is nothing but accumulated sin, so be sad that you are here, be indifferent to whatsoever this shore can give to you. Don’t be attached to anything here. Don’t fall in love with someone. Don’t fall in love with the beauty of this shore. Be alert and remember the other shore, keep your eyes on the other shore.”This too, is another extreme. It also carries half of the truth, and is as dangerous as the first extreme. This moment is also part of eternity, and this shore belongs to the river as much as the other shore. And the beauty on this shore, and the song and the poetry of this shore is as divine as the song and the poetry of the other shore. This very moment is eternity available to you. So just sacrificing this moment for the future is foolish, because the future will always come as this moment. The other shore will always come as this shore. And if you have learned a trick that spiritualists have learned, and that they have taught to the whole humanity and corrupted the mind – how to destroy this moment, how to be negative on this shore – then you will be negative anywhere. Wherever you are you will be negative. Wherever you are you will be destructive. Wherever you are you will remain sad and sorrowful. This is not religion.The Baul attitude is a great synthesis between these two polarities. The Baul understanding uses both half-truths and makes a whole truth out of it. The Bauls say, “This moment is not all, right; but to say that this moment is nothing is wrong.” The Bauls say, “Life is a preparation, but the preparation is nothing but to be blissful in this moment.” They are not materialists and they are not spiritualists. They are religious people.Religion is a great synthesis. And if you don’t understand this, you will be a victim of either this extreme or that. Or, you can be a victim of both, half-half. That’s how schizophrenia arises.Schizophrenia is not a disease that happens to a few people – it is the normal state of humanity. Everybody is divided, split. You can watch it in your own life. When you are not with a woman, with a man, not in love, you think, you fantasize about love. Love seems to be the goal. That seems to be the very meaning of life. When you are with a woman or with a man and in love, suddenly you start thinking in terms of spiritualism: “This is attachment, this is possessiveness, this is lust.” A condemnation arises.You cannot be alone and you cannot be with somebody. If you are alone you hanker for the crowd, for the other. If you are with somebody you start hankering to be alone.This is something to be understood, because everybody has to face this problem. You are born in a schizophrenic world. You have been given double standards; you have been taught materialism and you have been taught spiritualism, together. The whole society goes on teaching you contradictory things.I was staying with a vice chancellor, and he told me that he was very worried about the new generation. He has two young boys and he was worried about them. He wants them to be humble. He wants them to be true, honest; he wants them to be religious, prayerful.I said, “That’s okay. What else do you want them to be?”He said, “Of course, I would like them to succeed in life.”I insisted, “What do you mean by success?”He said, “At least I have become a vice chancellor. I would like them to be well-educated, to reach to high posts, to succeed materially as far as wealth is concerned: a good house, a good car, a good wife, respect in the society.”And then he became a little uneasy, and he said, “But why are you asking this?”I said, “I am asking this because both are contradictory. On the one hand you want your son to be humble, on the other hand you want him to be ambitious. Now both will make him just split. On the one hand he will try to carry the ideal of humility, humbleness, simplicity; on the other hand, the ideal to succeed, to be ambitious, to achieve. An ambitious man cannot be humble; a humble man cannot be ambitious. And you want him to be prayerful? And you want him to be true and honest? A man who is trying to succeed in the world has to be dishonest. Of course, he has to be dishonest in such a way that nobody ever discovers it. He has to be very cunningly dishonest. He has to pretend to honesty and remain dishonest. He has to pretend to humbleness and remain egoistic. But these are such different, diametrically opposite goals, and you put them inside one person – that person will always remain divided. If he succeeds he will think, ‘What happened to my humbleness, what happened to my prayer, what happened to my compassion?’ If he becomes humble he will think, ‘What happened to my ambition? I am nowhere.’”You are born in a schizophrenic world. Your parents were schizophrenic and your teachers were schizophrenic; your priests, your politicians are schizophrenic. They go on talking about two diametrically opposite goals, and they go on creating the split in you.The Bauls are very healthy people – not schizophrenic, not split. Their synthesis has to be understood; the very understanding will help you tremendously.They say, “This world and the other world are not opposite.” They say, “To eat, drink and be merry, and to be prayerful, are not opposite.” They say, “This shore and the other shore belong to the same river of God.” So they say that each moment has to be lived as a materialist, and each moment has to be given a direction as a spiritualist. Each moment, one has to be delightful, rejoicing, celebrating, at the same time, remaining alert and conscious, remaining fully aware about the future unfoldment. But that unfoldment is not against this moment’s rejoicing. In fact, because you rejoice in this moment, the next moment your flower opens more. The more you are happy in this moment, the more you will become capable of being happy in the next moment. If today has been a heaven, tomorrow cannot be a hell because it will be born out of today. If today has been tremendously beautiful, a day of song, a day of dance and laughter, then how can tomorrow be a day of sorrow? From where can sadness enter in? It is going to be your tomorrow. And whenever it will come, it will come as today, and you have learned the secret of how to live today.The Bauls say, “Learn from the materialist the way to live.” Learn from an Epicurean, a charvaka; learn from him the way to live this moment. Learn the direction from real spiritual people – a Buddha, a Mahavir, a Krishna – and make a synthesis out of both. Don’t divide time and eternity; don’t divide matter and mind; don’t divide earth and sky. Don’t divide the roots and the flowers, they are together. This togetherness is the goal of the Baul.And when inside you divisions disappear, and inside you there is no conflict, and inside you you are one, you become luminous. A great grace arises in you. Then you will be as happy as Epicurus and as silent as Buddha.In the soul of a Baul, Buddha and Epicurus embrace each other. And this is my goal, and this is my teaching also. If somehow you can become a Buddha without becoming an Epicurus simultaneously, you will miss much. You will become a stone Buddha; you will not be alive. Or if you can become an Epicurus without becoming a Buddha, you will miss much. You may enjoy a few fleeting moments of life, but that’s not enough. Life has more to give and you live only on the waves, you never reach the depths.I would like you to become capable to live on the waves, with the sun shining and the storm raging and great winds blowing, and to go into the depth also, where all storms cease, where deep darkness exists without any penetration from the sun, where everything is silent and peaceful and tranquil, and there is no disturbance. But I would like you to become capable of both. If one makes you incapable of the other, then you are not a very rich human being. Then you are half-human. Then half of your being is dead. Then you are paralyzed; then you are not fully alive.You must have heard what the existentialists say. They have a very basic dictum: that existence precedes essence. They say that man is born first, and then, by and by, he creates his own essence, his own soul. Man is born empty, with no content in him, just a blank paper. Then, by and by, he has to write his own autobiography on it. He has to make his own signature, he brings none – he comes as an emptiness.The Bauls say just the opposite thing. They say: Man is born with essence, the adhar manush. The essential man is always there, manifest or not manifest. The tree is already in the seed. Essence precedes existence, not otherwise. The Bauls say that life is not a creation of something new, it is just unfoldment. You already have it; it just has to be unfolded, barriers just have to be removed. Obstacles just have to be put aside and your life starts unfolding. You are like a bud – when obstacles are no more there you start flowering, your lotus opens.But that which you are going to become you already are, in essence. “Because if you are not already,” the Bauls say, “then you cannot become.” You can become only that which you are. You can become only your being. There is no other way of becoming, there is nothing else you can become. A rosebush will grow roses, a lotus plant will grow lotuses. You are already carrying your destiny, just obstacles have to be removed.This is what Bauls call preparation. To prepare oneself means to remove the obstacles on the path. If you remove hate, love starts flowing. You are not to create love, nobody can create love. If you were to create love then it would be impossible. Just remove the hate and you will see love streaming. Remove unconsciousness and you will see knowing arising in you. Remove the negative and the positive starts unfolding itself. Then the whole preparation is just negative. It is almost as if a rock is blocking a small stream: you remove the rock and the stream starts moving. With the rock blocking her path, it may not ever have been possible for her to come and be manifested.We are carrying many rocks within our beings – call them blocks in your energy – but those blocks have to be dissolved and removed.The methods of the Bauls are very simple. They say that if you can dance, many blocks will disappear from your being – because when a person dances and really moves into dance, and becomes movement, then he becomes liquid. Have you not seen it? If you have seen somebody lost in dancing, can’t you see it? – that he is no longer solid? He is flowing. The solidity is gone, he has become liquid. This liquidity melts the blocks. So dancing is the yoga of the Baul; he dances for hours together. When the moon is in the sky in the night, the Bauls will dance the whole night – because for them the moon is a symbol of their Beloved, Krishna. They call Krishna “the moon.” When the moon is there they will dance, and they will dance madly. And this dance is not a performance. It is not for somebody else to see. If somebody sees it and watches, that’s another thing. The Baul dances for him-self, for his own pleasure.Somebody asked Tulsidas, a great poet, “Why have you written Ramayana? Why?” – because he devoted his whole life to it. Said Tulsidas, “Swantahsukhai Tulsi raghunath gatha”: for my own pleasure I have been singing the story of Rama – swantahsukhai; for my own pleasure, for my sheer pleasure, but for my own pleasure. It is not a performance, it is not for somebody else. The Bauls dance swantahsukhai, for their own pleasure.Singing is another of their methods, They have chosen very aesthetic methods, not hard, but very soft methods, feminine methods, Taoist methods. They sing and they are lost completely in their singing. Singing is chanting for them, singing is prayer for them. And they sing about their Beloved, and they sing about their Lord, about their God. If you are lost in your singing you are lost in nadabrahma, you are lost in “the soundless sound.” And their singing and dancing is not a ritualized thing. There is no ritual. Each Baul is individual. You will not find two Bauls singing the same song or singing in the same way. And you will not find two Bauls dancing the same dance or dancing the same way. They don’t follow any ritual.This has to be understood, because this is very, very fundamental for them. And this I would like you to remember: if anything becomes a ritual, then drop it; it is useless now – because a ritual means a repetition. Mohammedans do their namaj in a certain way every day; it becomes a ritual. Christians do their prayer, the same prayer again and again. They become so habitual with it that no consciousness is required. They can do it and they can think many thoughts in the background. It has become robot-like. They can repeat the words. They know the words, they have repeated them so many times. It is a dead ritual.Bauls say, “Let your prayer arise in each moment. What is the need to carry the past? Can’t you talk to your God directly? What is the point of repeating the same thing again?” Today is different from yesterday – the prayer has to be new, as new as the morning sun or the morning dewdrop. Say something that arises in your heart. If nothing arises, bow down in deep silence, because he knows. He will understand your silence. Some day you feel like dancing – dance. Now that is the prayer for that moment. Some day you want to sing – but don’t repeat anybody else’s song, because that is not your heart, and that is not the way you can pour your heart into the divine feet. Let your own song arise. Forget about meter and grammar. God is not too much of a grammarian, and he is not worried about what words you use. He is more concerned about your heart; he is more concerned about your intention. He will understand. So Bauls make their own songs on the spur of the moment. It is spontaneous. They just relax in the moment: they let the dance happen, they let the singing happen.That’s why they are known as mad people, because on some day they may be quarrelling with God! It has to be so. When you love God you can quarrel also. Some day they may be very angry and they will say, “No, I’m not going to pray to you today. What have you done to me? I am very angry.” But this is beautiful; this is prayer. This will be heard. This will reach to the very core of existence. When you love, sometimes you are annoyed also. When you love, sometimes you are angry also, sometimes you dance also, sometimes you complain also. Man is very helpless, and a Baul lives in total helplessness. That’s why he leaves all possessions and becomes a beggar on the road. He leaves himself in the hands of God. He says, “I will trust you.”Just the other day I was reading one prayer of a Baul, and the Baul says, “Okay, if you want to test me, test. And if you want to give me pain, give. I will try to tolerate as much as I can. Okay.” But his talk is not mere talk; it is a communication. And he’s not repeating scripture. He creates his scripture. And when you create your scripture, only then do you live it. If it is borrowed you cannot live it. A borrowed song is not a song, and a borrowed dance is not a dance. Let it arise in you. Don’t be worried about performance, because we do performance because we are too concerned about the opinion of others. The Baul is not performing anything; his approach is direct. He talks to God as a small child talks to his father or to his mother, or a lover talks to his beloved – it is alive.The song for today:The milk of the lioness is seen at its bestwhen stored in a golden cup.Worshipping prospers in a proper container.So Bauls say, “Prepare yourself.” But when they say to prepare yourself, they don’t mean to be against the world. Their preparation is life-affirmative. When they say “prepare,” they don’t mean it as other spiritualists mean it. The other spiritualists say, “Prepare”; they are saying: drop enjoying, drop delighting in life, move against life. Start destroying all attachment, all love, all celebration. These spiritualists seem to be, in some deeper way, very masochistic. Suffering becomes a very great value for them. They start creating suffering for themselves.No, a Baul is a lover of life. When he says prepare, he says to enjoy this moment so you are ready for the next moment. Make this moment golden. Let all your moments be a series of golden moments, and you will become a golden cup.The milk of the lioness is seen at its best when stored in a golden cup. Become a golden cup before you invite God to pour himself into you. Enjoy, delight, rejoice, so that you can become capable of higher rejoicings. Celebrate this shore so that you can learn the ways of celebration and you can be called to the other shore. Only those who are ready will be called. If you are sad, gloomy, masochistic, torturing yourself, you are putting the other shore farther away. Because that shore belongs to those who can celebrate. That shore comes closer the more you celebrate. In fact, if your celebration comes to a peak, this shore turns to be that shore. When you are really at the peak of your celebration, when your dance is at the ultimate climax, immediately this shore is no more this shore, you are on the other shore. You are no more in the world, you are in God.Worshipping prospers in a proper container. A right container is needed. If you are desiring to become a container for God, if you have invited him to be your guest and you want to be his host, then you will have to learn the ways of paradise. You will have to live in such a way, herenow, that this very moment becomes a paradise. Only then can you invite God. Many people go on inviting without thinking if they are ready to receive him.If he comes, will he find you ready? If he comes, will you be able to welcome him? Have you the golden cup ready if he pours down upon you? Where will you collect him? Is your heart ready, open to receive him? Are you receptive, sensitive? Nobody asks this.Many people come to me and they say, “Where is God?” – as if it is God’s duty to prove himself, to prove where he is. And if he cannot prove himself, then they cannot trust. God is surrounding you, herenow. He is within and without. Nothing else is, only God is. But you are not ready. The golden cup is missing. You don’t have the eyes to see him, and you don’t have the ears to listen to him, and you don’t have the hands to touch him. You are not ready, and you can receive only that for which you are ready. Not even a single moment is lost. Once you are ready, immediately – not even a single moment’s gap, immediately the moment you are ready – he happens. Because he has already happened; only your readiness has to happen. Even if sometimes we try to be ready, our efforts are very half-hearted.The songwriter, Bob Dylan, gives us a modern parable that expresses quite well what I wish to say to you. On the back side of his album, John Wesley Harding, we read of three kings who visit a man named Frank. The first king explains their mission to Frank:“Mr. Dylan has come out with a new record. This record, of course, features none but his own songs, and we understand that you are the key.”“That’s right,” said Frank, “I am.”“Well then,” said the king in a bit of excitement, “could you please open it up for us?”Frank, who all this time had been reclining with his eyes closed, suddenly opened them both as wide as a tiger. “And just how far would you like to go in?” he asked.The chief of the kings replied, “Not too far, but just enough so we can say that we have been there.”Even when people are seeking God, they want only to go this far – so that they can say to the world that we have seen him. But they don’t want to go far enough – because if you go far enough into God, you never come back. They don’t want to take another step – because if you go deep, then there comes a point of no return. They only want to go a little bit, so that they can come back into the world and say to people that, “We have seen God also.” But their whole interest is in the world and the respectability that the world can give to them. They have a big bank balance, they have a big palace to live; now they even possess God in their homes.This parable is beautiful…replies the chief of the kings, “Not too far, but just enough so we can say that we have been there.”When you go to the temple you are still not going; your face is towards the marketplace. Have you seen this sometimes in you or in others? – if you are alone in the temple, you don’t enjoy your prayer very much. If there are many people watching, then there is great enthusiasm. Then you are so full of spirit. Then your prayer is great, you feel very high – not because of the prayer, but because the whole town is watching you. And they will think how religious, how virtuous, how close to God you are. You would like them to feel jealous. It is a performance. But your performance is before the people; God is out of it. You are not contacting him.Contact him alone, because it is not a performance. You are not to prove anything to anybody, you are just to open your heart.The Bauls sing,“As you wonder, sitting alone,the time approaches for death.Heedless of all, O my insane heart,you have traveled eight million timesthe painful ways of life to death,to find the measured land,the body of the man.“Why did you let such humanearth turn to wasteland?Cultivated, it could have yieldeda harvest of gold.Take up, my heart,the spade of devotion,wrench out the weeds of sin;the seed of faith will grow.”Just destroy obstacles.“Take up, my heart, the spade of devotion,wrench out the weeds of sin;the seed of faith will grow.”You are carrying the seed within you. It is already treasured in the deepest core of your being, waiting and waiting and waiting for obstacles to be removed so that it can unfold. God is your intrinsic quality; God is your destiny. You are the seed and God is going to be the flower out of this seed.“Human limbs are held togetherby a pair of lotus blossomsgrowing in the lower and the upperregions of the body.But the lotusesburst open in searchas the sun in the bodyrises and sets.”As your awareness rises and sets, your innermost lotuses open and close. Just as in the morning the sun rises in the sky on the horizon in the East, and the lotuses bloom, when night comes and the sun sets in the West, the lotuses close again. The Bauls say, Human limbs are held together by a pair of lotus blossoms…What the yogis call chakras: the vortexes of energy, the wheels of energy, the seven chakras. Bauls call them the seven lotuses.“…growing in the lower and the upperregions of the body.But the lotusesburst open in searchas the sun in the bodyrises and sets.“On which of these bloomsis the full moon born,and on whichthe darkest night of the month?”The lowest lotus is the sex lotus. If you remain there you will remain in a dark night. The last lotus, the seventh, sahasrar, is the lotus where the moon becomes full. Move from sex to love. Love is the quality and the function of the man who has come to sahasrar; and sex is the quality and the function of the man who lives at the lowest lotus.And don’t be worried, the Bauls sing,“My worries continue, for my crumbling boat that can no longer carry. Water rushes through her hulk and salt eats at her keel. My boat can bear no more the burden of water.O master of my life, open your eyes. Show me your kindness and hold me as I die.“Passions like bandits raided my boat and went off with the spoils. They cut the mooring rope and left me adrift. The master says: Wash away the stains of your heart and your boat will thrive in tranquility.”Just the stains on your heart have to be washed away. The heart just has to drop doubts, the heart has to drop suspicions. Once trust arises, you are washed clean. Trust is a tremendous cleansing of the heart. Then the lotuses open.“Sown on a slab of stone, the seed of faith dries day by day, never sprouting. You may cultivate the arid earth, but the hardened seed will yield no harvest.“Great is the woodland where the sandal grows, and the breeze, bearing the scent of sandal perfumes the neighboring trees turning them into sandalwood.”If on a very hard heart you want to sow the seed of God, it will not grow. Let your heart be soft, let it become receptive. Then it will be like the soft soil of the woodland where sandals grow. And these lines are beautiful: Great is the woodland where the sandal grows, and the breeze, bearing the scent of sandal perfumes the neighboring trees turning them into sandalwood.And when one man’s seed flowers not only is he perfumed, all those who come in contact with him become sandalwood. Hence, the glory of satsang, the glory of the presence of a master. He has become a sandalwood. Just coming in contact with him you will be perfumed, and your own seed will start sprouting.“Gathering planks and pieces of metal you build a boat to float on the sea, but the elements are alien to water. The boat sails and the boat sinks but the tie of love is never torn.”If the vehicle is not right, if the preparedness is not right, then the whole effort will be lost. You can make a heavy boat, but then it will sink. It will not float in the sea. The Bauls say that only in the boat of love, in soft, feminine passivity, in the boat of songs and dances, does one reach to the other shore. Become more feminine, more soft, like soft soil, and throw out all hard stones from your heart. We ordinarily do just the opposite, we go on gathering doubts and suspicions. We go on destroying our own soil.Worshipping prospers in a proper container. The lover who wholly loves, can reach reality, comprehending the unattainable man.The lover who wholly loves, can reach reality, comprehending the unattainable man. Love is the path of the Baul; love, and nothing else – wholly in love, totally in love, total trust.“To find nectar, stir the cauldron on the fire, and unite the act of loving with the feeling for love.”Ordinarily people love, but they don’t have a feeling for love. They exploit love. They even act like lovers – but their love is in the service of gratification. They don’t have a feeling for love. They don’t love love. They don’t have respect, reverence for love. Love remains a lust; it never becomes worship, prayer.“To find nectar, stir the cauldron on the fire, and unite the act of loving with the feeling for love. Distill the sweetness of the heart and reach the treasures, devoting yourself to those wholly devoted.”If you can find a person who is wholly devoted to God, then devote yourself to that person – because love cannot be taught, it can only be caught. Nobody can teach you the ways of love; you will have to live in close vicinity of a lover. Nobody can teach you how to pray: you will have to live in close vicinity of one who is in prayer. Watching him, feeling him, moving around him, tasting the flavor of his being, will teach you what prayer is. Then prayer will not become a ritual. Then prayer will be a flowering within you, a spontaneous arising of a new vision.Distill the sweetness of the heart and reach the treasures, devoting yourself to those wholly devoted. That is the relationship between a master and a disciple. Bauls move in search of a master. Whenever they find somebody whose song, whose dancing is prayerful…and there is no intellectual criterion for knowing it; you have just to be with someone.How do you know that a person is in love? What is the criterion? Just be with him and see: see how he behaves, see how he responds. See his tears and his songs. Watch his moods in different moments. By and by, you will be able to feel what worship, what love, what prayer is. Yes, it cannot be taught, but it can be caught.“Will the day ever dawn when the treasured man of my heart will become my own? Though not cast in any shape, the man is evidenced in the ways of love.”There is no proof for God, but there is enough proof in those people who have loved him. There is no proof that God exists, but there is enough proof that a Meera existed, that Chaitanya existed. There is enough proof because we have seen a transfiguration happening in Meera, we have seen the transmutation happening in Chaitanya. We have seen, they were ordinary metal suddenly becoming gold. We don’t know God exists; there is no proof – but is it not enough proof? The Bauls say, …the man is evidenced in the ways of love. That is the only evidence.Vivekananda went to Ramakrishna. He wanted a proof for God, and Ramakrishna started laughing in his mad way. And suddenly, he touched Vivekananda’s heart with his feet. Vivekananda fell into a swoon, a trance. The friends that had come with Vivekananda were all worried: “What has happened?” And Vivekananda was not the sort to fall easily into a trance. He was an intellectual, atheistic, skeptical, well trained in logic and philosophy. What had happened? What had this man done? And when Vivekananda came back, he was a totally different man. Then Vivekananda tried in thousands of ways to escape from this man Ramakrishna, but it was impossible. It was as if a great magnet was pulling him. He would escape for a few days and then come back, almost against his will. One day he would again find himself sitting before Ramakrishna, and he would tell Ramakrishna, “Leave me alone. Why are you haunting me?” Ramakrishna said, “What can I do? You asked, ‘Is there any God, is there any proof?’ I don’t know any proof. All that I know is that he is in me, so I allowed him to touch you. What else can I do? Now it is for you to decide whether God is or not.”There is no proof, but there are enough proofs; no direct proof, but many indirect evidences.“Will the day ever dawn when the treasured man of my heart will become my own? Though not cast in any shape, the man is evidenced in the ways of love. Those who are absorbed by the flavors of feelings and are wholly living with the knowledge of death have won their foes – pride and envy, lust and anger, ignorance and greed. If your life, flowing with life,longs for the man, the man will come with kindly steps. Look at the worlds of gods, demons and man – all held in your body. He is already there.”God has already penetrated you: the news may not have reached yet, the gospel may not have been heard yet.The English word gospel is very beautiful. In the old English it was “godspell,” then it became “gospel.” Godspell is even better. He has already penetrated you. He is already there but the news has not reached you. Your head is too far away from your heart. Bring your head a little closer.The man is evidenced in the ways of love…, and the worlds of gods, demons and man – all are held in your body. He is already there, holding all together. The Bauls go on crying and weeping; their tears are the proof. Their weeping is so authentic, their crying is so authentic that once coming in contact with a Baul, you will never ask whether God exists or not.“I shall not open my eyes again if I don’t see him at first sight. Can you then tell me through the sense of smelling and through my listening ears that he has come – that he has come to the sky in the East – that your friend has come to the sky of the East?”I shall not open my eyes if I don’t see him at first sight. They go on singing, praying. Their song is so true, their prayer is so penetrating. How it is possible without God? Yes, God is evidenced in the ways of love. The lover who wholly loves can reach reality, comprehending the unattainable man. The emphasis is on wholly, totally, utterly, completely. Immediately, when you are total you are ready, the golden cup is ready.The secrets of deathare revealed to himwhile he is fully alive.What does he carefor the other shores of life?The secrets of death are revealed to him while he is fully alive. …And the lover knows what death is. The lover knows that death is not. Only the lover knows that death is the most false thing in existence. Why? How does the lover come to know that death is not? – because the lover has already died in his love. And he finds himself, he is still there – not only there but more so, so much so that he has never been before. Dying, he is for the first time living totally. He dies in the love of God, in the love of the Beloved. He surrenders himself utterly, unconditionally.Just a few days ago Girisha wrote me a letter. She thinks she has too much work in the ashram. Maybe that’s true, maybe it is not true. But in the letter she wrote something which is very meaningful. She wrote in the letter, “I have too much work and it is not surrender, it is sacrifice.” Now surrender knows nothing about sacrifice.If you have known surrender, you are sacrificed already. You are no more there to be sacrificed. Surrender means you have died already. If you have surrendered to me, then there is no problem. Then, more work or less work – it has nothing to do with you. It is irrelevant. Then I have to look after it, I have to decide what work is more and what work is less. And I have to decide how much you have to be put into work and how long, and how much you have to be forced and pushed in a certain direction. But for you, it is not any longer a problem – you are surrendered. But if you think that it is becoming a sacrifice and not a surrender, then you are not surrendered at all. Then anything will look like sacrifice. A lover knows nothing of sacrifice. When you are surrendered, you are dead as far as your ego is concerned. Then whatsoever happens, you not only accept it, you accept in deep gratitude.The lover knows the secrets of death, because he has moved into death already through his love. There are only two deaths: one that happens at the end of your life, and the other that can happen between death and birth – the death of love, lovedeath. One who dies in love never dies again. Then all deaths are finished for him. He’s already resurrected. He has come to know that only the ego dies. If you drop the ego then you are deathless.The secrets of death are revealed to him while he is fully alive. What does he care for other shores of life? In that tremendous moment of surrender – this shore turns to be the other shore, this world becomes the other world. What does he care for other shores…? I have been reading a very significant story:Four hundred years ago a gardener planted a small pine in one inch of soil in a shallow dish. He trimmed each root and branch as the tree grew. When he died, his son took up the task, and so on down through nineteen generations. Today that tree stands in the Kovala Gardens of Tokyo, never having outgrown the original dish. After four hundred years it is only twenty inches high, and a twisted top some thirty-six inches across.That little tree shouts a warning to everybody. The mind and soul can be cut back just like the tree, always with the same result – a dwarf.If you are not growing your roots into life, if you are not growing your roots and spreading your roots in love, in trust, you will remain a dwarf. You will never become the essential man, adhar manush. Grow, grow towards depth – because when your roots grow towards depth, your branches grow towards height. Depth and height grow together. The deeper you go into the earth, the higher you go into the sky. The deeper you go into this shore, the closer you reach to the other shore.Love, love life, love all that surrounds you, and let your roots spread as far and as wide as possible. You will start touching the feet of God. Your flowers will start being offered to the divine feet. Otherwise, remember – you will remain a dwarf.Love is a must. It is the only nourishment for the soul. The body can exist with food; the soul can exist only with love. Let it not remain just a word; allow it to become a penetrating experience.Love is worship for the Bauls, love is prayer for the Bauls, love is God for the Bauls.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 2 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 2 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why doesn't trust arise out of the decision to trust?Trust is not a decision on your part. You cannot decide for it. When you are finished with doubting, when you have come to see doubt through and through and you are completely convinced of the futility of the doubt, trust arises. You have to deal with the doubt, you are not to do anything about trust. Your trust will not be of much importance because your trust, your decision, will always be against doubt. And trust is not contrary to doubt; trust is simply the absence of doubt. When doubt is not, trust is.Trust is not the opposite, remember. Notwithstanding what the dictionaries say, trust is not opposite to doubt, just as darkness is not opposite to light. It appears opposite, but it is not – because you cannot destroy light by bringing darkness in. You cannot bring darkness in. There is no way to destroy light by throwing darkness on it. Darkness has never been able to destroy the small flame of a very small candle. The whole darkness of the existence is impotent before a small candle.Why is it so? If darkness is opposite, inimical, antagonistic, then it should be capable sometimes to defeat light. It is sheer absence. Darkness is because light is not. When light is, darkness is not. When you put a light on in your room, have you watched what happens? Darkness does not go out of the room; it is not that darkness escapes out of the room. It is found simply not to be there. It never was – it is pure negativity.Doubt is like darkness, trust is like light. If you have doubt, then you will decide for trust. Otherwise there is no need to decide for trust. Why decide for it? You must be having tremendous doubt. The greater the doubt, the greater the need is felt to create trust. So whenever somebody says, “I trust very strongly,” remember that he is fighting against a very strong doubt. That’s how people become fanatics. The fanaticism is born because they have created a false trust. Their doubt is alive, their doubt is not finished. The doubt has not disappeared, the doubt is there. And to fight with the doubt they have created a trust against it. If the doubt is very strong, they have to cling fanatically to their trust. Whenever somebody says that, “I am a staunch believer,” remember, deep down in his heart he is carrying disbelief. Otherwise, there is no need to be a strong believer. Simple trust is enough – why strong? If you say to somebody, “I love you very strongly,” something is wrong. Love is enough.Love is not a quantity. When somebody says, “I love you very much,” something is wrong, because love is not a quantity. You cannot love less and more. Either you love or you don’t love. The division is very clear-cut.Just a few days ago a new book had come, and the first copy I always give to Vivek. I wrote “With love to Vivek.” She told me, “Why not much love?” I said, “That is impossible. I cannot write that” – because to me, more or less is not possible. I can simply write “love”; ‘much love” is absurd. Quantity is not a question, but simple quality. When you say “much,” you must be hiding something behind that “much”; something of hatred, something of anger, something of jealousy, but something which is not love. To hide that, you have to show your over-enthusiasm, what you call “gung ho”: much love, strong trust, staunch belief. Whenever you are too much of a Christian, you are not a Christian at all. If you are too much of a Hindu, you have not understood at all.Just the other night a young girl was saying to me that she was afraid. She wants to take sannyas but she is afraid, “Because it will be putting Christ as number two; you will become the first.” She was very puzzled. “It will be putting Christ behind you,” she told me. I told her, “Just look into my eyes. If you really love Christ then you will find Christ in me. You will not find two persons. But if you are a Christian, then it is difficult. Then forget all about sannyas.” One who loves Christ can love me – there is no conflict; one who loves Krishna can love me, there is no conflict. But if one is a Hindu, one is a Mohammedan, one is a Christian, then it is difficult. A Christian is not a lover of Christ. To be a Christian is a decision on your part; doubt has not disappeared, doubt has been repressed.Don’t repress doubt. Rather, just on the contrary, watch, look deeply into it, analyze it. Don’t leave any part of it unanalyzed, unknown. Become acquainted with all the layers of the doubting mind. That very acquaintance, that penetration into doubt, will dissolve doubt. One day suddenly you will awake one morning full of trust – not as your decision. It cannot be a decision because trust is something you are born with, doubt is a learned thing. Trust is tacit, inborn.Every child trusts. As he grows, doubt arises. Doubt is learned. So trust is there always as an undercurrent in your being. You just drop doubt, trust will arise. And then trust has a tremendous beauty because it is pure. It is not against doubt, it is simply absence of doubt. The rock has been removed and the stream has come bubbling up, flowing.So please, don’t try to make a decision about it. Your decision will be a delay; and the more you decide, the more you will find, deep inside, the worm of doubt increasing. Then you will be divided in two and you will never be at ease, and there will be continuous agony.So many people believe in God, and deep down is doubt – throbbing, alive, waiting for its opportunity to destroy the trust. And the trust is bogus because the trust is on the periphery, and the doubt has reached almost to the very core of your being. Never decide about love, about trust, about God. These things are not your decisions. They are not arguments, they are not conclusions.When doubt is no more there, trust is. It happens. It flows. It arises out of your innermost core, from the innermost shrine. You start listening to a new music of being, a new style of being, a new way of being. It is not of the mind, it is of the being.The second question:Osho,What really is the difference between a Baul, a Tantrika, a Bhakta, and a Sufi? Do they all belong to the path of love? They seem to be intermingled. Please enlighten.The boundaries are overlapping. They are all on the path of love, but still there are subtle distinctions. Even with overlapping boundaries they have something special: a Tantrika, a Baul, and a Bhakta. The Sufi is not different from a Bhakta. A Sufi is the Bhakta on the Mohammedan path; a Bhakta is the Sufi on the Hindu path. There is no difference between a Bhakta and a Sufi, so we will not discuss that. The difference is only of terminology. The Sufis use the Mohammedan terminology, the Bhakta uses the Hindu terminology. The difference is not of any importance; it is just language. But these three: a Baul, a Tantrika and a Bhakta have to be understood.Love has three possibilities: sex, the lowest; love, higher than sex; and prayer, the highest.The Tantrika remains sex oriented. The Tantrika in fact avoids love because love will become an entanglement. He remains a pure technician of sex. With the sex energy he works like a scientist: aloof, detached. He does not bring love into it. He transforms the energy. Love arises in him, prayer also, but those are consequences. They follow like shadows, but the orientation is sex energy. His whole work, his whole lab, is there at the sex center. He works there, unattached, aloof, almost indifferent to the person.With whomever the Tantrika is making love, he remains completely aloof, far away. That is part of the Tantra methodology: that you should not be attached to the person. That’s why Tantrikas say: “Don’t do Tantra techniques with your wife or with your beloved. No, find somebody with whom you are not attached at all, so that you can become a pure technician.” It is scientific.It is just like this: you may be a great surgeon and you may have done thousands of surgeries, but when it comes to operating on your own wife your hands will start trembling. If it comes to operating on your own child you will have to call another surgeon. He may be not so expert as you, but still you will have to call somebody else – because the surgeon needs to be completely aloof, not concerned. Only then can surgery be perfectly scientific.The Tantrika is absolutely of the scientific attitude. He finds a woman or a man with whom he is not attached at all. And before he even moves into a Tantric relationship with somebody, months are needed to prepare. And the whole preparation is: how to avoid love, how not to fall into deep contact with the other person. Otherwise, the whole method will not be of any use.The Baul is love oriented. If sex comes into a Baul’s life, it is just like a shadow. It is part of his love. He’s not afraid of sex, but he is not sex oriented. He loves a woman: because he loves the woman he wants to share all that he has, sexual energies included. But sex is not his lab; his lab is love, deep contact, care for the other person – so much so that you become less important and the other becomes more important.That which is a hindrance on the path of the Tantrika is the path of the Baul. If sex comes, it is okay. If it doesn’t come, that too is okay. Sex is not the goal. And he is not working on the crude energy of sex, he is working on the subtle energy of love. As the Tantrika is working on a seed, the Baul is working on the flower, the Bhakta or Sufi is working on the fragrance. They become more and more subtle.Prayer is the highest form of sex energy, higher than love. It is the fragrance; very subtle, all grossness gone. The Bhakta or the Sufi works on prayer. If, following prayer, love enters, it is allowed. There is no problem about it. Even if, following love, sex enters, it is allowed – but the whole attention is focused on prayer. So if a Bhakta falls in love with somebody, it is a form of prayer. The other is divine, the other is a god or goddess. He makes love sacred. The Baul is just in the middle of the Tantrika and the Bhakta or Sufi. He is a bridge.There are difficulties with the Tantrika. The difficulty is it is very gross, and the possibility is that you may be lost in that grossness. It may overpower you. Sex is tremendous energy, wild energy, very stormy, and you are moving in an ocean. The ocean is in deep storm, and you have a very small boat, and it is very dangerous. It is very easy to enter on the path of Tantra, it is very difficult to come out of it. If a hundred enter, only one may survive – because you are playing with wild energy. The energy is so great that you may be overpowered by it; the very possibility is there.Prayer is very difficult – fragrance – you cannot see it, it is very elusive. It is very difficult to enter on the path of prayer. If you enter, you come out of it. It is very easy to enter on the path of Tantra, but going is easy, coming is very difficult. On the path of prayer entering is very difficult, coming out is very easy. The entry is almost impossible – you don’t even know anything about love; what to say about prayer? It is just a word with no content. It is too abstract, it is too far away. You cannot make any contact with it, with what prayer is. So, at the most, you can become a victim of a certain ritual. You can repeat a prayer: that will be just verbal, mind stuff, a mind game. It will not be possible ordinarily to enter on the path of prayer.The path of the Baul is just in the middle. Entry is not as easy as on the path of Tantra, and not as difficult as on the path of prayer. It is humanly possible. The Baul is very realistic, very down-to-earth, and it seems to be the safest path possible. Just in the middle, balancing both – on the one hand sex, on the other hand prayer, and the Baul walks just in the middle.The third question:Osho,You tell me to follow my feelings, and when I finally dare to and am feeling much freer and simpler and happier, you say I am immature. What does it mean?It is from Madhuri.It means exactly what it says: you are immature. What is immaturity? Whatsoever you are doing, you are doing almost unconsciously. Yes, I say be spontaneous, but I don’t mean be unconscious. I mean be alert and spontaneous. By “being spontaneous” you immediately understand to become driftwood; so whatsoever happens, whatsoever and wheresoever the mind leads you, you are led by it. You become accidental. Immaturity makes a man accidental; maturity gives man a direction.Maturity comes from the Latin root, maturas, which means “to be ripe.” A fruit is mature when the fruit is ripe, when it has become sweet and is ready to be digested, can be eaten, can become part of anybody’s life. A mature person is one who has come to know what love is, and love has made him sweet.Now what Madhuri is doing is not love, it is just sexual fantasy – so one day moving with one man, another day moving with another man. This can be very destructive. Remember, what I say has to be understood very accurately, otherwise my sayings will not be helpful. They will become harmful.It happened:Mulla Nasruddin came home. His wife asked him, “What happened Nasruddin, when you asked your boss for a raise today?”“He was like a lamb,” said Mulla Nasruddin.“Really? What did he say?”“Bah!”Please listen to what I say carefully, and don’t give it your own interpretation. Don’t distort its meaning. Be spontaneous, but you can be spontaneous only when you are very aware. Otherwise you will become an accident – one moment going to the north, another moment going to the south. You will lose all direction.A spontaneous man is ready to respond to each moment. Sometimes some may see that he is moving to the north, and sometimes others may see that he is moving to the south, but his inner direction remains absolutely certain. His inner direction remains arrowed. He may have to adjust to circumstances, but once adjusted, he again gains energy, momentum, and starts moving towards his direction. He has a feel for the direction, but that feel comes only when you are very, very alert.Otherwise, just spontaneity will reduce you to being animals; animals are spontaneous, but they are not buddhas. So just spontaneity cannot make one a buddha – something more, something plus is needed: spontaneity plus awareness. Then you are not a mechanism, and you are not driftwood either.The doctor on an ocean liner notified the steward that a man had died in stateroom forty-five. The usual instructions to bury the body were given.Some time later the doctor peeped into the cabin and found the body still there. He called the steward’s attention to the matter, and the latter said, “I thought you said cabin forty-nine. I went to that cabin and noticed that one of them was in the bunk.‘Are you dead,’ says I?‘Pretty nearly,’ says he; so I buried him.”Even if a person says that he is pretty dead, he is alive. Don’t be too linguistic, don’t be too literal. I say listen to your feelings, but I don’t mean that you should become fragmented. I mean: listen to your feelings, but your feelings have to become a garland. Your feelings should not be like a heap of flowers. Your feelings should be like a garland, a thread running inside the flowers. Maybe nobody is able to see it, but a thread is joining them in a continuity: that continuity is the direction. Unless your feelings are a garland, you will disperse into fragments, you will fall into pieces, you will lose your togetherness.Yes, I had told Madhuri to be spontaneous, to move according to her feelings. But I have been insisting continuously to do everything, but always remember that awareness is a requirement, a basic requirement – then do whatsoever you want to do. If there is something you are doing for which awareness becomes a hindrance, then don’t do it. If there is something you are doing and awareness does not become a hindrance to it but on the contrary helps it, do it. That is the whole definition of the right and the wrong. The wrong is that which cannot be done with awareness, for which unawareness is a must. The right is that which can be done only with awareness, for which unawareness has to be dropped, otherwise it cannot be done. Awareness is a must. The right is that for which awareness is a must, the wrong is that for which unawareness is a must. That is my definition of sin and virtue. And you are to decide; the responsibility is yours.It happened:A worried woman went to see her doctor and told him that her husband appeared to have no virility, and had no interest in her whatsoever.He gave her a prescription, saying “These will help him. Next time you and your husband are having a quiet meal together, just slip a couple of these pills into his coffee and they will make him spontaneous. And then come and see me again.”Two weeks later she went to see her doctor again, and he asked her if his remedy had been successful.“Oh yes, doctor,” she said. “Absolutely marvelous. I slipped the pills into my husband’s coffee and after two sips he began making love to me.”The doctor smiled. “Fine. No complaints then?”She said, “Well, there is one. My husband and I can’t ever show ourselves in that restaurant again.”Now remember Madhuri, what I say has to be under-stood, because finally, you will decide where to slip those pills. I cannot follow you. You will decide where to be spontaneous, how to be spontaneous – and unconsciousness is not spontaneity. Spontaneity is very alert, very responsible, very caring. You are simply fooling around.“You tell me to follow my feelings and when I finally dare to, and I am feeling much freer and simpler and happier, you say I am immature. What does it mean?”I give you a certain rope to see what you do with my assertions, with my statements. I give you a certain rope, but when I see you are going crazy, then I have to pull you back. I have been watching, waiting to see what Madhuri is doing, but enough is enough.Let me tell you one anecdote:Abdul the Arab was marooned in the desert. His camel had sat down and flatly refused to get up. At long last another Arab came by, and Abdul told him his problem.“I can fix that,” said the second Arab, “only it will cost you five rupees.”“That’s cheap at the price,” said Abdul, “you go ahead.”So without further ado the Arab crouched down by the side of Abdul’s camel and whispered a few words in its ear. Suddenly the camel leapt to its feet and took off across the desert like a greyhound.Abdul was amazed and delighted. “That trick is worth more than five rupees,” he said.“I know,” said the second Arab, “and I want five hundred rupees from you before I tell you the magic words you have to use to catch him.”That is only half the story: now you will have to catch him…now five hundred rupees are needed. Unless the second Arab utters the same mantra into Abdul’s ear, he cannot catch the camel.Madhuri, your desires are running like greyhounds. It was easy; it cost you only five rupees, but now you will have to catch your camel and it will cost five hundred rupees. It will be more arduous.To just move with desires one always feels simple, because one becomes almost like an animal. It is almost felt like happiness because there is no tension, no responsibility. You don’t care a bit about the other person. Now the camel has to be caught.Oh yes, I told you to be free with your feelings; now I tell you to be aware. It will be more arduous, but if you can be aware, then you will really become simple. This simplicity is nothing: this is just regression into childhood, or regression into animality. The simplicity I want you to attain is the simplicity of a buddha; not a regression, but the very climax of life. This simplicity is not going to help much. It has not helped anybody. This simplicity is very primitive, childish, immature.But I wanted to see what you do, and I have seen what you are doing. Now become more alert. Bring a discipline to your life, a direction. Become more caring, more loving, more responsible. Your body has to be respected, it is the very shrine of God. You are not to treat it the way you are treating it; it is disrespectful. But it will be hard, I know. But I create situations in which hard things have to be done, because that is the only way to grow.The fourth question:Osho,What is the difference between patience, postponement, and sheer stupidity?Yes, the question is significant because people can get confused about these three.Patience is very alert, patience is very active, patience is very expectant. If you are waiting for somebody – a friend is to call – you may be sitting just by the door, but you are very attentive, alert. Any noise on the road, any car passing by, and immediately you start looking – maybe the friend has come? The wind on your doors, and suddenly you are alert – maybe he has knocked. Dead leaves in the garden moving hither and thither, and you come out of your home – maybe he has come. Patience is as active as that. It is a waiting. It is not dull, it is very radiant. It is not unconscious, it is not like a stupor. It is like a flame burning bright. One waits. One can wait infinitely, but one waits, expectant, active, alert, watchful.Just the opposite is sheer stupidity. You can just be dull, idiotic, stupid, in a stupor, and you can think that you are waiting, you are patient. And you can enjoy that others who are working hard to reach somewhere are impatient people; you are very patient. But remember, patience needs work. Patience is not inactivity. A patient person works patiently. He does not demand, he does not demand too much, he does not demand in a hurry, he does not demand instant satori or samadhi. He knows it is arduous, the path is hard. He knows it is difficult, a thousand and one are the pitfalls. To be lost is easy, to achieve is difficult. It is almost impossible to achieve, and he knows it – but that is the attraction, that is the challenge, God is impossible, but that’s the beauty of it, that’s the challenge. The challenge has to be accepted. He works hard at it and yet remains patient, knowing well his limitations, knowing well the very impossibility of the desire.It is an impossible passion: to know God, to be God. It is unbelievable that it happens. That’s why people go on denying that Buddha ever existed, that Jesus is a myth, that Krishna is just the imagination of the poets. Why do so many people insist that Buddha is just a myth, that Jesus and Krishna never existed? Why? They are simply saying that the whole thing seems to be impossible – it cannot happen.In a way they are right: it cannot happen, but still it happens. It happens very rarely. It happens so rarely that you can say that it does not happen at all. Once in a while, thousands of years pass, then somebody becomes enlightened – almost as if it never happens.Knowing this, one waits; but one does not wait in inactivity, because then the waiting will be futile. The waiting has to be just like the farmer waiting. He sows the seeds; they will come in season. It cannot be hurried. There is no point in going again and again to the field, digging and seeing whether the seeds have sprouted yet or not, because that will be very destructive. That will not allow the seeds to sprout at all. That impatience will destroy the seeds. He waits, he waters – nothing is seen for months. Nothing comes above the earth, but he waits with deep patience, goes on working, caring about the field, praying and expectant that they are coming, that they are on the way. And one day, they are there.Sheer stupidity is hiding your inactivity, your inertia, your lethargy, in beautiful terms. A lethargic person can say, “I’m not in a hurry, I’m waiting,” and he will not do anything. Then you are waiting in vain; it is not going to happen. Yes, the seeds will sprout in season, but the seeds have to be sown; otherwise they will not sprout.So watch inside you. These distinctions are not distinctions of one man, these distinctions exist in each man. These are not categories, that somebody is “sheer stupid” and somebody is “very patient.” No, these moods exist together in everybody. There is a stupid moment in your life, there is a patient moment in your life, and postponement is just in the middle of these two.Postponement is very cunning; patience is very alert, Stupidity is inactive, unconscious. Patience is conscious, postponement is subconscious. Postponement has a double bind in it: you want to do something and yet you are not ready to do anything for it. It is a very cunning state of affairs. You want to meditate, but you say, “Tomorrow.” If you really want, then today is the right time, because tomorrow never comes. If you really want, then meditate right now, because there is no point in postponing it. How can you be certain that tomorrow will ever come? It may never come. And if it is really important to you and your desire is intense for it, then you will not waste a single moment in postponing it. You will postpone everything else, but you will meditate. You postpone only that which is not significant to you, or, you are playing with yourself, being cunning with yourself. One part of your mind says, “Yes, it is important.” Another part of mind says, “Yes, it is important, I know; that’s why tomorrow we will start.” You are satisfied.A man was challenged by his good friend as to who was the more energetic person. The first said he got up at six, went for a walk, breakfasted at eight, did an hour’s work, then to the office, half an hour for lunch, and so on. The detailed work and alternating exercise stretched out till eleven p.m.“My goodness,” said the friend, “how long have you been doing this?”“I start on Monday.”God is always postponed, love is always postponed, meditation is always postponed. Anger, greed, hatred, never; the devil, never. When the devil invites you, you are immediately ready. Immediately, instantly you stand up. You say, “I’m coming!” When somebody insults you, you don’t say “Tomorrow I will be angry;” but with love you always go on postponing. For prayer you say, “Yes, it has to be done.” This is a very cunning state.You don’t want to recognize the fact that you don’t desire prayer, you don’t desire love, you don’t desire meditation. You don’t want to recognize the fact that you don’t have any passion for God, so you postpone in this way. You manage well. You go on doing that which you really desire, and you go on postponing that which you don’t desire at all, but you are not courageous enough to recognize the fact. At least be honest. Postponement is dishonest, very dishonest. Watch inside yourself, at what you have been postponing, and you will find that all that is beautiful you have been postponing. It is a double bind; you are divided, or you are being very clever with yourself.I have heard….A rabbi had the misfortune to run his car into the side of Father Murphy’s car. He jumped out and went to the other’s door, loud with apologies.“My dear Father Murphy, so sorry I am. Oy vey! that I should be so silly as to do this to you of all people, a fellow man of God! Are you all right?”“Oh yes, no injuries, Rabbi,” said Father Murphy. “But I am a bit shaken up.”“Of course you are,” said the Rabbi, solicitously. “Here, have a sip of this – it is good whiskey.” And he handed a hip flask to the priest who drank heartily.“Go on, Father, have another. It is all my fault. Drink deeply, don’t worry about the cost.” The priest needed no second bidding, and took another deep swig.“Won’t you have one, Rabbi?” he asked.“With the police just arriving!” exclaimed the Rabbi.The mind is very cunning. Everybody’s mind is the mind of the Jew. “Jew” is not a race, it is the innermost core of all minds. And when you are playing cunning games with others, by and by you learn the trick of playing with yourself.This is the greatest problem that every human being has to face. You have been cunning with others; that pays in the world. By and by, you have learned the trick so deeply that you forget that now you are playing the cunningness with yourself. The mind is very worldly, very Jewish. It knows no other business than business.I have heard….Abe had reached retirement a very worried man. Most of his life he had enjoyed to the full and his savings left a lot to be desired.On the morning of his retirement he turned to Rachel with a worried frown: “I don’t know how we are going to afford it. I don’t know how we can retire.”Rachel reached for a bottom drawer and pulled out a bankbook which showed regular deposits over the last forty years. Not only could they afford to retire, they were rich.“But how did you do it?” said Abe.Rachel said shyly, “Well, every time you made an advance to me in our married life, I put ten shillings away, and look how it has mounted up.”Overjoyed, he put his arms around his wife, “Oy vey, this is wonderful! But Rachel, why on earth did you not tell me before? If only I had known I would have given you all my business.”Get it?The mind is always thinking in terms of business. Even when it is love, it is business. Even when it is prayer, it is business. Even when it is God, it is business.And once you have become too accustomed to the business world, you start playing games with yourself. Be alert. Postponement is one of the most dangerous games that a man can play with himself. If you want, do it. If you don’t want, be honest; who is forcing you? Just be honest. Don’t do it, but know well that you are not going to do it because you don’t want to do it. Why be deceptive? This sincerity will help.As I see, no man can live without love if he is sincere. But many millions of people live without love because they go on postponing. One day they die, their lives completely dry and desert-like.As I see it, no man can live without God – but millions live, because they have created a false God, a substitute God, a God which is always postponed. It is easy now; you can live without God because you have a false feeling that God is there, you believe in him, and one day you are going to devote your whole life to him. That “one day” will never come. If you want that one day to come, it has already arrived – it is today. This moment is that moment of transformation.The fifth question:Osho,Someone has dared me to ask you this impertinent question – What do you do with Vivek? Anything I could possibly understand through telling?It will be difficult. Vivek is so close to me that she is constantly on the cross. She has to be; it is difficult. To be so close to me is arduous. The more you are close to me, the more the responsibility. The more you are close to me, the more you have to transform yourself. The more you feel the unworthiness, the more you start feeling how to become more worthy – and the goal seems almost impossible. And I go on creating many situations. I have to create them because only through friction does integration happen. Only through harder and harder situations does one grow. Growth is not soft; growth is painful.You ask me, “What do you do with Vivek?”I am killing her slowly. That is the only way for her to get a totally new being, to be reborn. It is a cross to be with me, and hard is the task.Let me tell you one anecdote:An unruly, problem son of a Jewish family was causing his parents much heartache by his behavior. He had been expelled from a state school.So, finally, in desperation, they sent him to a Roman Catholic school.On his return from his first day, he went straight to his room and began to do his homework.His father came back from work and asked, “Momma, well, tell me the bad news.”“No bad news, Poppa,” said Momma. “He came in as quiet as a lamb, and is now in his room doing his homework already.”“Homework?” exclaimed Poppa. “He has never done homework in his life! He must be ill!”So Poppa went to the boy’s room and said, “What is this Momma telling me, that you are doing homework? Why this change of heart, all of a sudden?”And the boy replied, “Poppa, I am the only Jewish boy in that school. On the wall opposite my desk is a picture of the last Jewish boy they had there. Oy, you should see what they did to him!”Jesus crucified.To be very close to me is to be on the cross. So Vivek has to do her homework, that’s all. That’s what I go on doing to her. Of course, she has to do more homework than any of you.The sixth question:Osho,In a recent lecture you were saying, “On the path of love, forget all about meditation; on the path of meditation, forget all about love.” I believe myself to be rather on the path of meditation, and what you are saying now about the indispensable value of love is confusing to me. I understand that speaking of the Bauls you have become a Baul, and are fully in the path of love.How should I then hear those lectures? And what is the importance of love, emotions and feelings on the path of meditation?If I am talking about the Bauls and love and devotion and prayer, and you are on the path of meditation, listen to me meditatively, that’s all. Just listen to me meditatively – then you will be growing in meditation through listening; don’t listen through the intellect. There is no need because you are on the path of meditation, so you need not worry about the details of what I am saying. You can listen very silently without being at all worried about what I am saying, what the details are. You can simply listen in deep meditation. Let listening be your meditation, and that will do. But if you listen from the intellect that will create confusion. If I am talking on the path of meditation and you are on the path of love, listen to me lovingly. You don’t lose track of your path. And then, whether I am talking on love or on meditation, you will be fulfilled. Your own path will be strengthened; your will will be made stronger.The last question:Osho,Please help me. Show me my path: love or meditation. Give me one sutra suitable to my nature.It is from Neelam. I know her. I have known her long enough, not only in this life, but in other lives also. Her path is absolutely certain – it is love.Through love she is going to achieve; through love she is going to be. Through love all that can happen will happen to her, and I can say it absolutely. I may not be so certain when others ask me. Somebody who has come very recently, I have to know better, to penetrate him more, to watch him in different situations, to watch his moods, subtle layers upon layers of being, then…but about Neelam it is absolutely certain. I have known her in this life, I have known her in other lives. Her direction is absolutely clear: love is her meditation.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 2 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 2 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Never plunge into the river of lust,you will not reach the shores. It is a river of no coasts where typhoons rage.Go to the home of beauty and form, should you wish to see the man within. His ways cross the sphere where life lives with death, and sense with insanity.Close your eyes and try to catch Him. He is slipping by.Jean-Paul Sartre says that man is a useless passion – meaningless, futile. He is right if there is nothing beyond man; if there is nothing transcendental to man, he is right because the meaning always comes from a higher source. The meaning is never in the thing in itself, it always comes from the beyond.For example, you can watch a seed; in itself it is meaningless unless it sprouts. Once it sprouts it becomes meaningful. The tree is the meaning for the seed. Now the seed exists for a certain reason. Its existence is not accidental, it is meaningful. It has to give birth, it has to create something; something that is beyond it, something that is bigger than it, something that is more comprehensive.But then, what is the meaning of the tree in itself? Again meaning disappears unless the tree can flower. The meaning of the tree is in the flowering. When it flowers, yes, there is meaning: the tree has become a mother, the tree has given birth, the tree has become significant. It was not there without any purpose; the flower is the proof. It was there meaningfully, it was there waiting for the flower.But what is the meaning of the flower in itself unless the fragrance is released to the winds? Once the fragrance is released the flower is meaningful, and so on and so forth. The meaning is always in a higher state. The meaning is always of the beyond. The meaning is transcendental.If there is nothing beyond man, then Sartre is absolutely right: then man is a useless passion running here and there, but doomed to failure. He cannot reach, cannot arrive, because there is nowhere to arrive. He cannot become, because there is no beyond to become. He cannot spread, cannot flower, cannot release the fragrance. If man ends with himself, then man is certainly useless. But man doesn’t end with himself; he is a growth. Man is a becoming, a growing, a continuous transcendence.Friedrich Nietzsche has said, “That day will be the most unfortunate day when man does not aspire to become higher, when man does not aspire to transcend himself. That day will be the most unfortunate when the arrow of man’s desire will not be moving higher than man, when there will be no target to reach, when man will be confined, closed in himself. That day will be the most unfortunate day.” It seems that the modern man is coming closer and closer to that unfortunate day. That doomsday is coming closer and closer every moment, and Sartre is going to be true if you allow him to be true.If you allow him, and you remain a seed and don’t sprout; if you allow him, and you remain a tree and don’t flower; if you allow him, and you remain a flower and don’t release your fragrance – then, of course, life is hell, just absurd, not worth living. Then to be born is to be born in misery. Then death is a blessing and life is a curse. But it is not so; it depends on you whether your life will be meaningful or meaningless. It depends on you.That is the whole point of religion – that meaning is not already given, it has to be created. That meaning is not already transferred to you; only the potentiality. Only the possibility, only the opportunity is there – you can flower into a meaningful existence, or you can wither away, useless. Great is the responsibility. If you don’t do it, nobody else can do it for you. You cannot rely on servants. Life is so valuable, you cannot rely on anybody else. You will have to take control of the whole situation, you will have to take the responsibility on your shoulders.You become a man really the day you become responsible for your growth. You become a man really the day you decide that you have to create meaning in your life. You are given a blank page: you will have to sign it, and you will have to write your song on it. The song is not already there. You are there, the possibility is there – but the song has to be sung, the dance has to be danced. The dancer is there, but what is the meaning of a dancer if he has not danced yet? Even to call him a dancer is meaningless – because unless he dances, how can you call him a dancer? Unless a seed becomes a tree it is just a name, it is not a seed; unless a tree flowers it is just a name, it is not yet a tree; and unless a flower releases its fragrance, it is just a name, it is not yet a flower.You create your being continuously. And if you don’t create, you will just be driftwood, accidental, moving here and there with no direction.The Bauls start from the first step. They have a whole vision, a whole perception of all the possibilities of man, of all the rungs of the ladder. The first rung is libido, lust, sex energy. And sex energy has continuously puzzled man. If it remains just sex, it will become meaningless. Then you will be in a rut.Sex is meaningful only when out of lust, love is born. Love is meaningful only when out of love, prayer is born. If your sex remains just sexuality, a circular repetition, a mechanical thing that you go on doing, then you will remain meaningless. Because sex is your energy; it has to be transformed. It is very crude, it is raw material. Much has to be done on it. It is a raw diamond. You have to cut it, you have to polish it, you have to give it a shape and a form. You have to give it beauty. It depends on you. If you go on carrying the raw stone, it is valueless – not only that, it will be a burden on you. It is better to throw it, better to throw it than to carry it. Why carry it unless something higher can be evolved out of it?Always remember this: Bauls are not against sex, against lust. But they say that if you remain confined to lust, you will be lost.Never plunge into the river of lust,you will not reach the shores. It is a river of no coasts, where typhoons rage.What do they mean? – “the river of lust, it has no shores, and if you plunge into it you will be lost.” One has to rise above it. It is not that something is wrong in it, remember this point. Don’t conclude that Bauls are saying that something is wrong with sex. They are simply saying that the wrong arises when you are confined to it. If you can use it, if you can make a stepping-stone out of it, if you can go higher than it, then it is beautiful. It has been a great help. Without it, it would have been impossible to rise above it.Lust in itself is like a seed: just pure possibility waiting for the right soil, waiting for the right season, waiting for the gardener, the skillful man who can help it to sprout. A seed is not actual, just potential. There is no necessity for it to become a tree. It may not ever become; it may be lost completely. If you put that seed on a stone, it will remain a seed. Ages can pass and the seed will not sprout. Many people are like that seed: those who have not found their soil yet, who have not found their right season yet. These are the worldly people. A religious person is one whose seed has reached to the right soil, and is disappearing. When the seed disappears, the tree is born. When you disappear, then the soul is born. When the soul disappears, the God is born.You exist like the hard shell of a seed – that is the ego of man. The worldly man is the egoistic man; the nonworldly man is the humble man. By “humble” a very simple thing is meant: he is disappearing as a seed, he is ready to die into the earth. The word humble comes from humus. Humus means the earth. The humble man is one who is ready to disappear into the earth; the humble man is one who is ready to lose himself.Jesus says again and again that if you don’t lose yourself you will not regain, if you don’t lose yourself you will never be: “Blessed are those who are ready to lose.” What does he mean? He means, blessed is the seed that loses its hard shell, becomes vulnerable, opens its soft heart to the soil so the soil can work on it, and moves into the unknown; drops the confinement of the known, drops the commitment to the known, and becomes committed to the unknown.Dangers are there – storms will be there, clouds and thunder and lightning. For a small plant the whole world is a crisis, a thousand and one risks. For the seed there is no danger; the seed is closed, windowless. It is in an imprisonment – protected, well-protected. But a small plant is very fragile. Watch it: a seed is very hard, secure; the plant is fragile and soft, and can be destroyed very easily. And the flower is even more fragile – as fragile as a dream, as fragile as a poem. And the fragrance is even more fragile; it almost disappears, becomes indefinable. All growth is towards the unknown, towards the soft, towards the fragile, towards the indefinable. Growth is towards disappearance. Only the gross appears; God is invisible. Only matter appears; mind is invisible. Only the gross can be touched, is tangible, but the subtle is intangible. That’s why God cannot be seen – because God is the fragrance of the flower – very subtle, very, very subtle.Remember, with the gross there is more security. Lust is more secure than love; love is more secure than prayer. And if you are looking for security you will remain confined in lust.Many people are born in sex. Nothing is wrong with that; everybody has to be born in sex. The problem arises when many people live only in sex, and die also in sex. That means that there has been no growth, no evolution. Being born in sex is perfectly natural, but to die in it? Then what is the point? Then what is the meaning of being born? Then you have not grown; then nothing has happened to you.I was reading about one old man, an old man of almost eighty-five years. He went to his doctor, and he said, “Doctor, I am becoming impotent.”The doctor looked at him and said, “Oh? And when did you first notice this?”The old man said, “Last night and again this morning.”People live…the longer you live in lust, the uglier becomes your being. And if you have to also die in it, then the whole life was a wastage. You never even went a step further than your birth. Birth is of course natural, it has to be in sex – but death need not be.I have heard….Little Sammy was busy doing his homework while waiting with his Mummy in the baby clinic. He turned to his Mum and said, “Mummy, where did I come from?”She said, “Ach…ah, the stork brought you, darling.”“Where did you come from?”“Oh, the stork brought me too.”“And where did Grandmama come from?”“Why, Grandmama was found under a gooseberry bush.”So he continued his essay and wrote, “It seems that there has not been a natural birth in our family for three generations!”To be born in sex is natural; one need not be defensive about it. But to die in sex is unnatural. From sex one should step higher. From the seed to the fragrance is the evolution. But many people live a repetitive cycle: they go on moving in a routine. They go on doing things, not even aware of what they are doing, not even aware of how many times they have done the same thing, not being aware that it brings nothing. But they go on doing it, not knowing what else to do. They remain occupied in the same circular way.That’s why in the East we call it samsar, the wheel. The world is called ‘the wheel’. Just as when a wheel goes on moving and the same spokes go on turning up and down, up and down, up and down. If your life is like a wheel and the same spokes go on moving, your life will not have any meaning – because meaning arises only when you take a step beyond yourself. And remember this too: if you take a step beyond and then you are stuck there, again meaning disappears.So meaning is in the new. And if you want to be constantly meaningful, eternally meaningful, then you have to go on growing and growing and growing. If you are stuck anywhere, meaning immediately disappears. Meaning is not in being stuck, meaning is in flow, meaning is in evolving – so remember it. You can get stuck at love; then again meaning disappears, then again you become stale. Then the river is no more moving. Again you will become dirty, flow is lost. And when the river is flowing it is fresh, when the river is not flowing it becomes stagnant.The same is true about life. If you get stuck at love, again flow is lost. Again you are in a rut. Prayer is needed …and there are higher things than prayer. Prayer is the last that can be defined; prayer is the last that can be talked about – that too, not adequately, but very inadequately. But prayer is the last, the horizon. Not that on the horizon the earth stops; not that on the horizon the sky finishes. The horizon simply shows our limitation: our eyes cannot go beyond it, that’s all. Prayer is the horizon of the libido energy, but it is not the end. There are higher things than prayer, but words don’t exist for those things. When you reach to prayer then you will know that there are higher things than prayer, and growth is eternal.People are almost dead because they are stuck. They go on seeking the same thing again and again. Watch it. One should be in search of the new. The very search renews you, rejuvenates you. If you have some beautiful experience today, don’t ask again for it tomorrow because now it is meaningless – you have known it, it is finished. Ask for something more, seek for something new, grope for the unfamiliar and the unknown. Go beyond it. It was beautiful but don’t try to repeat it, because repetition kills beauty; repetition makes everything boring. And once you become accustomed to boredom you will become dead. Then you will go on revolving.I have heard….It was a gay party. Wine, whiskey and wit flowed freely. An obsequious-looking waiter offered a tray with drinks to a solemn, stern-looking man, obviously a clergyman. The Father looked sternly at him and said, “No thanks, I do not drink.”The waiter left, but soon enough another appeared on the scene with a second tray. God’s good man gave him a withering glare. “Don’t you know I do not drink at all?” And he added as an afterthought, “I would rather commit adultery than imbibe alcohol.”Mulla Nasruddin, his neighbor, leisurely sipping his scotch, got up with alacrity, put down the glass and exclaimed, “Good heavens, I’d no idea there was a choice!”People are continuously obsessed with sex. And there are two ways to be obsessed with sex: one is the ordinary man’s way, the Playboy way; another the so-called religious man’s way. But both remain obsessed with lust – one for, the other against. Their constant fixation is sex; neither goes beyond it.Bauls don’t belong to either category. They don’t belong to the worldly man because they go beyond sex; they don’t belong to the austere man because they are not against sex; they also don’t belong to the so-called religious man, the monk, because they say, “Sex is your energy; it has to be used. Of course, it has to be refined, but it has not to be condemned.” How can you refine a stone and make a diamond of it if you are condemnatory about it, if you throw it away? And if you start escaping from it, how can you refine it, how can you polish it, how can you make a valuable thing out of it? So there are two types of fixations in the world: the people who think sex is life, and the people who think to fight with sex is life – and both are wrong. To use sex creatively; that is the goal of the Baul.Mulla Nasruddin constantly irritated his friends with his eternal optimism. No matter how bad the situation, he would always say, “It could have been worse.” To cure him of this annoying habit his friends decided to invent a situation so completely black, so dreadful that even Nasruddin could find no hope in it.Approaching him at the club bar one day, one of them said, “Mulla, did you hear what happened to George? He went home last night, found his wife in bed with another man, shot them both, then turned the gun on himself.”“Terrible,” said the Mulla, “but it could have been worse.”“How in the hell,” asked his dumbfounded friend, “could it possibly have been worse?”“Well,” said Nasruddin, “if it had happened the day before, I would be dead now.”People are in a rut, repeating the same thing again and again and again. It seems their eyes are completely closed. It seems they have no idea of what is possible. It seems nobody has given them even a glimpse of the beyond. It seems that they have never looked towards the heights. They have not seen the sky; they go on crawling in the mud. Nothing is wrong essentially in the mud; it is beautiful if you can stand in it, rooted, grounded, and your eyes can move towards the heights. Then the very quality of the mud is transformed.Never plunge into the river of lust, you will not reach the shores. It is a river of no coasts where typhoons rage. And you all must have felt that whatsoever you call love brings misery and nothing else: conflict, agony, suffering. Whatsoever you have called love gives you hell and nothing else. But still, somehow you manage to remain in it, you manage not to see beyond it.It happened:A very wise old man was approached by his son. “Father,” said the son, “I want to get married.”“No, my boy. You are not wise enough,” said the old man.“When will I be wise enough?” asked the lad.The old man said, “When you get rid of the idea that you want to get married, then you will be wise enough, and then you can get married.”It seems paradoxical; it is true: when you are no longer occupied with sex, when it is no longer an obsession, a neurosis, you are wise enough to go into it – because then you can use all the possibilities that become available through it. Then it is not just fun; then it is not just passing time; then it is not just a search for oblivion. Then it becomes a creative act on your part. Then you are creating something out of this tremendous energy. It is God’s gift. Bauls call it lust if you remain confined in it. If you can go beyond it, it starts changing its form, it starts changing its quality.The Bauls sing,“Ploughman, are you out of your wits not to take care of your own land? A squadron of six birds is picking at the rice,grown golden and ripe, in the field of your limbs. Farming the splendid measured land of this human body, you raise the crop, the devotion to God. But passions eat at it like sparrows.“The fence of consciousness is down to dust, leaving open gaps. Cattle clamber up and feast on your harvest….“Shame to you, my shameless heart, what now can I say? You have gathered a piece of glass at the price of gold. In spite of a pair of eyes you miss the valuable jewels, caring only for artificial stones. Wandering blindfolded, you could not see that the house overflowed with the choicest rubies, and diamonds, and gems of fire.“Hugging a sickle in your waistband, what do you search from field to field? What is the use, my heart? Will you not explore for oncethe home of beauty…?”Whatsoever you go on seeking in the mechanical ways of sexuality is not the search for beauty. It is not the search of love, it is not the search for God. At the most, it is a natural device, a biological device to drown yourself in forgetfulness. It is a natural arrangement in your body: you can drown yourself in it. It can become your alcohol, it can become your drug, it can become your acid.Sex is chemical; it releases certain hormones in your body. It gives you a certain illusory euphoria. It gives you a few moments when you feel at the top of the world. But then again you are back in the valley, and the valley is darker than before, and the valley is uglier than before – as if you have been tricked, cheated. Sex gives you an illusion as if something is happening. If you remain confined to sex, then you will simply waste your energy. By and by, the energy will ooze out of you, and you will remain just a dead shell.The Bauls say,“What color is your cottage? On the shore of this bogus world the frame of your home is made of bones, and the roof is thatched with skin. But the pair of peacocks on the landing pier hardly know that they will end one day.“As the childhood passed in play, passion, the age of passionate sport passes. The old age, too, is going away, calling, calling for the master and the lord. Your teeth are dropping down, and the hair is growing gray, the age of manhood is at a low ebb, the plaster of your painted house will be crumbling now softly, softly….”The energy oozes out by and by. Very few are in the world who use this tremendous opportunity for growth. Watch your steps. You are given a certain opportunity to grow. If you don’t grow you will simply waste; life will be just a vegetation. You cannot call yourself alive if you are not aware. If awareness is not crystallized in you, you are fast asleep, in a stupor – a somnambulist, a sleepwalker. And sex is one of the great tranquilizers. Many people use it exactly like a tranquilizer: they make love and then they go to sleep. Then they sleep better. Energy released, empty, they fall into deep stupor. That sleep is not real sleep – it is just exhaustion, it is just emptiness. It is not full of energy. That sleep is like death, not like life.“The ways of the tortuous river slip from your grasp. Beware, brothers, do not step into the stream. The water rushes down, wrecking the blackened hills. Brothers, beware of the tortuous stream. The river was dry when the waters of the flood surged down the tortuous stream. How can we cross the river now?”Even when you are silent and not preoccupied with sex, it is very difficult to cross the river. Even when the river is not flooded, even when the river is a summer stream – very thin, very small, very shallow – then too it is difficult to pass and go beyond it. And when the rains come and the river is flooded and when you are so full of lust, it becomes impossible to cross it.“The river was dry when the waters of the flood surged down the tortuous stream. How can we cross the river now? Be on your guard, O boatman, and hold tight to the oars, and if the boat tends to turn over, remember the master.”Bauls say that there is only one way to come out of the stupor man lives in, and that is remembrance of God: namsmaran, remembrance of his name. That has always been part of the basic techniques on the path of love – to remember him. And when a devotee, with deep reverence, remembers the name of God, his whole being is thrilled, his energy starts rushing upwards. Ordinarily the energy is rushing downwards; that is the way of sex. If you really cry the name of God, whatsoever it is – Ram, Allah, or whatever, all names are his – the very cry, the very remembrance hits somewhere near the sahasrar, the seventh chakra, in the head. If remembrance is not just ritual, if with deep love and reverence and devotion and surrender you have called the name of God, suddenly there comes a change in your body energies. The energy that was going to the sex center starts rising high.The Bauls say,“God has reversed the acts of the play. The land talks in paradox and the flowers devour the heads of fruits, and the gentle vine, roaring, strangles the tree. The moon rises in the day, and the sun at night with shining rays.“The blood is white, and on the lake of blood float a pair of swans, copulating continuously in a jungle of lust and love.”All the great mystics have described it: when the energies start rushing upwards, when gravitation no longer affects your energy, when your energy is functioning under another law – the law of grace; when you are pulled up, when you are falling up, when you are rushing upwards as if the sky is pulling you, then man comes to know a totally different world. Everything is upside-down – or maybe it is really right-side-up – but everything changes.Kabir has said that when it happened to him, he saw the ocean burning, and the fire very cold. He saw fishes running on dry land, and he saw trees whose roots were in the sky and whose branches were coming to the earth. These are just symbolic sayings.Everything we had known while sex energy was running downwards is affected by it. When the sex energy rushes up, a totally different world is revealed. Then you don’t see this world because your eyes are no more the same. You are in a new dimension, just diametrically opposite to the old.But ordinarily our whole concept of life is centered on sex. Whatsoever we do: we earn money, we earn money for sex; we try to earn fame, but we earn fame for sex. Even sometimes very innocent activities which you cannot connect with sex are connected with sex if the person is still infatuated with lust. It is difficult to see how a person who is running after fame is running after sex.Just ask the psychologists. They say women are more attracted by fame than by anything else; they are not so attracted by the face, handsomeness, as they are attracted by achievement. An achiever, one who has much money, power, prestige, is more attractive to women than anybody else. Because a woman is constantly in search of somebody to lean on. You may be beautiful, but if you have no power you cannot give any guarantee, any security to the woman. If you are powerful, maybe you are not beautiful, you are not intelligent, but that doesn’t matter. But if you are powerful, reliable, the woman can lean on your shoulders. There is a certain guarantee in you.Men are attracted by physical proportions, body-beauty; a woman is more attracted by fame, prestige, by power, achievement. So if men are too mad after power, the arithmetic is simple. Even in the face of death or in the face of danger people go on lusting.Jeevan has sent me a beautiful joke.Isador Ginsberg was instructed by his physician to take a holiday after years of hard work building up his clothing business. On his holiday he met a young blonde who spent much time with him. Returning to his office, he felt and looked like a new person; love had entered his life.A few weeks later a distinguished gentleman asked to see Mr. Isador Ginsberg alone. Smilingly, excitedly, Isador read the card handed to him. His caller was an attorney-at-law with a very reputable law firm.“I represent Miss Mamie Lottery. You remember her, from Hotel Carleton?”“Yes, yes,” Isador panted excitedly.“Well, Mr. Ginsberg, what do you think of these?” And he lays out on the desk a number of photographs of Isador and Mamie in decidedly compromising positions.Isador was absolutely flabbergasted; he stared wide-eyed at each of the pictures in turn. Many minutes of silence gripped the air. Finally he turned to the lawyer and said with a firm order in his voice, “Well, I will take two of this, three of that one, and four copies of each of the other pictures.”The grip of lust is such that you cannot see the danger ahead. The grip of lust is such that you cannot even see death ahead. In fact, a very strange phenomenon happens: the more a person comes close to his death, the more lustful he becomes. Because sex gives a feeling of life, one clings more to sexuality. Old people may not be physically able to move into sexuality, but then they start moving in their fantasies. It almost always happens.I have watched many people die. It rarely happens that a person dies with God on his mind; almost always, nine out of ten times, people die with sex on their minds. And that becomes the beginning of another life: sex on the mind becomes the beginning of another sex life.But it has to be so if you have not been working hard to go beyond it, to go beyond its grip. If you have not been struggling hard to release yourself from its clutches, then it is going to be so – because at the moment of death you start thinking more of sex, because sex seems to be just the opposite of death. Sex is birth; mind fantasizes about sex. And when the last moment has come when the body is going to disappear, a bout of energy, the last bout, streams into your head, overpowers you. If you die with sex on the mind, you will be moving again into the wheel of life, what the Hindus call anagamin, coming and going, coming and going; a repetitious circle.Go to the home of beauty and form, should you wish to see the man within.The Bauls say, Go to the home of beauty and form, should you wish to see the man within. Love is more aesthetic; lust is almost non-aesthetic. Lust is ugly, and you can observe it. When somebody looks at you with lust in his eyes, have you watched the face? – it becomes ugly. Even a beautiful face becomes ugly when lust is there in the eyes. And just the opposite also happens: even an ugly face becomes beautiful when there is love in the eyes. Love in the eyes gives a totally different color to the face; a different aura arises. Lust gives a black aura, a very evilish aura around you. To look at somebody with lust is ugly. It is not the search for beauty.One of the greatest Indian poets, Rabindranath, has said that, “Beauty is truth,” and he is right. And he was very impressed by the Bauls. In fact, he was the first man to introduce the Bauls to the West; he was the first man to translate a few Baul poems into English. He was a sort of Baul himself: he says, “Beauty is truth.” If you seek beauty you will become truthful. The more aesthetic you become, the more sensitive you become towards beauty, the more balanced and harmonious you will become – because finally, beauty belongs to God.Let me explain it to you:You see a woman. If you look with lustful eyes, you see only the body, the matter, the material part; if you look with love, you see something that is not matter, that is spiritual. And if you see a woman with prayer, then you see something absolutely divine; it depends on your eyes. With lustful eyes you see only the body part of the woman; with loveful eyes you see the spiritual part of the woman; and with prayerful eyes you see the divine – God himself. Wherever your sensitivity towards beauty is perfect, the divine is revealed.Go to the home of beauty and form,should you wish to see the man within. His ways cross the sphere where life lives with death, and sense with insanity.His ways cross the sphere where life lives with death, and sense with insanity. God’s ways are paradoxical. The Bauls say that in God all the opposites meet, all the polarities become one. In God, death and life are not two things. In God, darkness and light are not two things. In God, the beginning and the end are not two things. God means the totality; God comprehends all. So when you reach towards God you will not be losing anything, you will be simply gaining all. In the beginning it may appear that you are losing something, but God is all-inclusive. Lust remains in God, of course, but absolutely transformed. Matter remains in God, but becomes sacred, is holy. One remains in the world but no more of it. God himself is in the world, but not of the world. The world belongs to him but he does not belong to the world.This polarity has to be understood. The Bauls’ god is a greater god than the Christian god, the Jewish god or the Mohammedan god, because those gods are of the theologians. The Bauls’ god is more poetic; those gods are more logical. The Bauls’ god is more illogical, but more true. Christians say, “God is only good.” The very word God is derived from the root good. God is good, then what happens to bad? Then where does the bad exist? To explain that they have to create a devil. But the Bauls laugh about such theoretical cunningness. They say that God creates the Devil, so he remains the creator of the devil. And if you say the Devil has gone against God, then there are only two possibilities: one, that God is not omnipotent, and the devil can go against him – then God is not all-powerful; the other, that God himself provokes him to go against – then he is all-powerful, but then he is the cause of the Devil.Bauls say that God is both, and when they say God is both, they mean that God is incomprehensible, he is paradoxical. God is all. In him, everything is transfigured, all opposites become a harmony. God is the orchestra. He is the one in the many. He’s the unity of all.His ways cross the sphere where life lives with death, and sense with insanity. Bauls say, “He is the supermost reason and the supermost irreason also.” They say that God is reason, and God is madness also. For a logical mind it becomes difficult to figure out. But Bauls say life is not of logic. The Bauls say, “We are simply describing what is the case. We are not saying what should be, we are simply describing what is the case. This is the way we have known God: he is very rational and very irrational, both. He is infinite compassion and infinite justice, both. In him, all the polarities have become one.”To understand this, one has to understand with one’s totality. You cannot understand this assertion, this statement, through your intellect. Then it looks absurd. But watch…look at life: all that is alive must be somehow his, and all that dies must be somehow dying in him. Yes, he lives in very reasonable people, but who lives in mad people then? In mad people also he lives, and he loves all the ways.So Bauls say, “Don’t be afraid; you just be yourself and you will find him.” You need not become somebody else to find him. You just be yourself. If you are mad, then just be mad; then that is your way to find him. If you are a singer, then go on singing. He’s all-inclusive; your singing will become a prayer and a way. If you cannot sing, don’t be worried; there is no need. If you feel that just being silent and sitting silently you enjoy your being perfectly, then that is your way. All ways are his.The Bauls say, “Wherever you are, from wherever you travel, you travel towards him. Just don’t get stuck; go on traveling. Go on moving, don’t allow movement to die. Wherever you are stuck, then the distance arises. Just go on moving and be yourself.” They don’t give you a certain morality; they don’t give you a certain ideal; they don’t give you any shoulds. They are not worried about the “ought.” They say, “This is the case – he loves all as they are.” Just you go on moving, don’t get frozen.Close your eyes and try to catch him, He is slipping by.Beautiful…Close your eyes and try to catch him, he’s slipping by. If you are stuck somewhere you will miss him. You be on the move because he is on the move. He’s always slipping, he’s always moving into the new and into the unknown. If you cling with the known you will miss him. Close your eyes and watch how swiftly he moves, how dancingly he moves. He is continuously slipping out of the old. He is the constantly new. He is like the snake who comes out of his old skin, leaves the old skin and slips by. God is continuously slipping out of history, because he is eternity.God is continuously slipping out of that which has already happened, because he is not repetitive. And if you are clinging to history then you will miss him, because then you will be looking at the past and he is always moving into the future. God is future and mind is past; then the distance arises.A real religious man is one who has no past, who has no autobiography, who is continuously new, each moment slipping with God. He does not bother – what has happened, has happened – finished! Put a full stop on it, and never look back. Go on…he is always calling you ahead, and ahead. He is always persuading you to move into new territories of being: from lust to love, from love to prayer – and there are higher realms than prayer. And he is constantly on the move. If you follow him, the only way is to be constantly on the move.Be a river…yes, they are right….Close your eyes and try to catch him, he is slipping by. Why close your eyes? Because in the beginning it will be difficult to see him from without. There are so many forms, you may get lost. There is so much all around, so complicated is the world that you may get lost. Start from the simple – start from yourself. Close your eyes; then there is only one – you! It is simple to become acquainted that way. Close your eyes and see him; he is continuously slipping by. It is your consciousness, the essential man. The Bauls call him the adhar manush. He is in you, in your essence, but he is continuously slipping by, going ahead. That’s how he evolves. God is evolution and God is revolution also, because sometimes he moves slowly, and sometimes he moves very fast.One has to be very alert to keep pace with him. If you lose your alertness, he is gone. Then one never knows when one will come across him again. One moment lost in unawareness and he will be at the farthest end of the world. One has to remain constantly alert, aware. But first watch him inside. Not that he’s not outside; he’s there also – because all is his, within and without. But first it is easier to understand him within yourself. Once seen there, you will be able to see him everywhere. Once understood: there, open your eyes, and he is standing all around you: in the trees, in the birds, in the man, in the woman, in the rocks, in the rivers, in the mountains, in the clouds. But first, get introduced to him.And the best introduction, and the easiest possible, is to close your eyes and look, watch there. You will find the snake always moving and leaving its old skin. This is the flow of life energy.The Bauls’ god is not a dead, stagnant concept. It is not a god sitting somewhere on a golden throne in the seventh heaven. The Bauls’ god is a very alive god, kicking in you, streaming in you. The Bauls’ god is nothing but a synonym for life. LIFE written with capital letters is what the Bauls’ god is all about.The Bauls say,“My heart is saturated, but I wish I knew with what – joy or death.”Strange is the feeling when you become acquainted with God: you cannot say what it is, you cannot describe it. It is so contradictory, so paradoxical.“My heart is saturated, but I wish I knew with what – joy or death.”He is both: death and resurrection, cross and rebirth.“A sense of wonder has overtaken all. Where is that ocean and where are the rivers? And yet still the waves are there for you to observe, only if you unite your eyes with your heart.”That is the meaning of “close your eyes” – so that you can bring your heart and your eyes parallel, united. Only if you unite your eyes with your heart, then suddenly you will see the god of all paradoxes, the mad and the source of all reason, life and the source of all death.The Bauls say,“There is no patience in the core of my heart. Shivering with tears it cries with the eyes, and in the silence of lovely sound forever calls, Come Beloved, come, come, please come!”The Bauls’ path is not the path of the austere man, of the monk, no. It is the path of the dancer, the singer, the aesthetic man. His prayer is full of beauty, and God is not a concept of philosophy, but the Beloved.“Free impulses live together with the forces of abstinence, and the feminine energy entwined with the spirit of man, resembles the tuned strings of the lute, wholly invisible. The heart is the home of no separation.”When you reach deep within yourself, when you touch your own core, your heart, you have come to the land of no separation. There, not only are you with God, you are one with him – because you are also part of him. It is he who has expressed himself in you. Feel fortunate, feel blessed; he has also chosen you to be one of his forms.Close your eyes and try to catch him, he is slipping by.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 2 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 2 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I have heard:A psychologist wants to experiment with his twin sons. He takes them down to his group rooms and puts each in a room by himself. In Ike's room he loads in a pile of TV advertised, hard-sell toys. Ike is diagnosed as a complaining, negative pessimist. In Mike's room he loads in an enormous pile of manure. Mike is the optimist.An hour after they are locked in, he enters Ike's room. There is Ike tossing out toy after toy, complaining, “This is not any good, that one won't work.”As he opens the door into the second room he is unable to find his son for a few moments. But he hears his voice; it is saying, “There's gotta be a pony, there's gotta be a pony.” And as he appears he is shown frantically digging through the manure, looking for the pony.I have changed rooms; I have got my eye out for the pony.The first thing to be understood about pessimism and optimism is that they are not different. They look different, but don’t be deceived by their appearances. They are just two polarities of the same phenomenon. A pessimist can become an optimist and an optimist can become a pessimist. A pessimist is just an optimist standing on his head, and vice versa. They are not two different people, they are not two different dimensions. Remember, it is not worth changing rooms. Get out of both the rooms, under the sky where neither pessimism nor optimism exist. You can be at ease only when both are gone, because both are wrong.Analyze the situation. The pessimist goes on looking at the darker side of things and goes on denying the whiter side; he accepts only half of the truth. The optimist goes on denying the darker side of things and accepts only the whiter side – he is also half true. Neither of them accepts the whole truth, because the whole truth is both summer and winter, God and devil, darkness and light, good and evil, life and death. The whole truth is both. Both are doing the same exercise – they are denying the one half and accepting the other half. The other half is as much half as the first; there is no difference. If the pessimist is wrong, the optimist is also wrong. Both are not ready to accept the truth as it is. They choose.Move out of both the rooms under the open sky of choicelessness. Don’t choose. Let truth be as it is. Don’t try to paint it in your own mood. Try to see the facticity of it – don’t bring your mood in. Don’t look through hope, don’t look through frustration. Don’t be positive and don’t be negative – that is the highest consciousness possible.But optimism appeals because the world is more or less pessimistic. People have long faces; they are always complaining and grumbling. It is beautiful to come across the optimist. People are always talking about the thorns; it is fortunate to meet somebody who talks about flowers and fragrances. But he is also wrong.Let me tell you another anecdote.Once I went to visit Mulla Nasruddin in the hospital where he was confined as a result of a car accident.The Mulla had been seriously injured: a broken leg, both arms broken, a broken collarbone, terrible cuts over his face and head, and several broken ribs. He was so thoroughly bandaged and taped and strapped up that only his two eyes and mouth were showing.I was at a loss for words, but I realized that I must say something.So I asked the Mulla, “How do you feel today, Nasruddin? I suppose all of those broken bones and cuts cause a great deal of pain. Do you suffer very much?”“No, not much,” said Nasruddin. “Only when I laugh.”It is good to meet such a person. It is rare, but it is as wrong as the common variety The pessimist is the common variety. Out of a hundred persons, ninety-nine are pessimists. They are looking for misery, they are waiting for misery. They are convinced that something is going to happen which is going to be wrong. They are ready for it. If it doesn’t happen they will be very disappointed, but they are waiting for the negative, for the dark side. These people are certainly wrong, but then because of these people – and they are in the majority – the other rarity becomes very valuable: a person who is looking for the morning, who looks for the white lightning in the darkest of clouds.When the night is very dark he waits, because he knows now the morning is very close. He is always hopeful. But I again insist that both are wrong because life is both black and white. In fact, life is gray. On one extreme end it looks white, on the other extreme end it looks black, but just in between the two it is nothing but shades of gray.One who understands both becomes choiceless. He is neither pessimist nor optimist. You will not find him in either of the rooms. You will not find him unhappy, you will not find him over enthusiastic about happiness. That is the goal of the buddhas: they are not in agony and they are not in any ecstasy. They don’t know any excitement; they are simply peaceful, silent. That is what bliss is, sat-chit-anand. Bliss is not happiness, because happiness has a certain excitement in it – it is feverish. Sooner or later you will be tired of it; it is unnatural. Sooner or later you will have to change, you will have to become unhappy. Bliss is neither; it is neither negative nor positive – it is transcendental, it is beyond duality. One remains tranquil, calm, quiet, centered. Whatsoever happens, good or bad, one accepts both because one knows life is both.This is the real man. He is completely without any attitude. It is very easy if you have been a pessimist for long: one day you realize that you are unnecessarily being unhappy, miserable, so you change the role. You slip into the role of an optimist. But now you have moved from one extreme to the other.Let me tell you one anecdote.One day Mulla Nasruddin visited a large department store to buy his wife some nylon hose. Inadvertently he got caught in the mad rush of a counter where a bargain sale was going on.He soon found himself being pushed and stepped on by frantic women. He stood it as long as he could, then with head lowered and elbows out, he plowed through the crowd.“You there!” said a woman. “Can’t you act like a gentleman?”“Not anymore,” said Nasruddin. “I have been acting like a gentleman for an hour. From now on I am acting like a lady.”There is a point where one gets fed up with one role. The pessimist one day realizes that, “Why? Why go on seeing the darker side? Why go on counting the thorns on the rosebush?” He forgets about thorns; he starts counting the roses – but both are half. He has moved from one half to another half; the totality remains as far away as before.The rosebush is both the thorn and the rose; they are both joined together. They are not against, they are not enemies. In fact the thorns protect the flower. They are part of the whole organic being of the rosebush. And so is life. Good and bad are joined together; sinners and saints are joined together; birth and death are joined together. A real understanding happens when you have understood this, this polarity. And by understanding it, you have gone beyond it. Then you become tranquil – because there is nothing to be happy about and there is nothing to be unhappy about.Remember, if you are happy, somewhere deep in the unconscious you are still carrying the possibility of unhappiness, because you can be happy only if you can be unhappy. Both possibilities exist together. They cannot be separated, they are two aspects of the same coin. So if you throw away one aspect, the other is also thrown. If you keep one aspect the other is also kept. If you become a pessimist in the conscious mind, you will be an optimist in the unconscious. If you are an optimist in the conscious mind, you will be a pessimist in the unconscious.Happiness, unhappiness, exist together. You can change the role anytime you like. In fact, people go on changing: in the morning you are an optimist, by the evening you have become a pessimist. That’s why beggars come to beg in the morning – because morning makes many more people optimistic. By the evening, knowing the whole life and the nastiness of it, people become pessimistic, tired, angry, frustrated. In the evening beggars don’t come to beg because who is going to give? In the morning people are more open; the morning sun again brings hope. The night is gone: “Maybe today something is going to happen.” People are more positive. By the evening, people become negative.In the day you change your roles many times. If you are a little alert, you will see: a moment before you were an optimist, a moment afterwards you have become a pessimist. Small things: changes in the climate, changes in the relationship, a small gesture on somebody’s part can make you change your role.Have you watched it? You are sitting, sad, and somebody comes, and he is a man of laughter and he laughs and he jokes – you forget that you were sad and you start laughing. You were laughing and a few friends come and they are all sad; they bring a climate of sadness, and you relapse into it.As I see it, every man is born with both possibilities. You have to go beyond it; you have to see the futility of both. That’s what silence is: it is complete absence of duality. So please avoid being extremists. Excess should always be avoided, because excess is the root of all untruth. In fact, there are no lies in the world, only half-truths and truth. All half-truths are lies; and the truth is not half, it is whole.The mind tends to be always moving towards the extreme – so you are moving towards the height, then you are moving towards the valley, going up then coming down. Like a yo-yo you go on, and you never become aware that both are useless. Like a pendulum of an old clock you move from one extreme to another. Once the pendulum stops in the middle, the clock stops. Once you stop in the middle, time disappears. Then you are no more part of this world. The clock stops…then you are part of eternity. Watch the pendulum moving from left to right, from right to left. A very strange thing is happening. When the pendulum is going to the right, you see it as going to the right.Ask the mechanic: he will say that when the pendulum is going to the right it is gaining momentum to go to the left; when it is going to the left it is gaining momentum to go to the right. So when you are unhappy, you are gaining momentum to be happy. When you are happy, you are gaining momentum to be unhappy. When you are loving you are gaining momentum to be hateful, and when you are hateful you are gaining momentum to be loving.Once you understand this subtle mechanism, that mind tends to be always moving towards extremes, you stop cooperating with the mind. Pessimist or optimist, both are within mind, and the real man of understanding is beyond it.It happened:Mulla Nasruddin was getting ready to apply to a local department store for a job.A friend told him that it was the policy of the store to hire nobody but Catholic Christians, and that if he wanted a job there he would have to lie about being a Catholic Christian.Nasruddin applied for the job, and the personnel man asked him the usual questions.Then he said to the Mulla, “To what church do you belong?”“I am a Catholic,” said Nasruddin, “and all my family are Catholics. In fact, my father is a priest and my mother is a nun, sir.”Go the whole way! Remember to stop in the middle. That will bring balance, that will bring centering.For the first time you will feel unperturbed, undistracted, and you will be able to accept both. Your acceptivity will become total. You will not be angry because there are thorns, and you will not be ecstatic, exhilarated, excited, because there are roses. You will see that both are, and both are good, both are needed. But you remain unaffected, untouched, unscratched – unscratched by the thorns and unscratched by the flower also. This is the goal.The second question:Osho,I need to trust so badly, and I suffer because I don't. From where am I to find the courage to trust my killer?People who trust themselves can trust others. People who don’t trust themselves cannot trust anybody. Out of self-trust, trust arises. If you are distrustful about yourself, then you cannot trust me, you cannot trust anybody. Because if you don’t trust yourself, how can you trust your trust? It is going to be your trust. Maybe you trust in me, but it is your trust – you trust in me and you don’t trust yourself. So it is not a question about me, it is a deep question about yourself. And who are these people who cannot trust themselves? Something has gone wrong somewhere.First, these are the people who don’t have a very good self-image; they are condemnatory towards themselves. They always feel guilty and always feel wrong. They are always defensive and always trying to prove that they are not wrong, but they feel deep down that they are wrong. These are the people who have somehow missed a loving atmosphere.Psychologists say that the person who cannot trust himself is bound to have some deep-rooted problem with the mother. The mother-child relationship somewhere did not happen as it should. Because the mother is the first person in the child’s experience; if the mother trusts the child, if the mother loves the child, the child starts loving the mother and trusting the mother. Through the mother the child becomes aware of the world. The mother is the window from where he enters existence. And by and by, if there exists a beautiful relationship between the child and the mother, a response, a deep sensitivity, a deep transfer of energies, a flowering…then the child starts trusting others also. Because he knows the first experience was beautiful, there is no reason to think that the second is not going to be beautiful. There is every reason to believe that the world is good.If in your childhood there was a deep milieu of love around you, you will become religious, trust will arise. You will trust, trust will become your natural quality. Ordinarily, you will not distrust anybody unless somebody tries hard to create distrust in you – only then will you distrust. But distrust will be exceptional. One man deceives you and tries hard to destroy your trust. Maybe trust in that man is destroyed, but you will not start distrusting the whole humanity. You will say, “This is one man, and there are millions of men. Just for one man, why distrust all?” But if the basic trust is lacking, and something has gone wrong between you and your mother, then distrust becomes your basic quality. Then ordinarily, naturally, you distrust. There is no need for anybody to prove. You distrust men, and then if somebody wants you to trust him, he will have to work hard, very hard. And even then, you will trust him conditionally. And even then, that trust will not be very comprehensive. It will be very narrow, it will be arrowed at one person.That is the problem. In the old times people were very trusting. Shraddha, trust, was a simple quality. There was no need to cultivate it. In fact, if somebody wanted to become a great skeptic, doubting, then great training was needed, great conditioning was needed. People were simply trustful because love relationships were very, very deep. In the modern world love has disappeared, and trust is nothing but the climax of love, the cream of love. Love has disappeared. Children are born into families where the father and mother are not in love. Children are born – the mother does not care, is not bothered about what happens to them. In fact, she is annoyed because they are a disturbance, and they are disturbing her life. Women are avoiding children, and if they happen it seems like an accident. And there is a deep negative attitude. The child gets that negative attitude; he is poisoned from the very beginning. He cannot trust the mother.Just three or four days ago a sannyasin told me that during Primal Therapy here in the ashram, he came across a childhood memory. He remembered, he could see it, that his mother had tried to kill him by suffocating him. He could see the whole memory, again relived. Now his whole being is wavering, trembling. And he’s not an ordinary man; he himself is a psychotherapist. Now he understands many things that he had never understood before: why he seems to be so dead, stone-like, rock-like, unflowing, why he cannot trust anybody, why he cannot move into love easily, why it is such a great effort, and even then, something, somewhere goes wrong. He is not streaming – the mother tried to suffocate him.The basic trust lost, the tacit trust lost: “Even my mother tried to kill me? Then who can be trusted?” – impossible. Now this world is just inimical. One has to struggle; it is a survival of the fittest.Many times I have wondered: somebody should try a psychoanalytical study of Charles Darwin. Nobody has tried yet. There must have been something gone wrong between him and his mother, hence the hypothesis of the survival of the fittest. In the same way one can have a psychoanalytical study of Prince Kropotkin. There must have been a deep love relationship between him and his mother, so deep that he contradicted Charles Darwin and tried to replace his theory of survival of the fittest with the theory of cooperation. He said, “There is no conflict in life, but there is cooperation. In fact, when a tiger jumps on an animal and eats the animal, this too is cooperation.” How does he explain it? He says, “In fact, the moment the tiger jumps on his prey, the prey relaxes, dies easily. There is no conflict. The prey becomes food for the tiger.”There must be a cooperation when you pick an apple from the tree and you eat it; there must be a deep cooperation between the apple and you. Otherwise, the apple would create trouble in your body. It would go on fighting you if there were a conflict. It would never allow itself to be absorbed by your body; it would remain inimical. But it simply dissolves into you, becomes your blood, becomes your bones, becomes your flesh. Kropotkin says, “There is tremendous cooperation in life.” Even when a tiger jumps and kills the prey, he says there is cooperation. Ask Charles Darwin: even when there are two friends deep in love, and they are ready to die for each other, Darwin says that these are just pretensions. Deep inside there is conflict, struggle, competition, jealousy.A philosophy is not born out of the blue. A philosophy comes from your own existence, your own lived experience. If the child has been deep in love with the mother and the mother has showered her love, that is the beginning of all trust for the future. Then the child will make more loving relationships with women, will make more loving relationships with friends, one day will be able to surrender to a master – and finally, will be able to dissolve himself completely into God. But if the basic link is missing then the foundation is missing. Then you try hard, but it becomes more and more difficult. That’s what I feel about the questioner.“I need to trust so badly”…yes, because trust is nourishment. Without trust you remain hungry, you remain starved. Trust is the most subtle nourishment for life. If you don’t trust you cannot really live. You are always in fear; you are surrounded by death, not by life. With a deep trust inside, the whole view changes. Then you are at home and there is no conflict. Then you are not a stranger in the world. Then you are not an alien, you are not a foreigner. You belong to the world, the world belongs to you. The world is happy that you are – the world is protecting you. This feeling of a deep protection gives courage, and gives courage to move into unknown paths.When the mother is in the home the child has courage. Have you watched it? He can go out on the road, he can move into the garden, and he can do a thousand and one things. When the mother is not there he simply sits inside, he is afraid. He cannot go out; the protection is not there, the protective aura is not there. The atmosphere is totally alien.It happened once…I was staying with a friend. The couple had gone to attend some marriage ceremony and they had left their small kid to play, and they said to me, “Just you watch.” I was watching – he was playing just outside the porch. He fell, he looked all around, he looked at me. I looked at him very silently. He waited for a single second to feel whether it was worth crying or not. But I was so neutral, as if I was not there, so he shrugged his shoulders: “This fellow is useless.”He started playing again. After half an hour when the mother and the father arrived, he started crying. I said, “This is illogical. Half an hour has passed, now it can’t be hurting.” He said, “That is not the question. But you looked towards me with such stony eyes, so I thought, ‘What is the point? Even if it hurts, it hurts. Crying is useless.’ Now my mother has come.” Now he is in a different atmosphere – now he can cry because he knows somebody is there to console, somebody is there to feel for him, somebody is there who cares.If you have lived a childhood of a deep showering of love and trust on you, you gather a beautiful self-image about yourself. And if your parents have been really in deep love with each other, and they were very happy with you because you were the culmination of their love, the crescendo of their love, the actualization of their love; if they were deep in love, then you are the song that is born out of their love. You are the proof, the evidence that they loved each other. You are their creation: they feel happy about you, they accept you, and they accept the way you are. Even if they try to help you, they try to help you in a very loving way. Even if they say sometimes, “Don’t do this,” you don’t feel offended and you don’t feel insulted. In fact, you feel cared about.But when the love is missing and the father and mother go on saying, “Don’t do this,” and, “Do this,” by and by the child starts learning that, “I am not accepted as I am. If I do certain things, I am loved. If I don’t do certain things, I am not loved. If I do some other things, I am hated.”So he starts shrinking. His pure being is not accepted and loved. The love is conditional; trust is lost. Then he will never be able to have a beautiful self-image. Because it is mother’s eyes which reflect you for the first time, and if you can see happiness there, a bliss, a thrill, a great ecstasy just watching you, you know you are valuable, you know you have intrinsic value. Then it is very easy to trust, very easy to surrender, because you are not afraid. But if you know that you are wrong, then you are always trying to prove that you are right. People become argumentative. All argumentative people basically are people who don’t have good images of themselves. They are very defensive, very touchy. If there is some argumentative person, and you say that “This thing you have done wrong,” he immediately jumps on you, becomes very angry. He cannot even take a small friendly criticism. But if he has a good image about himself he is ready to listen, he’s ready to learn, he’s ready to respect others’ opinions. Maybe they are right, and even if they are right and he is wrong, he is not worried because that doesn’t matter. He remains good in his eyes.People are touchy – they don’t want criticism, they don’t want somebody to say to them to do this; they don’t want somebody to say to them not to do that. And these people think they cannot surrender because they are very powerful. They are just ill, neurotic. Only a powerful man or woman can surrender – weaklings, never. Because in surrender they think their weakness will be known to the whole world. They know they are weak, they know their inferiority complex, so they cannot bow down. It is difficult for them, because bowing down will be accepting that they are inferior. Only a superior person can bow down; inferior persons can never bow down. They cannot respect anybody because they don’t respect themselves. They don’t know what respect is, and they are always afraid of surrender because surrender means weakness to them.Remember it: surrender is possible if you are tremendously powerful; you are not worried about surrender, you know that you can surrender and still you will not be weak. You can surrender and you will not lose your willpower. In fact, by surrendering you are showing the greatest willpower there is.So if you feel it difficult to trust, then you have to go back. You have to dig deep into your memories. You have to go into your past. You have to clean your mind of past impressions. You must be having a great heap of rubbish from your past; unburden it.This is the key to do it: if you can go back not just as memory, but as a reliving. Make it a meditation. Every day, in the night, for one hour just go back. Try to find out all that has happened in your childhood. The deeper you can go the better – because we are hiding many things that have happened, but we don’t allow them to bubble up into consciousness. Allow them to surface. Going every day, you will feel deeper and deeper. First you will remember somewhere when you were at the age of four or five, and you will not be able to go beyond that. Suddenly, a China Wall will face you. But go – by and by, you will see that you are going deeper: three years, two years. People have reached to the point where they were born from the womb. There have been people who have reached into the memories of the womb, and there are people who have reached beyond that, into the other life when they died.But if you can reach to the point where you were born, and you can relive that moment, it will be of deep agony, pain. You will almost feel as if you are being born again. You may scream as the child screamed for the first time. You will feel suffocated as the child felt suffocated when for the first time he was out of the womb – because for a few seconds he was not able to breathe. There was great suffocation: then he screamed and the breath came, and his passages became open, his lungs started functioning. You may have to move to that point. From there you come back. Go again, come back, every night. It will take at least three to nine months, and every day you will feel more unburdened, more and more unburdened, and trust will arise simultaneously, by the side. Once the past is clear and you have seen all that has happened, you are free of it. This is the key: if you become aware of anything in your memory, you are freed from it. Awareness liberates, unconsciousness creates a bondage. Then trust will become possible.When you are here with me, you are again in another womb, you are again waiting for another birth. That is the function of a master – to give you another birth, to make you dwij, twice-born. One birth is from mother and father, another birth is from the guru, the master. You are again in another womb, a spiritual womb. You have to close accounts with your physical womb completely. You have to drop all hangovers with your physical birth so you can be totally herenow with me. “I need to trust so badly…” Yes, that is the point: a person who cannot trust needs to trust very badly. And a person who can trust is not even aware that he needs. The need arises when you are starving.Psychologists have come across this – that love is food. Just twenty years ago, if somebody had said that love was subtle vitality, then scientists would have laughed. They would have thought, “You are a poet, you live in illusion and dreams. Love and food? – all nonsense.” But now scientific researchers say, “Love is food.” When a child is given food, that nourishes his body; and if love is not given, then his soul is not nourished. His soul remains immature. Now there are ways to measure whether a child is being loved or not, whether the warmth he needs is being given to him or not. You can give a child all the nourishment he needs, all the medical care he needs, in a hospital. Just remove the mother – give him milk, medicine, care, everything, but don’t hug him, don’t kiss him, don’t touch him. Many experiments have been done. The child, by and by, starts shrinking into himself. He becomes ill, and in most of the cases he dies, for no visible cause at all. Or, if he survives, he survives at the minimum: he becomes an imbecile, an idiot. He will live, but he will live just on the fringe. He will never be deep in life, he has no energy. To hug the child, to give your body’s warmth to him is food, is very subtle food. Now this is being recognized, by and by.Let me make you one prediction: after twenty or thirty years, psychologists will come to reveal that trust is even a higher food, of a greater potency – higher than love…. Like prayer. Trust is prayerfulness, but it is very subtle. You can feel it. If you have trust, you will suddenly see that with me you are going on a great adventure, and your life starts immediately changing. If you don’t have trust, you will stand there. I go on talking, I go on pulling you; you are stuck – somehow you go on missing me. Let your trust arise. That trust will be a bridge between me and you. Then ordinary words become luminous, then just my presence can become a womb, and you can be reborn.“I need to trust so badly, and I suffer because I don’t. From where am I to find the courage to trust my killer?” Yes, I am a killer, in a way. I have to kill you because that is the only way for you to be reborn. I have to cut you completely from your past, I have to destroy your biography; then only the new can arise.But if you have trust, you will be ready to die. If you have trust, you know resurrection is certain. I cannot guarantee it; there is no way to guarantee it. Only trust is the guarantee. I can talk about it, I can “poetize” about it, but that will create only dreams in you, not guarantees. I can tell what has happened to me, I can allure you towards it, but it will not be a guarantee. “Who knows – this man may be just lying, or this man may not be lying, he may be just in illusion?” How to prove it? It is not a thing that I can show to you. If you trust, then there is a guarantee. – in your trust is your guarantee.You can trust me in two ways. That too has to be understood, because one way is a wrong way.You can trust me because you feel insecure, alone. You can force trust because you can feel more secure with me. That’s how many people live in churches, organizations, religions. Somebody is a Christian, somebody is a Hindu; it gives a certain security. You are not alone – millions of Hindus, millions of Christians – you are not alone. “How can so many people be wrong? They must be right” – so you hold, hang with the crowd, just because you are afraid. Trust can arise because of fear – then it is negative; it will not give you a new birth. In fact, it will obstruct a new birth. Trust can arise out of love; then it is right.People who trust because they are afraid, because they want somebody to hang on to, to cling to, they are afraid and they want somebody’s hand, they look at the sky and they pray to God just to feel unafraid. Have you watched? Sometimes passing through a dark street in the night you start whistling, or you start singing – not that it is going to help. But it helps in a way. Singing, you become warmer. Singing, you become occupied; fear is repressed. Whistling, you start feeling good. You forget that it is dark and it is dangerous, but it makes no real change in reality. If there is fear and danger it is still there. In fact, it is more, because a person who is engaged in singing can be robbed more easily because he will be less alert. He will be less cautious while whistling. He is creating an illusion around him with whistling. If your trust arises out of fear, it is better not to have that trust. It is false.I have heard:Mulla Nasruddin climbing into a barber’s chair asked, “Where is the barber who used to work on the next chair?”“Oh, that was a sad case,” the barber said. “He became so nervous and despondent over poor business, that one day when a customer said he did not want a massage, he went out of his mind and cut the customer’s throat with a razor. He is now in the state mental hospital. By the way, would you like a massage, sir?”“Absolutely!” said Mulla Nasruddin.Out of fear you can say “absolutely,” but that will not be trust. Trust is born out of love, and if you find that you cannot trust, then you have to work hard. You have a very loaded past, wrongly loaded. You have to clean it, clear it.The third question:Osho,I believe there is a God. There must be something keeping the universe together. But deep in myself I don't feel that God is there or you are there, or that God is with me. I experience myself as lost and unprotected in a threatening world. I only feel comfortable when I am alone. I miss that basic trust. The knowledge I gathered, the feelings I have felt, the experiences I have had did not lead me to an inner trust. Can you please help me?First, belief is a pretension. Never believe in anything. Belief is pseudo-trust. It gives you a feeling as if you trust. It is ‘as if’ trust; it is very dangerous. If you have not experienced anything of the divine, please be honest. There is no need to trust, there is no need to believe in God. Don’t make God a logical exercise. The questioner says, “I believe there is a God. There must be something keeping the universe together.” This is a logical thing: the universe is there and things are really going together, everything is going beautifully together, so the logical mind says, “There must be somebody who is keeping it together. Existence is there, so somebody must have created it.”But God cannot be approached through logic. God can be approached only through love. God is not a syllogism; it is not a conclusion. That’s why scientists can never reach to God’s truth. And people who were real thinkers have always denied God – because if you are really thinking, you cannot believe in God. God seems to be improbable, impossible, absurd. But logic can give you a false notion. It simply says that when you see that the world is going together, you infer that somebody is keeping it together. Just say that the world is going so tremendously together, that’s all – “I don’t know why, I don’t know who is keeping it or whether anybody is keeping it.” The conclusion is not right; remember that you don’t know. That ignorance will be very, very helpful, because that ignorance will be sincere, authentic, true.Now let me tell you – you think that the world is going so together, that’s why there must be a God. There have been philosophers who say that just because the world is going so together, there cannot be a God. Because if God is there, then sometimes he will get bored – just the same repetitive world. Then there will be some personality in the world. It is so mechanical: the stars go on moving, the sun goes on rising, the earth goes on moving, the people are born, the fruits and the seeds and again the trees and the seasons. It seems so mechanical, many philosophers say, because the world is going so absolutely correctly that there cannot be a person behind it. Because sometimes a person changes also, and sometimes he gets fed-up also. One day he thinks, “No more sunrise today. Enough is enough.” One day he thinks, “Now, out of mango seeds apples will arise.”If there is a personality in the world, just think – a Picasso painting the same painting every day. If out of Picasso’s house the same painting came every day, would it prove that there is a person inside, or there is a mechanism? You never go inside the house. You don’t know who is inside; just a painting is coming every day on an assembly line. The same painting, everything perfect, accurate – will it prove that there lives inside a great painter, a Picasso? Or will it simply prove that there is a mechanism which goes on reproducing? There are philosophers who say because the world is running so mechanically there cannot be a personality behind it. Now what to do?You say, the world is there: there must be a creator. There are philosophers who say that if the world needs a creator, then the creator will also need a further creator. Who will create the creator? And if you say that the creator needs no creator – don’t be foolish. Then they say, “Then what is the point? Then the world can be without a creator, if the creator himself can be without the creator.” So you have accepted the principle basically that something can be without being created – so the world can be without a creator. If you go into logic you will be in trouble.Let me tell you one anecdote.“This is a lesson in logic,” said the old professor in the teahouse.“If the show starts at nine and dinner is at six, and my son has the measles, and my brother drives a Cadillac, how old am I?”“You are eighty-four,” replied Mulla Nasruddin promptly.“Right,” said the professor. “Now tell the rest of the fellows here how you arrived at the correct answer.”“It is easy,” said Nasruddin. “I have got an uncle who is forty-two, and he is only half nuts. So you must be eighty-four.”If you make God an exercise in logic, you will go nuts. Nobody has ever come out of the logical inquiry sane. Nobody has ever come back sane, because the dimension is totally different. It has nothing to do with logic, it has something to do with the heart, something to do with love.“I believe there is a God.” Please don’t believe, because that belief will become a rock and it will not allow you to move deeper. Simply know that you don’t know, accept your ignorance. Don’t hide behind a belief because there is possibility from ignorance, but there is no possibility from false, borrowed, logical knowledge. Logical knowledge is barren, love is fertile.“I believe there is a God. There must be something keeping the universe together” – this is not the way to approach God – “but deep in myself I don’t feel that God is there.” Of course…how can you feel, how can you feel a logical proposition in the heart? Two plus two is four, certainly true – but can you love this proposition? Can you fall in love with two plus two is four? And if somebody denies it, will you be ready to become a martyr for it because it is true? You will say, “Forget all about it. If you want to make two plus two equal five, make it. Why should I lose my life for it?”Nobody dies, stakes his life, for a logical proposition. It is not worth it. If somebody denies it, let it be so. Two plus two is perfectly true, but not a truth of the category of God, not even a truth of the category of Laila or Majnu. If your logic is proved wrong, nothing is proved wrong. You can change your logic. But if your love is proved wrong, you can never be the same person again. If your love is proved wrong, you are proved wrong. If your logic is proved wrong, nothing is proved wrong. You can change the logic; you remain unaffected by it. “Deep in myself I don’t feel God” – because there is no way from belief to feeling. They are not connected, so forget about belief.Otherwise there is a dangerous possibility: you may pretend that you feel. Many people pretend. They go to the church, to the temple, to the mosque and they pretend that they are feeling for God. Their feeling is not feeling at all. In the temple you can see tears flowing down their eyes. Outside the temple you never come across that man again, that man you had seen in the temple. You never see him the same in the marketplace. That was just a mask: he was trying hard to feel. He was even ready to cry and shed false tears, what you call the “crocodile tears.” You can see him praying, but nothing is arising out of his heart – there is no fire inside, no passion – the prayer is just verbal. He goes on repeating something which he has been told to repeat; it is just parrot-like. Feeling arises only when you live in tremendous, austere sincerity.Forget about belief in God; there is no need. Just know that you don’t know. This should be the beginning: I don’t know. Maybe God is there, maybe God is not there – I have to inquire. Now where to find, how to find? If God is there, he must be the God of the trees and the birds and the animals also, not only of man. Trees don’t know any logic, birds don’t know any logic, animals don’t know any logic. If there is a God he must be the God of all. Logic is very local – just a part, a very small part of the world. Humanity has a small corner of the mind for mathematical and logical thinking.God must be the God of all, so forget about logic. Start approaching as the trees approach. Start approaching as the rivers run towards the sea, start approaching as the birds approach, start approaching through your being, your totality. Dance deeply. Forget about God, just dance deeply – because in a great dancing mood, in a moment, mind disappears, you become total.When you are really dancing and the movement is fast, mind cannot function. Mind stops; you become a no-mind. You are, but you are not a mind, and you don’t think in terms of logic. You become a tree, a tree in a strong wind, a flower, a river, a rock, a star, but you lose that small territory that is dominating you, the territory of logic. Suddenly you will start a contact; you will feel you have been contacted by someone and that you have contacted someone. A dancer becomes religious, has to become. Sing – and I’m not saying sing a religious song. If singing is true, it is religious. What the words are does not matter. Run, swim, do something, and be lost in doing it.Hence, I emphasize dynamic methods of meditation: dancing, singing, music, Tai Chi, karate. Do something, because when you do, you are part of the greater world of the trees, of birds, of animals. They are doers, they are not thinkers. When you do something, suddenly you fall into the oceanic unity of existence. There is then a feeling that God is. But that God is not the God of Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans. That God is your God. That has nothing to do with the Bible and the Gita and the Koran. That God is your God. That God has nothing to do with logic, syllogism, philosophy, dogma; that God is a felt, lived experience. Then…then you will know, and there is no other way to know.People are learning from scriptures, and the greatest scripture that has been given to you by existence remains unopened. And through scriptures you get notions.I have heard:Mulla Nasruddin went to see a lawyer about a divorce.“What grounds do you think you have for a divorce?” the lawyer asked.“It is my wife’s manners,” said the Mulla. “She has such bad table manners; she is disgracing the whole family.”“That’s bad,” the lawyer remarked. “How long have you been married?”“Nine years,” said the Mulla.“If you have been able to put up with her table manners for nine years, I can’t understand why you want a divorce now,” the lawyer said.“Well,” said Nasruddin, “I did not know it before. I just bought a book on etiquette this morning.”You first read the books, then you decide about life.First move into life and then decide about books. And then you will be surprised that the Gita and the Koran and the Bible are not three books, they are one book. Then Buddha, Christ and Krishna are not three persons, but three voices of the same person. But if you are first caught up in the logical structure of books, then you will never be able to know life. Try to become more natural. Forget all about God, the God that is discussed in the universities and in the churches and the temples. Forget about that God. Be with the God that is already surrounding you, that is your surround. This moment the cuckoo goes on doing her prayer, the birds go on doing prayer. Look at the trees, at how prayerful they are. The whole existence is in prayer, and what are you doing sitting inside your skull thinking about whether God exists or not?“He must exist because the world is going so beautifully together.” The world is going beautifully together. Become part of this togetherness, dissolve into this togetherness! When the river is flowing by, why not jump into it? What are you doing sitting on the bank with closed eyes thinking the river must be there because…? Drop all these “becauses.”The inner trust arises only when you have a live contact with God. Do whatsoever you can do, but please don’t become just heads. Nothing is wrong with the head if it goes together with your totality. The wrongness enters when it becomes a part, apart, and it starts dominating the whole. Get back down into your belly from the head! Come back to your senses, become more earthly.That’s the message of the Bauls: become more true and real. When you are real, God is real; when you are true, God is true – because when you are true you are capable of contact with the truth of existence. When you are real you are suddenly in harmony with the whole. When you are false, then the problem arises of whether God exists or not. When the problem arises of whether God exists or not, that simply shows that you have lost your harmony with the whole. Get into harmony, get into line, fall into line again. Come back, be more real and true.That is the whole message of all religions, of religion as such. That’s why Buddha and Mahavira don’t talk about God they say, “There is no need.” Mahavira talks about truth: “Be true, be authentic, and you will be Gods.” Just by being true you come closer to truth. It’s simple. Can’t you see such a simple point: that by being true, you come closer to truth?Belief is false, borrowed knowledge is false. Drop all that is borrowed. You may feel poorer for the time being, because your knowledge gives you very great ego, that “I know.” Knowing that you don’t know, you may feel poor for a few days, you may feel like a beggar. But if you are ready to be true, suddenly one day the conversion happens. When you have lost all borrowed knowledge, something arises in you which was waiting and waiting. Something arises in you and fills your whole space of consciousness. That is what God is.God is nothing but life. God is not a person; God is the energy you are, God is the energy the trees are, God is the energy the stars are. Everything is made of the stuff – God. God is not the creator, God is this creation. This very moment you are in the ocean of God, but he is so close and you are so far away in your head that bridges are missing.The last question:Osho,How come I'm so crazy about you?I attract crazy people; I am crazy, that’s why.But crazy people are beautiful people. They are the only sane people in the world. That is the meaning of the word ‘Baul’. Baul means crazy, mad. I am a Baul, and I attract Bauls – that’s why.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 2 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 2 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The man that breathes lives on the air,and the other, unseen, rests above reach. Between the two moves another man as a secret link. Worship knowingly.It is a sport amongst the three of them. My searching heart, whom do you seek?Between the doors of birth and death, stands yet another door, wholly inexplicable. He who is able to be born at the door of death, is devoted eternally….Die before dying, die living.Religion is a very complex phenomenon; its complexity has to be understood.There are seven types of religions in the world. The first type is ignorance oriented. Because people cannot tolerate their ignorance, they hide it. Because it is difficult to know that one does not know, it is against the ego, people believe. Their belief systems function to protect their egos. They are helpful, but in the long range they are very harmful. In the beginning they seem to be protecting, but finally they are very destructive. The very orientation is in ignorance.Religion is light, religion is understanding, religion is awareness, religion is authenticity. But a major part of humanity remains in the first type of religion. It is simply to avoid the reality, to avoid the gap that one feels in one’s own being, to avoid the black hole of ignorance.The people of the first type are the fanatics. They cannot even tolerate that there can be other sorts of religions in the world. Their religion is the religion. Because they are so afraid of their ignorance, if there is some other religion also then they will become suspicious, then doubt will arise. Then they will not be so certain. To gain certainty they become very stubborn, madly stubborn. They cannot read others’ scriptures, they cannot listen to other nuances of truth, they cannot be tolerant towards other revelations of God. Their revelation is the only revelation, and their prophet is the only prophet. Everything else is absolutely false. These people talk in terms of absolute, while a man of understanding is always relative.These people have done great harm to religion. Because of these people, religion itself looks a little stupid. Remember not to be a victim of this first sort. Almost ninety percent of humanity lives in this first sort of religion, and that is in no way better than irreligion. Maybe it is worse – because an irreligious person is not fanatic. An irreligious person is more open, at least ready to listen, ready to talk things out, ready to argue, ready to seek and inquire. But the first type of religious person is not even ready to listen.When I was a student in the university I used to stay with one of my professors. His mother was a very devout Hindu; completely uneducated, but very religious. One day on a cold winter night, a fire was burning in the room in the fireplace, and I was reading Rig Veda. She came by the way and she asked, “What are you reading so late in the night?” Just to tease her, I said, “This is the Koran.” She jumped over me, took away the Rig Veda and threw it in the fireplace and said, “Are you a Mohammedan? How do you dare to bring the Koran in my house!” Next day I told her son, my professor that, “Your mother is a Mohammedan” – because this sort of thing has only been known to be done by Mohammedans.Mohammedans burned one of the greatest treasures of the world, the library of Alexandria. The library was the greatest in the ancient world. The fire continued for almost six months, the library was so big. It took six months for it to be burned down completely. And the man who burnt it was a Mohammedan, Calipha. His logic is the logic of the first type of religion. He came with a Koran in one hand and with a burning torch in the other, and he asked the librarian, “I have a simple question. In this big library, millions of books are there….”Those books contained all that humanity had learned up to that time, and it was really more than we know now. That library contained every information about Lemuria, Atlantis, and all the scriptures of Atlantis, the continent that disappeared into the Atlantic. It was the ancientmost library, a great preserve. Had it still been, humanity would have been totally different – because we are rediscovering many things which had already been discovered.This Calipha said, “If this library contains only that which is contained in the Koran, then it is not needed; it is superfluous. If it contains more than is contained in the Koran, then it is wrong. Then it has to be destroyed immediately. Either way it has to be destroyed. If it contains the same as the Koran, then it is superfluous. Why manage such a big library unnecessarily? The Koran is enough. And if you say that it contains many more things than the Koran, then those things are bound to be wrong, because the Koran is the truth.”Holding the Koran in one hand, he started the fire with the other hand – in the name of the Koran. Mohammed must have cried and wept that day in heaven, because in his name, the library was being burnt. This is the first type of religion. Always remain alert, because this stubborn man exists in everybody.I was reading just the other night….Two old codgers had equal reputations for being stubborn. When they encountered each other in situations where one had to give in, a third party usually had to settle the issue. One day the old fellows, each driving a large load of hay, met on a narrow lane. Both were determined not to give an inch. Finally one said to the other, “I am prepared to stay here as long as you want to wait.”He took out his newspaper and began to read. The other filled his pipe and smoked contentedly. After half an hour of silence he leaned forward and called out to his neighbor, “Would you mind letting me read the paper when you’re through?”This stubborn man exists in everybody, and this is the lowest type of man. It exists in Hindus, in Jainas, it exists in Mohammedans, in Christians, Buddhists– it exists in everybody. And everybody has to be aware not to get caught. Only then can you rise to higher sorts of religion.The problem with this first type of religion is that we are almost always brought up in it. We are conditioned in it, so it becomes almost normal. It looks normal. A Hindu is brought up with the idea that others are wrong. Even if he is taught to be tolerant, that tolerance is of one who knows towards others who don’t know. A Jaina is absolutely brought up with the belief that only he is right; others are all ignorant, stumbling, groping in darkness. This conditioning can become so deep that you may forget that this is a conditioning, and that you have to go beyond it.Mulla Nasruddin was telling a friend his future through palmistry.He said, “You will be poor and unhappy and miserable until you are sixty.”“Then what?” asked the man hopefully.“By that time,” said Nasruddin, “you will be used to it.”That’s the problem: one can become used to a certain conditioning, and one can start thinking as if it is one’s nature, or as if it is the truth. So one has to be very alert and watchful to find this lowest possibility in oneself and not get caught in it.Sometimes we go on working hard in transforming our lives, and we go on believing in the first type of religion. The revolution is not possible – because you are trying something which is so low that it cannot be really religious. The first type of religion is just religion in name; it should not be called religion.One man was saying to another, “My son-in-law, the doctor, has been treating a patient for yellow jaundice for twenty years. He just found out the man is Chinese.”“Ain’t that something?” said the other man.“What is terrible is that he cured him.”Twenty years treating a man for yellow jaundice – he may be Chinese, but how long can he protect himself? If continuously you work on yourself with a wrong attitude, your nature starts yielding. You start functioning the way you want to function. Yes, the habit can become second nature. Unfortunately, sometimes it becomes first nature, and nature is completely forgotten.The characteristic of the first sort of religion is imitation; it insists on imitation. Imitate Buddha, imitate Christ, imitate Mahavira, but imitate – imitate somebody. Don’t be yourself, be somebody else. And if you are very stubborn you can force yourself to be somebody else.You will never be somebody else, deep down you cannot be. You will remain yourself, but you can force so much that you almost start looking like somebody else.Each man is born with a unique individuality, and each man has a destiny of his own. Imitation is crime, it is criminal. If you try to become a Buddha, you may become an imitation Buddha. You may look like Buddha, you may walk like Buddha, you may talk like Buddha, but you will miss. You will miss all that life was ready to deliver to you, because Buddha happens only once. It is not in the nature of things to repeat. God is so creative that he never repeats anything. You cannot find another human being in the present, in the past, or in the future, who is going to resemble you exactly. It has never happened. Man is not a mechanism. He is not like Ford cars on an assembly line; you can produce millions alike, exactly alike. Man is a soul, is individual. Imitation is poisonous. Never imitate anybody, otherwise you will be a victim of the first sort of religion, which is not religion at all.Then there is the second type. The second type is fear oriented. Man is afraid, the world is a strange world, and man wants to be secure, safe. In childhood the father protects, the mother protects. But there are many people, millions of them, who never grow beyond their childhood. They remain stuck somewhere, and they still need a father and a mother. Hence God is called the Father or the Mother. They need a divine Father to protect them; they are not mature enough to be on their own. They need some security.One psychologist, Winnicott, has been working with a particular problem with small children for many years, He has discovered many beautiful things; they are pertinent.You may have watched small children with their teddy bear, or their toy, their special toy, or their blanket, or something that has a special personality to the child. The teddy bear…you cannot replace the teddy bear. You may say that you can find a better one, but that doesn’t matter. – there is a love relationship between the child and his teddy bear. His teddy bear is unique; you cannot replace it. It becomes dirty, it becomes smelly, rotten, but the child goes on carrying it. You cannot find a new one, a fresh one. Even parents have to tolerate it. Even they have to respect, because a child feels offended. If the parents are going to travel, they have to tolerate the teddy bear also; they have to treat it almost as a member of the family. They know this is foolish, but for the child it has significance.What significance does the teddy bear have for the child? It is objective in a way. It is there, outside the child; it is part of reality. Certainly it is not just imagination, it is not just subjective; it is not a dream, it is there. But it is not totally there – many of the child’s dreams are involved in it. It is an object, objective, but much subjectivity is involved in it. For the child it is almost alive. The child has projected many things onto the teddy bear. He talks to the teddy bear, sometimes he becomes angry and throws it away, then says, “I am sorry” and takes it back. It has a personality, almost human.Without the teddy bear he cannot go to sleep. Holding, hugging, he goes to sleep; he feels secure. With the teddy bear the world is okay, everything is okay. Without the teddy bear he is suddenly alone. So the teddy bear exists in a totally new dimension which is neither subjective nor objective. Winnicott calls it “the transitory realm”: a little objective and a little subjective. Many children grow physically, but they never grow spiritually, and they need teddy bears all their lives. Your images of God in the temple are nothing but teddy bears.So when a Hindu goes into the Hindu temple, he sees something which a Mohammedan cannot see. The Mohammedan can only see a stone statue. The Hindu sees something which nobody else can see; it is his teddy bear. It is objectively there, but not totally objective. Much subjectivity of the worshiper is projected on it; it functions as a screen.You go to a Jaina temple. You may be a Hindu, but in a Jaina temple you will not feel any reverence arising in you. Sometimes you may even feel a little offended, because Mahavira, his statue, is nude, naked. You may feel a little offended. You may like to go out as soon as possible; you may not feel any respect. But then there comes a Jaina with tremendous respect; it is his teddy bear, and he feels very protected. So whenever you are in fear, you start remembering God. Your God is a by-product of your fear. When you are feeling good, unafraid, you don’t bother. There is no need.The second type of religion is fear oriented. It is very ill. It is almost neurotic – because maturity only comes to you when you realize that you are alone, and you have to be alone, and you have to face the reality as it is. These transitory teddy bears are just of your imagination; they are not going to help.If something is going to happen, it is going to happen; the teddy bear cannot protect you. If death is going to happen, it is going to happen. You go on calling to God, but protection cannot come to you. You are calling nobody, you are simply calling out of fear.Maybe calling loudly gives you a certain courage. Maybe praying…prayer gives you a certain courage, but there is no God to respond to it. There is nobody who is going to respond to your prayer. But if you have an idea that somebody is there to respond to your prayer, you may feel a little relieved, relaxed.Once I saw Mulla Nasruddin praying very devoutly. When he had finished his namaj, I asked him: “Mulla, there must be some problem, you were praying so deeply. Please answer my one question: are your prayers ever answered?”He said, “Yes, one way or the other.”But if the prayer is answered one way or the other, what is the point of it? Yes, sometimes it coincides with the facts, sometimes it does not coincide with the facts, but your prayer makes no difference to the facts. It may make a little difference in your mind, but it makes no difference in reality.The fear oriented religion is the religion of “don’t”: don’t do this, don’t do that – because fear is negative. The Ten Commandments are all fear oriented – don’t do this, don’t do that – as if religion is nothing but avoiding – don’t do this, don’t do that – closing oneself in safety and security, never taking any risk, never moving on the dangerous path, in fact not allowing yourself to be alive. Just as the first type of religion is stupid, fanatic, the second type of religion is negative. It gives a certain stiffness, uptightness. It is childish. It is a search for security which is nowhere possible, because life exists as insecurity. God exists as insecurity, danger, and risk.The key word for the fear oriented religion is “hell,” and of course, repression, continuous repression: don’t do this. The second type of person is always afraid – what to eat, what not to eat, whether to love a woman or not to love a woman, whether to make a house or not to make a house. And whatsoever you repress, you are never free of it; in fact, you are more and more in its power. Because when you repress a thing it goes deeper into your unconscious. It reaches to your very roots and poisons your whole being.I have heard….An old-timer was seeing a movie for the first time. He was known to be a very religious man, a man who used to do his prayer regularly, fulfill all the duties, had never been known to get involved in any sort of problematic situations. He was, in short, a very simple man – but not so simple inside. At one point in the feature, a bevy of shapely girls dashed across the screen. They crossed a railroad track, reached a swimming pool and began to disrobe for the plunge. They had taken off their shoes, stockings, shirts, skirts, and were beginning to…and a passing freight train sped across the screen and obscured the view. When it had passed, the next scene showed the girls frolicking in the water.The old-timer saw the show again and again and again. At length an usher tapped him on the shoulder. “Are you not ever going home?” he asked.“Oh, I reckon not for a while yet,” said the old-timer. “One of these times that darned train is going to be late.”Deep inside you will always carry whatsoever has been repressed. You may follow the religion as ritual, but it will never become your heart.I have heard an anecdote:For centuries European Jews were the victims of organized persecution called “pogroms.” These pogroms took place so often that Jews developed a sense of humor about them.In a small town in Poland, soldiers broke into the house of Ostrovoski and his family. Living with him were his wife, three daughters, two sons, and his very aged and religious mother. She was known around almost as a saint.“Line up!” shouted the sergeant in charge. “We are gonna beat up all the men and rape all the women!”“Wait,” pleaded Ostrovoski. “You can wallop me and my sons, abuse my wife and daughters, but please sir, I beg you, don’t rape my mother. She is seventy-five years old and very religious.”“Shut up!” yelled the old woman. “A pogrom is a pogrom!”Remember, repression is not a way towards freedom. Repression is worse than expression, because through expression a person is bound to become free one day or other. But through repression, one always remains obsessed. Only life gives you freedom. A lived life gives you freedom, an unlived life remains very attractive, and the mind goes on roaming around whatsoever you have repressed.Smulovitz, aged eighty-three and widowed, refused to be placed in just any Miami Beach old age home. “I won’t eat anything,” he declared to his son, “unless it is strictly kosher.”The son searched for weeks and weeks and finally found a place that served meals in accordance with the Jewish dietary laws. He placed his old father in the home, secure in the knowledge that his father would be eating only kosher food.Three days later he came for a visit and learned that the old man had left and checked into the Fontainbleau Hotel. The boy rushed over to the hotel, got a key, went upstairs, opened the door, and there was his father in bed with a blonde. They were both stark naked.“Poppa, how could you?” asked the bewildered boy.“But look,” said the old man, “I’m not eating.”People who live through rituals out of fear may avoid one thing, but they will fall into another – because the understanding is not their own. It is just fear oriented. It is hell they are afraid of. A real religion gives you fearlessness: let that be the criterion. If religion gives you fear, then it is not really religion.The third type of religion is out of greed. It is a “do” religion. Just as the fear oriented is a “don’t” religion, the greed oriented is a “do” religion: do this. And just as the fear oriented religion has the key word hell, the religion of greed has the key word heaven. Everything is to be done in such a way that the world – the other world – is completely secure and your happiness beyond death is guaranteed. “Do” religion or greed religion is formal, ritualistic, ambitious, desire oriented. It is full of desires.See the Mohammedan concept of paradise, or the Christian concept of paradise, or the Hindu concept of paradise. Degrees may be different, but this is a very strange thing: all that these people say one has to deny oneself in this life, they go on providing in heaven in great quantities. You are to be celibate here just to achieve heaven where beautiful apsaras, always young, stuck at the age of sixteen, are available. Mohammedans say, “Don’t take any alcoholic beverage. But in heaven, rivers of wine! No need to be worried.” But this seems to be absurd.If something is wrong, it is wrong. How can it become good and right in heaven? Then Omar Khayyam is right. He says, “If in heaven rivers of wine are available then let us practice here, because if we go unpracticed, it will be difficult to live in paradise. So let this life be a little rehearsal, so that we have the taste, and we have the capacity.” Then Omar Khayyam seems to be more logical. In fact, he is joking against the Mohammedan concept of paradise. It is foolish; the whole concept is foolish. But people become religious out of greed.One thing is certain: that whatsoever you accumulate here will be taken away, death will take it away. So the greedy person wants to accumulate something which cannot be taken by death. But the accumulating idea, the desire to accumulate remains there. Now he accumulates virtue. Virtue is the coin of the other world. He goes on accumulating virtue so he can live in the other world forever and forever, in lust.This type of man is basically worldly. His other world is nothing but a projection of this world. He will do because he has desires, and he has ambition, and he has a power lust, but his doing will not be of the heart. It will be a sort of manipulation.Mulla Nasruddin and his young son were driving in the country one winter. It was snowing – their bullock cart broke down. They finally reached a farmhouse and were welcomed for the night. The house was cold and the attic in which they were invited to spend the night was just like an icebox. Stripping to his underwear, the Mulla jumped into a featherbed and pulled the blankets over his head. The young man was slightly embarrassed.“Excuse me, Dad,” he said. “Don’t you think we ought to say our prayers before going to bed?”The Mulla stuck one eye out from under the covers. “Son,” he said, “I keep prayed up ahead for situations just like this one.”Then things are just on the surface. Greed and fear and ignorance are just on the periphery.These are three sorts of religions – and they are all mixed together. You cannot find a person who is absolutely, purely of the first type or the second type or the third type. Wherever greed is, there is fear; wherever fear is, there is greed; and wherever greed and fear exist, there is ignorance – because they cannot exist without them. So I am not talking about pure types. I am classifying simply so that you can understand well. Otherwise they are all mixed. These three are the lowest types of religion. They should not be called religions.Then there is the fourth type: the religion of logic, calculation, cleverness – a “do” plus “don’t” religion: worldly, materialistic, opportunistic, intellectual, theoretical, scriptural, traditional. This is the religion of the pundits, the learned scholar who tries to prove God through logic, who thinks that the mysteries of life can be understood through the head.This type of religion creates theology. It is not really religion but just a very faint carbon copy of it. But all the churches are based on it. When a Buddha exists in the world, or a Mohammed, or a Krishna, or a Christ, then pundits and scholars and learned people, intellectually clever and cunning people, gather together around them. They start working hard: “What does Jesus mean?” They start creating a theology, a creed, a dogma, a church. They are very successful people because they are very logical people. They cannot give you God, they cannot give you truth, but they give you great organizations.They give you the Catholic Church, the Protestant Church. They give you great theologies, just clevernesses, nothing of the real experience – just intellectual, head oriented. Their whole edifice is as if one is making a house of cards: a small breeze and the house is gone. Their whole edifice is such, as if one is trying to sail in a boat of paper. It looks like a real boat, the form is of a boat, but it is a paper boat. It is doomed, it is already doomed. Logic is a paper boat. And life cannot be understood through logic.I have heard about one American:A very wealthy American was convinced that an atomic war was just around the corner, and determined that he would survive it. He bought an acre of land in the middle of the Arizona desert and employed a labor force to build him a home five miles underground. It was to be encased in lead fifty yards thick, and equipped with its own power plant which would supply sufficient electricity to give him light, heat, and purified air for at least ten years. Frozen food, water, cigars, alcoholic refreshment for the same period of time had to be provided, together with every conceivable aid to luxurious living. The job was completed in three years at a cost of five billion dollars.The proud owner went to the desert to inspect it, and a Red Indian shot him in the back with an arrow.That’s how life is: you make all the arrangements and just one arrow is enough to finish you. Man is very fragile. How can man’s logic understand reality? Man is so limited, his understanding is so shortsighted. No, there is no way through logic. Through logic a philosophy is born, but not real religion.These four are ordinarily known as religion.The fifth, sixth and seventh are the real religions. The fifth is the religion based on intelligence – not on logic, not on intellect, but on intelligence. And there is a lot of difference between intellect and intelligence.Intellect is logical; intelligence is paradoxical. Intellect is analytical; intelligence is synthetical. Intellect divides, cuts into pieces to understand a thing. Science is based on intellect, dissection, division, analysis. Intelligence joins things together, makes a whole out of parts – because this is one of the greatest understandings: that the part exists through the whole, not vice versa. And the whole is not just the sum of the parts, it is more than the sum.For example, you can have a roseflower, and you can go to a scientist, to a logician. You can ask him, “I want to understand this roseflower” – what will he do? He will dissect it, he will separate all the elements that are making it a flower. When you go next you will find the flower gone. Instead of the flower there will be a few labeled bottles. The elements have been separated, but one thing is certain – there will not be any bottle on which will be the label “beauty.”Beauty is not matter and beauty does not belong to parts. Once you dissect a flower, once the wholeness of the flower is gone, beauty is also gone. Beauty belongs to the whole, it is the grace that comes to the whole. It is more than the sum. Then only parts are there. You can dissect a man; the moment you dissect, life disappears. Then you know only a dead body, a corpse. You can find out how much aluminum is there and how much iron and how much water – eighty percent or something. You can find the whole mechanism – the lungs, the kidneys, everything – but one thing is not there: life. One thing is not there that was the most valuable. One thing is not there that we wanted to understand really, and everything else is there.Now even scientists are becoming alert that when you take blood out of a man’s bloodstream and you examine it, it is no longer the same blood. Inside the bloodstream of the man it was alive, throbbing with life. Now it is just a corpse. It cannot be the same because the gestalt has changed. You can take the color of the roseflower from it, but is it the same color? It looks the same but it cannot be the same. Where is that fragileness? Where is that aliveness, that throb of life? When it was in the roseflower it was in a totally different arrangement and life was present. It was full of presence; God was there beating in its heart. Taken out, the part is there but you cannot say the part is the same. It cannot be because the part exists in the whole.Intellect dissects, analyzes. It is the instrument of science; intelligence is the instrument of religion – it joins together. Hence, the greatest science of spirituality we have is called yoga. Yoga means the methodology to join. Yoga means to join things together. God is the greatest totality, all things together. God is not a person, God is a presence, the presence when the total is functioning in a great harmony – the trees and the birds and the earth and the stars and the moon and the sun and the rivers and the ocean – all together. That togetherness is God. If you dissect, you will never find God. Dissect a man; you cannot find the presence that was making him alive. Dissect the world; you cannot find the presence that is God.Intelligence is the method to join things together. An intelligent person is very synthetical. He always looks for a higher whole, because the meaning is always in the higher whole. He always looks for something higher in which the lower is dissolved and functions as a part, functions as a note in the harmony of the whole, gives its own contribution to the orchestra of the whole but is not separate from it. Intelligence moves upwards, intellect moves downwards. Intellect goes to the cause.Please follow it; the point is delicate: intellect goes to the cause; intelligence goes to the goal. Intelligence moves into the future, intellect moves into the past. Intellect reduces everything to the lowest denominator. If you ask what love is, intellect will say it is nothing but sex – the lowest denominator. If you ask what prayer is, the intellect will say it is nothing but repressed sex. Ask intelligence what sex is, and intelligence will say it is nothing but the seed of prayer. It is potential love. Intellect reduces to the lowest; it reduces everything to the lowest.Ask intellect what a lotus is, and it will say it is nothing, just an illusion; the reality is the mud – because the lotus comes out of the mud and again falls back into the mud. The mud is the real, the lotus is just an illusion. Mud remains, the lotus comes and goes. Ask intelligence what mud is, and intelligence will say, “It is the potentiality of being a lotus.” Then mud disappears and millions of lotuses flower.Intelligence goes to the higher and the higher and the higher, and the whole effort is to reach to the ultimate, to the pinnacle of existence. Because things can be explained only through the higher, not through the lower. You don’t explain through the lower, you explain away. And when the lower becomes too important, all beauty is lost, all truth, all good. Everything that has any significance is lost. Then you start crying, “Where is meaning in life?”In the West, science destroyed every value and reduced everything to matter. Now everybody is worried about what is the meaning of life, because meaning exists in the higher whole. See, you are alone; you feel, “What is the meaning of life?” Then you fall in love with a woman; a certain meaning arises. Now two have become one – a little higher. A single man is a little lower than a couple, a couple is a little higher. Two things have joined together. Two opposite forces have mingled, the feminine and the male energies. Now it is more of a circle.That’s why in India we have the concept of ardhanarishwar. Shiva is painted as half woman and half man. The concept of ardhanarishwar says that man is half, and woman is half. When a man and woman meet in deep love, a higher reality arises: certainly greater, more complex, because two energies are meeting.Then a child is born; now there is a family – more meaning. Now the father feels a meaning in his life: the child has to be brought up. He loves the child, he works hard, but work is now no longer work. He is working for his child, for his beloved, for his home. He works, but the hardness of the work has disappeared. He is not dragging it. Tired of the whole day, he comes home dancing. Seeing the smile on his child’s face, he is tremendously happy. A family is a higher unit than the couple, and so on and so forth. And God is nothing but the communion of all, the greatest family of all. That’s why I go on calling these orange people my family.I would like you to disappear in the whole. I would like you to be so absorbed in the whole that you remain individual, but you become part of a greater unity, bigger than you. Meaning arises immediately whenever you become part of a greater unity. When a poet writes a poem, meaning arises – because the poet is not alone; he has created something. When a dancer dances, meaning arises. When a mother gives birth to a child, meaning arises. Left alone, cut from everything else, isolated like an island, you are meaningless. Joined together you are meaningful. The bigger the whole, the bigger is the meaning. That’s why I say God is the biggest conceivable whole, without God you cannot attain to the highest meaning.God is not a person; God is not sitting somewhere; those ideas are just stupid. God is the total presence of existence, the being, the very ground of being. God exists wherever there is union; wherever there is yoga, God comes into existence. You are walking alone; God is fast asleep. Then suddenly you see somebody and you smile; God is awakened, the other has come in. Your smile is not isolated, it is a bridge. You have thrown a bridge towards the other. The other has also smiled, there has been a response. Between you both arises that space I call God – a little throb. When you come to the tree and you sit by the side of the tree, completely oblivious to the existence of the tree, God is fast asleep. Then suddenly you look at the tree, and an upsurge of feeling for the tree and God has arisen.Wherever there is love, God is; wherever there is response, God is. God is the space; it exists wherever union exists. That’s why I say love is the purest possibility of God, because it is the subtlest union of energies. Hence the insistence of the Bauls that love is God. Forget God, love will do. But never forget love, because God alone won’t do. Intelligence is discrimination, understanding. Truth is the key word, sat. The man who moves through intelligence moves towards sat, truth.Higher than intelligence is the sixth type of religion. I call it the religion of meditation. Meditation is awareness, spontaneity, what the Bauls call sahaj manush, the spontaneous man. Freedom – it is non-traditional, it is radical, revolutionary, individual. The key word is chit, consciousness. Intelligence is still the highest form of intellect, intelligence is the purest form of intellect. The ladder is the same. Intellect is going downwards on the same ladder, intelligence is going upwards, but the ladder is the same. In meditation the ladder is thrown. Now, no more movement on the same ladder, neither upwards nor downwards. Now, no more movement, but a state of no-movement inside, a drowning into oneself, a sinking in.Intellect is other oriented; intelligence is also other oriented. Intellect cuts the other, intelligence joins the other, but both are other oriented. So if you understand rightly, the first four types of religion I don’t call religion. They are pseudo-religions. Real religion starts with the fifth type, and that is the lowest, but real.The sixth type of religion is that of meditation, chit, consciousness; one simply moves into oneself. All directions are dropped, all dimensions dropped. One simply tries to be oneself, one simply tries just to be. That is where Zen exists, in the sixth type of religion. The very word Zen means dhyana, meditation.Then comes the highest type of religion, the seventh: the religion of ecstasy, samadhi. Just as the fifth type has the key word sat, truth, and the sixth type, the religion of meditation, has the key word chit, consciousness, the seventh, the highest, has anand, bliss, ecstasy. That is the key word: sat-chit-anand, truth, consciousness, ecstasy.The Bauls belong to the seventh type – joy, celebration, song, dance, ecstasy – anand. They make meditation tremendously joyful – because a person can be meditative and can become sad. A person can be meditative and can become very silent and may miss bliss. Because meditation can make you silent, absolutely still, but unless dance happens in it, something is missing.Peace is good, peace is very beautiful, but something is lacking in it; bliss is lacking. When peace starts dancing it is bliss. When peace becomes active, overflowing, it is bliss. When bliss is enclosed in a seed it is peace. And when the seed has sprouted, not only that, but the tree has bloomed and the flowers have come and the seed has become a bloom, then it is samadhi. That is the highest type of religion. Peace has to dance and silence has to sing. And unless your innermost realization becomes a laughter, something is still lacking. Something still has to be done.That’s where the Bauls enter. Their religion is that of ecstasy.Now the song for today:The man that breathes lives on the air, and the other, unseen, rests above reach. Between the two moves another man as a secret link. Worship knowingly.The man that breathes, and the man that lives beyond – between these two, there is a third man, the link: body, psyche, and soul. Or you can use the Christian Trinity – God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.Body is the man that breathes. By breathing, the body is alive. The breath goes into your body; it gives prana, vitality, to your body. Without breath the body would disappear, because without breath the body would be disconnected from the atmosphere. The atmosphere is continuously pouring its own being into your being. Exhaling, inhaling – atmosphere is continuously keeping you alive, flowing, streaming. “The body,” Bauls say, “is the first man.”Then there is a beyond which needs no breathing, which is eternally there, which needs nothing. That is the God of the Bauls. They call the essential man the adhar manush. And between the two is the psyche, the mind, or call it heart. Bauls call it heart, the Holy Ghost. It exists as a link. The whole work has to be done in the psyche. On one pole of it exists the body, on the other pole, God. The whole work of discipline, of sadhana, has to be done in the psyche. That is what meditation is all about.The man that breathes lives on the air, and the other, unseen, rests above reach. Between the two moves another man as a secret link. Worship knowingly. The Bauls say that just worship won’t do, but worship knowingly. The body has to worship the psyche, and the psyche has to worship the unseen. This is what they mean by “worship knowingly.” Let your body follow your psyche, your heart, let your body follow your feelings, and let your feelings follow the unknown, the unseen. Then you are a worshiper. Then worship is not an ordinary ritual that you do in the temple; then worship is something that you do in your own being. That is your real temple.It is a sport amongst the three of them. My searching heart, whom do you seek?And the Bauls say it is a leela, a sport. These three are running, chasing each other: the body, the psyche, and the soul. My searching heart, whom do you seek? This word leela, sport, has to be understood. It is uniquely Eastern. In the West never has a concept like that ever arisen. In the West the concept of God is that of a worker, not of a player. The concept of God is of a creator, and the creation seems to be very serious. But the concept of leela is of fun, play. In the East we have known that God is not serious, and religion need not be serious. God is the greatest player, he is in a great play.As a painter plays with the brush and the paint and the color on the canvas, out of play something arises. The painting can be done in two ways: you can be very serious about it – but then you will be just a technician. You may do it perfectly well, but it will lack something – it will lack spirit. That is the difference between a technician and an artist. An artist has no plan. He simply sits before the canvas and starts playing. He is more childlike. Out of his play something arises. That is the best way to understand modern painting. Modern painting is more Eastern than Western. Picasso is more Eastern than Western because he is playing. That’s why it is very difficult to understand modern painting.Classical painting is very simple to understand. It exactly reproduces life, it is a replica. It is more like photography – mechanical. Modern painting is very difficult to understand. It is as difficult to understand as the flowers. Somebody asked Picasso, seeing his painting he asked, “What does it mean?” Picasso said, “Nobody goes to the plants and asks, and nobody goes to the birds and asks, ‘What do you mean?’ Why do you come to me, and me alone? Go to the plants and ask the flowers ‘why?’” – a great leela goes on.Botanists have become aware of something very rare and meaningful. They have become aware that insects play with flowers and imitate flowers; they deceive flowers. Butterflies imitate flowers and deceive flowers. And on the other hand, flowers imitate insects and butterflies, and the play goes on. Lizards imitate rocks, rocks imitate lizards; the great play continues – hide-and-seek.Leela is a beautiful concept. It relaxes you tremendously, absolutely. If God is in leela, then don’t be serious and don’t keep long faces; there is no need. Become more playful. Life is a sport. Look at life with the eyes of play, non-seriously. The difference is tremendous.You go on a street to your office; then you have a totally different mind – tense, ambitious, worried, stressed. On the same route, you go for a morning walk – the road is the same, the trees are the same, the birds are the same, the sky is the same, you are the same, the people passing are the same. But when you go for a morning walk you have no stress, no tension, because you are not going anywhere in particular. It is just a morning walk – you are enjoying it, you are playful. Prayer is a play. So if you go to the temple and you become very serious, you will miss the temple. Go to the temple to laugh, go to the temple to enjoy, go to the temple to celebrate.The Bauls sing,“I have no knowledgeof my own self. If for once I could know what I am, the unknown would be known. God is nearby and yet far away – like the mountain hiding behind my streaming hair. I travel distant towns of Dakar and Delhi constantly searching, but circling round my own knees.“God is alive in my living form. Only purity of heart will lead me to Him. The more I study the wisdom of the Vedas, the more I am bewildered. I am blind in spite of my eyes. Only purity of heart will lead me to him.“God is alive in my own living form. Never in my life did I once face the man who lives in my own little room.“My eyes blinded by the weight of storms can see nothing, even when He stirs. My hands fail to reach His hands as He is forever engaged with the world.“I keep silent when they call him the bird of life, and the water and the fire and the earth and the air, while no one is sure.“Could I ever wish to know anyone else? I do not yet know my own little room….”The Bauls say if you can know your own little room, you will know all – because he is there. He is in the body as the breathing man. He is in the psyche as your intelligence, awareness, meditation. And he is beyond you. Move slowly: let the body follow feeling, let the feeling follow the unknown. Don’t move by knowledge, move by feeling, and then you will be in tune with God.“He does not dwell in the complex of stars, nor in limitless space. He is not found in the ethical scriptures nor in the texts of the Vedas. He lives beyond the existence of all.“The man is here, in his form without form to adorn the hamlet of my limbs and the sky above in the glow of his feelings, the platform of spontaneous matter.”Even matter, the body, is spontaneous. That is his platform. The man is here!“If you fail to recognize your own heart, can you ever come to know the great unknown? The farthest away will be nearest to you and the unknown within your knowing. Fill up your home with the world abroad, and you will attain the unattainable man.”Open your heart to the skies, to the unknown, to the unfamiliar. Don’t move with knowledge, because knowledge means that which you have already known. That’s why the Vedas won’t help. Veda means knowledge; the very word veda means knowledge. It comes from a root ved, which means “to know.” Hence, the Bauls’ continuous criticism of the Vedas. Knowledge is not going to help.Move into the unknown, wait for the unknown to knock at your door. You simply wait – alert, expectant, ready to receive, with a feeling heart, and being playful.Between the doors of birth and death, stands yet another door, wholly inexplicable. He who is able to be born at the door of death, is devoted eternally…. Die before dying, die living.A very significant secret: between the doors of birth and death, stands yet another door…that door is what we call love. Have you watched? Between birth and death there is nothing else to happen but love. If you miss love between birth and death, you have missed the whole opportunity of life. You may gather knowledge and you may gather valuable stones, and you may gather money and prestige and power, but if you have missed love, then you have missed the real door.The first door, the door of birth, is simply an opportunity to move through the second door, the door of love. Between birth and death is love. In fact, life exists only to give an opportunity to love and be loved. If that is missed, all is missed. If that is not missed, then even if you have missed all, nothing is missed. And this door of love is real death. The other death that will come in the end is not real, because you will survive it. You will be reborn again. As death follows birth, so birth follows death. They are two aspects of the same coin. But if you move into the door of love, then you die and you die so totally that then there is no birth for you, and of course no death. Love is the real death because the ego disappears completely.In ordinary death the body disappears, ego remains, and that carries you into new lives. That is the whole thread of rebirth. Once that thread is broken and the root is cut, you disappear from the world of matter, from the world of the visible into the world of the invisible, the beyond, the other shore.Between the doors of birth and death, stands yet another door, wholly inexplicable. He who is able to be born at the door of death, is devoted eternally….That is what Bauls call the real door of death.Die before dying, die living.If you can die before dying, that is, if you can pass through the door of love, if you can die living, then there is no death for you. Then you have become deathless, then you are immortal, then you are a god. Then you are no more part of the material world where bodies are formed and where bodies are de-formed. Then you are no more into the world of forms, of creation, destruction; you are beyond. That beyond is already in you. It is here; it is right now, in this moment, here. But you will have to pass through the alchemy of love, otherwise you will never know it.The Bauls sing,“Reaching for reality is lame talk to describe the goal of the lover-worshiper. He will attain the great unattainable. Stare at the face of the invisible one bearing the nectar of love.“How can I capture the man who is not to be caught? He lives on the other bank of the river, and the skin of my eyes screens my sight.”The body screens your sight. If you become too identified with the body, it becomes a barrier. Reverse the process: let the body follow the heart, not the heart the body. If the heart has to follow the body, body becomes a barrier. Then you cannot reach the other shore. If the body follows the heart, the body becomes the boat.“Where is the home of the moon? And what makes the cycle of the days wander, encircling the moving nights? The lunar eclipse in the night of the full moon is known to all. But no one inquires about the blackened moon on the darkest night of the month.“He who is able to make the full moon rise in the sky of the darkest night, has a right to claim the glory of the three worlds – the heaven, the earth and the nether spheres.”He who is able to make the full moon rise in the sky of the darkest night…that is their description of love. A lover is capable of creating life out of death; he can do the miracle. He can make the moon rise in the darkest night. That’s why there is a fear about love. I have observed thousands of people trembling whenever they are on the threshold of love, afraid. Why does so much fear come out of love?Erich Fromm has written a beautiful book in which he says that love seems to be one of the most risky things, one of the most dangerous. And there is tremendous fear in humanity about love. People talk about love; they may be talking just to deceive themselves. Their talk may be just a substitute to give them a feeling that they are lovers. But people are afraid of love. It gives fear, because love is death. Your ego has to be dropped completely, utterly effaced. It is suicide. Fear is natural, but if you are courageous enough and you can pass through it, if you can carry the cross of love on your shoulders, resurrection is certain. The moment ego is dropped, you are born.“He who knows the essence of love, fears none. Devoted only to love’s own form, alive before his eyes, his home is in happiness itself. Lulling lust by lust alone, he raids the heart of the God that churns all hearts, finding himself in perennial love.“Let your heart be a caring home for the man of your heart. Focus your vision through the eye-black of loving. He will be floating on the mercurial mirror.“Hours wither like broken games on the playground of the earth. Abandon search and join the carnival of love. Abandon search and join the carnival of love….”The Bauls say just intellectual search, seeking, is not going to help. Join the carnival of love…that is what prayer is, that is what worship is.Be ecstatic, joyful, celebrating, singing, dancing. Let God be allowed to be playful through you. Let playfulness be your only prayer. Let joy be your only worship.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 2 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 2 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,How should I pray? I don't know how to properly express this love that I feel into prayer.Prayer is not a technique, it is not a ritual, it is not a formality. There is no pattern to it. It is a spontaneous outpouring of the heart, so don’t ask how, because there is no how and there cannot be any how to it. Whatsoever happens in the moment is right. If tears come, good. If you sing, good. If you dance, good. If nothing comes and you simply remain silent, good. Because prayer is not in the expression; it is not in the container, it is in the content. Sometimes silence is prayerful, sometimes singing is prayerful. It depends on you, it depends on the heart.So if I say sing, and you sing because I have told you to sing, then the prayer is false from the very beginning. Listen to your heart, feel your moment, and let it be – and whatsoever happens is good. Sometimes nothing will happen, but that is what is happening. You allow it, you don’t impose your will on it. When you ask how, you are trying to impose your will, you are trying to plan. That’s how prayer has been missed. That’s how all the churches and religions have become rituals. They have a set prayer, a set form: the authorized version, the approved. But how can anybody approve prayer? How can anybody give you an authorized version?Prayer has to arise in you, it has to flower in you. And each moment has its own prayer, and each mood has its own prayer. Nobody knows what is going to happen to your innermost world tomorrow morning. How can it be fixed? A fixed prayer is a false prayer – this much can certainly be said. A ritualized prayer is no longer prayer – this can be said in absolute terms. An unritualized, spontaneous gesture – that’s what prayer is.Sometimes you may feel very sad, because sadness also belongs to God. Sadness is also divine. There is no necessity to always be happy. Then sadness is your prayer. Then let your heart cry and let your eyes pour down tears. Then let sadness be offered to God. Whatsoever is there in your heart, let it be offered to the divine feet – joy or sadness, sometimes even anger.Sometimes one is angry with God. If you cannot be angry with God, you have not yet known love. Sometimes one is really in a deep rage. Then let anger be your prayer. Fight with God – he is yours, you are his, and love knows no formality. Love can survive all fights. If it cannot survive a fight, then it is not love. So sometimes you don’t feel like praying; then let that be your prayer. You say to God, “Wait! I’m not in the mood, and the way you are doing things, it is not even worth praying.” But let it be a spontaneous pouring of your heart.Never be inauthentic with God because that is the way of not being with him. If you are insincere with God, deep down you are complaining, and on the surface praying? – then God will see the complaint, not the prayer. You have been false. He can look directly into your heart. Whom are you trying to deceive? The smile on your face is not going to deceive God; your truth will be known to him. He can only know your truth; lies don’t exist for him. So let the truth be there. You simply present your truth to him and say: “Today I’m angry, I am angry with your world, I am angry with you, I am angry with my life. I hate it! And I cannot pray, so you will have to remain without my prayer today. I suffer much; now you suffer.”Talk to him as one talks to one’s lover, one’s friend, one’s mother. Talk to him as one talks to a small child.I was staying with a family, and the mother ordered the small child to pray. He was very interested, and he was not ready to go to sleep, and he wanted to be with me a little longer. But the family was very disciplinarian, so they said, “Now it is nine o’clock. You go and sleep, and don’t forget your prayer.” He was angry – I could see it.He went into his room. I followed just to listen to what he was going to pray. In the darkness I heard him say, “God, make bad people good and good people nice.”He knows his mother is good, his father is good, but not nice. I have heard about another child….He was staying in a guest house with the family. The first night he prayed. He always used to sleep with a small light on, but there was no light and the electricity had gone. Suddenly, as he prayed the electricity disappeared. He was just getting into his bed, and he told his mother, “Let me get up again and let me pray again more carefully, because the night is going to be dark.” First he had just prayed by the way, but now the night was going to be dark and there was no light and he was more afraid.He said, “Let me pray again. Let me get out, and let me pray more carefully, because now there is more danger.”Listen to children’s prayer and become a child.All the religions say that God is the father. In fact, the emphasis should be that man is the child. That is the real meaning when we call God “the Father.” But we have forgotten; God is the father but we are not his children. Forget whether he is the father or not. You just be a child – spontaneous, true, authentic. Don’t ask me and don’t ask anybody how to pray. Let the moment decide, let the moment be decisive, and the truth of the moment should be your prayer.That’s my answer: the truth of the moment, whatsoever it is, unconditionally, should be your prayer. And once you allow the truth of the moment to possess you, you will start growing, and you will know tremendous beauties of prayer. You have entered on the path. But if you simply go on repeating a certain prayer, a technique, then you will miss. You will never enter on the path, you will just remain outside.The second question:Osho,To steal your enlightenment I am incessantly praying. Please Osho, at least bless me, so that my prayer may become more intense and alive.That’s beautiful.A disciple has to steal much from the master, because there are a few things which cannot be given; only you can take, I cannot give. The nature of the thing is such that it cannot be given, but you can take. A disciple has much to steal from the master. The question is very significant, and I bless you.But prayer alone won’t do, because prayer belongs to one path, and enlightenment belongs to another path. Prayer is part of the path of the devotee, the bhakta, the Sufi. He says, “I don’t want any enlightenment. I just want to be playing with you continuously my Lord – a thousand and one games in a thousand and one worlds in a thousand and one lives. I don’t want to get out of the game, I don’t want to get out of this leela; it is beautiful. I want to remain a part of it. Make me worthy so I can remain always here and now, playing the game of hide-and-seek with you.”Prayer is part of the path of the devotee, the lover. The lover loves the bondage of love. He’s not in any way trying to get out of it. In fact, his only prayer is that he should be thought worthy so that God continues the game he is playing. The play is beautiful – he’s not asking for freedom from it.The word enlightenment belongs to the path of meditation. The meditator says, “Enough is enough. Long have I suffered; now let me be free.” In fact, he cannot ask. He tries, but he cannot pray – because to the man on the path of meditation, even prayer is a bondage. Mahavira never prayed, Buddha never prayed. Prayer was meaningless for Buddha; he made all efforts to get out of it. So if you want enlightenment then don’t pray because prayer will create a bondage. It is a most refined love. The bondage is very golden, but it is a bondage. If you choose it that way, then it’s okay. But then enlightenment is not the right word.I have heard….The indignant mother asked her young son, “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to go fishing?”“Because I wanted to go fishing,” said the small boy.If you really want to go fishing, don’t ask, go – asking won’t help. Then you are alone if you want to be enlightened. Then there is no God; then there is nobody who can help you. Because if you need anybody’s help, that very help becomes a bondage. If I help you to become free, you will start depending on me. Then without me you will not be able to be free. No help is possible on the path of meditation, only indications. Buddha has said, “Buddhas only show the path. They cannot help in any substantial way. You have to go on your own, you have to be your own light.”I have heard an anecdote:“I am going away for a few days, Nasruddin,” said the master of the house. “And I am going to leave with you all my keys. They’re to my closets as well as those to my chests and jewel boxes. I know they will be safe with you but of course, I expect you not to touch them.”When the master returned, the Mulla said to him, “Master, I am going to leave you.”“Why, Nasruddin?”“Because you don’t trust me.”“How can you say that? I left you all my keys.”“That you did, master, but not one of them fits.”If you really want to steal enlightenment from me, no key is going to fit – not because I am giving you wrong keys, but because the door is open and there is no lock…and you are looking for the lock. Because you have a key you are looking for a lock, and the lock does not exist. So you can go on looking for the lock because of your key, and you will miss. The door is open; you just enter me and it is there. Nobody is barring the path. But prayer will not be helpful; meditation will be helpful. Meditation will give you the clarity to see.There is a very beautiful incident in the life of Houdini, the great magician.His whole life was a tremendous success; he was a miracle monger. He did so many miracles that if he was a man to cheat humanity, he could have cheated very easily. But he was a very sincere man. He would say, “Whatsoever I am doing is nothing but skill; there is no miracle in it.” No magician has ever done as much as Houdini has done. His power was almost impossible to believe. He was thrown in almost all the great prisons of the world, and within seconds he would be out. He was chained, locked, and within seconds – the chains wouldn’t work, locks wouldn’t work – something would happen, and he would be out. He would be out almost within seconds, not even a minute.But in Italy he failed, only once in his life. He was thrown in the central prison of Rome, and thousands of people had gathered to see him come out. Minutes passed and there was no sign of him. It was almost half an hour, and people started getting restless because it had never happened before: “What has happened? Has he gone mad, or died, or what happened? Or has the great magician failed?”After one hour he came out, perspiring and laughing loudly. And the people asked, “What happened? One hour? We were thinking that you had either gone mad or you were dead! Even the authorities were thinking to go in and see. What happened?”He said, “They tricked me; they made me a fool. The door was not locked! All my skill is to open the lock, and I was trying to find out where the lock is, and there was no lock. The door was not locked at all, it was already open. Tired, exhausted, worried, puzzled, I fell, and when I fell and struck the door, the door opened. That’s how I am out; not because of my skill.”Exactly the same is the case with me.The question has been asked by Bodhidharma; he has many keys. Nothing will fit, and he is collecting more and more keys. He is very calculating, clever. Now that those keys are not fitting he is asking for my blessings. My blessings are there whether you ask or not, but keys are not going to fit. Throw the keys! The door is open. Nobody is barring the path. But if you seek enlightenment, the path is of meditation. If you seek eternal play, then there is no need to think in terms of enlightenment.These two terms are different, totally different. The ultimate result is the same. The bhakta, the devotee, finds his enlightenment in this beautiful play of God, and the meditator finds this game beautiful when he reaches his enlightenment. But they approach in different directions with different methodology, with different attitudes. One has to decide it very clearly, otherwise you can get confused. Love or meditation has to be chosen very clearly, and then stick to the path. Finally, everything that has happened on the other path will also happen to you, so don’t be worried. But it will happen only on the peak. All the paths meet when they reach to the peak of the mountain, but all the paths move differently.The third question:Osho,How to recognize past-life experiences from illusion, madness?There is no need: all that is past is already illusion. There is no difference between illusion and the past. All that is gone is no longer real. Now this is something to be understood very deeply.Yesterday is no more. Now what is the difference between a real yesterday and an imagined yesterday? There is no difference because both will exist only in your mind – the real and the imagined. Both will be imaginations of a sort. What will be the difference between a real yesterday and an unreal yesterday? There is no difference because both are unreal. They both exist only in your mind and nowhere else. All past is illusory; all future is illusory because it is not yet; and between the two is the present. Hence in the East we call the whole existence illusory, maya – because between two illusions how can reality exist? And today is also going to be yesterday; today is continuously passing into yesterday. The present is continuously becoming past. How can the real become illusory? The future is passing into past, and the present is just a gate, nothing else. Future is illusory, past is illusory; just on the gate things appear, for a single moment, to be real.What type of reality can this be? That too is illusory. Hindus say it is only appearance, not real. Real is that which subsists. Real is that which is always eternally there. Real is that which is beyond time. Unreal is that which is within time. The past is within time. It will be difficult to think of the present as unreal, but start from the past. It is easy to think of the past as unreal, because whether it happened or not, what difference does it make? It may not have happened at all. It may be just in your mind, it may be just your idea that it happened. It is very easy to think about the past as unreal, and about the future also. Between the two is the narrow bridge of the present. How can something real be between two unrealities? How can the middle be real, when both ends are unreal, and when this real also is continuously turning into unreality and illusion? No, all that is experienced is imagination; it is dream stuff. Only the experiencer is real, only the observer is real. The observed is dream; the observer, the witness, is real. That is one of the greatest discoveries of human consciousness in the whole of human history.There is nothing to compare with it. All other discoveries are just childish. This one discovery is the base of all religion: the witness is real. One thing is certain; that you are, you as a witness. Even for a dream to exist, a dreamer is needed. The dream may be a dream, but the dreamer cannot be a dream. Even to be deceived I would have to exist; even to fall into error, I will be needed. Without me the error cannot exist. This witness is the search of meditation.So don’t be bothered about how to recognize past life experiences from illusion, madness. There is nothing to recognize. There is no need.I have heard….Mulla Nasruddin was telling his wife about a dream he had experienced the night before.“It was terrible,” he said. “I was at a birthday party at Joe’s house. His mother had baked a chocolate cake three feet high, and when she cut it everybody was given a piece that was so large that it hung over the sides of the plate. Then she dipped up some homemade ice cream. She had so much of it that she had to give each one of us our share in a soup bowl.”“What was so terrible about the dream?” asked his wife.“Oh,” said Nasruddin, “I woke up before I could get the first taste.”We are continuously waking up from the past. Each moment is a wakening. But we are continuously falling asleep into the future, so each moment is again a moment of stumbling into darkness and sleep. So the real distinction that has to be made is between waking and sleeping. No other distinction is of any value.Try to be so wakeful that you don’t fall asleep again. Remain so alert that the future is not allowed to deceive you again as you had allowed it before. What has become past is nothing, but once it is your future then you get deceived by it. Now it is past; now another future is arriving. Every moment future is arriving, and future can deceive you only if you are asleep. Then again it will become past.Now let me tell you one thing: if you remain alert and you don’t allow the future to deceive you in the present, the past disappears. Then there is no memory left of it, no trace of it. Then one is just a clean slate, a sky without any clouds, a flame without smoke. That’s what the state of enlightenment is – so alert that only the witness is real and everything else is nothing but ripples on the surface of the water. Everything is passing, everything is a flux. Only one thing remains and remains and remains, and that is your consciousness, your awareness.But we are caught in the net of the past. That which passes somehow remains in the mind. It passes, it is no longer there, but somehow the mind clings to it.I have heard….A man in the upstairs apartment yelled to Mulla Nasruddin downstairs, “If you don’t stop playing that clarinet I will go crazy!”“Too late,” said Nasruddin. “I stopped an hour ago.”People are continuously worried about things which have almost gone and disappeared. The past makes you crazy. You go on brooding, you go on playing with the wounds, you go on hurting yourself again and again. You go on feeding your ego again and again. The past seems to be your treasure. It is nothing – just bubbles, air bubbles. And the same is the future; and between the two is this moment of the present. Be alert, be awake. No other distinction is of any significance. Only one distinction is of significance, and that is of being alert or unalert.Now I can tell you this: if you are unalert, then whatsoever happens is imaginary. If you are alert, then whatsoever happens is real. Were you alert in the past? If you were alert, then it was real. Are you alert right now? If you are alert then whatsoever is happening before you is real. Will you be alert tomorrow? Then whatsoever will happen will be real. So forget about reality and unreality; just try to become more and more alert.Reality and unreality are not qualities of the objective world, they are qualities of subjective consciousness. For Buddha everything is real. For you, fast asleep, snoring, everything is unreal. Just think of it in this way: you are sleeping in a room and somebody is sitting by your side alert and awake. The room is the same. Both are in the same room, in the same space. One is fast asleep, the other is sitting by the side. Are they in the same room? Can they be in the same room? Because one who is asleep is dreaming, dreaming of a thousand and one other rooms except this one. Have you ever dreamed about the same room in which you were sleeping? – no, never. A dream is always somewhere else. That’s the function of the dream: to take you somewhere else.The man who is asleep is dreaming. He is not aware of this room and the reality of this room. He has his own imaginary reality. The man who is awake and sitting by his side is in this room. His alertness gives him a totally different quality of reality. Buddha, walking, moving from one village to another village, and by his side his disciple, Ananda – both are in two different worlds. Ananda is fast asleep, dreaming; Buddha is awake, non-dreaming. When you are not dreaming, you are encountering reality. But when you are dreaming, you are encountering only your dream – unreality. What is the criterion for reality? – Alertness. Become more alert; then the world becomes more real. Become even more alert; the world becomes even more real.When you are at the peak of your awareness, the world is so radiantly real that it is difficult to call it matter. One has to call it God, nothing else will do. It is so radiantly real, it is so eternally real that one has to say that time has ceased. Reality is neither past, nor present, nor future; it simply is. It is herenow. Now is not part of time. In fact, you should not use the word now. Only enlightened people should be allowed to use it, because your now is just not there.What do you call “now”? The moment you call it “now” it is already past. Or, if you call it “now” before it is past, then it is in the future. You are so asleep that by the time you come to recapture it, it is already gone. It is very slippery. Now is possible only when you are so alert that there is not a single dream in your mind, not a single thought, no ripples arising. Then you are totally present. When you are present then reality is present. It is your presence that reveals the presence of reality. Then you are in the now, and the now is eternal. Then it never comes and goes, it is simply there. Then nothing comes and nothing goes.One of Buddha’s great disciples, Bodhidharma, used to say that Buddha never existed; he was never born, he never walked on the earth, he never talked. One of his disciples told him that what he was saying seemed simply absurd. “Buddha was born in Kapilvastu to a certain king, to a certain woman. He renounced the world. These are historical facts, and you go on denying them? And you yourself are a follower of Buddha. If he never existed, if he was never born and he never walked on the earth, then whom do you follow?”Bodhidharma said, “I follow that one who was never born, never walked on the earth, never uttered a single word, never died. I follow that. He is the real Buddha. And all else which you call history is nothing but dreams seen by sleepy people.”Now this has to be understood. I am talking to you; it is a fact. I am talking to you, you are listening to me, but still Bodhidharma is perfectly true: it is still a dream because you are not awake. If you are awake you will see that I have not uttered a single word. Then you will see a totally different reality, where words are not uttered, where silence reigns, where wordless reality is encountered. If you are awake you will see me directly, and you will see total stillness, but that will depend on your silence, that will depend on your non-dreaming state, that will depend on your awakening. Then you will see that this man who is sitting in front of you is not the real man. Then something else, something totally different, diametrically different, will be revealed to you.That’s the meaning when we call Buddha “Bhagwan.” It is not a reality for everybody, but only for those who became alert; they recognized. That’s what we mean when we call Jesus “Son of God.” It was not revealed to all, because everybody knew that this man was nobody else but the son of Joseph the carpenter. And he was just claiming nonsense, that he is the Son of God. But those who loved him and those who were tremendously alert about his reality became aware that the son of Joseph the carpenter was just a reflection in the world of unreality, in the world of dreams. “Son of God” is the reality. But you can see that reality only to that extent to which you have become real. More than that you cannot do.Facts are not truths. Something may be a fact and may not be true, and something may be true and may not be a fact. This word fact is derived from a Latin root which means “to do,” facere. This is beautiful. A fact is that about which you can do something. But our doing is nothing but dreaming. You can do many things in your dream also; they are facts. You become so obsessed with your dream that sometimes it has happened that you had a nightmare, and then you awake, but you still go on trembling, you still go on perspiring. The fear is still there, the heart beats faster. Now you know that it was a dream, now you know that it was just a nightmare, nothing to be worried about, but still you are trembling. The dream has affected you so much that it even penetrates your reality – your body, your mind.But we go on living in two sorts of sleep: one is in the night which we call sleep, and the other is in the day which we call waking. It is a waking sleep, just for name’s sake. Our eyes are open, but unless thinking stops completely, your real eye remains closed.“How to recognize past life experiences from illusion?” There is no way and there is no need, and one should not waste time in foolish things. The gone is gone; the gone is already illusion. Only one thing remains and that is your witnessing. Catch hold of it, don’t lose track of it. It will be difficult to catch hold of it; again and again you will lose track, but again and again remind yourself to catch hold of it. Many times you will miss the goal, many times you will have glimpses. But by and by, more and more possibility will open. And if you can remain alert even for a few minutes together, a new man will be born unto you. You will be totally different. The old will be gone, and then you will not be worried with past, or future, or present. You will simply live in a different dimension, the dimension of eternity – where nothing passes, nothing is born, nothing dies, everything remains.The fourth question:Osho,I am full of energy, feeling playful and more and more friendly, but I talk too much. What to do?Be playful about that too; don’t make it a serious thing. Talk playfully, and if nobody is listening, take it playfully – because there is no necessity that somebody should listen. Don’t feel offended. If it comes easy for you to talk, talk. If the other is not in the mood to listen, that is his problem. But don’t feel offended. Just remain alert to what is happening in you, that you want to talk. It will happen to many people.When meditation releases energy in you, it will find all sorts of ways to be expressed. It depends on what type of talent you have. If you are a painter and meditation releases energy, you will paint more, you will paint madly. You will forget everything, the whole world. Your whole energy will be poured into painting. If you are a dancer your meditation will make you a very deep dancer. It depends on the capacity, talent, individuality, personality. So nobody knows what will happen. Sometimes sudden changes will happen: a person who was very silent and was never talkative suddenly becomes talkative. He may have been repressed. He may not have been allowed ever to talk. When the energy arises and flows, he may start talking.But there is nothing to be worried about. Don’t repress it. If you feel it is getting too heavy for others, then just sit in your room and talk alone. There is no need for somebody else to listen to you. In fact, who listens? You can talk to the wall and it will be more human, because you will not be creating any suffering for anybody. You will not torture, you will not bore anybody.Somebody has sent me a beautiful anecdote.Pat Reilly was confessing his sins.“Sure, Father, I had sex seven times last night.”The priest asked, “How many women?”“Ah, Father, there was only one woman,” answered Pat.To which the priest said, “Well, it is not as bad as I thought. Who is the woman?”“My wife, Father.”“Well,” said the priest, “there is nothing wrong with that, my son.”“I know, Father, but I just had to tell someone,” said Pat.There are moments when you just have to tell someone. If you don’t tell, it becomes heavy on you. If you tell, you are released and relaxed. If you can find a sympathetic listener, good; otherwise just talk to yourself. But don’t repress it. Repressed, it will become a burden on you. Just sit in front of the wall and have a good talk. In the beginning you will feel it a little crazy, but the more you do it, the more you will see the beauty of it. It is less violent. It does not waste somebody else’s time, and it works the same way, it does the same: you are relieved. And after a good talk with the wall you will feel very, very relaxed. In fact, everybody needs to do it. The world would be better and more silent if people started talking to the walls.Try it. It will be deep meditation – knowing well that the wall is not listening. But that is not the point.I have heard about a great psychoanalyst who became very old but still continued to practice six, seven, eight hours per day, listening to the patients. He had a young disciple, an apprentice, who became tired after three or four hours – listening to nonsense, neurotic obsessions, fixations, the same thing again and again.He asked his old master one day, “How do you manage? Because I see you as fresh in the evening as in the morning when you come to the clinic. You are as fresh as when you go – seven, eight hours of nonsense. You never get tired. I get tired after two, three hours – and I am a young man!”The old man laughed and said, “Who listens?”Freud arranged it very well. He did not even face the patient. He would tell the patient to lie on a couch, and there would be a curtain, and behind the curtain he would sit. And the patient lying on the couch looking at the ceiling, had to talk. It was really very meaningful. One: when a person is lying down he is more relaxed. He talks of deeper things than when he is sitting. He goes deeper into his unconscious. Talk to a man standing, and he will be very superficial. Sit down, and he goes a little deeper. Let him lie down and then listen to him; he goes very deep.And then: he was not facing anybody. When you are facing somebody the very presence of the other functions as a repressive force. Then you start saying things which he would like. Then you start saying things in such a way that he is not offended. Then you manage somehow to say things which will be approved by him. Then there is much repression; then the truth never comes out. When the man is not facing you and you are just facing the ceiling, you have nothing to manage. The ceiling will never be offended, you can say anything you like. By and by, one goes deep into associations.There is no need for the Freudian couch, simply your bedroom will do. And there is no need for anybody to sit there, you can just talk and listen to yourself. Talking and listening to yourself will give you a depth, a great under-standing about your own mind.So talk to the wall, and listen. Be both together, the talker and the listener. Don’t analyze, don’t judge, don’t say “this is good and that is bad,” “that should not be said and this should be said,” no. And don’t make any refinement, don’t polish. Simply blurt out whatsoever comes to the mind – ugly, absurd, irrelevant. Let the mind have full play and you simply watch. It will be a very great meditation.The new groom was singing the praises of married life to his bachelor friend.“Yes, it is wonderful. Breakfast before I go to work is large and delicious. When I go off after that the little woman gives me a big hug and kiss at the door. I return home at night, supper is on the table. After that I sit in the living room reading the paper while the missus cleans away the dishes. Then she changes into something more comfortable and sits down beside me, and talks to me. And she talks, and talks, and talks, until I wish she would drop dead.”Don’t give such an opportunity to anybody that he starts thinking, “When are you going to drop dead?” It is your problem. Or, you can make a good arrangement if somebody has the same problem. This is Amida’s problem. In this ashram there are so many mad people; you can find somebody else who has the same problem. Then you can make a good arrangement: one hour you talk, one hour you listen to him – no need to be connected with each other, no need to be relevant, and no need to follow any rules of conversation. It is not a conversation. One hour you blurt whatsoever comes to your mind, and of course, then you have to pay – one hour you have to listen. And it will be valuable for both.But one thing should be remembered: don’t repress it. Anything repressed becomes poisonous. And talking is just innocent; the wall will do. Go to the trees and they will feel very happy; nobody talks to them. They are always waiting. They will feel grateful. Or go to the river or to the rocks, but don’t repress. By and by, things will clear up and talking will disappear. It is just the beginning. Then deeper layers of being will be touched.Talk is the most superficial layer of your life, just a very superficial layer. When energy is flowing deep, that layer starts trembling, ripples arise. Allow them. Soon, when the talk is exhausted and you have thrown out all the rubbish that you have been carrying for your whole life, silence will come. And that silence will be completely uncorrupted, virgin. You can force your talking, you can repress it and you can look silent, but your silence will not be real silence. Deep down the tremor will continue; deep down the volcano is getting ready to erupt any moment. You are sitting on top of it. People look silent but they are not silent. I would like you to become really silent, and the way is a deep catharsis.I know Amida is feeling great energy. Her energy sources are tapped, and she is getting connected with her very ground of being. So in all ways she will feel too powerful. Talk also is one of the most basic ingredients of a human being. A human being is a human being because he can talk. No other animal has that capacity. And then Amida is a woman, not even a man.I have heard….A woman was saying to her husband that the new priest was a great talker. And she said, “I have never known a man to talk so fast. It is almost impossible to understand what he is saying. His words overlap.”The husband said, “I know the reason for it. His father was a politician and his mother was a woman.”Now, the perfect combination. So Amida is a woman; talking is easy. There are many reasons for it. Have you watched? – small girls start talking before boys. Boys lag behind. In colleges, schools, universities also, as far as language is concerned, girls are always better than boys. They always get higher marks, they are more articulate. Something seems to be different between the feminine mind and the male mind: the male mind is a better doer, the female mind is a better talker.Maybe because much energy is taken by doing as far as man is concerned; no energy is taken by doing as far as woman is concerned, so the whole energy pours into one direction. But there is nothing wrong about it. A good talker has something valuable: he can communicate better. To be articulate is beautiful because communication is more possible. And a good talk is an aesthetic value in itself. But first, let the flood be thrown out. Then things will sort themselves out, then things will settle.After this flood is gone, Amida will find very small sentences coming into her consciousness, but diamond-like, each sentence a value in itself. But first this flood has to go. If the flood is repressed, then those diamonds will be lost forever. That’s why all the great scriptures of the world are written in sutras, aphorisms because the people who wrote them went through this flood of catharsis. When the catharsis was complete, then diamond-like, small sentences – simple, aesthetic, beautiful, complete – started bubbling in the consciousness. It is from that consciousness that the Vedas, the Koran were born. And it is from that consciousness that the beauty of the language of the Bible arises. Never again has it been surpassed.Jesus was illiterate, but nobody has ever surpassed that clarity, that penetrating reality of his assertions. Behind it is great meditation. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali or the Brahma Sutras of Badarayana or the Bhakti Sutras of Narada – small sentences, the smallest you can conceive, almost telegraphic – but so much is pressed into them that each sentence has atomic energy. If it explodes – and if you lovingly take it into yourself, into your heart, it will explode – you will become luminous through it. But first the flood has to go. It is a good symbol that the flood has come. Allow it. If you can find some sympathetic ears, good. Otherwise, trees, rocks, but don’t repress it.The fifth question:Osho,I am confronted by death. I accept, or so I think, and then people get sick and death happens and hospitalization and I get this enormous knot of fear in my stomach. I am so scared of death and dying. I get so freaked out.Death is a problem. You can avoid it, you can postpone it, but you cannot completely dissolve it. You have to face it. It can be dissolved only by going through it to the very end, all the way. It is very risky and it will give you great fear. Your whole being will start shaking and trembling; the very idea of dying is unacceptable. It looks so unjust and it looks so meaningless. If a person is to die then what is the meaning of life? Then why am I living, for what? If only death is finally to happen, then why not commit suicide now? Why get up every day, work hard, go to bed, get up again, work hard, go to bed – for what? Just to die in the end?Death is the only metaphysical problem. It is because of death that man starts thinking. It is because of death that man became contemplative, a meditator. In fact, it is because of death that religion was born. The whole credit goes to death. Death stirred everybody’s consciousness. The problem is such; it has to be solved. So nothing is wrong with it.The question is from Vidya.“I am confronted by death…” everybody is confronted by death. Martin Heidegger has said, “Man is a being towards death.” And that is the priority of man. Animals die, but they don’t know that they die or that they are going to die. Trees die, but there is no confrontation with death. It is the priority of man that only man knows that he is going to die. Hence, man can grow beyond death. Hence, there is a possibility to penetrate into death and overcome it.“I accept or so I think…” no, acceptance is not possible. You can deceive: you can think that you accept because it is so troublesome even to look at it. Even to think about it is so troublesome that one thinks, “Yes, okay, I’m going to die – so what? I’m going to die, but don’t raise the question. Don’t talk about it.” One keeps it away, goes on putting it by the side so it does not come in the way, keeps it in the unconscious. Acceptance is not possible. You will have to face death, and when you have faced it you need not accept because then you know there is no death.“And then many people get sick and death happens and hospitalization and I get this enormous knot of fear in my stomach…” that is where the problem has to be solved. That enormous knot in the stomach is exactly the place where death happens. The Japanese call it hara. Just below the navel, two inches below the navel is a point where body and soul are connected. It is there where disconnection happens when you die. Nothing dies, because body cannot die, body is already dead. And you cannot die because you are life itself. Just the connection between you and the body disappears.That knot is exactly the place where the work has to be done, so don’t try to avoid that knot. I would like to say to Vidya that whenever you feel that knot, it is such a valuable moment. Close your eyes, go deep into the knot. That is hara. Feel it, allow it; it has some message for you, it wants to say something to you. If you allow it, it will give you the message. If you relax into it, if you go into it, by and by, you will see the knot has disappeared and there is, instead of a knot, a lotus flower – something flowering there. It is a very beautiful experience. And if you go still deeper you will see that it is a bridge, that flower is a bridge. On this side is the body, on the other side is your reality, your soul. And that flower is connecting both; the flower is the bridge.The flower’s roots are in the body, and the flower’s fragrance and the petals are in the soul. It is a link. But if you are afraid and you don’t go there, it feels like a knot, a tension, a stress.“I am so scared of death and dying. I get so freaked out…” there is no need to freak out; freak in. It’s perfectly natural that when somebody dies, somebody is hospitalized again and again, again and again you remember your death. Nothing is wrong in it.I have heard….A beatnik visited a psychiatrist and pleaded, “You have got to help me.”“What is your problem?” asked the head shrinker.“Lately,” said the beat, “I have had the most compelling desire to shave and shower.”Now if you don’t shower and you don’t shave, one day or other there is going to be a very compelling desire to shave and shower. It is not a problem; just go and take a shower. You are avoiding death. It has to be faced, it is part of life’s work. It is one of the greatest lessons one has to learn. There is no need to be freaking out; that is not going to help. Go in, face it. Remember that yes, one day or other you will be hospitalized, one day or other you will be ill, and one day or other, you are going to die. So there is no point in postponing it. It is better to understand it before it is too late.Mulla Nasruddin got sick and worriedly sent a hurried call for the priest, and insisted that he call on him every day to groom his neglected soul for the hereafter.Once when the priest made his daily call, he found Mulla Nasruddin in high spirits.“I am getting along fine, sir,” chortled Nasruddin. “My doctor says I’ll live another ten years, you don’t need to come back for a while. But how about dropping in again in about nine years, eleven months and twenty-nine days?”One day it has to be faced. Don’t be foolish; don’t postpone it. Because if you postpone it to the very end, it will be too late. It is not certain when the last day will happen. It can happen today, it can happen tomorrow, it can happen any moment. Death is very unpredictable.We live in death, so any moment it can happen. Face it, encounter it, and that knot in the stomach is the right place to encounter it. That is the very door from where you enter into life and from where you go out of life.The last question:Osho,Being in love with you is scary, and I surrender.It is from Prem Purnima. My answer is: being in love with you, Purnima, is even more scary, and I accept.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 2 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 2 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Those who are deadand yet fully alive and know the flavors and feelings in loving; they will cross the river. Gazing at the stream of life and death, they seek integrity. They have no wish for happiness at all, walking against the wind.They kill lust with lust and enter the city of love unattached….Man is energy, a dynamism, a process, a very creative process with a thousand and one potentialities, with infinite alternatives open. Man is an opening, an evolution, and with all the possibilities that existence has. Man is a miniature existence; a drop, of course, but a drop has all that the ocean has; a drop, of course, but a conscious drop. And the consciousness is oceanic; it knows no boundaries. But the man I am talking about is the essential man of the Bauls, the adhar manush. You can be that, but you are not that. You are the seed. You can open and blossom and release your fragrance to the winds, but you are not yet that. It has to be remembered.Gurdjieff used to say that man is not born with a soul; he has to create it through effort. A man is born only with an opportunity. It can be used, it can be wasted, so all depends on you. One has to become a creator of oneself. The parents have given you a body and a possibility, but the real birth has yet to happen. And for that real birth you will have to become your own mother, your own father. That real birth is an inner creativity. You have to move withinwards to find your own source of energy, and not only that, but to change the mechanical channels of that energy, to make conscious channels for it.Ordinarily, energy flows downwards. That’s what Bauls call lust. When they call it lust they are not denouncing it, condemning it. It is just a fact, just as water flows downwards. It is natural for water to flow downwards, down the hill. But water can rise upwards; just a little heat is needed. The water has to be heated; it can evaporate. At a certain degree of heat, a hundred degrees, it starts rising towards the heavens. The same water that was always going downhill starts going uphill. A conversion has happened; just heat was needed. In the East this heat is known as tap. The word tap means heat; the word tap means “heating yourself.”The Bauls sing,“While desire burns in the limbsstill there is time. Boil the juice on the fire of longing to condense the fruit. The sweetness of syrup will ferment and sour unless it is stirred on controlled heat.“Feelings evolve from desire, and love shoots forth from lust.”Lust is the same energy as love; the difference is only of direction. Lust moves downwards, love has started the uphill task. Lust is like the roots of a tree, love is like wings of a bird – but the energy is the same. All energy is the same. Energy as such is neutral. Unless you become conscious about it you cannot be creative.And the downhill movement is very destructive: you are simply dissipating yourself. You are not getting any integration through it – what Gurdjieff used to call crystallization. Every moment you are poured with energy. Existence goes on pouring energy into you: through air, through water, food; through the sunlight, through the moonlight, and through a thousand and one other subtle influences. The universe goes on pouring its energy into you. What are you doing with that energy? Are you doing anything or simply wasting it? Are you creating something out of it? Are you getting a certain integrity, crystallization out of it? Or does it just come through one end and is lost through the other end?There are many people who are just like a pipe: you pour one thing through one end, through the other end it goes out. Don’t be a pipe. When the energy is in you, do something with it so that something of it becomes a permanent part of you. Otherwise the whole life will be just a pipe: eating, defecating, drinking, urinating – just a pipe. Subtle juices are created by your energy. That’s what sex is; a very subtle juice. Now what are you doing with it? Are you doing anything with it, or just wasting it?Lust is the lowest form of sex energy; love, the highest form. Unless your lust becomes love you will be missing your goal.Gurdjieff used to say that there is a certain mechanism in man; he called it kundabuffer, just parallel to kundalini: kundalini is a center, but it functions only when the energy rises upwards. Kundabuffer is that center which functions in you when the energy goes downwards. Kundabuffer has to be destroyed, melted, destructured. It is a mechanism out of the continuous practice of many lives. A certain mechanism has arisen in everybody, a channel. The moment energy is ready it simply moves through that channel. That channel is already there to take it out of your being. If this is the truth and nothing else is possible, then Jean-Paul Sartre is right: that man is a useless passion. Then for a few days you are alive on the earth, doing nothing – eating things, throwing things, absorbing things, throwing things. Then what is the point of it all?But this is not all. The kundabuffer can be melted; that channel can be broken. And once that channel is broken another channel starts functioning. It is already there waiting for you. Not that it does not exist; it exists. It has come with you but you have not used it yet. You have not allowed energy to flow into it. Of course, it is an uphill task, it is arduous. Going downhill is very easy; going uphill, strength, awareness, a certain will, courage, trust…many things will be needed.The Bauls sing,“The act of lovingis not an ideal dream. Loving grows from the grilling of lust – like feeling death, being wholly alive.“The clay-beetle buried in the earth lives on clay, nestling in it. Lovers who know how love can overcome lust –though an uphill walk, even for a man of strength…”The very courageous, the really strong people, the really adventurous, become attracted towards paths of self-realization or paths of self-transformation. Religion is the greatest adventure there is. Going to Everest is nothing, going to the moon also is nothing; going to the highest peak of your being is the real task. Because in the first place, we are not even aware that the peak exists. In the first place, we are so unconscious that we don’t know what we are doing. We don’t know what we are doing with our lives.I have heard….The manager of a small power plant was electrocuted while on the job. The assistant manager informed the police chief, the coroner, and the workmen in the plant. They gathered, horror-stricken, about the body of the dead manager stretched out on the floor, and began to speculate how an experienced man could commit so fatal an error.“The only thing I can think of,” remarked the assistant manager, “is that poor Joe must have picked up this terminal in one hand….”The assistant manager picked up the terminal and then without thinking reached out with his other hand and came into contact with…Bang!The assistant manager was stretched out next to the manager, but the mystery was now resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.Man is unconscious. You go on doing things without knowing why. You go on doing things you could not do if you were even a little conscious. What we are doing with our life is just sleeping through it. Consciousness has to be evolved. The more consciousness you have, the more energy starts flowing upwards on its own accord. Consciousness is the clue, the key, the master key. Lust becomes love through consciousness, so love cannot be an unconscious thing.When Bauls say that love is the door, they don’t mean the love that you call love. Your love is as unconscious as anything else. It is unconscious, that’s why we use the expression “falling in love.” Yes, it is a “falling in.” The love Bauls are talking about is a rising in love, not falling in love. It is not a fall, it is a rise. So don’t misunderstand that your love is what Bauls are talking about. Your love is just a name for lust – a good name, a beautiful, nice name. And beware of nice words because they can be very deceptive. If you label lust as love, you will be deceived by your own labeling.Lust happens when you are unconscious. You see a woman or a man and you fall in love, and you don’t know why, sometimes even against yourself, in spite of yourself.People come and say to me, “What can we do? We are helpless; love has happened.” This love is not the love of the Baul; this is lust. What a Baul calls lust is this: unconscious love is lust. Then it flows downwards. Then it moves through the sex center into the world again. Upwards lust is love, but then it is conscious. Consciousness is the staircase: step by step you become more and more conscious. Whatsoever you do, you do it with full consciousness – even walking, eating, going to bed, talking, listening – small things of life, but you do them with consciousness. And when you are in love, you are in love with full consciousness.It is not against yourself. It is not that you are possessed, it is not that you are a victim, it is not that you are being pulled by somebody like a magnet. No, you are moving on your own. The Bauls’ love is very cool; it has the coolness of awareness. Your love is very hot; it has the fever of unconsciousness. You are functioning through kundabuffer. This mechanism exists just at the center of sex. People who are living through kundabuffer can live two sorts of lives: one of indulgence, the other of repression – but both are the same.Ordinarily the people who live a life of repression are thought to be saints. That’s simply foolish. They are the same people in a different garb. People who live a life of indulgence are as unconscious as the people who live a life of repression. In fact, the stronger the kundabuffer is, the more people become repressive, because they want to control it. They are afraid. They are afraid because they are losing the ego control over their sex desire. They try to control it, but their control is like forcing the sex desire deep into the unconscious. They sit on top of it; they have to continuously fight with it. And remember: if you have to fight with something you can never leave it and you can never go beyond it.To fight with it you have to remain on the same level. To fight with it you have to remain sitting on top of it for twenty-four hours. There is no holiday. You leave it even for a single moment and it is again there, forcing you towards indulgence. Indulgence and repression are the two faces of the same type of person. In your monasteries you will find the repressive type, in the world you will find the indulgent type. The playboy and the so-called saint may look opposite to each other, but they are complementary. Their obsession is the same, their fixation is the same, their neurosis is the same. Kundabuffer has to be melted down. What to do? One small technique will be of tremendous help.Whenever you feel sex desire arising, there are three possibilities: one, indulge in it – ordinary, everybody is doing that; second: repress it, force it down so it goes beyond your consciousness into the darkness of the unconscious. Throw it into the basement of your life. That’s what your so-called extraordinary people are doing – mahatmas, saints, monks. But both are against nature. Both are against the inner science of transformation. The third – a very rare minority ever tries it – is, when the sex desire arises, close your eyes.It is a very valuable moment: desire arising is energy arising. It is like the sun rising in the morning. Close your eyes; this is the moment to be meditative. Move downwards to the sex center where you are feeling the thrill the vibration, the kick. Move there and just be a silent onlooker. Witness it, don’t condemn it. The moment you condemn you have gone far away from it. And don’t enjoy it, because the moment you enjoy you are unconscious. Just be alert, watchful, like a lamp burning in a dark night. You just take your consciousness there, unflickering, unwavering. You see what is happening at the sex center. What is this energy?Don’t call it names because all words have become contaminated. Even if you say it is sex, immediately you have started condemning it. The very word has become condemnatory. Or, if you belong to the new generation, then the very word has become something sacred. But the word is always loaded with emotion.Any word which is loaded with emotion becomes a barrier on the path of awareness. You just don’t call it anything. Just watch the fact that an energy is arising near the sex center. There is a thrill – watch it. And watching it, you will feel a totally new quality of energy. Watching it, you will see it is rising upwards. It is finding a path inside you. And the moment it starts rising upwards you will feel a coolness falling on you, a silence surrounding you, a grace, a beatitude, a benediction, a blessing all around you. It is no longer like a thorn, painful. It no longer hurts; it is very soothing, like a balm. And the more you remain aware, the higher it will go. If it can come up to the heart, which is not very difficult – difficult, but not very difficult…. If you remain alert you will see it has come to the heart. When it comes to the heart you will know for the first time what love is.Up to now you have been carrying a counterfeit in the name of love. When the energy comes to the heart chakra, then it is transformed into love. Once it is transformed into love, once you have felt it, once it has penetrated you, your whole being will feel purified. You will feel virgin, you will feel so pure, so holy, that you cannot think that heaven is anywhere else. You will know it is within you, within your heart. And heaven will become a truth; it will not be theology then, it will become almost a geography. You will know exactly where it is, and God will no longer be a hypothesis. In that purity, in that silence, in that fulfillment of love you will see, God is – not as a theory, but as a self-evident truth; not as an argument, not as a proof, not as a conclusion, not as a syllogism, but simply it is there. There is no way to deny it. It is there so much that you can deny yourself, but you cannot deny God. You yourself look so faint before the reality of God that you can say, “I may not be, but he is.”That will be the first glimpse. Energy can rise still higher. When it comes to the center of the throat, it becomes prayer. People have been doing prayer, but they don’t know what prayer is – because prayer is the most subtle and refined form of love. If you have not moved through the heart center you cannot go to prayer; there is no way. One has to go via the heart. Because of the throat center, because it exists at the throat center and happens at the throat center, people have started doing rituals. People have made prayers: they assert, they say something. But just by using the throat center and saying something to God you are not praying., although prayer is concerned with the throat center. But not as verbalization, it is an experience at that center. And the experience is exactly like when a child sucks at his mother’s breast for the first time. It is not that you say something, but you receive something.Prayer is not saying something to God, but receiving something from God. God becomes the mother, the mother’s breast. Prayer is a nourishment. Yes, it exists and happens at the throat center because the throat center is the center to receive. The throat center is the first center which starts functioning because the child has to suck air; that happens through the throat center. And then he has to suck milk; that happens through the throat center. Prayer is just like sucking air, vitality, or sucking milk at the breast of your mother.Hence, Jesus says, “Unless you become like small babes, you will not enter into my kingdom of God.” He is talking about the throat center. But Christians have completely lost track of it. He is saying in a symbolic way to again become a babe, again start sucking from the throat center the energy that life is. Now, of course, the breast is invisible and the milk is invisible.Have you watched a man in prayer? How diffused with grace he looks, how peaceful, how at home, how relaxed. Watch a small babe sucking milk, fallen asleep with the nipple of the breast still in his mouth, resting on his mother’s breast, fallen asleep. Watch the face of the child; that is the face of the saint also when he arrives at the throat center and prayer arises.Prayer is not something that you do with God; prayer is something that you allow God to do with you. Prayer is receptive. It is not an action on your part, it is a passive welcome. Prayer is not saying something to God; on the contrary, it is listening to God. It is being ready to receive his gift. It is very difficult to receive his gift because you have your own ideas, you have your own plans. You go on telling him, showing him the right path: “Do this, then I will be happy.”We have the adage that man proposes and God disposes. This is simply stupid, sheer stupidity. Just the other way round is the case: God proposes and man goes on disposing – because you have your own plans. You never listen to him, you think you are wiser than him. You go on advising him: “Do this, don’t do that” – that’s what you do in your prayer.A real prayer has nothing to suggest to God except a deep gratitude, thankfulness. It simply accepts whatsoever God is pouring. Prayer is receiving the gift. But it happens at the throat center. It is the highest form of love. And when you go still higher, then at the seventh center, sahasrar, happens samadhi, the ultimate ecstasy, where the seeker is lost in the sought – where you are no more yourself, where God and you lose boundaries and become one.Overlapping starts at the throat center; boundaries become dim, not very clear-cut. But still, you exist separately. You have a separate center and God has a separate center. In prayer you two are meeting, overlapping. In some way peripheries are merging into each other, but still centers are different. The higher you go, the more centers come closer and closer. At the sahasrar, the seventh chakra, your centers become one. Then there is only one center.That’s what is meant when Jesus says, “Not I, but my Father lives in me.” Now the seeker and the sought are not two. The ultimate meeting has happened, the ultimate love has flowered, has come to fruition and fulfillment.If you become aware and a witness when the sex center is throbbing with energy, vibrating, streaming – without choosing indulgence or repression – if you can remain just in the middle, a watcher, an observer, this tremendous transformation happens on its own. So next time you feel full of passion, don’t move into these two easily available alternatives: indulgence or repression. Just remain in the middle, and you are at a point where the door can open. It always opens in the middle. Buddha used to call his path “the middle path,” majjhim nikaya, because he said, “Everywhere excess is prohibited. Always choose the middle.”The exact middle is the point beyond. If you can find the exact middle ground between two opposites, two rivals, you have gone beyond them, you have reached a transcendence. The transcendence opens just in the middle; the middle is the beyond.When you are watching, standing like a witness at the sex center, energy moves upwards. Kundabuffer starts melting, and kundalini starts functioning. Kundalini is the right path, kundabuffer the wrong path – kundabuffer is functioning because we have lived so unconsciously for many lives that kundalini cannot function. Kundalini needs the fuel of consciousness. If that gas is missing, kundalini cannot function. Kundabuffer functions with unconsciousness. So it depends on you: if you go on supplying unconsciousness, kundabuffer will go on functioning; if you supply consciousness, suddenly your life turns. You start moving towards the interior of your being, a deep interiority arises.A man who was extremely successful with mule teams was asked how he managed the stubborn creatures.“Well,” explained the man, “when they won’t move, I pick up a handful of soil and put it in their mouths. Of course, they spit it out, but as a rule they start on.”“Why do you think it has that effect?” asked the person.“I’m not sure, but I think it changes the current of their thoughts.”If you start witnessing, nobody knows exactly how your energy starts moving, but somehow it happens. Maybe it changes your current of thought. It is a great shock.You try – you are angry, you are getting into anger; suddenly become alert. Shake and jerk your body and become alert, and see what happens. Suddenly you will see that something has slipped out of your hands; you are no longer angry. Somehow anger looks foolish now. Or, slap your face when you are getting angry rather than slapping somebody else’s face – that is not going to help. Slap your own face when you are getting angry and see what happens. Suddenly, the mechanism that was going to function in a routine way cannot function; you have shocked it.A consciousness arises if you slap your own face, a consciousness which breaks the unconscious pattern. So wherever you want to change, remember consciousness is the key. Otherwise, we are almost living in a sort of insanity. A few mad people are in the madhouses, the remainder are outside. But it is very difficult to find a sane man; the differences are only of degrees. Have you ever watched the fact, have you ever become afraid of it? – that the person who has become mad was also just like you a few days before? Nobody had ever thought that he would become mad; he is mad. Can’t the same happen to you?It is told about William James, the greatest American psychologist, that when he went to visit a madhouse for the first time, he came back home very sad. He had fever. The wife was worried. She said, “What has happened? When you went you were perfectly okay.” He said, “Don’t talk to me. I’m in no mood to talk.” He slipped under the blankets and remained ill for two or three days. Everybody was worried. The doctor said, “Nothing is wrong.” Then he said what had happened.Seeing many mad people in the madhouse, suddenly a thought occurred to him: “The same can happen to me.” That gave him a trembling; he was never the same man again. But that made him very alert.Inside your mind, continuous madness exists – and you know it. How can you manage not to know it? But it goes on like an undercurrent. On the surface you manage well.I have heard….A clergyman had occasion to preach to the inmates of an insane hospital. During his sermon he noticed that one of the patients paid the closest attention, his eyes riveted upon the preacher’s face, his body bent eagerly forward. This interest was most flattering.After the service, the speaker noticed that the man spoke to the superintendent. So as soon as possible, the preacher inquired, “Didn’t that man speak to you about my sermon?”“Yes.”“Would you mind telling me what he said?”The superintendent tried to sidestep, but the preacher insisted.“Well,” he said at last, “what the man said was, ‘Just think…he is out and I am in.’”You may be out and somebody may be in, but the difference is only of degree. Unless you become conscious, you are always on the verge of madness, always boiling, always ready. Any small thing can prove the last straw on the camel. Any small thing, any small incident, and you may cross the boundary.To live unconsciously is not to really live. To become conscious, to move consciously, to be conscious of all that happens in your mind, to be separate from your mind – because consciousness becomes separate; whenever you watch something you become separate from that thing – this is the secret. If you watch your thoughts you become separate from your thoughts; you are no more identified. And when you are not identified, you are not cooperating, and you don’t go on giving energy to your thoughts – by and by, they disappear. When the host is not interested, the guests disappear. They don’t come so often; or even if they come they don’t stay so long. Gaps arise – one thought comes, then minutes pass and another thought does not come. In that gap you face reality. Then there is no screen between you and reality. Unscreened reality is what God is.The song for today:Those who are deadand yet fully alive and know the flavorsand feelingsin loving; they will cross the river.Gazing at the stream of life and death, they seek integrity. They have no wish for happiness at all, walking against the wind.They kill lustwith lust and enter the city of love unattached….Tremendous sutras, tremendously significant sutras. Those who are dead and yet fully alive…. How can you be dead and yet fully alive? If you become a witness to your body, then you know you are not the body. The body is born and the body is going to die; the moment you know you are not the body, you know that you were never born and you will never die. So in a sense you become wholly alive, eternally alive – what Jesus calls “abundance of life,” overflowingly alive. You cannot be exhausted then.Then you are not caused: you don’t have any beginning and you cannot have any end; you are perpetual energy, eternal energy. Then you are wholly alive on the one hand, and because you know you are not the body, then the life that you used to think consisted in body is no longer there. The body is already dead. You use it, you live in it, but you are no longer identified with it.Those who are deadand yet fully aliveand know the flavorsand feelingsin loving; they will cross the river.And when you are fully alive and no longer attached to the body, no longer identified with the body, no longer does the idea exist in you that you are the body, then love arises. Because the moment you are no longer the body, the kundabuffer is broken – because the kundabuffer can exist only when you are identified with the body. The kundabuffer is a part of the body.Now be careful about what I am saying; be attentive: the kundabuffer is part of the body and kundalini is not part of the body. Kundalini is part of you, it is part of your consciousness. So people, there are many…even a few doctors have tried to find out where the kundalini exists in the body. A few have even been foolish enough to prove that it exists here or there, at this center or that. Kundalini is not part of the physical body at all.And Gurdjieff was right: if people are trying to prove that kundalini is part of the body, then whatsoever they prove is kundabuffer, not kundalini. Nobody was there to say to Gurdjieff that kundalini is part of the soul, not of the body. And all the so-called Hindu yogis, particularly the modern ones, try in every way to imitate science when they write. They try to show and prove that yoga is scientific. Of course, then they start falling victim to the same attitude, the same standpoint as the scientists have become victims of: the standpoint that starts with the body and thinks the body is all. So they try to prove that kundalini exists somewhere in the physical body, that it is physiological.Gurdjieff used to say that these people were talking about kundabuffer: “Their kundalini is not kundalini, but kundabuffer; a false entity.” When you are too attached to the body, this false entity arises. It arises in the body, not in you. When you are no longer identified with the body kundabuffer disappears. It is, in fact, the kundabuffer from where you are identified with the body. That’s why sex becomes almost synonymous with life. When a woman has come to her menopause she starts thinking that her life is finished. When a man comes to know that he is no longer sexually potent, he starts feeling that now he is useless. These wrong attitudes exist because we are too identified with the sex center.If witnessing arises and you are separate, and you know that you are separate – not that you repeat it, not that the Vedas say that you are separate from your body so you repeat it, you chant it, and constant repetition gives you an illusory idea that, yes, you are separate from the body. That is not going to help. Your own knowing, experiential, existential, can be of help, nothing else. If you know you are not the body, suddenly love arises; energy starts moving towards the heart center. The heart does not exist in the lungs. The heart is not part of the body, lungs are a part of the body. And whatsoever you have been thinking of as your heartbeat is not a heartbeat, it is just lungs beating. Hidden behind this beat is another beat. You can think of it in this way: the lungs and heart are parallel. Lungs belong to the body, and heart belongs to the soul.Kundabuffer and kundalini are parallel: kundabuffer belongs to the body, kundalini belongs to the soul. Sex and love are parallel: sex belongs to the body, love belongs to the soul. The world and God are parallel: the world belongs to the body, God belongs to the soul. Body and soul exist parallel, like two parallel lines always together and yet meeting nowhere; always together, running together for thousands of lives and meeting nowhere. They affect each other, but meeting never happens. They color each other.When you become too obsessed with the body, your body almost possesses the soul. When you become too detached from the body, your soul starts possessing your body. Ordinarily the soul remains a slave and the body becomes the master. But when the conversion happens, understanding arises. The soul regains its mastery and body comes to its right place – becomes a slave, an obedient slave.Those who are deadand yet fully aliveand know the flavorsand feelingsin loving; they will cross the river. Gazing at the stream of life and death they seek integrity.Integrity, yoga – integration, crystallization, centering, or whatsoever you like to call it – is the goal. Gazing at…that is the key; what I was calling witnessing. Gazing at the stream of life and death, they seek integrity. Inside you there is one stream of life and one stream of death. Body is the stream of death, soul is the stream of life. Soul never dies, body is never alive. With the soul-body together, the body reflects the life of the soul. It is simply luminous with the life of the soul. Life is borrowed; it is like the moon. The moon has no rays of its own, it reflects the sun. The rays come from the sun, are reflected by the moon, but you see them as if they are coming from the moon.It is as if you burn a small lamp in a room and somebody passing outside looks inside through the glass window. The glass window spreads the light of the lamp outside also, but the light is not coming from the glass window, it is coming from an interior place. Your body reflects life – your body is luminous with the life of the soul. That’s why when the soul disappears the body is dead. The body was always dead. Go and put off the light inside the room and the window will be dark. It was always dark because it has no light of its own.Body is the stream of death, and if you continue to be attached to the body, you will again and again be falling into the stream of death. You will be born and you will be dying, and you will be born and you will be dying – this is what the Hindus call ‘the wheel of life and death’. Go in, withinwards, and find the source of life. It is totally different from the body. It has made its abode in the body, but it is not the body. That is the stream of life.Watching, gazing, witnessing these two…the stream of life and death, they seek integrity. And once your understanding has become perfect about what death is and what life is, you become integrated, you become centered. Because then no more is your center in the body. Then there is no longer any illusion that you are in the body. Then you are suddenly aware of the real center of your being, of your innermost shrine.They have no wishfor happiness at all, walking against the wind.The Bauls say the real seekers have no wish for happiness at all, walking against the wind. They simply float with life. They don’t ask anything from life, they simply receive. Whatsoever life gives, they enjoy, they delight in it, but their demand has ceased. They don’t swim, and they never swim against the stream; they simply float with the stream. That’s what surrender is.There is a beautiful song….“Oh cruelly eager, are you going to fry on fire your heart’s flower-bud? Are you going to force it to blossom and let the scent escape without biding your time?“Look at my master, God, eternally opening the buds to bloom but never in a hurry.“You are dependent on the hours of the day because of your terrifying greed. What else can you do? Listen to the Beloved’s appeal and do not hurt the master at heart.“The stream spontaneously flows, lost in itself, listening to His words, O my eager one.”The Bauls say, “Don’t try to force anything.” Let life be a deep let-go. See God opening millions of flowers every day without forcing the buds, waiting, never in a hurry, giving their time to them. The Bauls say, “Everything happens at its right time, everything happens in its own season. Wait, don’t be impatient, don’t be in a hurry. All hurry is greed, and all hurry is a subtle fight.” That which is going to happen will happen. Whenever it is going to happen it will happen; you need not fight existence. You can surrender, you can trust. This has to be understood.If this becomes part of your inner climate, it will give you tremendous joy. Then you are no longer proposing anything, and then nobody can frustrate you. You don’t have any plan and you don’t have any goal. You are not going somewhere, you have simply left yourself in his hands, and he takes you wherever he wants. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done….” Let his will be done: that is the Bauls’ method. It is of surrender and love and trust. The Baul is not a yogi, certainly not a hatha yogi; the Baul is a lover, a devotee. He trusts that God is taking him into some unknown world, but it must be beautiful because he is taking him. The river is going to the ocean; it must be going, because it is his river. This childlike trust is his only method.They have no wishfor happiness at all, walking against the wind.They kill lustwith lust and enter the city of love unattached….That’s why Bauls say, “Even if lust has to be transcended, it is through lust.” If anger has to be transcended, it is through anger. They know the alchemy of how to change poison into nectar. They don’t say to throw it, it is poison. They say to transform it, nectar is hiding behind it. The poison is only just the shell. Find the inner content of it; love is hiding behind lust, soul is hiding behind the body, God is hiding behind the world. Don’t throw it. It will be throwing something tremendously valuable. Maybe you are not yet aware of what value is there. You think it is just a stone. Become a jeweler. It is what Bauls call to become a rusik, a connoisseur. Know the taste of it, find out the ways, what it is. Become alert to the hidden reality, open the doors and go into it. It may be a Kohinoor, don’t throw it. If God has given you the stone, it must be a Kohinoor – otherwise why should he give it to you? Don’t think yourself wiser than him. Let his wisdom be supreme. You trust. If he has given you a stone it must be a Kohinoor, it must be a great diamond. It is his gift; it cannot be otherwise.So even in lust they are not like ordinary ascetics. They don’t fight, they search deep in it, they try to find the chemistry of it. Something is bound to be there, otherwise why should God give so much sex energy to everyone? And to man he has given more than to any animal. In animals, sex is seasonal. Once a year or twice a year they become sexual, otherwise sex disappears. Man is sexual for twenty-four hours, twelve months a year, year in and year out. Something is bound to be there. Why has so much sex energy been given to man? It cannot be only for generative reasons – because animals are doing perfectly well. If man were only seasonally sexual, things, in a way, would have been better: once a year for a month, and for eleven months you are free. You can do a thousand and one things and not be worried about it. One month in a year would be enough.But why has man been given so much sex energy? It cannot be only to generate children. This great treasure has been given for some other reason: it carries a hidden possibility for becoming tremendously alert and aware. This energy has to become love, and this love has to become prayer, and this prayer has to become ecstasy.The generative part is very minor as far as man is concerned. Something of greater value is hiding in it. God cannot give you something without there being a particular reason in it.They kill lust with lust and enter the city of love unattached… When lust is transformed and you enter into the city of love, you enter unattached. Remember, that is their definition of love. If love has attachment in it, it is lust, If love has no attachment in it, only then is it not lust. When you are in lust you are not really thinking of the other, thinking of your beloved or lover. You are simply using the other for your own ends. And of course, attachment is bound to be there, because you would like to possess him, and you would like to possess him or her forever. Because tomorrow also you may need, the day after tomorrow also you may need. You need a lover and you want to possess him.Love is a gift. You give; you need not be worried about whether tomorrow he will be there to receive or not. Because a lover can give to the trees, to the rocks. A lover can give to the emptiness of the sky. A lover can simply flower and send his fragrance to the winds, even if nobody is there. Just think: Buddha sitting under his bodhi tree, alone, full of love, overflowing…. Not that somebody is there to receive, but God is always there to receive, in so many forms, in so many ways.Lust is greed, lust is attachment, lust is possessiveness. Love needs no possession, love knows no attachment, because love is not greed. Love is a gift, it is a sharing. You have found something; your heart is full, your fruits are ripe. You hanker that somebody should come and share. It is unconditional; who shares does not matter. But you are so full of it that you would like to be unburdened – as when clouds are full of rainwater, they rain. Sometimes they rain in a forest, sometimes they rain on a hill, sometimes they rain in a desert, but they rain. The fact of where they rain is irrelevant. They are so full they have to rain. A lover is so full he becomes a cloud, full of lovewater; he has to rain. That raining is spontaneous.“The so-called lovers rarely know the flavors of loving. A lover lives for love alone as the fish in the water.“Great is the lover who can love day and night and is wholly devoted to love’s intercourse. Worship with prayers. The man or the woman is still alone, but a lover is formed when the souls conjoin.”Ordinarily a man is alone, a woman is alone. Loneliness is there. Even if you are attached to a man or woman or a friend, and it is only the attachment of lust, you will remain lonely. Have you not watched it? Attached to a woman, attached to a man, but still you remain lonely. Somewhere deep down there is no communication with the other; you are cut off, like islands. Even dialogue seems to be impossible. Lovers ordinarily never talk to each other, because each talk creates argument, and each talk brings conflict. By and by, they learn to be silent; by and by, they learn somehow to avoid the other, or at the most, tolerate. But they remain lonely. Even if the other is there, there is space; the inner space remains unfulfilled.The Bauls say, “The man or the woman is still alone, but a lover is formed when the souls conjoin.” It is not a question of two bodies; it is not a question of two bodies meeting and embracing and penetrating each other. The question is of two souls penetrating each other. When two souls penetrate each other, then loneliness disappears for ever. Then a totally new world arises where you are never, never lonely. You have become a whole. Man is half, woman is half. When love happens, wholeness happens.“Poison and nectar are mingled in one like music played and heard in one single act. The human heart free from flaw, forever enlightened, sees good and evil – same time, same space.“A child sucking his mother draws milk; a leech at the breast of a woman draws blood.”Poison and nectar are mingled in one…. Love and lust are mingled in one, life and death are mingled in one. It depends on you what you are going to choose of it. A child sucking his mother draws milk; a leech at the same breast draws blood. It depends on you. Lust is not bad, but love and lust are mingled together.Choose love; bring love out of lust. Let your life be a life of alertness, so whatsoever you do is done in such awareness that only that which is valuable is chosen, and the valueless is left. The whole life is nothing but a great effort to choose life against death, to choose love instead of lust, to choose God instead of the world, to choose beauty, good, truth, instead of falsities.“My heart! You are in a muddle. As the days go, your inherited riches, plundered, fly. You only doze around the clock drinking dreams and living in five homes with no control.“The robber rests with you, my heart, in your own room. But how can you know? Your eyes are shut in sleep.”This is unawareness: Your robber rests with you, my heart, in your own room. But how can you know? Your eyes are shut in sleep. Open your eyes. Watch what is happening inside, outside. Be alert to the death and life stream, and by and by, fall into the life stream and be integrated.“Love springs as feelings merge. Divided forms assume a single way. A pair of hearts running in parallel streams long to reach the God of loving.”Bauls say, “Love a man, love a woman, but let this love be nothing but an offering to the ultimate love, the love of God.”“Love springs as feelings merge. Divided forms assume a single way. A pair of hearts running in parallel streams long to reach the God of loving.”If your love is love and not lust, then, by and by, you will find that you and your beloved are both moving together, singing, dancing towards the Ultimate Lover, the Ultimate Beloved where, and only where, one can find rest. Then you are moving towards the ultimate home. If lust is there, then you are moving nowhere.Lust is like dead, stagnant water – a pond; love is like a river. And if you love somebody, your rivers move parallel towards the ocean. It is good to go dancing with your beloved, good to go hand in hand, good to go singing, with laughter in the heart. But remember, if your life becomes a pool, stagnant, then it is lust. Love is always flowing. Love is dynamic, lust is stale and stagnant.“The essence of beauty in the mirror of love stares at his face; the formless within the visual form.“The fire cools in his hands and quicksilver roasts on flames.”Love is a miracle. Once love has happened, miracles happen continuously: fire cools in his hands and quicksilver roasts on flames.Love has a different world. Lust lives under a different law. The mystics have called the law of lust the law of gravitation: one is pulled downwards. And the law of love is the law of grace: one is pulled upwards.I have heard….A Sufi mystic was staying in somebody’s house and he was thought to be a madman, so the family was a little afraid. The man was not reliable; he might do anything. But he was also known as a great mystic so they could not throw him out; they were also afraid of that. In the night – “Where to put him? Where is he going to sleep?” So they put him in the basement.In the middle of the night they suddenly heard laughter coming from the terrace. They could recognize the laughter; it was that madman’s. But how did he reach the terrace? He had been put in the basement. They ran upstairs; he was laughing madly, he was rolling on the terrace.They said, “What has happened? How have you come here?”He said, “That’s why I am laughing. I was sleeping in the basement, and then a miracle of miracles happened: suddenly I fell upwards. Hence, I am laughing!”The story is beautiful. Mystics fall upwards, love falls upwards. It is a part of another world, of another law: the law of grace.“Light has burst on the walls of the sky. The kind one has blossomed at last.“Waking in the morning, I saw him present, appearing close to my face. Flowers wither and birds flutter and the dew forms on the leaves.“The glow of the night is melting away with the rising heat of the sun.”Love is rising sun, lust is the dark night of the soul.“Explore the nature of your own body, my unfeeling heart. Unless you know your very substance, worshipping God is of no avail.“The body is the home of seven heavens for you to voyage. You will blunder as you never learned to know the friends and the foes alive in your body.”So the basic work is to know the foe and the friend in the body. To know that which you are and that which you are not is the basic work, to discriminate between death and life, lust and love, kundabuffer and kundalini.There is no need to go anywhere. All that is going to happen is going to happen within you. All is given there, all is already given. Just a little discrimination, a little awareness is needed. Bring light unto your own being. Close your eyes from the outside and open your eyes withinwards. The whole world is there in miniature.The mystics say: As above, so below.The Hindus say: Whatsoever is in brahman, whatsoever is in the universe, is also in man.Man is a small map of the whole cosmos. The limited and unlimited both exist in you; matter and consciousness both exist in you; the lowest and the highest, both exist in you. Nietzsche used to say that man is a rope stretched between two abysses, two eternities.Yes, man is a rope, a bridge. You are a ladder: one part is resting on the earth, the other part – you cannot even see it – is resting at the feet of God. Watch it, recognize it, feel the direction. And move. Start moving.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 2 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 2 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What do you do when somebody hates you?Whether somebody hates you or somebody loves you should not make any difference in you. If you are, you remain the same. If you are not, then you are immediately changed. If you are not, then anybody can pull you, push you; then anybody can push your buttons and change you. Then you are a slave, then you are not a master. Your mastery begins when whatsoever happens outside does not change you; your inner climate remains the same.A psychoanalyst was attending a convention. At one of the lectures one ugly woman sitting next to him began to pinch him. Annoyed, he was about to give her an angry retort, when he changed his mind: “Why should I get angry?” he decided. “After all, it is her problem.”Whether somebody loves you or hates you, it is his or her problem. If you are, if you have understood your being, you remain in tune with yourself. Nobody can disturb your inner harmony. If somebody loves, good; if somebody hates, good. Both remain somewhere outside you. This is what we call mastery. This is what we call crystallization – becoming free of impressions, influences.You ask me, “What do you do when somebody hates you?” What can I do? It is that person’s problem; it has nothing to do with me. If I was not here he would have hated somebody else. He would have hated. If there were nobody and he were alone, he would have hated himself. Hatred is his problem. It has nothing to do with me, not in the least. Basically it does not even refer to me; I am just an excuse. Somebody else would have done as well, would have functioned as an excuse for him.Have you not watched it? When you are angry, you are simply angry. It is not that your anger is addressed to somebody. That ‘somebody’ is nothing but an excuse. Angry, you come home from the office; you jump on your wife. Angry, you go from your home; you are angry in the office with the peon, with the clerk, with this and that. If you analyze your states of mind, you will come to see that they belong to you. You live in your own world, but you go on projecting it on others.When you are angry, you are angry – but not at me. When you are full of hate, you are full of hate – not for me. When you are full of love, you are full of love – not for me. Once you understand it, you remain like a lotus leaf in the world. You remain in the water but the water does not touch; it touches you not. You remain in the world and yet aloof, not of it. Then nobody can disturb your silence, and nobody can distract you. Your compassion goes on flowing. If you love me, you receive my compassion. If you hate me, you will not receive my compassion – not because I will not give to you. I will be continuously giving to you, as much as I give to those who love me, but you will be closed and you will not receive it.Once being is attained, one is compassion, unconditional compassion. Not that in some moments he becomes compassionate and some moments he is not compassionate. Compassion then is his natural climate, compassion is his permanent mood, compassion is his integrated being. Then whatsoever you do, his compassion goes on showering on you. But there are moments when you will receive it, when you will be open, and there are moments when you will not receive it because you will be closed – in hate you will not receive it, in love you will receive it.And you may even feel the difference – because one who loves me will start growing, one who hates me will start shrinking. Both will become so totally different that you may start thinking that I must be giving more to the one I love, or one who loves me, and I’m not giving to one who hates me or is angry at me or is closed towards me. But I am not doing that. The clouds are there and they are showering; if your pot is not broken it will be filled.Or even if your pot is not broken, but is upside-down, then you will miss. Hate is a state of upsidedownness. Then rains can go on showering but you will remain empty, because your opening is not there. Once you are have been put rightside-up, that’s what love is. Love is nothing but an opening, a receptivity, a welcome, an invitation, that “I am ready; come, please.”The Bauls go on singing, “Come Beloved, come.” They go on sending their invitations. Love is inviting, hate is repelling. If you love me you will receive much – not because I am giving you more especially; but if you hate me you will not receive at all – not because I am not giving, but because you are closed. But I remain myself. I am not identified with my body, I am not identified with my mind. I have come home.If you are identified with your body and somebody hurts your body, you will be angry; he is hurting you. If you are identified with your mind and somebody insults you, you will be angry, because he is hurting your mind. Once you are identified with your being nobody can hurt, because nobody has yet invented any way to hurt being. The body can be hurt, can be killed. The mind can be hurt…but the being cannot be touched. There is no way to hurt it, there is no way to create pain. It’s very nature is blissfulness.You can hurt my body – simple. If I am identified with the body I will be angry because I will think you have hurt me. If you insult me, then the hurt goes into the mind. If I am identified with the mind, again you are my enemy. But I am neither identified with the body nor with the mind – I am the witness. So whatsoever you do, it never reaches to my witnessing center. This goes on witnessing it; it remains utterly unaffected. Once false identifications fall, you are unperturbed. Then you become the center of the cyclone, and storms can go on raging all around you, but deep inside you remain at the still, small center of your being, completely transcendental to whatsoever is happening.I have heard…A philosopher, a barber and a bald-headed fool were traveling together. Losing their way they were forced to sleep in the open air, and to avoid danger it was agreed to watch by turns. The first lot fell on the barber, who for amusement shaved the philosopher’s head while he was sleeping. He then awoke him, and the philosopher, raising his hand to scratch his head, exclaimed, “Here is a pretty mistake! You have awakened the old bald-headed fool instead of me.”Your identification is the basic problem. If you are identified with the body, then you are going to remain in constant trouble. Because body is continuously changing, your identity will never be at a point where you can settle and relax. One day the body is young, another day it is old. One day it is healthy, another day it is ill. One day you are so radiant with youth, another day just a dilapidated structure, a ruin. Continuously, the body is in a flux. That’s why people who are identified with the body will remain constantly puzzled, confused, not knowing who they are. You are identifying with something which is not reliable. One day it is born, another day it dies. It is continuously dying and continuously changing. How can you rest with it?If you are identified with the mind, there will be even more trouble. Because the body at least has a certain structure: it changes, but changes very slowly. You never feel the change. It changes very silently, and it takes years really, to feel a certain change happening. A child does not become a young man overnight, and a young man does not become an old man overnight. It takes years, and very slow is the change; and such minute, minor changes happen that one is never aware. But with the mind you are constantly in turmoil; every single moment there is change – one moment you are happy, another moment you are sad. One moment you were at the top of the world, feeling so fortunate, another moment you are in hell, thinking to commit suicide. How can you identify with the mind?Being is that which remains always the same, eternally the same. It has no form so it cannot change, and it has no content so it cannot change. The being is contentless, formless. It has no name, no form – what in the East we call namarupa. These two things change: the name and the form. It is neither. It is simple, sheer existence, empty of all content and all form. Once you have entered this emptiness nothing can disturb you, because there is nothing to be disturbed. Nothing can hit you, because there is nobody inside to be hit. Then if you hate me, your arrow will pass through me. It cannot strike because there is nobody. You cannot make a target of me. Whether you love me or hate me, you cannot make a target of me. So it makes no difference. And I don’t do anything, I just remain myself.One day Mulla Nasruddin was saying to me, “Yes, I used to be in politics myself. I was a dogcatcher in my town for two years, but finally lost the job.”“What was the matter?” I asked him. “A change of mayors, or something?”He said, “No, I finally caught the dog.”And that’s what I would like to say to you: I finally caught the dog. Now there is no work left for me. I am jobless. I’m not doing anything: all desires have gone, all doing has left. I’m just here. I’m just being to you. If you love, you will receive me with great welcome, and you will be tremendously benefitted. If you hate you will miss, and the responsibility will be yours. Now it is for you to choose. But I don’t do anything.The second question:Osho,You are recommending meditation or devotion; I find them both helpful as both lead to the same goal: bliss, ananda. Sometimes I feel I am that, or rather this, the essential man, and sometimes I feel ecstatic in being a devotee: singing, praying, dancing, talking of him, playing leela with the divine. Can I be both? What is my real nature? Which would you suggest for my growth? In fifteen months of sannyas with you, the fear of death is gone, body has become the temple divine, mind has become an instrument for his use. All your words are sweet, but sweeter is your silence from which I have received my life's direction: do nothing, accept, act, which is working very well for my growth. Kindly enlighten.If things are going so beautifully, why make a problem? Can’t you accept your own insight? Do you always need a witness? Do you always need somebody else’s approval? If I am gone, you will be in a mess. When you are feeling so happy, is not that happiness enough proof that you are on the right track?But in life you have been wrong so many times that you have lost trust in your own self. This is one very basic thing to be understood and relearned: trust in yourself. When everything is going beautifully and you are feeling happy and blissful, forget what I am saying. Don’t be worried about it. You know well that things are going well. Why create suspicion about your own experiences?I have heard….Mulla Nasruddin was going on a sight-seeing tour of Detroit. Going up Jefferson Avenue, the driver of the bus called out all the places of interest.“On the right,” he announced, “we see the Dodge House.”“John Dodge?” the Mulla asked.“No, sir, Horace Dodge.” Continuing on further, he called out, “On the far left corner we have the Ford House.”“Henry?” the Mulla suggested.“No sir, Edsel.” Still further out on Jefferson: “On the near left crossing you will see Christ’s Church.”“Jesus? Or wrong again?” Nasruddin asked sheepishly.I understand that life is such that you have been found wrong so many times that you have lost your inner feel. You have lost trust in yourself. You have lost confidence, so you have to ask somebody. Even if you are feeling blissful you have to ask somebody, “Am I going right?” Bliss is the indication.So now, two are the possibilities: either you are really feeling blissful as you write in your question – then there is no need to ask me; or you are just imagining and you know it – hence you have asked. That too has to be decided deep inside you. Because an imagined bliss is no bliss at all. You can imagine. Man has imagination in abundance. You can imagine things because I am talking about bliss continuously: about love, about meditation, ecstasy. You can catch those words and your greed can start playing leela with you, rather than you playing leela with the divine. Your greed can start playing leela with you, and it can give you ideas. But if they are imaginary you will always be suspicious because deep down you will know that this is just fantasy. If that is the case, then asking is perfectly meaningful.You have to decide. If it is really happening, you are really happy, it is a fact and you are not imagining it, then you are on the right track – because there is no indication other than blissfulness.When you feel blissful you are right, moving in exactly the way you should move. Because bliss increases only when you are approaching closer to God, and in no other way. If you are going away from God, anguish arises. You feel more and more frustrated, more and more bored, more and more miserable. Misery is an indication that you are going astray, a natural indication that you have lost track of truth.Bliss simply says that you are falling in line with the whole. Things are becoming harmonious, the garden of the beloved is coming closer: the air feels cooler, winds bring the fragrance of the flowers, a freshness, a new thrill, a new enthusiasm. Then you are moving towards the garden of the beloved. Maybe you cannot see yet, but the direction is right.So trust yourself. But if you are imagining, then drop all your imagination.The third question:Osho,At darshan, from the way you talked to me it seems clear my meditation is to live totally in the here and now. You made it clear I was not to live in hope. T.S. Eliot said, “I said to my soul, ‘Be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.'” Anything more to say?The question is from Pradeepa. She understood perfectly what I was trying to show her.Maturity happens when you start living without hope. Hope is childish. You become mature when you don’t project hope into the future. In fact, you are mature when you don’t have any future; you just live in the moment because that is the only reality there is. In the past, religion used to talk about the hereafter. Those were the childish, immature days of religion. Now religion talks about herenow; religion has come of age.In the Vedas, in the Koran, in the Bible, the hereafter is the basic goal. But now man is no longer that childish. That sort of God and that sort of religion is dead. It was a religion of hope, it was a religion of future.Now another sort of religion is asserting itself all over the world, and this religion is about herenow, the present. There is nowhere else to go and there is no other space and no other time to live, only this space and this time, here and now. Life has to become very, very intense in this moment. A man who lives in hope dissipates life. He spreads life; it becomes too thin. And when it becomes too thin, it is never happy. Happiness means intensity, tremendous depth. If you spread your hope into the future, life will become very thin. It will lose depth.When I say drop all hope, I mean be so intense in the moment that there is no need for the future. Then there is a turning, a transformation. The very quality of time changes for you, it becomes eternal. What can you do with hope? In fact, what can you hope? You cannot hope for the new. You can only hope for the old, that which has happened before – maybe with a little modification here and there, a little more decorated. But hope is nothing but past: you have lived something, you have experienced something, and you again and again hope for it. It is a repetition; it is circular.Hope means simply projecting the past into the future again. You loved a man yesterday, you want to love the man tomorrow also. And you know that yesterday was not a fulfillment, hence the hope; yesterday was not enough, hence the hope. You missed something yesterday. Now that missed gap is torturing you, it is creating agony. You hope that again tomorrow that man will be available to love you, and tomorrow you will really love.But between yesterday and tomorrow is today. If you really want to love, then why not be herenow, today? Otherwise, when today will have become yesterday you will again start projecting it. Incomplete experiences are projected. Uncompleted desires are projected. If you really love totally this moment, you will never think about this moment again. It is finished, it is complete, it is perfect. It disappears, it leaves no trace on you.This is what Krishnamurti calls “total act.” Total act creates no karma: it creates no chain, it creates no bondage. If it is total, you never remember it again; there is no point. We remember only something which has remained incomplete. Mind tends to complete things.And you have so many incomplete experiences; they go on being projected into the future. The past is gone – now there is no way to complete them in the past; and the present is going out of your hands fast, slipping, so you don’t see any point, any possibility to complete them in the present. The future is long: you can project – this life, another life, this world, another world – you can project eternity. Then you are at ease. You say, “I am not at a loss; tomorrow is there. There will be another life.” But by and by, you are getting trapped in a wrong pattern. No, hope is not the right thing.Live in the present so deeply, so completely, that nothing is left. Then there will be no projection. You will move very smoothly into tomorrow without carrying any load from today. And when there is no yesterday haunting you, then there is no tomorrow. When the past is not hanging around you, there is no future.Pradeepa has understood rightly – that’s what I was trying to show her. Hope is an illness, a disease of the mind. It is hope that is not allowing you to live. Hope is not the friend, remember; it is the foe. It is because of hope that you go on postponing. But you will remain the same tomorrow also, and tomorrow also you will hope for some future. And this way it can go on for eternity, and you can go on missing. Stop postponing. And who knows what the future is going to reveal to you? There is no way to know about it. It is an opening; all alternatives are open. What is really going to happen, nobody can predict. People have tried.That’s why people go to astrologers, to I Ching, and to other sorts of things. I Ching goes on fascinating people, astrologers go on influencing people. Astrology still seems to be a great force. Why? – because people are missing and are hoping for the future. They want some clue to know what is going to happen so they can arrange it that way.These things will persist, even if it is scientifically proved that it is all nonsense. They will persist because it is not a question of science, it is a question of human hope. Unless hope is dropped, I Ching cannot be dropped. Unless hope is dropped, astrology cannot be dropped. It will have great power over man’s mind because hope is gripping you. You would like to know little clues about the future so you can move more confidently, you can project more confidently, and you can postpone many more things. If you know something about tomorrow, I think you will not live today.You will say, “What is the need? Tomorrow we will live.” Even without knowing anything about tomorrow you are doing that. And tomorrow never comes…and when it comes, it is always today. And you don’t know how to live today.So you are in a great trap. Drop that whole structure. Hope is the bondage of man, hope is samsar, hope is the world. Once you drop hope you become a sannyasin; then there is nowhere to go.I have heard….One day Mulla Nasruddin was in a very deep meditative mood. Sitting by the side of his dog he delivered a monologue:“You are only a dog, but I wish I was you. When you go to your bed you just turn around three times and lie down. When I go to bed I have to lock up the place, and wind up the clock, and put out the cat, and undress myself, and my wife wakes up and scolds and then the baby wakes and cries and I have to walk him around the house and then maybe I get myself to bed in time to get up again. When you get up, you just stretch yourself, stretch your neck a little, and you are up. I have to light the fire, put on the kettle, scrap some with my wife, and get myself breakfast. You lie around all day and have plenty of fun; I have to work all day and have plenty of trouble. When you die, you are dead; when I die I have to go somewhere again.”This “somewhere again”…call it hell, or call it heaven, but somewhere; and God is here and you are always going somewhere. God is your surround, and you are always missing him because you are missing the present. God has only one tense – that is present. The past and future don’t exist. Man exists in the past and future, not in the present; God exists in the present, not in the past and future. So how is the meeting going to happen? We live in different dimensions. Either God starts living in the past and future – then there can be a meeting, but then he will not be God, he will be just as ordinary a man as you are. Or you start living in the present – then the meeting happens. But then too you will not be human, you will become divine. Only the divine can meet with the divine; only the same can meet the same.Drop hope. Hope is the cause of why you are missing God. And the problem is, the vicious circle is: the more you miss God, the more you hope; the more you hope, the more you miss. Once you look deep down into hope – its structure, its grip on you – the very vision, and the hope, drops on its own accord. Suddenly you are here and now, and you will see as if a curtain had dropped from your eyes, a curtain has dropped from your senses. You will become tremendously fresh and young, and you will see a totally luminous world all around you. The trees will be green but in a different way: tremendously green – and the green will be luminous. The world will immediately turn into a psychedelic world. It is – your eyes are just so covered with dust that you cannot see the psychedelic that is surrounding you from everywhere.Drop hope.But whenever I say to somebody to drop hope, he thinks that I am telling him to become hopeless. No, I’m not doing that. When you drop hope there is no possibility of becoming hopeless, because hopelessness exists only because of hope. You hope and it is not fulfilled; hopelessness arises. You hope, and you hope again and again in vain; hopelessness arises. Hopelessness is frustrated hope. The moment you drop hope, hopelessness is also dropped. You are simply without hope and without hopelessness. And that is the most beautiful moment that can happen to a man, because in that very moment one enters into the shrine of God.The fourth question:Osho,Despite all you have said, l am still unwilling to make a choice between the path of meditation and the path of love. My heart loves the world too much to say ‘enough', and my mind is too cynical to surrender. Gurdjieff speaks of a fourth way which involves simultaneous work on body, heart and mind. Is there no possibility of following this path?Be alert of your own cunningness. You cannot surrender here, and you think you will be able to surrender to Gurdjieff? The problem is not with me or Gurdjieff, the problem is that with me you cannot surrender. And Gurdjieff was a hard taskmaster, one of the most dangerous masters ever after Bodhidharma. The problem is with you. See the point of it. The point is, if I talk about love, people come to me and they say, “It is difficult for us; can’t we meditate?” And if I tell them to meditate they say, “It is so difficult. Is there not some other way?” They want to postpone.Now you are asking, “Can’t we follow Gurdjieff?” Ask one thing: are you ready to follow? Following is difficult. Following means surrendering; following means that now you put your mind aside. Gurdjieff is now an excuse so you can think inside yourself, “If I am not surrendered to this man, at least I am ready to surrender to Gurdjieff.” But where are you going to find Gurdjieff? And if you ever come across him, you will start thinking of other masters, because there are many possibilities. You will ask the same question of Gurdjieff…that it is difficult for me to surrender to you, and it is very difficult to work on body, mind and soul together – because even to work on one thing separately is difficult. To work on three things together is, of course, going to be more complex, more arduous. So then you can say, “Can’t I follow the path of the Bauls?”This is how you have been traveling in your many lives. Remember, you are not new on this earth. And remember, you have been with many masters – otherwise you would not be here. You have forgotten completely, but you have missed many times. It is not for the first time that you are missing. You may have walked with Buddha, you may have walked with Jesus. There are people who I know for certain have walked with Jesus, but they missed. There are people who walked with Buddha and they missed. But the search goes on….The first thing that I try to find out whenever a person wants to be initiated by me is whether he is new, or an old sinner. Up to now, I have not come across a fresh man who is getting interested in religion for the first time. No, one has been with many masters, has traveled on many paths, but never has been totally anywhere. Now you can miss this opportunity also.I have heard…A couple in their sixties had somehow managed to survive forty-five years of married life filled with as much fighting as love.When hubby came home from his office on his sixty-fifth birthday, his wife lovingly presented him with two beautiful ties. He was so touched that he would not let her cook dinner. He wanted to take her out as soon as he had time to clean up and change his shirt. It was a rare moment of tenderness. A few minutes later hubby came downstairs dressed for an evening on the town and wearing one of his gift ties. His wife stared at him for a moment before the force of argumentative habit took command.“What is the matter?” she snarled. “The other one is no good?”But now, a man can wear only one tie: “What is the matter? The other one is no good?” If you just want to be argumentative, then you can follow Gurdjieff.But that will be just avoiding the opportunity that is here, available to you. Do something. If you want to follow Gurdjieff, follow. Follow Gurdjieff, but please follow. Don’t go on playing games with yourself. One can be very clever, one can deceive oneself. It is not very dangerous when you deceive others, because sooner or later they will find out that you are deceiving. It cannot go on for long. But when you are deceiving yourself, it is very difficult. Who is going to find out? You are alone there, and if you are deceiving….I have heard about one man traveling on a train. He was playing solitaire. A man in the compartment who was watching became aware that the other man was deceiving himself. He was the only player. The other man watching became aware that he was deceiving himself.He said, “What is the matter? What are you doing? Can’t you see that you go on deceiving yourself?”The man said, “I have been doing it for my whole life.”The other man asked, “Can’t you catch yourself deceiving?”He said, “I am too clever.”Cleverness can become a great obstacle because cleverness is not intelligence; cleverness is a good name for cunningness. Be aware of it. Follow if you want to follow on Gurdjieff’s path. Perfectly good; that path is perfectly good. But then what are you doing here wasting your time? Follow that path. For what are you waiting? If you are here, then forget Gurdjieff and everything else. If you want to be here with me, then be here with me so something actually happens.But this is very common, it is not unusual: people go on changing their masters, from one place to another. Whenever they feel that now it is getting too much, and they may get committed and involved, they change. Again they start playing the same game somewhere else. When they feel that now the moment is coming – they will have to do something – they again change.It is a marriage…to be with me is to be married with me. People stay with me up to the point where the courtship continues. Once the problem arises of getting committed, involved, then they are scared. Then they start thinking of some other path. Any path will do – because really it is not a question of paths, it is a question of surrendering. Surrender on any path, and truth will happen to you – because it happens not because of any path, it happens because of surrender.Some years ago, a politician was being driven about by a farmer in a buggy. A winged insect kept circling around the horse’s head and then about the politician’s head.“Uncle, what kind of insect is that?” asked the politician.“Just a horsefly,” said the old man.“Horsefly? What is that?”“Just a fly that flies around the heads of horses and mules and jackasses.”As the insect was still buzzing about the politician’s head he saw a chance for a little banter, and said:“Uncle, you don’t mean to say I am a horse?”“No, you certainly ain’t no horse.”“Well, you don’t mean to call me a mule do you?”The farmer, irritated, said, “You ain’t no mule, either.”Then the politician spoke emphatically, “Now look here, Uncle, do I look like a jackass to you? Surely you don’t mean to call me a jackass?”“No, sir, I ain’t calling you no jackass and you don’t look like a jackass to me. But you see, you can’t fool the horsefly.”Don’t be very cunning, don’t be clever, because you can’t fool existence. You can fool only yourself. In the final analysis you cannot fool anybody else except you. So watch each step that your mind takes. I’m not saying, “Follow me.”; I’m saying, “Follow.” Anywhere, wherever your heart leads you, wherever you feel a certain harmony between you and the master, go there and follow. But follow. Just thinking is not going to help.You cannot befool existence.The fifth question:Osho,Being outside the ashram is sometimes hard for me, for I see how hard people are and how they step on each other. This hurts me very much, sometimes even bodily, and I feel vulnerable like a small child. Please tell me how to deal with it.There are always problems in the world, and the world has always been there, and the world will remain there. If you start working out, changing circumstances, changing people, thinking of a utopian world, changing the government, the structure, the economy, the politics, the education, you will be lost. That is the trap known as politics. That’s how many people waste their own lives. Be very clear about it: the only person you can help right now is you yourself. Right now you cannot help anybody. This may be just a distraction, just a trick of the mind. See your own problems, see your own anxieties, see your own mind, and first try to change it.It happens to many people: the moment they become interested in some sort of religion, meditation, prayer, immediately the mind tells them, “What are you doing sitting here silently? The world needs you; there are so many poor people. There is much conflict, violence, aggression. What are you doing praying in the temple? Go and help people.” How can you help those people? You are just like them. You may create even more problems for them, but you cannot help. That’s how all the revolutions have always failed; no revolution has yet succeeded because the revolutionaries are in the same boat.The religious person is one who understands that “I am very tiny, I am very limited. If with this limited energy, even if I can change myself, that will be a miracle.” And if you can change yourself, if you are a totally different being with new life shining in your eyes and a new song in your heart, then maybe you can be helpful to others also, because then you will have something to share.Just the other day Shiva sent me a very beautiful incident in the life of Basho. Basho is the greatest haiku poet of Japan, the master haiku poet. But he was not just a poet. Before becoming a poet he was a mystic; before he starting pouring out with beautiful poetry, he poured deep into his own center. He was a meditator.It is said that Basho was entering upon a journey when he was a young man. The journey was an endeavor to find himself. Not long after he had begun he heard a small child crying alone in the forest – maybe he was sitting under a tree, meditating, or trying to meditate; he heard a small child crying alone in the forest. He meditated for a long time on what to do. He then picked up his pack and continued on his way, leaving the child to its own fate.In his journal he recorded: “First one has to do what one needs for oneself before one can do anything for another.”Looks hard…a child alone in the forest, crying, and this man meditates on whether to do anything or not, whether he can help the child, whether it will be right to help him or not. A child, a helpless child crying in the wilderness, alone, lost – and Basho meditates over it and finally decides he cannot help anybody else when he has not even helped himself yet. He himself is lost in a wilderness, he himself is lonely, he himself is childish. How can he help anybody?The incident looks very hard, but is very meaningful. I’m not saying don’t help a child in the forest if you find him crying and weeping. But try to understand: your own light is not burning and you start helping others. Your own inner being is in total darkness and you start helping others. You yourself are suffering and you become a servant of the people. You have not passed through the inner rebellion and you become a revolutionary. This is simply absurd, but this idea arises in everybody’s mind. It seems so simple to help others. In fact, people who really need to change themselves always become interested in changing others. That becomes an occupation, and they can forget themselves.This is what I have watched. I have seen so many social workers, sarvodayis, and I have never seen a single person who has any inner light to help anybody. But they are trying hard to help everybody. They are madly after transforming the society and the people and people’s minds, and they have completely forgotten that they have not done the same to themselves. But they become occupied.Once an old revolutionary and social worker was staying with me. I asked him, “You are completely absorbed in your work. Have you ever thought if what you really want happens, if by a miracle, overnight, all that you want happens, what you will do the next morning? Have you ever thought about it?”He laughed, it was a very empty laughter, but then he became a little sad. He said, “If it is possible, I will be at a loss as to what to do then. If the world is exactly as I want it, then I will be at a loss for what to do. I may even commit suicide.”These people are occupied; this is their obsession. And they have chosen such an obsession that it can never be fulfilled. So you can go on changing others, life after life. Who are you? This is also a sort of ego: that others are hard upon each other, that they are stepping on each other. Just the idea that others are hard gives you a feeling that you are very soft.No, you are not. This may be your way of ambition: to help people, to help them to become soft, to help them to become more kind, compassionate.Kahlil Gibran has written a small story:There was a dog, a great revolutionary one might say, who was always teaching other dogs of the town that “Just because of your nonsense barking we are not growing. You waste your energy by barking unnecessarily.” A postman passes, and suddenly…a policeman passes, a sannyasin passes…dogs are against uniforms, any sort of uniform, and they are revolutionaries. They immediately start barking. The leader used to tell them, “Stop this! Don’t waste energy, because this same energy can be put into something useful, creative. Dogs can rule the whole world, but you are wasting your energy for no purpose at all. This habit has to be dropped. This is the only sin, the original sin.” The dogs were always feeling that he was perfectly right, logically, he was right: why do we go on barking?And much energy is wasted; one feels tired. Again the next morning one starts barking, and again by the night one is tired. What is the point of it all? They could see the leader’s meaning, but they also knew that they were just dogs, poor dogs. The ideal was very great and the leader was really a revealer – because whatsoever he was preaching he was doing. He never used to bark. You could see his character: that whatsoever he preached he practiced also.But by and by, they got tired of his constant preaching. One day they decided – it was the birthday of the leader – and they decided, as a gift, that at least on that night they would resist the temptation to bark. At least for one night they would respect the leader and give him a gift. He could not be more happy than this.All the dogs stopped that night. It was very difficult, arduous. It was just like when you are meditating, how difficult it is to stop thinking. It was the same problem. They stopped barking, and they had always barked. And they were not great saints, but ordinary dogs. But they tried hard. It was very, very arduous. They were hiding in their places with closed eyes, with clenched teeth, so they would not see anything, they would not listen to anything. It was a great discipline. The leader walked around the town. He was very puzzled: “To whom to preach? Whom to teach now? What has happened?” – complete silence.Then suddenly when midnight had passed, he became so annoyed, because he had never really thought that the dogs would listen to him. He had known well that they would never listen, that it was just natural for dogs to bark. His demand was unnatural, but the dogs had stopped. His whole leadership was at stake. What was he going to do from tomorrow? Because all he knew was just to teach. His whole ministry was at stake. And then for the first time he realized that because he was constantly teaching from the morning till the night that’s why he had never felt the need to bark. The energy was so involved, and that was a sort of barking.But that night, nowhere, nobody was found guilty. And the preacher dog started feeling a tremendous urge to bark. A dog is, after all, a dog. Then he went into a dark lane and started barking. When the other dogs heard that somebody had broken the agreement, they said, “Why should we suffer?” The whole town started barking. Back came the leader and said, “You fools! When are you going to stop barking? Because of your barking we have remained just dogs. Otherwise, we would have dominated the whole world.”Remember well that a social servant, a revolutionary, is asking for the impossible – but it keeps him occupied. And when you are occupied with others’ problems, you tend to forget your own problems. First, settle those problems, because that is your first, basic responsibility.A famous psychologist had bought a farm just for fun. Every time he threw grain into his plowed furrows an army of black crows would swoop down and gobble up his grain. Finally, swallowing his pride, the psychologist appealed to his old neighbor, Mulla Nasruddin. The Mulla stepped into the field and went through all the motions of planting without using any seed. The crows swooped down, protested briefly and flew away.The Mulla repeated the process the next day and then the next, each time sending the birds off befuddled and hungry. Finally, on the fourth day, he planted the field with grain; not a crow bothered to come.When the psychologist tried to thank Mulla, the Mulla grunted. “Just plain ordinary psychology,” said he. “Ever heard of it?”Remember, this is very plain, ordinary psychology: not to poke your nose into others’ affairs. If they are doing something wrong, that is for them to realize. Nobody else can make them realize. Unless they decide to realize it there is no way, and you will be wasting your valuable time and energy. Your first responsibility is to transform your own being. And when your being is transformed things start happening of their own accord.You become a light and people start finding their paths through your light. Not that you go, not that you force them to see. Your light, burning bright, is enough invitation; people start coming.Whosoever is in need of light will come to you. There is no need to go after anybody because that very going is foolish. Nobody has changed anybody against his will. That is not the way things happen. This is plain, ordinary psychology; ever heard of it?…just keep to yourself.The sixth question:Osho,I am desperate. I feel more and more energy and a deep let-go wanting to happen. In the last while I often have a feeling of letting myself fall into something, like into the sea, or into the incredible beautiful vast clouds of the sky. But the stronger this becomes, the stronger another part, my ego, is trying to keep me down, to put me to sleep again, to tell me that everything is just bullshit and fantasy. This is so incredibly strong, and there does not seem to be anything like willpower. I feel totally powerless; that makes me feel desperate, helpless, and sometimes frustrated. Please help me.The question is from Anand Maria. Maria, there seems to be some misunderstanding in your mind. It is not the ego that is trying to give you a message that you moving in fantasies; you are moving in fantasies. But fantasies are beautiful. You are dreaming sweet dreams. It is not the ego that is pulling you down, it is the ego that is dreaming and that is going into fantasies. The part that wants to pull you down is your awareness. You are in a total confusion about it.Awareness always brings you back to reality. Ego is, in fact, a dream; it is a false entity. Ego never stops anybody from going into fantasies, because ego feeds on fantasy. Ego is the greatest fantasy. How can it prevent you from going into fantasies? It wants you to dream, it wants you to dream great dreams of the other world.It is not the ego that is pulling you down to the earth. The part that is pulling you down to reality is awareness, but you are condemning awareness, and you would like to go into the fantasies more and more. No, you are in a complete mess, Maria.“I feel more and more energy and a deep let-go wanting to happen. In the last while I often have a feeling of letting myself fall into something, like the sea, or into the incredible beautiful vast clouds of the sky….” They are nowhere, they are just in your imagination.“But the stronger this becomes, the stronger another part, my ego, is trying to keep me down, to put me to sleep again, to tell me that everything is just bullshit and fantasy….” It is; it is bullshit. It will be hard for you.Let me tell you one anecdote.A schoolteacher in London had a mixed class containing children of all religions, of all nationalities. One day she asked her class who was the greatest man who ever lived, and said that the child who gave the correct answer would receive fifty pence.The first child was American and answered, “George Washington.” Patrick O’Kelly was next and he said that St. Patrick was the greatest man who ever lived. There was an Indian child who said Gautam Buddha, and a Chinese who said Lao Tzu.Then little Abe was next in line and without hesitation he answered, “Jesus.”The teacher promptly gave him the coin and said, “Now tell me how it is that you, being a little Jew, and not believing in Jesus as the Christ, mention his name as the greatest man who ever lived?”“Well,” replied Abe, “deep in my heart I know it was Moses, but business is business.”Deep in your heart you also know it is bullshit. That’s why you are pulled back to the earth again and again. Come back to the earth; imagination won’t help.There is a poetry, a different type of poetry which arises out of reality. Yes, there are beautiful clouds and there are vast oceans of beatitude, but that arises by being rooted in the earth. There is no conflict between that beauty and reality. That beauty is nothing but reality itself manifested in its total grandeur. But right now, whatsoever you are doing is just a fantasy. So change your emphasis. It is the ego which is fantasizing, and it is awareness which is pulling you down. Allow awareness to work more and more, and don’t waste time in dreams.I have heard….Two fishermen were exchanging their experiences of the previous day. One man said he had caught a three-hundred-pound salmon.“But salmon never weighed as much as three hundred pounds,” said the other man.“Nevertheless, I caught one weighing three hundred pounds. What did you catch?”“Not much,” answered the second man. “Only a rusty old lamp. But on the bottom of it was inscribed: Property of Christopher Columbus, 1492. When I opened the lamp I was surprised to find it still held a candle in it, and you know that the candle was still lit?”“Now let us get together on these stories,” urged the first fisherman. “If you will put out that damned candle, I will take a couple of hundred pounds off that salmon.”One wants to have sweet experiences, one desires to have beautiful experiences. But just by desiring them you cannot have them, you can only dream about them. You can have them not by desiring, but by working hard on your being. Tremendous effort is needed. Then one day reality comes, is revealed. And then it has a splendor which no dream can ever have. Because dream is just a dream, a thought in the mind – a colorful thought, but still a thought. When reality is revealed, it is totally different; it is millions of times more beautiful than any dream. Don’t waste time in dreaming. Walk on earth, be in the body, come back to your senses.The last question. It is from Divya.Osho,I don't want to hear any more about love or meditation; they are one to me. I seek truth and you are the means. My devotion and my prayers are an expression of gratitude. Love is not the asking, and love is not the other. Love is, I am. Sometimes I wonder whether you exist or whether I am perpetually creating you, or whether I exist separate from you. I truly must be a god if you are so beautiful. My love, my gratitude for you is the only certainty that remains, the only reality. I am the knowing, and yet each time I hear you say ‘love or meditation' you catch me again off center, fiddling with categories: “Am I this or that? Let us see.” What a beautiful trip you are.Thank you, Divya.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 2 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 2 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The Bauls sing:My heartdress yourself in the spirit of all women and reverse your nature and habits. Millions of suns will burst open with brilliance and the formless in visual forms.You will see what cannot be seen only if you can be the formless in you.The song for today:My heart dress yourself in the spirit of all women and reverse your nature and habits. Millions of suns will burst open with brilliance and the formless in visual forms.You will see what cannot be seen only if you can be the formless in you.The song is tremendously important, is very basic to the Baul attitude. There are two approaches towards God: one is of the male mind – aggressive, active; the other is of the feminine mind – passive, receptive. Bauls belong to the second approach, just as Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu belong to the second approach. Mahavira and Patanjali belong to the first approach.The male mind seeks and searches for God as if God is somewhere else and has to be discovered. The feminine mind simply prays and waits. The feminine mind trusts that: “When I am ready, God will come to me.” It is God who comes, not the seeker who goes to God. And, in fact, how can you seek God? You don’t know him, you don’t know his address, you don’t know the direction, you don’t know the definition. And even if you come across him, how are you going to recognize him? Because recognition is possible only if you have known him before.All search in a way is futile. And because of the male mind, atheism has become very predominant in the world. It is the failure of the male mind that atheism has become so prevalent. In the West atheism has become really the greatest religion – because the West is male oriented. The very orientation is of conquering – as if there is a fight between man and God, as if there is a tussle, a wrestling. In the West the result of this effort has been only that God has completely disappeared. Nietzsche declared, “God is dead.” Nietzsche is the very essence of the male mind: will to power, will to dominate, will to possess. If you search for him too much, your very search will become a barrier.There have been a few people who have attained through that approach also – a Mahavira, a Patanjali – but those cases are rare, and the struggle is very long and unnecessary. God comes to you. God is always coming to you. The Bauls say, “It is not you who seek him, it is he who is seeking you. It is not that you pray to him, he is praying to you. Listen! Be passive, accept. He is knocking on the door, and inside the room you are so occupied in searching and seeking that you cannot listen to the knock.” Man cannot seek God; only God can seek man. This is a profound truth to be understood, because how can you seek God? How can you relate? You are so dark, so dull, so asleep, so unconscious, so ignorant – how are you going to seek? And whatsoever you seek will never be bigger than you, cannot be. Your God will be your God.If horses seek God, they will make an image of God, but the image will be of a horse, not of a man – because man has never done anything good to horses. In fact, if they had some mythology about the devil, man’s image would be the image of the devil. If trees are seeking God, they will seek in the form of trees – because we cannot go beyond our form. Our form will be the limitation. So if you seek, the God is going to be yours, and your God is almost no God.Let him seek you. Allow him. His hand has been reaching for you continuously; just be in a let-go. Don’t escape from him, that’s all. There is no need to seek him positively, just don’t escape from him. Let him be, listen, be receptive, welcome. In that listening, in that receptivity, he will penetrate you. Become feminine, become a woman. A buddha is a woman.Buddha was seeking for six years; he tried the male oriented approach. He was a warrior, the son of a great king, trained in the ways of war and fight and struggle. It was natural for him to seek God. He tried, he tried hard. He went from one master to another, and he was so sincere that no master could say to him, “You are not doing it right, that’s why you are not reaching.” He was so sincere in his effort that all the teachers told him, “This is all we can say to you. And if it is not happening, then find some other master. We are incapable. We cannot do more than this.”One day he renounced the whole world, then came the ultimate renunciation – one day he renounced the searching and seeking also…seeing the futility of it, just groping in the dark. That night when he dropped searching also, he became a woman. That night he relaxed under the bodhi tree; there was nothing to do now.Man is a doer. Woman is a lover, not a doer. Man is the mind, woman is the heart. Man can create things, but cannot give birth to life. For that, receptivity is needed, receptivity of the earth. The seed falls into it, disappears underground, and one day a new life arises. That’s how a child is born. A womb is needed to give birth to God, or, to give birth to yourself. You have to become a womb.Buddha became a womb that night, renounced all. Now there was nothing to do. Just meditate over it: nothing to do. The world was finished, there was nothing to find. Now even the spiritual search was gone. Everything became absolutely calm and quiet. When there is nothing to seek there is no desire; when there is no desire there is no thought; and when there is no desire, no thought, no search, the ego cannot exist. It exists as the doer. In that moment, future disappeared. When you are not going to do something, what is the point of having a future? The future is needed as a space to project your desires. To project, then future is needed. That night, future the disappeared; in fact, even time disappeared.When you are not a doer what is the use of time? Buddha relaxed. This relaxation was absolute, total, whole. He relaxed into himself – nowhere to go, one has to relax into oneself; no desire, no thought, everything has proved futile. In fact, what proved futile was the male oriented mind, the mind of the doer. In the morning when the last star was disappearing, he opened his eyes. The whole night had been a night of dreamless sleep, because dreams are by-products of desires. Have you watched? When you want to do something, it is very difficult to sleep in the night; the morning is too exciting. Tomorrow is too exciting, you have to do something. Even if you are going for a holiday to the Himalayas, you cannot sleep in the night; planning continues. You have to do this and that, and rehearsal continues. Sleep becomes difficult …dreams.Buddha slept for the first time. That sleep was samadhi: no thought, no dream, no desire. He relaxed into his center, and when he opened his eyes he was like a small babe – fresh, young. He looked at the last disappearing star, and as the star disappeared, he also disappeared. He became enlightened. But enlightenment happened in a deeply feminine state of mind.Hence, Jainas and Buddhists are always in conflict – because Mahavira is a male oriented mind, a warrior, a conqueror. That is the meaning of the word mahavir. That is not his real name; his real name was Vardhman. But he conquered truth. And he was so brave and the adventure was so great that he is remembered as Mahavira: the great courageous one. There is a very subtle conflict between Jainas and Buddhists.Down through the centuries they have been arguing against each other. That can be understood. Reason is male-mind, female-mind, yin and yang, active and passive, day and night. The day is the symbol of the man; the night is the symbol of the woman. The day is full of activity, the night is simply rest. The day is bright, light – the sun is there. You can see things clear-cut. You can define things: you can know what is what and who is who. In the night darkness surrounds. The whole existence is enveloped in darkness. You cannot distinguish what is what; you cannot see where you are, who you are. It is a tremendous relaxation of all definitions, of all limitations. Woman is always known as the dark one, the night, the earth. Buddha became a woman that night; he became enlightened.The Bauls say,My heart, dress yourself in the spirit of all women.Become a woman. They mean of course, psychologically, spiritually. It has nothing to do with your body, but your attitude. Woman is patient. Just think of a man having a child in his belly for nine months. You cannot conceive that a man will be able to tolerate it – impossible. A woman is very patient, accepting. Woman’s resistance is much stronger than man’s. Man, in fact, is the weaker sex. He may be stronger as far as muscles are concerned, but muscles are no criterion of strength. One hundred fifteen boys are born to a hundred girls. By the time they reach the age of marriage, fifteen boys have died. Nature has to give birth to more males because a few of them are going to die. Women live longer than men, almost five years more; that’s why you see so many widows in the world. And women are more resistant to illness, disease. Women are more tolerant, more accepting. From where comes this strength? – it comes from their receptivity. When you are a doer you exhaust yourself.A woman and a man making love…man exhausts himself; woman is enriched, nourished, because she is at the receptive end. Making love, a man loses energy, a woman gains it. That’s why women have been suppressed all over the world. If they were not suppressed the man would be killed: it would become impossible for any man to satisfy any woman. Now, modern researchers say that women have multiple orgasms. A woman can make love to one dozen people in one night and still feel fresh, full of energy. A man can make love only once, and then he is exhausted. Man throws energy out, woman takes energy in. The same has to happen with God.The Bauls say, “Become feminine, become passive.” But remember, when they say become passive they don’t mean to become lazy. To be lazy is also the same as to be active. Lazy is not passive. He may not be doing anything, but in his mind he goes on doing. He may not be actually doing anything, but he goes on doing many things in the mind – even more so, because the whole energy is available and he has nothing do. He goes on thinking and doing things in the mind; that activity remains.Passivity does not mean inactivity, it means a very expectant patience, a very active patience, alive patience. The lazy man is dull; the lazy man is simply dead. Passivity is not deadness. It is fully alive: the reservoir is full of energy, but not going anywhere, not going on any search, just waiting for the Beloved to come.That’s why women never take any initiative in love affairs – they cannot. If a woman takes the initiative in the love affair, then she must be a part of the “lib movement.” Then she is losing her womanhood somehow. They wait: the initiative has to come from the man. The woman waits – not that she doesn’t love, she loves tremendously; no man can love that deeply – but she waits. She trusts that things will happen in their right time, and hurrying is not good. A woman is non-tense but full of energy, hence the feminine beauty. The roundness of the feminine body is not only a physical thing – the same is so in her psychology also. She has a round shape, smooth, warm, ready to dissolve, but not aggressive. Passivity means non-aggressiveness, nonviolence. It is not laziness.I have heard….The Swiss people, especially those from their capital, Berne, are said to be as slow as snails. One day two Berner friends went out for a walk. After one hour one said, “Christmas is beautiful.”Another hour passed when his friend answered, “Yes, and love is beautiful too.”After a long while the first answered, “You are right but Christmas is more often.”One can be so lazy that Christmas is more often than lovemaking. Laziness is a sort of stagnancy. Laziness is lustlessness; laziness is suicide – slow, very slow. So remember, passivity is not negation of energy. Passivity is a reservoir of energy – vibrant, throbbing streaming, ready to receive, but non-aggressive.It happened:A Sufi mystic was sitting under a tree. A passerby told him, “What are you doing here? Your house is on fire.” Just in front of him the house was on fire.“I know it, stranger,” said the so-called mystic.“Then why are you not doing something about it?” cried the excited stranger.“I am,” said that mystic. “ever since the fire started, I have been praying for rain.”The Baul is not lazy. He is full of action, but he is not active. This distinction has to be understood.You can sit, for all practical purposes, not doing anything, and your mind can go on being active, occupied, engaged. You can be engaged in much activity and your mind can remain inactive, passive, aloof, detached. They are not against being active, they are against being continuously occupied inside, because then you don’t give space for God to enter into you. You don’t allow him enough of a door. Your inner world is so full of rotten furniture that he cannot find a place to stay there.A deep inner emptiness is needed; that inner emptiness becomes the womb. I’m not saying stop doing, stop action; I’m not saying that. I am saying that whatsoever you are doing, let it be just an outside activity. Inside become feminine, silent, doors opened, empty, waiting.In the mother’s womb the feminine egg simply waits. It does not go anywhere. The male sperm travels, and it travels with fast speed. It is really a tremendous distance for the male sperm to travel to the woman’s egg; great competition starts. Men are competitive from the very beginning, even before they are born. While making love to a woman a man releases millions of sperm, and they all rush towards the egg. Great speed is needed because only one will be able to reach the egg, not all. Only one is going to be the Nobel Prize winner. The real Olympics start there! And it is a life and death question, it is not ordinary.And the competition is great: millions of sperm fighting, rushing – one will reach. Sometimes it happens that two reach at the same time, hence twins are born. Because once one sperm has entered, then the door is closed. Sometimes two sperm reach exactly at the same time, or three sperm reach exactly at the same time; the door was open, so all the three enter in. Then there are three children born, or two children, or four, or even six. But that rarely happens. Ordinarily one reaches just a split second before the others. The door is open; once one guest has entered, the door closes. But the feminine egg simply waits there…great trust.That’s why women cannot be competitive: they cannot fight, they cannot struggle. And if you find a woman somewhere who struggles and fights, who is competitive, then something of womanhood is missing in her. Physically she may be a woman, psychologically she is a man. So remember, passivity is not laziness. Passivity has its own kind of activity. It is non-tense, relaxed.I have heard…Two turtles were dragging through the desert, very thirsty. After a while they discovered a big bottle of Coca-Cola (must have been Americans). They jumped with joy, but soon realized they had no opener. They tried hard but there was no chance to open the bottle, so they decided one would go back to the village and the other would watch the bottle.A long time passed – five hours, ten hours, one day, two days, five days, seven days. Then the one turtle again tried to open the bottle. Immediately, the other one came running from the nearby sand dune and shouted, “If you start like this, I will never go.”Bauls are very active people, whirlwinds – dancing, singing, and yet very inactive people as far as God is concerned. They say, “Whenever you think is the right time, come; you will find me waiting. I am helpless, I don’t know where you are. I am helpless, I don’t know how to find you. My only prayer is that you help me to allow you to find me.” They simply dance and wait, they sing and wait. This waiting for God is their prayer.If you can wait you will pass through a great transformation. Nothing needs to be done; simple waiting – but it needs great trust. Otherwise the mind will say, “What are you doing? If you are not going to seek him, you will never find him.”Bauls say, just like Lao Tzu, “Seek and you will miss. Seek not and find.” He is here; your seeking takes you somewhere else. He has already come. The guest is at the door; He is knocking. But you are so occupied inside the mind – maybe occupied for him, thinking about him, but so occupied – that you cannot listen to the moment, and you cannot be open to the herenow.My heart,dress yourself in the spirit of all women and reverse your nature and habits.Patanjali calls this reversal pratyahar – go back to the source. Mahavira calls this reversion pratyakraman – come in, don’t go without; fall withinwards. Ordinarily your mind is future oriented, always moving somewhere else, looking for God somewhere in the future.The Bauls say he has been here from the very beginning. He is not in the future. He is the very cause, the source of all, so no need to seek him in the future. Just fall deep down into your own being and you will find him waiting for you to come home. He is already there, he is already the case.…and reverse your nature and habits. What do they mean by reversing your habits and your nature? Ordinarily man is upside-down. Non-essential things have become very important to you, and you go on losing the essential. You go on gathering seashells and colored stones, not for a single moment becoming aware that you are losing your life. That is the only precious thing.I have heard…Mulla Nasruddin was stabbed by burglars, but before dying he wrote a note to his wife from the hospital. The last paragraph of it read, “I have been very fortunate because only the day before I had put all my money and negotiable bonds in my safety deposit box at the bank, so that I am losing practically nothing but my life.”But life is all. What else is there? If you lose your life and gain the whole world, what are you gaining? And if you gain your life and lose the whole world, nothing is lost. The Bauls say, “You will have to change your habits, you will almost have to reverse your nature.”Right now you are going outward; you will have to go inward. Right now you are seeking God; you will have to allow him to seek you. Right now you are attached to material things which have no intrinsic value; you will have to attach yourself to spiritual values which are really eternally valuable. Right now you go on fighting with life, struggling. Almost everyone believes in the survival of the fittest, so one goes on fighting and fighting and fighting. The Bauls say; “Love, don’t fight. God is never known through fighting. Nothing is achieved through fighting; only love opens the door.”Right now we go on thinking that someday in the future we are going to be happy, joyful, celebrating. Bauls say, “You are fools! If you want to be happy, nothing is lacking. Right now, this moment, dance; this moment, laugh. This moment is all there is; celebrate it.” People come to me and if I say to them, “Celebrate your life.” they say, “That’s why we have come here: to learn how to create situations in which we can celebrate.” The situation is already there: trees go on celebrating, birds go on singing. What do they have? – no bank balance, no prestige, no power. They are not presidents or prime ministers. But have you ever seen trees or birds brooding, worried, thinking of the future? No, they simply live. What has happened to man?Bauls say, “Celebrate this moment.”This is what Christ called conversion: a one hundred and eighty degree turn – less will not do. That’s what I call sannyas: a hundred eighty degree turn – less will not do. It is not a question of renouncing life, it is just a question of renouncing old habits. It is just a question of becoming more alert and seeing what is essential and what is not. If you go on choosing the essential, sooner or later you will reach to the essential man, what Bauls call adhar manush. And the way to reach to the essential man is to be sahaj manush, spontaneous man. Spontaneity should be the prayer, but we are so cunning and so clever.I stayed once with an efficiency expert. When we were going to sleep, he sat in his bed and he said, “Now I will pray.” So I watched him to see what prayer he was doing. He looked at the sky and said, “Ditto.” I was surprised: “What type of prayer is this?”So I asked him, “If you are not offended, if you don’t mind, please tell me. I have heard many types of prayers, but ‘ditto’? This is something absolutely new.”He said, “I say a prayer only once in a year, the first day of the year. And then what is the point of repeating the same prayer every day? I say ‘ditto,’ and God must understand.”Even prayer is calculation. Even in prayer people are so miserly. They cannot say something to God today. In fact, their cleverness is the basis of their stupidity; their cunningness is the cause of their idiocy. They are not intelligent; an intelligent person lives in the moment – very responsive. He allows his heart to move into prayer. He does not force anything upon the heart, he simply allows it to flow towards God. In fact, you should always remember that prayer is not to change the heart of God, prayer changes you. But people pray in such a way, as if they are giving advice to God: “Don’t do this, do this!” All prayers, if reduced to the bare minimum, will mean that people are saying to God, “Please God, don’t let two plus two be four. Have compassion on me. This time at least make two plus two be five.” Prayers are complaints, grumblings. Then prayer does not exist. Prayer is not to change God; he needs no change. Prayer is to change yourself.But how can saying “ditto” change you? If you say “ditto,” you remain ditto; there is no possibility. Let it be remembered always that prayer never changes God. There is no need to change him. He is as he should be, and his existence is as it should be – perfect. The only change needed is within your own heart. Your prayer changes you. When you cry, tears come, or you sing and you dance, it changes you.Of course, when you are in a different mood, a feminine mood, God can come closer to you; you attract him, you allow him, you become an opening towards him. Prayer is an opening towards God. It is putting your heart before him so his presence can transform you. And this should be the way of the whole of your life. It is not a question of praying once a day or once a year or once in a lifetime. Prayer should become like breathing; it should be there each moment. The Baul never goes to the temple or to the mosque or to the gurudwara. Wherever he is, he is in prayer.People who live unspontaneous lives become too crowded by thoughts – of course, borrowed. All thoughts are borrowed. Knowledge as such is borrowed. Knowing is pure and yours, but knowledge is not. People who are not spontaneous become mechanical. They don’t see what is the case, they go on seeing what their expertise allows them to see; they see through blinkers.I have heard…Mulla Nasruddin’s wife was carried to the hospital in an unconscious condition after a terrible fall. The surgeon made a brief examination, shook his head significantly and then turned sympathetically to the anxious husband. “Mulla,” he said, “I’m sorry to tell you that your wife is dead.”“No, I ain’t,” said the supposed corpse, opening one eye.“Hush up, you!” said Nasruddin. “Doesn’t the doctor know better than you?”Experts are everywhere. It is good as far as worldly thing are concerned, but in the spiritual dimension there are no experts – because the spiritual dimension does not allow itself to be defined, to be reduced to theorems. It is not geometry and it is not mathematics, it is sheer poetry. It knows no limitations, hence the spontaneous songs of the Bauls. They are not philosophers, not metaphysicians; they are simple singers, poets. And their poetry is not according to the rules, and their poetry is not what people know of as poetry. They don’t know any meter, they are not worried about language; they are simple people. Their poetry is their overflowing heart.…and reverse your nature and habits. The key to this sutra is: become conscious, because all your habits are unconsciously dominated. You do things like a sleep walker. Become conscious and your habits will change, and the conversion will happen. Do whatsoever you are doing but become more conscious while doing it. Don’t become a robot, be a man.Bauls say that once consciousness enters into your being, a new climate arises. In that new climate, new flowers open; in that new climate, new birds come and nestle around you; in that new climate, God is the closest reality. He is within and he is without. But God is not a theory to be discussed; it is something to be lived, an experience.They sing,“He talks to mebut He would not let me see Him.”Listen to each single word very attentively…“He talks to me but He would not let me see Him. He moves close to my hands, but away from my reach.“I explore the sky and the earth searching Him, circling round my error of not knowing me: who am I, and who is He?”He talks to me but he would not let me see him…. These are symbols. I am talking to you; then you are passive because you have only to listen. When I am talking to you you become feminine, you become the receiving end. But if you want to see me you become male, because then you have to do something.The Bauls say: God talks to me but he would not let me see him. He allows me to be passive but he won’t allow me to be active. He moves close to my hands, I can almost touch him, but the moment I try to touch he is far away. He moves close to my hands but away from my reach, because reaching for him is again active. He comes close to you when you are simply waiting. Don’t try to grab him, he is very elusive. The moment you become male, he is gone; the moment you become female, he is there.“Attested by your own heart, oh my master, lead me the right way. As you play the melody on the lute, the lute could never sing on its own without you to play it.”Attested by your own heart, oh my master, lead me the right way. The Baul says, “I don’t know which is the right way; you lead me. And I have nothing to say about the goal. Let your heart decide it. Whatsoever you decide is my destiny. “…lead me the right way as you play the melody on the lute. The lute could never sing on its own without you to play it.” The Baul becomes a hollow bamboo, a flute. This is what passivity is. If God is ready to sing, the Baul is ready to take his song as far as he can – but he himself cannot sing. All song is his, all energy is his. At the most we can be hollow bamboos, not obstructing the way. If this is achieved, everything is achieved. If you are not obstructing the way of his song, it is enough. Humanity cannot do more than that.“How could he stand in a normal upright way? The man without a heart in him, the roots of his tree are planted in the sky and the branches lie on the earth.“Flowers are in blossom on the tree, but it never bears fruit. For him, the river is dying of thirst and the fire perishes, freezing, and birds nestle in the water. He is meeting his master in the cremation ground.”Ordinary life is a chaos; things are not where they should be – everything is misplaced. Roots are in the sky and branches are coming to the earth. The tree has flowered, but it never comes to fruit. The river is there and one is dying of thirst. God is there but you are standing on your head, so you cannot see him. Or, even if you see him, you see him very distorted. Mind is a mechanism to distort. Hence, whether you are on the path of love or on the path of meditation, one thing is needed on both the paths as a basic requirement: that the mind should be put aside. Mind goes on distorting.Millions of suns will burst open with brilliance and the formless in visual forms.God is a tremendous experience of light, of beauty, of splendor. God is not a word, it is a dimension. It is a vast ocean in which you disappear like a small drop. Millions of suns will burst open with brilliance and the formless in visual forms. And once you have tasted him, then every form becomes his form.Then the formless is bursting all around. But first, one has to have the taste. If I tell you that in these green trees it is he who is green, words will reach you but meaning will not. You will understand what I am saying, and yet you will not understand. Words you will understand: the container you will carry, but the content will be lost unless you have tasted him. Then, everything is his form. In a rock, he is a rock; in a tree, he is the tree; in a flower, he is a flower; in a star, he is a star. Then all forms are his, in tremendous forms, in millions of forms, he is expressing himself. God is expression, manifestation, revelation. If you watch your own being you will be able to understand it.If you have some talent – if you can paint, or if you can sing, or if you can compose poetry – then unless you have done it you will not feel happy, you will not feel fulfilled. Unless your destiny is fulfilled, unless your innermost core has become creative, you will feel something is missing somewhere. You may know it, you may not know it, but you will feel a gap, a big gap in your life. You may have all that life can give to you, but if you have not found the right thing that allows your being to express itself, then you will be like a rosebush on which flowers have never happened. Then the rosebush will be sad, because the rosebush will be just futile. What is the point of being there? Once flowers bloom, the rosebush has attained to meaning, significance; the rosebush has become creative. Her soul is released, she is no more in bondage.If you ask me what is moksha, liberation, this is moksha for me: to release your soul from bondage. I’m not telling you to go to the monasteries, or to the Himalayas and sit in a cave and just waste your life. I am saying that you move into the creative dimension because that is the dimension of God. Sing if you have a song to sing, and that will be your moksha. Paint if painting is somewhere hidden in you and wants to assert – that will be your moksha. Dance! If dance is throbbing within your heart, then let it be manifested. Once manifested, your soul will be free.As I see it, the so-called religious people are less religious than the creative people. A poet is more religious to me, a painter more religious, a dancer more religious than your so-called mahatmas – because they are not creative at all. They are almost stupid people; they are simply withering away – they are rosebushes that have stopped growing roseflowers. Now even to call them rosebushes is not right; they are simply vegetating.In India a great calamity has happened: these people are respected. Uncreative people are respected, and the reasons to give them respect are simply foolish. Somebody fasts – now this is uncreative activity; or somebody stands for hours in the hot sun – now this is good in a circus, but life is not enriched by it; or somebody can lie on a bed of thorns. What is the point in it? What are you creating? One can become very insensitive and lie down on thorns. And the body has dead spots on it, so if you try to find out you will be able to find out. Just tell your wife or your husband to take a thorn or a needle and push many spots on your back. You will see that a few spots you will feel, and a few you will not feel; those are the spots. There are dead spots on the back. One has just to find where they are, then you can lie down on a bed of thorns. And by and by, the body becomes immune, resistant, hard. But these people lose all sensitivity: they have never produced a song, they have never danced. But in India they are thought to be great souls. It is ugly, it is stupid, it is very dangerous – because the whole country has been worshipping uncreativity.Worship dancers, singers; worship poets, painters; just worship creative people – because God’s only definition is creativity. He’s the creator, so be a creator in your own right. Then your stream runs parallel to his stream. And if you become really creative, totally creative, you fall into his stream. He starts functioning through you. All creativity is his. So whenever you are creative, you are prayerful; whether you go to a mosque or a temple is irrelevant.Bauls are very creative people, simple, but very creative. This I call the great calamity that happened in India. Because of this many things disappeared: the genius of this country disappeared. Because you don’t need a genius to fast, you need only a stubborn, mule-type mind, that’s all; just a cruel, masochistic mind, that’s all. Your mahatmas are nothing but super-masochists, destructive people. If you starve somebody else you will be caught by the police; if you starve yourself you will be respected as a mahatma. But in both cases you are creating pain, misery.I have been in contact with thousands of monks – Jaina monks, Buddhist monks, Hindu monks. Rarely has it happened – I was simply surprised – rarely did I come across somebody who was intelligent. But they are doing certain things which have become respectable, and nobody reevaluates that if you honor and respect uncreative things, the country will become, by and by, more uncreative.Bow your head down wherever you find creativity, because God is nothing but creativity. So wherever there is a sign of creativity, God has a signature there. He has already been there. Maybe even the poet does not know, but he has been touched by something from the beyond.Rabindranath used to close his doors whenever he was in a poetic mood – sometimes for one day, two days, three days he would not come out. He would forget about food, he would not go to the bathroom, he would forget about everything. The whole family and his disciples would be worried too: “How long is this going to be?…” And he had told them never to disturb him, because whenever he was in a poetic mood, God is there. So disturbing him would be disturbing God. He would cry and tears would fall from his eyes, and he would be almost transfigured.Once it happened…A group of people had come to meet him, and they were drinking tea. Suddenly the cup slipped from Rabindranath’s hand, and he closed his eyes. People knew…they watched this beautiful phenomenon for a single moment. His face changed – a new radiance, a new grace, something of the invisible entered. They, without disturbing him, slowly, slowly disappeared. Only one man remained, hiding behind a tree to see what was happening. He had come for the first time. That man himself has told me, “I have never seen such a transfiguration. By and by, Rabindranath was no more human – something superhuman, a great ecstasy. And I could see the luminousness, and he started swaying, and he started singing. And those words were not coming from him; he was just instrumental. For three days he remained in that state.”Poetry is always born when the poet is just instrumental. Painting is born when the painter is not painting his ideas, but is possessed by God. Remember it: I would like my sannyasins to be creative, because I don’t know of any other way to come close to God.These uncreative religions, and the uncreative religious people have done nothing but harm – quarreling, argumentative, killing each other. And with the problem about the transcendental, one thing is very complex; you cannot prove anything. The experience is transcendental. Christians cannot prove they are right; Hindus cannot prove they are right. No, no decision can be decisive, so they go on fighting and quarreling. The whole energy that should become creative becomes destructive.This also has to be noted: if you don’t use your energy in a creative way, if it doesn’t become a dance and a laughter and a delight, then the same energy will become harmful and poisonous. It will be destructive.It is said that Adolf Hitler wanted to become a painter, but he was refused admission. Just think: the whole world would have been totally different if he had been accepted in the academy. There would have been no Second World War. The whole humanity would have been totally different. But this man could not be creative. He wanted to be creative, he had the energy; certainly he had tremendous energy: he dragged the whole world towards destruction as no other man has ever been able to do.But it was the same energy; it could have become creative, but it became uncreative.I have heard…The father lectured his son on the evils of fisticuffs as a way of settling disputes. “Don’t you know that when you grow up you can’t use your fists to settle an argument?” the father began. “You must begin to use peaceful and amicable means of arriving at a decision. Try to reason things out, try to discover by logic and evidence which is right and abide by the right. Remember that might does not make right. Though the strong may win over the weak, that still does not prove that the weak is wrong.”“I know, Dad,” said the boy, kicking at the grass. “But this was different.”“Different, what different? How different? What were you and Johnny arguing about that you had to fight over it?”“Well, he said he could whip me and I couldn’t whip him, and there was only one way to find out which of us was right.”It cannot be decided by amicable means. If this is the question: who can whip whom? Then only whipping can decide. Destructive people are always very egoistic because they don’t know how to drop their egos. The creative person knows glimpses of no-ego, of egolessness. He knows states of no-ego. In moments of creativity, he becomes so possessed that he has a taste of something of the beyond. But a destructive person knows no non-ego states; he becomes a crystallized ego.And then the whole world goes on fighting: Hindus fighting Mohammedans, Mohammedans fighting Hindus, Christians fighting Jews, Jews fighting Christians; the whole world is just a conflict. It could have been a great orchestra, but it is simply a war.Religion has to become creative – being uncreative should be thought of as the original sin, and being creative should be thought of as the only and the supermost virtue.Millions of suns will burst open with brilliance and the formless in visual forms.If you are moving in the right direction – receptive, creative, happy, celebrating, loving – millions of suns will burst open. One day you come to your innermost shrine …and the formless in visual forms.You will see what cannot be seen only if you can be the formless in you.Remember it: you can see …only if you can be the formless in you. If you want to see the formless you will have to become formless within. Because only when the wave lengths are the same, is there communion. When you are also formless within you, suddenly something clicks and you are one with God. He is formless, you are formless; there cannot be two formlessnesses. There can be millions of forms, but formlessness can only be one.How to attain to this inner formlessness? – drop the ego. That is giving you a limitation. Drop the very word I. Use it, it is utilitarian in the outside world, but never bring it home. Never say “I” inside because that makes a limitation, and because of that barrier you will never be able to move into the beloved, and you will never be able to allow the beloved to move into you. If you want to see God, become something like God. Be creative – one thing; be formless – another thing.“Have you tallied, my heart, the number of ways of finding Him in the city of love? The treasure of life, sans bogus reckonings, the world is a carnival where lovers meet like children of games.“Figure out the nature of your feelings for the jewel of your life. He is reached in the way each seek to reach Him.”He is reached in the way each seek to reach him…. Through tender passion or servitude, through loyalty or parental care, or through the love of tranquility, peace, find the feelings which are born with you and then worship Him with your own strength.”Bauls say that there are no fixed laws and rules to reach him. There is no methodology. There are no super highways to reach to him, only small footpaths. And each has to seek him in his own way. Of course, a poet has to seek in his own way, a dancer has to seek in his own way, a lover has to seek in his own way, a meditator has to seek in his own way.So you should never listen to what others are saying; listen to your feelings. Remain true to yourself and you will remain true to God. He has already given you the key – the key is in your feelings. Never imitate, because there is no one way for all. If you understand me rightly, then the really religious world will be a world of no religions – no Hindu, no Mohammedan, no Christian, no Jaina. A real world which is religious will be of religious people: everybody seeking and searching in his own way. And God is not limited.Jesus says, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” Yes, there are millions of doors. In fact, for each individual there is a separate door – special; nobody else can enter through that door but you. So don’t imitate: imitation creates falsity, pseudoness, inauthenticity. Just feel your own way and don’t bother about what others say.It is nobody else’s business. Don’t bother about what churches say, organizations say – listen to your own heart.Bauls are very individualistic. Religion has to be individualistic because it is a process of individuation. But what other religions have done up to now is to destroy individuality and try to make everybody a part of the crowd. They have created mobs, and they have destroyed individuals. Bauls are rebellious about it.“He who has seen the beauty of the Beloved friend can never forget it. The form is for seeing but not for discourse, as beauty has no comparison. He who has seen that form flashing on the mirror, the darkness of his heart is gone.“He lives with his eyes focused on the form, careless of the river between life and death. His heart, forever devoted to the beauty, dares the gods.”Each one has to come to his own vision, each one has to look through his own eyes. You cannot see through my eyes, and you cannot touch him through my hands. Even if I hold your hand and put it on him, it will never reach to him – because you are not ready. If you are ready, he is always reaching you. And what is readiness in the eyes of the Bauls? – become individual.Remember, God is very original; he never makes the same model again. A Buddha is a Buddha, a Krishna is a Krishna – never again does he repeat. So don’t go on carrying Gitas and Dhammapadas. Read them as beautiful pieces, read them as poetry, but not as religion. Read them as great art, literature, but not as religion. Listen to the Koran recited – it is tremendously beautiful whether you understand it or not, whether you know the language or not. The very word koran means recite. There is no comparison; no other scripture can be recited so beautifully. It is aesthetic, it has a tremendous beauty of sound; listen to it. Read the Bible – never has literature ever been able to transcend the simple assertions of Jesus – but never as religion. Religion you will have to find yourself. Poetry you can find, beautiful assertions you can find. And I’m not saying don’t read them, because they are your heritage. They make you rich.A man who has not read about Buddha and who has not read his assertions cannot be contemporary. Something will be missing. If you have not read the Koran and the Bible and Mahavira’s statements, then you will lack something very essential. You will be poorer for that. Read, but read as great literature. Enjoy it, delight in it, but don’t believe. A poem is not to be believed, it is to be delighted in.Belief is borrowed. You will have to find your own trust, you will have to find your own faith. Hard is the path, arduous are the ways. In the beginning it looks almost impossible to reach, but I say to you, it is only in appearance. If you start moving: if you start praying, if you start dancing, if you start singing in his name, he arrives.“Do you wish to visit my inner home and drink nectar, my heart? Will you not fail to enter where lovers march in a joyous carnival singing of love?“Then walk the way with a lamp of beauty, leaving behind this greed, that lust, the ways of the world, and all qualities.“Blames and violence, old age and death, dawn and dusk do not live there. Only rays of color brilliantly shine.”What cannot be seen you will see. The impossible will happen. Religion is the impossible revolution. It happens – it is almost impossible to believe that it happens. It is so beyond the ordinary mind; it is so beyond logic, it is so beyond intellect, that it is difficult to believe that it happens – but it happens. Look into my eyes, look into me, watch and feel; it has happened. It can happen to you.You will see what cannot be seen only if you can be the formless in you.But the only art that you have to learn is how to be formless within you. How to drop the ego is the very core of all religions; how to efface yourself utterly, so utterly that your room is just an emptiness, that you are just a room and nothing else, just space, pure space. In that pure space one starts seeing that which cannot be seen, and one starts hearing that which cannot be heard, and one starts touching what cannot be touched, and one arrives to the point where all seeking, searching, desiring disappears. One is fulfilled.That benediction is your birthright. And if you are missing, nobody else is responsible. Only you, and only you are responsible if you miss. There is no need to miss anymore – even for a single moment. Once understood, what is the problem? Why cannot you put yourself aside? Why cannot you be in a state where no “I” exists?Sometimes it happens accidentally. Listening to great music, sometimes it happens that you forget that you are. You are, more so than ever before – more grounded, more centered – but still you forget that you are. It disappears in great music. Watching a Himalayan peak, it disappears sometimes. It is so wonderful, so surprising, so pure…the untouched Himalayan snow…that for a moment you touch an altitude of your own being, and the ego is left, deep down.Sometimes, if in the night you are suddenly awakened, for a single moment you are puzzled about who you are and where you are. Have you not watched it? Otherwise, ask your wife or husband one day to wake you suddenly in the night, to shake you, and see: for a few seconds you are, but there is no feeling of who you are. The name, the form, the identity is not there. You are coming from such deep sleep that it will take a little time to take back the garb of the ego.It happens in love. Two lovers sitting are not two – something between them has fallen, disappeared. Barriers gone, they are overlapping. It happens accidentally also, but if you understand it you can, by and by, allow it to grow in you. That’s all that religion is about.My heart, dress yourself in the spirit of all women and reverse your nature and habits. Millions of suns will burst open with brilliance and the formless in visual forms.You will see what cannot be seen only if you can be the formless in you.Enough for today.

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The Beloved Vol 2 01-10Category: BAUL MYSTICS

The Beloved Vol 2 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,There is no more searching and seeking. That has all stopped. I have found nothing in particular, but I feel free, freed. I go about my business without anxiety. This for me is bliss, and I feel such a flood of gratitude for your presence here.There is nothing to be found in particular. The search for the particular is illusory, utterly illusory. The mind seeks something in particular; that is the problem with the mind. God is not a particular thing or a particular being; God is sheer existence.All that is, is God. God is the greatest generality. You cannot find him somewhere because he is everywhere. You cannot find him in any place because he is the whole, the total. You cannot indicate him; whatsoever the indication, it will be wrong: He is in all directions, within and without. Mind is narrow; it goes on seeking in a very concentrated way. Concentration is not the approach towards God. Concentration is a mind approach. God is everywhere, so you have to relax, you have to be meditative. That’s the difference between concentration and meditation. Concentration is a focusing of the mind exclusively on something. That’s what desire is: a concentrated mind, a mind intent to reach somewhere, to reach something, a great seeking – but it has to be narrow. And God is the infinite.You have to relax, and you have to drop all searching – only then you’ll find him. Seek, and you will never find him. Just be, and he has always been there, surrounding you – he has never left you for a single moment, because you cannot exist without him. It is impossible to be without him for a single split moment. He is your life. He is your being. You can exist without food for months, you can exist without water for a few days, you can exist without air for a few seconds, but you cannot exist without God even for a split second. It is impossible.This is my whole effort here: to help you to relax. I am not here to make you tense, ambitious, desiring to find God. One who is searching is still in the world. The searcher is a part of the world. One day he was seeking money, power, prestige; now he is seeking God, bliss, heaven – but the search continues. He has only changed the objects of the search, but he remains the same.I am here to help you to see the point that God is already the case. You are just like a fish already in the ocean. Maybe the ocean is so obvious that you can’t see it: you are born in it, you are made of it, you will dissolve in it. It is a question of recognition, not of search. A searching mind becomes concentrated. Relax and just recognize.So I don’t say to you to seek God, I say to you to live him right now. There is no need to seek – enjoy him right now, celebrate! Let it be a festival. He has already happened. He is just waiting for you to dance with him, to delight with him.Good. Girisha is perfectly right: “I have found nothing in particular…” right, precisely, that’s the point: nothing is to be found in particular. “But I feel free, freed.” Exactly, that is the point to be understood. A great freedom is needed – freedom from desire, freedom from search, freedom from seeking, freedom from the narrow mind. One simply relaxes in all directions. When you relax, you are all-dimensional; but when you seek, you are one-dimensional. When you relax you become part of the whole; when you seek you remain an ego.This “nothing” is what God is; and this freedom, this tremendous freedom – that there is no longer any desire to bind you, no bondage exists – this is what moksha, liberation is. Moksha or liberation is not a geographical thing. It is not somewhere: it is not after you die, it is a recognition, a recognition of here and now.Be free of all seeking.There are only two types of people in the world: one, who are continuously seeking. They seek and they never find, because seeking is not the way to find. They seek one thing, then another thing, then another thing; they continuously change their objects, but they continue seeking. They are one-dimensional people. They miss God because God is all-dimensional. They are linear people; they move in a line – and God is all. You cannot find him through linear logic.Then there is another type of person – very rare – who doesn’t seek, who enjoys, who delights in whatsoever is available, who dances, who sings. These are the Bauls, these are the really authentically religious people.God is not somewhere in the future. If you delight, he is here. If you celebrate, you will find him just by your side, beating in your heart. But if you seek him you will never find him anywhere; the seeking mind never reaches to reality. And one becomes too much of a seeker, by and by: too much practice, conditions, so you go on seeking. Today you will seek, yesterday you were seeking, tomorrow also you will seek; past lives you were seeking, this life you are seeking, in the future lives also you will seek. Seeking has become habitual. It has become a structure. Drop that structure! This is my message: he is here, right this very moment. Don’t miss him. There is no point in seeking; you just also be here, as he is here, and the meeting, and the communion, and the orgasm…you become one.“I go about my business without anxiety” – beautiful! Because then everything is his, business also. Ordinary day-to-day activity becomes religious, because all is his. When you are taking a bath, you are giving him a bath: when you are standing under a shower, he is showering on you. When you are eating he is eating, and when you feel satisfied he feels satisfied. When you are singing he is singing within you, and he is the audience also; he is listening to you. Every moment and every act becomes luminous with his presence. When the whole life becomes luminous – waking, he wakes in you; sleeping, he goes to sleep and takes a rest – then there is no distraction. Then you are continuously in tune with him. Then the harmony has happened. This is what a religious life is all about.Religious life is not something separate from life. It is not the life of the temple or of the monastery; it is the life offered to God – totally, unconditionally, utterly. Now one lives because he wants you to live; and one lives happily, because he has chosen you, because he has chosen you to be an instrument to him. Then you become a flute on his lips…then everything is tremendously beautiful. This is what the Bauls want to say….“…and I feel such a flood of gratitude for your presence here.” Gratitude arises whenever you start feeling God’s presence around you; then only gratitude is left. Then your whole energy becomes gratitude, then your whole being becomes a thanksgiving, it becomes a prayer – because nothing is missing, and the world is so perfect, and everything is as it should be. Gratitude is natural. Gratitude is not something that can be practiced. You have been taught to be grateful; you cannot be. Gratefulness is a consequence; when you feel God close by, gratitude arises. It is a by-product. Respect arises. This respect is not something that you manage, it is something beyond you. You have been taught to be grateful to your parents, taught to be grateful to your teachers, taught to be grateful to your elders, but those are all just conditionings. When real gratitude arises, then you see what a tremendous difference there is. The gratitude that was taught was just a concept, a dead ritual. You were following it like a mechanism. When the real gratitude upsurges in your being, you feel for the first time what prayer is, what love is.Good, Girisha. Continue to remember, continue to relax, continue not to lose this experience that is happening to you, because this experience is the only experience that makes life meaningful, which gives life a glow, a benediction. You are blessed, Girisha, but don’t lose track of it. It is very difficult to get it, and it is very easy to lose it – because mind has a long history, and it is very strong, and this new experience is just a small sprout, very soft, fragile. The mind’s heavy rock can crush it at any moment, so be very alert.People who have not known anything like the spiritual experience of ecstasy, elation, who have never felt any presence of God, need not be very alert, because they have nothing to lose. But a person who has had an experience, a glimpse, a mini-satori, has much to lose. He will have to be more cautious. Be more cautious. Allow what has happened to you to happen more and more. Go deeper into it so that that which is fragile becomes strong, that which is new becomes deeply rooted in your being.It fact, people who are searching and seeking and making much fuss about it are completely unaware that finally, when they reach, they will find there is nothing.I have heard….One lawyer was cross-examining Mulla Nasruddin, a witness. He asked, “And you say you called on Mrs. Sultana on May 2nd? Now will you tell the jury just what she said?”“I object to the question,” interrupted the lawyer on the other side. After nearly an hour’s argument between counsel the judge finally allowed the question.“As I was saying,” the first lawyer began again, “on May 2nd you called on Mrs. Sultana. Now what did she say?”“Nothing,” replied Nasruddin. “She was not at home.”One day, when you arrive, you simply are amazed that for so many lives you were seeking something which had never been there, and that which has been there was so close to you, and there was no need to seek it. Delight, enjoy. God is not a thing, it is an attitude, an attitude of celebration and festivity. Drop sadness. He is so close by; dance!Drop long faces, it is sacrilege – because he is so close by. Forget your childish miseries and worries; he is so close by. Don’t go on brooding about immaterial things; he is so close by. Allow him to hold your hand. He has been waiting for you for long.The second question:Osho,If you happened to meet a Baul, a Tantrika, and a yogi, with whom would you like to take a cup of tea?It is a very complex question. The answer is not easy, but still I will try.I will tell the yogi to prepare the cup of tea, because those are the most hygienic people! And I will tell the Tantrika to bring it, because they know how to present a thing; they know what ritual is. But I am going to take tea with the Baul.The third question:Osho,When one becomes empty of all thoughts, empty of all plannings, empty of all desires, what transformation will happen in one's outer and one's inner life? How will one behave? How will one see things? How will one live in the world? Please say.It depends, it depends on the individual. There cannot be any dogmatic statement about it because each individual is so unique. When Basho becomes enlightened he starts singing poetry, poems; Buddha has never done that. When Krishna becomes enlightened he starts dancing, singing; Mahavira has never done that. When Mahavira becomes enlightened he keeps silence for many years, remains absolutely silent, not a ripple is allowed; Meera has not done that. When she becomes enlightened, she dances from village to village, she sings the glory of God. It is very difficult to make a dogmatic statement.There have been people who renounced life when they became enlightened and went to the Himalayas, they moved as far away from society as possible. There have been people who became enlightened and came back to the world, even if they had been in the Himalayas, and started living with people again. There have been people who remained emperors even when they became enlightened. Zen masters go on living very ordinary lives; it is very difficult even to recognize. If you don’t have eyes to penetrate them, you will not recognize them.It is said about a great Zen master, Rinzai….The emperor came to see him. He was cutting wood just in front of the ashram.The emperor asked, “Where is your master?” Rinzai said, “He is inside.”Now of course, the emperor thought he must be inside the ashram, so he went inside the ashram. Rinzai ran in another door and sat on the master’s chair with closed eyes. When the emperor reached, he recognized: “This man seems to be exactly like…just like the woodcutter.” He said, “What is the matter? Who are you? Are you trying to befool me, or are you a madman?”Rinzai said, “But I have told you, he is inside, and you didn’t understand me. Because you did not understand me, I had to run and I had to sit on this chair. Maybe you can understand only superficials. I was ready then and there to reveal myself, but you didn’t wait. Yes, I am the master, now what do you want? And don’t waste much time, because much wood is still left to be cut and chopped.”Zen masters live very ordinary lives: they chop wood, they carry water from the well, they prepare food in the kitchen. It is very difficult to see them unless you have eyes. They don’t live any sort of extraordinary life, because they say, “The very search to be extraordinary is egoistic.” Just to be ordinary is the real attitude of a religious man. And remember, the urge to be extraordinary is very ordinary. There is nothing extraordinary about it because everybody wants to be extraordinary. To be ordinary is very extraordinary – because who wants to be ordinary?So it is very difficult, and I will not give you a criterion to judge by because those criteria have been very destructive and harmful. Once you have a dead criterion with you, you will miss many real people, and you will be deceived by many pseudo people. Whosoever can fulfill that criterion will look like he is enlightened.For example: Mahavira became enlightened; he became naked. Now, anybody can stand naked; there is nothing special about it. Any madman can do that. And you can go to visit a nudist club – they are not all Mahaviras. Buddha became enlightened; he was sitting in a particular posture, the lotus posture. You can sit in a lotus posture. If you are Eastern, then it is very simple; if you are Western, then six months’ practice, but that’s all. You can sit in a lotus posture, but that will not make you a Buddha. You can imitate very easily; that’s how imitators are all over the world. Go and see a Jaina monk: he imitates perfectly, but nothing else is there.Enlightenment is always new, fresh – it is not an imitation, it is not a carbon copy; it is always original. So I cannot tell you exactly how he will behave, but I can tell you how to imbibe. If there is somebody who has something of the unknown around him – a mystique – then, how to imbibe? Drop all considerations, all mental considerations. Don’t ask that he should be ‘like this’; just be with him. Just sit with him in silence. Be open to him.If he has become enlightened, suddenly you will see a throb within you that you have never known before, your energy will start rising. You will see a great silence arising in you, and a great bliss, drop by drop, reaching your innermost core of being. An enlightened person, if allowed to enter into you, will give you self-evident proofs. But those are not intellectual proofs; they are not arguments of mind. He argues with his whole being. His argument is that of his presence – so allow his presence and don’t carry any criterion.If you are a Jaina you will miss Buddha; if you are a Jaina you will miss Krishna; if you are a Jaina you will miss Christ. If you are a Christian you will miss Mahavira. You will carry an idea, a fixed pattern. Don’t carry any fixed pattern. If you feel that somebody is there who is livelier than you, more radiant than you, more understanding than you, more compassion overflowing from his being, then just be in his presence.That’s what we call satsang: just be in his presence. If he has arrived, you will feel a sudden pull in your being – you are being pulled towards some unknown center. And you will feel tremendous beauty, bliss. blessings showering on you. That will be the only criterion; but for that you have to be ready.Ordinarily, people ask, “Give us some objective criterion.” There is none. The criterion can only be if you are open. What is the criterion to know whether this flower is a rose or not? The only criterion is to open your eyes, open your nostrils, smell it, let it reach your being; only that will reveal. But if you don’t have eyes and you have lost your sense of smell, then it will be very, very difficult for you to know whether it is a rose or something else. It may be just a plastic rose or a paper rose; it can deceive you.So I will not give you any description of the objective reality, of what happens – it is individual, unique, always different, never the same – but I can give you a subjective way to feel.I have heard….A maddened Roman swordsman came into the village cutting down men, women, and children, and terrifying everyone. Arriving at the doors of a Zen monastery, he smashed down the door with the hilt of his sword. Striding up to the master who was sitting in zazen, he raised his sword and was just about to kill him, when something of the master’s stillness reached him.And angrily he shouted, “Don’t you realize that standing in front of you is a man who can cut you in two without the blink of an eye!”The master quietly said, “Don’t you realize that sitting in front of you is a man who can be cut in two without the blink of an eye? So go ahead. Don’t be distracted by my silence; do whatsoever you have decided to do.” But the silence had reached the madman, the silence of the master had touched his heart; now it was impossible.So just be open.Even if you are a madman, and open, you will recognize enlightenment wherever it is, in whatsoever form it has taken. And even if you are a great philosopher, intellectual, very rational to the core, if you don’t allow yourself to imbibe the spirit of silence and bliss, you will miss. You have to be very, very open. You have to be in a let-go – and then the evidence comes so strongly. It is so certain that you can deny everything, but you cannot deny a man of enlightenment – it is impossible. You may not be able to prove it to others – because there is no way to prove it – but for you, the thing is settled.And once it is settled for you, once you have been in contact with an enlightened man, a bridge has been created. Now you can never be the same again. The very phenomenon that you could recognize a man of enlightenment is enough to start the foundation of your own enlightenment. It is enough to give you a new direction, a new being, a new birth.The fourth question:Osho,Anything I see happening in myself is false, illusory, and a mind trip, right? Is my recognition of the mind trip a mind trip too?Right….As far as thoughts go, everything is a mind trip. When thoughts cease and you see without any thoughts crowding in your mind, when you see clearly with no smoke of the thoughts surrounding you, when your look is simple, innocent, uncorrupted by thoughts, then it is not a mind trip. Only meditation is not a mind trip; everything else is a mind trip. Or, love is not a mind trip; everything else is a mind trip.If love or meditation has happened to you, you will know what I am indicating towards. In a deep moment of love, thinking stops. The moment is so intriguing, the moment is so tremendously powerful, the moment is so intensely alive, that thinking stops. You are simply in awe, a great wonder surrounds you. Or in deep meditation, when the moment of silence has come and you are absolutely silent, still – no flickering, no wavering, no trembling, the flame of your consciousness is straight – then thinking stops. Then you are outside the grip of the mind. Otherwise, everything is a mind trip.Remember it: one has to go beyond the mind because the mind is samsar, the mind is the world. It is because of your thinking that you are missing the truth. Once thinking has stopped you are face to face with the reality. It is the continuous screen of thinking that is distorting reality. It is as if you are looking in a lake full of ripples. It is a full moon night, and the lake is reflecting the beautiful moon – but it is full of ripples. You cannot gather it together; the moon goes on splitting into a thousand fragments. The whole lake seems to be spread over by the moon, silvery…many fragments of the moon all around. Then the wind stops, the ripples disappear: those fragments start falling into one moon. The silver that was spread all over the lake becomes more concentrated in one place. When the lake is completely without ripples, the moon is reflected perfectly. When the mind is with thoughts, the lake is with ripples; when the mind is without thoughts, the lake is without ripples. God is reflected perfectly when there is no ripple in you.Forget all about God – the only thing to be done is how to become rippleless, how to become thoughtless, how to drop this constant obsession with thinking. It can be dropped – it is because of your cooperation that it continues. It is your energy that you go on giving to it that keeps it alive. It is just like a man on a bicycle; he goes on pedaling – it is his energy that keeps the cycle going on. Once he stops pedaling, the cycle may go a little further because of the past momentum, but then it has to stop.Don’t give energy to your thoughts. Become a witness – indifferent, aloof, distant. Just see the thoughts, and don’t be in any way involved in them. Note the fact: the thoughts are there; but don’t choose this way or that, don’t be for or against, don’t be pro or con. Just be a watcher. Let the mind traffic move, just stand by the side and look at it, unaffected by it, as if it has nothing to do with you.Sometimes try it: go on the busiest street where the traffic rush is too much. Stand by the side of the road and see the traffic – so many people going hither and thither, and cars and bicycles and trucks and buses. You just stand by the side and look, and do the same inside: close your eyes and see – the mind is a traffic of thoughts, thoughts rushing here and there. You watch, you just be a watcher. By and by, you will see that the traffic is becoming less and less. By and by, you will see that the road is empty, nobody is passing. In those rare moments, first glimpses of samadhi will enter in you.There are three stages of samadhi. First, when you achieve glimpses through gaps – one thought comes, then it has gone and another has not come for the time being. There may even be a gap for a few seconds; in that interval reality penetrates you – the moon becomes one. The reflection is there only for a single moment, but you will see the first glimpse.This is what in Zen they call satori.By and by, the gaps will become bigger, and when the gaps become bigger and you see reality more clearly, that vision of reality changes you. Then you cannot be the same because your vision becomes your reality also. Whatsoever you are seeing affects your being. Your vision, by and by, is absorbed, digested. That is the second stage of samadhi.And then comes the last stage: when suddenly the whole traffic disappears, as if you were fast asleep and dreaming and somebody has shaken you and awakened you, and the whole traffic of dreaming has stopped. In that third stage you become one with reality, because there is nothing to divide. The fence that was dividing you has disappeared. The wall is no more there. The wall is made of the bricks of thoughts, desires, feelings, emotions; once it disappears – it is a China wall, very ancient, and every strong – but once it disappears, there is no fence between you and God.When for the first time the third stage happens, that is where the Upanishads announced, “aham brahmasmi” – I am God, I am the brahman. It is where the Sufi mystic, Mansoor, declares, “ana’l haq” – I am the truth. It is there when Jesus declares, “I and my God are one, I and my Father are one.”The fifth question:Osho,On the one hand you are giving ultimate freedom to do whatsoever we want to do, and on the other hand you are giving responsibility. With responsibility, I cannot use the word ‘freedom' as I want, hence I have to wait for the right meaning of freedom. The moment I get it, I get it with responsibility. Osho, when I understand I feel ‘thank you'. Otherwise, I would like to use, and I have already used it as a license.It is one of the perennial questions of humanity: the question of freedom and responsibility. If you are free, you interpret it as if now there is no responsibility. Just a hundred years ago Friedrich Nietzsche declared, “God is dead, and man is free.” And the next sentence he wrote is, “Now you can do whatsoever you want to do. There is no responsibility. God is dead, man is free, and there is no responsibility.” There he was absolutely wrong.When there is no God, there is tremendous responsibility on your shoulders. If there is a God, he can share your responsibility. You can throw your responsibility on him: you can say, “It is you who have made the world; it is you who have made me in this way; it is you who is finally, ultimately, responsible, not me. How can I be ultimately responsible? I am just a creature, and you are the creator. Why have you put seeds of corruption in me and seeds of sin in me from the beginning? You are responsible. I am free.” In fact, if there is no God, then man is absolutely responsible for his acts, because there is no way to throw responsibility on anybody else.When I say to you that you are free, I mean that you are responsible. You cannot throw responsibility on anybody else, you are alone. And whatsoever you do, it is your doing. You cannot say that somebody else forced you to do it – because you are free; nobody can force you! Because you are free, it is your decision to do something or not to do something. With freedom comes responsibility. Freedom is responsibility. But the mind is very cunning, the mind interprets in its own way: it always goes on listening to that which it wants to listen to. It goes on interpreting things in its own way. The mind never tries to understand what really is the truth. It has taken that decision already.I have heard….“I am a respectable man, doctor, but lately life has become intolerable because of my feelings of guilt and self-recrimination.” The patient gulped miserably before continuing.“You see, I have recently fallen victim to an uncontrollable urge to pinch or fondle girls in the subway.”“Dearie me,” tutted the psychiatrist consolingly, “we must certainly help you to rid yourself of this unfortunate urge. I can quite see how distressing….”The patient broke in anxiously.“It is not so much the urge I wanted you to get rid of for me, doctor, it is the guilt.”People go on talking about freedom, but they don’t want freedom exactly, they want irresponsibility. They ask for freedom, but deep down, unconsciously, they ask for irresponsibility, license. Freedom is maturity; license is very childish. Freedom is possible only when you are so integrated that you can take the responsibility of being free. The world is not free because people are not mature.Revolutionaries have been doing many things down through the centuries, but everything fails. Utopians have been continuously thinking of how to make man free, but nobody bothers – because man cannot be free unless he is integrated. Only a Buddha can be free, a Mahavira can be free, a Christ, a Mohammed can be free, a Zarathustra can be free, because freedom means the man now is aware. If you are not aware then the state is needed, the government is needed, the police are needed, the court is needed. Then freedom has to be cut from everywhere. Then freedom exists only in name; in fact it doesn’t exist. How can freedom exist when governments exist? – it is impossible. But what to do? If governments disappear, there will simply be anarchy.Freedom will not come in if governments disappear, there will simply be anarchy: it will be a worse state than it is now. It will be sheer madness. Police are needed because you are not alert. Otherwise, what is the point of having a policeman standing on the crossroad? If people are alert, the policeman can be removed, will have to be removed, because he is unnecessary. But people are not conscious.So when I say “freedom,” I mean be responsible. The more responsible you become, the more free you become; or the more free you become, the more responsibility comes on you. Then you have to be very alert to what you are doing, what you are saying. Even about your small unconscious gestures you have to be very alert – because there is nobody else to control you, it is only you. When I say to you that you are free, I mean that you are a god. It is not license, it is tremendous discipline.The sixth question:Osho,After hearing you for the last nine days and undergoing morning and evening meditations in your ashram, I came to the conclusion that I envy Vivek, but I am not jealous of her. I feel she is holding the ‘parampada' of beloved disciple in the ashram. How to reach that stage?Mind functions in such strange ways. You have been here to meditate; it has nothing to do with anybody else. In fact, a real meditator will not look at what is happening to others. A real meditator will be going inwards.It is said about Bayazid that he lived with his master for twelve years, and he passed the same hall every day to come to the master.One day the master said to Bayazid, “You go back to the hall. There, in the cupboard, one book is lying – you bring that book.” Bayazid said, “I will go, because I have never seen that there is a cupboard.” The master said, “You have been coming to see me every day for twelve years continuously, and you have had to pass that hall every day; and you have not looked around?” He said, “I was coming to you, master. I am not here to look at what is in the hall, whether there is a cupboard or not, and whether there is a book in it or not. I am not here for that. My whole intent, my whole being is just for you. I am open towards you. I will go and see.”The master said, “There is no need; the book is not needed. In fact, there is no book and there is no cupboard. It was just a test to see whether you are distracted. I am happy that you are not distracted.”Now, this question is a question of distraction. How are you related to anybody? You should be meditating, or, at the most, you should be open towards me. But mind goes on creating new complexities and troubles.The question is from a woman, so that shows something about the feminine mind also – she is more interested in Vivek than in me. If you are to feel envious, feel envious of me! But a woman is a woman; even if she has come to meditate, it makes not much difference. And then she says, “I am not jealous of her, but I envy.” This is always happening in the mind: if somebody is envious we call him jealous; if we are jealous we say this is just envy. There is a double bind.What is envy? It is nothing but passive jealousy. Maybe jealousy is too strong a phenomenon; envy is a little passive. The difference may be of degrees, but it is not of quality, it is only of quantity. Envy can become jealousy at any moment; envy is just jealousy in progress. Mind has to drop all envies and jealousies.She has asked, “How to reach that stage?” The first thing is to drop envy and jealousy, otherwise there is no possibility – because love cannot exist where envy and jealousies exist. Then your search is only for a certain type of power: that in the name of love you are just trying to fulfill the ego. And it is arduous to drop, because love exists only when all the negative elements of the mind are dropped. It is very arduous. You can ask Vivek how arduous it is.Just a few days ago she was saying to me, “You are worse than Gurdjieff!” Now that is a great compliment. Gurdjieff was really very hard on his disciples, and she says, “You are worse than Gurdjieff!”But I can understand: I am hard, I have to be hard. The closer you come to me, the harder you will find me. When you come just as a visitor, then it is okay; I am not hard. I have to be very, very polite when you come as a visitor – that is the trap. Once you are trapped, then I become hard. The woman has not taken sannyas yet; she should take sannyas and see.Come closer to me…you will be coming closer to your own death. Love is death. You will have to die; only then can you come close to me. You will have to efface yourself utterly; only then can you come close to me. But people think that love is the promise of a rose garden. Yes, ultimately yes, but on the way it is a lot of hell.Let me tell you one anecdote:A great philosopher, feeling the absolute meaninglessness of life, decided to commit suicide by hanging himself. A friend came into the room and discovered him standing with a rope around his waist, and he inquired what he was trying to do. The philosopher told him he was taking his own life. “But,” said the friend, “why have you the rope round your waist?”“Well,” said the philosopher, “when I tied it round my neck, it was choking me.”Love is a rope round the neck – it will choke you, it will kill you. Only those who are courageous enough to commit suicide – a spiritual suicide – who are ready to die, only they can be reborn, and only they can be close to me. It has nothing to do with me. I am there, available to everybody. My invitation is there for you to come. It depends on you. But if you come just to become close to me, envious of others who are close, you are coming close for wrong reasons. Then your rope will be just around your waist, and you will say, “I cannot put it on my neck, it is choking.”People can come close also for wrong reasons, for political reasons. Now this woman has a political mind: she thinks Vivek is in a parampada, in the highest power position. This is a search for power.Those who are close to me are close because they have effaced themselves. At least they are sincerely trying. It is hard, it is difficult, but they are trying.I was reading a small anecdote:There was a small camp of little Boy Scouts. The camp counselor was explaining the rules of a new game: “If your enemy calls your number from his side of the battlefield,” he said, “you must be a dead man immediately – drop just where you are. Lie still as if you are dead, become completely dead.”Ten minutes later came an agonized whisper from the youngest camper, “Please may I move now? I am a dead man, but I am on an ant hill.”You can pretend that you are effacing yourself, you can pretend that you are humble, you can pretend that you are ready to drop your ego, but pretensions won’t help. Sooner or later truth comes out. And one should not become interested for the wrong reasons.The girl was rich and the young man, Mulla Nasruddin, was very poor. She liked him but that was all, and Nasruddin knew it. One night he had been a little more tender than usual.“You are very rich,” he ventured.“Yes,” she replied frankly. “I am worth one million rupees.”“And I am poor.”“Yes.”“Will you marry me?”“No.”“I thought you would not.”“Then why did you ask me, Nasruddin?”“Aw,” said Nasruddin, “just to see how a man feels when he loses one million rupees.”Don’t ask such questions, because they come out of wrong desires. First watch from where they are coming and be very, very alert. See as clearly as possible. Don’t hide behind words. Don’t call your jealousy “envy.” Be very hard with yourself. Only then will your diagnosis be helpful, and right questions will arise. If you ask a wrong question, you waste time.The last question:Osho,Who is a Baul? Please give us the definition.It should have been asked in the beginning; now this is going to be last. But in a way, it is good.If in the beginning you had asked about the definition of a Baul, it would have been almost impossible to say anything. Not that now I can define, but at least now I can say it is indefinable. The Baul is not a metaphysics, the Baul is a mystique. I can invite you to participate in that mystery, but definition is not possible. So I am not going to define. Instead, I will tell you a story. Maybe that will give you a definition; but you will have to find it yourself.I have heard….Once upon a time, an angel came to Earth to see man and his world, because he had heard so many stories of man’s splendor that he could not resist his curiosity. The beauty of the world overwhelmed him: the sunlit mountain peaks and dark forests, the whining winds and tossing, rainbow-colored valleys, the dewkissed soil, the soil’s lusty smell, the animals, fierce and gentle. Everywhere there was such beauty. But when the angel saw man he was awed, for he heard the music of the human heart and the song of the human soul. He fell in deep love with the human mystery. Dusk came, but he lingered on. Man and man’s earth had so moved the angel that he hesitated to leave.But finally, his time finished, he had to go with tears in his eyes. And tremendously encircled, enriched by this adventure on the earth, by this experience, before going out, before going back to his own world, just out of sheer joy he wanted to help some people on their way. He looked about, and saw four persons walking together.He approached them and said, “I have come to grant you each one wish.” As luck would have it, they all were spiritual aspirants.The first one spoke up, “I have striven incessantly after distant divine truth – nothing but struggle, struggle, struggle. Give me spiritual peace!”“But struggling is one of the joys of life,” said the angel, not understanding the first seeker’s wish.“I would like peace!” insisted the man.This being his wish, the angel changed the youth into a cow that chewed the grass of a distant pasture quite contentedly.A bit disturbed, the angel turned to the other aspirant.“God is pure but I am not,” said the other. “Please rid me of all impurities, of passions, emotions, desires.”“Are not they the very fount of life?” asked the angel.“But I don’t want life, I want purity!” insisted the second man. He then closed his eyes and waited for his transformation. In a split second he disappeared, and in a faraway temple, a marble statue appeared in his likeness.Then the third one said, “Make me perfect; anything less will simply not do.” He vanished but did not reappear anywhere, for nothing on earth is perfect or can be perfect.The angel turned to the fourth, “And what is your wish?”“I have no wish,” replied this happy man.“No wish at all?”“None – except to be human, fully human and alive.”A near-smothered joy began again to stir within the angel. He looked longingly upon this blessed man, and then leaned over and embraced him with a deep love. The fourth man continued on his way singing the glory of life, dancing the joy of life.This fourth man is the Baul.There is no other way to define a Baul. The Baul is tremendous love for life, tremendous love for this earth, tremendous love for all that is. The Baul is not an idealist, he is a realist – down to earth. The Baul does not ask for any paradise somewhere else, he is already in paradise, herenow. The Baul is not a seeker, the Baul is one who has found. the Baul is a siddha: one who has looked into life and realized that all is available and there is no need to seek. One has just to participate in this mystery called life. He dances, he sings, he enjoys, he is blissful for no reason at all. This is half the story; the other half is still there.The angel reached heaven. God called him and asked him, “What were you doing on the earth? Tinkering with my creation?”The angel said, “I am sorry, but those people desired; those were their wishes. I simply helped them to fulfill.”God said, “That’s right. I am not angry, I was just inquiring. Have you any wish to be fulfilled?”The angel said, “Make me the fourth man back on the earth. Send me back and make me the fourth man.”Let that be your wish also. And there is no need to ask, because that is already fulfilled. You are a man on the earth, a woman on the earth; enjoy this gift of God! In deep gratefulness, sing the song, dance the dance that is waiting deep inside your being to be expressed. Be creative. Flower.A Baul is a flowering. A Baul is a flowing energy. A Baul is not the ordinarily so-called religious, a Baul is really religious. He is not against the world, because he is not against God. It is his creation; he is not against anything because all is God’s. He finds the temple ofGod everywhere. Every presence is full of his presence. A Baul is a madman; that is the meaning of the word baul. It comes from a Sanskrit word, vatul, which means mad. Become mad in the name of God! Become mad in sheer joy!And then you will know what a Baul is. There is no way to define; I can only indicate. There is no way to even describe, but I am here, present – I am a Baul. You look into me, taste me a little, eat me, drink me; that may give you some definition. And if you really want, if you really desire the definition, then become a Baul. There is no other way to know it. To know God one has become a God, because you can know only that which you have become. Only existence, and the experience of existence, can enlighten you, nothing else.Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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First, learn the preliminaries.Think that all phenomena are like dreams.Examine the nature of unborn awareness.Let even the remedy itself go free on its own.Settle in the nature of basic cognition, the essence.Between sessions, consider phenomena as phantoms.Train in joining, sending and taking together.Do this by riding the breath.Three objects, three poisons, three bases of virtue.Train with phrases in every mode of behavior.Religion is not a science. Religion is not a science in the sense physics, mathematics and chemistry are sciences, but still it is a science because it is the ultimate knowing: the word science means knowing. And if religion is not a science, what else can be? It is the highest knowing; it is the purest knowing.Ordinary science is knowledge, not knowing; religion is knowing itself. Ordinary science is object-oriented – it knows something, hence it is knowledge. Religion is not object-oriented; it has no object, it knows nothing. Knowing knows itself, as if the mirror is reflecting itself. It is utterly pure of all content; hence religion is not knowledge but knowing.Science is a lower kind of knowing, religion is a higher kind. Religion is philosophia ultima: the ultimate knowing. The difference between the two is not of the spirit – the spirit is the same – but the difference is certainly of purity.Science is mixed with much mud. Religion is pure essence, pure fragrance. The mud has disappeared; the lotus has appeared. And at the ultimate stage even the lotus has disappeared, only the fragrance abides. These are the three stages of knowing: the mud, the lotus, and the fragrance.Religion cannot be grasped – because there is no object in it, but still it can be understood. It cannot be explained, but it can be experienced. There is no way of informing you about religion, because it cannot be reduced to information. But you can be shown the way, the path to it – fingers pointing to the moon. The fingers are not the moon, obviously, but the fingers can point to the moon.These “Seven Points of Mind Training” of the great master Atisha, are fingers, seven fingers pointing to the moon. Don’t be caught by the fingers, don’t become too much obsessed with the fingers. That is not the point, that will be missing the point. Use the fingers and forget them, and look where the fingers are pointing. And when you see the moon, who bothers about the fingers? Who remembers them? They automatically become nonessential; they disappear.That’s why for those who have experienced religion, all the scriptures become utterly useless, all methods become nonessential. When the goal is achieved the path is forgotten.Atisha is one of the rare masters, rare in the sense that he was taught by three enlightened masters. It has never happened before, and never since. To be a disciple of three enlightened masters is simply unbelievable – because one enlightened master is enough, but this story that he was taught by three enlightened masters, has a very metaphorical significance also. And it is true, it is historical too.The three masters that Atisha remained with for many years were, first Dharmakirti, a great Buddhist mystic. He taught him no-mind, he taught him emptiness, he taught him how to be thoughtless, he taught him how to drop all content from the mind and be contentless. The second master was Dharmarakshita, another Buddhist mystic. He taught him love, compassion. The third master was Yogin Maitreya, another Buddhist mystic. He taught him the art of taking the suffering of others and absorbing it into your own heart: love in action.This could happen because all these three masters were great friends. They had started their search together; while they were on the way they had remained together, and when they attained they were still together.Atisha became a disciple of Dharmakirti. Dharmakirti said to him, “I will teach you the first principle. For the second you will go to Dharmarakshita, and for the third to Yogin Maitreya. This way you will know all the three faces of the ultimate reality, the three faces of God – the trinity, the trimurti. And this way you will learn each face from the person who is the most perfect in it.”These are the three ways people reach to the ultimate. If you reach through emptiness you attain the other two also, but your path remains basically that of emptiness – you know more about emptiness, so emptiness will be emphasized in whatsoever you teach.That’s what happened in Buddha’s case. He had attained through emptiness, hence his whole teaching became emptiness-oriented. There is no God in Buddha’s teaching, because God is a thought, content, an object – God is the other, and Buddha had attained by dropping the other. Buddha had attained by emptying his mind totally, hence there is no place for God, no place for anything at all. His path is the purest via negativa.That was also the case with Dharmakirti. He was the perfect master of emptiness, a master par excellence of emptiness. And when Atisha had learned how to be empty, the master said, “It will be better for you to go to Dharmarakshita for the next step, because he has attained from a totally different path. Just as you can reach Everest from different sides, he has reached from a totally different path: the path of compassion. I can also teach you the path of compassion, but my knowing about that path is only known from the top.“I have reached through the path of emptiness. Once you reach the top, you can look down at all the paths, they are all available to your vision. But to follow a path in its different dimensions, to follow a path in all its details, small details, is a totally different thing.” To look at it from a helicopter or from the mountaintop is certainly a different vision; it is a bird’s-eye view.Dharmakirti said, “If there had been nobody available here, I would have taught you the other too. But when a man like Dharmarakshita is just here, my neighbor, living in another cave just nearby, it is better you go to him.”One has first to become empty, utterly empty, but you have not to cling to emptiness, otherwise your life will never know the positive expression of religion. Your life will miss the poetry, the joy of sharing; you will remain empty. You will have a kind of freedom, but your freedom will be only freedom from, it will not be freedom for, and unless freedom is both – freedom from and freedom for – something is missing, something is lacking. Your freedom will be poor. Just to be free from is a poor kind of freedom.The real freedom starts only when you are free for. You can sing a song and you can dance a dance and you can celebrate, and you can start overflowing – that’s what compassion is.Man lives in passion. When the mind disappears, passion is transformed into compassion. Passion means you are a beggar with a begging bowl; you are asking and asking for more and more from everybody; you are exploiting others. Your relationships are nothing but exploitations – cunning devices to possess the other, very clever strategies to dominate. When you are living in the mind, in passion, your whole life is power politics: even your love, even your social service, even your humanitarian works are nothing but power politics. Deep down, there is a desire to be powerful over others.The same energy, when the mind is dropped, becomes compassion, and it takes a totally new turn. It is no longer begging; you become an emperor, you start giving. Now you have something – you had it always, but because of the mind, you were not aware of it. The mind was functioning like darkness around you, and you were unaware of the light within. The mind was creating an illusion of being a beggar, while all the time you had been an emperor. The mind was creating a dream – in reality, you never needed anything. Already all had been given. All that you need, all that you can need is already the case.Godliness is within you, but because of the mind – mind means dreaming, desiring – you never look within, you go on rushing outward. You keep yourself in the background, your eyes are turned toward the outside; they have become focused there. That’s what the mind is all about: focusing the eyes on the outside. One has to learn how to unfocus them from there – how to make them loose, less rigid, more liquid, so that they can turn inward. Once you have seen who you are, the beggar disappears. In fact, it had never existed; it was just a dream, an idea.The mind is creating all your misery. With the mind gone, misery is gone, and suddenly you are full of energy and the energy needs expression, sharing; it wants to become a song, a dance, a celebration. That is compassion: you start sharing.Atisha learned compassion from Dharmarakshita, but compassion has two faces. One is inactive compassion: the meditator sits silently in his cave, showering his compassion over the whole existence, but it is a very inactive kind of compassion. You have to go to him to partake of it; he will not come to you. You will have to go to the mountains to his cave to share his joy; he will not come to you. He will not move in any way, he will not take any active step. He will not flow toward others; he will not seek and search for the people with whom he can share his dance. He will wait.This is a feminine kind of compassion: just as a woman waits – she never takes the initiative; she never goes to the man. She may love the man, but she will never be the first to say, “I love you.” She will wait; she will hope that one day or other, sooner or later, the man will propose. Woman is inactive love, passive love. Man is active love; man takes the initiative.In the same way, compassion has two possibilities: the feminine and the masculine. From Dharmarakshita, Atisha learned the feminine art of being in love with existence. One more step was needed. Dharmarakshita told him, “Go to Yogin Maitreya” – these three masters were all living together in the same vicinity – “Go to Yogin Maitreya and learn how to transform the baser energy into active energy, so love becomes active,” and once love is active, compassion is active, you have passed through all the three dimensions of truth – you have known all. You have known utter emptiness, you have known compassion arising, you have known compassion showering. Life is fulfilled only when all these three have happened.Because Atisha learned under three enlightened masters, he is called “Atisha the Thrice Great.” Nothing more is known about his ordinary life, when and where exactly he was born. He existed somewhere in the eleventh century. He was born in India, but the moment his love became active he started moving toward Tibet, as if a great magnet was pulling him there. In the Himalayas, he attained; then he never came back to India.He moved toward Tibet, his love showered on Tibet. He transformed the whole quality of Tibetan consciousness. He was a miracle worker; whatsoever he touched transformed into gold. He was one of the greatest alchemists the world has ever known.These “Seven Points of Mind Training” are the fundamental teaching that he gave to Tibet – a gift from India to Tibet. India has given great gifts to the world. Atisha is one of those great gifts. Just as India gave Bodhidharma to China, India gave Atisha to Tibet. Tibet is infinitely indebted to this man.These seven points, the smallest treatise you can find, are of immense value. You will have to meditate over each statement. They are the whole of religion condensed; you will have to unfold each statement. They are like seeds; they contain much. It may not be apparently so, but the moment you move into the statements deeply, when you contemplate and meditate and start experimenting with them, you will be surprised – you will be going into the greatest adventure of your life.The first:First, learn the preliminaries.What are the preliminaries? These are the preliminaries. First: truth is. Truth is not something to be created, truth is not something that is far away. Truth is herenow; truth surrounds you as the ocean surrounds the fish. The fish may not be aware – once the fish becomes aware of the ocean, the fish is enlightened. The fish is not aware, cannot be aware, because the fish is born in the ocean, has always lived in the ocean, is part of the ocean as any wave is part of the ocean. The fish is also a wave – a little more solid, but born out of the ocean, lives in the ocean and one day disappears in the ocean. The fish may never come to know about the ocean. To know something, a little distance is needed. To know something, perspective is needed. And the ocean is so close, that’s why the fish may not be aware of it.So is the case with truth, or if you like you can use the word God. So is the case with God. It is not that he is far away and that’s why we don’t know about him; it is because he is not far away but very close by. Even to say that it is close by is not right, because you are it. He is within you and without: he is all and all.This is the first thing that has to be allowed to sink deep in your heart: truth already is, we are in it. This is the most fundamental thing to begin with. You are not to discover it; it is not covered. All that is needed is a new kind of awareness, which is missing in you. Truth is there, but you are not aware; you are not mindful, you are not alert. You don’t know how to watch, you don’t know how to observe, you don’t know how to look and see. You have eyes but still you are blind, you have ears but you are deaf.The first preliminary is truth is.The second preliminary is the mind is the barrier. Nothing else is hindering you from truth, just your own mind. The mind surrounds you like a film, like a movie that goes on and on, and you remain engrossed in it, fascinated by it. It is a fantasy that surrounds you; a continuous story that goes on and on, and because you are so fascinated by it you go on missing that which is. The mind is not; it is only a fantasy, it is only a faculty for dreaming.The mind is nothing but dreams and dreams – dreams of the past, dreams of the future, dreams of how things should be, dreams of great ambitions, achievements. Dreams and desires, that is the stuff mind is made of, but it surrounds you like a China Wall. Because of it the fish remains unaware of the ocean.The second preliminary is the mind is the only barrier.The third: no-mind is the door. Atisha calls no-mind bodhichitta: that is his word for no-mind. It can be translated as buddha-mind, buddha-consciousness, too or if you like you can call it christ-consciousness, krishna-consciousness. It doesn’t make any difference what name is used, but the basic quality of bodhichitta is that it is no-mind. It looks paradoxical: the mind in the state of no-mind. But the meaning is very clear: mind without content, mind without thoughts, is what is meant, is what is indicated.Remember the word bodhichitta, because Atisha says the whole effort of religion, the whole science of religion, is nothing but an endeavor to create bodhichitta, buddha-consciousness: a mind which functions as a no-mind, a mind which no longer dreams, no longer thinks, a mind which is just awareness, pure awareness. These are the preliminaries.The second sutra:Think that all phenomena are like dreams.Now the work starts. Atisha is very condensed, seedlike. That is the meaning of a sutra: it is just a thread, just a hint, and then you have to decode it. Think that all phenomena are like dreams.Phenomena means all that you see, all that you experience. All that can ever be experienced, is all phenomena. Remember, not only are the objects of the world phenomena and dreams, but also objects of consciousness. They may be objects of the world; they may be just objects of the mind. They may be great spiritual experiences. You may see kundalini rising in you: that too is a phenomenon – a beautiful dream, a very sweet dream, but it is a dream all the same. You may see great light flooding your being, but that light is also a phenomenon. You may see lotuses blooming inside you and a great fragrance arising within your being: those too are phenomena, because you are always the seer and never the seen, always the experiencer and never the experienced, always the witness and never the witnessed.All that can be witnessed, seen, observed, is phenomena. Material phenomena, psychological phenomena, spiritual phenomena – they are all the same. There is no need to make any distinction. The basic thing to remember is that which can be seen is a dream.Think that all phenomena are dreams. This is a tremendously powerful technique. Start contemplating in this way: if you are walking on the street, contemplate that people passing by are all dreams: the shops, and the shopkeepers and the customers and the people coming and going; all are dreams. The houses, the buses, the train, the airplane, all are dreams.Immediately, you will be surprised by something of tremendous import happening within you. The moment you think “All are dreams” suddenly, like a flash, one thing comes into your vision, “I am a dream too.” Because if the seen is a dream, then who is this “I”? If the object is a dream, then the subject is also a dream. If the object is false, how can the subject be the truth? Impossible!If you watch everything as a dream, suddenly you will find something slipping out of your being: the idea of the ego. This is the only way to drop the ego, and the simplest. Just try it – meditate this way. Meditating this way, again and again, one day the miracle happens: you look in, and the ego is not found there.The ego is a by-product, a by-product of the illusion that whatsoever you are seeing is true. If you think that objects are true, then the ego can exist; it is a by-product. If you think that objects are dreams, the ego disappears and if you think continuously that all is a dream, then one day, in a dream in the night, you will be surprised: suddenly in the dream, you will remember that this is a dream too. And immediately, as the remembrance happens, the dream will disappear. For the first time you will experience yourself deep asleep, yet awake – a very paradoxical experience, but of great benefit.Once you have seen your dream disappearing because you have become aware of the dream, your quality of consciousness will have a new flavor to it. The next morning you will wake up with a totally different quality you had never known before. You will wake up for the first time. Now you will know that all those other mornings were false; you were not really awake. The dreams continued – the only difference was that in the night you were dreaming with eyes closed, in the day you were dreaming with eyes open.If the dream has disappeared because awareness happened, suddenly you became aware in the dream. And remember, awareness and dreaming cannot exist together. Here, awareness arises, and there, the dream disappears. When you become awake in your sleep, the next morning is going to be something so important that it is incomparable. Nothing like it has ever happened. Your eyes will be so clear, so transparent, and everything will look so psychedelic, so colorful, so alive. Even rocks will be sen to be breathing, pulsating; even rocks will have a heartbeat. When you are awake, the whole existence changes its quality.We are living in a dream. We are asleep, even when we think we are awake.Think that all phenomena are like dreams. First, objects will lose their objectivity, and second, the subject will lose its subjectivity. And that brings you to a transcendence. The object is no longer important, the subject is no longer important; then what is left? A transcendental consciousness: bodhichitta – just a witnessing, with no idea of “I” and “thou”; just a pure mirror which reflects that which is.And existence is nothing but that which is.The third sutra:Examine the nature of unborn awareness.Now you know what awareness is. You have known this transcendental awareness where objects and subjects are no longer existential. You have known for the first time this purity, this crystal clear mirror. Now examine the nature of this awareness.Look into it; look deep into it. Shake yourself into as full alertness as possible. Wake up and see, and you will start laughing – because now you will see there has never been a birth, and there is never going to be a death.This is unborn and undying consciousness. It has always been here. It is eternal; it is timeless. How afraid you were of death, and how afraid you were of old age, and how afraid you were of a thousand and one things! And nothing has ever happened; all was a dream.Seeing this, one smiles, one laughs. Your whole life up to now has been ridiculous, absurd. You were unnecessarily afraid, unnecessarily greedy, unnecessarily suffering. You were living in a nightmare and it was your own creation.Examine the nature of unborn awareness. And you are freed from all misery, all suffering, all hell.Let even the remedy itself go free on its own.Now, don’t start clinging to the remedy, to the method. That temptation arises. It is the last temptation, the very last effort of the mind to survive. The mind comes from a back door; it tries once more. Before it disappears forever, it makes one more effort, and that effort is to cling to the method – the method of thinking that all phenomena are dreams.It has given you such joy, such a deep experience of reality that naturally you would like to cling to it. And once you cling you are back in the same old rut again: the mind is back in disguise. Cling to anything and the mind is back, because clinging is mind. Hold on to anything, depend on anything, and the mind is back, because the mind is dependence, slavery. Possess anything – even a spiritual method, even a method of meditation – become a possessor, and you will be possessed by it. Whether you possess money or you possess a tremendously significant method of meditation, it doesn’t matter. Whatsoever you possess, you will be possessed by it and you will be afraid to lose it.Once a Sufi mystic was brought to me. For thirty years, continuously he had used the Sufi method zikr, and he had attained to great experiences. One could see it; even ordinary people were aware that he was living in a totally different world. You could see it in his eyes; they were shining with joy. His very being had a vibe of the beyond.His disciples brought him to me, and they said, “Our master is a realized soul. What do you say about him?”I said, “Leave your master with me for three days, and then come back.”The master stayed with me for three days. On the third day, he was very angry and he said, “You have destroyed my thirty years’ work” – because I told him a simple thing – just this sutra of Atisha: Let even the remedy itself go…I told him, “Now for thirty years you have been remembering one thing, that all is divine. The tree is God, the rock is God, the people are God, the dog is God, everything is God – for thirty years you have been remembering it continuously,” and he had really made a sincere effort.He said, “Yes.”I said, “Now stop remembering. How long are you going to remember? If it has happened, then stop remembering and let us see what happens. If it has really happened, then even after dropping remembering, it will remain.”It was so logical that he agreed. He said, “It has happened.”I said, “Then give it a try. For three days, forget remembering, stop remembering.”He said, “I cannot stop, it has become automatic.”I said, “Just wait and try.”It took him at least two days, forty-eight hours, to stop. It was hard to stop; it had become automatic. There was now no need to remember; for thirty years he had been remembering, it was simply there like an undercurrent, but within forty-eight hours it stopped.On the morning of the third day, he was very angry. He said, “What have you done? All that joy has disappeared. I am feeling very ordinary, I am feeling the same as I was before I started on the journey thirty years ago.” He started crying out of anger and out of sadness; tears started coming to his eyes. He said, “Give me back my method – please don’t take it!”I said, “Just look! If this is so dependent on the method, then nothing has happened. It is just an illusion that you are creating by continuous remembering. This is nothing but autohypnosis.”All the great masters say this, that one day you have to drop the method – and the sooner you drop it, the better. The moment you attain, the moment awareness is released in you, immediately drop the method.Just look! This is only the fourth sutra. In the third sutra Atisha says: Examine the nature of unborn awareness.And in the fourth, immediately: Let even the remedy itself go…Now there is no more examination, no more mindfulness, no more remembering that all is a dream. Once the first taste of awareness has happened on your tongue, be quick! Because the mind is very cunning – the mind can start telling you, “Look, you are no longer ordinary, you are extraordinary. Look, you have attained. Look, you have become a buddha, you are enlightened. Look, this is the goal of all human beings, and very rarely, one in a million attains. You are that one in a million.”The mind will say all these beautiful sweet nothings, and of course, the ego can come back. You can start feeling very good, holier than thou. You can start feeling special, spiritual, saintly, and all is lost. Through the remedy, the disease is back. Cling to the remedy, and the disease is back.One has to be very alert about dropping the method. Once you attain something, immediately drop the method, otherwise your mind will start clinging to the method. It will talk very logically to you, saying, “It is the method that is important.”Buddha used to tell a story again and again. Five idiots passed through a village. Seeing them, people were surprised because they were carrying a boat on their heads. The boat was really big; it was almost crushing those five idiots, they were almost dying under the weight of it. And people asked, “What are you doing?”They said, “We cannot leave this boat. This is the boat, which helped us to come from the other shore to this shore. How can we leave it? It is because of it that we have been able to come here. Without it, we would have died on the other shore. The night was coming close, and there were wild animals on the other shore. It was as sure as anything that by the morning we would have been dead. We will never leave this boat; we are indebted forever. We will carry it on our heads in sheer gratitude.”This can happen, because all minds are idiots. The mind as such is idiotic.The origin of the word idiot is beautiful to remember. Idiocy means something private, something special, something that is your own, something eccentric. That is the basic meaning of idiocy – to function in an eccentric way.The mind always functions in an eccentric way; the mind is always an idiot. The really intelligent person has no mind. Intelligence arises out of no-mind, idiocy out of the mind. Mind is idiotic; no-mind is wise. No-mind is wisdom, intelligence.The mind depends on knowledge, on methods, on money, on experience, on this and that. The mind always needs props, it needs supports; it cannot exist on its own. On its own, it flops.The ultimate effort of the mind to come back will be when you attain to some awareness. It will say, “Look, so we have arrived.” The moment something inside you says, “We have arrived,” beware! Be very, very cautious now, each step has to be of great caution.Let even the remedy itself go free on its own. Now please don’t cling to the remedy, to the method. This is the emphasis of J. Krishnamurti – but this is his first sutra. It should be the fourth. That’s where he is wrong; it cannot be the first sutra. How can you drop a method that you have never used? You can only drop a method that you have used.Atisha is far more logical, far more scientific, than J. Krishnamurti, but I can understand why he emphasizes it, because he is afraid that if you go into the first three sutras the fourth may never arrive, you may be lost in the first three. Many are lost in the preliminaries; many are lost in the methods. So he has become too cautious, extremely cautious.Those five idiots were carrying the boat, and J. Krishnamurti is on the other shore teaching people: “Don’t enter the boat” – too cautious – “because if you enter the boat, who knows, you may start carrying the boat on your head. So please don’t enter it.”There are many who have become afraid of entering the boat, but to be afraid of entering the boat is the same idiocy; there is no difference. One who is afraid of entering the boat is the same person who will carry the boat; otherwise why should you be afraid?There are old friends of mine, who have followed J. Krishnamurti for their whole life. They come to me and say, “We would like to come here, but we are afraid of all the methods that you teach. Methods are dangerous,” they say.Methods are dangerous only if you are unaware, otherwise they can be used beautifully. Do you think a boat is dangerous? It is dangerous if you are thinking to carry it on your head for your whole life out of sheer gratitude, otherwise it is just a raft to be used and discarded. All methods are rafts to be used and discarded, used and abandoned, used and never looked back at again – there is no need, no point!These are two extremes. At one extreme are those five idiots, and at the other extreme are the followers of J. Krishnamurti. There is no need to be either. My approach is: use the boat, use beautiful boats, use as many boats as possible, with this awareness, that when the shore is reached the boat is abandoned with no clinging. While you are in the boat enjoy it, be thankful to it. When you get out of the boat, say thank you and move on.The fifth sutra:Settle in the nature of basic cognition, the essence.If you drop the remedy, automatically you will start settling in your being. The mind clings; it never allows you to settle in your being. It keeps you interested in something that you are not: the boats.When you don’t cling to anything, there is nowhere to go – all boats have been abandoned, you cannot go anywhere; all paths have been dropped, you cannot go anywhere; all dreams and desires have disappeared, there is no way to move. Relaxation happens of its own accord. Just think of the word relax. Be, settle, you have come home.Settle in the nature of basic cognition, the essence. When you settle, there is pure awareness, with no effort, with no method. If awareness needs a method it is still not true awareness, not the essential awareness, not the natural spontaneous awareness. It is still a by-product of the method; it is cultivated, created. It is a by-product of the mind; it is not yet the truth.“Settle now in the nature of basic cognition, the essence.” Now there is nothing to do. See, be, enjoy – only this moment exists. This now, this here, this cawing of the crows – and all is silence.To know this serenity is to know who you are, what this existence is all about. This is samadhi, in the words of Patanjali. This is sambodhi, in the words of Gautam Buddha. This is bodhichitta, in the words of Atisha.Between sessions, consider phenomena as phantoms.Now Atisha is really, very aware of the disciple. He knows that these experiences of settling into your being will be only momentary in the beginning. One moment you will find yourself relaxed into your being, another moment it will be gone. In the beginning, it is bound to be so; one moment you are flooded with the unknown, with the mysterious, another moment it is no longer there. One moment all is fragrance, and the next moment you are searching for it and you cannot find where it has gone.Only glimpses will happen in the beginning. Slowly, slowly they become more and more solid, they abide more and more. Slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, very slowly, they settle forever. Before that, you cannot be allowed to take it for granted; that will be a mistake. Hence he says: Between sessions…When you are sitting in meditation, a session of meditation, this will happen – but it will go. So what are you supposed to do between sessions? Between sessions, consider phenomena as phantoms. Between sessions, continue to use the method. Drop the method when you are deep in meditation. The moment comes, as awareness is getting purer and purer, when suddenly it is utterly pure: drop the method, abandon the method, and forget all about the remedy: just settle and be.This will happen only for moments in the beginning. Sometimes it happens here listening to me. Just for a moment, like a breeze, you are transported into another world, the world of no-mind. Just for a moment, you know that you know – but only for a moment. Again the darkness gathers and the mind is back with all its dreams, with all its desires and all its stupidities.For a moment, the clouds had separated and you had seen the sun. Now the clouds are there again: it is all dark and the sun has disappeared. Now even to believe that the sun exists will be difficult. Now, to believe that what you had experienced a moment before was true, will be difficult. It may have been a fantasy; the mind may say it may have just been imagination.It is so incredible, it looks so impossible, that it could have happened to you. With all this stupidity in the mind, with all these clouds and darknesses, it had happened to you: you saw the sun for a moment. It doesn’t look probable – you must have imagined it; maybe you had fallen into a dream and seen it.In between sessions start again – be in the boat, use the boat again. …consider phenomena as phantoms.Atisha is very considerate to the disciples; otherwise, the fourth sutra would have been the last – or, at the most, the fifth: Settle in the nature of basic cognition, the essence.If Atisha had been a man like Bodhidharma, the treatise would have finished at the fifth sutra, or even at the fourth: Let even the remedy itself go free on its own.Then the settling happens on its own. Bodhidharma was very miserly, he would not have used the fifth, but Atisha is very considerate to the disciple. He had been a disciple, so he knew the difficulties of a disciple. And he had been a disciple of three great masters, so he knew all the difficulties that a disciple has to face. He had been a pilgrim; he knew all the problems. He had been a pilgrim on three paths, all the three possible paths, so he knew all the problems, and all the difficulties and all the pitfalls and all the obstacles that are bound to arise on the path of a disciple, hence his considerateness. He says, Between sessions…Between these moments of meditativeness, between these moments of utter joy, emptiness and purity, between these moments of being, remember that all are dreams, that every phenomenon is a phantom. Go on using this method til the settling has happened forever.Train in joining, sending, and taking together.Do this by riding the breath.Now emptiness has been experienced – this is what he had learned. Up to this sutra, he had been with the first master, Dharmakirti. With this sutra, the second master, Dharmarakshita.Train in joining, sending, and taking together. Do this by riding the breath. Now he says to start being compassionate and the method is, when you breathe in – listen carefully, it is one of the greatest methods. When you breathe in, think that you are breathing in all the miseries of all the people in the world. All the darkness, all the negativity, all the hell that exists anywhere, you are breathing it in. Let it be absorbed in your heart.You may have read or heard about the so-called positive thinkers of the West. They say just the opposite – they don’t know what they are saying. They say, “When you breathe out, throw out all your misery and negativity; and when you breathe in, breathe in joy, positivity, happiness, cheerfulness.”Atisha’s method is just the opposite: when you breathe in, breathe in all the misery and suffering of all the beings of the world – past, present and future. And when you breathe out, breathe out all the joy that you have, all the blissfulness that you have, all the benediction that you have. Breathe out, pour yourself into existence. This is the method of compassion: drink in all the suffering and pour out all the blessings.You will be surprised if you do it. The moment you take all the sufferings of the world inside you, they are no longer sufferings. The heart immediately transforms the energy. The heart is a transforming force: drink in misery, and it is transformed into blissfulness…then pour it out.Once you have learned that your heart can do this magic, this miracle, you will like to do it again and again. Try it. It is one of the most practical methods – simple, and it brings immediate results. Do it today, and see.That is one of the approaches of Buddha and all his disciples. Atisha is one of his disciples, in the same tradition, in the same line. Buddha says, again and again, to his disciples, “Ihi passiko: come and see!” They are very scientific people. Buddhism is the most scientific religion on the earth; hence, Buddhism is gaining more and more ground in the world every day. As the world becomes more intelligent, Buddha will become more and more important. It is bound to be so. As more and more people come to know about science, Buddha will have great appeal, he will convince the scientific mind – because he says, “Whatsoever I am saying can be practiced. And I don’t say to you, believe it, I say, experiment with it, experience it, and only then if you feel it yourself, trust it. Otherwise there is no need to believe.”Try this beautiful method of compassion: take in all the misery and pour out all the joy.Train in joining, sending, and taking together.Do this by riding the breath.Three objects, three poisons, three bases of virtue.There are three objects, which either can function as three poisons or can become three bases of infinite virtue. Atisha is talking of the inner alchemy. The poison can become the nectar; the baser metal can be transformed into gold.What are these three objects? The first is aversion, the second is attachment, and the third is indifference. This is how the mind functions. You feel aversion to whatsoever you dislike, you feel attachment to whatsoever you like, and you feel indifferent to things which you neither dislike nor like. These are the three objects. Between these three, the mind exists. These are the three legs of the tripod called the mind: aversion, attachment, and indifference. If you live in these three as they are, you are living in poison.This is how we have created a hell out of life. Aversion, dislike, hatred, repulsion – that creates one third of your hell. Attachment, liking, clinging, possessiveness – that creates the second one third of your hell. And indifference to all that you are neither attracted to nor repulsed by – that creates the third part, the third one third of your hell.Just watch your mind; this is how your mind functions. It is always saying, “I like this, I don’t like that, and I am indifferent to the third.” These are the three ways, in which the mind goes on moving. This is the rut, the routine.Atisha says these are the three poisons, but they can become the three bases of virtue. How can they become three bases of great virtue? If you bring in the quality of compassion, if you learn the art of absorbing suffering, as if all the suffering of the world is coming riding on the breath, then how can you be repulsed? How can you dislike anything, how can you be indifferent to anything, and how can you be attached to anything? If you are unconditionally taking in all the suffering in the world, drinking it, absorbing it in your heart, and then pouring blessings onto the whole of existence unconditionally – and not to somebody in particular, remember – not only to man but to all: to all beings, trees and rocks, and birds and animals; to the whole existence, material, immaterial… when you are pouring out blessings unconditionally, how can you be attached?Attachment, aversion, indifference: all disappear with this small technique. With their disappearance, the poison is transformed into nectar, and the bondage becomes freedom, and the hell is no longer a hell, it is heaven.In these moments, you come to know: This very body the buddha, this very earth the lotus paradise.And the last sutra:Train with phrases in every mode of behavior.Atisha is not an escapist. He does not teach escapism, he does not tell you to move from situations which are not to your liking. He says: You have to learn to function in bodhichitta, in buddha-consciousness, in all kinds of situations – in the marketplace, in the monastery; with people in the crowd or alone in a cave; with friends or with enemies; with family, familiar people, and with strangers; with men and with animals. In all kinds of situations, in all kinds of challenges, you have to learn to function in compassion, in meditation – because all these experiences of different situations will make your bodhichitta riper and riper.Don’t escape from any situation – if you escape, then something will remain missing in you: then your bodhichitta will not be that ripe; will not be that rich. Live life in its multidimensionality!That’s what I teach you too: Live life in its totality, and living in the world, don’t be of it. Live in the world like a lotus flower in water: it lives in water, but the water touches it not. Only then will bodhichitta flower in you, bloom in you. Only then will you come to know the ultimate consciousness, which is freedom, which is joy, eternal joy, which is benediction. Not to know it is to miss the whole point of life; to know it is the only goal. The only goal – remember it!Remember, Atisha’s sutras are not philosophical, not speculative not abstract. They are experimental; they are scientific.Let me repeat again: religion is a science in the sense that it is the purest knowing. Yet it is not a science in the sense of chemistry and physics. It is not the science of the outward; it is the science of the inward. It is not the science of the exterior; it is the science of the interior. It is the science that takes you beyond, it is the science that takes you into the unknown and the unknowable. It is the greatest adventure there is. It is a call and a challenge to all those who have any courage, any guts, any intelligence.Religion is not for cowards, it is for people who want to live dangerously.Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,This sounds like a silly question. I am not sure that I want to become enlightened. I am surprised to see so many people around who seem to have that desire. I feel very much attached to my country and I love my work there. Still I want to take sannyas – is that possible? Is it not a contradiction?All questions are silly and so are all answers. Questions come out of the mind like leaves come out of the trees. Questions are part of the mind that has to be dropped; questions keep the mind nourished.A question is really a search for food. The answer is the food. The question is a groping: the mind is feeling hungry, it wants to be strengthened; it wants to be fed, it searches for food. Wherever it can find something satisfying… Any answer that makes the mind knowledgeable, that gives the mind the feeling “Now I know,” functions as a food. And the mind can go on and on asking, collecting answers, becoming knowledgeable.The more knowledgeable the mind is, the more difficult it is to drop it. And it has to be dropped, because unless questioning ceases in you, you will never be silent. Unless questioning disappears totally, you will not find that space, that serenity, that stillness, which can make you aware of who you are, and of what this reality is.Remember, reality is never going to come to you in the form of an answer. It has never happened that way; it is not going to happen that way. It can’t happen that way, it is not in the nature of things. Reality comes to you when there is no question left; reality comes to an unquestioning state of awareness.So the first thing to be remembered is: all questions are silly, and all answers are too. Then you will be a little puzzled – why do I go on answering your questions? If you look deep down into my answers, you will see that they are not answers. They don’t nourish your mind, they destroy your mind, they shatter you. They are meant to be shocks. The purpose of my answering is to hammer your mind – it is hammering; it is not answering.In the beginning, when you come here for the first time and you don’t understand me and my purpose, you may think that I am answering you. The longer you are here, the deeper you become attuned with me, the more you know that my answering is not to give you answers. It is not to make you more knowledgeable – just the opposite. It is to take your knowledge away, to make you unknowledgeable, to make you ignorant – ignorant again, innocent again – so that questioning disappears.And when there is no questioning, there is a totally new quality to your consciousness. That quality is called wonder. Wondering is not questioning, it is feeling mystified by existence. Questioning is an effort to demystify existence, it is an effort not to accept the mystery of life; hence we reduce every mystery to a question. The question means the mystery is only a problem to be solved and once solved, there will be no mystery.My effort in answering you is not to demystify existence but to mystify it more. Hence my contradictions. I cannot be consistent – I am not answering you. I cannot be consistent, because I am not here to make you more knowledgeable. If I am consistent, you will have a body of knowledge – very satisfying to the mind, nourishing, strengthening, gratifying.I am deliberately inconsistent, contradictory, so that you cannot make any body of knowledge out of me. So if one day you start gathering something, another day I take it away. I don’t allow you to gather anything. Sooner or later, you are bound to be awakened to the fact that something totally different is transpiring here. It is not that I am giving you some dogma to be believed in, some philosophy to be lived by, no, not at all. I am utterly destructive, I am taking everything away from you.Slowly, slowly your mind will stop questioning. What is the point? When no answer answers, then what is the point? The day you stop questioning is a day of great rejoicing, because then wondering starts. You have moved into a totally new dimension; you are a child again.Jesus says: “Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of God.” Certainly, he means unless you are ignorant again, innocent again, unquestioning and wondering.There is a difference between the question of a child and a grownup person. The difference is of quality. The child asks not to be answered, he is simply being articulate about his wonder. If you don’t answer the child he forgets about his question and he starts asking another question. His purpose is not to be answered; his purpose is simply that he is talking to himself. He is being articulate about his wonder, he is trying to figure out what it is – the wonder, the mystery. He is not hankering for an answer, so no answer will satisfy him. If you give him an answer, he will ask another question about the answer. His wondering continues.When a grownup person – educated, sophisticated, well read, informed – asks a question, he asks it out of his knowledge, to gather more knowledge. The mind always hankers for more and more. If you have money, it hankers for more money; if you have prestige, it hankers for more prestige; if you have knowledge, it hankers for more knowledge. The mind lives in the “more.”This is the way you go on and on avoiding reality. Reality is a mystery; it is not a question to be asked. It is a mystery to be lived, a mystery to be experienced, a mystery to be loved – a mystery to be dissolved in, to be drowned in.I am answering you, not to answer but to simply destroy the question. I am not a teacher. The teacher teaches you; the master does not teach you, he helps you unlearn.You say, “This sounds like a silly question.” Not only does it sound, it is. All questions are – what can I do? What can you do?You say, “I am not sure that I want to become enlightened.” That shows how the mind functions, it is never sure of anything. The mind is always unsure; it lives in unsureness. The mind lives in confusion; it can never have any clarity. Clarity is not part of the mind at all; clarity is the absence of the mind, confusion is the presence of the mind. Confusion and mind are synonymous.You can’t have a clear mind. If you have clarity, you cannot have the mind; if you have the mind, you can’t have clarity. The mind is always divided against itself, it lives in conflict. Divisibility is its nature, hence those who live in the mind never become individuals, indivisibles. They remain divided: one part wants this, and another part wants that.The mind is a crowd of many desires; it is not a single desire. The mind is multi-psychic, and all the fragments are falling apart in different directions. It is a miracle how we go on keeping ourselves together. It is a hard struggle to keep oneself together. Somehow, we manage, but that togetherness remains only on the surface. Deep down there is turmoil.You fall in love with a woman; are you sure that you are in love – really sure? I have never come across a lover who is really sure. You may even get married, but are you sure…you may have children, but are you sure that you really wanted to have children?That’s how you are living: nothing is sure, but one has to do something or other to keep oneself occupied, so you go on keeping yourself occupied. But surety is not of the mind, it cannot be, and the same problem will arise on every level. The same problem is facing you again.You say, “I am not sure that I want to become enlightened,” but there must be a certain desire, otherwise why the question? A part of your mind must be saying, “Become enlightened” – just a part. Another part must be saying, “Are you mad? Have you lost your senses? You have a wife at home, and children, and work, and you love your country – and you are trying to become enlightened? You must have become a victim of mass hypnosis: so many people in orange, it is dangerous to live with such mad people – so many mad people, enjoying and laughing, and loving and looking so happy! Keep on remembering you have a wife, children, a job. Keep alert!”But again and again the desire will come. When so many people are interested in enlightenment, there must be something in it. You can deceive one, you can deceive two, but how can you deceive so many…thousands of people interested in enlightenment? It can’t be all bullshit. So a desire arises to have a little taste of it, and fear is there too.This is the situation; always it is so, in everything it is so. You want to purchase a car, and it is the same: whether to purchase a Chevrolet, or a Ford or a Benz? If your wife is not there to help you, you will never purchase any car! Women are more decisive; they are still less in the mind than men. They function out of the heart; their feeling side is still alive. Fortunately, they are not yet so civilized; they are still primitive, a little wild, leaning toward the intuitive and not toward the intellect, still capable and courageous enough to act decisively, to act intuitively, to act illogically.All decisions come from the heart. The mind is never decisive, it cannot be. If you want to decide through the mind, you never can. I am not talking about great things like enlightenment and the existence of God or the existence of life after death. I am not talking about great things, just small things – whether to purchase this soap or that, or which toothpaste – and you will find the same difficulty. The mind is fragmentary, divided. Hence my consistent insistence that you get out of the mind and start living. The mind only thinks and never lives. It thinks beautiful thoughts, but they are thoughts all the same, just dreams.Get out of the mind if you want to live. Get out of the mind if you want to live this moment. The mind cannot live in this moment, because it has to decide first, and the moment is lost in thinking, and by the time the mind has decided – if it ever decides – that moment is gone already. You are always lagging behind. The mind is always running after life, and lagging behind and missing it continuously.Many of you must have dreamed something like this: Anand Maitreya continuously dreams that he is going to catch a train, and in the dream, he always misses it. Many people, I think almost everybody, has dreams of that kind – that you are just going to make it, just going to make it…and you miss it. By the time you reach the platform, the train has left. You see it leaving, but it is too late; you cannot get on it.Anand Maitreya’s dream is a very significant dream and a universal one. This is simply how the mind functions; this dream symbolizes the mind: it is always missing the train. It is bound to be so, because the mind takes time to think, and time cannot stop for you; it goes on and on slipping out of your hands.You never have two moments together in your hands, only one single moment. It is such a small moment that there is no space for thinking to move, no space for thoughts to exist. Either you can live it, or you can think. To live it is to be enlightened; to think is to miss.Enlightenment is not a goal that you have to decide whether to accept it or not. It is not a goal. Enlightenment is the realization that we have only the present moment to live. The next moment is not certain – it may come, it may not come.In fact, tomorrow never comes. It is always arriving and arriving, but never arrives. The mind lives in the tomorrows – and life is possible only in the present.Jesus says to his disciples, “Look at the lilies in the field, how beautiful they are! Even the great Solomon was not so beautiful attired in all his grandeur as these poor lily flowers.” What is the secret? The secret is that they think not of the morrow. They live now; they live here.To live now is to be enlightened, to live here is to be enlightened, to be a lily is to be enlightened this very moment! Don’t think about what I am saying. Don’t think about it, just be here. This is the taste of enlightenment. Once you have tasted it, you will want to taste it more and more.Don’t make a goal out of it; it is not a goal, it is the most ordinary state of consciousness. It is nothing extraordinary; it is nothing special. Trees are enlightened and the birds are enlightened, and rocks are enlightened, and the sun and the moon are enlightened. Only man is not, because only man thinks and goes on missing.The moment you realize that you are missing because you are brooding too much, then small glimpses start happening. Small gaps in the traffic of the mind, small gaps when there is no traffic: those are the moments of meditation. They can happen anywhere.Yes, in your country too! So, no need to be worried – you need not be in India. India has no copyright on enlightenment: it is not patented yet, it cannot be patented. You can be enlightened anywhere. You can be enlightened remaining a husband, a father, a mother, a wife. You can be enlightened as an engineer, as a doctor, as a carpenter, as a vagabond – even as a hippie. You can be enlightened anywhere.Enlightenment is not something you have to work for, to strive for. It is something that you have to relax for – not strive, but relax. Relax, and this moment you are enlightened. Many times you will become enlightened, and many times you will become unenlightened again, just because of the old habit.You say, “I am surprised to see so many people around who seem to have that desire.” If they have that desire, they will never become enlightened. Either: you can have the desire, or you can have enlightenment; you can’t have both. Either: you can eat the cake, or you can have it; you can’t do both. If you have a desire for enlightenment, then enlightenment is never going to happen to you – never, never – because desiring is what prevents it, so enlightenment cannot be desired; that will be a contradiction in terms.Either: you are enlightened or you are not, it is as simple as that. Enlightenment is not caused by anything, it is your nature. Thus, it is not a question of making a great endeavor. It is not an enterprise; you need not plan for it. It is already the case!That is Atisha’s first preliminary: Truth is.Enlightenment is. It is as much as the sunlight showering all around, but you can remain with closed eyes, and you are in a dark night although the sun is showering everywhere. Open your eyes and the night disappears and there is no darkness. Even when you were thinking there was darkness, there was not. It was a very private affair, idiotic; it was something eccentric that you were doing.To be unenlightened is something that you have earned; great effort has been invested in being unenlightened, and continuously you have to go on making an effort to remain unenlightened. Just drop making any more efforts to remain unenlightened, and you are enlightened. Enlightenment is your natural state; it is what you are.So please don’t misunderstand my people. Newcomers are certainly desirous; they have come out of desire, in search of something, but those who have been here with me a little longer are no longer in any desire. They are living moment to moment, enjoying the extraordinary ordinariness of life. Small things – sipping hot tea in the morning: you can sip it in an enlightened way, and you can sip it in an unenlightened way. If, sipping hot tea early in the morning, you are not in the moment but thinking of something else – you have to go to the morning discourse – you are unenlightened. You missed an enlightened cup of tea, and remember, if that is your habit, you will miss the discourse too – because this again is nothing but a cup of tea. Then in the discourse, you will be thinking, “I have to do the Sufi meditation, I have to rush to do this and that and then come back.”It is not a question of one moment; it is a question of your pattern, your gestalt. If this is your gestalt, that you are always rushing ahead of time, thinking of the next moment, then you remain unenlightened. And this is your effort, this is something that you are doing.For enlightenment, nothing has to be done, only this understanding: “Why should I go on keeping myself unenlightened?”That’s why one day I decided: “Enough is enough. I have lived so many lives in an unenlightened way.” And since then I have lived in an enlightened way. This is simply an understanding; it is not a desire.You say, “I feel very much attached to my country and love my work there.” Perfectly good! Love your work, love your country, go back – but live there in such a simple moment-to-moment way that you remain enlightened. Don’t lag behind, don’t rush ahead. Just be herenow, wherever you are, whatsoever you are doing.“Still,” you say, “I want to take sannyas – is that possible? Is it not a contradiction?” It is a contradiction, but you are living in contradictions, and this is the last contradiction. Before you can come out of your contradictory life, your life of conflict, you have to close the doors of that life. Sannyas is nothing but closing the doors – the last thing. It is simply a declaration that “I have lived in the mind for so long, and nothing but misery has been my experience. Now I am taking a jump out of the mind into the unknown. I am going into a totally different kind of life.”Sannyas is just a gesture from your side that yes, understanding has dawned, and you would like to come closer to me to see what it actually is.To be close to a master, to be relating to a master, to be intimate with a master, is nothing but an approach toward your own ultimate understanding, your own enlightenment. Your mind will make you very much frightened of the unknown; it will drag you back. And it is always safer to live with the known; it is familiar, you are efficient in living with it. To move into the unknown, you will need a guide – a guide who has moved into the unknown, who lives in the unknown, who lives in innocence. Just to imbibe the spirit you need the guide…not for any guidance, but just to imbibe the spirit of the unknown, the joy of the unknown, the celebration of the unknown.Once you start drinking something of the master, you will not go back to the old ways of the mind. That’s what sannyas is all about.Yes, you can take sannyas. In the beginning, it is bound to be the same conflict: whether to take it or not, whether to go into it or not. It is natural, because that’s how you have functioned for many lives. This has become your second nature.I persuade you, I seduce you into sannyas. Great persuasion is needed, great seduction is needed. That’s why I have created sannyas; otherwise there was no need; you could have come here, listened to me, and gone. You would have listened to me, but you would not have come close to me. This is a bridge. You would have heard me, but you would not have tasted of my silence. You would have known what I say about love, but you would not have known my love.Sannyas makes it possible. It is an energy field; it is a buddhafield. It is communion: nonverbal, heart-to-heart, and, one day, being-to-being.The second question:Osho,Today I saw and heard you in the flesh and I found myself in accord with and moved and inspired by you so much that I feel I must ask you two questions connected with it and another not directly connected.Why are you so against the mind? Surely we all use it and need it, and it seems to me that it is only when we abuse it – that is to say, using it as a defense against feeling too deeply and against transcending itself – that we are entitled to criticize it.The other question is concerned more with my problem, although no doubt there are others who feel as I do:Why do you find it so necessary, so important, for sannyasins to wear orange and a photograph of yourself – in fact a sort of uniform and an icon? If I leave here with a feeling of love and deep respect for a wise man, a healer, I shall not need to carry his photo around with me. His image will be too deeply entrenched in my inner self, and if I need to consult him in my mind, I shall "conjure him up" and see him much more vividly than if I look at a photo. I would very much like to take sannyas, but because of this last question, you may not accept me.Dear lady, please excuse me. It must have been just coincidence that you felt in accord with me, it can only be a coincidence; otherwise it is impossible to feel in accord with me.So, don’t decide so soon. You have heard me only once: just be here a little longer, and you will see so many contradictions! Wait a little, give me a little more time, and you will not feel in accord with me at all. In fact, this time too, it was not you feeling in accord with me, but me somehow appearing in accord with you.You already have great ideas; you are very knowledgeable. Your question is not out of innocence, it is out of knowledge.So many people are here. I cannot say things which will shatter everybody’s mind. If I say something and it shatters one person’s mind, it may be in accord with somebody else’s mind. For him I will work tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, but sooner or later, the hammer comes down on everybody – and then you will not feel so inspired. In fact, answering your question, I will make you very much uninspired. Wait!What do you mean by inspiration? It seems you already know something; otherwise, what do you mean by inspiration? What do you mean by accord? You already know something, and you say “Yes, this man is talking sense” – sense, because this is what you have always believed in.I am not here to support your belief; I have to take your beliefs away. I am not here to inspire you, because all inspiration creates slavery. If you are inspired by me, you will become a slave to me; you will become dependent on me. I don’t inspire you, I simply go on shattering, shocking you. Sooner or later, I am here, you are here and we are tremendously connected, but there is no slavery, no dependence. We relate, but there is no question of inspiration, because one who inspires you automatically becomes important for you – so much so that you start feeling dependent.You are searching for a father figure who can inspire you, who can put a little fire in your dull and dead life. But if somebody else puts fire into your life, he becomes powerful over you.I am not here to put any fire into you; I am just here to help you to see your own fire. Be a light unto yourself. Inspiration means you will follow somebody else; you will imitate them, you will become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. Sannyas is a declaration that you are no longer a Hindu, no longer a Christian, no longer a Mohammedan, that you don’t belong to any creed or any dogma. I have no creed, no dogma. Becoming a sannyasin simply means that you have declared your freedom.Certainly, the question arises: why the orange, the mala, and the photograph? Why? This is a device, dear lady, to keep unwanted people out. This is not for the crowds, it is not for the mob; it is only for the chosen few. The ultimate – call it godliness, enlightenment – is only for those who are really courageous, immensely courageous – because the ultimate becomes available only to those who can drop the mind and move into the immediate. The immediate is the door to the ultimate. To drop the mind needs great courage – it is not for everybody.This is just a device. Orange is as good as any other color, or no color. It has nothing special about it. I could have chosen any – green, black, that would have done, but its purpose is that it is a device. It is for people who are ready to do a few mad things – because later on, bigger and bigger mad things are waiting. If you cannot do such a simple, silly thing as wearing orange, a locket and a mala, if you can’t gather enough courage to look foolish, a laughingstock wherever you go, and feel absurd and ridiculous – if you cannot do this much, then this place is not for you, because bigger and bigger things will have to be done.As you move deeper into intimacy with me, I will demand more and more illogical things, because only through those demands can the mind Only then, can your cultivated mind, cultivated for centuries, be shaken to the foundations.This is just a simple device to help freak out people who are not meant to be here. They simply escape. Seeing such a mad crowd, seeing people in orange, they become afraid and they escape.This is deliberately done. I could have made it easier for you to be here, to gather more knowledge, and be inspired, and things like that. But this is not Christian Science. I am not Billy Graham, I am not here to inspire you. This is a totally different phenomenon. In fact, I am not even religious; I am not spiritual at all. All these labels are utterly irrelevant. This is just a device to choose those who are ready to go with me, who are ready to go with me to absurd limits.But you are cleverer. You say, “I can have you in my heart, entrenched deep in my being” – as if you know what being is and what depth is. You are cunning and clever. You say, “I can conjure you up,” but whatsoever you conjure up will be your own mind, a figment of your own mind; it will not be me, it cannot be me.You can have me only if you move with me unconditionally. No condition from your side can be accepted. And sometimes I demand things which are patently absurd, and I know that they are absurd.My people slowly, slowly start understanding that if you can do something absurd, that helps you become a little looser, out of your minds. Once you are unconditionally with me, if I say, “Go and move naked in the streets,” you say, “Okay.” If you can say that, simply and innocently, I am not going to send you to move naked in the streets; the purpose is fulfilled. If you hesitate, if you say, “What do you mean?” then you will have to go.These are small devices, and sometimes, small devices work very deeply, because you cannot detect them. Big devices you can detect – they are so big, any stupid person can see them.Just the other day, Krishna Prem wrote a letter to me saying that he remembers many times, that in many, many past lives he has been related to Divyananda, with who he is in love. In the past life, he was the mother and Divyananda was the son. He could not fulfill all the motherly duties in that life, that’s why he is in love with Divyananda now. “But now it seems that the debts are paid, and Divyananda is hurting me in many ways, so should I finish the relationship?”I sent him a message, “Go and talk to Teertha.” He was very much hurt, naturally. He was talking about such big things: he must have been waiting for me to say, “Krishna Prem, you have arrived. Remembering your past lives, this is great! This is your first satori, Krishna Prem.” Deep down, he must have waited for this.Rather than saying anything about his great experience, I told him to go to Teertha and talk. That must have hurt him deeply because I am not directly answering him; I am sending him to Teertha. And who is this Teertha, anyhow? Krishna Prem being sent to Teertha? Krishna Prem is as highly evolved as Teertha, so why? Or maybe he is even higher and holier. Why? Why to Teertha?For two days, he lived in great despair. Now, such a small thing, and he could not detect it. It took forty-eight hours for him to detect it; then he understood: “This is just a shock to my ego.” Then immediately, in that understanding, all despair disappeared. In that understanding, just that moment, all darkness was gone and he was light, happy, and back to his natural being again. But it took him forty-eight hours to detect it.Now there is no need: Krishna Prem, you need not go to Teertha. Now I will find something else!Small, very small things are more difficult to detect, for the simple reason that they are small. Big things you can see. When there are mountains you can see them, but just a small grain of sand is undetectable.If you want to be here, if you really want to relate with me, you will have to learn a totally different way of relating. I am not a teacher, so if you are only a student here to be inspired, and all that… I am not a missionary, either; I am not here to convert you to some philosophy.If you are really to relate with a master – who has no knowledge but who knows, who has knowing but no knowledge – then you will have to relax a little. You will have to drop your ideas of how things should be. Remember always, many times it happens: you want to become a sannyasin, but you forget who is the master and who is the disciple, and deep down you start expecting things to be fulfilled by the master. He has to be according to you, then he is right.But any master worth the name can never be according to you. People who are according to you are politicians. They know that you will follow them only if they are according to you: that is a mutual arrangement. They have to follow you to make followers out of you: that is a mutual exploitation. That’s what political leaders are, followers of the followers. They go on looking at you, at what your expectations are, and they go on fulfilling them.I offend in every way. I cannot fulfill your expectations. If I start fulfilling your expectations, I will not be of any use to you. Then really you will be the master and I will be the disciple.Who is taking sannyas from whom? This has to be decided in the beginning. Am I taking sannyas from you, or are you taking sannyas from me? Let it be very clear. Many times you take sannyas and it is not clear, and you want me to be this way or that way, to live this way or to live that way. And if I am not according to you, then you are disappointed.The real master will always disappoint you. He has to disappoint you. This is how, slowly, slowly, chunks of your mind will be broken off and taken away from you. I have to continuously hammer you, and I have to be absolutely clear about it from the very beginning. The orange, the mala, the picture, have no other purpose. The purpose is that you have to know clearly that it is you who have to be unconditionally in accord with me, and that you have to drop all expectations of my being in accord with you. Only then can the work start. For those who are ready for it, sannyas is only for them. Those who are not ready for it, sannyas helps them to run away, to get lost.You say, “Why are you so against the mind?” I am not against the mind; I am simply stating the fact – what the mind is. If you see what the mind is, you will drop it. When I say, “Drop the mind,” I am not against the mind. I am simply making it clear to you what the mind is, what it has done to you, how it has become a bondage.It is not a question of using it or abusing it. The mind itself is the problem, not its use or abuse. And remember, you cannot use the mind till you know how to be without the mind. Only people who know how to be without the mind, are capable of using the mind, otherwise the mind uses them. It is the mind that is using you, but mind is very clever, it goes on deceiving you. It goes on saying, “You are using me.”It is the mind that is using you. You are being used; the mind has become the master of you, you are a slave, but the mind is very clever, it goes on buttressing you. It says, “I am just an instrument, you are the master.” But watch, look into the mechanism of the mind, how it goes on using you. You think you are using it. You can use it only when you know that you are separate from it; otherwise how will you use it? You are identified with it.If you say, “I am a Christian,” you are identified with the Christian mind. If you say, “I am a Hindu,” you are identified with the Hindu mind. If you say, “I am German,” you are identified with the German mind. This identification has to be broken. You have to know that you are not the mind. Only in moments when the mind is not functioning – when you are unoccupied, when there is a gap, stillness, silence, when the mind has ceased – will you be able to know whom you are, to know yourself as consciousness. Then you can use the mind.I am using the mind, you are not using the mind. So how can I be against the mind? I am not against the mind. I may appear to be, but the whole effort is to disconnect you from the mind so that you can know your separation from it, your freedom. Once you know your freedom, you can use the mind. Then it is a beautiful instrument, one of the most beautiful instruments. Man has not yet been able to make something better. Even the biggest computer, the most efficient computer, is not yet capable of doing the things that the mind can do. A single mind can contain all the libraries of the world.It is tremendous to think of the powers of the mind, but because those powers are great, there is danger also: they can overpower you. That’s what has happened: because the mind is such a beautiful, powerful instrument, you have become possessed by it. You cannot use it anymore. It uses you, it directs you, it gives you programs. It goes on goading you in directions which it has decided to follow. It does not allow you any freedom, it does not leave you any choice. Unless it is convinced, it won’t allow you to move even a single inch.So who is the master? You cannot be the master unless you have come to know that you are not identified with the mind.The man who is identified with his car cannot drive it; the car will drive him, and then some accident is bound to happen. You have to be separate from the car; you have to know that you are separate, that the car is beautiful, a beautiful mechanism to be used, and it can perform many things. But you have to be separate.You say, “Why are you so against the mind? Surely we all use it.” No. All cannot use it. Only very rarely is there a person who uses the mind: a Buddha, a Jesus, an Atisha, a Tilopa – only very rarely, and few and far between; otherwise you are used by the mind. No, all are not using the mind; otherwise what will the difference be between a Buddha and you? There will be no difference. You use the mind and Buddha uses the mind – what is the difference? Buddha uses the mind; you are used by the mind – that’s the difference. Buddha can use the mind because he knows he is utterly separate.Remember, it is not a question of abuse. If you cannot use the mind, how can you abuse it? It is the mind; whether it uses you or abuses you, you cannot abuse it.When scientists discovered atomic energy, do you think they used the mind, or abused it? When the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein could not sleep the whole night; for days, his nights were disturbed. He could not sleep, he could not rest; he was really terribly disturbed. He had been instrumental in creating the atom bomb. It was he himself who wrote the letter to the president of America, saying that the atom bomb was possible.Now the question arises: was Einstein consciously using his mind writing the letter to the president of America releasing this powerful information to the politicians? Was he aware of the consequences? Did he ever think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – that thousands of people, innocent civilians, would be burned within seconds, for no fault of their own. No, he had not thought about it, he was not conscious of it. In fact, he was not even alert to what use atom bombs would be put. Before he died, somebody asked him, “If you are born again, what would you like to be? A great mathematician again, a great physicist, a great scientist?”He is reported to have said, “No, never! Rather, I would like to be a plumber. But now it is too late.”Einstein had one of the most beautiful minds. Did he abuse it? Do you think the scientists who have created great technology and destroyed the whole ecology of the earth, used their minds or abused them?If one day this planet earth is going to die, it will be because of the great minds of the twentieth century – because if in the whole history of humanity there have been a hundred scientists, ninety-nine happen to be alive in the twentieth century. In fact, seventy-five percent of the great scientists of all the ages are alive now.The mind has gathered such a great momentum. We have created great technology within the last hundred years, particularly within these last ten years, but that technology is going to destroy this earth. Who will be responsible? What will you say? The scientists used the mind or abused it?If you ask me, I will say they were not masters of their minds. They neither used nor abused the mind; the mind used them, abused them.Science now needs great meditators; otherwise, this earth is doomed. Science now needs people who can use their minds, who are masters of their being, who can use science in a conscious way. Otherwise, we are on the verge of committing universal suicide.Man cannot live for more than twenty-five years the way he has lived up to now, unless a drastic change is made. And the greatest thing that can be of help, which can help humanity to survive, and the earth to still go on living…and this is a beautiful earth. Compared to this earth millions and millions of stars are just dead: no flowers bloom, no rivers flow, there are no birds, no animals, no people. This universe is almost a great desert. This earth is alive! Something tremendously important: consciousness has happened here, but this consciousness is still not a master, it is a slave. It has to be freed.That’s my work here, my basic fundamental work: to help you be free of the mind so that you can use it. If you are the master, you cannot abuse it; that is impossible. When you are alert, conscious, meditative, abuse is not possible.If Einstein had also been a buddha, there would have been atomic energy but no atom bombs, and atomic energy would have become a blessing – the greatest blessing ever. The earth would have become a paradise, but Albert Einstein was not a buddha; unfortunately he knew nothing of meditation – a great mind, but the master was missing; a great mechanism, a great airplane without the pilot.I have heard that they made an airplane, which could go to the farthest distances without any pilot – pilotless, automatic. There was great thrill and enthusiasm, and on the first flight, the automatic mechanism communicated to the people, “We are moving at such and such a height, at such and such a temperature, and at such and such a speed. Please be at ease, don’t be worried. Nothing can go wrong, nothing can go wrong, nothing can go wrong, nothing can go wrong…” And it went on! It has already gone wrong. Think of those people, what must have happened to those people! Now, what to do?Great science is there, a by-product of the mind, but it is in the hands of slaves. Buddhas are needed to take possession of humanity – and one or two buddhas won’t do. Many, many buddhas are needed in every field, in every direction, in every dimension of life, so that the mind can be used. Otherwise, the mind was never as efficient as it is now, and that is the danger. The mind was never as clever as it is now, never as powerful as it is now.We have given atom bombs into the hands of children. If no accident happens, that will be a miracle. There is every possibility that an accident is bound to happen. Children are playing with atom bombs.Politicians are the most immature minds in the world. Only third-rate minds become interested in politics: mediocre people and people who are suffering from an inferiority complex, they become politicians. In these people’s hands are atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, laser beams, and this and that.You can cease at any moment! I may not be able to finish my discourse. Any moment…we are sitting on a pile of hydrogen bombs, and there are so many…it is unbelievable how stupid man can be. We have so many hydrogen bombs that we can destroy every single human being seven hundred times. Now, what stupidity! For what? A man simply dies a single time. If you want to be very cautious, twice will do – but what is the point of seven hundred times? And they are continuously creating more and more. The whole earth is full of hydrogen bombs; we can destroy seven hundred earths like this. Still seventy percent of our energy is being put into war efforts. This whole earth seems to be a madhouse.You say, “Surely we all use it and need it and it seems to me that it is only when we abuse it – that is to say, using it as a defense against feeling too deeply and against transcending itself – that we are entitled to criticize it.” I am not criticizing it. In fact, you will be able to appreciate it more if you understand what I am saying, you will be able to use it more if you understand what I am saying. If you become a transcendence of the mind, a witness to the mind, and you know that you are separate, and the mind no longer has any sway over you, you are no longer hypnotized by it, you will be able to really appreciate it. I appreciate it. And you will also be able to use it, and you will never be able to abuse it. A conscious person cannot abuse anything.The last question:Osho,I have noticed that when I see a woman who is particularly lovely, and I am taken into that sweet silence, I forget all about philosophy or religion, but I am lost and found entering a moment. I think animals are wise because God doesn't trouble them with metaphysics. Still, I want to throw my books out…but still I like them.A woman is metaphysics, philosophy, poetry. So is a man. Certainly, one will forget metaphysics and philosophy when one comes across alive metaphysics, alive philosophy, alive poetry. That simply shows that you are still alive. To appreciate beauty, to be drowned and drunk with it, is something immensely valuable.There would have been something wrong if, seeing a beautiful woman, you still remembered the Old Testament, or the Bhagavadgita or the Koran. That would have shown that something is wrong with you. This simply shows you are natural, human.Let this sensitivity grow, and slowly, slowly, as you become more and more sensitive, more and more sensuous, you will see more and more beauty around. The deeper is your insight, the greater the beauty. And when you see this whole existence as a tremendous dance, a celebration, you are liberated by it.It is celebration that liberates, it is love that liberates, it is beauty that liberates – it is not metaphysics or philosophy.However, I am not saying that you have to throw your books out – because there are beautiful books too; they are by-products of great experiences. Don’t be lost in them, but to read something of Shakespeare or Kalidas or to read something from Buddha or Atisha is to move into the same world of beauty from a different door.There are many doors to the temple of godliness. Beauty is one, wisdom is another, love still another, and so on and so forth. Music can do it, poetry can do it, literature can do it. The flowers on the trees are beautiful – what do you think of great poems? They are flowers of consciousness.You need not throw away your books. In fact, by throwing away your books, you will simply be saying that you are still attached to them. Hate is nothing but love standing on its head, love doing sirshsasana, a headstand. Love and hate are not separate, they are one. In fact, we should stop using these two words separately; we should make one word: lovehate. Not even a hyphen is needed between the two; they are simply one energy like hot and cold, summer and winter, life and death, darkness and light.There is no need to throw away your books – enjoy them! There is no need to stop enjoying the beautiful form of a woman, because that too is divine. Enjoy life in all its dimensions. Why this continuous obsession to become one-dimensional: either this or that? Why not both? Why live in either/or? Why not live in both/and? That’s my approach: live in both/and, and drop living in either/or.Søren Kierkegaard has written a book, Either/Or. He lived his whole life in either/or. He could not decide whether to marry the woman he loved – and loved tremendously; he could not decide. That either/or continued for so long that finally the woman decided to go with somebody else. For years, he could not decide.His book became so famous, he himself became so famous, that when he used to walk in Copenhagen, urchins and children and people would shout behind him, “Either/Or! Either/Or! Here goes either/or!” Even children had come to know that he used to stand at crossroads thinking, “Where to go? Either/or – to move this way or that? Both roads lead to the same goal, both go to the station, but which one to follow?” And he would stand at the crossroads thinking, for hours.He lived only in thought; he was really a metaphysician. His father had left a heritage; he had enough money, so there was no need to work either. So the whole day, for twenty-four hours, he was thinking. And when he had drawn the last money from the bank, on the way home, he dropped dead. He did well – otherwise he would have been in difficulty.My feeling is that he must have been thinking, “To be or not to be? Either/or,” because now there was no money left. He must have suffered a heart attack between that either/or. That had been his whole way of life.There is no need to choose – why not live choicelessly? Why not live all that life makes available to you? Don’t be a spiritualist and don’t be a materialist: be both. Don’t be a Zorba and don’t be a Buddha; be both: Zorba the Buddha. Enjoy all that existence has showered on you.That’s my message to my sannyasins. You are not yet my sannyasin, but if you start living in totality, accepting all, giving each moment its due, respecting all, and when a beautiful woman passes suddenly you are thrilled, that shows you are alive, that you are not dead yet.But this need not be just a sexual stirring in you – that is very poor. It has to be something more; it can be a spiritual stirring too. I am not against sex, but to live only a sexual life is to live life at the minimum. Why not live the whole spectrum of it, from sex to samadhi?When a really beautiful woman passes by, if only your sexuality is stirred, then the animal is alive but you are not. But if your spirituality is also stirred, then you are alive in your totality. And to be alive in totality is the way to godliness.Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why don't I trust you?Trust is possible only if first you trust in yourself. The most fundamental thing has to happen within you first. If you trust in yourself you can trust in me, you can trust in people, you can trust in existence. But if you don’t trust in yourself then no other trust is ever possible.And the society destroys trust at the very roots. It does not allow you to trust yourself. It teaches all other kinds of trust – trust in the parents, trust in the church, trust in the state, trust in God, ad infinitum. But the basic trust is completely destroyed. And then all other trusts are phony, are bound to be phony. Then all other trusts are just plastic flowers. You don’t have real roots for real flowers to grow.The society does it deliberately, on purpose, because a man who trusts in himself is dangerous for the society – a society that depends on slavery, a society that has invested too much in slavery.A man trusting himself is an independent man. You cannot make predictions about him, he will move in his own way. Freedom will be his life. He will trust when he feels, when he loves, and then his trust will have a tremendous intensity and truth in it. Then his trust will be alive and authentic. And he will be ready to risk all for his trust, but only when he feels it, only when it is true, only when it stirs his heart, only when it stirs his intelligence and his love, otherwise not. You cannot force him into any kind of believing.And this society depends on belief. Its whole structure is that of autohypnosis. Its whole structure is based in creating robots and machines, not men. It needs dependent people – so much so that they are constantly in need of being tyrannized, so much so that they are searching and seeking their own tyrants, their own Adolf Hitlers, their own Mussolinis, their own Josef Stalins and Mao Zedongs.This earth, this beautiful earth, we have turned into a great prison. A few power-lusty people have reduced the whole of humanity into a mob. Man is allowed to exist only if he compromises with all kinds of nonsense.Now, to tell a child to believe in God is nonsense, utter nonsense – not that godliness does not exist, but because the child has not yet felt the thirst, the desire, the longing. He is not yet ready to go in search of the truth, the ultimate truth of life. He is not yet mature enough to inquire into the reality of God. That love affair has to happen some day, but it can happen only if no belief is imposed upon him. If he is converted before the thirst has arisen to explore and to know, then his whole life he will live in a phony way, he will live in a pseudo way.Yes, he will talk about God, because he has been told that God is. And he has been told authoritatively, and he has been told by people who were very powerful in his childhood – his parents, the priests, the teachers. He has been told by people and he had to accept it; it was a question of his survival. He could not say no to his parents, because without them he would not be able to live at all. It was too risky to say no, he had to say yes. But his yes can’t be true.How can it be true? He is saying yes only as a political device, to survive. You have not turned him into a religious person, you have made him a diplomat, you have created a politician. You have sabotaged his potential to grow into an authentic being. You have poisoned him. You have destroyed the very possibility of his intelligence, because intelligence arises only when the longing to know arises.Now the longing will never arise, because before the question has taken possession of his soul, the answer has already been supplied. Before he was hungry, the food has been forced into his being. Now, without hunger, this forced food cannot be digested; there is no hunger to digest it. That’s why people live like pipes through which life passes like undigested food.One has to be very patient with children, very alert, very conscious not to say anything that may hinder their own intelligence from arriving, not to convert them into Christians, Hindus and Mohammedans. One needs infinite patience.One day that miracle happens when the child himself starts inquiring. Then too, don’t supply him with ready-made answers. Ready-made answers help nobody, ready-made answers are dull and stupid. Help him to become more intelligent. Rather than giving him answers, give him situations and challenges so that his intelligence is sharpened and he asks more deeply – so that the question penetrates to his very core, so the question becomes a question of life and death.But that is not allowed. Parents are very much afraid, the society is very much afraid: if children are allowed to remain free, who knows? They may never come to the fold the parents belonged to, they may never go to the church – Catholic, Protestant, this or that. Who knows what is going to happen when they become intelligent on their own? They will not be within your control. And this society goes into deeper and deeper politics to control everybody, to possess everybody’s soul.That’s why the first thing they have to do is to destroy trust – the trust of the child in himself, the confidence of the child in himself. They have to make him shaky and afraid. Once he is trembling he is controllable. If he is confident he is uncontrollable. If he is confident he will assert himself, he will try to do his own thing. He will never want to do anybody else’s thing. He will go on his own journey, he will not fulfill somebody else’s desires for some trip. He will never be an imitator, he will never be a dull and dead person. He will be so alive, so pulsating with life, that nobody will be able to control him.Destroy his trust and you have castrated him. You have taken his power. Now he will always be powerless and always in need of somebody to dominate, direct and command him. Now he will be a good soldier, a good citizen, a good nationalist, a good Christian, a good Mohammedan, a good Hindu. Yes, he will be all these things, but he will not be a real individual. He will not have any roots; he will be uprooted his whole life. He will live without roots – and to live without roots is to live in misery, is to live in hell. Just as trees need roots in the earth, man is also a tree and needs roots in existence or else he will live a very unintelligent life. He may succeed in the world, he may become very famous…Just the other day, I was reading a story:Three surgeons, old friends, met on holiday. On the beach, sitting under the sun, they started boasting. The first said, “I came across a man who had lost both of his legs in the war. I gave him artificial legs, and it has been a miracle. Now he has become one of the greatest runners in the world! There is every possibility that in the next coming Olympics he is going to win.”The other said, “That’s nothing. I came across a woman who fell from a thirty-story building: her face was completely crushed. I did a great job of plastic surgery. Now just the other day I came to know through the newspapers that she has become the world beauty queen.”The third was a humble man. They both looked at him and asked, “What have you done lately? What’s new?”The man said, “Nothing much – and moreover, I am not allowed to say anything about it.”Both his colleagues became more curious. They said, “But we are friends, we can keep your secret. You need not be worried, it will not leak out.”So he said, “Okay, if you say so, if you promise. A man was brought to me: he had lost his head in a car accident. I was at a loss to know what to do. I rushed into my garden just to think what to do, and suddenly I came across a cabbage. Finding nothing else, I transplanted the cabbage in place of the head. And do you know what? That man has become the prime minister of India.”You can destroy the child; still, he can become the prime minister of India. There is no inherent impossibility of becoming successful without intelligence. In fact it is more difficult to become successful with intelligence, because the intelligent person is inventive. He is always ahead of his time; it takes time to understand him.The unintelligent person is easily understood. He fits with the gestalt of the society; the society has values and criteria by which to judge him. But it takes years for the society to evaluate a genius.I am not saying that a person who has no intelligence cannot become successful, cannot become famous – but still he will remain phony. And that is the misery: you can become famous, but if you are phony you live in misery. You don’t know what blessings life is showering on you, you will never know. You do not have enough intelligence to know. You will never see the beauty of existence, because you don’t have the sensitivity to know it. You will never see the sheer miracle that surrounds you, that crosses your path in millions of ways every day. You will never see it, because to see it you need a tremendous capacity to understand, to feel, to be.This society is a power-oriented society. This society is still utterly primitive, utterly barbarious. A few people – politicians, priests, professors – a few people are dominating millions. And this society is run in such a way that no child is allowed to have intelligence. It is a sheer accident that once in a while a buddha arrives on the earth – a sheer accident.Somehow, once in a while, a person escapes from the clutches of the society. Once in a while a person remains unpoisoned by the society. That must be because of some error, some mistake of the society. Otherwise the society succeeds in destroying your roots, in destroying your trust in yourself. And once that is done, you will never be able to trust anybody.Once you are incapable of loving yourself, you will never be able to love anybody. That is an absolute truth, there are no exceptions to it. You can love others only if you are able to love yourself.But the society condemns self-love. It says it is selfishness, it says it is narcissistic. Yes, self-love can become narcissistic but it is not necessarily so. It can become narcissistic if it never moves beyond itself, it can become a kind of selfishness if it becomes confined to yourself. Otherwise, self-love is the beginning of all other loves.A person who loves himself sooner or later starts overflowing with love. A person who trusts himself cannot distrust anybody, even those who are going to deceive him, even those who have already deceived him. Yes, he cannot even distrust them, because now he knows trust is far more valuable than anything else.You can cheat a person – but in what can you cheat him? You can take some money or something else from him. But the man who knows the beauty of trust will not be distracted by these small things. He will still love you, he will still trust you. And then a miracle happens: if a man really trusts you, it is impossible to cheat him, almost impossible.It happens every day in your life, too. Whenever you trust somebody it becomes impossible for him to cheat you, to deceive you. Sitting on the platform in a railway station, you don’t know the person who is sitting by your side – a stranger, a complete stranger – and you say to him, “Just watch my luggage, I have to go to purchase a ticket. Please, just take care of the luggage.” And you go. You trust an absolute stranger. But it almost never happens that the stranger deceives you. He could have deceived you if you had not trusted him.Trust has a magic in it. How can he deceive you now that you have trusted him? How can he fall so low? He will never be able to forgive himself if he deceives you.There is an intrinsic quality in human consciousness to trust and to be trusted. Everybody enjoys being trusted, it is respect from the other person; and when you trust a stranger it is more so. There is no reason to trust him, and still you trust him. You raise the man to such a high pedestal, you value the man so much, it is almost impossible for him to fall from that height. And if he falls he will never be able to forgive himself, he will have to carry the weight of guilt his whole life.A man who trusts himself comes to know the beauty of it – comes to know that the more you trust yourself, the more you bloom; the more you are in a state of let-go and relaxation, the more you are settled and serene, the more you are calm, cool and quiet.And it is so beautiful that you start trusting more and more people, because the more you trust, the more your calmness deepens, your coolness goes deeper and deeper to the very core of your being. And the more you trust, the more you soar high. A man who can trust will sooner or later know the logic of trust. And then one day he is bound to try to trust the unknown.It is only when you can trust the unknown that you can trust a master – never before it – because the master represents nothing but the unknown. He represents the uncharted, he represents the infinite, the unbounded. He represents the oceanic, he represents the wild, he represents existence.You say, “Why don’t I trust you?” It is simple: you don’t trust yourself. Start trusting yourself – that is the fundamental lesson, the first lesson. Start loving yourself. If you don’t love yourself, who else is going to love you? But remember, if you only love yourself, your love will be very poor.A great Jewish mystic, Hillel, has said, “If you are not for yourself, who is going to be for you?” And also, “If you are only for yourself, then what meaning can your life ever have?” – a tremendously significant statement. Remember it: love yourself, because if you don’t love yourself nobody else will ever be able to love you. You cannot love a person who hates himself.And on this unfortunate earth, almost everybody hates himself, everybody condemns himself. How can you love a person who is condemnatory toward himself? He will not believe you. He cannot love himself – how can you dare to? He cannot love himself – how can you love him? He will suspect some game, some trick, some trip. He will suspect that you must be after something else. He will suspect that you are trying to deceive him in the name of love. He will be very cautious, alert, and his suspicion will poison your being.If you love a person who hates himself, you are trying to destroy his concept about himself. And nobody easily drops his concept about himself; that is his identity. He will fight with you, he will prove to you that he is right and you are wrong.That’s what is happening in every love relationship – let me call it every so-called love relationship. It is happening between every husband and wife, every lover and beloved, every man and every woman. How can you destroy the other’s concept about himself? That is his identity, that is his ego, that’s how he knows himself. If you take it away he will not know who he is. It is too risky; he cannot drop his concept so easily. He will prove to you that he is not worth loving, he is only worth hating.And the same is the case with you. You also hate yourself; you cannot allow anybody else to love you. Whenever somebody comes with loving energy around you, you shrink, you want to escape, you are afraid. You know perfectly well that you are unworthy of love, you know that only on the surface do you look so good, so beautiful; deep down you are ugly. And if you allow this person to love you, sooner or later – and it is going to be sooner than later – he will come to know who you are in reality.How long will you be able to pretend with a person with whom you have to live in love? You can pretend in the marketplace, you can pretend in the Lions’ Club and the Rotary Club – smiles, all smiles. You can do beautiful acting and role playing. But if you live with a woman or a man for twenty-four hours a day, then it is tiring to go on smiling and smiling and smiling. Then the smile tires you, because it is phony. It is just an exercise of the lips, and the lips become tired.How can you go on being sweet? Your bitterness will surface. Hence by the time the honeymoon is over, everything is over. Both have known each other’s reality, both have known each other’s phoniness, both have known each other’s falsity.One is afraid to become intimate. To be intimate means you will have to put aside the role. And you know who you are: worthless, just dirt. That’s what you have been told from the very beginning. Your parents, your teachers, your priests, your politicians, all have been telling you that you are dirt, worthless. Nobody has ever accepted you. Nobody has given you the feeling that you are loved and respected, that you are needed – that this existence will miss you, that without you this existence will not be the same, that without you there will be a hole. Without you this universe is going to lose some poetry, some beauty: a song will be missed, a note will be missed, there will be a gap – nobody has told you that.And that’s what my work here is: to destroy the distrust that has been created in you about yourself, to destroy all condemnation that has been imposed on you, to take it away from you and to give you a feeling that you are loved and respected, loved by existence. God has created you because he loved you. He loved you so much that he could not resist the temptation to create you.When a painter paints, he paints because he loves. Vincent van Gogh continuously painted the sun his whole life, he loved the sun so much. In fact it was the sun that drove him mad. For one year continuously he was standing and painting under the hot sun. His whole life revolved around the sun. And the day he was content painting the painting that he had always wanted to paint – and to paint this painting he had painted many others, but he had not been content with them – the day he was content, the day he could say, “Yes, this is the thing that I wanted to paint,” he committed suicide, because he said, “My work is done. I have done the thing that I came for. My destiny is fulfilled, now it is pointless to live.”His whole life a devotion to a certain painting? He must have been madly in love with the sun. He looked at the sun so long that it destroyed his eyes, his vision and it drove him mad.When a poet composes a song it is because he loves it. God has painted you, sung you, danced you. God loves you! If you don’t see any meaning in the word God don’t be worried; call it existence, call it the whole. Existence loves you, otherwise you would not be here.Relax into your being, you are cherished by the whole. That’s why the whole goes on breathing in you, pulsating in you. Once you start feeling this tremendous respect and love and trust of the whole in you, you will start growing roots into your being. You will trust yourself. And only then can you trust me. Only then can you trust your friends, your children, your husband, your wife. Only then can you trust the trees and the animals and the stars and the moon. Then one simply lives as trust. It is no longer a question of trusting this or that; one simply trusts. And to trust is simply to be religious.That’s what sannyas is all about. Sannyas is going to undo all that the society has done. It is not just accidental that priests are against me, politicians are against me, parents are against me, the whole establishment is against me – it is not accidental. I can understand the absolutely clear logic of it. I am trying to undo what they have done. I am sabotaging the whole pattern of this slave society.My effort is to create rebels, and the beginning of the rebel is to trust in oneself. If I can help you to trust in yourself, I have helped you. Nothing else is needed, everything else follows of its own accord.The second question:Osho,John Lilly has said, "What the mind believes is true or becomes true." Would you please comment on this?That’s what has been happening down the ages. That is the way of autohypnosis. John Lilly is absolutely wrong. “What the mind believes,” he says, “is true…” It is not. It only appears true.And he says “…or becomes true.” It never becomes true by being believed, but it starts appearing true. Yes, for the believer it becomes true, although it is not true, because belief begins in ignorance. Belief cannot create truth; truth is already the case.Remember the first preliminary of Atisha: truth is. You need not believe in it for it to be. Your belief or your disbelief is not going to make any difference to the truth. Truth is truth, whether you believe or you disbelieve.But if you believe in something, it starts appearing as true to you at least. That’s what the meaning of belief is: belief means to believe in something as true – you know that you don’t know, you know that the truth is unknown to you, but in your ignorance you start believing, because belief is cheap.To discover truth is arduous, it needs a long pilgrimage. It needs a great emptying of the mind, it needs a great cleansing of the heart. It needs a certain innocence, a rebirth: you have to become a child again.Only very few people have ever dared to discover truth. And it is risky, because it may not console you; it has no obligation to console you. It is risky: it may shatter all that you have known before, and you will have to rearrange your whole life. It is dangerous: it may destroy all your illusions, it may shatter all your dreams. It is really going through fire; it is going to burn you as you are, it is going to kill you as you are. And who knows what will happen later on?How can the seed know that by dying in the soil it will become a great tree? It will not be there to witness the happening. How can the seed know that one day, if it dies, there will be great foliage, green leaves, great branches, and flowers and fruits? How can the seed know? The seed will not be there. The seed has to disappear before it can happen. The seed has never met the tree. The seed has to disappear and die.Only very few people have that much courage. It really needs guts to discover truth. You will die as yourself. You will certainly be born, but how can you be convinced of it? What guarantee is there?There is no guarantee.Hence, unless you are with a master who has died and is reborn, who has crucified himself and is resurrected – unless you come across a man like Christ or Buddha or Atisha – you will not be able to gather enough courage.Seeing Atisha, something may start stirring in your heart, a chord may be touched, something may be triggered, a synchronicity. The presence of somebody who has arrived may create a great longing in you, may become the birth of an intense passionate search for truth.Belief cannot give you the truth, it only pretends. It is cheap, it is a plastic flower. You need not take all the trouble of growing a rosebush, you can simply go to the market and purchase plastic flowers – and they are longer lasting too, in fact they are almost eternal. Once in a while you can wash them, and they are fresh again. They will not deceive you, but at least they can deceive the neighbors, and that is the point. You will know all along that they are plastic flowers. How can you forget it? You have purchased them! The neighbors may be deceived, but how can you be deceived?And I don’t think that even the neighbors are deceived, because they have also purchased plastic flowers. They know they are deceiving you, they know you are deceiving them. Everybody is perfectly aware that everybody else is deceiving. “But this is how life is,” people say. Nobody is really deceived. People just pretend to be deceived. You pretend that you have real flowers, others pretend that they are deceived. Just watch, observe, and what I am saying will be experienced by you. It is a simple fact; I am not talking philosophy, just stating facts.What John Lilly says is utter nonsense. He says, “What the mind believes is true.” It is never true, because belief has nothing to do with truth. You can believe that this is night but just by your believing, this is not going to become night. But you can believe, and you can close your eyes and for you it is night – but only for you, remember, not in truth. You are living in a kind of hallucination.There is this danger in belief: it makes you feel that you know the truth. And because it makes you feel that you know the truth, this becomes the greatest barrier in the search. Believe or disbelieve and you are blocked – because disbelief is also nothing but belief in a negative form.The Catholic believes in God, the communist believes in no God: both are believers. Go to Kaaba or go to the Comintern, go to Kailash or to the Kremlin, it is all the same. The believer believes it is so, the nonbeliever believes it is not so. And because both have already settled without taking the trouble to go and discover it, the deeper is their belief, the stronger is their belief, the greater is the barrier. They will never go on a pilgrimage, there is no point. They will live surrounded by their own illusion, self-created, self-sustained. It may be consoling, but it is not liberating. Millions of people are wasting their lives in belief and disbelief.The inquiry into truth begins only when you drop all believing. You say, “I would like to encounter the truth on my own. I will not believe in Christ and I will not believe in Buddha. I would like to become a christ or a buddha myself, I would like to be a light unto myself.”Why should one be a Christian? It is ugly. Be a christ if you can be, but don’t be a Christian. Be a buddha if you have any respect for yourself, but don’t be a Buddhist. The Buddhist believes. Buddha knows.When you can know, when knowing is possible, why settle for believing? But again, the society would like you to believe, because believers are good people, obedient, law-abiding. They follow all formalities and etiquette, they are never troublemakers. They simply follow the crowd, whichever crowd they happen to be in; they simply go with the crowd. They are not real men, they are sheep. Humanity has not yet arrived.Somebody once said to George Bernard Shaw, “What do you think about civilization?” He said, “It is a good idea. Somebody should try it.”It has not yet been tried. Humanity is still arriving; we are still groping between animality and humanity. We are in limbo. Man has to be born, man has to be given birth to; we have to prepare the ground for man to appear.And the most significant thing that will help that man to come will be if we can drop believing – if we can drop being Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Jainas, Buddhists, communists. If you can drop believing, immediately your energy will take a new turn: it will start inquiring. And to inquire is beautiful. Your life will become a pilgrimage to truth, and in that very pilgrimage you grow.Growth is a by-product of the inquiry into truth. Believers never grow, they remain childish. And remember, to be childlike and to be childish are poles apart, they are not the same thing. It is beautiful to be childlike. The man of trust is childlike and the man of belief is childish. To be childlike is the ultimate in growth; that is the very culmination – consciousness has come to the ultimate peak. To be childlike means to be a sage, and to be childish means to be just un-grownup.The average mental age of human beings on the earth today is not more than twelve years. When for the first time this was discovered, it was such a shock. Nobody had ever thought about it; it was just by accident that it became known. In the First World War, for the first time in human history, the people who were candidates, who wanted to enter the army, were examined. Their mental age was inquired into, their IQ was determined. This was a great revelation – that they were not more than twelve years; the average age was just twelve years.This is childishness. The body goes on growing, and the mind has stopped at the age of twelve. What kind of humanity have we created on this earth? Why does the mind stop at twelve? Because by the time one is twelve, one has gathered all kinds of beliefs; one is already a believer, one already “knows” what truth is. One is a Christian, another is a communist; one believes in God, one does not believe in God; one believes in the Bible and the other believes in Das Kapital; one believes in the Bhagavadgita, another believes in the Red Book of Mao Zedong.We have drilled concepts and ideologies into the innocent minds of poor children. They are already becoming knowers. Do you know – by the age of seven, a child already knows fifty percent of all that he will ever know. And by the time he is fourteen he has almost arrived; now there is nowhere to go, he has only to vegetate. Now he will exist as a cabbage. If he goes to college then, as they say, he may become a cauliflower. A cabbage with a college education is a cauliflower. But there is not much difference, just labels change. The cabbage becomes an MA, a PhD, this and that, and just to show respect we call it a cauliflower. But the mental age is twelve.The real man grows to the very end. Even while he is dying, he is growing. Even the last moment of his life will still be an inquiry, a search, a learning. He will still be inquiring – now inquiring into death. He will be fascinated: death is such an unknown phenomenon, such a mystery, far more mysterious than life itself – how can an intelligent man be afraid? If in life he has not been afraid to go into the uncharted and the unknown, at the moment of death he will be thrilled, ecstatic. Now the last moment has come: he will be entering into the darkness, the dark tunnel of death. This is the greatest adventure one can ever go on; he will be learning.A real man never believes; he learns. A real man never becomes knowledgeable; he always remains open, open to truth. And he always remembers that “It is not that truth has to adjust to me, but just vice versa: I have to adjust to truth.” The believer tries to adjust truth to himself, the seeker adjusts himself to truth. Remember the difference; the difference is tremendous. One who believes, he says, “Truth should be like this, this is my belief.”Just think of a Christian… If God appears not like Jesus Christ but like Krishna, not on the cross but with a flute and girlfriends dancing around him, the Christian will close his eyes; he will say, “This is not my cup of tea.” Girlfriends? Can you think of Jesus with girlfriends? The cross and girlfriends can’t go together. Jesus hanging on the cross and girlfriends dancing around? It won’t fit, it will be very bizarre. He was waiting for Christ to appear, and instead of Christ this guy, Krishna, appears; he seems to be debauched. And the flute? The world is suffering and people are hungry and they need bread – and this man is playing on the flute? He seems to be utterly uncompassionate, he seems to be indulgent. The Christian cannot believe in Krishna: if God appears as Krishna, then the Christian will say, “This is not God.”And the same will be the case with the Hindu who was waiting for Krishna: if Christ appears, that will not be his idea of God – so sad, such a long face, so gloomy, with such suffering on his face.Christians say Jesus never laughed. I don’t think they are right, and I don’t think they represent the real Christ, but that’s what they have managed to propagate. The Hindu cannot accept the revelation; he must think this is some kind of nightmare. Jesus will not appeal to him.The believer cannot even trust his own experience. Even if truth is revealed, he will reject it, unless it fits with him. He is more important than truth itself; truth has an obligation to fit with him. He is the criterion, he is the decisive factor. This kind of man can never know truth; he is already prejudiced, poisoned.The man who wants to know truth has to be capable of dropping all concepts about truth. Everything about truth has to be dropped. Only then can you know truth. Know well: to know about truth is not to know truth. Whatsoever you know may be utter nonsense; there is every possibility that it is utter nonsense. In fact people can be conditioned to believe any kind of nonsense; they can be convinced.Once I went to address a conference of theosophists. Now, theosophists are people who will believe any bullshit – any! The more shitty it is, the more believable. So I just played a joke on them. I simply invented something; I invented a society called “Sitnalta.” They were all dozing, they became alert. Sitnalta? I made the word by just reading Atlantis backward. And then I told them, “This knowledge comes from Atlantis, the continent that disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean.”And then I talked about it, “There are really not seven chakras but seventeen. That great ancient esoteric knowledge is lost, but a society of enlightened masters still exists, and it still works. It is a very, very esoteric society, very few people are allowed to have any contact with it; its knowledge is kept utterly secret.”And I talked all kinds of nonsense that I could manage. And then the president of the society said, “I have heard about this society.” Now it was my turn to be surprised. And about whatsoever I had said, he said that it was the first time that the knowledge of this secret society had been revealed so exactly.And then letters started coming to me. One man even wrote saying, “I thank you very much for introducing this inner esoteric circle to the theosophists, because I am a member of the society, and I can vouch that whatsoever you have said is absolutely true.”There are people like these who are just waiting to believe in anything, because the more nonsensical a belief is, the more important it appears to be. The more absurd it is, the more believable – because if something is logical, then there is no question of believing in it.You don’t believe in the sun, you don’t believe in the moon. You don’t believe in the theory of relativity: either you understand it or you don’t understand it; there is no question of belief. You don’t believe in gravitation; there is no need. Nobody believes in a scientific theory – it is logical. Belief is needed only when something illogical, something utterly absurd, is propounded.Tertullian said, “I believe in God because it is absurd: Credo quia absurdum, my creed is the absurd.”All beliefs are absurd. If a belief is very logical, it will not create belief in you. So people go on inventing things.Man is basically a coward, he does not want to inquire. And he does not want to say “I don’t know” either.Now, that president of the theosophical society who said, “I have heard about this society” – he cannot say that he does not know, he does not have even that much courage. To accept one’s ignorance needs courage. To accept that you don’t know is the beginning of real knowledge. You go on believing, because there are holes in your life which have to be filled, and belief is easily available.There are three hundred religions on the earth. One truth, and three hundred religions? One existence, and three hundred religions? One existence, and three hundred religions? And I am not talking about sects – because each religion has dozens of sects, and then there are sub-sects of sects, and it goes on and on. If you count all the sects and all the sub-sects, then there will be three thousand or even more!How can so many beliefs, contradictory to each other, go on? People have a certain need – the need not to appear ignorant. How to fulfill this need? Gather a few beliefs. And the more absurd the belief is, the more knowledgeable you appear, because nobody else knows about it.There are people who believe in a hollow earth, and that inside the earth there is a civilization. Now, if somebody says so you cannot deny it; you cannot accept it, but at least you have to listen attentively. And that serves a purpose: everybody wants to be listened to attentively. And one thing is certain, this man knows more than you. You don’t know whether the earth is hollow or not; this man knows. And who knows? He may be right. He can gather a thousand and one proofs; he can argue for it, he can propound it in such a way that you at least have to be silent if you don’t agree.Believers and believers and believers – but where is truth? So many believers, but where is truth? If John Lilly is right, then the world would be full of truth, you would come across it everywhere. Everybody would have truth, because everybody is a believer. No, it is all nonsense.He says, “What the mind believes is true or becomes true.” No. What the mind believes is never true, because truth needs no belief. Belief is a barrier to truth. And what the mind believes never becomes true, because truth is not becoming, truth is being; it is already the case. You have to see it – or you can go on avoiding seeing it, but it is there. Nothing has to be added to it, it is eternally there.And the best way to avoid truth is to believe. Then you need not look at it. Your eyes become full of belief; belief functions as dust on the eyes. You become closed into yourself, the belief becomes a prison around you. Belief closes you; then you are living within yourself in a windowless existence, and you can go on believing whatsoever you want to believe. But remember, it is belief, and belief is a lie.Let me say that even when the truth is told to you, don’t believe in it. Explore, inquire, search, experiment, experience; don’t believe in it. Even when truth is conveyed to you, if you believe in it, you turn it into a lie. A truth believed is a lie, belief turns truth into a lie.Believe in Buddha and you believe in a lie. Believe in Christ and you believe in a lie. Don’t believe in Christ, don’t believe in Buddha, don’t believe in me. What I say, listen to it attentively, intelligently; experiment, experience. And when you have experienced, will you need to believe in it? There will be no doubt left, so what will be the point of belief? Belief is a way of repressing doubt: you doubt, hence you need belief. The rock of belief represses the spring of doubt.When you know, you know. You know it is so; there is no doubt left. Your experience has expelled all darkness and all doubt. Truth is; you are full of it. Truth never creates belief.How to attain to truth? By dropping all kinds of beliefs. And remember, I am saying all kinds – belief in me is included. Experience me, come along with me, let me share what I have seen, but don’t believe, don’t be in a hurry. Don’t say, “Now what is the point? Now that Osho has seen it, all that is left for me is to believe it.”What I have seen cannot become your experience unless you see it. And it is the experience of truth that delivers you from ignorance, from bondage, from misery. It is not the belief that delivers you, it is truth.Jesus says: “Truth liberates.” But how to attain to truth? It is not a question of belief, but a question of meditativeness. And what is meditation? Meditation is emptying your mind completely of all belief, ideology, concept, thought. Only in an empty mind, when there is no dust left on the mirror, truth reflects. That reflection is a benediction.The last question:Osho,Thank you so much just for life. All the beautiful methods are no good anymore. “I” will let the mind drop and the methods too. I fear that you will send me back to hell.Methods are never of any use. Methods have never been any good, but they still serve a purpose. The purpose is negative. If you have a thorn in your foot, you need another thorn to pull it out. Once the first thorn is pulled out by the second, don’t put the second back in the wound just out of gratefulness. Throw away both! The second thorn is as much a thorn as the first; their qualities are not different.Because your mind is so full of rubbish, you need something to pull it out. But whatsoever is going to pull it out is rubbish in its own way; it is the same. Poison is needed to kill poison. Don’t cling to the second poison, thinking it is medicine; don’t become addicted to the second poison.It is good that you say, “All the beautiful methods are no good anymore.” They never were. But they still serve a purpose, because man lives in such stupidity that he has to be pulled out of it. And remember, your lies, your beliefs, your ignorance, have to be dropped somehow; some ways and means have to be invented. Once your mind is dropped, you will see the whole ridiculousness of all the methods. Then you will understand that they were never needed at all.But don’t start talking about it to others, because there are many people who may drop them from the very beginning, seeing that if they are not needed then why bother? They are needed, although there comes a time when they have to be dropped. Use them, and drop them. All methods are like ladders. When you have climbed the ladder and you have reached the upper floor, you need not bother about it at all, it can be thrown away.In fact it should be thrown away. Keeping it may show some unconscious desire in you to go back; you want to keep the ladder there in case you decide to go back to your old rubbish. The ladder can help in that way too. A ladder is neutral – it can take you to the upper floor, it can bring you back down to the old situation. But the ladder cannot direct you.In fact the moment you have climbed the ladder, you have used it and reached a different plane of life, a different plane of understanding, throw the ladder away immediately, before you start clinging to it.So it is good that you think methods are no good anymore.“‘I’ will let the mind drop and the methods too.” If methods are no good anymore, where is the mind? And if the mind is still there to be dropped, then please don’t be in a hurry; the methods still have a little function to fulfill.You will not be able to let the mind drop. Who are you except the mind? Who will drop the mind, who will let the mind drop? You are not yet; you will know yourself only when the mind is dropped. When the mind disappears, you will know who you are. Before that, you don’t know. It is just the mind thinking about dropping the mind. The mind is very subtle, very cunning; it can go on playing new games. It can say, “Yes it is so beautiful to drop the mind.” And it is still the mind! And the mind can say, “There is no need for any method. You can drop me easily – it is up to you.”The mind is playing a very subtle trick. It is helping you to drop the methods first, and then the mind thinks, “We will see – we will see if you can drop me!”If it has really been understood – that methods are no longer useful – it is synonymous to that understanding that the mind is dropped. They mean the same thing: to know that methods are no longer needed, no longer useful, is to see that the mind is no longer there. Mind is method, mind is technique. The mind cannot exist without methods, methods cannot exist without the mind; they go together. They are two aspects of the same energy.And you say, “I fear that you will send me back to hell.” If methods are really dropped, there is no way to go back to hell. Even if I want to send you, I cannot. Methods are needed to go to hell. Methods are needed to come out of hell, methods are needed to go into hell, but no method is needed to go to heaven. When you are out of hell, you are in heaven.So the whole question is how to be out of hell? Out of hell is heaven. Heaven is not some place where you have to go, otherwise methods would be needed, paths and ways would be needed. No paths and no ways are needed. All paths, all ways, lead into hell. But if you are in hell, then you will have to use the same paths and the same ways to come back.Let me tell you one of the most beautiful parables that has ever been invented by man, the parable of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The moment they have eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge they fall – the original fall. They are no longer in paradise, they are no longer deathless, they are no longer in eternity; they have lost contact. What has happened? The mind has been created.That is the meaning of the parable. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge creates the mind; the moment they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the mind was created. Adam and Eve are still in the same place, in the same space, they have not gone anywhere. But the mind is created – and once the mind is there, paradise is lost, forgotten. One falls asleep and starts dreaming of hells, death, etcetera, etcetera. Now you will have to vomit the fruit of knowledge.You will have to vomit the mind out of your system. Once you have vomited knowledge out of your system, suddenly you will be awakened to the fact that you are in paradise. And you will start laughing at the whole ridiculousness of it, because you will know, you will become perfectly aware, that you had never been anywhere else. You have always been here, always and always – you had just fallen asleep and had a nightmare. Now that the poison is out of your system, the nightmare is finished.We are in the Garden of Eden, right now, this very moment. Nobody can send you to hell except knowledge, except methods, except the mind.Try to understand. Rather than being in a hurry to drop anything, try to understand. Become more aware, become more alert, more watchful, more observant, and methods will disappear and mind will disappear in the same instant. And then there is no hell – in fact there never has been, you had only imagined it. It is all paradise and always paradise. We are in existence, we are gods.Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Some time ago, while asleep in the night, I dreamed I was at a lecture. In the morning I could not remember anything you'd said except the phrase "Poetry is surrender." Since then I have been wondering what poetry has to do with surrender, and vice versa, and how poetry can be a path like love, prayer and meditation.Poetry contains all: it contains love, it contains prayer, it contains meditation, and much more. All that is divine, all that is beautiful, all that can take you to the transcendental, is contained in poetry.Poetry is not just poetry, poetry is essential religion. Poetry means a state of being where the mind is no longer interfering between you and existence; when there is communion between you and existence – direct, immediate; when you are suddenly possessed by the whole, where you disappear as a separate entity and the whole starts speaking through you, starts dancing through you; where you become a hollow bamboo and the whole transforms you into a flute.Poetry is the whole descending into the part, the ocean disappearing into the dewdrop. Poetry is a miracle.And when I use the word poetry my fingers are not pointing to the Shakespeares, the Kalidases; they are only partial poets. Yes, they knew certain moments of poetry, but they are not poets. They had a few glimpses when the doors of the unknown were open to them, they had some access to the deepest sources of life, but those moments were sheer gifts from the unknown. They knew nothing of how to reach them, they knew nothing about how the whole reached them. It was almost a state of unconsciousness. It happened in a dream, just as it has happened to you in a dream. They were dreamers.All the so-called great poets of the world, great painters, musicians, sculptors, they were all dreamers. Yes, they had a few glimpses in their dreams: something infiltrated, here and there a ray of light was able to pass through the dream barrier, and even that single ray was enough to create a Shakespeare or a Kalidas. But that’s not what I am pointing to.When I say poetry, I mean that which flowed through the buddhas. That is true poetry. Buddha is not a dreamer, Atisha is not a dreamer; if they are anything they are awakened people. Dreams have disappeared, evaporated. Now it is not only a glimpse of truth that comes to them unawares, possesses them, and then leaves them empty, spent, exhausted…The ordinary poet simply hops; for a moment he is off the ground, but only for a moment, and then he is back on the ground again.A buddha has wings – he does not hop. He knows how to go to the farthest star. He knows the way to approach the unknown, he has the key to unlock the doors to the mysterious. He is a master. And then something starts flowing through him which is not his own. He is only a medium; he is possessed. Then whatsoever he says is poetry; or, even if he keeps silent, his silence is poetry. His silence has tremendous music in it; whether he speaks or not doesn’t matter. Speaking, he speaks poetry; not speaking, he remains poetry. He is surrounded by poetry: he walks in poetry, he sleeps in poetry, poetry is his very soul, it is his essential being.How does this poetry happen? It happens in surrender, it happens when the part gathers enough courage to surrender to the whole, when the dewdrop slips into the ocean and becomes the ocean.Surrender is a very paradoxical state: on the one hand you disappear, on the other hand you appear for the first time in your infinite glory, in your multidimensional splendor. Yes, the dewdrop is gone, and gone forever; there is no way to recapture it, to reclaim it. The dewdrop has died as a drop, but in fact the dewdrop has become the ocean, has become oceanic. It still exists, no longer as a finite entity, but as something infinite, shore-less, boundless.This is the meaning of the myth of the phoenix. He dies, he is utterly burned, reduced to ashes, and then suddenly he is reborn out of the ashes – resurrection. The phoenix represents Christ: crucifixion and resurrection. The phoenix represents Buddha: death as an ego, and a new birth as utter egolessness. It represents all those who have known; to know means to be a phoenix. Die as you are, so that you can be that which you really are! Die in all your inauthenticity, phoniness, separation from existence.We go on believing that we are separate. We are not, not even for a single moment. In spite of your belief, you are one with the whole. But your belief can create nightmares for you; it is bound to create them. To believe that “I am separate” means to create fear.If you are separate from the whole, you can never get rid of fear, because the whole is so vast and you are so small, so tiny, so atomic, and you constantly have to fight the whole so that it does not absorb you. You have to be constantly alert, on guard, so the ocean does not simply take you in. You have to protect yourself behind walls and walls and walls. All this effort is nothing but fear. And then you are constantly aware that death is reaching you and death is going to destroy your separation. That’s what death is all about: death is the whole claiming the part back. And you are afraid that death will come and you will die. How to live long? How to attain a kind of deathlessness? Man tries it in many ways. To have children is one of the ways, hence the continuous urge to have children. The root of this desire to have children has nothing to do with children at all, it has something to do with death.You know you will not be able to be here forever; howsoever you try, you are going to fail, you know it, because millions have failed and nobody has ever succeeded. You are hoping against hope. Then find some other ways. One of the simplest ways, the most ancient way, is to have children: you will not be here, but something of you, a particle of you, a cell of you, will go on living. That is a vicarious way of becoming immortal.Now science is finding far more sophisticated ways – because your child may look a little bit like you, or may not look like you at all, and he will only be just a little bit like you; there is no intrinsic necessity for him to appear exactly like you. So now science has found ways to duplicate you. Some of your cells can be preserved, and when you die, a duplicate can be created out of those cells. And the duplicate will be exactly like you; not even twins are so alike. If you meet your duplicate you will be surprised: he will be exactly like you, absolutely like you.Now they say that to be safer, a duplicate can be created while you are alive, and the duplicate can be kept in deep freeze, so if some accident happens, if you die in a car accident, you can be immediately replaced. Your wife will never be able to detect it, your children will never come to know that this daddy is just an imitation, because he will be exactly like you.Men have tried in other ways also, far more sophisticated than this one. Write books, paint pictures, compose great symphonies: you will be gone but the music will remain; you will be gone, but your signature will be there on the book; you will be gone, but the sculpture that you created will be there. It will remind people of you, you will persist in their memories. You will not be able to walk on the earth, but you will be able to walk in people’s memories. It is better than nothing. Become famous, leave some marks in the history books – of course they will be only footnotes, but still, something is better than nothing.Man has been trying, down the ages, somehow to have some kind of immortality. The fear of death is so much, it haunts you your whole life.The moment you drop the idea of separation, the fear of death disappears. Hence I call this state of surrender the most paradoxical. You die of your own accord and then you cannot die at all, because the whole never dies, only its parts are being replaced. But if you become one with the whole, you will live forever: you will go beyond birth and death.That’s the search for nirvana, enlightenment, moksha, the kingdom of God – the state of deathlessness. But the condition that has to be fulfilled is very frightening. The condition is: first you have to die as a separate entity. That’s what surrender is all about: dying as a separate entity, dying as an ego. And in fact it is nothing to be worried about, because you are not separate, it is only a belief. So only the belief dies, not you. It is only a notion, an idea.It is as if you have seen a rope in the darkness of the night, and you have got the notion that it is a snake, and you are escaping from the snake in tremendous fear, trembling, perspiring. And then somebody comes along and says, “Don’t be worried. I have seen it in daylight, and I know perfectly well that it is only a rope. If you don’t trust me, ihi passiko, come with me! I will show you that it is only a rope.”And that’s what the buddhas have been doing down the ages, “Ihi passiko, come with me! Come and see!” They take the rope in their hand and they show you that this is only a rope, the snake was never there in the first place. All fear disappears, you start laughing. You start laughing at yourself, at how foolish you have been. You have been escaping from something which never existed in the first place. But whether it existed or not, those drops of perspiration were real; the fear, the trembling, the heartbeat going faster, the blood pressure – all those things were real.Unreal things can trigger real things, remember it. If you think they are real, they function for you as reality – only for you. It is a dream reality, but it can affect you, it can affect your whole life, your whole lifestyle.The ego is not there. The moment you become a little alert, aware, conscious, you will not find the ego at all. It will be a rope that you had misconceived as a snake; you will not find the snake anywhere.Death does not exist, death is unreal. But you create it, you create it by creating separation. Surrender means dropping the idea of separation: death disappears automatically, fear is found no more, and your whole flavor of life changes. Then each moment is such crystal purity, a purity of delight, joy, bliss. Then each moment is eternity. And to live that way is poetry, to live moment to moment without the ego is poetry. To live without the ego is grace, is music; to live without the ego is to live, to really live. That life I call poetry: the life of one who is surrendered to existence.And remember, let me repeat it again: when you surrender to existence you are not surrendering anything real. You are simply surrendering a false notion, you are simply surrendering an illusion, you are surrendering maya. You are surrendering something that you never had with you in the first place. And by surrendering that which you don’t have, you attain to that which you have.And to know that “I am at home, I always have been and I always will be,” is a great moment of relaxation. Knowing that “I am not an outsider, I am not alienated, I am not uprooted,” that “I belong to existence and the existence belongs to me,” all becomes calm and quiet and still. This stillness is surrender.The word surrender gives you a very wrong idea, as if you are surrendering something. You are not surrendering anything; you are simply dropping a dream, you are simply dropping something arbitrary that the society had created.The ego is needed, it has certain functions to fulfill in the society. Even when one is surrendered to existence, one goes on using the word I – but now it is only something utilitarian, nothing existential. He knows he is not; he uses the word because not using it will be unnecessarily creating trouble for others, it will make communication impossible. It is already impossible! It will be more difficult to communicate with people. So it is just an arbitrary device. If you know it is a device, arbitrary, utilitarian, useful but nothing existential, then it never creates any problem for you.Your dream has given you a glimpse, your dream has allowed you to see something, something you may not be allowing while you are awake. It sometimes happens. The conscious mind is more egoistic, obviously; the ego never penetrates into the unconscious. The society can only teach the conscious; the society cannot teach the unconscious, at least not yet – they are trying hard.In Soviet Russia particularly, they are trying hard to teach the unconscious. And unfortunately they are succeeding. They are teaching people while they are asleep. When you are asleep your conscious is no longer functioning; your unconscious functions. Now, in Russia particularly, they are doing great experiments in teaching people while they are asleep. It can be done, it is being done.This is one of the great dangers that future generations will have to face. If the politicians have gadgets with them which can teach people while they are asleep, then there will never be any possibility of rebellion.While he is asleep, you can make a person a communist, Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Mohammedan, and because it will be in his unconscious he will be absolutely unable to go beyond it. He will not be able to get rid of it, because the unconscious is nine times more powerful than the conscious. The conscious is only the tip of the iceberg: one-tenth of your mind is conscious, nine-tenths is unconscious. If the politician can reach the unconscious, then humanity is doomed. Then children will be taught while they are asleep. Even sleep will not be your own and private; even sleep will not be a personal thing, it will be owned by the state. You will not even be allowed to dream private dreams; the state will decide what dreams you can dream – because you may be dreaming some anti-state dreams, and the state cannot afford them. Your dreams can be manipulated, your unconscious can be manipulated, but fortunately it has not happened yet.You may be the last generation which has the possibility to rebel. And if you don’t rebel, there may be no more chances: humanity can be reduced to a “robotlike” existence. So rebel while there is still time! I don’t think there is much time left, maybe just this last part of the century, these coming twenty or twenty-five years. If humanity can rebel in these next twenty-five years, this is the last opportunity; otherwise people will be utterly unable to, their unconscious will dominate them. Up to now, the society has only been able to pollute your conscious mind – through education, through the church, through propaganda – but only your conscious mind; your unconscious is still free.It happens more often that you are closer to the truth, closer to reality, when you are deeply asleep. It is very strange, it should not be so; you should be closer to reality while you are awake. But your wakefulness is no longer yours; it is Hindu, it is Christian, it is Mohammedan, it is no longer yours; society has already impinged upon it, interfered with it, distorted it. But the unconscious is still yours.Hence psychoanalysis became so interested in your dreams, because in your dreams you are truer. In your dreams you are less false, in your dreams all the censors of the society disappear. In your dreams you are saying things as they are, seeing things as they are, seeing yourself as you are. The moment you are awake, you start pretending. Your wakefulness is a long, long pretension.Hence sleep is so relaxing, because to be continuously on guard and say the things which are supposed to be said, and do the things which the society requires to be done, is tiring, very tiring. One needs to fall into deep sleep every day for eight hours to get rid of all this, to be natural again, to forget the society and the nightmare and the hell that it has created.The more alert you become, the more watchful you are, the freer from the bondage of the society and its clutches, then only your body will need sleep, and even in your sleep there will continue an undercurrent of awareness. Your mind will not need any sleep; there is no intrinsic necessity for it to go to sleep, it is a created necessity.When your mind is clear, untethered, free, you will have less and less need for the mind to go to sleep. And then a miracle happens: if you can remain alert even while the body is asleep, you will know for the first time that you are separate from the body. The body is asleep and you are awake. How can you both be identical, how can you both be one? You will see the difference; the difference is so vast.The body belongs to the earth, you belong to the sky. The body belongs to matter, you belong to existence. The body is gross, you are not. The body has limits, is born and will die; you are never born and you will never die. This becomes your own experience, not a belief.Belief is fear-oriented. You would like to believe that you are immortal, but belief is just a belief, something pseudo, painted from the outside. Experience is totally different: it wells up within you, it is your own. And the moment you know, nothing can ever shake your knowing, nothing can destroy your knowing. The whole world may be against it, but you will still know that you are separate. The whole world may say there is no soul, but you will know there is. The whole world may say there is no godliness, but you will smile – because the experience is self-validating, it is self-evident.Your dream may be very significant. What you have not allowed in your waking consciousness has sprung up in your dreaming consciousness. A ray of light has entered you.In the West, before Freud, waking consciousness was thought to be the only consciousness; not so in the East – even after Freud, although dreaming consciousness has been accepted as valuable, one thing has still not yet happened: dreamless sleep is still ignored. This is not so in the East. The East has always accepted waking consciousness as the most superficial, dreaming consciousness as far deeper and more significant, and sleeping consciousness as even deeper, even more significant than dreaming consciousness. The West needs yet another Freud to introduce sleep as the most significant part.But the East knows something still more. There is a point, the fourth state of consciousness. It is called turiya, simply “the fourth”; it has no other name. Turiya means the fourth. When waking, dreaming and sleep all disappear, one is simply a witness. You cannot call it waking, because this witness never sleeps; you cannot call it dreaming, because for this witness no dream ever appears; you cannot call it sleep, because this witness never sleeps. It is eternal awareness. This is the bodhichitta of Atisha, this is christ-consciousness, this is buddhahood, enlightenment.So always be careful. Be more careful of your dreams than your waking, be more careful again of your dreamless sleep than of dreaming. And remember that you have to search for the fourth, because only the fourth is the ultimate. With the fourth you have arrived home. Now there is nowhere to go.You say you have forgotten all about the dream, but only remembered one phrase, “Poetry is surrender.” That is the very essence of my teaching. The most fundamental thing about my message to the world is, poetry is surrender – and vice versa, surrender is poetry.I would like my sannyasins, all of my sannyasins, to be creative – poets, musicians, painters, sculptors, and so on and so forth. In the past, the sannyasins of all the religions have lived a very uncreative life. They were respected for their uncreativity, and because of this uncreativity they have not added any beauty to the world. They have been a burden; they have not brought something of paradise to the earth. In fact they have been destructive – because you can either be creative, or you are bound to be destructive. You cannot remain neutral; either you have to affirm life with all its joys, or you start condemning life.The past has been a long, long drawn-out nightmare of destructive attitudes, life-negative approaches. I teach you life-affirmation. I teach you reverence for life. I teach you not renunciation but rejoicing. Become poets! And when I say become poets, I don’t mean that you all have to become Shakespeares, Miltons and Tennysons. If I come across Shakespeare and Milton and Tennyson, then too I will say please become poets – because they are only dreaming about poetry.Real poetry happens in the fourth state of consciousness. All the great so-called poets have only been dreamers; they were confined to the second state of consciousness. Prose remains confined to the first – waking consciousness, and your poetry is confined to the second.The poetry I am talking about is possible only in the fourth. When you have become fully alert, clear, when there is no mind anymore, then whatsoever you do will be poetry, whatsoever you do will be music. And even if you don’t do a thing, poetry will surround you, it will be your fragrance, it will be your very presence.You ask me, “Since then I have been wondering what poetry has to do with surrender, and vice versa, and how poetry can be a path like love, prayer and meditation.” Love is a path, prayer is a path, meditation is a path, because they are ways to poetry. Anything that leads you to godliness is bound to lead you to poetry. The godly man can be nothing but a poet. He will sing a song, not his own anymore of course: he will sing a song of existence. He will give utterance to the silence of existence, he will be a mouthpiece to the whole.I teach you meditation, prayer, love, only because they all take you to the center. And the center is poetry. They are all ways to poetry. To dissolve yourself in poetry is to dissolve yourself in existence – and certainly without surrender it is not possible. If you remain too much, godliness cannot happen. You have to be absent for it to become a presence in you.Die, so that you can be.The second question:Osho,Utter confusion is my part. Good and bad have ceased to exist. I am neither proud nor ashamed and yet I am both. Whatever I have achieved seems lost in a fog, resolved together with my failures. Like smoke I feel, but through the smoke a tremendous sadness arises like a sharp rock with a velvet covering. Osho, I can't perceive the end of it – or is there no end? Is it ecstasy carrying the weight of impurity? Please, Osho, give me sannyas.Confusion is a great opportunity. The problem with people who are not confused is great – they think they know, and they know not. The people who believe that they have clarity are really in great trouble; their clarity is very superficial. In fact they know nothing of clarity; what they call clarity is just stupidity.Idiots are very, very clear – clear in the sense that they do not have the intelligence to feel confusion. To feel confusion needs great intelligence. Only the intelligent ones feel confusion; otherwise the mediocres go on moving in life, smiling, laughing, accumulating money, struggling for more power and fame. If you see them you will feel a little jealous; they look so confident, they even look happy.If they are succeeding, if their money is increasing and their power is increasing and their fame is growing, you will feel a little jealous. You are so confused and they are so clear about their life; they have a direction, they have a goal, they know how to attain it, and they are managing, they are already achieving, they are climbing the ladder. And you are just standing there, confused about what to do, what not to do, what is right and what is wrong. But this has always been so; the mediocre remains certain. It is only for the more intelligent to feel confusion, chaos.Confusion is a great opportunity. It simply says that through the mind there is no way. If you are really confused – as you say, “I am utterly confused” – if you are really confused, you are blessed. Now something is possible, something immensely valuable; you are on the verge. If you are utterly confused, that means the mind has failed; now the mind can no longer supply any certainty to you. You are coming closer and closer to the death of the mind.And that is the greatest thing that can happen to any man in life, the greatest blessing – because once you see that the mind is confusion and there is no way out through the mind, how long can you go on clinging to the mind? Sooner or later you will have to drop it; even if you don’t drop it, it will drop of its own accord. Confusion will become so much, so heavy, that out of sheer heaviness it will drop. And when the mind drops, confusion disappears.I cannot say that you attain to certainty, no, because that too is a word applicable only to the mind and the world of the mind. When there is confusion, there can be certainty; when confusion disappears, certainty also disappears. You simply are – clear, neither confused nor certain, just a clarity, a transparency. And that transparency has beauty, that transparency is grace, it is exquisite.It is the most beautiful moment in one’s life when there is neither confusion nor certainty. One simply is: a mirror reflecting that which is, with no direction, going nowhere, with no idea of doing something, with no future, just utterly in the moment, tremendously in the moment.When there is no mind there can be no future, there can be no program for the future. Then this moment is all, all in all; this moment is your whole existence. The whole existence starts converging on this moment, and the moment becomes tremendously significant. It has depth, it has height, it has mystery, it has intensity, it has fire, it has immediacy; it grips you, it possesses you, it transforms you.But I cannot give you certainty; certainty is given by ideology. Certainty is nothing but patching up your confusion. You are confused. Somebody says, “Don’t be worried,” and says it very authoritatively, convinces you with arguments, with scriptures, and patches up your confusion, covers it with a beautiful blanket – with the Bible, with the Koran, with the Gita. And you feel good; but it is temporary, because the confusion is boiling within. You have not got rid of it, it has only been repressed.That’s why people cling to beliefs, churches, scriptures, doctrines, systems of thought. Why do people invest so much in systems of thought? Why should somebody be a Christian or a Hindu? Why should somebody be a communist – for what? There is a reason, a great reason too. Everybody is confused, and so somebody is needed to supply you with certainty. He can be the pope or he can be Mao Zedong, he can be Karl Marx or he can be Manu or Moses – anybody will do. And whenever there are great times of crisis, any stupid person who has the stubbornness to shout, to argue, who can pretend certainty, will become your leader. That’s how Adolf Hitlers, Josef Stalins and Mussolinis become important people.People have always been wondering why Adolf Hitler could dominate a great, intelligent race like the Germans. Why? It appears a paradox that a man like Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest thinkers of this age, was a supporter of Adolf Hitler. The great professors of the great German universities supported Adolf Hitler. Why? How was it possible?And Adolf Hitler was just a stupid person, uneducated, unsophisticated. But he had something in him that the professors were lacking, that intelligent people were lacking, that the Martin Heideggers were lacking. He had something in him that no intelligent person can have: he had absolute certainty. He was idiotic – but he could say things with no ifs and no buts; he could make statements as if he knew. He was a madman, but his madness had great impact. It changed the whole course of human history.It is not a surprise that the Germans became so interested and impressed by him. They were intelligent people, some of the most intelligent people on the earth, and intelligence always brings confusion. That is the secret of Adolf Hitler’s success. Intelligence brings confusion and confusion brings trembling, fear; one knows not where to go, what to do, and one starts looking for a leader. One starts searching for somebody who can say things with absoluteness, who can assert categorically.The same has happened in India; it has happened just now. This is one of the most ancient countries of the world, with the longest tradition of thinking and contemplation, the longest tradition of philosophizing. No other country has philosophized so much. And then this country chooses a man like Morarji Desai as the prime minister – a cabbage! But he has something in him – the stubbornness of a mediocre mind, the absoluteness of stupidity. He has something important to supply.Whenever people are in confusion they fall prey to third-rate minds. The first-rate minds fall prey to third-rate minds because the third-rate mind has no confusion. The third-rate mind knows that just by drinking your own urine all diseases can be cured – even cancer is curable by drinking your own urine. It is only possible to assert this if you really are utterly unintelligent.The intelligent person hesitates, ponders, wavers. The unintelligent never wavers, never hesitates. Where the wise will whisper, the fool simply declares from the housetops.Lao Tzu says, “I may be the only muddle-headed man in the world. Everybody seems to be so certain, except me.” He is right; he has such tremendous intelligence that he cannot be certain about anything.I cannot promise you certainty if you drop the mind. I can promise you only one thing, that you will be clear. There will be clarity, transparency, you will be able to see things as they are. You will be neither confused nor certain. Certainty and confusion are two sides of the same coin.But you are in a beautiful moment, and the world too is in a beautiful moment. Whenever there is a crisis of identity, whenever people don’t know who they are, whenever the past loses its grip, whenever people are uprooted from the traditional, whenever the past no longer seems relevant, this crisis arises, a great crisis of identity – who are we, what are we supposed to do?This opportunity can turn into a curse too, if you fall victim to some Adolf Hitler; but this curse can become a great opening into the unknown if you are fortunate enough to be in the vicinity of a buddha. If you are fortunate enough to be in love with a buddha, your life can be transformed.People who are still rooted in tradition, and who think they know what is right and what is wrong, will never come to a buddha. They will continue to live their life – the routine life, the dull, the dead life. They will go on fulfilling their duties as their forefathers used to do. For centuries they have been following a track and they will go on following that trodden track. Of course, when you follow a trodden track, you feel certain – so many people have walked on it. But when you come to a buddha and you start moving into the unknown, there is no highway, no trodden path. You will have to make your own path by walking; the path will not be found ready-made.That’s what I want each of my sannyasins to understand. You are not here to depend on me, you are not here to follow me, you are not here simply to accept me and believe in me. You are here to experiment; you have to move on your own. I can give you encouragement to move on your own, I can trigger a process of inquiry in you; but I will not give you a system of thought, I will not give you any certainty. I will only give you a pilgrimage – a pilgrimage which is hazardous, a pilgrimage which has millions and millions of pitfalls, a pilgrimage in which you will have to face more and more dangers every day, a pilgrimage that will take you to the top of human consciousness, to the fourth state. But the higher you go, the more is the danger of falling.I can only promise you a great adventure, risky, dangerous, with no promise that you will attain it – because the unknown cannot be guaranteed.So, if you have come to me to find some remedy for your confusion, then you have come to the wrong person, I am not the right person to be with. But if you have come to drop confusion and certainty, and be free of the mind that can either give you confusion or certainty, if you have come to me to go on the ultimate adventure in search of godliness, if you have come to me to dare, to accept the challenge of the uncharted sea, the roaring waves, with no possibility of seeing the other shore, then you have come to the right person. Then much is possible. I only say “possible” – I cannot say it is absolutely certain. It is always a possibility; you may be able to make it, you may not be able to make it, there is no guarantee. It is not a commodity that can be guaranteed; it is a gamble.And if you are ready to gamble, enter into this buddhafield. No need to wait any longer – you have already waited long enough, for many, many lives.You ask me, “Please, Osho, give me sannyas.” It is not a question of my giving you sannyas; it is a question of you taking it. Open your heart! I am always giving it. The question is of your receiving it, welcoming it.You say, “Good and bad have ceased to exist.” That is good, that’s beautiful. Good and bad are all man-made, sinners and saints are all man-made. And they are not different at all; the difference is only superficial, very superficial, not even skin-deep. Scratch a little, and in your saint you will find the sinner.This guy went to the pope and he said, “Hey pope, fuck you!”The pope could not believe it. He said, “Me? The head of the Catholic Church? Me, the spiritual head of millions and millions? Me, the direct descendant of Jesus Christ? Me, the only representative of God on earth? Fuck me? Fuck you!”There is not much difference. Just scratch a little, and you will find sinners in the saints and you will find saints in the sinners. All good, all bad, is just arbitrary, man-made.It’s a beautiful space you are entering. If good and bad have ceased to exist, so far, so good! Now enter another dimension, not man-made, where distinctions are of no relevance, where nothing is good and nothing is bad, where whatsoever is, is, and whatever ain’t, ain’t. There is no question of good and bad; either something is or something is not. Good and bad are nothing but alternatives to be chosen – either choose this, or choose that. They keep you in the division of either/or.The moment you start seeing the hocus-pocus-ness of all good and bad, when you start seeing that they are socially manufactured things… Of course they are utilitarian, and I am not saying to go into the marketplace and behave as if there is nothing good and nothing wrong. I am not saying to walk in the middle of the road, saying what does it matter whether one walks on the right or the left.When you are with people, remember, for them good and bad still exist. Be respectful to them and their dreams. It is not for you to disturb anybody’s dream. Who are you? It is not for you to interfere. Be polite to people and their stupidities, be polite to them and their games. But all the time remember, deep down nothing is good, nothing is bad.Existence is simply there; there is nothing to choose between. And remember, when there is nothing to choose between, you will become undivided. When there is something to choose between, it divides you too. Division is a double-edged sword: it divides reality outside, it divides you inside. If you choose, you choose division, you choose to be split, you choose schizophrenia. If you don’t choose, if you know there is nothing good, nothing bad, you choose sanity.Not choosing anything is choosing sanity, not choosing is to be sane, because now there is no division outside, how can you be divided inside? The inside and the outside go together. You become indivisible, you become an individual. This is the process of individuation. Nothing is good, nothing is bad. When this dawns in your consciousness, suddenly you are together, all fragments have disappeared into one unity. You are crystallized, you are centered.This is one of the greatest contributions of Eastern consciousness to the world. The Western religions still go on hanging around the idea of good and bad. That’s why it is so difficult for the Christian to understand the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu; it is impossible for them to understand. They are always looking with the Christian mind, “Where are the commandments?” And there are none! The Upanishads never say what is good and what is wrong, they never say what to do and what not to do, they don’t command. They are poetic assertions, they are poetry. They exult in existence, they are ecstatic, overflowing; they are just ecstatic ejaculations.The Upanishads say, “God is, and you are that: tattvamasi.” The Upanishads say, “God is, and I am God.” These are assertions arising out of ecstasy. They have no ethics, no morality, no reference even. The Christian mind, the Mohammedan mind, the Jewish mind, cannot understand why these books are thought to be religious. They may be good literature, but why are they thought to be religious?And if you ask one who has reached the same ecstasy as the Upanishadic seers, he will say the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, they are ethical, moral, but what do they have to do with religion? They are good, because they make a society move smoothly, but they have nothing religious in them – or maybe only a few statements here and there. The major part is ethical; the religious part seems to be so small that it can be neglected, ignored. And it has been ignored.To come to know that nothing is good, nothing is bad, is a turning point; it is a conversion. You start looking in; the outside reality loses meaning. The social reality is a fiction, a beautiful drama: you can participate in it, but then you don’t take it seriously. It is just a role to be played; play it as beautifully, as efficiently, as possible. But don’t take it seriously, it has nothing of the ultimate in it.The ultimate is the inner; the indivisible soul knows it. And, to come to that soul, this is a good turning-point.You say, “Good and bad have ceased to exist.” This is the right moment to take sannyas, this is what sannyas is all about. Now there is no need to wait, now there is no need even to ask my permission. Sannyas is already happening. Enter into this buddhafield. You have waited long – too long, really.I have heard…An old couple reached the divorce court. They were really ancient, ninety-five years old, and they had been married for seventy-five years. The judge could not believe his eyes. He said, “So you are thinking of divorce now, after seventy-five years of married life? Why now?”They looked at each other, and then the old man said, “Well, we waited till all the children were dead.”People go on waiting and waiting and waiting… Now, what hope! There is no need to wait anymore. You are welcome, you are ready. Even people who are not ready, I welcome them – because those who are not ready today may be ready tomorrow. Those who are not ready when they take sannyas, may be ready after they have taken sannyas. And who am I to refuse you if existence accepts you? I am nobody to refuse you.That’s why nobody is refused, no condition is made, nobody is thought to be unworthy. If existence thinks you worthy of being alive, that’s enough proof that you are also worthy of becoming a sannyasin.You say, “I am neither proud nor ashamed and yet I am both.” That’s the state of confusion. You will find everything like that – neither this nor that, yet both.“Whatever I have achieved seems lost in a fog” – you are really blessed – “resolved together with my failures.” Many should feel jealous of you. To know that all has failed is the beginning of a new journey. To know that “All that I have achieved is lost” is the beginning of a new search for something that cannot be lost. When one is utterly disillusioned with the world and all its successes, only then does one become spiritual.“Like smoke I feel, but through the smoke a tremendous sadness arises, like a sharp rock with a velvet covering.” It is bound to be so. When life has been lived through illusions and one day one suddenly feels all has been meaningless, useless – “I was chasing shadows” – a great sadness arises.But I can see your perceptiveness. Sadness is there, but “with a velvet covering.” Yes, sadness is there because of the past, and the velvet covering is what is possible; it only becomes possible now. Out of all this confusion is sadness; but because of this confusion and its utterness, deep down a new stirring is happening. You may not be aware of it yet, but something is stirring, a new joy is arising behind the curtain of sadness – a joy of a new search, of a new adventure, of a new life, of a new way to be.“Osho, I can’t perceive the end of it – or is there no end?” There is a beginning of the mind and there is an end of the mind, there is a beginning of the ego and there is an end of the ego, but there is no beginning to you and no end to you. And there is no beginning to the mystery of existence and no end to you. It is an ongoing process. Mysteries upon mysteries are waiting for you, hence the thrill and the ecstasy.Feel ecstatic that there is no end to life, that when you have reached one peak, suddenly another peak starts giving you challenges – a higher one, a more arduous climb, a more dangerous reach. And when you have reached the other peak, there will be another peak, peaks upon peaks. It is an eternal Himalayas of life.Just think of a point where you arrive, and now there is nothing else left. You will be utterly bored then; boredom will be your only fate! And life is not boredom, it is a dance. Life is not boredom, it is exultation, exuberance.Many, many things are going to happen, and many, many things will always remain to happen. The mystery never ends, it cannot end. That’s why it is called a mystery, it cannot even be known. It will never become knowledge, that’s why it is called a mystery; something in it is eternally elusive. And that’s the whole joy of life. The great splendor of life is that it keeps you eternally engaged, searching, exploring. Life is exploration, life is adventure.You ask, “Osho, I can’t perceive the end of it or is there no end?” There is an end to you, but there is no end to the real you.“Is it ecstasy carrying the weight of impurity?” There is no impurity anywhere. All is pure. Impurity is just a shadow of the confusion that you are feeling right now. When the confusion and the confusing mind are dropped, the shadows will disappear of their own accord.Your innermost core has always been pure; purity is intrinsic to you, it cannot be taken away. Your virginity is eternal; you cannot lose it, there is no way to lose it. You can only forget about it or remember it. If you forget about it, you live in confusion; if you remember it, all is clear. Again, I will not say “certain,” but just “clear.” All is transparent. That transparency is freedom, that transparency is wisdom. This transparency is your birthright; if you are not claiming it, nobody else is responsible except you. Claim it! It is yours. It is yours just for the asking.Sannyas is an effort to reclaim that which is yours and to drop that which is not yours. Sannyas is an effort to drop that which you really don’t have, and to claim that which you always had with you all along.Ecstasy is our very nature; not to be ecstatic is simply unnecessary. To be ecstatic is natural, spontaneous. It needs no effort to be ecstatic, it needs great effort to be miserable. That’s why you look so tired, because misery is really hard work; to maintain it is really difficult, because you are doing something against nature. You are going upstream – that’s what misery is.And what is bliss? Going with the river – so much so that the distinction between you and the river is simply lost. You are the river. How can it be difficult? To go with the river no swimming is needed; you simply float with the river and the river takes you to the ocean. The river is already going to the ocean.Life is a river. Don’t push it and you will not be miserable. The art of not pushing the river of life is sannyas.You are ready. This moment of confusion, this moment of chaos in your life, can open a new door, can turn a new leaf. Don’t wait anymore.Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Begin the development of taking with yourself.When evil fills the inanimate and animate universes change bad conditions to the bodhi path.Drive all blame into one.Be grateful to everyone.The insurpassable protection of emptiness is to see the manifestations of bewilderment as the four kayas.An excellent means is to have the four provisions.In order to bring any situation to the path quickly as soon as it is met, join it with meditation.The concise epitome of heart instruction: work with "five forces."The instructions for transference in the Mahayana are the "five forces." Behavior is important.The purpose of all dharma is contained in one point.Meditation is the source, compassion is the overflow of that source. The non-meditative man has no energy for love, for compassion, for celebration. The non-meditative person is disconnected from his own source of energy; he is not in contact with the ocean. He has a little bit of energy that is created by food, by air, by matter – he lives on physical energy.Physical energy has limitations. It is born at a certain moment in time, and it dies at another moment in time. Between birth and death it exists. It is like a lamp that burns because of the oil in it – once the oil is exhausted, the flame goes out.The meditative person comes to know something of the infinite, becomes bridged with the inexhaustible source of energy. His flame goes on and on, his flame knows no cessation. It cannot disappear, because in the first place it never appears. It cannot die, because it is unborn.How to bridge oneself with this inexhaustible source of life, abundance, richness? You can call that inexhaustible source existence, or you can call it truth or anything that you wish to call it. But one thing is absolutely certain: that man is a wave of something infinite.If the wave looks inward it will find the infinite. If it goes on looking outward it remains disconnected – disconnected from its own kingdom, disconnected from its own nature. Jesus calls this nature the kingdom of God. He again and again says, “The kingdom of God is within you. Go within.”Meditation is nothing but a bridge to go within. Once meditation has happened, the only thing that remains to happen is compassion.Buddha, the original master in Atisha’s line, said don’t remain contented with meditation unless compassion happens,. You have gone only halfway, you have yet to go a little further. Meditation, if it is true, is bound to overflow into compassion. Just as when a lamp is lit it immediately starts radiating light, it immediately starts dispersing darkness; once the inner light is lit, compassion is its radiation.Compassion is the proof that meditation has happened. Love is the fragrance that proves that the one-thousand-petaled lotus in the innermost core of your being has bloomed, that the spring has come – that you are no longer the same person you used to be, that that personality has ceased and individuality is born, that you are not living any longer in darkness, that you are light.These sutras are practical instructions, remember it. Atisha is not a philosopher, no wise man ever is. He is not a thinker; thinking is only for the mediocre, the foolish. The wise does not think, the wise knows. Thinking is an effort to know; it is guesswork, groping in the dark, shooting arrows in the dark.Wisdom is knowing. And when you know, you need not guess. You are not guessing that this is morning and the birds are singing and the trees are bathed in sunlight. You are not guessing it, you are not thinking that it is so. If somebody is guessing it, then he must be blind or at least drunk. It is an experience, and every experience is self-validating.Atisha is not a speculative thinker. What he is saying is not a philosophy or a system of thought. It is how he has attained; he is showing you the way. And the buddhas can only show the way – you will have to walk on it, nobody else can walk for you. Nobody else can do it for you; no proxy is possible in existence.Yes, others can communicate how they attained, what pitfalls to avoid, how to go on judging whether you are moving in the right direction or not, what energies to use and what energies to discard, what is helpful and what is a hindrance. They can give you little hints about the path – and I say “little hints”; they cannot give you a complete map either, because each individual will have to follow a path that is a little bit different, and each individual will come across unique experiences that nobody has come across before and nobody may ever come across again.Each individual is so unique that no absolute map can be given, only hints, vague hints, indications.You are not to cling to these instructions. Just understand them, absorb them, and don’t be a fanatic. Don’t say, “This has to be like this. If it is not like this then I am not going to follow it, then something is wrong.” It will be something like this, but in a very vague way. It will have a similar fragrance but it will not be exactly the same. Similar, yes, but not the same. One has to be aware of it. If one is not aware, then one becomes a fanatic – and fanatics have never arrived, their very fanaticism prevents them.These are small hints. These are not mathematical, these are not like two plus two is four. In the world of the mysterious, sometimes two plus two is three, sometimes two plus two is five. It is very rarely that two plus two is four, very rarely; it is the exception, not the rule. It is not mathematics, it is music. It is not logic, it is poetry.When you read a logical treatise, you read with a different mind. If you read poetry you need a totally different approach. In logic there is a clear-cut process, the process of syllogism – you know that this is so, and this is so, therefore this is bound to be so. There is a “therefore.”In poetry there is no “therefore.” Poetry takes quantum leaps. Poetry is a vision, not a logical process; a song, not a syllogism. Yes, even the song has some intrinsic logic in it, but it is not on the surface. And it is not for those who are on the path, it is only for those who have arrived.Once you have arrived you will see the whole logicalness of each step that you had taken, but not before it. You will see why you had to jump, why you had to take a certain step. When you were taking that step, nothing was clear, nothing was absolutely certain or guaranteed. You were taking that step according to your feeling, not according to your thinking. But later on, recapitulating, looking back, thinking can be revived. Now you can search for the undercurrent of logic.Those who have arrived are very logical. But those who are on the path, if they try to be logical, they will never arrive. This is one of the paradoxes to be understood. Hence the statements of Buddha, Tilopa, Saraha and Atisha are really very logical, but only for those who have arrived. The logic can be felt only backward. When you are progressing toward the goal, the ultimate, everything is vague, hidden behind a cloud. It is like the early morning mist. In the afternoon, in the full noontide, the mist will have disappeared. But that full noontide has yet to happen.So think, meditate, feel these instructions, but don’t take them in dead seriousness. There are bound to be a few differences. A few things are going to happen on your way which did not happen on Atisha’s way. A few things are going to happen on your way which have not happened on my way. There are as many ways in the world as there are people. Nobody can stand in your place; even those who are standing very close to you are not standing in exactly the same place. Your angle of vision is bound to be a little bit different from the angle of vision of somebody who is standing just by your side holding your hand. No two persons can see the world in exactly the same way, it is impossible. And everybody has to move from his own place, his own space.Now, Atisha existed one thousand years ago. He must have seen a totally different world, he must have walked through a totally different world, with a different kind of language – where a different kind of understanding was prevalent, where different attitudes and approaches were still valid. They are no longer valid, they are no longer relevant, that world has disappeared. Atisha’s world exists no longer.Still, his instructions are of tremendous importance, taken non-fanatically. Taken fanatically, you miss the whole point. One has to be very, very loose and relaxed. While thinking about the past buddhas, one has to be available to them, open to them, but unclinging and detached, knowing perfectly well that centuries have passed, knowing perfectly well that “I am not Atisha, so how can I follow these instructions absolutely?”But Atisha is not telling you to follow his instructions absolutely. He is simply giving a glimpse of his vision and the way he has arrived at it. He is simply sharing his poetry with you, his compassion with you.Remember it – otherwise it is very easy for people to become fanatics. Why do millions of people in the world become fanatics? For a simple reason: by becoming a fanatic you avoid all experimenting, by becoming a fanatic you escape from thinking on your own, feeling on your own. By becoming a fanatic you throw all responsibility on somebody else’s shoulders – Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Atisha.Remember, your responsibility is such, it cannot be given to anybody else, it cannot be thrown on somebody else. Your responsibility is absolutely yours. You will have to think, you will have to feel, you will have to meditate, you will have to walk, for yourself. And let me remind you again: you may come across scenes which Atisha has never come across.If you go to the Himalayas and you want to climb Everest, there are many ways to climb it, many sides. From one side you may come across beautiful valleys and rivers and trees. From the other side you may not come across any river, you may not come across trees at all, you may come across only rocks and rocks. From the third side you may come across glaciers, virgin snow that has never melted. And you will all reach the top.Those who have reached the top will always be considerate and liberal. They cannot be stubborn, they cannot say, “This is the only path,” because from the top they can see that there are many paths. They can see many pilgrims arriving, reaching from different routes. And each route has its own world. Atisha followed a certain route. But he was very fortunate to have three enlightened masters; he reached Everest by at least three routes. His vision is very comprehensive, his vision is wide, it is not narrow.Jesus says, “My path is narrow but straight.” He followed only one master. Naturally his path is very narrow and straight. It is not the case with Atisha; his path is very zigzag and very wide. It contains many paths in it, it is a great synthesis.The first sutra:Begin the development of taking with yourself.Let me remind you, in the last sutra Atisha was saying that when you take the breath in, let it become your meditation that all the suffering of all the beings in the world is riding on that incoming breath and reaching your heart. Absorb all that suffering, pain and misery in your heart, and see a miracle happen.Whenever you absorb somebody else’s misery, pain and suffering, the moment you absorb it, it is transformed. The natural tendency is to avoid it; the natural tendency is to protect yourself against suffering. The natural tendency is to keep aloof, not to sympathize, not to empathize. People, even when they sympathize, sympathize only formally. They pay lip service; they don’t mean it. If they really meant it, they could have helped the other person. They could have absorbed his suffering, they could have drunk his suffering.And it happens a few times, and you know it: there are people, if you meet them you feel an unburdening. When they are gone, you feel light, you feel flowing, you feel more vibrant, more alive – as if they have taken a great burden off your head, off your chest, as if they have poured some nectar into your being. You feel a dance left within your heart when they leave. You wait again and again for them to come to you; you seek their company, you enjoy it, because you are nourished by their presence.The opposite kind of people also exist. If they meet you they leave you more burdened than you ever were. They leave you in a kind of despair, disgust. You feel you have been sucked, your energy is lower. They have taken something from your energy and they have not given anything to you. This is an ordinary experience.If people avoid you, remember, they are not responsible. Something in you makes them avoid you. If people don’t want to meet you, if they find excuses to escape from you, remember, they are not responsible. You must be doing something negative to their energy.If people seek you, if people become friendly immediately, if people feel a certain affinity – even strangers would like to come and sit close to you, would like to hold your hand, would just like to be with you – that means you must be knowingly or unknowingly helping them. Everybody is burdened with great misery, everybody is under great suffering, everybody’s heart is hurting. There is much pain.Atisha says before you can do this with the whole existence, you will have to start first with yourself. This is one of the fundamental secrets of inner growth. You cannot do anything with others that you have not done in the first place with yourself. You can hurt others if you hurt yourself, you will be a pain in the necks of others if you are a pain in the neck to yourself, you can be a blessing to others only if you are a blessing to yourself.Whatsoever you can do with others, you must have done to yourself before, because that is the only thing that you can share. You can share only that which you have; you cannot share that which you don’t have.Atisha says: Begin the development of taking with yourself. Rather than starting by taking the whole misery of the world and absorbing it in the heart, start with your own misery. Don’t go into the deep sea so fast; learn swimming in shallow water. And if you immediately start taking the misery of the whole existence, it will remain simply an experiment in speculation. It won’t be real, it can’t be real. It will be just verbal.You can say to yourself, “Yes, I am taking the misery of the whole world” – but what do you know of the misery of the whole world? You have not even experienced your own misery.We go on avoiding our own misery. If you feel miserable, you put on the radio or the TV and you become engaged. You start reading the newspaper so that you can forget your misery, or you go to the movies, or you go to your woman or your man. You go to the club, you go shopping in the market, just somehow to keep yourself away from yourself, so that you need not see the wound, so that you need not look at how much it hurts within.People go on avoiding themselves. What do they know of misery? How can they think of the misery of the whole existence? First, you have to begin with yourself. If you are feeling miserable, let it become a meditation. Sit silently, close the doors. First feel the misery with as much intensity as possible. Feel the hurt. Somebody has insulted you. Now, the best way to avoid the hurt is to go and insult him, so that you become occupied with him. That is not meditation.If somebody has insulted you, feel thankful to him that he has given you an opportunity to feel a deep wound. He has opened a wound in you. The wound may be created by many, many insults that you have suffered in your whole life; he may not be the cause of all the suffering, but he has triggered a process.Just close your room, sit silently, with no anger for the person but with total awareness of the feeling that is arising in you – the hurt feeling that you have been rejected, that you have been insulted. And then you will be surprised that not only is this man there: all the men and all the women and all the people that have ever insulted you will start moving in your memory.You will not only start remembering them, you will start reliving them. You will be going into a kind of primal. Feel the hurt, feel the pain, don’t avoid it. That’s why in many therapies the patient is told not to take any drugs before the therapy begins, for the simple reason that drugs are a way to escape from your inner misery. They don’t allow you to see your wounds, they repress them. They don’t allow you to go into your suffering, and unless you go into your suffering, you cannot be released from the imprisonment of it.It is perfectly scientific to drop all drugs before going into a group – if possible even drugs like coffee, tea, smoking, because these are all ways to escape.Have you watched? Whenever you feel nervous you immediately start smoking. It is a way to avoid nervousness; you become occupied with smoking. Really it is a regression. Smoking makes you again feel like a child – unworried, un-responsible – because smoking is nothing but a symbolic breast. The hot smoke going in simply takes you back to the days when you were feeding on the mother’s breast and the warm milk was going in; the nipple has now become the cigarette. The cigarette is a symbolic nipple.Through regression you avoid the responsibilities and the pains of being adult. And that’s what goes on through many, many drugs. Modern man is drugged as never before, because modern man is living in great suffering. Without drugs it will be impossible to live in so much suffering. Those drugs create a barrier; they keep you drugged, they don’t allow you enough sensitivity to know your pain.The first thing to do is close your doors and stop any kind of occupation – looking at the TV, listening to the radio, reading a book. Stop all occupation, because that too is a subtle drug. Just be silent, utterly alone. Don’t even pray, because that again is a drug, you are becoming occupied, you start talking to God, you start praying, you escape from yourself.Atisha is saying: Just be yourself. Whatsoever the pain of it and whatsoever the suffering of it, let it be so. First experience it in its total intensity. It will be difficult, it will be heart-rending. You may start crying like a child, you may start rolling on the ground in deep pain, your body may go through contortions. You may suddenly become aware that the pain is not only in the heart, it is all over the body – that it is aching all over, that it is painful all over, that your whole body is nothing but pain.If you can experience it – this is of tremendous importance – then start absorbing it. Don’t throw it away. It is such a valuable energy, don’t throw it away. Absorb it, drink it, accept it, welcome it, feel grateful to it. And say to yourself, “This time I’m not going to avoid it, this time I’m not going to reject it, this time I’m not going to throw it away. This time I will drink it and receive it like a guest. This time I will digest it.”It may take a few days for you to be able to digest it, but the day it happens, you have stumbled upon a door which will take you really far, far away. A new journey has started in your life, you are moving into a new kind of being – because immediately, the moment you accept the pain with no rejection anywhere, its energy and its quality changes. It is no longer pain. In fact one is simply surprised, one cannot believe it, it is so incredible. One cannot believe that suffering can be transformed into ecstasy, that pain can become joy.But in ordinary life you are aware that opposites are always joined together, that they are not opposites but complementaries. You know perfectly well, your love can at any moment become hate, and your hate can at any moment become love. In fact if you hate too much, intensely and totally, it is bound to become love.That’s what happened to the person called Saul who later on became Paul and founded this ugly phenomenon, the Christian church. Jesus is not the founder of the Christian church, the founder of the Christian church is Saint Paul. And the story is worth remembering.When he was born, his name was Saul. And he was so anti-.Christ that his whole life was devoted to destroying Christians and Christianity. His whole dedication was to persecute Christians, destroying any possibility of Christianity for the future, and effacing the name of Christ. He must have hated tremendously, his hate cannot be ordinary. When you devote your whole life to the object of your hatred, it is bound to be really total. Otherwise who cares? If you hate something you don’t devote your whole life to it. But if you hate totally, then it becomes a life-and-death problem.Persecuting Christians, destroying Christians, destroying their power-holds, arguing with Christians, convincing them that this was nonsense, that this man Jesus was mad, a neurotic, a pretender, a hypocrite, one day it happened, the miracle happened. He was going to persecute more Christians in another town. On the way he was alone, and suddenly he saw Jesus appearing out of nowhere and asking him, “Why do you persecute me?”Out of shock, terror, he fell on the ground, apologizing, crying great tears of repentance. The vision disappeared, and with the disappearance of the vision the old Saul disappeared. To remember this point he changed his name to Paul; the old man was dead, a new man had arrived. And he became the founder of the Christian church. He became a great lover of Jesus: the greatest lover the world has ever known.Hate can become love. Jesus did not appear; it was just the intensity of his hate that projected Jesus. It was not Jesus who asked him, “Why do you persecute me?” It was his own unconscious which was suffering so much because of this hatred of Jesus. It was his own unconscious that asked him, “Why do you persecute me?” It was his own unconscious that became personified in the vision of Jesus. The miracle happened because the hate was total.Whenever anything is total it turns into its opposite. This is a great secret to be remembered. Whenever something is total it changes into its opposite, because there is no way to go any further; the cul-de-sac has arrived.Watch an old-world clock with a pendulum. It goes on and on: the pendulum goes to the left, to the extreme left, and then there is a point beyond which it cannot go, then it starts moving toward the right.Opposites are complementaries. If you can suffer your suffering in totality, in great intensity, you will be surprised: Saul becomes Paul. You will not be able to believe it when it happens for the first time, that your own suffering absorbed willingly, welcomingly, becomes a great blessing. The same energy that becomes hate becomes love, the same energy that becomes pain becomes pleasure, the same energy that becomes suffering becomes bliss.But start with your own self.Make a small experiment with your own pains, sufferings and miseries. And once you have found the key, then you can share it with the whole existence. Then you can take all the suffering of all the world, or all the worlds.Ride on the incoming breath and your small heart is bigger than the whole universe, if you know what miracles it can do. And then pour out your blessings. It is the same energy passing through your heart that becomes bliss, that becomes a blessing. Then let blessings go riding on the outgoing breath to all the nooks and corners of existence.Atisha says: This is compassion. Compassion is to become a transforming force in existence – transforming the ugly into the beautiful, kissing the frog and transforming it into a prince, transforming darkness into light. To become such a medium of transformation is compassion.Begin the development of taking with yourself.When evil fills the inanimate and animate universes change bad conditions to the bodhi path.This is the Buddhist alchemy: all evil can be transformed into the bodhi path, the path to become a buddha. Evil is not against you, you just don’t know how to use it. Poison is not your enemy, you just don’t know how to use it. Poison is not your enemy, you just don’t know how to make medicine out of it. In wise hands poison becomes medicinal, in foolish hands medicine can become poison. It all depends on you, on your artfulness.Have you ever looked at the word evil? Read backward, it is live. Life can become evil, evil can become life; it all depends on how you read it.There are three things to be understood about this sutra, to change bad conditions to the bodhi path so that you can attain to bodhichitta, the mind or no-mind of a buddha. The first is: do not resist evil. That is a saying of Jesus; there is every possibility that Jesus got it from Buddhist sources. He traveled in India; he had traveled in India before he started his mission in Israel.That’s why in the Bible there is almost no account of his life. Only once is he mentioned as having gone with his parents to the great temple and that he argued with the rabbis there. He must have been nearabout twelve at that time. After that incident there is no life story in the Bible. For eighteen years he simply disappears from Israel, and then suddenly when he is thirty he appears again. His ministry lasted only for three years; by the age of thirty-three he was crucified.Where had he been for eighteen years? It is a long period. And why does the Bible mention nothing about it?In Tibet there are still books available which relate everything about those eighteen years. He had been in the East. In fact that was one of the reasons why he could not be accepted by the Jews, because he brought something very alien and strange. Although he was quoting the prophets from the Old Testament, he was giving to those old ancient statements new meanings that had never been heard before. He was bringing something foreign into the Jewish world.For example, this statement: Do not resist evil. Now this is very un-Jewish. The Jewish God is very much against evil; he is so much against it that there are stories that he destroyed whole cities like Sodom and Gomorrah. He destroyed whole cities because those cities had fallen into evil. There were good people there too, but in order to destroy the evil people even the good people were destroyed.The Jewish God says, “I am a very jealous God; if you don’t obey me you will be destroyed.” He is very dictatorial. And the Old Testament says evil has to be punished – an eye for an eye.Jesus says again and again, “You have been told that if somebody throws a brick at you, throw a stone or a rock at him. But I say unto you, if somebody hits you on one cheek, give him the other also.”This is alien, strange, to Jewish thinking. But this is not alien to Buddhist thinking, this is pure Buddhism. Do not resist evil. That is the first thing if you want to absorb evil in your heart and transform it. If you resist it, how can you transform it? Accept it.Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” The Jewish God cannot love his enemies, so why should man? If God is incapable of loving his enemies, how can you expect poor man to? “And love your enemies,” Jesus says, “as you love yourself.” Again, he got it from some strange sources that the Jews were not aware of. This is a Buddhist approach, this is the contribution of Buddha to the world – one of the greatest contributions ever, because this is the inner alchemy. Accept evil. Don’t resist it, don’t fight with it, don’t be angry with it; absorb it, because it can be transformed into good.The art of transforming suffering, pain, evil, into something good is the art of seeing the necessity of the opposite. Light can exist only if darkness exists. Then why hate darkness? Without darkness there will be no light, so those who love light and hate darkness are in a dilemma; they don’t know what they are doing.Life cannot exist without death. Then why hate death? Because it is death that creates the space for life to exist. This is a great insight, that death is the contrast, the background, the blackboard on which life is written with white chalk. Death is the darkness of night on which life starts twinkling like stars. If you destroy the darkness of the night the stars will disappear. That’s what happens in the day. The stars are still there – do you think they have disappeared? They are still there, but because there is too much light you cannot see them. They can be seen only in contrast.The saint is possible only because of the sinner. Hence, Buddha says don’t hate the sinner, he makes it possible for the saint to exist. They are two aspects of the same coin.Seeing this, one is neither attached to good nor detached from bad. One accepts both as part and parcel of life. In that acceptance you can transform things. Only through that acceptance is transformation possible.And before you can transform suffering you will have to become a witness; that is the third point. First: do not resist evil. Second: know that opposites are not opposites but complementaries, inevitably joined together, so there is no choice – remain choiceless. And the third is: be a witness, because if you are a witness to your suffering you will be able to absorb it. If you become identified with it you cannot absorb it.The moment you become identified with your suffering you want to discard it, you want to get rid of it, it is so painful. But if you are a witness then suffering loses all thorns, all stings. Then there is suffering, and you are a witness to it. You are just a mirror; it has nothing to do with you. Happiness comes and goes, unhappiness comes and goes, it is a passing show; you are just there, a mirror reflecting it. Life comes and goes, death comes and goes; the mirror is not affected by either. The mirror reflects but remains unaffected, the mirror is not imprinted by either.A great distance arises when you witness. And only in that witnessing can you become able to transform the baser metal into gold. Only in that witnessing do you become a scientist of the inner, a detached observer. Now you know the opposites are not opposites, so they can be changed into each other. Then it is not a question of destroying evil in the world, but of transforming evil into something beneficial; transforming poison into nectar.Drive all blame into one.The third sutra. The ordinary mind always throws the responsibility on somebody else. It is always the other making you suffer. Your wife is making you suffer, your husband is making you suffer, your parents are making you suffer, your children are making you suffer, or the financial system of the society, capitalism, communism, fascism, the prevalent political ideology, the social structure, or fate, karma, God…you name it.People have millions of ways to shirk responsibility. But the moment you say somebody else – XYZ – is making you suffer, then you cannot do anything to change it. What can you do? When the society changes and communism comes and there is a classless world, then everybody will be happy. Before it, it is not possible. How can you be happy in a society which is poor? And how can you be happy in a society which is dominated by the capitalists? How can you be happy with a society which is bureaucratic? How can you be happy with a society which does not allow you freedom?Excuses and excuses and excuses – excuses just to avoid one single insight that “I am responsible for myself. Nobody else is responsible for me; it is absolutely and utterly my responsibility. Whatsoever I am, I am my own creation.” This is the meaning of the third sutra:Drive all blame into one. And that one is you. Once this insight settles: “I am responsible for my life – for all my suffering, for my pain, for all that has happened to me and is happening to me – I have chosen it this way; these are the seeds that I sowed and now I am reaping the crop; I am responsible” – once this insight becomes a natural understanding in you, then everything else is simple. Then life starts taking a new turn, starts moving into a new dimension. That dimension is conversion, revolution, mutation – because once I know I am responsible, I also know that I can drop it any moment I decide to. Nobody can prevent me from dropping it.Can anybody prevent you from dropping your misery, from transforming your misery into bliss? Nobody. Even if you are in a jail, chained, imprisoned, nobody can imprison you; your soul still remains free.Of course you have a very limited situation, but even in that limited situation you can sing a song. You can either cry tears of helplessness or you can sing a song. Even with chains on your feet you can dance; then even the sound of the chains will have a melody to it.The fourth sutra:Be grateful to everyone.Atisha is really very, very scientific. First, he says take the whole responsibility on yourself. Secondly, he says be grateful to everyone. Now that nobody is responsible for your misery except you, if it is all your own doing, then what is left?Be grateful to everyone. Because everybody is creating a space for you to be transformed – even those who think they are obstructing you, even those whom you think are enemies. Your friends, your enemies, good people and bad people, favorable circumstances, unfavorable circumstances – all together they are creating the context in which you can be transformed and become a buddha. Be grateful to all.A man once came and spat on Buddha, on his face. Of course his disciples were enraged. His closest disciple, Ananda, said to him, “This is too much!” He was red-hot with anger. He said to Buddha, “Just give me permission so that I can show this man what he has done.”Buddha wiped his face and said to the man, “Thank you, sir. You created a context in which I could see whether I can still be angry or not. And I am not, and I am tremendously happy. And also you created a context for Ananda: now he can see that he can still be angry. Many thanks, we are so grateful! Once in a while, please, you are invited to come. Whenever you have the urge to spit on somebody, you can come to us.”It was such a shock to the man, he could not believe his ears, what was happening. He had come expecting that he would anger Buddha. He had failed. The whole night he could not sleep, he tossed and turned and could not sleep. Continuously the idea haunted him – his spitting on the Buddha, one of the most insulting things, and Buddha remaining as calm and quiet as he had been before, as if nothing had happened, wiping his face and saying to him, “Thank you, sir. And whenever you have this desire to spit on somebody, please come to us.”He remembered it again and again. That face, that calm and quiet face, those compassionate eyes. And when he had said thank you, it had not been just a formality, he was really grateful. His whole being was saying that he was grateful, his whole atmosphere was grateful. Just as he could see that Ananda was red-hot with anger, Buddha was so cool, so loving, so compassionate. He could not forgive himself now, what had he done? Spitting on that man – a man like Buddha!Early the next morning he rushed back, fell down at the feet of Buddha, and said, “Forgive me, sir. I could not sleep the whole night.”Buddha said, “Forget all about it. There is no need to ask forgiveness for something which has already passed. So much water has gone down the Ganges.” Buddha was sitting on the bank of the Ganges under a tree. He showed the man, “Look, each moment so much water is flowing down! Twenty-four hours have passed – why are you carrying it, something which is no longer existential? Forget all about it.“And I cannot forgive you, because in the first place I was not angry with you. If I had been angry, I could have forgiven you. If you really need forgiveness, ask Ananda. Fall at his feet – he will enjoy it!”Be grateful to everyone. To those who have helped, to those who have hindered, to those who have been indifferent. Be grateful to all, because all together they are creating the context in which buddhas are born, in which you can become a buddha.The insurpassable protection of emptiness is to see the manifestations of bewilderment as the four kayas.Atisha talks about the four bodies. These four bodies are significant to be understood. The first is called dharmakaya: the body of the ultimate law. And what is the ultimate law? Emptiness is the ultimate law: all is empty.If you really want to grow, you will have to let this insight soak into you: all is empty. Life is empty, death is empty, all phenomena are empty – because nothing abides, everything passes by, all is dream stuff. If this is understood, this will protect you. How can you be insulted if all is empty? How can you be miserable if all is empty? How can there be pain if all is empty? You are empty, the other is empty, so you must have seen a dream that the other was insulting you, that the other spat on you.If you really want to protect your understanding, this is the first body to grow around yourself, the body of emptiness, the milieu of emptiness. All is empty.Buddha used to send his disciples to the funeral pyres to meditate there. The newcomers had to be there for three months in the beginning. Where bodies are burned, they would just sit there and watch, day in and day out. People would be brought in, burned, and then the friends would leave. What kind of life is this? What substance does it have?Just the other day, the man was so haughty, so proud, so egoistic, that if you had said anything wrong he would have jumped on you. And now where is he? Disappeared in the flames. This is what life is. “Sooner or later I am also going to be on the funeral pyre and all will be burned. So why bother, why make so much fuss? It is only a few days’ dream. And those few days are not much in the eternity of time, they are just momentary.”Let this body of emptiness grow around you; you will be protected by it.The second body is nirmankaya: the first arising of compassion. When all is empty, when everybody is on the funeral pyre, then compassion arises. It is not to be cultivated, remember; it arises out of the first body. If you cultivate it you still believe in the ego. If you cultivate it you still believe in character, if you cultivate it you still believe in virtue. And if there is no self, what is virtue? If there is no self, what is character? If there is no self, then what is good?First settle into nobodiness and then the second body arises of its own accord. Nirmankaya means the body of creation. It is strange – the first body is the body of emptiness, and the second body is the body of creation. But this is the insight of all the great buddhas, that if you become a nobody, a great creation arises out of you. The whole starts flowing through you; you become a vehicle, a passage, a medium, a voice, for the whole.And with the second body arising, the first experience will be of great compassion. Of course in the beginning it will be partial, conditional, caused by the suffering of others. You see an old man dying on the road and compassion arises, you see somebody starving and compassion arises – it has a cause outside. If nobody is dying and nobody is starving, there will be no compassion. In the second body, compassion comes and goes; it arises in certain situations and disappears in certain other situations.Out of the second, the third crystallizes. The third body is called sambhogkaya: the body of bliss. In the third body, compassion is unconditional. It does not arise and does not disappear; it remains, it abides. It is not a question of whether somebody is suffering or not; in the third body, one simply is compassion. In the second body, compassion is a relationship; when there is a need it happens. In the third body, compassion becomes your very state of being: need or no need, it is there. It is like a light burning in the night; it goes on radiating whether somebody is in the room or not. Whether somebody needs light or not, is not the point; the light goes on radiating.In the third body, the body of bliss, compassion is a natural phenomenon. Just as you go on breathing, even while you are asleep you go on breathing, a buddha is compassionate even while asleep. A buddha is simply compassionate. Compassion is not something that arises like a wave and disappears. Now compassion is oceanic.And the fourth body is called swabhavakaya: the body of the ultimate nature, of spontaneity, of your innermost being as it is. In the fourth body, all distinctions disappear, dualities are transcended. Good/bad, self/no-self, mind/no-mind, samsara/nirvana, God/Devil – all dualities are transcended. One simply is, with no distinctions, with no categories, with no divisions. This is the existential body; this is the real thing to be attained.Each seeker after truth passes through these four bodies.An excellent means is to have the four provisions.How to attain these four bodies? There are four provisions. The first is: observe. Observe without evaluation, observe everything, don’t miss any opportunity to observe – because it is not a question of what you are observing, the question is that observation is growing. Observe everything – the trees, the birds, the animals, the people, the traffic, your own mind and its traffic, your own reactions, others’ reactions. Use every situation to observe, so that observation becomes deep-rooted in you.And the second is: analyze, but only after you have observed – don’t mix them. At first, observation has to be simple observation, with no analysis, no judgment, no evaluation. When you have observed, then analyze, then go into details, then dissect. Then see its parts, how it is made, because each experience is very complex. If you really want to understand it you will have to dissect it into its parts.And then the third is: choose that which brings more and more bliss, silence, serenity and calmness to you.And the fourth is: discard all that which brings tension, anxiety, anguish and hell to you.These are the four provisions. If you follow these four provisions, four bodies will arise in you.In order to bring any situation to the path quickly as soon as it is met, join it with meditation.And remember, each situation has to become an opportunity to meditate. What is meditation? Becoming aware of what you are doing, becoming aware of what is happening to you.Somebody insults you: become aware. What is happening to you when the insult reaches you? Meditate over it; this is changing the whole gestalt. When somebody insults you, you concentrate on the person – “Why is he insulting me? Who does he think he is? How can I take revenge?” If he is very powerful you surrender, you start wagging your tail. If he is not very powerful and you see that he is weak, you pounce on him. But you forget yourself completely in all this; the other becomes the focus. This is missing an opportunity for meditation. When somebody insults you, meditate.Gurdjieff has said, “When my father was dying, I was only nine. He called me close to his bed and whispered in my ear, ‘My son, I am not leaving much to you, not in worldly things, but I have one thing to tell you that was told to me by my father on his deathbed. It has helped me tremendously; it has been my treasure. You are not very grown up yet, you may not understand what I am saying, but keep it, remember it. One day you will be grown up and then you may understand. This is a key: it unlocks the doors of great treasures.’”Of course Gurdjieff could not understand it at that moment, but it was the thing that changed his whole life. And his father said a very simple thing. He said, “Whenever somebody insults you, my son, tell him you will meditate over it for twenty-four hours and then you will come and answer him.”Gurdjieff could not believe that this was such a great key. He could not believe that “This is something so valuable that I have to remember it.” And we can forgive a young child of nine years old. But because this was something said by his dying father who had loved him tremendously, and immediately after saying it he breathed his last, it became imprinted on him; he could not forget it. Whenever he remembered his father, he would remember the saying.Without truly understanding, he started practicing it. If somebody insulted him he would say, “Sir, for twenty-four hours I have to meditate over it – that’s what my father told me. And he is here no longer, and I cannot disobey an old dead man. He loved me tremendously, and I loved him tremendously, and now there is no way to disobey him. You can disobey your father when he is alive, but when your father is dead how can you disobey him? So please forgive me, I will come after twenty-four hours and answer you.”And he says, “Meditating on it for twenty-four hours has given me the greatest insights into my being. Sometimes I found that the insult was right, that that’s how I am. So I would go to the person and say, ‘Sir, thank you, you were right. It was not an insult, it was simply a statement of fact. You called me stupid; I am.’”“Or sometimes it happened that meditating for twenty-four hours, I would come to know that it was an absolute lie. But when something is a lie, why be offended by it? So I would not even go to tell him that it was a lie. A lie is a lie, why be bothered by it?”But watching, meditating, slowly, slowly he became more and more aware of his reactions, rather than the actions of others.This is what Atisha says: In order to bring any situation to the path quickly as soon as it is met, join it with meditation. Whatsoever happens – good, bad, success, failure – immediately become aware of what is happening. Don’t miss a single moment. Don’t lag behind – be present to it, and you will be surprised, errors will start disappearing from your life. And then whatsoever you do will be right.People ask me what is right and what is wrong, and my answer is: If something arises out of awareness, it is right. If something arises out of unawareness, it is wrong. Right and wrong is not a question of what you do, but of how you do it. It is not a question of what, but of how – meditatively or non-meditatively, alert, awake, or doing things as if you are a sleepwalker.The concise epitome of heart instruction: work with "five forces."These are the five forces. The first force is intensity, totality. If you really want to have a transformed life, if you really want to become a light unto yourself, if you really want to know the ultimate mystery of existence and the ultimate ecstasy of being alive, then the first force is intensity, totality. Whatsoever you do, do it intensely, to the optimum. Don’t be lousy, don’t be lazy, don’t be partial. Go into it wholeheartedly, let it become a total absorption.If you dance, dance so totally that the dancer disappears and only the dance remains, and it will be a transformation. If you love, love totally, so totally that there is no lover found. The lover is found only if you are holding something back. That which you are holding back becomes the lover. If you are holding something back, that which you are holding back becomes the dancer, the singer. If you are totally in the dance, in the song, in the love, who is left behind there to say, “I am the lover, I am the dancer”? Nothing is left.And totality transforms.It is only at one hundred degrees intensity that one evaporates from the material into the spiritual, from the earth into the sky, from the ordinary into the extraordinary.The second force is familiarization: do and be what you really want to do and be. Life is lived according to gestalts that you have created around yourself. If you really want to be something else, then familiarize yourself with it. If you want to play the guitar, practice. If you want to dance, practice. If you want anything to happen in your life, imbibe more and more of it and drop all that is against it. And the way to drop it is not to use it, because by using it you create ways for it to come into you again and again and again.The third force is the force of white seeds. “White seeds” is a metaphor. Atisha means, drop all that is black. Don’t go on cultivating the black seeds of anger, jealousy, hatred, possessiveness, domination. Drop all black seeds. Even if they arise, watch, absorb them in the heart, and they will become white seeds. And what are the white seeds? Love, compassion, service, sincerity, sensitivity, awareness – these are the white seeds. If one day you want to have white flowers in your life, you will have to sow white seeds.And the fourth force is reproach – to completely abjure ego-oriented thoughts. Watch: whatsoever arises out of the ego, whatsoever is an ego trip, immediately disconnect yourself from it. Even to linger with it for a little while is dangerous, because lingering will give it energy. The moment you know it is an ego trip, immediately disconnect yourself.And everybody knows when they are going on an ego trip. It is not an art to be learned, everybody is born with it. You know it; you can go with it in spite of your knowing – that is another matter – but you know it. Whenever pride arises, whenever the ego raises its head, you know it. Cut off that head immediately in a single blow.And the fifth force is the force of the dedication of all virtue to the welfare of others. Whatsoever good happens to you, immediately share it. This is one of the most fundamental things in Buddhism. Don’t hoard it, don’t be a miser. If love has arisen, share it, shower it. If you cannot find people, shower it on the trees, on the rocks, but shower it. Don’t hoard it – because if you hoard it, it turns into poison; if you hoard it, it goes sour and bitter. Share it.And the more you share, the more will be coming into you from unknown sources. Slowly, slowly, you will be able to know the ways of inner economics. The outer economics is: hoard if you want to have things. And the inner economics is just the opposite: hoard, and you will not have it. Give, and you will have it; give more, and you will have more of it.The sutra:The instructions for transference in the Mahayana are the "five forces." Behavior is important.All these five forces can be significant only if you behave, if you act according to them. If you simply contemplate over them they are meaningless, they will remain impotent. Actualize them in your life.And the last sutra:The purpose of all dharma is contained in one point.That point is the ego. The ego is false. If you live according to the false ego your whole life will remain false. If you live without the ego your whole life will have the flavor of reality, truth and authenticity.Think, meditate, practice.Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Can you explain to us the difference between emptying oneself and effacing oneself? And what is the role of individuality in dissolution?The process of emptying oneself and the process of effacing oneself have nothing in common. Not only are they different, they are diametrically opposite.Emptying oneself brings individuality, more and more individuality. Emptying oneself means emptying oneself of all that is implied in personality.Personality is a farce, personality is pseudo, personality is that which is given to you by the society. Personality is imposed on you from the outside; it is a mask. Individuality is your very being. Individuality is that which you bring into the world, individuality is a gift from existence.Personality is ugly because it is pseudo. And the more personality you have, the less is the possibility for individuality to grow. The personality starts occupying the whole of your space. It is like a cancerous growth. It goes on growing, it possesses you totally. It leaves no space for individuality to have even its own corner. The personality has to be dropped, so that the individuality can be.Individuality is a non-egoistic phenomenon; it is pure am-ness, it has no “I” in it. Personality is nothing but “I”: it has no am-ness in it. Personality is aggressive, violent, dominating, political. Individuality is silent, loving, compassionate; it is religious.Emptying oneself means emptying of all content – just as you empty a room of all the junk that has gathered there down the years. When you have emptied the room of all the furniture and all the things, you have not destroyed the room, not at all; you have given it more roominess, more space. When all the furniture is gone, the room asserts itself, the room is.Effacing oneself means destroying the room itself – destroying the very space of your being, destroying the very uniqueness of your existence, destroying the gift from existence. Effacing yourself means becoming a slave.Individuality gives you mastery; it makes you very authentic, grounded, rooted. It gives you substance; you are no longer dream stuff. It gives you solidity, it gives you clarity, transparency, vision. It makes you aware of the beauty of existence, it makes you aware of the beauty of all. Effacing yourself destroys you, it is suicidal. You are not dropping your personality, you are dropping your very uniqueness. You are becoming more and more shadowy, rather than becoming more substantial. You are becoming a slave.And the ironical thing is that if you efface yourself, the ego will remain. Now it will become a very subtle ego, so subtle that it will be almost impossible to detect it. Now it will claim humbleness, nobodiness, humility. But the claim will persist. It will say, “Look, I have effaced myself. I am no more.”But when you say, “I am no more” you are – otherwise who is saying, “I am no more?”A so-called saint was once asked, “Are you God?”He said, “No” – but immediately he added, “The sun rises in the morning, but it does not declare ‘I am the sun.’”In a vicarious way he is saying, “I am God. But I am like the sun which rises every morning but does not declare ‘I am God.’”I told the man who had related the incident to me, “Go back to that so-called saint, and tell him that the sun does not say, ‘I am not the sun’ either.” The sun does not say, “I am the sun” or “I am not the sun” – not because the sun is enlightened, but simply because it cannot speak! If it could speak, it would have declared it in a thousand and one ways. In fact it is declaring in a thousand and one ways, “I am here!” It is declaring it in the flowers, in the birds; it is declaring all over, “I am here!”Once Krishnamurti was asked, “Why do you go on talking?”He said, “This is simply my nature, to talk.” He said, “I talk in the same way as the flower releases its fragrance.”The flower cannot talk, it has its own language: the fragrance is its language. The sun cannot talk, but the light that radiates from it is its way of communicating the fact: “I am here, I have arrived.”In Japan there is a saying, “Flowers don’t talk.” That saying is utterly wrong – they talk. Of course they speak their own language. The Tibetan speaks his language; will you say that he does not talk? The Chinese speaks his own language; will you say he does not talk? Just because you cannot understand, will you say he is not talking? The Chinese has his own language, so does the sun, so do the flowers, so do the animals, the birds, the rocks. In millions of languages the whole world asserts itself.But the humble person starts saying, “I am not. I am not an ego, I have effaced myself.” But who is saying these things? The person who has emptied himself will not say such things. He will say, “I am, and I am for the first time. But now in my I-am-ness ‘I’ is only linguistic, a way of saying it. Existentially, there is only am-ness.”And let this be the criterion for whether you are emptying yourself or effacing yourself. If you are emptying yourself you will become more and more blissful, because you will become more and more spacious. You will become more and more available to existence and to the celebration of existence. You will become open to existence and all its joys and all its blessings.But if you are effacing yourself you will become more and more sad and heavy, you will become more and more dull and dead – because effacing oneself is nothing but a slow suicide. Beware of it! And you have to be aware, very aware, because they both look alike.The real danger in spiritual growth is from things which are diametrically opposite but look very alike. The real problem does not arise from things which are apparently opposite; the real problem arises with things which are not so apparently opposite, and yet they are opposite.The real opposite of hate is not love, the real opposite of love is not hate – it is so apparent, who can be deceived by it? The real opposite of love is pseudo-love: love that pretends to be love, and is not. One has to be watchful there.The real opposite of compassion is not anger. The real opposite of compassion is cultivated compassion: compassion that is not within you but is only in your character, compassion that you have painted on your circumference.The real opposite of your smiles are not tears, but smiles which are painted, smiles which don’t go any deeper than the lips, which are nothing but exercises of the lips. No heart collaborates with them, no feeling stands behind them. There is nobody behind the smile, the smile is just a learned trick. Tears are not opposite to smiles, they are only complementaries. But the false smile is the real opposite.Always remember, the false is the enemy of the true. If your smile is true and your tears are true, they are friends, they will help each other because they both will strengthen the truth of your being. If your tears are false and your smiles are false, then too, they are friends; they will strengthen your falsity, your personality, your mask.The conflict is between the real and the unreal or pretended. Emptying oneself is of tremendous value, but effacing yourself is dangerous. Effacing yourself is a subtle way of the ego – the ego coming from the back door.And naturally it will make you more and more serious. That’s why your so-called saints look so serious. Their seriousness has a reason in it. The reason is, they are maintaining humbleness which is not really there. And to maintain something which is not really there is arduous, hard. One has to be continuously on guard. Just a little slip here and there, and the reality will assert, and it will destroy all that you have maintained for so long. It will destroy your respectability.Anything that has to be maintained will keep you serious and sad, deep down afraid of being caught red-handed, of being caught in your falsity. You will escape from people if you are carrying something false in you. You will not allow anybody to be friendly, to be intimate with you, because in intimacy the danger is that the other may be able to see something which strangers cannot see. You will keep people at a distance; you will run and rush away from people. You will have only formal relationships, but you will not really relate, because to really relate means to expose yourself.Hence your so-called saints escaped into the monasteries. It was out of fear. If they were in the marketplace they would be caught; it would be discovered that they are cheating, that they are deceiving, that they are hypocrites. In the monasteries they can maintain their hypocrisy and nobody will ever be able to detect it. And moreover, there are other hypocrites there; they can all maintain their conspiracy together more easily than each single hypocrite can maintain his alone.Monasteries came into existence for escapists. But you can live even in the world in a monastic way, keeping people always at a distance, never allowing anybody access to your inner being, never opening up, never allowing anybody to have a peek into you to see who you are, never looking into people’s eyes, avoiding people’s eyes, looking sideways. And always in a hurry, so that everybody knows you are so occupied, you don’t have any time to say hello, to hold somebody’s hand, to sit with somebody informally. You are so busy, you are always on the go.You will not even allow intimacy with those who are close to you – husbands, wives, children – with them also you will have a formal relationship, an institutional relationship.Hence marriage has become an institution. It is really ugly to see something so tremendously beautiful becoming an institution. And if people look so miserable it is natural. If you live in institutions you will be miserable.You ask me, “Can you explain to us the difference between emptying oneself and effacing oneself?” Effacing oneself is the way of the ego, emptying oneself is the way of understanding. In emptying yourself you simply understand the ways of the ego – and in that understanding, the ego disappears of its own accord. You don’t drop it, you don’t have to drop it. You don’t fight with it. It is not found.When you look within with attention, with the light of awareness, you cannot find any ego there. So the question does not arise of why or how one should efface oneself. There is nothing to efface. That which is, is, and cannot be effaced. And that which is not, is not, and there is no need to efface it.Emptying oneself simply means seeing oneself. And then many things start dropping, because you were unnecessarily carrying them. In the first place, they don’t exist. They are ghosts, nightmares; they disperse themselves when the light is brought in. Emptying oneself is a meditative process. Just looking in deeply, with no prejudice, with no prefabricated ideology, neither for nor against, just looking in, and emptying starts happening.And when you have emptied all content – thoughts, desires, memories, projections, hopes – when all is gone, for the first time you find yourself, because you are nothing but that pure space, that virgin space within you. Unburdened by anything, that contentless consciousness, that’s what you are. Seeing it, realizing it, one is free. One is freedom, one is joy, one is bliss.But effacing oneself is dangerous. It means you have accepted already that the ego is there and it has to be effaced. You have accepted an illusion, and now you want to destroy it. You have missed the first point. You have accepted that the rope is a snake, and now you are trying to kill the snake. You will be in great trouble. You will never be able to kill the snake, because in the first place there is none. You can go on beating the rope, but what about the snake? The snake will remain there.The snake exists in your illusion; the snake does not exist outside, otherwise you could have killed it. But how can you kill a snake which is not? You are fighting with a shadow, and you are bound to be defeated.Let this fundamental be remembered always: if you fight with anything false, you will be defeated. The false cannot be defeated, because it is false. How can you defeat something which is nonexistential? There is no way. The only way is bring light and see.Ihi passiko, come and see! In that very seeing, the snake is not found. The rope is there, the snake has disappeared. Now there is no need to efface yourself, no need to fight.There are millions of people who try to become humble, but their whole effort is nonsense, sheer stupidity.Once a man asked me, “Are you an egoist or a humble person?”I said. “Neither. Neti neti, neither this nor that. I cannot be either.”He said, “What are you talking about? One has to be either an egoist or a humble person.”I said, “You don’t understand. You know nothing; you have never gone within yourself. If you are humble, you are an egoist standing on his head. Humbleness is an expression of the ego. I am neither. I am simply whatsoever I am, neither humble nor egoistic, because I have seen that there is no ego. How can there be humbleness then?”Humbleness is diluted ego. But if there is no ego, how can you dilute it? If there is no snake, how can you take the poisonous teeth of the snake away? That’s what humbleness is. The poisonous teeth have been removed from the snake; now the snake cannot hurt, now the snake cannot bite, now the snake cannot do any harm – but the snake is there.Those teeth were false, because the snake itself is false.Buddha is neither egoistic nor humble. Both are impossible for the man of understanding. The ignorant person can be egoistic, can be humble – both are aspects of ignorance. And the ignorant person can try to efface the ego, because it is so respectable not to have the ego. One becomes a saint by effacing the ego, one attains great prestige and power by effacing the ego. But it is the same game; the game has not changed.My message to you is, please don’t efface yourself. Be yourself, look within yourself, and in that very seeing, the ego disappears. Even to say disappears is not right: the ego is not found, it has never been there. Its existence depended on your not looking within yourself. Seen, it is no longer there – it has never been there.And then you are individuality, uniqueness, a unique expression of the divine. And then there is great rejoicing. You start blooming, the spring has come. You start dancing, you start singing. Great gratitude arises in you that existence has made you a unique individual.There has never been a person like you before, there is nobody else like you right now in the whole world, and there will never be anybody like you. Just see how much respect existence has paid to you. You are a masterpiece – unrepeatable, incomparable, utterly unique. Even the hardest heart, the rocklike heart, will start melting in gratitude. Tears will start flowing, tears of bliss and joy, tears which laugh.But please remember, empty yourself, don’t efface yourself.The second question:Osho,What of those who take sannyas in Pune, only to drop it back in their home environment?They are assholes. And they are assholes not because they drop sannyas but because they take it. Their idea is that by taking sannyas here they will gain something, and then back home they can drop it.But if this idea is there from the very beginning, that “I am going to drop it when I am back home,” sannyas will not be a blessing to you. It cannot be a blessing to such a cunning mind. You will become a sannyasin and yet you will not become a sannyasin.I know there are people, at least ten percent of the people… I know immediately when they come to take sannyas – their eyes say it, their vibe says it, their whole being stinks of cunningness. But I respect people, I cannot say no. And then I think what is the harm? Let them play the game of being a sannyasin. And who knows? Sometimes a few of these people are caught too. In the beginning when they take sannyas they are just taking it to see what it is all about. But unawares they may be caught in it, they may be trapped.Being here for three or four months as a sannyasin, they may find it almost impossible to drop it back home. But even if they drop it, that is their business. They are just being stupid. They are trying to have intimacy with me, because that intimacy can transform you, can give you a new birth. But the intimacy is possible only if there is not a wall of cunningness between you and me. And the wall is there.I give them sannyas, seeing the wall, the Great China Wall, between me and them. I know they are not truly getting into it; they are just being clever. They are not clever, just being clever, because a really clever person will not deceive himself. And there are things you can be immensely benefited by, but only when you don’t play games.For example, love can be a transforming force in your life. But if you are just playing a role, acting, it is not going to enrich you. In fact, on the contrary, it may impoverish you more. If you love a woman or a man without really loving, just pretending, then you are learning something: that love is futile. Your whole life may become poisoned. Each time you love, that cunningness will be there; it will circulate in your blood, in your being. And you will know from the very beginning that it is all a game. You will never become intimate with any person – and intimacy is a revelation. Sannyas is the ultimate intimacy. You cannot be cunning. And if you are, you are deceiving only yourself.But why has this question arisen in you? You have taken sannyas only a few days ago. This must be lurking somewhere in your unconscious. This is your question, this may be your idea; maybe you are not very conscious about it. You may be thinking that you are asking the question for others, but others can ask questions for themselves; you need not worry about them. Who are you to be worried about them? Don’t you have worries of your own? But this question must be there, somewhere deep in your unconscious; this must be your strategy. And still, I repeat, you may not be conscious of it, but the unconscious has erupted in this question.But this is not exceptional. The world is full of assholes – so if a few assholes manage to come here, it is not a surprise. It is natural. I keep a ten percent margin for them; ten percent of people are bound to be deceptive. In fact it is a miracle that it is only ten percent.People have forgotten the language of commitment, involvement. People don’t know the beauty of commitment, they don’t know the joys of dedication. They don’t know what it means to be utterly dedicated to something. To be utterly dedicated to something means giving birth to a soul in you. It integrates you, it gives you a backbone. Otherwise people who don’t have any experience of commitment – in love, in trust – they live a life without a spine; they are spineless, they are just a hotchpotch, lousy. They are not really men; they have not yet arrived at that dignity of being a man.To be a man means to be committed, to be involved, to be ready to go to the very extreme of some experience. If it appeals to you, if it convinces you, if it converts you, then one has to be ready to go wherever it leads you – to the unknown, to the uncharted. Yes, there are many fears, and there are many problems to be faced and many challenges to be accepted, but this is how one grows, this is how one matures.Millions of people in the world remain immature, childish, for the simple reason that they don’t know how to commit themselves. They just remain rootless. And whenever a tree is rootless you can infer what is going to happen to the tree. Slowly, slowly, all juice will disappear from the tree, because it is no longer connected to any source of juice. The sap will not flow in it, it will lose its greenness, it will not be young and alive anymore. It will lose luster, grandeur, brilliance; it will lose all luminosity, it will not bloom. Springs will come and go, but it will just remain there, dead, dry.That’s what has happened to millions of people. They have lost their soil. Through sannyas I am trying to give you a soil that can nourish you, so that the sap can start flowing again in your system, so that again some juice flows in you, so that you become juicy again, so that again you are young, youthful, fresh.Man has lost one quality, the quality of zestfulness. And without zest, what is life? Just waiting for death? It can’t be anything else. Only with zest do you live; otherwise you vegetate.Sannyas is not renunciation, it is a way to live life in its totality and intensity. It is the art of living life in all its dimensions, it is the way to live life in all its richness. It is not the old idea of sannyas. I am not creating monks and nuns – no, not at all. I am creating alive people, vibrant, pulsating, zestful people, young and fresh, ready to go on any adventure in search of truth, in search of love, in search of godliness.How can you drop sannyas? That’s why I say they are assholes, not because they drop sannyas. They are assholes because they take it. They don’t understand what they are doing. They are not aware of where they are moving. They are not conscious; they are just sleepwalkers, robots, zombies. When they see that so many people have become sannyasins, their mob psychology, their crowd mind, their sheep mind, immediately gives them the idea, “So I also have to become a sannyasin.”Why? Unless it is a decision that arises in your very innermost core, why be bothered with it? Unless you start having a love relationship with me, why be bothered with it? Unless I have touched a chord in your heart, unless some music has happened in you through me, why be bothered about it?But they are not taking sannyas from me; they are taking sannyas from you, from other sannyasins. Seeing so many people in orange, and seeing so many people happy and joyous, they become jealous. They become competitive, they start feeling they are missing something. A dream arises in them: “I should also know what this sannyas is.” Certainly they know that they will not be able to follow it the whole way, but they say, they argue, within themselves, “At least while you are here, why not be a sannyasin and have a taste of it? And then when you go back home just forget all about it, so nobody will know about it and you can be part of your old routine again.”This is how the mob mind functions. And sannyas is not for the mob mind, it is not for the sheepish mind. It is for lions.And I am really surprised. It seems I have given you the wrong name. A lion, asking such a question? The question arises out of a very cowardly mind. The question arises out of a very cunning mind. And still, I repeat, you may not be aware of it – but that is more dangerous. If you are aware, something can be done.That’s why I am answering it, to make you aware of it. This is one of the transforming processes of life: if you become aware of something, you can get rid of it very easily. If you are not aware of it, there is no question of getting rid of it.So sometimes I even have to be hard with you, sometimes I have to be really cruel with you – because to wrench truths from the unconscious is not an easy affair. It is surgical, it hurts. And the surgery that I do, I do without any anesthesia, because the unconscious has to be made conscious. It cannot be done without anesthesia, so it really hurts. While I am talking to you and bringing some unconscious truth toward your consciousness, you cannot be put to sleep. If you are asleep, the unconscious will never become conscious.So this psychological surgery has to be without any anesthesia. The pain has to be accepted. And those who understand, they will welcome it. Not only will they welcome it, they will feel thankful, grateful, that I have brought something that was lurking deep down in the darkness into the conscious part of their mind. Now it can be dropped.This is a miracle of consciousness. Anything that becomes conscious can be dropped very easily. This is the whole secret of psychoanalysis and all other psychotherapies that have evolved out of psychoanalysis: to bring things from the unconscious to the conscious. That’s the whole function of the psychoanalyst. Once they are conscious, you yourself are capable of dropping them – because who wants to carry ugly things when one knows they are there? But ugly things can be carried for lives together if you are not aware.And remember, the conscious itself wants to get rid of many things, but you don’t allow it to have its say with you. Hence it has to find indirect ways. For example, in a dream it may communicate something to you, but by the morning you tend to forget it.There are very few people who remember their dreams. Why? It is such a colorful experience, and the whole night you have been dreaming. Out of eight hours, for at least six hours you have been dreaming. And I am talking about normal people, who don’t exist. What to say about the abnormal? They can manage to dream sixteen hours in eight hours! They can dream many dreams together, one dream overlapping another dream, dream into dream into dream. They can have such dreams…for example you can dream that you are going to a movie, and in the movie you see yourself on the screen as a person who is going to sleep, falls asleep and starts dreaming that he is going to a movie! This can go on and on and on, dreams within dreams within dreams.I am not talking about abnormal people; even normal people, very normal people, dream six hours per night. In fact that is the greatest activity that you do. You don’t do anything else for six hours every day. Six hours continuously dreaming! And in the morning all is forgotten; or only for a few seconds early on, for four or five seconds you remember a few things, a few fragments. And then soon, by the time you have taken your tea in bed, they have disappeared.The unconscious tries hard, for six hours every night, to relate to you what you are doing with your life. But you don’t listen. It tries in other ways too.For example, this question is an effort of the unconscious to relate to you something that is there as a seed. The unconscious always wants to communicate with the conscious. Why? – because the unconscious is so burdened, so heavy, it wants to unburden itself. And how can it unburden? There is only one way: to relate to the conscious.Hence Freud developed the technique of free association. He had to invent the couch, because if the patient is sitting it is difficult to connect with the unconscious. Our habitual way of connecting with the unconscious is by lying down on the bed; that has become a permanent habit, you have to be horizontal. The Freudian couch is significant; it helps your unconscious to relate to the conscious.And Freud used to disappear behind the couch, behind a curtain – because if somebody is present, the unconscious may remain shy, embarrassed, and the conscious may distort, may censor. So he used to hide behind a screen. The patient would be lying down on the couch relaxing, and Freud would say, “Just start saying whatsoever comes to your mind. Don’t edit it, don’t correct it, don’t try to make it look beautiful, sophisticated, logical, significant. Just let it be as it is, raw. Simply let it come out as it is.” The first few sessions are not significant. But slowly, slowly the patient relaxes, starts free associating, and the unconscious unburdens itself.Psychoanalysis does nothing else, it simply helps you to unburden the unconscious. It makes things conscious which have remained unconscious for long. And just in that very process things start changing. One or two years of psychoanalysis, and the person has changed enormously; he is a totally different person, more at ease, more at home. What has happened? Because the psychoanalyst has not done anything; no medicine has been given, no psychiatric treatment has been given.In fact the real psychoanalyst does not even comment, because commentary may become a disturbance. He simply listens; he is just ears and ears and nothing else. He is a passive silent listener, so you can unburden yourself totally, without any interference.The unconscious has its own language. It talks in metaphors, it talks in pictures. Its language is not conceptual, its language is pictorial. But its language is totally different from the language that you know.Now, this is a way of the unconscious. You are asking as if it is somebody else’s question – it is not.I have heard…A friend came to see a black couple. The father was very proud of his only child, a baby girl of eighteen months. He was bragging about the baby so much that the friend became interested and wanted to see the baby. So the baby was called and the father started talking about her intelligence, genius, and this and that. And then the baby said, “Mother….” The father beamed and said to the friend, “See, she has already spoken half a word!”Get it?……Now you got it – it takes a little time! Now, the baby is simply saying “Mother” but the father has his own ideas, he is interpreting in his own way.Drop interpretations. At least with me, be utterly nude. Why can’t you ask the question: “Osho, if I go back and drop sannyas, then…?” It would have been so beautiful, so sincere. But you have changed it.You say, “What of those who take sannyas in Pune, only to drop it back in their home environment?” They have never taken sannyas. Once you take sannyas, it cannot be dropped. It is not something that can be dropped. It is a milieu, an experience that goes so deep into you that it becomes your very heart. It permeates you.Sannyas is not just the orange clothes and the mala; that is just symbolic. Sannyas is something totally different, far more deep-going. It is not in the clothes. Once you have taken sannyas it is impossible to drop it – but the real crux is whether you have taken it. If you can drop it, that will simply show that you had never taken it in the first place. And if you have not taken it, you will not be benefited by it. Then naturally the mind will say, “What is the point? For three months you have been a sannyasin, and nothing has happened. Why not drop it?”And nothing has happened because from the very beginning you were not in it. You were not a participant; you were being tricky, you were being diplomatic.Please don’t be diplomatic here. This is an intimate relationship; please don’t bring any cleverness between me and you. With me, be simple, innocent, and then miracles are possible. You are entitled to miracles. But unless you allow them they cannot happen. They can happen only with your cooperation.The third question:Osho,Why do non-sannyasins have to sit behind the green line? It has been very difficult for me to see you, and this to someone who is only just learning about you is not helpful in feeling you. Actually I feel a little bit like a second-class citizen.The truth is you are a second-class citizen. I cannot help it, I cannot lie to you. Sannyasins are in a totally different relationship with me; they are privileged in every possible way. Non-sannyasins should feel grateful that at least they are allowed in, up to the green line.If you want to become a first-class citizen, become a sannyasin. You cannot become a first-class citizen without paying for it. In life you can’t get anything unless you pay for it. Even if you can get something without paying, it will not have any value for you. The value arises only when you pay for it – the more you pay, the more valuable it becomes. To come close to me, you will have to do something.And this arrangement – sannyasins sitting close to me and non-sannyasins sitting a little further away – has something else in it too. If non-sannyasins are in front of me, I cannot talk the way I am talking, because my talk is not something ready-made, it is a response. If I see my people silently sitting, attentive, drinking in every single word, focused, meditative, I can say far higher things; far more complicated things can be explained to them.But if non-sannyasins are sitting in front of me, I always have to begin from ABC. Then the plane can never take off; then the plane has to function like a bus. You can use a plane like a bus. It can take off only when it gains speed; a certain situation is needed for it to gain speed.I used to talk to millions of people in this country; then I had to stop. I was talking to thousands – in a single meeting, fifty thousand people. I traveled around this country for fifteen years, from one corner to another corner. I simply became tired of the whole thing, because each day I would have to start from ABC. It was always ABC, ABC, ABC, and it became absolutely clear that I would never be able to reach XYZ. I had to stop traveling.Now I don’t even go outside the gate of this place, because there I again meet people who live in the ABC. I am no longer interested in them. If they are interested, then they will have to come, and they will have to pass through barriers, and slowly, slowly they will have to become participants. They will have to become sannyasins.I am not talking to students but only to disciples. Students are still allowed, but it will not be very long before they are stopped completely. So before it is too late, cross the green line! Because I would like to talk only to my people, so that I can relate whatsoever I want to relate; so that I can depend and trust that whatsoever is said will be taken in good faith, in love; so that I know from the very beginning that everything can be revealed to them and nothing will be misunderstood.Just the other day, I was reading a report in the Indian Express. Their journalist had come here just two days ago. He wrote in his report that thousands of people were sitting so silently that you could hear the birds chirping in the trees. They were so silent, it was as if there was nobody there.And what was his conclusion? He thought it was all managed, that it was a performance. He thought it was a performance to impress that poor journalist from the Indian Express! He could not believe it, because he knows Indians, and he knows Indian meetings.I also know them. Once I was talking on Krishna in a meeting, and people were sitting with their backs toward me, talking with each other, gossiping – their backs toward me! That was the last day, the last straw on the camel. In the middle I left. The president of the meeting said, “Where are you going?” I said, “I am going forever! I am finished with these stupid people. I am talking about Krishna, they have invited me to talk to them, and nobody seems to listen.”That Indian journalist must have seen many, many such meetings. So, seeing three thousand people sitting silently here, nobody stirring, nobody talking with each other, it was natural to conclude that it was just to impress him.When I was leaving that day, I saw two persons sitting here who looked absolutely out of place. And when I bowed down to you, they did not respond. Now, if many such people are here around me, nonresponsive, I will not be able to pour out my heart; it will be impossible.Hence that green line. If you want to cross it, the doors are not closed. But don’t ask for anything without being really ready to pay for it. And as many, many more sannyasins will be coming, only those who are really dedicated and committed, only they will be able to sit close.And I understand your problem. To sit close, to be near to me, has its own blessing. The contact goes deeper, the vibe permeates you more totally, because it is not only a matter of the questions that I am answering or the words that I am using. Basically it is my presence; you have to drink it and you have to digest it.But I am sorry, I cannot do anything about it. Non-sannyasins are bound to remain second-class citizens here.The last question:Osho,Another discourse, another silly question. Why do you refer to your sannyasins as "the chosen few" when any lost soul who can make it to Pune with a willingness to participate in some trendy gestalt-oriented therapy groups and do some meditating, can apparently take sannyas? Who ever gets refused sannyas and on what grounds? P.S.: Bob Dylan says, "I never got into any of them guru trips. I never felt that lost!"Dick Blackburn, nobody is ever refused, no Tom, Harry or Dick. That does not mean that all are accepted. Nobody is ever refused, that’s true, but that does not mean that all are accepted. Only those who surrender are accepted. Only those who are utterly committed are accepted, who have fallen in love with me, who can trust, and whose trust is unconditional and absolute. They are accepted.Sannyas is not denied to anybody, because sannyas is an opportunity. A few people surrender even before taking sannyas, a few surrender after taking sannyas, a few surrender after being sannyasins for months or for years. Hence sannyas is not denied; it creates a space, a context, for surrender.But as to who is really received, who is really accepted, is a totally different matter. It is not declared; it remains esoteric. Only I know. And, slowly, slowly, the person who is accepted starts knowing it – but very slowly. Sometimes it takes years for the person to understand that he has been accepted. It is never said; not even to the person is it said that he has been accepted. It has to be understood; that is the beauty of it. Only then is it significant.But it starts happening. If I accept a person, slowly, slowly his energy starts giving messages to him that he has been accepted. One day it becomes such an absolute certainty, so self-evident, that there is no need for any other declaration, validation, or any certificate.I give sannyas to all. But only those are accepted who really take sannyas. That’s why I say sannyasins are the chosen few. It is out of my compassion that I don’t reject anybody. The most unworthy is also to be respected, loved, received, welcomed. And who knows? The unworthy may change. Man is unpredictable; the baser metal can any day become gold.And about the P.S, “Bob Dylan says, ‘I never got into any of them guru trips. I never felt that lost!’”To find a master is not for those who feel that they are lost. It is for those who start feeling that there is a way and that there is a ray; that they are not lost, that they can find somebody who will help them, who will make things more clear and transparent.Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,My mind has difficulty understanding the existence of “beginninglessness.” Would you please talk about it?Reality is indefinable. Reality simply is; there is no way to say what it is. It is not a “what,” it is not even a “that,” it is this. It is thisness: you can experience it, but it cannot be explained.And reality is beginningless and endless. The mind has a beginning and an end, hence the mind and reality cannot meet. The mind cannot comprehend the eternal. The mind exists in time, in fact the mind is time: it exists in the past and the future. And remember, time consists of only two tenses, past and future. The present is not part of time, the present is part of eternity.Hence the mind is never found in the present. It is always wavering, either toward the past or toward the future. It moves into that which is not, or into that which is not yet. Its whole skill consists in dreaming. It is rooted in the nonexistential, hence it cannot understand existence itself. It is like darkness. How can darkness comprehend light? How can death comprehend life? If death can comprehend life then death will have to be life. If darkness has to comprehend light then darkness will have to be light.And so is the case with the mind. If the mind wants to comprehend reality, it will have to come out of the past and the future. But coming out of the past and the future, it is no longer the mind at all. Hence the insistence of all the great masters of the world: The door to reality is no-mind.Slip out of the mind, and you will know what it is: the beginningless, the endless. Remain confined to the mind, and you will be puzzled; reality remains inconceivable.I cannot explain it to you, because in explaining I will have to use the mind. Trying to understand it, you will have to use the mind. I can be silent with you and if you can also be silent with me, then there is understanding. Understanding is not of the mind. Then there is great intelligence, great insight. Suddenly you know, and you know from a totally different center of your being; you know from the heart. Your knowing has the quality of love, not of knowledge. Your knowing has the quality of transcendence. It is no longer scientific knowledge, reducible to concepts. It is poetic vision, it is mystic experience.If you really want to understand, you will have to lose the mind. You will have to pay the price of losing the mind. But if you insist, “I have to understand through the mind,” then only one thing is possible. The mind will convince you, slowly, slowly, that there is nothing which is beginningless, nothing which is endless, nothing which is indefinable, nothing which is unknowable.The mind will reduce your experience to the measurable, the fathomable, the knowable – and the knowable is ordinary, mundane. The unknowable is sacred. And only with the unknowable does life become a benediction, only with the unknowable are you thrilled with the wonder of life and existence. Suddenly a song is born in your heart – a song that cannot be contained, a song that starts overflowing, a song that starts reaching others. A dance is born in you – a dance that has to be shared, a dance about which you cannot be miserly, a dance that makes you generous. A love is born in you – a love that is so infinite that it can fill the whole infinite existence. That is real understanding. But it happens only when the mind is dropped.Don’t try to do the impossible. Trying to understand reality through the mind is like pulling yourself up by your own shoestrings. Maybe you can hop a little bit, but that hopping is not going to help; you will be back on the ground again and again, and it will be very tiring. Just by pulling your own shoestrings you cannot fly into the sky; that is not going to give you wings.Slowly, slowly, learn the art of contacting reality without the mind interfering. Sometimes when the sun is setting, just sit there looking at the sun, not thinking about it – watching, not evaluating, not even saying, “How beautiful it is!” The moment you say something, the mind has come in.The mind consists of language. Don’t use language. Can’t you just see the sunset and its beauty? Can’t you be overwhelmed by its beauty? Can’t you be possessed by its grandeur? What is the point of bringing language in? Nobody is asking you to say anything. The sun does not understand your language, the clouds that have become so beautiful and luminous in the setting sun are unable to understand your language. Why bring it in? Put it aside; be in direct contact, be thrilled. If tears come to your eyes, good. If you start dancing, good. Or if you simply remain unmoving, stoned on the beauty of the sun, intoxicated, you will have gained a little experience – a little experience that goes very far, a little glimpse of no-mind.And there are a thousand and one situations every day. Holding the hand of your woman or your man, there is no need to talk. People are continuously talking – yakkety-yakkety-yakkety. And the reason why they are talking is that they are afraid to be silent, they are afraid to see the truth, they are afraid to see their utter emptiness, they are afraid to expose themselves, they are afraid to look deep into the other. Continuous talking keeps them on the surface, occupied, engaged.Holding the hand of your woman or man, why not sit silently? Why not close your eyes and feel? Feel the presence of the other, enter into the presence of the other, let the other’s presence enter into you; vibrate together, sway together; if suddenly a great energy possesses you, dance together – and you will reach to such orgasmic peaks of joy as you have never known before. Those orgasmic peaks have nothing to do with sex, in fact they have much to do with silence.And if you can also manage to become meditative in your sex life, if you can be silent while making love, in a kind of dance, you will be surprised. You have a built-in process to take you to the farthest shore.People make love in such an ugly way that if children sometimes see their parents making love, they think they are wrestling, fighting – that Daddy is going to kill Mum! Groaning, breathing in an ugly way, violent, their movements have no elegance. It is not a dance; certainly it is not a dance.And unless it becomes a dance it will remain very, very physiological; it won’t have any spirituality in it. But it is impossible. Unless your whole life is saturated with those moments that come when the mind ceases, your love life cannot move into silence.The night is full of stars. Lie down on the earth, disappear into the earth. We come from the earth, one day we will be going back to the earth to rest forever. At night sometimes, lying on the lawn, disappear into the earth. Look at the stars – just look, a pure look. Don’t start thinking about the names of the stars, the names of the constellations. Forget all that you know about stars, put aside all your knowledge, just see the stars. And suddenly there will be a communion; the stars will start pouring their light into you, and you will feel an expanding of consciousness. No drug can do it.Drugs are very artificial, arbitrary and harmful methods to know something which is naturally available, which is easily available, beneficially available. Just watching the stars, you will start feeling high, you will start soaring high.Make as much as you can of all the opportunities that life and existence allow you. Never miss a single opportunity when you can drop the mind, and slowly, slowly you will know the knack of it. It is a knack – it is certainly not a science, because it has no fixed methods.Somebody may be thrilled by the stars, somebody may not be. Somebody may be thrilled by the flowers, somebody else may not be affected at all. People are so different that there is no way of determining it in a scientific way; it is not a science. It is not even an art, because an art can be taught.So I insist on the word knack. It is a knack. You have to learn it by doing a few experiments with yourself. And once you have the knack…and everybody can have it, because every child is born with it. Every child brings wondering eyes into existence. Soon we force dust into his eyes; we cover his pure mirror with dust. Sooner or later, he becomes knowledgeable – and the sooner he does, the more happy we are. Our happiness is really in poisoning the child.If the child sees that the parents are very happy because he has become knowledgeable, he starts gathering more and more knowledge. He starts forgetting the knack that he had brought with him into this life, that was inborn. By the time he comes out of the university he has completely forgotten one of the most beautiful things that was given to him by existence: the capacity to wonder, the capacity to see without thinking, the capacity to contact reality without the mind continuously interfering, distorting.You will have to regain it.The sage is the person who regains his childhood; hence he is called “the twice born.” Jesus says, “Unless ye are born again, you will not be able to enter into my kingdom of God.” And the kingdom of God is here, but you have to be reborn – reborn as a no-mind.And I am not saying that when you are reborn as a no-mind you cannot use the mind. The mind has its limited uses. Use it. When you are working in your office, I am not telling you to be a no-mind. When you are working in your shop or in the factory, I am not saying to be a no-mind. I am saying be perfectly a mind. Use the mind but don’t carry it continuously, twenty-four hours, day in and day out, with you. Don’t go on dragging it. Use it as you use a chair. You don’t go on carrying your chair everywhere, wherever you go, just because you may need it.The mind is a beautiful instrument if you know how to be a no-mind too.The mind is impotent, incapable of knowing the beginningless and the endless. The mind exists between birth and death; it knows nothing beyond birth and beyond death.You were here before you were born, and you will be here after you are dead. The mind has a very limited existence, very momentary – one day it comes, another day it is gone. You are forever. Have some experience of your foreverness.But that is possible only through no-mind. No-mind is another name for meditation.The second question:Osho,Yes!This simple word yes contains all the religions of the world. It contains trust, it contains love, it contains surrender. It contains all the prayers that have ever been done, are being done, and will ever be done. If you can say yes with the totality of your heart, you have said all that can be said. To say yes to existence is to be religious, to say no is to be irreligious.That’s my definition of the atheist and the theist. The atheist is not one who denies God, and the theist is not one who believes in God – not necessarily so, because we have seen great theists who never believed in any God. We have known Buddha, Mahavira, Adinatha: we have known tremendously enlightened people who never talked about God. But they also talked about yes; they had to talk about yes.God can be dropped as an unnecessary hypothesis, but yes cannot be dropped. Yes is the very spirit of God. And yes can exist without God, but God cannot exist without yes. God is only the body, yes is the soul.There are people who believe in God and yet I will call them atheists, because their belief has no yes behind it. Their belief is bogus, their belief is formal; their belief is given by others, it is borrowed. Their parents, priests and teachers have taught them that God is; they have made them so much afraid that they cannot even question the existence of God. And they have given them promises of great things if they believe in God. There will be great rewards in heaven if you believe, and great punishments in hell if you don’t believe.Fear and greed have been exploited. The priest has behaved with you almost as the psychologist behaves with the rats upon which he goes on experimenting. The rats in psychological experiments are controlled by punishment and reward. Reward them, and they start learning the thing for which they are rewarded; punish them, and they start unlearning the thing for which they are punished.The priests have behaved with men as if men are rats. Psychologists are not the first to dehumanize humanity; priests were the pioneers. First the priests behaved with men as if they were rats, now the psychologists are behaving with rats as if they are men. But the process is the same, the technique exactly the same.There are people who are theists – believers in God, churchgoers, worshippers – and yet in their hearts there is no yes; in their hearts there is doubt. On the surface they behave religiously, deep down they are suspicious. It is the depth that determines you. It is not what you do that is decisive, it is what you feel at the deepest core of your being that determines you, that creates you. And there are atheists who go on saying there is no God, but they are not in any way different from the believers. Their disbelief has as much doubt in it as the belief of the believers.In Soviet Russia, in China, and in other red countries, disbelief is the belief; not to believe is to be a conformist, to believe is to be a revolutionary. The state goes on teaching that there is no God. If people are taught continuously, conditioned continuously, they become whatsoever they are conditioned for. It is a kind of mass hypnosis.Theists, atheists, both are victims. The really religious person has nothing to do with the Bible or the Koran or the Bhagavadgita. The really religious person has a deep communion with existence. He can say yes to a roseflower, he can say yes to the stars, he can say yes to people, he can say yes to his own being, to his own desires. He can say yes to whatsoever life brings to him; he is a yea-sayer. And in this yea saying is contained the essential prayerfulness.The last words of Jesus on earth were: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Amen.”Do you know this word amen, what it means? It simply means “Yes, Lord, yes. Let thy will be done. Don’t listen to what I say, I am ignorant. Don’t listen to what I desire; my desires are stupid – bound to be so. Go on doing whatsoever you feel right – go on doing it in spite of me.” That is the meaning of the word amen. Mohammedans also end their prayer with amin – it is the same word.Your question is tremendously significant. First, it is not a question, hence it is significant. It is a declaration, it is a dedication, it is surrender, it is trust.You say, “Osho, yes!” This is the beginning of real sannyas. If you can say yes with totality, with no strings attached to it, with no conditions, with no desire for any reward, if you can simply enjoy saying yes, if it is your dance, your song, then it is prayer. And all prayers reach God – whether God is mentioned or not, whether you believe in God or not. All prayers reach God. To reach him, a prayer has only to be an authentic prayerfulness.But I would like to tell you that your yes should not only be prayerfulness. It should become your very lifestyle, it should become your flavor, your fragrance. Down the ages, religions have been teaching people life-negation, life-condemnation. Down the ages, religions have been telling you that you are sinners, that your bodies are the houses of sin, that you have to destroy your life in order to praise the Lord, that you have to renounce the world to be able to be accepted by the Lord. This is all holy cow dung, utter nonsense.Life-affirmation, not life-negation, is religion – because God is life, and there is no other God. God is the green of the trees and the red of the trees and the gold of the trees. Godliness is all over the place. Only godliness is. To deny life means to deny existence, to condemn life means to condemn existence, to renounce life means you are thinking yourself wiser than existence.Existence has given you this life, this tremendously valuable gift, and you cannot even appreciate it. You cannot welcome it, you cannot feel any gratitude for it. On the contrary, you are complaining and complaining and complaining. Your heart is full of grudges, not gratitude.But this is what you have been taught by the priests down the ages. Priests have lived on it; this has been their basic strategy to exploit people.If life is lived in its totality, the priest is not needed at all. If you are already okay as you are, if life is beautiful as it is, what is the need for a priest? What is the need of a mediator between you and existence? You are directly in contact with existence: you are living in existence, breathing in existence, existence is pulsating in you. The priest and all his mumbo jumbo, his religion and scriptures, will be utterly useless. He can be significant only if he can create a rift between you and God. First the rift has to be created, then he can come and can tell you, “Now I am here, I can bridge the rift.” But first the rift has to be there, only then can it be bridged.And of course, you have to pay for it. When the priest does such great work bridging the rift, you have to pay for it. And in fact deep down, he is not interested in bridging it. He will only pretend that he is bridging it; the rift will remain. In fact he will make it more and more unbridgeable; the more unbridgeable it is, the more important he is. His importance consists in denying life, destroying life, making you renounce it.I teach you a tremendous total yes to life. I teach you not renunciation but rejoicing. Rejoice! Rejoice! Again and again, I say rejoice! – because in your rejoicing you will come closest to existence.When the dancer disappears in his dance, he is divine. When the singer disappears in his song, he is divine. Rejoice so deeply, so totally, that you disappear in your rejoicing: there is rejoicing, but there is nobody who is rejoicing. When it comes to such an optimum, there is a transformation, a revolution. You are no longer the old dark ugly self. You are showered with blessings. For the first time you come to know your grandeur, the splendor of your being. Say yes to life, say a total yes to life. That’s what sannyas is all about. I don’t give you concepts, dogmas, creeds. I only give you a certain life-affirmative lifestyle, a philosophy of life reverence.The third question:Osho,You told us that truth can't be transmitted or transferred, it can be attained only by experience. Many years ago when I was converted to Catholicism and when I took the "holy communion," I had genuine, pure feelings of love for Jesus and felt I had attained the "truth."As I see it today, I simply fell victim to a vicious fallacy induced by the priests through a kind of self-hypnosis, and had adored and worshipped nothing more than a piece of bread. I had to face the fact that I had attained, by experience, the wrong truth.How to distinguish between these cases of unconscious self-delusion and the "real thing"? How to avoid deception?Truth cannot be transferred, truth cannot be handed over to you by somebody else, because it is not a commodity. It is not a thing, it is an experience. In fact, the word experience is not exactly the right word. It will be truer to say that it is an experiencing; this is the first thing to be understood.I have to use language which is already there, created by the centuries, with all kinds of fallacies in it – obviously. Language is created for day-to-day use, language is created for the mundane world; as far as it goes, it is good. It is perfectly adequate for the marketplace, but as you start moving into deeper waters it becomes more and more inadequate – not only inadequate, it starts becoming utterly wrong.For example, think of these two words, experience and experiencing. When you use the word experience it gives you a sense of completion, as if something has come to a completion, as if the full stop has arrived. In life there are no full stops. Life knows nothing of full stops; it is an ongoing process, an eternal river. The goal never arrives; it is always arriving, but it never arrives. Hence the word experience is not right. It gives a false notion of completion, perfection; it makes you feel as if now you have arrived. experiencing is far more true.In reference to true life all nouns are wrong, only verbs are true. When you say, “This is a tree,” you are making a wrong statement existentially. Not linguistically, not grammatically, but existentially you are making a wrong statement, because the tree is not a static thing, it is growing. It is never in a state of isness, it is always becoming. In fact to call it a tree is not right: it is treeing. A river is rivering.If you look deep into life, nouns start disappearing, and there are only verbs. But that will create trouble in the marketplace. You cannot say to people, “I went to the rivering,” or, “This morning I saw a beautiful treeing.” They will think you have gone mad. Nothing is static in life, nothing is at rest.A great scientist, Eddington, is reported to have said that the word rest has no corresponding reality to it, because nothing is ever at rest, everything is moving. It is all movement.So let me say that truth is an experience in the sense of experiencing. You can never declare, you can never claim “I have it.” You can only be humble about it – “It is happening” – and then you will not be deceived. The deception comes because you start claiming “I have it.” Then the ego arises saying, “I have the truth. Only I have the truth, nobody else does. I have arrived.” And the ego raises its head.Truth is an experiencing. You cannot claim it, it is very mercurial. If you want to grab it, it will disappear from your fist. You can have it only with an open hand, not with a fist. When you make a noun out of it, you are trying to grab it in a fist; it will disappear. Let it remain a verb. Don’t say, “I have arrived.” Simply say, “The pilgrimage has started. I am a pilgrim, I am moving.”If the ego does not arise, nobody can deceive you. That is the second thing to be remembered. It is always the ego that deceives and is deceived. If you don’t have any ego, there is no possibility of you ever being deceived. But if you have the ego, then others will deceive you. What to say of others? – you will deceive yourself.The ego is the fundamental deception; don’t help it to grow in you, don’t nourish it. And the greatest thing that nourishes it is experiences, particularly spiritual experiences. You have seen Christ, you have seen Buddha; you have seen kundalini rising in your spine, the serpent uncoiling; you have seen great light, you have seen a lotus flowering inside your head, you have seen the heart chakra opening, and all that crap – beautiful sounding words, but only fools are deceived by them.If fools disappear from the world, all esotericism will disappear. There will be great poetry, but no esotericism in it. There will be immense mystery, but no esotericism in it.The third thing is that whenever you have some experience – spiritual or otherwise, wise or otherwise – whenever you have some experience, remember, you are not it. It is a content in consciousness – and all contents have to be dropped. Only then does the mind disappear. The mind is nothing but all the contents together; the accumulation of contents is the mind.Just look, watch. What is your mind? What is meant by the word mind? What exactly does it consist of? All your experiences, knowledge, the past, accumulated: that is your mind. You may have a materialist’s mind, you may have a spiritualist’s mind, it doesn’t matter a bit; the mind is the mind. The spiritual mind is as much a mind as the materialist mind. And we have to go beyond the mind.Don’t trust in the content – watch it, and let it pass. And yes, sometimes the content is so tremendously enchanting, so hypnotizing, that one would like to cling to it. When spiritual, so-called spiritual experiences start happening, it is really very tempting – more tempting than anything in the world. When you see great light inside, it is so tempting to cling to it, to claim, “I have arrived” – or at least to believe deep inside yourself, “I have arrived. While everybody else is groping in darkness, light has happened to me.”This is just a new kind of darkness, because you are again being caught, trapped, by the content. These two things have to be remembered: the content and the consciousness. The consciousness never becomes content, and the content never becomes consciousness. The consciousness is a pure mirror, it only reflects.Now, what does it matter to the mirror whether a beautiful woman is standing before it, or an ugly woman? Do you think it matters? Do you think the mirror starts thinking of clinging to the reflection of a beautiful woman – Sophia Loren? “Don’t let her go, cling.” Or do you think the mirror feels very repulsed if some ugly woman is there? It doesn’t matter. What does it have to do with the mirror?The mirror remains unaffected; it simply goes on reflecting whatsoever is the case. If it is darkness it reflects darkness, if it is morning it reflects morning. If somebody is dead it reflects death. If a child starts giggling, laughing, jumping, it reflects that. A roseflower is reflected with the same quality as it reflects a thorn; no distinction is made.This state is really spiritual.You ask me, “How to distinguish between these cases of unconscious self-delusion and the real thing?” The real thing never appears as a thing. The real thing is not a thing, the real thing is the mirrorlike consciousness.Always remember, always and always: “I am the witness.” Don’t get identified with any content, otherwise you will be falling into error. If you become identified with any content, howsoever beautiful and spiritual it appears, you have gone wrong, you have gone astray.And the temptation is certainly great. What to say when inside you see a great melody arising – anahat, the soundless sound, the sound of one hand clapping? It is such a beautiful experience, one would like to be drowned in it for ever and ever. Or when suddenly inside, fragrances are released…And remember, whatsoever can happen outside can happen inside too, because each sense has two doors to it, and each sense has two potential possibilities. One is for the outside, the other is for the inside. Your eyes can see light and colors and rainbows and the clouds and the stars outside; and your eyes have another aspect: the other side of your eyes.If you close your eyes and learn how to see within, you will be surprised. A far more beautiful sky opens its doors for you. A far more unbelievably beautiful world welcomes you; it has great splendor. You could never have imagined that things could ever be so beautiful. Stones turn into diamonds. Naturally, one would like to cling. Great treasures are there; one would like to hoard them. And there is nobody to compete with you; you are alone, and the whole kingdom is yours.And just as your nose has the capacity to smell beautiful flowers, it has an inner capacity too. Once you turn in, you will come to smell such fragrances that are not of this world – and it is very natural to be caught by them.But all these experiences are hindrances, obstacles. The real seeker when he moves inward has to be more alert than he has ever been on the outside. He has to be really alert not to be caught by anything.And I am not saying don’t enjoy. Enjoy – but remember that you are not it. Enjoy, it is your right to enjoy – but remember: “I am the witness of it all.” If that witnessing is remembered, you will never be “goofed,” you will never be deceived. Otherwise you can be deceived again and again.To summarize: the spiritual experience is not an experience, but experiencing. Second, experiencing is a content; and you are not the content, you are just a mirror. If this much is remembered, then there is no pitfall for you. Then your path is straight.The fourth question:Osho,What is the secret of your finding the right name for each of your thousands of sannyasins?To tell you the truth, there is no secret at all. Meditate on this story:There were three wise men following a star, bearing gifts to take to their lord. They traveled much and came to rest at a stable, as the star they were following was directly above it. They got down from their donkeys and the first went into the stable and laid his gift at the foot of the manger. The second followed, laying his gift at the foot of the manger also.It happened that the third was much taller than the first two, and as he entered the stable he hit his head on the beam. In great pain he shouted, “Jesus Christ!”At that, Mary looked up at him, smiling, and said, “Oh, what a beautiful name! I was going to call him Fred.”The fifth question:Osho,I simply cannot understand your generalizations about male and female type. Sometimes you acknowledge male and female principles regardless of gender. But most of the time you talk of woman being the "primitive" one, finding the "wolf" in the man. What of the woman who finds herself naturally the initiator or sees the cat, not the wolf, in her man? Some men are really longing to be passive. Some women may need to assert themselves to grow. How can it be simply a matter of women's lib making women "sophisticated" and over-rational?My statement that women are more primitive than men is not to condemn them, it is to condemn men. By “primitive” I mean more natural, more in tune with existence. Civilization is a falsification, civilization is going astray from nature. The more man becomes civilized the less happy, the less authentic he is. The more man becomes civilized, the more he is hung up in the head; he loses contact with his heart.The heart is still primitive. And it is good that the universities have not yet found a way to teach the heart and make it civilized. That is the only hope for humanity to survive. The woman is the only hope for humanity to survive. Up to now, man has been dominant, and man has been dominant for a very strange reason. The reason is that deep down man feels inferior. Out of inferiority, just to compensate for it, he started dominating the woman.Only in one sense is he stronger than the woman, and that is in muscular strength. In every other way the woman is far stronger than the man. The woman lives longer than the man, five to seven years longer. The woman suffers less through diseases, illnesses, than the man.One hundred and ten boys are born to every hundred girls. But by the time they reach sexual maturity the number is equaled – ten boys have disappeared down the drain.The woman has more resistance to illnesses and diseases of all kinds. More men go mad, the number is almost double. And more men commit suicide; again the number is double.In every possible way except the muscular, the woman is far superior. But to have muscular strength is not really something very superior; it is animalistic. In that sense a wolf is far superior, a tiger even more, a lion still more.Man must have become aware of his inferiority millions of years ago. And this is one of the psychological mechanisms: whenever you become aware of a certain inferiority, you have to compensate for it. The ugly person tries to look beautiful, pretends to be beautiful in every possible way. He will try with clothes, with cosmetics, he will go to beauticians, to plastic surgeons. It is over-compensation; somehow he knows that he is not beautiful and he has to be beautiful. The inferior person tries to be superior. And because of muscular strength, the man could prove to be the master, and he has dominated the woman down the ages.But the time has come now for a great change. The future belongs to women, not to men, because what man has done, down these ages, has been so ugly. Wars and wars and wars – that is his whole history. All the great that man has created is…Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadirshah, Alexander, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong – people like these.Yes, there have been a few men like Gautam Buddha, Jesus Christ, Krishna – but have you noted one point? They all look feminine. In fact that was one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s criticisms of Buddha and Jesus Christ, that they look feminine, that they are womanish.Buddha certainly looks feminine. Whenever a man moves into the heart, something in him goes feminine. He becomes more round, more soft, more vulnerable.Friedrich Nietzsche could not understand Gautama Buddha – because Nietzsche said that the most beautiful thing that ever happened to him, the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen, was not the stars, not the sunset or sunrise, not beautiful women, not roses and lotuses. No, nothing like that. You cannot imagine what was the most beautiful thing he had come across. He said that soldiers parading with naked swords, shining in the sunlight – that was his most beautiful experience, and the sound of their boots was the most musical thing he had ever come across – not Mozart, not Wagner, no, but the sound of those boots! And the regiment moving with naked swords shining in the sun, the most beautiful thing!Of course he could not understand Buddha. It is Friedrich Nietzsche who has been the father of this century, and this century is one of the ugliest. He is the father of two world wars, and he may be waiting for the third, waiting to give birth to the third. He says war is the most beautiful thing in the world, because it brings that which is greatest in man to the surface.He himself went mad, which seems very logical; such a man must go mad. And when he became mad he started signing his letters as “Anti-Christ Friedrich Nietzsche.” Even in his madness he could not forget one thing, that he was anti-Christ. Everything else was forgotten: he could not recognize his friends, he could not even recognize his own sister who had looked after him his whole life, but he could not forget one thing, that he was anti-Christ.Yes, there have been a few buddhas. But if you look closely at them you will find they are more feminine than masculine. All the great artists of the world slowly, slowly start growing a quality of feminineness: grace, elegance, exquisiteness. A certain flavor of softness, relaxedness, calmness and quietness surrounds them. They are no longer feverish.What I am teaching here is really to turn the whole world feminine.But you must be coming from that ugly movement called Women’s Lib. Not only is woman to be liberated, man also has to be liberated. The woman has to be liberated from her past, and the man has to be liberated from his past. We need liberation, we need a liberated human being. And remember, when I use the word man the woman is included. But women have become very touchy about it.Once I was talking in a very sophisticated club of women in Calcutta. In some reference I made the statement “All men are brothers.” And some woman who must have been like you stood up, very angry, furious. And she said, “Why do you go on making statements only about men? All men are brothers – and what about women? Why don’t you say all women are sisters and sisterhood is strong?”I said to the woman, “Lady, I am sorry. I will make a compromise: I will say all men are sisters. What else can I do? If I say all women are sisters, some man may get angry at me.”Don’t be foolish. When I am talking, try to be a little more sympathetic. You will not find any more sympathetic person than me, I make no distinctions between men and women; both have suffered. In fact suffering always comes like that, it is a double-edged sword. If you make somebody suffer, you have to suffer. If you make somebody a slave, you have to become a slave too; it is mutual.The day women are liberated will be a great day of liberation for men too. But don’t make the whole thing ugly. Otherwise there is every possibility – I fear that the possibility is there, and it is a great possibility that in fighting with men, women may lose something which is valuable. Something which has not yet been crushed and destroyed by men may be destroyed by women themselves in fighting with men. If you fight ferociously you will lose the beauty of femininity; you yourself will become as ugly as men.It has not to be decided by fighting, it has to be decided by understanding. Spread more and more understanding. Drop these ideas of being men and women! We are all human beings. To be a man or a woman is just a very superficial thing. Don’t make much fuss about it, it is not anything very important; don’t make it a big deal.And whatsoever I say sometimes may look like generalizations, because each time I cannot put in all the conditions; otherwise my talking to you would become very much burdened with footnotes. And I hate books with footnotes! I simply don’t read them. The moment I see footnotes I throw the book away – it has been written by some pundit, some scholar, some foolish person.You say, “I simply cannot understand your generalizations about male and female type…” I am always talking about types; the gender is not included. Whenever I say man I mean the man-type, and whenever I say woman I mean the woman-type. But I cannot each time say man-type, woman-type. And you are right that there are women who are not women, who are wolves; and there are men who are not wolves, who are cats. But then whatsoever I say about the man-type will be applicable to women who are wolves, and whatsoever I say about women will be applicable to men who are cats.I am not talking about the biological distinction between man and woman, I am talking about the psychological one. Yes, there are men who are far more feminine than any woman, and there are women who are far more masculine than any man. But this is not a beautiful state; this is ugly, because this is creating a duality in you. If you have the body of a man and the mind of a woman, there will be a conflict, a social struggle in you, a civil war in you. You will be continuously in a tug of war, fighting, tense.If you are a woman physiologically, and you have the mind of a man, your life will dissipate much energy in unnecessary conflict. It is far better to be in tune. If a man in the body, then a man in the mind; if a woman in the body, then a woman in the mind.And the Women’s Lib movement is creating unnecessary trouble. It is turning women into wolves, it is teaching them how to fight. Man is the enemy; how can you love the enemy? How can you be in an intimate relationship with the enemy?The man is not the enemy. The woman, to be really a woman, has to be more and more feminine, has to touch the heights of softness and vulnerability. And the man, to be really a man, has to move into his masculinity as deeply as possible. When a real man comes in contact with a real woman, they are polar opposites, extremes. But only extremes can fall in love, and only extremes can enjoy intimacy. Only extremes attract each other.What is happening now is a kind of unisex: men becoming more and more feminine, women becoming more and more masculine. Sooner or later, all distinctions will be lost. It will be a very colorless society, it will be boring.I would like the woman to become as feminine as possible, only then can she flower; and the man to be as masculine as possible, only then can he flower. When they are polar opposites, a great attraction, a great magnetism, arises between them. And when they come close, when they meet in intimacy, they bring two different worlds, two different dimensions, two different richnesses, and the meeting is a tremendous blessing, a benediction.Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,When does the boat reach the other shore?There is no other shore, this is the only shore there is. And it is not a question of reaching somewhere else, it is a question of awakening here and now. It is never there, it is always here; it is never then, it is always now. This moment contains the totality of reality.The boat I am talking about is not really a boat. I am talking about becoming aware. Man has fallen asleep – man is already where he needs to be, where he is meant to be. Man is in paradise. The Garden of Eden has never been left, nobody can expel you from it. But you can fall asleep, and you can start dreaming a thousand and one things. Then those dreams become your reality, and the reality fades far away, becomes unreal.You need not go anywhere. Meditation is neither a journey in space nor a journey in time, but an instantaneous awakening. If you can be silent now, this is the other shore. If you can allow the mind to cease, not to function, this is the other shore.But the mind is very clever and cunning; it distorts every great teaching. It jumps upon words, catches hold of the words, and starts giving meanings to them which are not real meanings.Yes, I talked about the other shore. And your mind must have caught the words the other shore, the boat. “Where is the other shore, and where is the boat, and how can I get to the boat, how can I get into it, and when will I reach the other shore?”You misunderstood the whole thing. Be awake, and this shore becomes the other shore, and this very moment becomes eternity. This very body the buddha, and this very place the lotus paradise.And awakening does not need time; not even a split second is needed for it to happen. It is only a question of a tremendous desire arising in you of such a quality of intensity that you become afire with it. In that fire, the old is gone and the new has arrived. The old was never there in the first place, you only believed in it. And the new has always been the case, you had only forgotten it.I declare to you that this is the only world there is, and this is the only life there is. Don’t start thinking of some other life somewhere after death, beyond the seven skies, in heaven. Those are all just mind dreams, mind trips, new ways to fall asleep again.Hence my insistence that no sannyasin has to leave the world, because leaving the world is part of a project, part of a dream of reaching to the other world. And because there is none, all your efforts will be in vain. You are not to go to the monasteries or to the Himalayas; you are not to escape from here. You have to become awakened here.And in fact it is easier to be awakened here than in a Himalayan cave. Have you not observed it? If you are suffering from a nightmare, awakening is easier. If you are having a sweet dream, awakening is more difficult. If in your dream you are on a honeymoon with your beloved, who wants to be awakened? In fact the person who tries to wake you up will look like the enemy. But if you are followed by a tiger and it is a question of life and death, and you are running and running and the tiger is coming closer and closer and closer, and you start feeling his breath on your back, then suddenly you are awake. It is too much to tolerate, it is unbearable.In a Himalayan cave you will be dreaming sweet dreams. That’s what people are doing in the monasteries – dreaming beautiful dreams of God, of angels, of heaven, of eternal peace and joy. In the world, people are suffering from nightmares – the nightmares of the share market, the nightmares of power politics. It is easier to be awakened here. If you cannot awaken here, you cannot wake up anywhere else.But remember, let me repeat it again, there is no other reality, there is only one reality. But the one reality can be seen in two ways: with sleepy eyes, dreamy eyes – full of dust – and then what you see is distorted; and the same reality can be seen without sleep, without dreaming eyes, without dust. Then whatsoever you see is the truth – and truth liberates.The second question:Osho,While you were pointing the finger to the moon you said today, "Men have to become more masculine." What is this masculine?Masculinity can have two directions, just as femininity can have two directions. The masculine mind can be aggressive, violent, destructive – that is only one of the possibilities. Men have tried that, and humanity has suffered much from it. And when men try this negative aspect of masculinity, women naturally start moving into the negative femininity, just to keep together with men. Otherwise the rift will be too great, unbridgeable. When the feminine is negative it is inactivity, lethargy, indifference. The negative man can only have a bridge to a negative woman.But there is a positive aspect. Nothing can be only negative; every negativity has a positive aspect too. Every dark cloud has a silver lining, and every night is followed by the morning.Positive masculinity is initiative, creativity, adventure. These are the same qualities, but moving on a different plane. The negative masculine mind becomes destructive, the positive masculine mind becomes creative. Destructiveness and creativeness are not two things, but two aspects of one energy. The same energy can become aggression and the same energy can become initiative.When aggression is initiative it has a beauty of its own. When violence becomes adventure, when violence becomes exploration, exploration of the new, of the unknown, it is tremendously beneficial.And so is the case with the feminine. Inactivity is negative, receptivity is positive. They both look alike, they look very similar. You will need very penetrating eyes to see the difference between the inactive and the receptive. The receptive is a welcome, it is an awaiting, it has a prayerfulness in it. Receptivity is a host, receptivity is a womb. Inactivity is simply dullness, death, hopelessness. There is nothing to wait for, nothing to expect, nothing is ever going to happen. It is falling into lethargy, it is falling into a kind of indifference. And indifference, lethargy are poisons.But the same thing that becomes indifference can become detachment, and then it has a totally different flavor. Indifference looks like detachment; it is not. Indifference is simply no interest. Detachment is not absence of interest – detachment is absolute interest, tremendous interest, but still with the capacity of non-clinging. Enjoy the moment while it is there and when the moment starts disappearing, as everything is bound to disappear, let it go. That is detachment.Lethargy is a negative state. One is like a lump of mud just lying there – no possibility of growth, no exuberance, no flowering. But the same energy can become a pool, a great pool of energy – not going anywhere, not doing anything, but the energy accumulating and accumulating and accumulating.And scientists say that at a certain point the quantitative change becomes a qualitative change. At a hundred degrees heat the water evaporates. At ninety-nine degrees it has not yet evaporated; at ninety-nine point nine degrees it has still not evaporated. But just point one degree more, and the water will take a quantum leap.Positive femininity is not like lethargy, it is like a tremendous pool of energy. And as the energy gathers and accumulates, it goes through many qualitative changes.A man, to be really masculine, has to be adventurous, has to be creative, has to be able to take as many initiatives in life as possible. The woman, to be really a woman, has to be a pool of energy behind the man, so the adventure can have as much energy as possible. Energy will be needed so that the adventure can have some inspiration, so that the adventure can have some poetry, so that the adventurous soul can relax in the woman and be replenished with life, rejuvenated.Man and woman both together, moving positively, are one whole. And the real couple – and there are very few real couples – is one in which each has joined with the other in a positive way. Ninety-nine percent of couples are joined together in a negative way. That’s why there is so much misery in the world.I repeat it again: the man has to be masculine and the woman has to be feminine, but in a positive way. Then to be together is a meditation, then to be together is really a great adventure. Then to be together brings new surprises every day. Then life is a dance between these two polarities, and they help each other, they nourish each other.Man alone will not be able to go very far. Woman alone will be just a pool of energy with no possibility of any dynamic movement. When both are together they are complementary. No one is higher than the other; complementaries are never higher and lower, complementaries are equal. Neither the man nor the woman is higher, they are complementaries. Together they make a whole, and together they can create a holiness which is not possible for either separately.That’s why Jesus or Buddha look a little less rich than Krishna, and the reason is that they are alone. Krishna is more total. Hence, in India, Krishna is thought to be the perfect avatar, the perfect incarnation of God. Buddha is thought to be partial, so is Mahavira a partial manifestation of God, and so is Jesus. Krishna has something of totality in him.And one more thing. If it were only a case of an outer meeting of man and woman, it would not have been so important. It is also a case of a meeting deep down in the being of each man and woman, because each man is a woman inside too, and each woman is a man inside too. The outer meeting and merging with the other is really a lesson, an experiment, to prepare for the inner meeting.Each man is born out of a man and a woman. Half of you comes from your father and half of you comes from your mother. You are a meeting of polar opposites.Modern psychology, particularly the Jungian school of psychology, accepts this, is based on this, that man is bisexual and so is woman. If your conscious mind is that of a man, then your unconscious will be that of a woman, and vice versa.But to manage the inner meeting is difficult in the beginning, because the inner is invisible. First you have to learn the lesson with the visible. Meet with the outer woman, meet with the outer man, so that you can have a few experiences of what this meeting is all about. Then, slowly, slowly, you can search withinward and find the same polarity there.The day your inner man and woman meet, you are enlightened. That day is a day of great celebration, not only for you but for the whole existence. One man has arrived back again. Out of millions and millions, one man has arrived.It is said that when Buddha became enlightened, flowers showered from the sky. These are not historical facts, they are poetic expressions, but of tremendous significance. The whole existence must have danced, must have sung, must have showered millions of flowers – because it is a rare phenomenon. A groping soul has suddenly become integrated, a fragmentary soul has certainly become crystallized. One man has become existence: it has to be celebrated. It is a blessing to the whole existence.But the first lesson has to be learned outside, remember. Unless you have known the woman on the outer plane, in all her richness, in all her sweetness and bitterness; unless you have known the man on the outside, in all his beauty and in all his ugliness, you will not be able to move into the inner dimension. You will not be able to allow the yin and yang, Shiva and Shakti, to meet inside.And that meeting is of utter importance, of ultimate importance, because only with that meeting do you become godly – never before it.The third question:Osho,Although I have not been to Krishnamurti's latest discourses in Mumbai, I have heard that he has talked against sannyas in them. It seems to me that this attitude is a device that helps both his work and yours, that he does not mean what he says. Please comment.J. Krishnamurti is an enlightened man – you need not defend him. He does mean what he says, he is against sannyas. That’s his approach toward life, a very narrow approach of course. He has a very tunnel-type of vision. Of course whatsoever he says is right according to his tunnel vision, but his vision is very narrow.He can say sannyas is wrong, he can say I am wrong. Still, I cannot say that he is wrong, because I have a wider vision, very inclusive. If I can say Buddha is right, Zarathustra is right, Lao Tzu is right, Tilopa, Atisha, and many, many more are right, I can also say Krishnamurti is right.Yes, there are people for whom his vision will be of help, but those people will be very few. In fact the people for whom his vision is right may not need his help at all – because to need help from a master is what sannyas is all about, to need help from a master is the fundamental of disciplehood. Whether you call it disciplehood or not does not matter.Krishnamurti is very much against the words disciple and master. But that’s what he has been doing for fifty years. He is a master who says that he is not a master. And the people who listen to him and follow him are disciples who think they are not disciples.It does not matter what you think. What matters is what you are. He is a master and he has disciples. He denies that he is a master; that is part of his device. In this egoistic world it is very difficult for people to surrender, to drop their egos. For the egoists who cannot drop their egos he opens a door. He says, “Keep your ego; you don’t need to be a disciple, you don’t need to be a sannyasin.” The egoists feel very good that they need not bow down to anybody. But listening to him continuously again and again, deep down the bowing starts happening, the surrender starts happening.He does not claim that he is a master. But whatsoever a master requires, he requires from his listeners. The master says, “Listen without thinking, listen totally, without any interference from your thoughts.” And that’s what he requires from his disciples whom he does not call disciples. It is a very sophisticated game. He can say sannyas is wrong – he has to say it.And whenever he is in India – and soon now, wherever he will be, in every meeting he will find my sannyasins. That irritates him very much, and it must be even more irritating that when he talks against sannyas and against sannyasins, my sannyasins laugh and enjoy it.He has been asking them, “Why do you come to me? If you have already got a master there is no need to come.” To one of my sannyasins he said in a private interview, “If you have got a master, you need not come here.”And my sannyasin said, “But my master says ‘Go everywhere. Wherever you find something can be learned, go there!’ This is his teaching and we are following him, and we are not here to follow you!”Naturally he gets very irritated. But you need not defend him. And this is the beauty, that he cannot accept me but I can accept him. It makes no problem for me. I accept all kinds of people and all kinds of philosophies; my vision is wide enough.In fact why is he so much against masters and disciples? It is a wound that has healed but the scar is still left. He was forced to be a disciple against his will. He was a small child when he was adopted by Annie Besant and the theosophists, only nine years old, completely unaware of what was being done to him. And he was forced to follow a very rigid discipline.Twenty-four hours a day he was being trained, because one of the theosophist leaders, Leadbeater, had this idea, this vision, that this boy is going to become a world teacher – a jagatguru, a master of the whole world – that he is going to become the vehicle of Lord Maitreya, that he has to be prepared so he can receive the new incarnation of Buddha in his body. So he was tortured in many ways.He was not allowed to eat like other children, he was not allowed to play with other children, as any child would like to. He was guarded. He was not allowed to go to ordinary schools, he was almost completely kept a prisoner. And then getting up early at three o’clock in the morning, and then the ritual bath, and so many, many rituals – Tibetan, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian…he must have become tired.And the last wound happened when his brother Nityananda died. There were two brothers, Krishnamurti and Nityananda, and both were being prepared, because there was a little suspicion as to who was really going to be the master. Nityananda died from this rigid discipline, this almost insane imposition. His death was a trauma for Krishnamurti; he had loved his brother tremendously. There was no other outlet for his love. He had been taken away from his family; his mother had died and his father was not able to look after them, he was just a small clerk. Both the children were adopted by Annie Besant and they had to travel all around the world learning different esoteric disciplines. It was very hard on them. There is every possibility that Nityananda died simply because of too much training.And then those masters, whom Krishnamurti had not chosen out of love…they were like prisoners and the masters were like jailers. He carried a very wrong notion about masters; it was very difficult for him to get free from their trap. Finally he got free from their trap – how long can you hold someone? When he became a young man, and strong enough to get out of the trap, he simply rushed out, and declared, “I am nobody’s master, and I am not going to be a world teacher, and this is all nonsense!”Since then, the scar has remained. Since then he has been talking about things like masters, disciplines, meditations, disciplehood, and he has been against all of them. It is natural. In fact he has never known a master, and he has never known disciplehood – because these are not things that can be imposed on you, these are things which you accept out of joy and love.You are far more fortunate than he is. You have chosen me out of joy, out of love, and you are free to leave me at any moment. He was not free to leave. He had not chosen these people. And there is every possibility that many wrong things were done to him when he was a child.It is almost an established fact that Leadbeater was a homosexual. The point was even raised in court that he was sexually exploiting the children. Just think of a nine-year-old child, if sexually mishandled he will have a very deep wound from it; it will be difficult for him to erase the scar.You can ask the psychologists: if a child is in some way sexually exploited, his whole life becomes disturbed. If a girl was somehow sexually exploited against her will, or when she was not aware of what was happening, she will never be at ease sexually, never. The fear will come again and again.There is every possibility that something like this happened. Krishnamurti never talks about these things, there is no point in talking about these things, all those old fogies are dead. But somewhere the scar is there. Hence his antagonism to masters, to disciplehood, to sannyas, to all kinds of methods. This shows something about his history; it shows nothing about masters and disciples.What does he know about Buddha and the disciples that Buddha had? What does he know about Atisha and the masters Dharmakirti, Dharmarakshita and Yogin Maitreya – what does he know about these people?And one thing more, a calamity happened. Annie Besant and Leadbeater never allowed him to read ancient scriptures because they were afraid he would lose his originality. So he was kept utterly ignorant of all the great traditions of the world.And if you don’t know anything about Atisha and Dharmakirti, you will miss something. Dharmakirti was the master who told Atisha to move to another master, Dharmarakshita, “because what I have known, I have given to you. I can give you the rest too, but that has never been my path. Go to Dharmarakshita, he has followed another route. He will give you something more, something more authentic. I have only heard about it, or only seen it from the mountain-top. I give you emptiness. Now, to learn compassion, go to Dharmarakshita.”What beautiful people they must have been! And Dharmarakshita told him, “I know only the feminine kind of compassion, the passive kind. For the active, you must go to another master, Yogin Maitreya; he will teach you.”These are not people who are possessive, who are jealous, who want to dominate. These are people who give freedom! Krishnamurti is utterly unaware of all the great traditions of the world – he only knows the theosophists.And that was one of the ugliest things that happened in this century. All kinds of fools gathered under the banner of theosophy, it was a hotchpotch. It was an effort to create a synthesis of all that is good from all the religions. But no such synthesis is possible. And if you make such a synthesis you will only have a corpse on your hands, not an alive body breathing, pulsating.It is as if you love many women – one woman has beautiful eyes, you take the eyes out; another woman has a beautiful nose, you cut off the nose – and so on and so forth. Put all the parts together, assemble them, and you will have a corpse. Making the corpse you have killed twenty beautiful women, and the end result is just utter stupidity.That’s what theosophy did. Something is beautiful in Hinduism, something is beautiful in Taoism, something is beautiful in Mohammedanism, something is beautiful in Judaism, and so on and so forth. Collect all that, put it together, put it in a mixer and mix it, and what you will have will be just a corpse.Krishnamurti unfortunately had to live with these people. But he has tremendous intelligence. Anybody else in his place would have been lost, anybody in his situation would not have been able to come out of the cage. And the cage was so beautiful, so alluring – thousands of followers were available. But he had the courage, he had the guts and intelligence to renounce all that, to simply move out of the whole trap.It was difficult for him, very difficult; even to survive was difficult. I respect the man, I respect him tremendously. And I can understand why he is against masters, disciples, sannyas.You say, “Although I have not been to Krishnamurti’s latest discourses in Mumbai, I have heard that he had talked against sannyas in them. It seems to me that this attitude is a device that helps both his work and yours, that he does not mean what he says.” He says what he means, he means what he says. His narrow vision is very clear. That is one of the most beautiful things about narrow visions, they are clear. The wider the sky, the less the clarity; the bigger the vision, the less the clarity.And my vision contains all. His vision is very exclusive, my vision is very inclusive. His vision is only his. My vision contains Buddha, Zarathustra, Moses, Mahavira, Mohammed, and millions more. And remember, I am not trying to make a synthesis here. I am not trying to choose whatsoever is beautiful in one and whatsoever is beautiful somewhere else. No, I accept every tradition as it is – even though sometimes it goes against me, even though sometimes there are points which I would like not to be there. But then who am I? Why should I bring my choice into it?I accept every tradition as it is, without interfering with it. This has never been done before, and this may not be done again for centuries, because to have such inclusive vision is very confusing. Being with me, you can never have certainty. The more you are with me, the more and more the ground under your feet will disappear. The more you are here with me, the more and more your mind will be taken away, and with it all certainty.Yes, you will have transparency, but no certainty.With Krishnamurti everything is certain, absolutely certain. He is one of the most consistent men who has ever walked on the earth, because he has such a narrow vision. When you have a very narrow vision you are bound to be very consistent.You cannot find a more inconsistent person than me, because I have to make space for so many contradictory standpoints. There is nothing in common between Bahauddin and Atisha, there is nothing in common between Rinzai and Mohammed, there is nothing in common between Mahavira and Christ. And yet they all have met in me, and they are all one in me. And I have not chosen, I have not interfered, I have simply digested them all.A tremendously new kind of symphony, I will not call it a synthesis but a symphony, is arising here. In a synthesis something dead is produced. In a symphony, in an orchestra, all instruments are playing, but in a tremendous harmony.Krishnamurti is a solo flute player. I am an orchestra; the flute is accepted. Of course my orchestra will not be accepted by Krishnamurti, he is a solo flute player. And a beautiful flute player he is, I appreciate him. I can appreciate him, but he cannot appreciate me. What does he know about the orchestra? I know everything about the flute, because it is part of my orchestra, just a small part. But for him the flute is all.Don’t try to defend him, there is no need. He can defend himself, he is quite capable. I can understand his criticism of sannyas. If he had not criticized it, that would have been a surprise. If he really wants to surprise me he should stop criticizing my sannyasins – it would be unbelievable, it would be really a shock to me!But let that old man continue, and please continue going to listen to him. Provoke him. Just sit in the front row, and whenever he criticizes sannyas, applaud, laugh. And then he will be really in a rage. He is the only enlightened person in the world who can get angry. And that’s perfectly beautiful. I love him, I respect him – and I love him and respect him as he is. But he cannot love and respect me; that too I can understand.The fourth question:Osho,Like Krishna and Buddha and Nanak and Jesus, your message is love. How are your misunderstood sannyasins vehicles for your message of love to the world?Krishna has talked about love, Buddha too, Jesus, Nanak and Kabir, they all have talked about love. But nobody has talked about love like me. Their love is very ethereal, abstract; their love is not of this world at all. Their love is philosophical. The way they define their love and the way I define my love are totally different. I accept love in its whole spectrum, all the colors of it, the whole rainbow of it. They are choosers; they say, “Only the color blue is love, all other colors are not love.” Or somebody says, “Only the color green is love, all others are not love.”They condemn earthly love, they condemn sensuous love, they condemn the body. And that’s where the difference is. To me, love is a ladder. One part of the ladder is resting on the earth – not only resting but really rooted in the earth – and the other end is touching heaven.They talk only of the other end. And because they talk only of the other end, it becomes humanly impossible to reach it, because the lower part is denied, and the higher can be reached only through the lower. You will have to pass over the lower rungs of the ladder, otherwise how are you going to reach the higher part?There have been people like Charvaka in India, and Epicurus in Greece, who believe only in the lower part of the ladder and deny the higher part.I accept the totality of it. I accept the mud, I accept the lotus, and I accept all that is in between. Hence I am bound to be misunderstood by everybody. The spiritual people will misunderstand me because they will think I am a materialist – that I don’t believe in the soul, that my preaching of love is nothing but a preaching of sex, that in the name of love I am only teaching people sexuality. And the materialists, the Epicureans, the Charvakas, they are also going to misunderstand me, obviously. They will say that my talk of sex and earthly love is only a trap to take you to those nonexistential abstractions – ecstasy, samadhi, godliness.I am going to be misunderstood by both the materialists and the spiritualists. And the same is going to be the case with my sannyasins. You are going to be misunderstood everywhere: in every culture, in every society, by every religion, by every ideology. To be with me is risky; you will have to be misunderstood. You will have to accept it as a fact of your existence.And the reason is clear; it is because nobody in the past has accepted the whole spectrum. I accept the whole spectrum because to me, the lower and the higher are not separate, they are one. The lower contains the higher, and the higher contains the lower. The mud is un-manifest lotus, and the lotus is manifest mud. I don’t condemn the mud, because in condemning the mud the lotus is condemned. And I don’t condemn the lotus, because if you condemn the lotus the mud loses all meaning; then it is simply mud and nothing else.I accept this earth and I accept this heaven. I accept both the body and the soul, the outer and the inner. My teaching is that of total acceptance.You will be misunderstood. And not only that you will be misunderstood; there is every possibility that you will misunderstand me too, because many of you will think that sex is all. And you can find quotes from my books easily supporting your standpoint. And many of you will misunderstand that sex has to be transcended, that only samadhi is the truth and that sex is just something to be bypassed, transcended and surpassed. Both these things are going to happen. Those who really understand me will see the point: what I am doing here. I am creating a materialist spirituality, or a spiritualist materialism. It has never been done before. And whenever something is done for the first time, it is natural that it will be misunderstood.A middle-aged American lady whose husband had recently died went to a spiritualist to get in touch with him as she was feeling lonely. Contact having been established, she said, “Hello, honey! How you doin?”Honey: “Fine. In fact I’m a hell of a lot better off than I was before.”Lady: “How do you pass the time, honey?”Honey: “Well, I wake up, make love, have breakfast, make love, have lunch, make love, have supper, make love, sleep, make love, wake up, make love – day in and day out.”Lady: “Where are you, honey? In heaven?”Honey: “No, I’m a bull in Koregaon Park, Pune.”That possibility is there, you can misunderstand me. And there are also others at the other extreme. Anybody who chooses one part of my teaching is bound to misunderstand me.You have to take me in toto, in my totality. Of course the totality is very confusing, because it contains the polar opposite. It is easier to choose one part – the materialist or the spiritualist; it is easier, you feel consistent. To choose me in my totality you will have to live a very inconsistent life: one moment this, another moment that. But that is my whole message.If one really wants to live life in all its richness, one has to learn how to be inconsistent, how to be consistently inconsistent, how to be able to move from one extreme to another – sometimes rooted deep in the earth and sometimes flying high in heaven, sometimes making love and sometimes meditating.And then, slowly, slowly, your heaven and your earth will come closer and closer, and you will become the horizon where they meet.The fifth question:Osho,Why do you call people cabbages and assholes? It seems so disrespectful.Cabbages are also people, and very innocent people. What do you mean, “It seems so disrespectful?” Disrespectful to whom? To cabbages? In fact it is more disrespectful to cabbages to compare them with men. What have they done?Just look at man’s history, and the history of cabbages. You will not find more innocent people than cabbages, they are all buddhas – so silent, so happy, so meditative. And you are saying, “It seems so disrespectful.” To man?And what can I do if somebody is an asshole? I am not condemning him, I am simply stating a fact. Do you want me to lie? An asshole is an asshole, plain and simple. And remember, it is perfectly okay to be an asshole.But why are you worried? Are you a cabbage or…?The last question:Osho,Don't you talk every day about “Sitnalta?”Yes, whatsoever I talk about is “Sitnalta,” – except the jokes. But there is a problem with jokes this time in this series. Atisha is against jokes. Hence I am not telling you too many jokes. It is really hard on me – I get so tempted, but then I remember this old Atisha, and I have tremendous respect for him.Soon you will come to it…. He has a sutra: “Don’t tell wicked jokes.” So, at first I was thinking to drop that sutra, but then I thought that would not be right.Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Grasp the principle of two witnesses.Always rely on just a happy frame of mind.Even though you are distracted, if you can do it, it is still mind training.Always observe the three general points.Change your inclination and then maintain it.Do not discuss defects.Don't think about anything that concerns others.Train first against the defilement that is greatest.Abandon all hopes of results.The first sutra:Grasp the principle of two witnesses.It is one of the most important sutras, one of the very fundamentals of inner alchemy. Let it sink deep in your heart. It can transform you, it can give you a new birth, a new vision, a new universe. It has two meanings; both meanings have to be understood.The first meaning: there are two kinds of witnesses. One kind is the people that surround you. You are constantly aware that you are being watched, witnessed. It creates self-consciousness in you. Hence the fear when you are on a stage facing a big crowd. Actors feel it, poets feel it, orators feel it – and not only the beginners, even those who have wasted their whole life in acting. When they come on the stage a great trembling arises in them, great fear: whether they will be able to make it or not.With so many eyes watching you, you are reduced to an object. You are no longer a subjectivity, you have become a thing. And you are afraid because they may not appreciate you. They may not feed your ego, they may not like you, they may reject you. Now you are in their hands. You are reduced to a dependent slave. Now you have to work in such a way that you will be appreciated. You have to buttress their egos, so that in response you can hope they will buttress your ego.When you are with your friends you are not so afraid. You know them, they are predictable, you depend on each other. But when you face the anonymous crowd, more fear arises. Your whole being starts trembling, your whole ego is at stake – you can fail. Who knows? Your success is not guaranteed.This is the first kind of witness. Others are witnessing you, and you are just a beggar. This is the situation in which millions of people live. They live for others, hence they only appear to live, they don’t live in reality. They are always adjusting to others, because they are happy only if others are happy with them. They are compromising constantly, they are selling their souls for a simple reason: so their ego can be strengthened, so that they can become famous, well known.Have you observed something of immense value that whenever a poet, a novelist or a scientist gets the Nobel Prize, immediately after that his creativity declines? No Nobel laureate has been able to produce anything valuable compared to the things that he created before he received it. What happens? Now you have attained the goal of the ego, there is no further to go, so there is no more need to adjust to people. Once a book becomes famous the author dies.That’s what happened with Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. That’s what happened with Rabindranath’s Gitanjali. And that is almost the rule, not the exception. Once you are famous you stop compromising. For what? You are already famous. And when you stop compromising, people start neglecting you, ignoring you. Your whole creativity was rooted in the desire of the ego; now the ego feels at rest, all creativity disappears.This is the situation in which ninety-nine point nine percent of people live. You know only one kind of witness – the other. And the other is always anxiety-creating.Jean-Paul Sartre rightly says, “The other is hell.” The other does not allow you to relax. Why do you feel so relaxed in your bathroom, in your bathtub? – because the other is not there. But relaxing in your bathtub, if you suddenly become aware that somebody is looking at you through the keyhole, suddenly all relaxation disappears. Again you are tense. You are being watched.To create fear in people, down the ages, the priests have been telling you that God is constantly watching you – constantly watching you, day in and day out. You may be asleep; he never sleeps, he goes on sitting by the bed and watching. He not only watches you, he watches your dreams and your thoughts too. You are not only going to be punished for your acts, but for your dreams, for your thoughts, your desires, your feelings.The priests created great fear in people. Just think of God watching continuously. No moment, not even a single moment, is allowed when you can be yourself. That was a great strategy for reducing people to things.Why do we hanker for the attention of others? – because as we are, we are hollow. As we are, we are not. As we are, we don’t have a center of being. We are just noise, a crowd, a house full of servants quarreling with each other because the master is absent or fast asleep. We hanker for other people’s attention so that we can create a pseudo-center. If the real is missing, at least we can depend on a pseudo-center. It will give you an appearance of togetherness, it will make you a person. You are not an individual – individuality is the fragrance of a really centered being, one who knows who he is.But if you are not an individual, then at least you can be a person, you can attain personality. And personality has to be begged for. Individuality is your innermost growth. It is a growth; you need not beg for it from anybody else, and nobody can give it to you. Individuality is your unfoldment. But personality can be begged for, people can give it to you – in fact, only other people can give it to you.If you are alone in the forest you will not have any personality, remember. You will have individuality but no personality at all. If you are alone in the Himalayas, who are you – a saint or a sinner? There is nobody to appreciate or condemn you, there is nobody to make you famous or notorious, there is nobody except yourself. In your total aloneness, who are you? A sinner or a saint? A very, very famous person, VVIP, or just a nobody?You are neither. You are neither a very, very important person nor a nobody, because for both the other is a must. The eyes of others are needed to reflect your personality. You are neither this nor that. You are, but you are in your reality; you are not created by others. You are as you are, in your utter nudity, authenticity.This is one of the reasons many people thought it wise to escape from the society. It was not really to escape from the society, it was not really against society, it was just an effort to renounce the personality.Buddha left his palace. He was not a coward and he was not an escapist, so why did he leave the palace? Rabindranath has written a beautiful poem about it. He left the palace; for twelve years he roamed in the forests, practiced and meditated. And the day of ultimate rejoicing came, he became enlightened. And, naturally, the first thing that he remembered was that he had to go back to the palace to deliver the good news to the woman he had loved, to the child that he had left behind, to the old father who was still hoping that he would come back.It is so human, it touches the heart. After twelve years he returned. His father was angry, as fathers will be. His father could not see who he was, could not see what he had become, could not see his individuality which was so loud and so clear. The whole world was becoming aware of it, but his father was blind to it. He was still thinking about him in terms of the personality that was no longer there, that he had renounced the day he left the palace.In fact Buddha had to leave the palace just to renounce his personality. He wanted to know himself as he was, not what others were thinking about him. But the father was looking into his face with the eyes of twelve years ago. He said again to Buddha, “I am your father, I love you; although you have hurt me deeply, have wounded me deeply. I am an old man, and these twelve years have been a torture, and you are my only son. I have somehow tried to live so that you could come back. Now you are back, take charge of the empire, be the king! Now let me rest, it is time for me to rest. Although you have committed a sin against me, and you have been almost murderous toward me, I forgive you and my doors are still open.”Buddha laughed. He said, “Sir, be a little more aware of whom you are talking with. The man who left the palace is no more; he died long ago. I am somebody else – look at me!”And the father became even angrier. He said, “Do you want to deceive me? I don’t know you? I know you more than you know yourself! I am your father, I have given birth to you, in your blood my blood circulates – and I don’t know you?”Buddha said, “Still I pray, sir. You have certainly given birth to me. I came through you, that’s true, but you were only a vehicle. And just because somebody has come riding on a horse, it does not mean that the horse knows the rider. I have passed through the doors of your body, but that does not mean that you know me. In fact, twelve years ago, even I did not know who I was. Now I know! Look into my eyes. Please forget the past – be here now!”But the father was incapable. With his old eyes, full of tears of anger and joy, he could not see what had happened to Buddha. “What nonsense is he talking about, that he has died and is reborn, that he is a totally different individuality? That he is no more a personality, that he is an individuality?”In dictionaries, personality and individuality are synonyms. They are not synonymous in life. The personality is false, a pretension, a facade. Individuality is your truth.Why do we want many, many people to give attention to us? Why do we hanker for this? To create personality. And the more personality you create around yourself, the less is the possibility of knowing your individuality.And when Buddha went to see his wife, she was even angrier. She asked only one question, a very significant one. She said, “I have only one question to ask you. I have waited for all these years, and I have only one question. The question is simple, but be honest.” She still thinks that Buddha can be dishonest! “Be honest, be true, and just tell me one thing. Whatever you have attained in the forest, was it impossible to attain it here in the palace? Is God only in the forest and not here in the marketplace?”Her question is of tremendous significance. Buddha said, “Yes, the truth is as much here as it is there. But it would have been very difficult for me to know it here, because I was lost in a personality – the personality of the prince, the personality of a husband, the personality of a father, the personality of a son. The personality was too much. I never left the palace really, I was only leaving my personality behind so that there would be nobody to remind me who I was, and I could answer the question ‘Who am I?’ on my own. I wanted to encounter myself. I was not interested in anybody else’s answers.”But everybody else is interested in others’ answers. How much you love it when somebody says, “You are so beautiful.”Sarvesh was saying to Mukta, “I feel a little lost.” Naturally! He is one of the best ventriloquists the world knows; he has lived the life of a showman – always on the stage, lights flooding him from everywhere, thousands of people absolutely alert, watching what he is doing with great appreciation. He has talent, genius, and he has lived flooded with others’ attentions.Now naturally in this commune nobody comes to say to him, “Sarvesh, you are great. Sarvesh you are this, you are that.” He must be feeling a little bit lost. That is a problem for people who are public figures, it is very difficult for them to drop their personality.But he is trying, and I am certain that he will succeed. It is going to happen. On the one hand he has hankered for the attention of others, but sooner or later you become tired of it too, because it is just artificial food. Maybe it tastes good, maybe its flavor is beautiful, but it does not nourish, it does not give you vitality.Personality is a showpiece. It can deceive others, but it cannot deceive you, at least not for long. That’s why Sarvesh has come here, tired, exhausted by all the attention. But old habits persists a little longer. Sooner or later he will start enjoying himself, sooner or later he will start enjoying his individuality.And the day you can enjoy your individuality, you are free – free from dependence on others. If you ask for their attention you have to pay for it later. It is a bondage. The more you ask people to be attentive toward you, the more you are becoming a thing, a commodity, which can be sold and purchased.That’s what happens to all public figures – to politicians, to showbiz people. This is one kind of witnessing; you want to be witnessed. It gives you respectability, and in order to have respectability you will have to create character and morality. But all that character and all that morality is just hypocrisy. You create it with a motivation, so that others can be attracted toward you.If you want respectability you will have to be a conformist, you will have to be obedient to the society and its demands. You will have to live according to wrong values, because the society consists of people who are fast asleep – their values cannot be right values.Yes, but there is one thing: you can become a saint. That’s how thousands of your saints are. They have sacrificed everything at the altar of respectability. They have tortured themselves, they have been suicidal, but they have gained one thing. They have become saints, people worship them.If you want that kind of worship, respectability, sainthood, then you will become more and more false, more and more pseudo, more and more plastic. You will never be a real rose. And that is the greatest calamity in life that can happen to a man, to be a plastic rose and not to be a real rose.The second kind of witnessing is totally different, just the polar opposite. It is not that you hanker for others’ attention; on the contrary, you start paying attention to yourself. You become a witness to your own being. You start watching your thoughts, desires, dreams, motives, greed, jealousies. You create a new kind of awareness within you. You become a center, a silent center which goes on watching whatsoever is happening.You are angry, and you watch it. You are not just angry, a new element is introduced into it: you are watching it. And the miracle is that if you can watch anger, the anger disappears without being repressed.The first kind of saint will have to repress it. He will have to repress his sexuality, he will have to repress his greed. And the more you repress anything, the deeper it goes into your unconscious. It becomes part of your basement and it starts affecting your life from there. It is like a wound oozing with pus, but you have covered it. Just by covering it, you don’t become healthy, it does not heal. In fact by covering it you are helping it to grow more and more. Your saints stink, stink of all kinds of repressions.The second kind of witnessing creates a totally different kind of person. It creates the sage. The sage is one who knows who he is, not according to others. The sage is one who lives a life according to his own nature, not according to others’ values. He has his own vision and the courage to live it.The sage is rebellious. The saint is obedient, orthodox, conventional, traditional, conformist. The sage is nonconformist, nontraditional, non-conventional, rebellious. Rebellion is the very taste of his being. He is not dependent on others. He knows what freedom is, and he knows the joys of freedom. The saint will be followed by a big crowd. The sage will have only the chosen people who will be able to understand him.The sage will be misunderstood by the masses, the saint will be worshipped. The sage will be condemned by the masses, maybe even murdered. Jesus is crucified and the pope is worshipped. Jesus is a sage and the pope is a saint.The saint has character and the sage has consciousness. And there is a tremendous difference. They are as different as the earth and the sky. Character is imposed for some ulterior motives – to gain respectability in this world and to have more and more heavenly pleasures. Consciousness has no future, no motivation, it is a joy unto itself. It is not a means to some end, it is an end unto itself.To be with a saint is to be with an imitator. To be with a sage is to be with something true and authentic. To be with a saint is to be at the most with a teacher. To be with a sage is to be with a master. These are the two witnesses.Atisha says: Grasp the principle of two witnesses. Avoid the first and plunge into the second. There is another meaning to this sutra too. The other meaning is, first witness the objects of the mind. This is a higher meaning than the first. Witness the objects of the mind.Patanjali calls it dhyana, meditation – from the same word come Zen and ch’an. Witness the objects, the contents, of the mind. Whatsoever passes before you, watch it, without evaluating, judging or condemning. Don’t be for or against, just watch, and dhyana, meditation, is created.And the second is, witness the witness itself – and samadhi is created, satori is created, the ultimate ecstasy is created. The first leads to the second. Start watching your thoughts but don’t stop there. When thoughts have disappeared then don’t think that you have arrived. One more thing has to be done, one more step. Now watch the watcher. Now just witness the witnessing. Nothing else is left, only you are. Just suddenly become aware of awareness itself, and then dhyana is transformed into samadhi. By watching the mind, the mind disappears. By watching the witness, the witness expands and becomes universal.The first is a negative step to get rid of the mind. The second is a positive step to get rooted in the ultimate consciousness – call it godliness or nirvana or whatever you wish.The second sutra:Always rely on just a happy frame of mind.If you are unhappy, that simply means that you have learned tricks for being unhappy, and nothing else. Unhappiness depends on the frame of your mind. There are people who are unhappy in all kinds of situations. They have a certain quality to their mind which transforms everything into unhappiness. If you tell them about the beauty of the rose they immediately start counting the thorns. If you say to them, “What a beautiful morning, what a sunny day!” they will look at you as if your statement surprises them. They will say, “So what! One day between two dark nights! Only one day between two dark nights, so what is the big deal? Why are you looking so fascinated?”The same thing can be looked at from a positive reference; then suddenly each night is surrounded by two days. And then suddenly it is a miracle that the rose is possible, that such a delicate flower is possible among so many thorns.Everything is the same. All depends on what kind of frame you are carrying in your head. Millions of people are carrying crosses; naturally, obviously, they are burdened. Their life is a drag. Their frame is such that it immediately becomes focused on everything that is negative. It magnifies the negative; it is a morbid approach toward life, pathological. But they go on thinking, “What can we do? The world is such.”No, the world is not such! The world is absolutely neutral. It has thorns, it has roses, it has nights, it has days. The world is utterly neutral, balanced, it has all. Now it depends on you as to what you choose. If you have decided to choose only the wrong, you will live in a wrong kind of world, because you will live in your own chosen world.That’s how people create hell and heaven on the same earth. It looks very unbelievable that Buddha lived on this earth with the same kind of people, and lived in paradise. And you also live on the same earth with the same kind of people, and you live in hell.Now, there are two possibilities. The political mind says, “Change the world.” The religious mind says, “Change the frame of your mind.”Religion and politics are diametrically opposite. There is a possibility one day of a meeting of science and religion. Sooner or later, science and religion are bound to meet, because their approach is very similar. Maybe the direction is different – science searches the outer, and religion the inner. But the search, the quality of the search, is the same. The spirit of the search is the same.But I don’t see any possibility that politics and religion can ever meet. Politics always thinks the world is wrong; change the society, the economic structure, this and that, and everything will be okay. And religion says the world has always been the same and will remain the same; you can change only one thing: the context of your mind, the space of your mind.Always rely on just a happy frame of mind. Let it become one of the fundamental rules of your life. Even if you come across a negative, find something positive in it. You will always be able to find something. And the day you become skillful at finding the positive in the negative, you will dance with joy.Try it, try the new vision of life. Think in terms of optimism, don’t be a pessimist. The pessimist creates hell around himself and lives in it – you live in the world you create.Remember, there is not only one world, there are as many worlds as there are minds in the world. I live in my world, you live in your own world. They are not only different, they never overlap. They are utterly different, they exist on different planes.Atisha makes it a fundamental rule for his disciples to live in a happy frame of mind. Then you start turning each opportunity into a challenge for growth. For example, somebody insults you. Now it is so clear that you have been insulted, how can you practice a happy frame of mind now? Yes, it can be practiced. Insult a buddha and you will know.Gautama Buddha was insulted once. He was passing by a village, and the villagers were very much against him. It was impossible for them to comprehend what he was teaching. Compared to the buddhas, the whole world is always very primitive, very unsophisticated, very stupid. The people gathered and insulted him very much.Buddha listened very silently and then he said, “If you are finished, can I take leave of you, because I have to reach the other village, and they must be waiting for me. If you are not finished, then when I return tomorrow morning you can come again and finish your job.”One man from the crowd asked, “Have you not heard us? We have been insulting you, abusing you. We have been using all kinds of dirty words that we can find.”Buddha laughed. He said, “You have come a little late – you should have come ten years ago. Then I was in the same frame of mind as you are; then I would have replied, and replied well. But now this is simply an opportunity for me to be compassionate, to be meditative. I am thankful to you that you allowed me this opportunity. This is just a test – a test of whether or not I have anything of the negative lurking anywhere in my unconscious mind.“And I am happy to declare to you, friends, that not even a single shadow of the negative has passed through my mind. I have remained utterly blissful, you have not been able to affect me in any way. And I am tremendously happy that you gave me such a great opportunity. Very few people are as kind as you are.”This is how one should use situations, this is how a sannyasin should use negative opportunities for inner growth, for inner understanding, for meditativeness, for love, for compassion. And once you have learned this happy frame of mind, this positive vision of life, you will be surprised that the whole existence starts functioning in a totally different way. It starts mothering you. It starts helping you in every possible way, it becomes a great friend.And to know this is to know godliness. To know this, that existence mothers you, is to know godliness. There is no other God – just this feeling, this tremendous feeling, this penetrating feeling, that the existence loves you, protects you, helps you and showers many, many blessings on you; that the existence is graceful toward you, that you are not alienated, that you are not a stranger, that this is your home.To feel that “This existence is my home” is to know godliness.The third sutra:Even though you are distracted, if you can do it, it is still mind training.Yes, sometimes you will be distracted. You are not yet all buddhas – there will be times when you will be distracted, there will be times when you will be dragged down by the negative, sucked in by the old habit. And by the time you know, it has already happened; you are miserable. The shadow has fallen on you, that sunlit peak has disappeared, you have fallen into the dark valley.Then what to do in those moments? Atisha says: Even though you are distracted, if you can do it, it is still mind training. What does he mean by if you can do it? This is of great importance. If you can be attentive to your inattention, if you can be aware that you have fallen into the trap of the negative, it is still meditation, it is still mind training, you are still growing.Yes, many times you will fall; it is natural. And many times you will forget; it is natural. And many times you will be trapped and it will take time for you to remember. But the moment you remember, remember totally. Wake up totally and say, “I have fallen.”And see the difference. If you ask the ordinary religious person he will say, “Repent – punish yourself.” But Atisha is saying: If you are attentive, that’s enough. Be attentive to your inattention, be aware that you have not been aware, that’s all. No repentance is needed. Don’t feel guilty; it is natural, it is human. To fall many times is not something to feel guilty about. To commit errors, to go astray, is part of our human frailty and limitations. So there is no need to repent.Repentance is ugly. It is like playing with your wound, fingering your wound. It is unnecessary, and not only unnecessary but harmful – the wound may become septic, and fingering your wound is not going to help it heal either.If you have fallen, just know that you have fallen, with no guilt, with no repentance. There is no need to go anywhere to confess it, just knowing it is enough. And knowing it, you are helping your awareness to grow. Less and less will you fall, because knowing will become stronger in you.The fourth sutra:Always observe the three general points.What are the three general points? The first is regularity of meditativeness. Remember, it is very difficult to create meditation, it is very easy to lose it. Anything higher takes much arduous effort to create, but it can disappear within a moment. To lose contact with it is very easy.That is one of the qualities of the higher. It is like growing a roseflower – just a little hard wind and the rose has withered, the petals have fallen, or some animal has entered the garden and the rose is eaten. It is very easy to lose it, and it was so long a journey to create it.And whenever there is a conflict between the higher and the lower, always remember, the lower wins easily. If you clash a roseflower with a rock, the roseflower is going to die, not the rock. The rock may not even become aware that there has been a clash, that it has killed something beautiful.Your whole past is full of rocks, and when you start growing a rose of awareness in you, there are a thousand and one possibilities of it being destroyed by your old rocks: habits, mechanical habits. You will have to be very watchful and careful. You will have to walk like a woman who is pregnant. Hence the man of awareness walks carefully, lives carefully.And this has to be a regular phenomenon. It is not that one day you do a little meditation, then for a few days you forget about it, and then one day you do it again. It has to be as regular as sleep, as food, as exercise, as breathing. Only then will the infinite glory of existence open its doors to you.So the first general point is: be regular.The second general point: don’t waste your time with the nonessential.Don’t fool around. Millions of people are wasting their time with the nonessential, and the irony is that they know that it is nonessential. But they say, “What else to do?” They are not aware of anything more significant.People are playing cards, and if you ask them, “What are you doing?” they say, “We are killing time.” Killing time? Time is life! So you are really killing life. And the time that you are killing cannot be recaptured again; once gone, it is gone forever.The man who wants to become a buddha has to drop the nonessential more and more, so that more energy is available for the essential. Take a look at your life, how many nonessential things you are doing – and for what? And how long you have done them – and what have you gained? Are you going to repeat the same stupid pattern your whole life? Enough is enough! Take a look, meditate over it. Speak only that which is essential, do only that which is essential, read only that which is essential. And so much time is saved and so much energy is saved, and all that energy and time can easily be channeled toward meditation, toward inner growth, toward witnessing.I have never seen a man who is so poor that he cannot meditate. But people are engaged in foolish things, utterly foolish. They don’t look foolish, because everybody else is also doing the same.But the seeker has to be watchful. Take more note of what you are doing, what you are doing with your life – because to grow roses of awareness much energy will be needed, a reservoir of energy will be needed. All that is great comes only when you have extra energy. If your whole energy is wasted on the mundane, then the sacred will never be contacted.And the third general point: don’t rationalize your errors and mistakes. The mind tends to rationalize. If you commit some mistake, the mind says, “It had to be so, there were reasons for it. I am not responsible, the very situation was like this.” And the mind is very clever at rationalizing everything.Avoid rationalizing your own errors and mistakes, because if you rationalize you protect them. Then they will be repeated. Avoid rationalizing your errors. Stop rationalization completely. Reasoning is one thing, rationalization is totally another. Reasoning can be used for some positive purposes, but rationalization can never be used for any positive purpose.And you will be able to find out when you are rationalizing, because you can deceive others but you cannot deceive yourself. You know that you have fallen. Rather than wasting time in rationalizing and convincing yourself that nothing has gone wrong, put the whole energy into being aware.All these general points are to help you so that you can block the leaks of your energy. Otherwise existence goes on pouring energy into you, and you have so many leakages that you are never full. Energy comes, and leaks out.The fifth sutra:Change your inclination and then maintain it.Change your inclination from the mind to the heart. That is the first change. Think less, feel more. Intellectualize less, intuit more. Thinking is a very deceptive process, it makes you feel that you are doing great things. But you are simply making castles in the air. Thoughts are nothing but castles in the air.Feelings are more material, more substantial. They transform you. Thinking about love is not going to help, but feeling love is bound to change you. Thinking is very much loved by the ego, because the ego feeds on fictions. The ego cannot digest any reality, and thinking is a fictitious process. It is a kind of dreaming, a sophisticated dreaming. Dreams are pictorial and thinking is conceptual, but the process is the same. Dreaming is a primitive kind of thinking, and thinking is a civilized kind of dreaming.Change from the mind to the heart, from thinking to feeling, from logic to love.And the second change is from the heart to the being – because there is a still deeper layer in you where even feelings cannot reach. Remember these three words: mind, heart, being. Being is your pure nature. Surrounding the being is feeling, and surrounding feeling is thinking. Thinking is far away from being but feeling is a little closer; it reflects some glory of being – just as in the sunset the sun is reflected by the clouds and the clouds start having beautiful colors. They themselves are not the sun, but they are reflecting the light of the sun.Feelings are close to being, so they reflect something of the being. But one has to go beyond feelings too. Then what is being? It is neither thinking nor feeling, it is pure am-ness. One simply is.Thinking is very selfish and egoistic. Feeling is more altruistic, less egoistic. Being is no-ego, egolessness – neither selfishness nor altruism but a spontaneity, a moment-to-moment responsiveness. One lives not according to oneself, one lives according to existence, according to the whole.Feeling is half, and no half can ever satisfy you. Thinking and feeling are both halves and you will remain divided. Being is total, and only the total can bring contentment.And the ultimate, the fourth change, is from being to nonbeing. That is nirvana, enlightenment; one simply disappears, one simply is not. Existence is, enlightenment is. Light is, delight is, but there is nobody who is delighted. Neti neti: neither this nor that, neither existence nor nonexistence – this is the ultimate state. Atisha is slowly, slowly taking his disciples toward it.Let me repeat: from thinking to feeling, from feeling to being, from being to nonbeing, and one has arrived. One has disappeared and one has arrived. One is no more, for the first time. And for the first time one really is.The sixth sutra:Do not discuss defects.The mind tends to discuss the defects of others. It helps the ego to feel good. Everybody is such a sinner; when everybody is such a sinner, comparatively one feels like a saint. When everybody is doing wrong, it feels good that “At least I am not doing that much wrong.”Hence people talk about others’ defects; not only do they talk about them, they go on magnifying them. That’s why there is so much joy in gossiping. And when the gossip passes from one hand to another hand, it becomes richer. When it passes back again, something will be added to it. By the evening, if you come to know the gossip that you started in the morning, you will be surprised. In the morning it was just a molehill, now it is a mountain. People are very creative, really creative and inventive.Why are people so interested in gossiping about others, in finding fault with others, in looking into others’ loopholes and defects? Why are people continuously trying to look through others’ keyholes? The reason is that this helps to give them a better feeling about themselves. They become Peeping Toms, just to have a good feeling that “I am far better.” There is a motivation. It is not just to help others – it is not, whatsoever they say, notwithstanding what they say. The basic reason is, “If others are very ugly, then I am beautiful.” They are following Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.I have heard:Mulla Nasruddin was staying in a hotel. A telegram had arrived from home and he was in a hurry to catch the train. He rushed. But when he reached downstairs and looked at his luggage the umbrella was missing. So he had to go up to the room again and by the time he reached the fourteenth floor the room had already been given to somebody else – a newlywed couple.Although he was in a hurry and he might miss the train if he lingered there a little longer, the temptation was great. So he looked through the keyhole to see what was happening.A newlywed couple – they were also in a hurry, they had already waited too long; the marriage ceremony and the church and the guests and all that – somehow they had got rid of all of them and they were lying naked on the bed, talking sweet nothings. And the young man was saying to the woman, “You have such beautiful eyes. I have never seen such beautiful eyes! To whom do these eyes belong?”And the woman said, “To you! To you, and only to you!”And so on, the list went on. “These beautiful hands, these beautiful breasts,” this and that – this went on and on. And Mulla had completely forgotten about the train and the taxi waiting downstairs. But then suddenly he remembered his umbrella. When the list was about to be completed, he said, “Wait! When you come to the yellow umbrella, that belongs to me.”People are unconsciously doing many things. If they become conscious these things will drop. Atisha says: Don’t ponder over others’ defects, it is none of your business. Don’t interfere in others’ lives, it is none of your business.But there are great moralists whose whole work is to see who is doing wrong. Their whole life is wasted; they are like police dogs sniffing here and there. Their whole life’s work is to know who is doing wrong.Atisha says: That is an ugly trait and a sheer wastage of time and energy. Not only is it a wastage but it strengthens and gratifies the ego. And an ego more gratified becomes more of a barrier.And remember, it is not only a question of not discussing others’ defects. Don’t even be too concerned about your own defects. Take note, be aware, and let the matter be settled then and there. There are a few other people who brag about their own defects. It is suspected by psychologists that in Saint Augustine’s autobiography, his confessions, are not true. He bragged about his defects. He was not that bad a person. But man is really unbelievable. If you start bragging about your qualities, then too, you go to extremes. If you start bragging about sins, then too, you go to the extreme. But in both ways you do only one thing.What Saint Augustine was doing is simple. By bragging about his defects and sins and all kinds of ugly things, he was preparing a context. Out of such a hell he rose and became a great saint. Now his saintliness looks far more significant than it would have looked if he had been simply a good person from the very beginning.And the same is the case with Mahatma Gandhi in India. In his autobiography he simply exaggerates about his defects and goes on talking about them. It helps him in a very vicarious way. He was so low, he was in such a seventh hell, and from there he started rising and became a great mahatma, a great saint. The journey was very arduous. This is very ego-fulfilling.Don’t discuss others’ defects, don’t discuss your own defects. Take note, and that is that. Atisha says awareness is enough, nothing else is needed. If you are fully aware of anything, the fire of awareness burns it. There is no need for any other remedy.Don't think about anything that concerns others.And that’s what you go on thinking. Ninety-nine percent of the things that you think about concern others. Drop them – drop them immediately!Your life is short, and your life is slipping out of your fingers. Each moment you are less, each day you are less, and each day you are less alive and more dead! Each birthday is a death day; one more year has slipped through your hands. Be a little more intelligent.Do not think about anything that concerns others.Train first against the defilement that is greatest.Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples – the first thing, the very, very first thing, “Find out what your greatest characteristic is, your greatest undoing, your central characteristic of unconsciousness.” Each one’s is different.Somebody is sex-obsessed. In a country like India, where for centuries sex has been repressed, that has become almost a universal characteristic; everybody is obsessed with sex. Somebody is obsessed with anger, or somebody else is obsessed with greed. You have to watch which is your basic obsession.So first find your main characteristic upon which your whole ego edifice rests. And then be constantly aware of it, because it can exist only if you are unaware. It is burned in the fire of awareness automatically.And remember, remember always, that you are not to cultivate the opposite of it. Otherwise, what happens is a person becomes aware that “My obsession is anger, so what should I do? I should cultivate compassion.” “My obsession is sex, so what should I do? I should practice brahmacharya, celibacy.”People move from one to the opposite. That is not the way of transformation. It is the same pendulum, moving from left to right, from right to left. And that’s how your life has been moving for centuries; it is the same pendulum.The pendulum has to be stopped in the middle. And that’s the miracle of awareness. Just be aware that “This is my chief pitfall, this is the place where I stumble again and again, this is the root of my unconsciousness.” Don’t try to cultivate the opposite of it, but pour your whole awareness into it. Create a great bonfire of awareness, and it will be burned. And then the pendulum stops in the middle.And with the stopping of the pendulum, time stops. You suddenly enter into the world of timelessness, deathlessness, eternity.And the last sutra:Abandon all hopes of results.The ego is result-oriented, the mind always hankers for results. The mind is never interested in the act itself, its interest is in the result. “What am I going to gain out of it?” If the mind can manage to gain, without going through any action, then it will choose the shortcut.That’s why educated people become very cunning, because they are able to find shortcuts. If you earn money through a legal way, it may take your whole life. But you can earn money by smuggling, by gambling or by something else – by becoming a political leader, a prime minister, a president – then you have all the shortcuts available to you. The educated person becomes cunning. He does not become wise, he simply becomes clever. He becomes so cunning that he wants to have everything without doing anything for it.The mind, the ego, are all result-oriented. The being is not result-oriented. And how can the nonbeing ever be result-oriented? It is not there at all in the first place.Meditation happens only to those who are not result-oriented.There is an ancient story:A man was very much interested in self-knowledge, in self-realization. His whole search had been to find a master who could teach him meditation. He went from one master to another, but nothing was happening.Years went by, he was tired, exhausted. Then he heard that “If you really want to find a master you will have to go to the Himalayas. He lives in some unknown parts of the Himalayas; you will have to search for him. One thing is certain, he is there. Nobody knows exactly where, because whenever somebody comes to know of him he moves from that place and goes even deeper into the Himalayan ranges.”The man was getting old, but he gathered courage. For two years he had to work to earn money for the journey, then he made the journey. It is an old story. He had to ride on camels and horses and then go on foot, and then he reached the Himalayas. People said, “Yes, we have heard about the old man, very ancient he is, one cannot say how old – maybe three hundred years old, or even five hundred years old; nobody knows. He lives somewhere, but the location cannot be given to you. Nobody is aware of where exactly you will find him, but he is there. If you search hard you are bound to find him.”The man searched and searched and searched. For two years he was roaming in the Himalayas – tired, exhausted, dead exhausted living only on wild fruits, leaves and grass. He had lost much weight. But he was intent that he had to find this man; even if it took his life, it would be worth it.And can you imagine? One day he saw a small hut, a grass hut. He was so tired that he was not even able to walk, so he crawled. He reached the hut. There was no door; he looked in, there was nobody inside. Not only was there nobody inside, but there was every sign that for years there had been nobody inside.Can you think what would have happened to that man? He fell on the ground. Out of sheer tiredness he said, “I give up.” He was lying there under the sun in the cool breeze of the Himalayas, and for the first time he started feeling so blissful, he had never tasted such bliss! Suddenly he started feeling so full of light. Suddenly all thoughts disappeared, suddenly he was transported – for no reason at all, because he had not done anything.And then he became aware that somebody was leaning over him. He opened his eyes. A very ancient man was there. And the old man, smiling, said, “So you have come. Have you something to ask me?”And the man said, “No.”And the old man laughed, a great belly laugh which was echoed by the valleys. And he said, “So now you know what meditation is?”And the man said, “Yes.”What had happened? That assertion which came from his deepest core of being – “I give up” – in that very giving up, all goal-oriented mind efforts and endeavors disappeared. “I give up.” In that very moment he was no longer the same person. And bliss showered on him. He was silent, he was a nobody, and he touched the ultimate stratum of nonbeing. He knew what meditation is.Meditation is a non-goal-oriented state of mind.This last sutra is tremendously significant: Abandon all hopes of results. And then there is no need to go anywhere, Existence will come to you. Deep down say, “I give up.” And silence descends, benediction showers.Meditate over these sutras, they are meant only for meditators. Atisha is not a philosopher, he is a siddha, a buddha. What he is saying is not some speculation, but clear-cut instructions given only to those who are ready to travel, to go on the pilgrimage into the unknown.Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is so attractive about missing?It has a tremendous attraction, because it is only through missing that the ego can survive. It is only through searching, seeking, desiring, that the ego exists; it exists in the tension between that which is and that which should be.The moment the “should” disappears, the ego collapses. Hence all ethical systems, all moralities, are nourishments for the ego. The moral man is the most egoistic man in the world. And the mechanism is very simple. Seeking, searching, you live in the future, which is not; and the ego can exist only with that which is not, because it itself is not.If you are in the moment, in the present, the ego has no possibility of surviving even for a single moment. The present is and the ego is not, like light is and darkness is not. Bring light in, and darkness disappears. Even to say that it disappears is not right, because it was not there in the first place, so how can it disappear? It was a pure absence: absence of light – that’s what darkness is.The absence of the present – that’s what the ego is. Not to be herenow – that’s what the ego is: not to be herenow, to be somewhere else, seeking and searching for a faraway goal, looking at a faraway distant star. The farther away the goal, the bigger the ego.Hence people who are not worldly have bigger egos than the so-called poor worldly people. Spiritual people have bigger egos, naturally; their goal is very far away, distant, beyond death, above the seven skies. God is their goal, or moksha or nirvana – goals that look almost impossible.The possible goal can give you only a small ego, and that too only for the time being. Once the goal is achieved you will start feeling frustrated. That’s what happens every day. You wanted a beautiful house, now you have got it, and suddenly frustration sets in. The ego needs a new goal to survive; now it starts fantasizing about a bigger palace.You were seeking and searching for a woman; now you have her, and the moment you have her you are finished with her. It may take a few days for you to recognize the fact, that is another matter, but you are finished with her. Now your ego needs another woman so that the journey can continue.The ego is constantly journeying from the present to some nonexistential future. If you ask me, this is my definition of samsara, the world. The ego journeying from the present to the future is the world. And the ego not journeying at all, simply being herenow, is the end of samsara: you are in nirvana, samadhi, enlightenment. Hence enlightenment cannot be reduced to a goal. If you reduce it to a goal, you have missed the whole point.All the buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact: Be – don’t try to become. Within these two words, be and becoming, your whole life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance. But you have been taught to become this, to become that. And the mind is so cunning, and the ways of the ego are so subtle that it even turns godliness, nirvana, enlightenment, truth, into goals; it starts asking how to achieve them. They are not to be achieved, they cannot be achieved; the achieving mind is the only barrier. They are already here. You have to drop the achieving mind, you have to forget journeying from this point to that, you simply have to relax and be, and all is attained.Lao Tzu calls it wu-wei, action without action. You have not moved a single inch, and you have arrived; this is wu-wei. You have not gone anywhere, you have not even thought of going anywhere, and you are already there. Suddenly the recognition comes, “I never lost the home, I only fell asleep and started dreaming about achieving.”Those who give you goals are your enemies. Those who tell you what to become and how to become it, are the poisoners. The real master simply says, “There is nothing to become. You are already that, it is already the case. Stop running after shadows. Sit silently and be.”Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.The second question:Osho,Because I am only a beginner in the search for reality, could you define for me the four terms: truth, God, spiritual, fact.If you are only a beginner in the search, please come back, don’t go ahead. Don’t become more of an expert in the spiritual search, because the experts are the losers. Don’t become more knowledgeable, become more innocent. Drop all that you know, forget all that you know. Remain wondering, but don’t transform your wondering into questions, because once the wonder is changed into a question, sooner or later the question will bring knowledge. And knowledge is a false coin.From the state of wonder, there are two paths. One is of questioning – the wrong path – it leads you into more and more knowledge. The other is not of questioning but enjoying. Enjoy the wonder, the wonder that life is, the wonder that existence is, the wonder of the sun and the sunlight and the trees bathed in its golden rays. Experience it. Don’t put in a question mark, let it be as it is.Remain ignorant if you ever want to become enlightened. Remain innocent, childlike, if you ever want a communion with existence and reality. Remain in wonder if you want the mysteries to open up for you. Mysteries never open up for those who go on questioning. Questioners sooner or later end up in a library. Questioners sooner or later end up with scriptures, because scriptures are full of answers.And answers are dangerous, they kill your wonder. They are dangerous because they give you the feeling that you know, although you know not. They give you this misconception about yourself that now questions have been solved. “I know what the Bible says, I know what the Koran says, I know what the Gita says. I have arrived.” You will become a parrot; you will repeat but you will not know. This is not the way to know – knowledge is not the way to know.Then what is the way to know? Wonder. Let your heart dance with wonder. Be full of wonder: throb with it, breathe it in, breathe it out. Why be in such a hurry for the answer? Can’t you allow a mystery to remain a mystery? I know there is a great temptation not to allow it to remain a mystery, to reduce it to knowledge. Why is this temptation there? – because only if you are full of knowledge will you be in control.Mystery will control you, knowledge will make you the controller. Mystery will possess you. You cannot possess the mysterious; it is so vast and your hands are so small. It is so infinite, you cannot possess it, you will have to be possessed by it – and that is the fear. Knowledge you can possess, it is so trivial; knowledge you can control.This temptation of the mind to reduce every wonder, every mystery, to a question, is basically fear-oriented. We are afraid, afraid of the tremendousness of life, of this incredible existence. We are afraid. Out of fear we create some small knowledge around ourselves as a protection, as an armor, as a defense.It is only cowards who reduce the tremendously valuable capacity of wondering to questions. The really brave, the courageous, leave it as it is. Rather than changing it into a question, he jumps into the mystery. Rather than trying to control it, he allows the mystery to possess him.And the joy of being possessed, and the benediction of being possessed, is invaluable. You cannot imagine what it is, you have never dreamt about it – because to be possessed by the mystery is to be possessed by existence.You say, “Because I am only a beginner…” You are fortunate that you are only a beginner. There are many who have become experts; they will have to come back home, and it is going to be a long, long arduous journey. They have accumulated so much knowledge that dropping it is going to be a difficult task. If you are really a beginner, be happy. You have not gone far away, you are just beginning. Come back.There is no need to define these beautiful words, because they are not only words. You want me to define truth. Do you know has anybody ever defined truth? Is it definable at all? What is a definition? A definition means a tautology – you put the same words in a different way. What are your definitions, in fact? Synonyms.Just look at your definitions and you will find you have been paraphrasing. But how can paraphrasing define anything? The second thing that you think is the definition, in its own turn needs another definition. Definitions are either tautologies or just stupid.For example, ask what the mind is and the knowers, the knowledgeable, say, “It is not matter.” And then ask them, “What is matter?” And they say, “It is not mind.” What kind of defining is going on? Mind is not matter; this becomes a definition. Matter is not mind; this becomes a definition. Both remain indefinable; you have not defined anything, you have simply shifted the problem from one place to another. You can befool only fools.And the truth means the whole: all that is, the total. All that is – how can you define it? It is unbounded, infinite. Definition means drawing a line around it, locating it, saying, “This is it.” But there is no way to define truth, because there is no way to draw a line around it. It is infinite, it is eternal, it has no beginning, no end.People who have tried to define truth say, “Truth is that which is.” But that is tautology. The question remains the same, the mystery remains unsolved. “Truth is that which is” – what have you added? Have you made it a little simpler than before? You can call it “that which is” or you can call it truth, or you can call it God, but you are simply using names, words, labels, for something which is basically indefinable.Truth cannot be defined, although it can certainly be experienced. But experience is not a definition. A definition is made by the mind, experience comes through participating. If somebody asks, “What is a dance?” how can you define it? But you can dance and you can know the inner feel of it.Godliness is the ultimate dance. You will have to learn ecstatic dancing to experience godliness. Godliness is the dance where the dancer disappears. Then the experience arrives, showers on you, and you know. But that knowing is not knowledge, that knowing is wisdom.Truth cannot be defined. Lao Tzu says if you define it you have already made it untrue. He lived a long life; it must have been really long because the story is that for eighty-two years he lived in his mother’s womb, so when he was born he was already eighty-two years old. Then if he lived for at least eighty-two more years, he must have lived very long. But he never wrote a single word.His whole life his disciples were again and again asking, requesting, “Write something. You are getting older and older and older, and one day you will have to leave the body. Leave your last testament.” But he would laugh and not say a thing, or he would keep silent as if he had not heard.Then when he became very old, he started moving toward the Himalayas. He said to his disciples, “Now I am going to the Himalayas, never to return again. My whole life I have been a wanderer, and the Himalayas are the best place to die. I lived beautifully, I lived the most ecstatic life possible. I would also like to die most ecstatically, most aesthetically. I would like to die in the silence of the Himalayas, in those beautiful mountains.”When he was leaving the border of China, the guard at the border prevented him. He said, “I won’t allow you to leave the country unless you write something.” He must have been a very perceptive man, the guard. The world is in his debt for one of the greatest things that has ever been written – the Tao Te Ching. There is no other book comparable to it.He could find no way to avoid it because the guard wouldn’t allow him to go, and he wanted to leave the country as fast, as quickly, as possible. Death was coming closer and he wanted to die in the silence of the Himalayas. Compelled to write, he sat in the guard’s room for three days and completed the book, Tao Te Ching.But the first thing that he wrote was, “Tao cannot be said. Once said, it is no longer Tao.”You can understand what he means. He is saying that if you read the first statement, there is no need to go any further. “Truth cannot be said. Once said, it is no longer true” – this is his declaration. Now, if you understand, the book is finished. What can be said about the truth? Yes, it can be lived, experienced. You can love, live, be – but definition is not possible. If you want definitions you will have to go to a university. Professors define what truth is, and each professor of philosophy defines it in his own way, and there are millions of definitions, and all are false. No definition can ever be true.What to say about truth – even the small experiences of life cannot be defined. What is love? Or what is the taste of sugar on your tongue? How to define it? What is beauty when you see it in a lotus flower?One of the greatest modern philosophers, G. E. Moore, has written a book, Principia Ethica, in which he tries to define what good is. Of course, that is the first question in the world of ethics: what is good? And for two hundred or two hundred and fifty pages, he tries hard this way and that, and cannot define it. And he was one of the most perceptive people this century has produced.Defeated, tired, exhausted, in the end he says good is indefinable. It is as indefinable as the color yellow. If somebody asks, “What is yellow?” – there is a marigold flower, and somebody asks, “You call it yellow? What is yellow?” – how are you going to define it? What more can you say? Yellow is yellow, good is good, beauty is beauty. But these are tautologies; you are not defining anything, you are simply repeating words.What is truth? There is no way to define it.I am not teaching philosophy to you, I am sharing my truth with you. Don’t ask for definitions. If you have the courage, then take a plunge into the experience that is made available here. Take a jump into meditation, and you will know. And still, even when you know, you will not be able to define it.And you ask, “What is God?” That is another name for truth – the lover’s name. “Truth” is the name given by the meditator to totality. “God” is the name given to totality, to truth, by a lover, by a devotee. Both arrows point to the same phenomenon, but the lover can’t think in terms of abstract words. “Truth” is very abstract: you cannot hug truth, can you? You cannot kiss truth – or can you? You cannot say hello to truth, you cannot hold hands with truth. “Truth” is impersonal; it is the word given by the meditator who does not want to bring any personality into it.“God” is the name given out of love, out of a personal relationship with existence. The lover wants to say “Thou,” the lover wants to say “Hi,” the lover wants to have a communion, a dialogue. It is the same totality, but the lover makes it personal. Then truth becomes God.And you ask, “What is spiritual?” To be in relationship with truth or existence is to be spiritual. Remember, to be in relationship – not to talk about spirituality, not to follow a certain creed, dogma, church, but to be in direct immediate relationship with existence is spirituality. To be in tune with the whole, to feel the harmony and the joy and the sheer celebration of being here, that is spirituality. It has nothing to do with going to the church or the temple, it has nothing to do with reciting the Koran or the Bible or the Gita. It has nothing to do with any kind of worship ritual, it has something to do with communion – communion with the trees, communion with the stars, communion with the rivers, communion with all that is. It is communion with this multidimensional expression of existence, it is having a dialogue with the whole. The quality of mad love is needed, then you are spiritual. Spirituality is not a head trip; it is a heart-to-heart dialogue, and ultimately a being-to-being dialogue.And fourth, you ask, “What is a fact?” A fact is the truth seen with unawareness, seen with blindness, seen with closed eyes, seen unintelligently, un-meditatively. Then the truth becomes a fact.For example, you come across a buddha. If you look at him unconsciously he is just a fact, a historical fact; he is born on a certain day and is going to die on a certain day. He is the body that you can see with your eyes; he is a certain person, a personality. History can take note of him, you can have a picture of him.But if you look, not with unconsciousness but with great consciousness, with awareness, with great light, silence, then the fact is no longer there – there is truth. Then Buddha is not somebody who is born on a certain date, he is somebody who is never born and is never going to die. Then Buddha is not the body, the body is just an abode. Then Buddha is not the confined being that appears to you; he represents the total, the whole. Then Buddha is a ray of the infinite, a gift of the beyond to the earth. Then suddenly the fact has disappeared; now there is truth.But history can take no note of truth; history consists of facts. In India we have two different systems. One we call history; history takes note of the facts. Another we call purana, mythology; it takes note of the truth. We have not written histories about Buddha, Mahavira or Krishna, no. That would have been dragging something immensely beautiful into the muddy unconsciousness of humanity. We have not written histories about these people, we have written myths. What is a myth? A myth is a parable, a parable that only points to the moon but says nothing about it – a finger pointing to the moon, an indication, an arrow, saying nothing.Go to a Jaina temple and you will be surprised. You will find twenty-four statues of twenty-four great enlightened masters, the twenty-four tirthankaras. And the most striking thing will be this, that they all look absolutely alike. This is impossible – there are not even two persons absolutely alike in the world, not even twins are absolutely alike. So how was it possible – and the time span is big, thousands of years – to be exactly alike?This is not history. These statues don’t depict the real persons, no, not at all. They are not pictorial representations. Then what are they? They represent something of the inner, they represent something of meditativeness, they represent something of inner stillness, of being. Those twenty-four statues are just representations, visible representations, of something which is invisible.Sitting before these statues, if you silently go on watching, you will be surprised. Something starts happening inside you. The form of the statue is an objective art; it synchronizes with the inner form of your being. The posture of the statue synchronizes with your posture. If you sit in the same posture – with erect spine, half-opened eyes, just looking at the tip of your nose, doing nothing, as if you are also a marble statue, all white, within and without – then you will know that you are not facing ordinary statues, you are confronting great symbols. This is mythology.Mythology is bound to be poetic, because only poetry can give a few glimpses of the unknown.It is said that wherever Buddha moved, trees would start blooming out of season. Now, this is poetry, pure poetry; it did not happen as a fact. But this shows something; there is no other way to say it. It says whenever Buddha is contacted, even trees start blooming out of season – so what to say about man?It is said that wherever Mohammed would move in the desert’s hot sun – fire everywhere – a small cloud, a white cloud, would go on moving above him just to give him shade like an umbrella. This is poetry, beautiful, but it is not a historical fact. A man like Mohammed is protected by existence, a man like Mohammed is in every way cared for by existence. One who has surrendered to existence is bound to be cared for by existence. One who has trusted totally, how can existence be uncaring about him? To say this, there is this metaphor of the cloud just hanging over his head wherever he would go.Jesus dies on the cross, and then after three days is resurrected. This is poetry, not history. This is not fact, this is truth. It simply says that those who die in godliness and for godliness attain to eternal life. Those who are ready to die for godliness are resurrected on another plane of being; they lose the physical body but they gain the luminous body. They are no longer part of the earth but they become part of the sky; they disappear from time but they appear in eternity.But all the religions have been trying to prove that these are facts. And in trying to prove that these are facts they have simply proved that they are fools. These are not facts, these are symbolic truths.Whatsoever you see around you is a fact. You see a tree, a green tree, full of sap and flowers – it is a fact. But if you meditate and one day suddenly your eyes open, open to the real, and the tree is no longer just a tree… The green of it is nothing but existence green in it, and the sap running through it is no longer a physical phenomenon but something spiritual; if one day you can see the being of the tree, the godliness of the tree, that the tree is only a manifestation of the divine, then you have seen the truth.Truth needs meditative eyes. If you don’t have meditative eyes, then the whole of life is just dull dead facts, unrelated to each other, accidental, meaningless, a jumble, just a chance phenomenon. If you see the truth, everything falls into line, everything falls together in a harmony, everything starts having significance.Remember always, significance is the shadow of truth. And those who live only in facts live an utterly meaningless life.The third question:Osho,You have said that enlightenment is always total, never partial. Still you compare your state of no-mind with an orchestra while that of Krishnamurti is compared with that of a single flute player. Has not the enlightened one access to all knowledge? Why that tunnel vision of Krishnamurti?Enlightenment is always total. If it is an orchestra it is a total orchestra, if it is only a solo flute then it is an absolutely total solo flute. Existence is always total, so is enlightenment always total. The small flower is as total as the sun. Totality is a very different phenomenon than quantity; it is concerned with quality.Krishnamurti’s solo flute is as total as my orchestra, my orchestra is not more total. Totality cannot be more or less. You think in terms of quantity, that’s why the question has arisen. I am talking about quality. Each act of the enlightened person is total. Whether he is drinking tea or painting a great painting, playing music or just sitting silently doing nothing, each act is total. Krishnamurti is a solo flute player – and a few solo flute players are needed as much as orchestras are needed. They enhance the beauty of existence, they make life richer.Drop your mind that goes on comparing in terms of quantity. Raise your level of consciousness a little higher and start thinking of quality, and then there is no problem.Krishnamurti is doing what he can do best. I would not like him to become an orchestra, no. That would impoverish the world. He should go on doing what he is doing; that gives color to life, variety.I cannot become a solo flute player – not that it is not beautiful, it is simply not my way. I enjoy being an orchestra. I would like Atisha to play with me, and Bahauddin and Kabir and Nanak and Lao Tzu and Zarathustra and many, many more. I would like to play with them and all become part of this orchestra.This is my way. There is nothing higher or lower. Once you are enlightened, there is nothing higher or lower; there cannot be. If a lotus flower becomes enlightened it will be a lotus flower. If a rose becomes enlightened it will be a rose. They both have the same quality of being enlightened, but the rose will remain a rose and the lotus will remain a lotus.You ask me, “You have said that enlightenment is always total, never partial.”Yes, it is never partial. Krishnamurti is not a partial flute player. He is a total flute player; he is totally in his act, utterly in his act. He says he is fortunate that he has not read the Vedas, the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads, Tao Te Ching. Why? – because they might have disturbed him, might have left a few traces behind, might have become part of his being. He wants to be simply himself, in utter purity.My approach is totally different. I would like to have as big a company of enlightened people with me as possible. It is a difficult company, because they are all such different people; to become a host to all of them is troublesome. But I enjoy it. The more troublesome it is, the more I enjoy it. It is a beautiful challenge. You cannot understand how difficult it is to have Buddha, Mahavira, Mohammed and Moses staying together with you. Mahavira stands naked, and Buddha does not like it at all. And because Buddha is not naked, Mahavira is not happy either. To have all these people stay with you is a great challenge.Krishnamurti lives alone. It has its own challenge, but that is not my choice. I am not saying that my choice has to be his choice, I am not saying that he has to do what I am doing. I am perfectly happy doing my thing, and I am perfectly happy that he is doing his thing.Many people have asked me questions saying that I have spoken on dead masters, so many, but why don’t I speak sometimes on a living master?Let Krishnamurti die, then I will speak on him. There is a reason for it. I know how difficult it is even to keep so many dead masters together, but you can manage with dead masters – if I tell Mahavira to stand in this corner, he has to stand in this corner. But a living master won’t listen; he will start meddling, he will start arguing with others. And sometimes I need a little sleep too.You say, “Has not the enlightened one access to all knowledge?”Enlightenment has nothing to do with knowledge at all. The enlightened one has no access to knowledge. Yes, he has every access to innocence – and Krishnamurti playing his flute is as innocent as I am with my orchestra. It is not a question of knowledge, it is a question of wisdom. Wisdom is a totally different phenomenon – wisdom is innocence. You can even call it ignorance, that will do, but please don’t call it knowledge. It is closer to ignorance than to knowledge.Socrates is reported to have said in his last days, “I know only one thing, that I know nothing.” This is enlightenment: knowing only one thing, “I know nothing.” The moment all knowledge disappears, the ego disappears, the personality disappears, then the separation between you and existence disappears. Again you are clean, pure, one with the whole.And you also ask, “Why that tunnel vision of Krishnamurti?”That you have to ask Krishnamurti, not me. That is not my business. He loves it, that’s how he has grown. For centuries, for many, many lives, he has been moving toward a tunnel vision. And the tunnel vision has its own beauties, because whatsoever you see, you see very clearly because your eyes are focused.Hence the clarity of Krishnamurti. Nobody has ever been so clear, so crystal clear. Nobody has ever been so logical, so rational; nobody has ever been so analytical. His profundity in going into things and their details, is simply unbelievable. But that is part of his tunnel vision. You cannot have everything, remember. If you want clarity you will need tunnel vision; you will have to become more and more focused on less and less.That’s how they define science: “Knowing more and more about less and less.” And if science ever succeeds in its ultimate goal, then we will have to say, “Knowing everything about nothing.” That can be the only logical conclusion of knowing more and more about less and less. Where will it lead? It will lead to a point where you know all about nothing.Science is a tunnel vision. Krishnamurti is a scientific individuality, very scientific. Hence his appeal for all those who love analysis, dissection, who love going into minute details. He is just the opposite of Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu says, “Everybody seems to be so clear; only I am confused.”A man of the quality of Lao Tzu, a man of ultimate enlightenment, saying this: “Everybody seems to be so clear about everything, except me. I am so confused, I am so muddle-headed, that I don’t know what is what. Everybody walks with such certainty, and I hesitate at each step. Everybody goes so straight, without looking sideways. And I walk like a man in winter crossing a cold, icy-cold stream.”Lao Tzu is just the opposite of J. Krishnamurti. He has no tunnel vision. His vision is so wide, so spread out, it cannot be very clear. It is bound to be hazy, misty, but that too has its own beauty. Krishnamurti’s statements have logic. Lao Tzu’s statements have poetry.My vision is even wider than Lao Tzu’s. I include Lao Tzu and many more. Obviously Lao Tzu could not have included me. Twenty-five centuries have passed; in those twenty-five centuries great enlightened people have happened on the earth. I claim the whole heritage, as nobody has ever claimed before.Lao Tzu had never heard about Krishna, Lao Tzu had never heard about Patanjali. Patanjali had never heard about Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu or Lieh Tzu. Buddha had no awareness of Zarathustra or Moses.Now the world has become a small village, a global village, and the whole history of humanity is ours. I am in a totally different situation. I know everything about Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Milarepa, Marpa, Tilopa, Naropa, Bodhidharma, Mahakashyap, Sariputra, Mahavira, Adinatha, Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Francis, Kabir, Nanak, Dadu, Meera, Rabiya – all. The whole world is available to me.I see the whole sky, all the stars, all the constellations; my vision is bound to be the most poetic. But the deeper you go into poetry, the less and less logical it becomes. The deeper you go into poetry, it becomes more and more love-like and less and less like logic. At the very rock bottom of poetry, all clarity disappears. Nothing is clear, but everything is beautiful, everything is mysterious. Nothing is clear but everything is simply fantastic.Krishnamurti has his way, and I am happy that he is in the world. He is at the other extreme. If he is gone, I will miss him more than anybody else in the world.But I can understand your question. This is not the only question; you have asked many more about the same thing. It seems it has hurt you deeply that I criticized Krishnamurti. You don’t understand me yet. This is my way of paying respects to him. This is my way of declaring that there exists another enlightened person in the world.If my orchestra does not suit you, then the only alternative possible is the solo flute-playing of J. Krishnamurti. There is no other, no third person who can be of any help to you. Either Krishnamurti or me – there is no other alternative. Right now there is no other alternative.Krishnamurti is bound to criticize me; I can understand it. His standpoint is simple and clear, my standpoint is a little more unclear. Sometimes I will appreciate him tremendously, because I would like him to become part of my orchestra. And sometimes I will criticize him, because my own liking is not for solo flutes.The last question:Osho,I feel you share a lot of esoteric points with people who have no way of validating what you are saying. What is the importance of hearing about the sixth or the sixteenth Jaina tirthankara, or other esoteric information, to the person in Oshkosh or Brooklyn going to work on the crowded bus or subway every day? What is the relevance of hearing that Jesus was once in India or that a Rosicrucian sect of spirits working from the other side possessed Hitler?Fools are everywhere – as much in Oshkosh and Brooklyn as they are in Mumbai and Pune. No country has any claim on fools. And fools are always searching for something esoteric – only nonsense appeals to them. And sometimes I talk nonsense, because I am not here only to help those who are not fools. I am also throwing my net wider and wider; some fools have to be caught by me too. They are good people!Now just look, from where have you come? How were you caught? Those stupid theories about the sixth or sixteenth tirthankaras, or the Rosicrucian secret masters, Koothumi, K.H., directing Adolf Hitler and the whole Nazi movement….There is a deep urge in man to know things that are worthless, to know things that make you feel special – because only you know those things and nobody else. Man wants to be special, and nothing makes you more special than so-called esoteric knowledge. That is why esoteric knowledge remains important. All kinds of rubbish go on in the name of esoteric knowledge – that the earth is hollow, that inside the earth there are great civilizations. And there are people who still believe in it, and many more such stories.Man lives such a dull and drab life that he wants some sensation. Those who are a little wiser, they read scientific fiction or detective stories. Those who are not so wise, they read spiritual fiction.And these things were said by me when I was surrounded by a certain group of fools. They were not interested in anything else. And I have to respond to you; as you grow, my responses will be higher and higher. The day you have understood the whole stupidity of the human mind I will not need to talk to you; just sitting silently will be more than enough.These things were told by me to a certain group of people who were only interested in those things. It would have been absolutely pointless to talk about anything else with those people. Now that they have almost disappeared, now that a totally different quality has come here, I can go more into the world of the truth. But still I have to use words, and words distort.Only silence communicates the truth as it is. Please get ready as soon as possible, so that we can just be together, merging into each other’s energies, being lost in each other. And miracles are possible. What I cannot say in years can be communicated in a single moment of silence, and what can never be said can transpire when between me and you there is no barrier of thought – when my silence and your silence are just present to each other, mirroring each other just as two mirrors mirror each other.My real work has not yet started. I am just preparing the ground, preparing the people who will be able to take part in the real work. This is just the preliminary stage. So don’t waste time, get ready for great things, great things are waiting for you. But the only readiness from your side will be a tremendous silence – and then there will be no need to talk at all.It is really a torture for me to talk to you. You cannot imagine how difficult it is for me to force myself to talk to you continuously. It is just like walking on a tightrope. Words have disappeared in me; I have to bring them back again and again. It is arduous, tiring. But it cannot be stopped unless you say, “I give up.”The day you are able to say, “Now I am ready to be silent. I don’t hope for anything, I am ready to renounce hoping. I am ready to renounce all ideas of spirituality, God, truth, nirvana, enlightenment, I would just like to enjoy being with you, this moment, here, now” – then miracles will start happening.Yes, out of season you are going to bloom.And remember, you are entitled to all those miracles, they are your birthright.Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I don't understand. You said that longing is in and of itself divine. Yet you have often said that all desiring, even for God, is mundane and not spiritual.Longing in its purity is divine, longing when it longs for nothing is divine. The moment an object of longing arises, it becomes mundane. Longing is a pure fire that purifies, longing is a smokeless fire, a smokeless flame. But the moment it becomes attached to any object whatsoever: worldly, otherworldly; money, meditation, God, nirvana, it doesn’t matter – any object, and the longing is no longer pure. It is contaminated by the object. Then the object becomes more important than the longing itself. Then the longing is only a means, it is no longer the end in itself.And the whole effort of sannyas is to help you drop all objects of longing. Longing will not disappear – in fact, the more objects are dropped, the more intense, the more total the longing will become, because the energy involved in the objects will be released. And there comes a moment when one is simply thirsty – not thirsty for something, but just simply thirsty. Hungry – not hungry for something, just a pure fire of longing. And that very pure fire consumes you, reduces you to ashes. And out of that, something new is born.This is the meaning of the parable of the phoenix, this is the significance of the parable of the phoenix. The bird dies in a fire that arises within his own being, is consumed by it, disappears into it, and then is resurrected.And this is the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection too: his dying on the cross and being reborn. Jesus says again and again, “Unless ye are born again, ye will not be able to enter into my kingdom of God.”But how to be born again unless you die first? An ultimate death has to precede it before the ultimate birth can happen.I can understand your confusion – because on the one hand I say, “Longing is in and of itself divine.” I repeat it again, it is so. And there is no contradiction when I say that all desiring, even for God, is mundane and not spiritual. Longing is divine. Long for, and you have fallen. This is the original fall. You have lost the purity, the virginity of longing; it has become muddy, it has fallen on the earth, its wings are cut.There is no contradiction in these two statements. Whenever you find a contradiction in my statements make it a point to meditate over them, because essentially there cannot be a contradiction. Apparently there may be, but now you have to start doing some homework too.Meditate, look at all the possible aspects, all the possible meanings, and you will be surprised. When you are able to see the consistency, the intrinsic consistency, when you are able to go beyond the contradiction, it will be a moment of great insight. It will fill you with light; it will make you delighted, because it is a discovery, and each discovery helps growth.The second question:Osho,Often I have the feeling that I am not doing something I ought to be doing, or doing something I should not be doing; that something has to change and fast – a schooldays' worry that I am not going to make the grade, that I might be expelled.This is how we all have been brought up. Our whole education – in the family, in the society, in the school, in the college, in the university – creates tension in us. And the fundamental tension is that you are not doing that which you ought to do.Then it persists your whole life; it follows you like a nightmare, it goes on haunting you. It will never leave you at rest, it will never allow you to relax. If you relax, it will say, “What are you doing? You are not supposed to relax; you should be doing something.” If you are doing something it will say, “What are you doing? You need some rest, it is a must, otherwise you will drive yourself crazy – you are already on the verge.”If you do something good, it will say, “You are a fool. Doing good is not going to pay, people will cheat you.” If you do something bad it will say, “What are you doing? You are preparing the way to go to hell, you will have to suffer for it.” It will never leave you at rest; whatsoever you do, it will be there condemning you.This condemner has been implanted in you. This is the greatest calamity that has happened to humanity. And unless we get rid of this condemner inside us we cannot be truly human, we cannot be truly joyous and we cannot participate in the celebration that existence is.And now nobody can drop it except you. And this is not only your problem, this is the problem of almost each and every human being. Whatsoever country you are born in, whatsoever religion you belong to, it doesn’t matter – Catholic, communist, Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist; it does not matter to what kind of ideology you belong, the essential is the same. The essential is to create a split in you, so one part always condemns the other part. If you follow the first part then the second part starts condemning you. You are in an inner conflict, a civil war.This civil war has to be dropped, otherwise you will miss the whole beauty, the benediction of life. You will never be able to laugh to your heart’s content, you will never be able to love, you will never be able to be total in anything. And it is only out of totality that one blooms, that the spring comes, and your life starts having color and music and poetry.It is only out of totality that suddenly you feel the presence of godliness all around you. But the irony is that the split has been created by your so-called saints, priests and churches. In fact the priest has been the greatest enemy of godliness on the earth.We have to get rid of all the priests; they are the root cause of human pathology. They have made everybody ill at ease, they have caused an epidemic of neurosis. And the neurosis has become so prevalent that we take it for granted. We think that this is all life is about, we think this is what life is: a suffering, a long, long, delayed suffering, a painful, agonizing existence; an autobiography of much ado about nothing.And if we look at our so-called life, it seems so, because there is never a single flower, never a single song in the heart, never a ray of divine delight.It is not surprising that intelligent people all over the world are asking what is the meaning of life. “Why should we go on living? Why are we so cowardly as to go on living? Why can’t we gather a little courage and put a stop to all this nonsense? Why can’t we commit suicide?”Never before in the world were there so many people thinking that life is so utterly meaningless. Why has this happened in this age? It has nothing to do with this age. For centuries, for at least five thousand years, the priests have been doing the harm. Now it has reached to the ultimate peak.It is not our work, we are victims. We are the victims of history. If man becomes a little more conscious, the first thing to be done is to burn all the history books. Forget the past – it was nightmarish. Start anew from ABC, as if Adam is born again. Start as if we are again in the Garden of Eden, innocent, uncontaminated, unpolluted by the priests.The priests have been very mean, because they discovered something tremendously significant for themselves: divide a man, split a man, make him basically schizophrenic and you will always remain in power. A divided man is a weak man. An undivided man, an individual, has strength – strength to accept any adventure, any challenge.A man was looking for a good church to attend and found a small one in which the congregation was reading with the minister. They were saying, “We have left undone those things we ought to have done and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”The man dropped into a seat and sighed with relief as he said to himself, “Thank goodness, I’ve found my crowd at last.”Go to any church and you will find your crowd, you will find replicas of your being. Maybe the language is a little bit different, the ritual a little bit different, but the fundamentals are the same. The fundamental is: man has to be reduced to a civil war.The first day when you recognize this, what the priests have done to you, is a day of great insight. And the first day when you drop all this nonsense is the day of the beginning of liberation.Do what your nature wants to do, do what your intrinsic qualities hanker to do. Don’t listen to the scriptures, listen to your own heart; that is the only scripture I prescribe. Yes, listen very attentively, very consciously, and you will never be wrong. And listening to your own heart you will never be divided. Listening to your own heart you will start moving in the right direction, without ever thinking what is right and what is wrong.So the whole art for the new humanity will consist in the secret of listening to the heart consciously, alertly, attentively. And by all means follow it, and go wherever it takes you. Yes, sometimes it will take you into dangers – but then remember, those dangers are needed to make you ripe. And sometimes it will take you astray – but remember again, those goings astray are part of growth. Many times you will fall. Rise up again, because this is how one gathers strength, by falling and rising again. This is how one becomes integrated.But don’t follow rules imposed from the outside. No imposed rule can ever be right, because rules are invented by people who want to rule you. Yes, sometimes there have been great enlightened people in the world too – a Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna, a Mohammed. They have not given rules to the world, they have given their love. But sooner or later the disciples gather together and start making codes of conduct. Once the master is gone, once the light is gone and they are in deep darkness, they start groping for certain rules to follow, because now the light in which they could have seen is no longer there. Now they will have to depend on rules.What Jesus did was his own heart’s whisperings, and what Christians go on doing is not their own hearts’ whisperings. They are imitators – and the moment you imitate, you insult your humanity, you insult existence.Never be an imitator, be always original. Don’t become a carbon copy. And that’s what is happening all over the world: carbon copies and carbon copies.Life is really a dance if you are an original – and you are meant to be an original. And no two men are alike, so my way of life can never become your way of life.Imbibe the spirit, imbibe the silence of the master, learn his grace. Drink as much out of his being as possible, but don’t imitate him. Imbibing his spirit, drinking his love, receiving his compassion, you will be able to listen to your own heart’s whisperings. And they are whisperings. The heart speaks in a very still, small voice; it does not shout.Listen to the master’s silence so one day you can listen to your own innermost core. And then this problem will never arise: “I am doing something that I should not do, and I am not doing something that I should do.” This problem arises only because you are being dominated by outer rules; you are imitators.What is right for a Buddha is not right for you. Just look how different Krishna is from Buddha. If Krishna had followed Buddha we would have missed one of the most beautiful men of this earth. Or if Buddha had followed Krishna he would have been just a poor specimen. Just think of Buddha playing on the flute; he would have disturbed many people’s sleep, he was not a flute player. Just think of Buddha dancing; it looks so ridiculous, just absurd.But the same is the case with Krishna. Sitting underneath a tree with no flute, with no crown of peacock feathers, with no beautiful clothes, just sitting like a beggar under a tree with closed eyes, nobody dancing around him, nothing of the dance, nothing of the song, Krishna looks so poor, so impoverished.A Buddha is a Buddha, a Krishna is a Krishna, and you are you. And you are not in any way less than anybody else. Respect yourself, respect your own inner voice and follow it.And remember, I am not guaranteeing you that it will always lead you to the right. Many times it will take you to the wrong, because to come to the right door one has to knock first on many wrong doors. That’s how it is. If you suddenly stumble upon the right door, you will not be able to recognize that it is right.There are many people who come here directly, they have never been to anybody else. It is almost impossible to have any contact with them. They cannot understand what is happening here, they have no background, they have no context for it. They have not learned what is wrong, so how can they understand what is right?But when people come here, and they have lived with many, many so-called masters and lived with many, many seekers and been part of many schools, when they come here something immediately is lit in their hearts. They have seen so much that now they can recognize what is true.So remember, in the ultimate reckoning no effort is ever wasted, all efforts contribute to the ultimate climax of your growth. So don’t be hesitant, don’t be worried too much about going wrong. That is one of the problems; people have been taught never to do anything wrong, and then they become so hesitant, so fearful, so frightened of doing wrong, that they become stuck. They cannot move, something wrong may happen. So they become like rocks, they lose all movement.I teach you: commit as many mistakes as possible, remembering only one thing: don’t commit the same mistake again. And you will be growing. It is part of your freedom to go astray, it is part of your dignity to go even against existence. And sometimes it is beautiful to go even against existence. This is how you will start having a spine; otherwise there are millions of spineless people.Because I say such things, many people are angered. Just the other day a journalist came here. He had come to cover what is happening here in this place, and he wanted to have both stories – the people who are for it, and the people who are against it. So he went around the town. He talked to police officers, he went to see the municipal commissioner of Pune. And what the municipal commissioner said was really beautiful, I loved it.He said, “This man is so dangerous that he should be expelled from Pune – not only from Pune but from India, not only from India but from the world!”I loved it. And I started thinking, “Where will they expel me from the world?” That’s a really fantastic idea! If they can manage it, I am willing to go.Why is there so much anger? The anger has a reason to it, it has a rationale behind it. The rationale is that I am trying to give you a totally new vision of religious life – and if the new vision succeeds, then all the old visions will have to die.Forget all about what you have been told: “This is right and this is wrong.” Life is not so fixed. The thing that is right today may be wrong tomorrow, the thing that is wrong this moment may be right the next moment. Life cannot be pigeonholed; you cannot label it so easily: “This is right and this is wrong.” Life is not a chemist’s shop where every bottle is labeled and you know what is what. Life is a mystery; one moment something fits and then it is right. Another moment, so much water has gone down the Ganges that it no longer fits and it is wrong.What is my definition of right? That which is harmonious with existence is right, and that which is disharmonious with existence is wrong. You will have to be very alert each moment, because it has to be decided each moment afresh. You cannot depend on ready-made answers for what is right and what is wrong. Only stupid people depend on ready-made answers, because then they need not be intelligent. There is no need; you already know what is right and what is wrong. You can cram the list, the list is not very big.The Jews have ten commandments, so simple, you know what is right and what is wrong. But life goes on changing continuously. If Moses comes back, I don’t think he will give you the same ten commandments – he cannot. After three thousand years, how can he give you the same commandments? He will have to invent something new.But my own understanding is this, that whenever commandments are given they create difficulties for people, because by the time they are given they are already out of date. Life moves so fast; it is a dynamism, it is not static. It is not a stagnant pool, it is a Ganges, it goes on flowing. It is never the same for two consecutive moments. So one thing may be right this moment, and may not be right the next.Then what to do? The only possible thing is to make people so aware that they themselves can decide how to respond to a changing life.An old Zen story: There were two temples, rivals. Both the masters – they must have been so-called masters, must have really been priests – were so much against each other that they told their followers never to look at the other temple.Each of the priests had a boy to serve him, to go and fetch things for him, to go on errands. The priest of the first temple told his boy servant, “Never talk to the other boy. Those people are dangerous.”But boys are boys. One day they met on the road, and the boy from the first temple asked the other, “Where are you going?”The other said, “Wherever the wind takes me.” He must have been listening to great Zen things in the temple; he said, “Wherever the wind takes me.” A great statement, pure Tao.But the first boy was very much embarrassed, offended, and he could not find how to answer him. Frustrated, angry, and also feeling guilty because, “My master had said not to talk with these people. These people are really dangerous. Now, what kind of answer is this? He has humiliated me.”He went to his master and told him what had happened. “I am sorry that I talked to him. You were right, those people are strange. What kind of answer is this? I asked him, ‘Where are you going?’ – a simple formal question – and I knew he was going to the market, just as I was going to the market. But he said, ‘Wherever the winds take me.’”The master said, “I warned you, but you didn’t listen. Now look, tomorrow you stand at the same place again. When he comes ask him, ‘Where are you going?’ and he will say, ‘Wherever the winds take me.’ Then you also be a little more philosophical. Say, ‘If you don’t have any legs, then? Because the soul is bodiless and the wind cannot take the soul anywhere!’ What about that?”Absolutely ready, the whole night he repeated it again and again and again. And next morning very early he went there, stood on the right spot, and at the exact time the boy came. He was very happy, now he was going to show him what real philosophy is. So he asked, “Where are you going?” And he was waiting…but the boy said, “I am going to fetch vegetables from the market.” Now, what to do with the philosophy that he had learned?Life is like that. You cannot prepare for it, you cannot be ready for it. That’s its beauty, that’s its wonder: that it always takes you unawares, it always comes as a surprise. If you have eyes you will see that each moment is a surprise and no ready-made answer is ever applicable.And all the old religions have supplied you with ready-made answers. Manu has given his commandments, Moses has given his commandments, and so on and so forth.I don’t give you any commandment. In fact the very word commandment is ugly. To command somebody is to reduce him to a slave. I don’t give you any orders, you are not to be obedient to me or to anybody else. I simply teach you an intrinsic law of life. Be obedient to your own self, be a light unto yourself and follow the light and this problem will never arise. Then whatsoever you do is the thing to do, and whatsoever you don’t do is the thing that has not to be done.And remember, don’t go on looking back again and again, because life goes on changing. Tomorrow you may start thinking what you did yesterday was wrong. It was not wrong yesterday, it might look wrong tomorrow. There is no need to look back; life goes ahead. But there are many drivers who go on looking in the rear-view mirror. They drive onward but they look backward; their life is going to be a catastrophe.Look ahead. The road that you have passed, you have passed. It is finished, don’t carry it anymore. Don’t be unnecessarily burdened by the past. Go on closing the chapters that you have read; there is no need to go back again and again. And never judge anything of the past from the new perspective that is arriving, because the new is new, incomparably new. The old was right in its own context, and the new is right in its own context, and they are incomparable.What I am trying to explain to you is: drop guilt – because to be guilty is to live in hell. Not being guilty, you will have the freshness of dewdrops in the early morning sun, you will have the freshness of the lotus petals in the lake, you will have the freshness of the stars in the night. Once guilt disappears you will have a totally different kind of life, luminous and radiant. You will have a dance to your feet and your heart will be singing a thousand and one songs.To live in such rejoicing is to be a sannyasin, to live in such joy is to live a divine life. To live burdened with guilt is simply to be exploited by the priests.Get out of your prisons – Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist, communist. Get out of all your prisons, get out of all your ideologies, because ideologies supply you ready-made answers. If you ask the communist a question he will have to look in Das Kapital. In the same way, if you ask the Hindu he turns the pages of the Gita.When are you going to use your own consciousness? When? How long are you going to remain tethered to the dead past? The Gita was born five thousand years back; life has changed so much. If you want to read the Gita, read it as beautiful literature – but just like that, no more than that. It is beautiful literature, it is beautiful poetry, but it has no dictums to be followed and no commandments to be followed. Enjoy it as a gift from the past, as the gift of a great poet, Vyasa. But don’t make it a discipline for your life; it is utterly irrelevant.And everything becomes irrelevant, because life never remains confined. It goes on and on; it crosses all borders, all boundaries, it is an infinite process. The Gita comes to a full stop somewhere, the Koran comes to a full stop somewhere, but life never comes to a full stop, remember it. Remind yourself of it.And the only way to be in contact with life, the only way not to lag behind life, is to have a heart which is not guilty, a heart which is innocent. Forget all about what you have been told – what has to be done and what has not to be done – nobody else can decide it for you.Avoid those pretenders who decide for you; take the reins in your own hands. You have to decide. In fact, in that very decisiveness, your soul is born. When others decide for you, your soul remains asleep and dull. When you start deciding on your own, a sharpness arises. To decide means to take risks, to decide means you may be doing wrong – who knows, that is the risk. Who knows what is going to happen? That is the risk, there is no guarantee.With the old, there is a guarantee. Millions and millions of people have followed it, how can so many people be wrong? That is the guarantee. And if so many people say it is right, it must be right.In fact the logic of life is just the opposite. If so many people are following a certain thing, be certain it is wrong, because so many people are not so enlightened and cannot be so enlightened. The majority consists of fools, utter fools. Beware of the majority. If so many people are following something, that is enough proof that it is wrong.Truth happens to individuals, not to crowds. Have you ever heard of a crowd becoming enlightened? Truth happens to individuals – a Tilopa, an Atisha, a Nanak, a Kabir, a Farid.Truth happens to individuals.Be an individual if you really want truth to happen to you. Take all the risks that are needed to be an individual, and accept the challenges so that they can sharpen you, can give you brilliance and intelligence.Truth is not a belief, it is utter intelligence. It is a flaring-up of the hidden sources of your life, it is an enlightening experience of your consciousness. But you will have to provide the right space for it to happen. And the right space is accepting yourself as you are. Don’t deny anything, don’t get split, don’t feel guilty.Rejoice! And I say to you again, rejoice as you are.The third question:Osho,Why does so much controversy surround you and your ashram?If it were not so, it would have been really a surprise, it would have been a miracle, it would have been unbelievable. This is the natural course. This is what was happening to Socrates. And what was his mistake? His mistake was that he was trying to tell the truth as it is. His mistake, his only mistake, was that he was not ready to compromise with the stupidities of the crowd. He lived in continuous controversy; he died because of those controversies.Do you think Jesus lived a noncontroversial life? Then why was he crucified? A reward for a noncontroversial life? He lived continuously in controversy; it is bound to be so. So it was with Buddha, so it was with Bodhidharma, so it has always been and it seems it is always going to be.Truth creates controversy, because it shocks people, it shatters their illusions. And they want to cling to their illusions; those illusions are very consoling, comfortable, convenient, cozy. They don’t want to leave their dreams, they are not ready to drop their investments in all kinds of foolish projects – and that’s what truth requires of them. They feel angry, they want to take revenge.It’s absolutely natural. I am going to live in controversy – and this is only the beginning. Wait for the day they expel me from the world! I am really enchanted: where will they send me? It will be worth it, worth all the trouble of going there and living out of the world.This is only the beginning, this is just the spark. Soon the whole forest will be on fire, and this fire is going to spread all over the earth…because I am not fighting against Hindu fanaticism, I am not fighting against Mohammedan fanaticism, I am simply fighting against all kinds of fanaticism.Socrates was only fighting against the lies that were prevalent in the small city of Athens; it was a very small place. Buddha was against the Hindu beliefs, Jesus was fighting the Judaic heritage. My fight is multidimensional: I am fighting with Jews, I am fighting with Hindus, I am fighting with Buddhists, I am fighting with Jainas, I am fighting with Mohammedans. My fight is not addressed to anybody in particular. Hence I am bound to create so many enemies, more than anybody has ever done.But certainly I am also going to create just as many friends, more than anybody has ever done, because life keeps a balance. If you have so many enemies you will have as many friends, if you have so many friends you will have as many enemies. Life always keeps a balance, life never loses balance. So the more enemies there are, the more friends there will be.The whole thing seems to be very intriguing, very interesting. And remember, you cannot satisfy all – that is not possible, and I am not interested in it either.Two thousand five hundred years ago, Aesop told this story:It was a bright sunny morning in a mountain village. An old man and his grandson were going to the market in the large town in the valley to sell a donkey. The donkey was beautifully groomed and brushed and they set off happily down the steep path. In a while they passed some people lounging by the side of the path.“Look at that silly pair!” said one of the onlookers. “There they go, scrambling and stumbling down the path, when they could be riding comfortably on the back of that sure-footed beast.”The old man heard this and thought it was right. So he and the boy mounted the donkey, and thus continued their descent.Soon they passed another group of people gossiping by the wayside. “Look at the lazy pair, breaking the back of that poor donkey!”The old man thought they were right, and since he was the heavier, he decided to walk while the boy rode.In a little while they heard more comments. “Look at that disrespectful child – he rides while the old man walks!”The old man thought they were right, and it was only proper that he should ride while the boy walked.Sure enough, they soon heard this: “What a mean old man, riding at his ease while the poor child has to try to keep up on foot!”By this time the old man and the boy were becoming increasingly bewildered. When they finally heard the criticism that the donkey would be all worn out and no one would want to buy him after the long walk to the market, they sat down by the side of the road dejected.After the donkey had been allowed to rest for a while, they continued the journey, but in a completely different manner. Thus it was, late that afternoon, that the old man and the boy were seen gasping breathlessly into the marketplace. Slung on a pole between them, hung by his tied feet, was the donkey!As Aesop said: “You can’t please everyone. If you try, you lose yourself.”I cannot please everybody, and neither am I interested in pleasing everybody. I am not a politician; the politician tries to please everybody. I am here only to help those who really want to be helped. I am not interested in the mob, in the crowd. I am only interested in those sincere seekers who are ready to risk all – all – to attain themselves.This is going to anger many, this is going to create much controversy, because I am a very uncompromising person. I will say only that which is true to me, whatsoever the consequence. If I am condemned for it or murdered for it, that’s perfectly okay. But I am not going to compromise, not an iota.I have nothing to lose, so why compromise? I have nothing to gain, so why compromise? All that could have happened has happened. Nothing can be taken away from me, because my treasure is of the inner. And nothing can be added to it, because my treasure is of the inner.So I am going to live the way I want to live. I am going to live in my own spontaneity and authenticity. I am not here to fulfill anybody’s expectations. I am not interested in being called a spiritual person or a saint either. I don’t need any compliments from anybody, I don’t want the crowd to worship me. All those stupid games are finished.I am in that state where nothing can happen anymore; it is beyond happening. So I will go on saying things which offend people. It is not that I want to offend them, but what can I do? If truth offends them, then it offends them. I am going to live life the way it is happening to me. If it is not according to their expectations, either they can change their expectations or they can feel angry, miserable, and go on clinging to their expectations.I am utterly free from their opinion, it does not matter at all to me.So the controversies will become more and more. And because I am controversial, my people are bound to be controversial too. Because I am controversial, you will also be offensive, you will also have to suffer. You will also have to be ready to be persecuted in many ways.But remember one thing. To live a life of compromise is worse than death. And to live a life of truth, even if it is for a single moment, is far more valuable than to live eternally in lies. To die for truth is far more valuable than to live in lies.The last question:Osho,What is your idea of heaven?There is no heaven and there is no hell. They are not geographical, they are part of your psychology. They are psychological. To live a life of spontaneity, truth, love and beauty is to live in heaven. To live a life of hypocrisy, lies and compromises, to live according to others, is to live in hell. To live in freedom is heaven, and to live in bondage is hell.You can decorate your prison cell beautifully, but that makes no difference, it is still a prison cell. And that’s what people have been doing, they go on decorating their prison cell. They give it beautiful names, they go on painting it, putting new pictures on the walls, arranging the furniture in new ways, purchasing more and more things – but they live in prisons.Your marriage is a prison, your church is a prison, your nationality is a prison. How many prisons you have created! You are not living in one prison, your prisons are like Chinese boxes: a box within a box within a box within a box, it goes on. You are like an onion: peel it, another layer; peel that, another layer. Destroy one prison and you find another inside. This is what hell is.To reach the very core of the onion, where all layers have been dropped and there is only nothingness in your hands, that is freedom, nirvana, bodhichitta. The consciousness of a buddha, the pure consciousness of a buddha, that is heaven.And my idea of heaven is not something far away, a heaven in the sky where only angels live. Do you know that angels don’t perspire? They don’t need any deodorants. And do you know, in heaven there are no pubs, because pubs are not needed. There are rivers of wine, so you can jump into the rivers and drink to your heart’s content. And there are beautiful women who never grow old, who are stuck at the age of eighteen. Centuries and centuries have passed, but they are stuck at the age of eighteen. They have golden bodies. Just think of it! It looks more like a nightmare. Golden bodies? With eyes of sapphire?No, that is not my idea of heaven. In that way, I am an old Jew.The minister said to his friend, “Rabbi, I dreamed of a Jewish heaven the other night. It was very lifelike, and it seemed to me to suit the Jewish ideal very well. It was a crowded tenement district with Jewish people everywhere. There were clothes on lines from every window, women on every stoop, pushcart peddlers on every corner, children playing stick-ball on every street. The noise and confusion were so great that I woke up.”The rabbi said, “By a strange coincidence, Father Williams, I dreamed the other night of an Episcopalian heaven. It was very lifelike, and it seemed to me just the ideal of Episcopalians. It was a neat suburb, with well-spaced English Tudor and manor houses, with beautiful lawns, each with its own flowerbed, with clean wide tree-lined streets, and all was suffused in warm sunshine.”The vicar smiled. “And the people?”“Oh,” murmured the rabbi, “there were no people.”My idea of heaven is not unearthly. Heaven is here – you just have to know how to live it. And hell too is here, and you know perfectly well how to live it. It is only a question of changing your perspective, your approach toward life.The earth is beautiful. If you start living its beauty, enjoying its joys with no guilt in your heart, you are in paradise. If you condemn everything, every small joy, if you become a condemner, a poisoner, then the same earth turns into a hell – but only for you. It depends on you where you live, it is a question of your own inner transformation. It is not a change of place, it is a change of inner space.Live joyously, guiltlessly, live totally, live intensely. Then heaven is no longer a metaphysical concept, it is your own experience.Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,One of the essential laws of nature seems to be relationship, interdependence. I have watched two birds fly, intimate with each other and with the wind, so easy and without strife, in perfect harmony. What is the secret of this that seems so hard for human beings? Please Osho, say something about relationship.The most fundamental thing to be remembered is that life is dialectical. It exists through duality, it is a rhythm between opposites. You cannot be happy forever, otherwise happiness will lose all meaning. You cannot be in harmony forever, otherwise you will become unaware of the harmony. Harmony has to be followed by discord again and again, and happiness has to be followed by unhappiness. Every pleasure has its own pain, and every pain has its own pleasure.Unless one understands this duality of existence, one remains in unnecessary misery. Accept the total, with all its agonies and all its ecstasies. Don’t hanker for the impossible; don’t desire that there should be only ecstasy and no agony.Ecstasy cannot exist alone, it needs a contrast. Agony becomes the blackboard, then ecstasy becomes very clear and loud, just as in the darkness of night the stars are so bright. The darker the night, the brighter are the stars. In the day they don’t disappear, they simply become invisible; you cannot see them because there is no contrast.Think of a life without death, and it will be unendurable pain, an unendurable existence. It will be impossible to live without death. Death defines life, gives it a kind of intensity; because life is fleeting, each moment becomes precious. If life is eternal, then who cares? One can wait for tomorrow forever – then who will live now and here? Because tomorrow there is death, it forces you to live now and here. You have to plunge into the present moment, you have to go to its ultimate depth, because who knows, the next moment may come, may not come.Seeing this rhythm, one is at ease, at ease with both. When unhappiness comes one welcomes it, when happiness comes one welcomes it, knowing that they are partners in the same game.This is something which has to be continuously remembered. If it becomes a fundamental remembrance in you, your life will have a totally new flavor – the flavor of freedom, the flavor of unclinging-ness, the flavor of nonattachment. Whatsoever comes, you remain still, silent, accepting.And the person who is capable of being still, silent, accepting of pain, frustration and misery, transforms the very quality of misery itself. To him, misery also becomes a treasure; to him, even pain gives a sharpness. To him, even darkness has its own beauty, depth, infinity. To him, even death is not the end but only a beginning of something unknown.You say, “One of the essential laws of nature seems to be relationship, interdependence.” They are not synonymous. Relationship is one thing, interdependence totally another. Relationship means you are separate; you are independent and so is the other, and you decide to relate. Relationship is not interdependence, it is a contract between two independent persons. Hence all relationships are false, because basically independence is false. Nobody is independent – and if you are not independent how can you relate? With whom can you relate?Life is interdependence. Nobody is independent, not for a single moment can you exist alone. You need the whole existence to support you; each moment you are breathing it in and out. It is not relationship, it is utter interdependence. Remember, I am not saying it is dependence, because the idea of dependence again presumes that we are independent. If we are independent then dependence is possible. But both are impossible; it is interdependence.What do you say? Are waves independent of the ocean or are they dependent on the ocean? Neither is true. They are the ocean, neither independent nor dependent. The ocean cannot exist without the waves, the waves cannot exist without the ocean. They are utterly one, it is a unity.And so is our whole life. We are waves of a cosmic ocean of consciousness. That means love can have three dimensions. One: that of dependence; that’s what happens to the majority of people. The husband is dependent on the wife, the wife is dependent on the husband; they exploit each other, they dominate each other, they possess each other, they reduce each other to a commodity. In ninety-nine percent of cases, that’s what is happening in the world. That’s why love, which can open the gates of paradise, only opens the gates of hell.The second possibility is love between two independent persons. That too happens once in a while. But that too brings misery, because there is constant conflict. No adjustment is possible; both are so independent and nobody is ready to compromise, to adjust with the other.Poets, artists, thinkers, scientists, those who live in a kind of independence, at least in their minds, are impossible people to live with; they are eccentric people to live with. They give freedom to the other, but their freedom looks more like indifference than like freedom, looks more as if they don’t care, as if it doesn’t matter to them. They leave each other to their own spaces. Relationship seems to be only superficial; they are afraid to go deeper into each other, because they are more attached to their freedom than to love, and they don’t want to compromise.And the third possibility is of interdependence. That happens very rarely, but whenever it happens a part of paradise falls on the earth. Two persons, neither independent nor dependent but in a tremendous synchronicity, as if breathing for each other, one soul in two bodies – whenever that happens, love has happened. Only call this love. The other two are not really love, they are just arrangements – social, psychological, biological, but arrangements. The third is something spiritual.You also say, “I have watched two birds fly, intimate with each other and with the wind, so easy and without strife, in perfect harmony.” Yes, it creates jealousy. But birds are not aware; they have no consciousness, they exist below consciousness. Their harmony looks like harmony to you, not to them. And their joy on the wing is your interpretation, not theirs. Remember it: it is your interpretation. They can’t interpret; they have not yet evolved that consciousness which can interpret, which can look back, which can look forward, which can look into things. Their behavior is mechanical.Man is a higher being, man has the capacity to be conscious. And with consciousness, trouble begins. The higher you move, the more dangerous every step becomes. If you fall, you will be falling from such heights that you will disappear somewhere in the valley. In the valley you can walk unconsciously, there is no fear. But when you are moving toward the top, reaching to the peak, you will have to be more and more conscious.Man is very close to existence, the closest. Hence the responsibility and the danger, the hazard, the adventure. You can fall. And what is the fall?Because you are capable of being conscious, there are two possibilities. You can become self-conscious – that is the fall. If the self overpowers your consciousness, you have fallen. If consciousness does not allow the self to overpower it, if you simply are conscious and there is no self in it – a consciousness without a center, a consciousness without anybody being there to be conscious – then you are rising and rising and rising and the climax is not far away. Maybe a few steps more, and you have arrived home. Then you will know what harmony is. And you will know the eternal harmony of existence, the silence that has never been broken; from the beginningless beginnings to the endless end, it continues the same. Then you will know the virgin purity of existence, which has never been polluted.What can poor birds and animals know of it?But I can understand, sometimes it creates great jealousy. Two birds on the wing in such harmony, in such love and intimacy, not only between themselves but with the wind, with the sun, with the rain, and man starts feeling, “Why can’t I be so happy? Why can’t I relate with such beauty? Why can’t I enjoy the wind and the rain and the sun so relaxedly?”It is not because you are lower than the birds, it is because you are higher and much more is required of you. It is because you are higher that existence’s criterion for you is higher too. Yes, a drunkard looks lost, without any anxiety, without any worry, and Buddha also looks without any worry and without any anxiety; Buddha also looks drunk. But do you think they exist on the same plane? The drunkard has fallen from consciousness, and the Buddha has risen from the self.Self-consciousness is human. If you fall from consciousness you will have a certain forgetfulness of anxiety. If you rise from the self you will not only have a forgetfulness of anxiety; anxieties simply evaporate, they no longer exist.You can become buddhas. You have the capacity, the potential, to become a buddha. The birds are poor. But man has fallen so low that he even starts feeling jealous of poor birds.You ask, “What is the secret of this that seems so hard for human beings?” The secret is consciousness. Consciousness brings freedom. Freedom does not mean only the freedom to do right; if that was the meaning of freedom, what kind of freedom would it be? If you are only free to do right, then you are not free. Freedom implies both the alternatives – to do right, to do wrong. Freedom implies the right to say yes or to say no.And this is something subtle to be understood. Saying no feels more of a freedom than saying yes. And I am not philosophizing, it is a simple fact you can observe in yourself. Whenever you say no, you feel more free. Whenever you say yes, you don’t feel free, because yes means you have obeyed, yes means you have surrendered – where is the freedom? No means you are stubborn, keeping aloof; no means you have asserted yourself, no means you are ready to fight. No defines you more clearly than yes. Yes is vague, it is like a cloud. No is very solid and substantial, like a rock.That’s why psychologists say that between seven and fourteen years of age each child starts learning to say no more and more. By saying no, he is getting out of the psychological womb of the mother. Even when there is no need to say no, he will say no. Even when to say yes is in his favor, he will say no.There is much at stake; he has to learn to say no more and more. By the time he is fourteen, sexually mature, he will say the ultimate no to the mother; he will fall in love with a woman. That is his ultimate no to the mother, he is turning his back on the mother. He says, “I am finished with you, I have chosen my woman. I have become an individual, independent in my own right. I want to live my life, I want to do my own thing.”And if the parents insist, “Have short hair,” he will have long hair. If the parents insist, “Have long hair,” he will have short hair. Just watch a little longer. When hippies become parents then they will see; their children will have short hair – because they will have to learn no.If the parents insist, “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” the children will start living in every kind of dirt. They will be dirty. They won’t take a bath, they won’t clean themselves, they won’t use soap. And they will find rationalizations that soap is dangerous to the skin, that it is unnatural, that no animal ever uses soap. They can find as many rationalizations as possible, but deep down all those rationalizations are just cover-ups. The real thing is, they want to say no. And of course when you want to say no, you have to find reasons.Hence, no gives you a sense of freedom; not only that, it also gives you a sense of intelligence. To say yes needs no intelligence. When you say yes, nobody asks you why. When you have already said yes, who bothers to ask you why? There is no need of any reasoning or argument, you have already said yes. When you say no, it is bound to be asked why? It sharpens your intelligence, it gives you a definition, a style, freedom. Watch the psychology of the no.It is so hard for human beings to be in harmony, because of consciousness. Consciousness gives freedom, freedom gives you the capacity to say no, and there is more possibility to say no than to say yes. And without yes, there is no harmony. Yes is harmony. But it takes time to grow up, to mature, to come to such a maturity where you can say yes and yet remain free, where you can say yes and yet remain unique, where you can say yes and yet not become a slave.The freedom that is brought by no is a very childish freedom. It is good for seven-year-olds up to fourteen-year-olds. But if a person gets caught in it and his whole life becomes a no-saying, then he has stopped growing.The ultimate growth is to say yes with such joy as a child says no. That is a second childhood. And the man who can say yes with tremendous freedom and joy, with no hesitation, with no strings attached, with no conditions – a pure and simple joy, a pure and simple yes – that man has become a sage. That man lives in harmony again. And his harmony is of a totally different dimension than the harmony of trees, animals and birds. They live in harmony because they cannot say no, and the sage lives in harmony because he does not say no. Between the two, the birds and the buddhas, are all human beings – un-grown-up, immature, childish, stuck somewhere, still trying to say no, to have some feeling of freedom.I am not saying don’t learn to say no. I am saying learn to say no when it is time to say no, but don’t get stuck with it. Slowly, slowly, see that there is a higher freedom that comes with yes, and a greater harmony. A peace that passeth understanding.The second question:Osho,Is relationship there because love is not?Yes. Love is not a relationship. Love relates, but it is not a relationship. A relationship is something finished. A relationship is a noun; the full stop has come, the honeymoon is over. Now there is no joy, no enthusiasm, now all is finished.You can carry it on, just to keep your promises. You can carry it on because it is comfortable, convenient, cozy. You can carry it on because there is nothing else to do. You can carry it on because if you disrupt it, it is going to create much trouble for you.Relationship means something complete, finished, closed. Love is never a relationship; love is relating. It is always a river, flowing, unending. Love knows no full stop; the honeymoon begins but never ends. It is not like a novel that starts at a certain point and ends at a certain point. It is an ongoing phenomenon. Lovers end, love continues. It is a continuum. It is a verb, not a noun. And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? – because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a security, relationship has a certainty. Relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say good-bye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid that we want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable. We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don’t allow it freedom to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun.You are in love with a woman or a man and immediately you start thinking of getting married. Make it a legal contract. Why? How does the law come into love? The law comes into love because love is not there. It is only a fantasy, and you know the fantasy will disappear. Before it disappears settle down, before it disappears do something so it becomes impossible to separate.In a better world, with more meditative people, with a little more enlightenment spread over the earth, people will love, love immensely, but their love will remain a relating, not a relationship. And I am not saying that their love will be only momentary. There is every possibility their love may go deeper than your love, may have a higher quality of intimacy, may have something more of poetry and more of godliness in it. And there is every possibility their love may last longer than your so-called relationship ever lasts. But it will not be guaranteed by the law, by the court, by the policeman.The guarantee will be inner. It will be a commitment from the heart, it will be a silent communion. If you enjoy being with somebody, you will like to enjoy it more and more. If you enjoy the intimacy, you will like to explore the intimacy more and more.And there are a few flowers of love which bloom only after long intimacies. There are seasonal flowers too; within six weeks they are there in the sun, but within six weeks again they are gone forever. There are flowers which take years to come, and there are flowers which take many, many years to come. The longer it takes, the deeper it goes.But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another heart. It has not even to be verbalized, because to verbalize it is to profane it. It has to be a silent commitment; eye to eye, heart to heart, being to being. It has to be understood, not said.It is so ugly seeing people going to the church or to the court to get married. It is so ugly, so inhuman. It simply shows they can’t trust themselves, they trust the policeman more than they trust their own inner voice. It shows they can’t trust their love, they trust the law.Forget relationships and learn how to relate. Once you are in a relationship you start taking each other for granted. That’s what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows either. It is impossible to know the other, the other remains a mystery. And to take the other for granted is insulting, disrespectful.To think that you know your wife is very, very ungrateful. How can you know the woman? How can you know the man? They are processes, they are not things. The woman that you knew yesterday is not there today. So much water has gone down the Ganges; she is somebody else, totally different. Relate again, start again, don’t take it for granted.And the man that you slept with last night – look at his face again in the morning – is no longer the same person, so much has changed. So much, incalculably much, has changed. That is the difference between a thing and a person. The furniture in the room is the same, but the man and the woman, they are no longer the same. Explore again, start again. That’s what I mean by relating.Relating means you are always starting, you are continuously trying to become acquainted. Again and again, you are introducing yourself to each other. You are trying to see the many facets of the other’s personality. You are trying to penetrate deeper and deeper into his realm of inner feelings, into the deep recesses of his being. You are trying to unravel a mystery which cannot be unraveled.That is the joy of love: the exploration of consciousness. And if you relate, and don’t reduce it to a relationship, then the other will become a mirror to you. Exploring him, unawares you will be exploring yourself too. Getting deeper into the other, knowing his feelings, his thoughts, his deeper stirrings, you will know your own deeper stirrings too. Lovers become mirrors to each other, and then love becomes a meditation. Relationship is ugly, relating is beautiful.In relationship both persons become blind to each other. Just think, how long has it been since you saw your wife eye to eye? How long has it been since you looked at your husband? Maybe years. Who looks at one’s own wife? You have already taken it for granted that you know her. What more is there to look at? You are more interested in strangers than in the people you know – you know the whole topography of their bodies, you know how they respond, you know everything that has happened is going to happen again and again. It is a repetitive circle.It is not so, it is not really so. Nothing ever repeats; everything is new every day. Just your eyes become old, your assumptions become old, your mirror gathers dust and you become incapable of reflecting the other.Hence I say relate. By saying relate, I mean remain continuously on a honeymoon. Go on searching and seeking each other, finding new ways of loving each other, finding new ways of being with each other. And each person is such an infinite mystery, inexhaustible, unfathomable, that it is not possible that you can ever say, “I have known her,” or, “I have known him.” At the most you can say, “I have tried my best, but the mystery remains a mystery.”In fact the more you know, the more mysterious the other becomes. Then love is a constant adventure.The third question:Osho,I feel like the frog in the fairy tale who gets kissed and starts growing up to be the handsome prince. But I'm still wearing “froggy” clothes and they are too tight and the princess isn't interested and wouldn't it be nice just to be a frog again? Help!You seem to be very old fashioned. The world has changed a lot since these kinds of stories were written. Now just the vice versa exists. Touch a prince and he becomes a frog, kiss a prince and immediately there is a frog.This fable is no longer applicable. But it will be good to go a little deeper into it. Why were such kinds of stories invented? – why in the first place? What is their psychology? The psychology is to cover up something ugly about human beings. The reality is that the moment you kiss a woman or a man, the moment you fall in love with a man or a woman, immediately the process starts that the man starts becoming a frog, the woman starts becoming a frog.Now, this is a fact, and you all know it. And these fables were created to cover up this reality. These fables were created to deceive you, that this is not so: that, in reality, kiss a frog and he becomes a prince. To deceive you about the reality of life, these stories were created. Small children read these stories and believe in them, and later on they are very much disillusioned.These stories are fantasies, wish fulfillments. That’s how man would like things to be. Kiss a frog and the frog transforms into a handsome prince. These are wish fulfillments; it does not happen, what happens is just the contrary. But how to hide it? How not to look at it? Create beautiful fables around it.Ninety-nine percent of religion and a hundred percent of literature consists of deceptions. It goes on talking about things as they are not, never have been, and never will be.But man is the animal who lives through illusions. He cannot live with reality; reality is too much, it hurts. Have you not seen it in your own life? Fall in love with a woman; she was so beautiful when she was unavailable; when she was beyond your grasp she was like a Cleopatra. And once you are married to her you are fed up with her, bored to death. Now you cannot believe how you managed to see Cleopatra in this woman; she looks ugly in every possible way.And the same is the case from her side. She was thinking you were a charming prince, like the princes in the fables on their beautiful horses. She thought she had found her charming prince. And when she lives with the reality, he snores in the night, he stinks, and he has such dirty habits – he smokes, she cannot even kiss him because he smells so much of smoking. And suddenly she becomes aware that the charming prince was never there in reality; it was a projection, she had projected him.Every day the person becomes more and more ordinary. The reality is: kiss a prince and he becomes a frog. But then how to live?If all these realities are made known, then life will become impossible. So we create fantasies, fables, fictions, to create consolation, to create a little cozy atmosphere. If it is not real, at least you can dream, you can fantasize, you can believe that if it is not real today, tomorrow it is going to be real. Go on kissing the frog, and sooner or later he will become a prince. These are make-believes.People believe in the immortality of the soul because they are conscious of death – not that they know the soul is immortal, but just because they see everybody dying, they know the certainty of death. Now, how to escape from the certainty? Create a fiction.Remember, I am not saying that the soul is not eternal, I am simply saying that people’s belief that the soul is eternal is a fiction. The belief is a fiction.People believe in a God who cares, because they feel so uncared for. Nobody cares about them, they feel so left alone, nobody seems to be interested in them; whether they live or die will not matter. They have to create a father figure high in heaven who cares for them. Even if nobody cares, God cares. It is a great solace.In the name of religion, in the name of literature, in the name of poetry, music, we have been creating fictions –we create a few buffers around ourselves, so the shocks of reality don’t reach to us.You must have seen buffers on railway trains. Between two bogies, two compartments, there are buffers, so if somehow some accident happens, the compartments don’t run into each other and the shock of the accident can be absorbed by the buffers. Cars have springs so that you don’t feel the bumps on rough roads. Those springs go on absorbing the bumps, the shocks; they are shock absorbers.Man has created many psychological shock absorbers around himself. And what I would like to say to you is this: that unless you drop all shock absorbers you are never going to be free.Only truth liberates.Although in the beginning, truth shocks very much – but that’s how it is, that’s how things are, that’s how nature functions. You have to open yourself, you have to be vulnerable to all the shocks of life. It will hurt, it will wound, you will cry, you will weep, you will be in a rage against life. But slowly, slowly you will start seeing that truth is truth, it is pointless to be in a rage against truth. And once the rage has subsided, the truth has a beauty of its own. Truth liberates.The real work of a master is how to destroy the absorbers of the disciples. And it is really very hard work – hard in the sense that the disciples resist in every possible way. They protect their absorbers, and if they feel that there is some danger, they create more absorbers around themselves. If they see that somebody is after them to snatch their absorbers, they become very defensive, very protective and they create more armors around themselves.The real master cannot give you solace, he can only give you freedom. He can give you bliss, but he cannot give you consolation. And he will have to destroy many things in you which you have cherished for long, nourished for long. He will have to take away all the clothes that protect you, he will have to leave you nude in reality.It frightens, it scares, but that is the only way you can grow. Growth has to be with reality, not against reality. And once you have tasted something of reality as it is, you will never gather any other buffers or shock-absorbers again.You say, “I feel like the frog in the fairy tale who gets kissed and starts growing up to be the handsome prince.” You must be dreaming. Things are not done that way here. You came here as a charming prince. You have been kissed, and now you are a frog. But there is nothing wrong with being a frog – frogs are beautiful people.You say, “But I’m still wearing ‘froggy’ clothes…” Of course – you are still a frog!“And they are too tight” – you are imagining – “and the princess isn’t interested and wouldn’t it be nice just to be a frog again?” What are you talking about? You don’t need any help, you are already one. Accept your “frogginess” and forget all about the princess. In fact I have never seen a frog interested in a princess – foolish idea! Become interested in another frog! And in that way I can help you. I have so many frogs here.The fourth question:Osho,You have said that Krishnamurti can get angry. How is that possible, as in enlightenment there is no one there to be angry?In enlightenment there is nobody there to get angry, and there is nobody there not to get angry either. So whatsoever happens, happens. Krishnamurti does not get angry the way you get angry. Everything with an enlightened person happens on a totally different plane. His anger comes out of his compassion. Your anger comes out of hate, aggression, cruelty. He becomes angry – sometimes he starts pulling his hair out, he hits his own forehead – but out of compassion.Just think, for fifty years or more he has been teaching a certain kind of truth to the world, and nobody understands him. The same people gather each year to listen to him – the same people.Once he was talking in Mumbai…somebody reported this to me, and the person who reported it to me is an old lady, older than Krishnamurti. She saw Krishnamurti when he was a child, she has seen him and listened to him for fifty years. And because she is a little deaf, very old, she sits in the front on a chair. And for fifty years Krishnamurti has been saying that there are no methods for meditating; meditation is not needed at all. Just be in the present and live your life, that’s enough meditation, no other technique is needed.For one and a half hours he poured his heart out, and at the end the lady stood up and asked, “How to meditate?” Now, what do you suppose he should do? He hit his head.This is not your anger. This is so unbelievable! He is tired of this lady, but this lady is not tired of him. She comes to every talk to listen to him, and asks the same stupid questions.When I say Krishnamurti can get angry, I don’t mean that he can get angry like you get angry. His anger is out of compassion. This is unbelievable! He wants to help this lady and he feels so helpless. He tries this way and that. His message is very simple, singular, one-dimensional. For fifty years he has been saying only a single word. In essence his whole teaching can be printed on one side of a postcard. He has been saying it in as many possible ways as one can invent, but it is the same citadel that he attacks from the north, from the south, from the west, from the east. And still people go on listening to him and go on asking the same old foolish questions.He certainly gets angry. And when a man like Krishnamurti gets angry, he is pure anger. Many in India have felt very disappointed with Krishnamurti because he gets angry. They have a certain concept that a buddha should not get angry. They go with a prejudice. And when they see that Krishnamurti can get angry, they are disillusioned, “So this man is not a buddha, he has not become enlightened yet.”I say to you that he is one of the most enlightened persons who has ever walked on this earth. Still he can get angry, but his anger comes out of compassion; it is condensed compassion. He cares about you, so much so that he becomes angry. This is a totally different quality of anger.And when he becomes angry he is real anger. Your anger is partial, lukewarm. Your anger is like a dog who is not certain how to behave with a stranger. He may be a friend of the master, so he wags his tail; he may be an enemy, so he barks. He does both together. On one hand he goes on barking, on the other hand he goes on wagging his tail. He is playing the diplomat, so whatsoever the case turns out to be, he can always feel right. If the master comes and he sees that the master is friendly, the barking will stop and his whole energy will go into the tail. If the master is angry with the intruder, then the tail will stop completely, and the whole energy will go into barking.Your anger is also like that. You are weighing up how far to go, how much will pay; don’t go beyond the limit, don’t provoke the other person too much.But when a man like Krishnamurti becomes angry he is pure anger. And pure anger has a beauty because it has totality. He is just anger. He is like a small child, red-faced, just anger all over, ready to destroy the whole world.That’s what happened to Jesus. When he went into the great temple and saw the moneychangers and their tables inside the temple, he was in a rage. He became angry – the same anger that comes out of compassion and love. Single-handed, he drove all the moneychangers out of the temple and overturned their boards. He must have been really very angry, because driving all the moneychangers out of the temple single-handed is not an easy thing.And reports say – I don’t know how far they are right, but reports say that he was not a very strong man. Reports say that he was not even a very tall man; you will be surprised, he was only four feet six inches. And not only that – on top of it he was a hunchback. I don’t know how far those reports are true, because I don’t want to go to court! But it is there in the books, ancient books, very ancient books.So how did this hunchback, four feet six inches high, drive out all the moneychangers single-handed? Must have been pure rage!Indians are angry about that. They cannot trust that Jesus is enlightened – just because of this incident.People have their prejudices, their ideas. Rather than seeing into reality, rather than looking into an enlightened man, they come ready with so many concepts, and unless he fits them he is not enlightened. And let me tell you, no enlightened person is going to fit with your unenlightened prejudices; it is impossible.It happened, a lady came to me. She had been a follower of Krishnamurti for many years, then a small thing disturbed the whole thing and the whole applecart was upturned. The thing was so small that I was surprised. There was a camp in Holland where Krishnamurti holds a camp every year, and the woman had gone there from India. Nearabout two thousand people had gathered from all over the world to listen to him.The next morning the lectures were going to start, and the woman had gone shopping. And she was surprised, Krishnamurti was also shopping. An enlightened person shopping? Can you believe it? Buddha in a supermarket? And not only that – he was purchasing a necktie. Enlightened people need neckties? And not only that – the whole counter was full of neckties and he was throwing them this way and that, and he was not satisfied with any.The woman watched, looked at the whole scene, and fell from the sky. She thought, “I have come from India for this ordinary man who is purchasing neckties. And even then, thousands of neckties of all colors and all kinds of material, and nothing is satisfying to him. Is this detachment? Is this awareness?”She turned away. She didn’t attend the camp, she came back immediately. And the first thing she did was to come running to me, and she said, “You are right.”I said, “What do you mean?”She said, “You are right that it was useless wasting my time with Krishnamurti. Now I want to become a sannyasin of yours.”I said, “Please excuse me, I cannot accept you. If you cannot accept Krishnamurti, how can I accept you because here you will see that are far more disappointing. Get lost! What are you going to do with my Mercedes Benz? So before it happens, why bother? What are you going to do with my air-conditioned room? Before it happens, it is better that you go and find some Muktananda, etcetera. You have not been able to understand Krishnamurti, you will not be able to understand me.”People like Krishnamurti live on a totally different plane. Their anger is not your anger. And who knows that he was not just playing with those ties for this stupid old woman? Masters are known to devise things like that. He got rid of this stupid old woman very easily.The last question:Osho,In Italy, a poor country, we have only three things – the pope, the pizza and gossip. Now in coming to India, we have lost the pizza and with you as the pope, please at least let us have the gossip!I am not averse to gossiping. In fact, I love it. But what to do with this old man, Atisha? Every day I decide to gossip a little, and he says no. And I have to be a little respectful toward him. And the problem is not so much with Atisha, the problem is the sutra that is coming. I will find a legal way to wriggle out of it. But gossiping is difficult – but if you promise me not to tell anybody, I will…A man was walking down the street looking into shop windows and his gaze stopped on a small overnight shaving-kit bag in a shop. What stopped him was the price – an exorbitant three hundred dollars.His curiosity got the better of him and he was compelled to go in and ask about it, although he did not need one. “Why is this little bag so expensive?” he asked.The shopkeeper replied, “It is made out of a very special leather.”“Even if it was made out of alligator skin or mink-lined, it wouldn’t be so costly,” said the inquiring man.The shopkeeper answered, “The story behind this small bag is special. The leather-smith’s uncle is a rabbi and this bag is made entirely out of foreskins.”“I can see that would be unique,” the man came back. “But three hundred dollars is still too high a price!”The shopkeeper then said, “It is very convenient. When you rub it, it turns into a large suitcase.”Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Abandon poisoned food.Don't be consistent.Don't make wicked jokes.Don't wait for an opportunity.Don't strike at the heart.Don't transfer the cow's load to the bull.Don't back the favorite.Don't have wrong views.Don't fall for the celestial demon.The first sutra:Abandon poisoned food.According to the mystic traditions of the East, all that you think you are is nothing but food. Your body is food, your mind is food, your soul is food. Beyond the soul there is certainly something which is not food. That something is known as anatta, no-self. It is utter emptiness. Buddha calls it shunya, the void. It is pure space. It contains nothing but itself; it is contentless consciousness.While the content persists, the food persists. By food is meant that which is ingested from the outside. The body needs physical food; without it, it will start withering away. This is how it survives; it contains nothing but physical food.Your mind contains memories, thoughts, desires, jealousies, power trips, and a thousand and one things. All that is also food; on a little more subtle plane it is food. Thought is food. Hence when you have nourishing thoughts your chest expands. When you have thoughts which give you energy you feel good. Somebody says something good about you, a compliment, and look what happens to you – you are nourished. And somebody says something wrong about you, and watch – it is as if something has been snatched away from you, you are weaker than you were before.The mind is food in a subtle form. The mind is nothing but the inner side of the body; hence what you eat affects your mind. If you eat non-vegetarian food you will have a particular kind of mind; if you eat vegetarian food you will certainly have a different kind of mind.Do you know this immensely important fact about Indian history? India never attacked any country in its whole history of ten thousand years – never, not a single aggressive act. How was it possible? Why? The same humanity exists here as exists everywhere else, but it is just that a different kind of body created a different mind.You can watch it yourself. Eat something and watch, eat something else and watch. Keep notes, and you will become aware and surprised to find that each thing that you digest is not only physical, it has a psychological part to it. It makes your mind vulnerable to certain ideas, to certain desires.Hence, down the ages, there has been a search for a kind of food that will not strengthen the mind but will help it to finally dissolve; a kind of food which, instead of strengthening the mind, will strengthen meditation, no-mind. No fixed and certain rules can be given, because people are different and each one has to decide for himself.And watch what you allow into your mind. People are completely unaware; they go on reading everything and anything, they go on looking at the TV, any silly stupid thing. They go on listening to the radio, they go on chitchatting, chattering with people, and they are all pouring rubbish into each other’s heads. Rubbish is all that they have.Avoid such situations in which you are unnecessarily burdened with rubbish. You already have too much as it is, you need to be unburdened of it. And you go on collecting it as if it is something precious.Talk less, listen only to the essential, be telegraphic in talking and listening. If you talk less, if you listen less, slowly, slowly you will see that a cleanliness, a feeling of purity, as if you have just taken a bath, will start arising within you. That becomes the necessary soil for meditation to arise. Don’t go on reading all kinds of nonsense.Once I used to live in a house where the neighbor was a madman who was very much interested in newspapers. He would come every day to collect all the newspapers from me. If sometimes he was ill or I was not at home, then he would come later on.Once it happened, for ten days I was away, and when I came back he came again to collect all the newspapers. I said to him, “But these are old now – ten days old.”He said, “What does it matter? It is the same rubbish! Only the dates change.”It must have been a very sane moment in that madman’s life. Yes, there are insane moments in so-called sane people’s lives, and vice versa. He was telling a truth, saying, “It is the same old nonsense. What does it matter? I have time, and I have to remain occupied.”I asked him, “What did you do for these ten days?”He said, “I was reading the old newspapers – reading them again and again and again.”Leave a few gaps in your mind unoccupied. Those moments of unoccupied consciousness are the first glimpses of meditation, the first penetrations of the beyond, the first flashes of no-mind. And then if you can manage to do this, the other thing is to choose physical food which does not help aggression and violence, which is not poisonous.Now even scientists agree with this, that when you kill an animal, out of fear he releases all kinds of poisons. Death is not easy. When you are killing an animal, out of fear, there is a great trembling inside. The animal wants to survive; all kinds of poisons are released.When you are in fear you also release poisons in the body. Those poisons are helpful; they help you to either fight or take flight. Sometimes it happens that in anger you can do things which you could never have imagined you can do. You can move a rock which ordinarily you could not have even shaken, but anger is there and poison is released.In fear, people can run so fast that even Olympic runners will be left behind. Just think of yourself running and somebody is behind you with a dagger to kill you with. You will do the best you can do, your whole body will be geared to function at its optimum.When you kill an animal there is anger, there is anxiety, there is fear. Death is facing it; all the glands of the animal release many kinds of poisons. Hence the modern idea is that before killing an animal, make him unconscious, give him anesthesia. In modern butcheries, anesthesia is being used. But that does not make much difference, only a very superficial difference, because at the deepest core where no anesthesia can ever reach, death has to be encountered. It may not be conscious, the animal may not be aware of what is happening, but it is happening as if in a dream. He is passing through a nightmare.And to eat meat is to eat poisoned food. Avoid anything that is poisoned on the physical plane, avoid anything that is poisoned on the mental plane. And on the mental plane things are more complicated. If you think you are a Hindu, you are poisoned; if you think you are a Mohammedan, you are poisoned. If you think you are a Christian, a Jaina, a Buddhist, you are poisoned. And you have been poisoned slowly, so slowly that you have become attuned to it. You are addicted to it.You have been spoon-fed from the very first day; from your mother’s breast, you have been poisoned. All kinds of conditionings are poisons. To think of oneself as a Hindu is to think of oneself opposed to humanity. To think of oneself as German, as Chinese, is to think of oneself opposed to humanity, is to think in terms of enmity, not friendship.Think only as a human being. If you have any intelligence, think only as a simple human being. And when your intelligence grows a little more you will drop even the adjective human; you will think of yourself only as a being. And the being includes all – the trees and the mountains and the rivers and the stars and the birds and the animals.Become bigger, become huge. Why are you living in tunnels? Why are you creeping into small dark black holes? But you think you are living in great ideological systems. You are not living in great ideological systems, because there are no great ideological systems. No idea is ever great enough to contain a human being; being-hood cannot be contained by any concept. All concepts cripple and paralyze.Don’t be a Catholic and don’t be a communist, just be a human being. These are all poisons, these are all prejudices. And down the ages you have been hypnotized into these prejudices. They have become part of your blood, your bones, your very marrow. You will have to be very alert to get rid of all this poisoning.Your body is not poisoned as much as your mind is. The body is a simple phenomenon, it can be easily cleaned. If you have been eating non-vegetarian foods it can be stopped, it is not such a big deal. And if you stop eating meat, within three months your body will be completely free of all the poisons created by non-vegetarian foods. It is simple. Physiology is not very complicated.But the problem arises with psychology. A Jaina monk never eats any poisoned food, never eats anything non-vegetarian. But his mind is so polluted and poisoned by Jainism as nobody else’s is.The real freedom is freedom from ideology. Can’t you simply live without any ideology? Is ideology needed? Why is ideology needed so much? It is needed because it helps you to remain stupid, it is needed because it helps you to remain unintelligent. It is needed because it supplies you ready-made answers and you need not find them on your own.The real man of intelligence will not cling to any ideology – for what? He will not carry a load of ready-made answers. He knows that he has intelligence enough, so that whatever situation arises he will be able to respond to it. Why carry an unnecessary load from the past? What is the point of carrying it?And in fact the more you carry from the past, the less you will be able to respond to the present, because the present is not a repetition of the past, it is always new, always, always new. It is never the old; it may sometimes appear like the old, but it is not old, there are basic differences.Life never repeats itself. It is always fresh, always new, always growing, always exploring, always moving into new adventures. Your old ready-made answers are not going to help you. In fact they will hinder you; they will not allow you to see the new situation. The situation will be new, and the answer will be the old.That’s why you look so stupid in life. But to remain stupid seems cheaper. To be intelligent needs effort, to be intelligent means you have to grow. And growth is painful. To be intelligent means you have to be continuously alert and aware; you cannot fall asleep, you cannot live like a somnambulist.And to be intelligent has a few more dangers too. To be intelligent is very difficult because you have to live with the stupid crowds. To live with blind people and have eyes is a dangerous situation; they are bound to destroy your eyes. They cannot tolerate you, you are an offense.Hence Jesus is crucified, Socrates is poisoned, Al-Hillaj is killed, Sarmad is beheaded. These were the most intelligent people that have ever walked on the earth. And how have we behaved with them? Why did a man of the intelligence of Socrates have to be killed? He became intolerable. His presence became such an offense. To look into his eyes meant to look in the mirror. And we are so ugly that rather than accepting the fact that we are ugly, the easier course is to destroy the mirror and forget all about your ugliness, and start living again in the old dream that you are the most beautiful person in the world.We destroyed Socrates because he was a mirror. Hence people have decided it is better to remain mediocre, it is better to remain unintelligent.Just the other day, I was reading a report. A few psychologists in England have discovered that by the time great politicians reach the highest posts, their intelligence is already withering away. Just think of a man of eighty-four becoming a prime minister! Those psychologists have warned the whole world that this is dangerous. People who have gone beyond sixty, seventy, eighty, they become prime ministers and presidents. This is dangerous for the world, because they have so much power and so little intelligence left.But those psychologists are not aware of another thing that I would like to tell you. In fact people choose them to be prime ministers and presidents because they are no longer intelligent. People don’t like intelligent persons. People like people who look like them, who are like them; they feel they are not strangers. Intelligent people will be strangers.I can’t think of any country which could choose Socrates to be the prime minister – impossible. He is so different, his approach to life is so different, his insight into things is so deep. No country could afford, or no country could be so courageous, as to make him the prime minister, because he would bring chaos. He would start changing each and everything, because each and everything needs to be changed.This rotten society has to be destroyed completely; only then can a new society be created. Renovation is not going to help. We have been renovating the same old ruins for centuries. No more props, no more renovations, no more whitewash! All that is needed is to demolish it, and let us create a new society. Let us bring a new human being, Homo novus. Let us give birth to something new, a new mind, a new consciousness.People choose dull dead persons to be in power because you can be safe with them. Now, India is very safe with Morarji Desai; he is not going to do a single thing. He will keep everything intact, he will keep this country’s ugly bureaucracy as it is. He will not change anything; his whole effort will be how to stop change. Jaiprakash Narayan was thinking of bringing about a total revolution, and what has happened is total failure.Countries choose mediocre people to be in power, because they will save their tradition, their conventions, their prejudices. They will protect their poisons. Instead of destroying them, they will enhance them and strengthen them.It is certainly dangerous to have unintelligent people in powerful posts. And it is becoming more and more dangerous, because they have more and more power and less and less intelligence. But why does it happen? There is a subtle logic in it. People don’t want to change. Change is arduous, change is difficult.If you change your poisonous foods you will be surprised; a new intelligence will be released in you. And this new intelligence will make it possible not to go on stuffing yourself with nonsense. This new intelligence will make you capable of dropping the past and its memories, of dropping unnecessary desires and dreams, dropping jealousies, angers, traumas and all kinds of psychological wounds.Because you cannot drop psychological wounds, you become victims of psycho-fraud. The world is full of psychoanalysts of many kinds, they come in all shapes and sizes. The world is full of all kinds of psychotherapies. But why are so many psychotherapies needed? They are needed because you are not intelligent enough to heal your own wounds. Instead of healing them, instead of opening them to the winds and to the sun, you go on hiding them. You need psychotherapists to help you to open your wounds to the sun so that they can be healed, so that they can be allowed to heal.But it is very difficult to find a real psychotherapist. Out of a hundred psychotherapists, ninety-nine are “psychofrauds,” not psychotherapists.You will be surprised to know that more psychotherapists and psychoanalysts commit suicide than any other profession. The number is almost double. Now, what kind of people are these? And how were they going to help? What were they doing their whole lives helping people?More psychoanalysts go mad, insane, than any other profession in the world. The number is almost double. Why? – and they were helping people toward sanity, and they themselves were insane. There is every possibility that they became interested in psychotherapy because of their insanity. It was an effort to find a cure for themselves.And you will be surprised to know that psychotherapists of one kind go for psychotherapy to psychotherapists of another kind. The Freudian goes to the Jungian, the Jungian goes to the Freudian, and so on and so forth. This is a very strange situation.If intelligence is released in you, you will be able to do all that is needed. You will be able to heal your own wounds, you will be able to see your own traumas, you need not go to a primal therapist.I am allowing all kinds of therapies in this commune. In fact, in no other place in the world are so many psychotherapies available – sixty in all. Why am I allowing these therapies? Just because of you, because you are not yet ready to release your intelligence.As the commune goes deeper and deeper into inner realizations, therapies can be dropped. When the commune has really bloomed, there will be no need of any therapy. Then love is therapy, intelligence is therapy. Then living day to day, moment to moment, aware and alert, is therapy. Then all kinds of things that you do during the day, cleaning and cooking and washing, they are all therapy.Therapies are here only for the time being. The day I become convinced that now the major part of you has gone beyond therapies, therapies will disappear, because then the major part will be able to pull the minor part into intelligence also.We are trying to create an intelligent kind of life. I am not so much of a religious person, I am not a saint, I have nothing to do with spirituality. All those categories are irrelevant about me. You cannot categorize me, you cannot pigeonhole me. But one thing can be said, that my whole effort is to help you release the energy called love-intelligence. If love-intelligence is released, you are healed.And the third kind of poisoned food is spiritual. That’s what the self is. The self needs continuous attention. It feeds on attention, attention is its food. It is not only the politician who hankers for attention, more and more attention from more and more people. Your so-called saints are doing the same.There is no difference between saints and politicians and actors, no difference at all. Their basic need is the same – attention: “More people should pay attention to me, more people should look up to me.” That becomes food for the ego, and that is the subtlest kind of poisoned food.These three things are implied in the first sutra. Atisha says: Abandon poisoned food. Physical, psychological, spiritual. Let your physiological body be pure of all poisons, toxins, and your mind unburdened from all kinds of rubbish, junk. And let your soul be free from the idea of the self. When the soul is free from the idea of “I” you have arrived at that inner space called no-self, anatta. That is freedom, that is nirvana, that is enlightenment. You have come home. Now there is nowhere to go; now you can settle, rest, relax. Now you can enjoy the millions of joys that are being showered upon you by existence.When these three poisoned foods are dropped, you become empty. But this emptiness is not a negative kind of emptiness. You are empty in the sense that all poisons, all contents, are gone. But you are full, full of something which cannot be named, full of something which devotees call God.Atisha cannot use that word; he is not a devotee, he is not a bhakta. He cannot say any word for it, he remains completely silent about it. He says: Drop this, drop this, drop this, and then whatsoever remains is you, the real you.And the second sutra is a very, very significant sutra.Don't be consistent.Have you ever heard anything like that, “Don’t be consistent”? When you hear it for the first time or read it for the first time, you will think there has been some mistake, maybe a proof mistake or something. Because your so-called saints have been telling you just the opposite. “Don’t be inconsistent,” they say. “Be consistent.”It is here that Atisha is superb. He says: Don't be consistent. Why? What is consistency? Consistency means living according to the past. With what will you be consistent? If you want to be consistent you can have only one reference: that is the past. To be consistent means to live according to the past, and to live according to the past is not to live at all. To live according to the past is to be dead. Then your life will be just a repetition.To be consistent means you have already decided that now there is no more to life, that you have already come to a full stop; you don’t allow life to have anything new to give to you, you have closed your doors. The sun will rise, but you will not allow its rays to enter into your room. And the flowers will bloom, but you will remain unaware of their fragrance. Moons will come and go, but you will remain stagnant. You have stopped being a river.A river cannot be a consistent phenomenon. Only a pond can be consistent, because it is non-flowing. The flow by its very nature has to be inconsistent, because it has to face new situations, new challenges. New spaces are constantly coming upon it; it has to respond spontaneously, not according to the past.The consistent man is a logical man, his life is one-dimensional. He lives in arithmetic, he follows logic. If anything goes against logic he simply avoids seeing it; he pretends that it is not there, because it is so disturbing to his logic.And the logical man is the poorest man in the world, because life consists not only of logic, but of love too. And love is illogical. Only a very small part of life is logical, the superficial part. The deeper you go, the more and more you move into the illogical, or, to be more correct, the “supralogical.”Logic is good in the marketplace, but not in the temple, not in the mosque, not in the church. Logic is good in the office, in the shop, in the factory. Logic is not good when you are with your friends, when you are with your beloved, with your children. Logic is good when you are dealing in a businesslike way. But life is not all business; there is something far more valuable in life than any business. Allow that too.A professor of philosophy went to a doctor and asked for advice on how to improve his sex life.“You seem to be in good physical condition,” said the doctor, after an examination. “Run ten miles a day, every day for seven days, then phone me.”A week later, the professor telephoned. “Well,” said the physician, “has the running improved your sex life?”“I don’t know,” said the professor. “I am seventy miles from home now.”This is the way a logical mind functions. It is one-dimensional. Life is multidimensional. Don’t confine it, don’t make it linear, don’t live like a line. Live the multi-dimensions of it, the multi-phases of it, and then you cannot be consistent, because life is paradoxical – one moment it is joy, another moment it is sadness. If you are very consistent, then you have to go on smiling; whether your heart is crying or smiling, that doesn’t matter, you have to be consistent. You have to be a Jimmy Carter and go on smiling.I have heard that his wife has to close his mouth every night, because in the night he also goes on smiling. If you practice such a thing the whole day, naturally, how can you relax so suddenly at night? It becomes a fixed pattern.Life consists of sadness too. And sadness is also beautiful; it has its own depth, its own delicacy, its own deliciousness, its own taste. A man is poorer if he has not known sadness; he is impoverished, very much impoverished. His laughter will be shallow, his laughter will not have depth, because depth comes only through sadness. A man who knows sadness, if he laughs, his laughter will have depth. His laughter will have something of his sadness too, his laughter will be more colorful.A man who lives life in its totality is a rainbow; he lives the whole spectrum of it. He cannot be consistent, he has to be inconsistent.Atisha is giving you something tremendously valuable. Live all the moods of life; they are your own and they all have something to contribute to your growth. Don’t become confined to a small space. Howsoever comfortable and cozy it looks, don’t become confined to a small space. Be an adventurer. Search and seek all facets of life, all aspects of life.It is said that you cannot write a novel about a good man. And that is true; a good man really has no life. What novel can you write about him? At the most you can write a character certificate: that he is good – and that is his whole life. He does not have much of a life, because he has no multidimensionality.Live, and allow all that is possible. Sing, dance, cry, weep, laugh, love, meditate, relate, be alone. Be in the marketplace, and sometimes in the mountains.Life is short. Live it as richly as possible, and don’t try to be consistent. The consistent man is a very poor man. Of course the society respects the consistent man, because the consistent man is predictable. You know what he is going to do tomorrow, you know how he is going to react. He is manageable, he can be easily manipulated. You know what buttons to push and how he will act. He is a machine; he is not truly a man. You can put him on and off and he will behave according to you; he is in your hands.The society respects the consistent man; the society calls consistency “character.” And the real man has no character. A real man is characterless, or beyond character. A real man cannot afford character, because character can be afforded only at the cost of life. If you renounce life, you can have character. If you don’t renounce life, you will have many characters, but not character. If you don’t renounce life, how can you have a character? Each moment life is new, and so are you.Society will not respect you, you will not be a respectable citizen – but who cares? Only mediocre people care about the respect of the society. The real person cares about only one thing: Whether I am living my life or not, whether I am living it according to my own vision or not, it is my life. I am responsible to myself.The most important responsibility is not to the nation or to the church or to anybody else. The real responsibility is to yourself. And that is you have to live your life according to your own light and you have to move wherever it leads, without any compromise.The man of character compromises. His character is nothing but an effort to guarantee the society, “I am not dangerous,” and to declare to the society, “I will follow the rules of the game, I am utterly at your disposal.”The saint has character, hence he is respected. The sage has no character, hence it is very difficult to recognize him. Socrates is a sage, Jesus is a sage, Lao Tzu is a sage but they are very difficult to recognize, almost impossible, because they don’t leave any trace behind them. They don’t fit into any mold, they are pure freedom. They are like birds flying in the sky, they don’t leave any footprints.It is only for a very few sensitive souls to find a sage as a master, because the mediocre follow the saint. Only very, very intelligent people attune themselves to a sage, and because the sage has no character he cannot fulfill any of your expectations. He is bound to offend you, he is bound to disappoint you, he is bound to shake you and shatter you in many, many ways.Slowly, slowly, he will make you as free as he himself is.And now the third sutra, the most dangerous. I have been really worried about it.Don't make wicked jokes.What is a wicked joke? First I will have to tell three just to explain. And three, because it is a very esoteric number.The first:With a buzz and a beep and a whirr, a strange spaceship descends to Earth. Two bizarre creatures emerge and float to the ground. They are a young Martian couple, both scientists here on an exploratory visit. They decide that the best way to find out about Earth is to communicate with some of the inhabitants, so off they bounce in search of some likely candidates. They enter an apartment building in the mysterious way Martians have of doing these things, and settle upon a newly-wedded couple by the names of Everett and Gladys Sprinkle (honest!).Well, Everett and Gladys are as surprised as could be, but quickly adjust, in that special way newlyweds have of adapting to startling surprises. With one thing and another, the talk finally ends up on the subject of reproduction. The Martian male astounds the Sprinkles by offering to demonstrate the way people reproduce on his planet. Before they can protest in their embarrassment, he grabs the Martian woman, places the eight chubby fingers of his single hand on her forehead, and while he sparkles and she twinkles, an opening appears in her side and a tiny baby Martian hops out and starts prancing around Everett and Gladys’ living room.The Martian male then asks them how it is done on Earth. They hem and haw a bit, and finally decide that it would be too difficult to describe. So, in the interest of interplanetary cooperation, they take off their clothes and give a demonstration.The Martians watch their performance, enthralled. When it is all over, the Martian woman asks, “When will the Earth child come out?” Gladys shakes her head and tells her that it will take nine months. The Martians are amazed at this, scratch their heads a bit, and then the male asks, “But if it isn’t coming out right now, how come you were both so excited toward the end?”The second:A man went to see his doctor because he was feeling under the weather. The doctor asked the usual questions such as had the man been drinking or eating too much.“No,” said the man.“Well, perhaps you have had too many late nights?” queried the doctor.“No,” the man replied.The doctor thought about the problem for a while and then asked, “Much sex?”“Infrequently,” came the reply.“Is that two words or one?”And the third:A woman walked into a supermarket to buy some broccoli. She went up to a man in the vegetable department and said, “Sir, do you have any broccoli?”The man replied, “No, ma’am, none today. Come back tomorrow.”A few hours later, the woman was back again, asking the man, “Sir, do you have any broccoli?”“Look, lady, I already told you, we don’t have any broccoli today.”The lady left, only to return again the same day. By this time, the man was exasperated and said, “What does t-o-m spell in the word tomato?”She replied, “Tom.”“And what does p-o-t spell in the word potato?” he asked.“Pot,” was the reply,He then said, “And what does f-u-c-k spell in the word broccoli?”She looked puzzled and said, “There’s no fuck in broccoli.”He sighed a deep sigh and exclaimed, “Lady, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all day!”I don’t know whether they are wicked jokes or not, but one thing is certain, Atisha would have enjoyed them.In fact, by “wicked jokes” he means something totally different. He means: don’t say anything against somebody, don’t hurt somebody when he is not present, don’t hurt somebody behind his back.The translation is not exact. Atisha’s whole meaning is: don’t gossip about people with a deliberate intention to hurt them, because that is not really a joke, that is not fun, that is not humorous. Atisha can’t be against the sense of humor, it is impossible. No man of his intelligence and awareness can be against the sense of humor. In fact, it is people like Atisha who have given the best religious humor to the world. Atisha comes from Gautama Buddha’s tradition – the same lineage as the Zen people. And Zen is the only religion which has accepted humor as prayer. It is not possible, not possible at all, that Atisha had no sense of humor.Then the sutra cannot be really against jokes. It is against hurting people. What he is saying is going deeper into the psychology of the joke, into the rationale behind the joke. It is what Sigmund Freud did one thousand years later. Sigmund Freud thinks that when you joke about somebody there is every possibility that you are aggressive, that you have anger, that in a vicarious way you are pretending to be humorous but you really want to offend.But that cannot be decided by anybody else from the outside; only you can be the judge. If there is a deliberate effort in your mind to offend somebody, to hurt somebody, if it is violence disguised as humor, avoid it. But if it is not violence but just a pure sense of humor, the sense of fun – the sense of not taking life seriously, not taking life too seriously, then there is no problem.If I meet Atisha some day, I am going to teach him a few jokes. And my feeling is he will enjoy it.Jokes can be just pure humor without any violence in them. Even though sometimes on the surface one may think there is some violence, the point is not what others think; the point is what your intention is. It is a question of intention. You can smile with an intention to offend, then smiling becomes a sin. Anything can become a sin if deep down the desire is to do violence. And anything can become virtue if deep down there is a desire to create more joy in life, more laughter in life.My own understanding is that there is nothing more valuable than laughter. Laughter brings you closest to prayerfulness. In fact only laughter is left in you when you are total. In everything else you remain partial, even in lovemaking you remain partial. But when you have a really heartfelt belly laugh, your total being – the physiological, the psychological, the spiritual – vibrates in one single tune; all parts vibrate in harmony.Hence, laughter relaxes. And relaxation is spiritual. Laughter brings you to the earth, brings you down from your stupid ideas of “holier-than-thou.” Laughter brings you to reality as it is. The world is a play of existence, a cosmic joke. And unless you understand it as a cosmic joke you will never be able to understand the ultimate mystery.I am all for jokes, I am all for laughter.Atisha has been wrongly translated. What he actually means is: Don’t be violent, even in your words. Even while joking, don’t be violent, because violence breeds more violence, anger will bring more anger, and it creates a vicious circle that has no end.The fourth:Don't wait for an opportunity.Because the opportunity is now, the opportunity is here. So those who say, “We are waiting for an opportunity,” are being deceptive, and they are not deceiving anybody but themselves.The opportunity is not going to come tomorrow. It has already arrived, it has always been here. It was here even when you were not here. Existence is opportunity; to be is the opportunity.Don't wait for an opportunity. Don’t say, “Tomorrow I will meditate, tomorrow I will love, tomorrow I will have a dancing relationship with existence.” Why tomorrow? Tomorrow never comes. Why not now? Why postpone? Postponement is a trick of the mind; it keeps you hoping, and meanwhile the opportunity is slipping by. And in the end you will come to the cul-de-sac – death – and there will be no more opportunity left.And this has happened many times in the past. You are not new here, you have been born and you have died many, many times. And each time the mind has played the same trick, and you have not yet learned anything.Atisha says:Don't wait for an opportunity.Don't strike at the heart.He says: Criticize people’s minds, criticize their ideologies, criticize their systems of thought, criticize everything – but never criticize anybody’s love, never criticize anybody’s trust. Why? – because love is so valuable, trust is so immensely valuable. To destroy it, to criticize it, to shatter it in any way, is the greatest harm one can do to anybody.You can criticize the mind – it should be criticized – but not the heart. Whenever you see something of the heart, avoid the temptation to criticize it.Just the opposite is the case with people. They can tolerate your ideology, they can tolerate your mind, but the moment they see your love, your trust, they jump upon you. They cannot tolerate your trust; it is too much. They will say that this is hypnosis, that you have been hypnotized, you have been deceived, you are living in an illusion; that love is madness, love is blind – logic has eyes, and love is blind.The truth is just the opposite. Logic is blind; criticize it! Love has eyes, only love has eyes, because only love can see God. Criticize beliefs, because beliefs are nothing but doubts hidden behind beautiful words. Criticize beliefs, but don’t criticize anybody’s trust.And what is the difference? Trust has the quality of love. Belief is just a rational approach. If somebody says, “I believe in God because these are the proofs for God,” then criticize him, because proofs can only prove the belief. But don’t criticize somebody who says, “I love God. I don’t know why, I simply love God. I am in love. There are no proofs, in fact there is every proof against him, but still I love God.”Remember the famous statement of Tertullian, a great Christian mystic: Credo quia absurdum. Somebody asked him, “Why do you believe in God?” He said, “Because God is absurd. Because God cannot be believed in, that’s why I believe in God.”Everything else can be believed, only God cannot be believed. But in believing that which cannot be believed, one grows. That is reaching for the impossible.So whenever you see somebody in love, somebody in trust, avoid the temptation to criticize. It is easy to criticize, it is easy to throw poison at somebody’s love affair. But you don’t know that you have been destructive, you don’t know you have destroyed something of immense beauty. You have thrown a rock on a roseflower.Don't transfer the cow's load to the bull.People are always finding scapegoats. Because they cannot answer the strong person, they take revenge on the weak.There is a story about Mulla Nasruddin. He was in the court of a great king, he was the jester of the court. He said something very funny, but the king felt offended, and he slapped Mulla Nasruddin. Now, Mulla wanted to slap him back, but that was risky, that was dangerous, so he slapped the man who was standing by his side.The man was taken aback; he said, “What are you doing? I have not done anything to you.”And Mulla said, “Why are you arguing with me? You can slap the man who is standing by your side. The world is big; by the time it comes back again we will see. Just let it go on – pass it on!”That’s what people are doing, actually doing. It is not just a story. The husband has been humiliated by the boss and he comes home and is angry at the wife for no reason at all. Or maybe he finds a reason; a reason can always be found, they are so simple to find. There is too much salt in the vegetables or the chappati is burned, or something – anything! He will find a reason, and he will convince himself that he is angry because of this reason. But The reality is that he is angry at his boss. The boss is a powerful man; to say anything could be dangerous, he might lose his job. So he smiled when the boss was insulting him; he went on wagging his tail. Now he is projecting the boss onto the wife.If the story is happening in the West, then the wife can also jump on him. But if it is happening in the East, the wife cannot do anything. In the East, husbands have been telling their wives that husbands have to be treated as gods. The wife cannot say anything; she will have to wait for the child to come back from school and then she will do whatsoever she wanted to do with the husband. She will beat the child. The child is late, his clothes are torn again, he has done this and that, he has been playing with the wrong boys again. And what can the child do? He will go into his room and beat or destroy his toys. In this way it goes on shifting.Atisha is saying: Please don’t shift things; otherwise your whole life you will be just shifting and shifting. Take the responsibility, take the risk. Respond to the situation, whatsoever the cost.Don't transfer the cow's load to the bull.Don't back the favorite.Don’t have likes and dislikes. Be just, be fair, don’t decide by your prejudices, your liking and disliking. Just decide the case on its own merit, and your life will have the beauty of truth, your life will have the strength of truth.Don't have wrong views.All views are wrong. Life should be lived without views, life should be lived in immediate contact with reality. But if it is not possible, then at least don’t have wrong views. What are wrong views? Views which are rooted in prejudice, hate, anger, greed, ambition, violence.The first thing is, don’t have any kind of views. Live life without a philosophy to live by. Philosophy is not needed to live life – and the best and most glorious life is the life which is lived without any philosophy: simple, innocent, spontaneous.But if it is not possible right now, then start by at least dropping wrong views. Don’t live through prejudice, don’t live through anger, don’t live through hatred, don’t live through greed, ambition, don’t live through dreams. Be real, more real, more realistic. Be a little more alert, watchful, watching each act cautiously, because each act creates a chain of actions. Whatsoever you do will remain in the world even when you are gone, because the chain will continue. If you cannot do something beautiful in the world, at least don’t do something ugly.The highest way is to live without any views, to just live, to just be. The second best is to at least drop the negative part and follow the positive. And slowly, slowly you will see that if you can drop the negative, the positive can also be dropped. In fact to drop the negative is more difficult than to drop the positive.The person who can drop the no can easily drop the yes, because the no is more ego-strengthening than the yes. The person who can drop anger, hatred, greed can easily drop the positive feelings. And to remain transcendental to all dualities is the ultimate goal of Atisha and all the great masters.And the last sutra:Don't fall for the celestial demon.The ego is called the celestial demon. Remember constantly, each moment of your life has to become a constant remembrance, that the ego is very subtle and it has very cunning ways to come back again and again. It follows you to the very last, it hopes to the very last that you will be trapped. Beware of it.This ego is called in Christian, Mohammedan and Judaic scriptures the devil. It is your own mind, the very center of your own mind.In the beginning, just try for a few moments to live without any “I”. You are digging a hole in the earth in the garden; just dig the hole, just become the digging, and forget that “I am doing it.” Let the doer evaporate. You will perspire in the sun, and there will be no doer, and the digging will continue. And you will be surprised how divine life is if the ego can disappear even for a single moment.Taking a shower, just let the water fall on you, but don’t be there as an “I”. Relax, forget the “I”, and you will be surprised. The shower is not only cooling your body, it cools your innermost core too.And if you search, you will find so many moments in ordinary life every day when the ego can be put aside. And the joy is so great that once you have tasted it you can do it again and again. And slowly, slowly you become capable of putting it off, unless it is absolutely necessary.And then that day of blessing also comes when you know it is not necessary at all. You say the final good-bye to it. The day the ego dies, you have reached the point of no-self. That is your real being. Nonbeing is your real being. Not to be is to be for the first time.Enough for today.

https://oshoworld.com/osho-audio-discourse-english-b/

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-book-of-wisdom-vol-1-14/

The first question:Osho,Can you say something about death and the art of dying?The first thing to be known about death is that death is a lie. Death exists not; it is one of the most illusory things. Death is the shadow of another lie – the name of that other lie is the ego. Death is the shadow of the ego; because the ego is, death appears to be there.The secret of knowing death, of understanding death, is not in death itself. You will have to go deeper into the existence of the ego. You will have to look, watch, observe, and be aware of what this ego is. And the day you have found that there is no ego, that there has never been – it appeared only because you were not aware, it appeared only because you were keeping your own existence in darkness – the day it is understood that the ego is a creation of an unconscious mind, the ego disappears and simultaneously death disappears.The real you is eternal. Life is neither born nor dies. The ocean continues, waves come and go – but what are waves? Just forms, the wind playing with the ocean. Waves have no substantial existence. So are we, waves, playthings.But if we look deep down into the wave there is an ocean, and the eternal depth of it and the unfathomable mystery of it. Look deep down into your own being and you will find the ocean. And that ocean is; the ocean always is. You cannot say, “It was,” you cannot say, “It will be.” You can only use one tense for it, the present tense: it is.This is the whole search of religion. The search is to find that which truly is. We have accepted things which really are not, and the greatest and the most central of them is the ego. And of course it casts a big shadow – that shadow is death.Those who try to understand death directly will never be able to penetrate into the mystery of it. They will be fighting with darkness. Darkness is nonexistential, you cannot fight with it. Bring light, and the darkness is no more.How can we know the ego? Bring a little more awareness to your existence. Each act has to be done less automatically than you have been doing up to now, and you have the key. If you are walking, don’t walk like a robot. Don’t go on walking as you have always walked, don’t do it mechanically. Bring a little awareness to it, slow down, let each step be taken in full consciousness.Buddha used to say to his disciples that when you raise your left foot, deep down say “Left.” When you raise your right foot, deep down say “Right.” First say it, so that you can become acquainted with this new process. Then slowly, slowly let the words disappear; just remember “Left, right, left, right.”Try it in small acts. You are not supposed to do big things. Eating, taking a bath, swimming, walking, talking, listening, cooking your food, washing your clothes – de-automatize the processes. Remember the word de-automatization; that is the whole secret of becoming aware.The mind is a robot. The robot has its utility; this is the way the mind functions. You learn something; when you learn it, in the beginning you are aware. For example, if you learn swimming you are very alert, because life is in danger. Or if you learn to drive a car you are very alert. You have to be alert. You have to be careful about many things – the steering wheel, the road, the people passing by, the accelerator, the brake, the clutch. You have to be aware of everything. So many things to remember, and you are nervous, and it is dangerous to commit a mistake. It is so dangerous, that’s why you have to keep aware. But the moment you have learned driving, this awareness will not be needed. Then the robot part of your mind will take it over.That’s what we call learning. Learning means something has been transferred from consciousness to the robot. That’s what learning is all about. Once you have learned a thing it is no more part of the conscious, it has been delivered to the unconscious. Now the unconscious can do it; now your consciousness is free to learn something else.This is in itself tremendously significant. Otherwise you will remain learning a single thing your whole life. The mind is a great servant, a great computer. Use it, but remember that it should not overpower you. Remember that you should remain capable of being aware, that it should not possess you in toto, that it should not become all and all, that a door should be left open from where you can come out of the robot.That opening of the door is called meditation. But remember, the robot is so skillful, it can even take meditation into its control. Once you have learned it, the mind says, “Now you need not be worried about it, I am capable of doing it. I will do it, you leave it to me.”And the mind is skillful; it is a very beautiful machine, it functions well. In fact all our science, together with all our so-called progress in knowledge, has not yet been able to create something so sophisticated as the human mind. The greatest computers in existence are still rudimentary compared to the mind.The mind is simply a miracle.But when something is so powerful, there is danger in it. You can be hypnotized so much by it and its power that you can lose your soul. If you have completely forgotten how to be aware, then the ego is created.Ego is the state of utter unawareness. The mind has taken possession of your whole being; it has spread like a cancer all over you, nothing is left out. The ego is the cancer of the inner, the cancer of the soul.And the only remedy, the only remedy I say, is meditation. Then you start reclaiming a few territories from the mind. And the process is difficult but exhilarating, the process is difficult but enchanting, the process is difficult but challenging, thrilling. It will bring a new joy into your life. When you reclaim territory back from the robot you will be surprised that you are becoming a totally new person, that your being is renewed, that this is a new birth.And you will be surprised that your eyes see more, your ears hear more, your hands touch more, your body feels more, your heart loves more – everything becomes more. And more not only in the sense of quantity but in the sense of quality too. You not only see more trees, you see trees more deeply. The green of the trees becomes greener – not only that, it becomes luminous. Not only that, the tree starts having an individuality of its own. Not only that; you can have a communion with existence now.And the more territories that are reclaimed, the more and more your life becomes psychedelic, colorful. You are then a rainbow – the whole spectrum; all the notes of music – the whole octave. Your life becomes richer, multidimensional, has depth, has height, has tremendously beautiful valleys and has tremendously beautiful sunlit peaks. You start expanding. As you reclaim parts from the robot, you start coming alive. For the first time you are turned on.This is the miracle of meditation; this is something not to be missed. The people who miss it have not lived at all. And to know life in such intensity, in such ecstasy, is to know that there is no death. Not to know life creates death; ignorance of life creates death.To know life is to know there is no death, there never has been. Nobody has ever died. I declare nobody is ever going to die. Death is impossible in the very nature of things – only life is. Yes, life goes on changing forms; one day you are this, another day you are something else. Where is the child you once were? Has the child died? Can you say that the child has died? The child has not died, but then where is the child? The form has changed. The child is still there in its essentiality, but now you have become a young man or a young woman. The child is there with all its beauty; it has been superimposed by new riches.And then one day you will become old. Then where is your youth? Died? No, again something more has happened. Old age has brought its own crop, old age has brought its own wisdom, old age has brought its own beauties.The child is innocent, that is his core. The youth is overflowing with energy, that is his core. And the old man has seen all, lived all, known all; wisdom has arisen, that is his core. But his wisdom contains something of his youth; it is also overflowing, it is radiant, it is vibrant, it is pulsating, it is alive. And it also has something of the child; it is innocent.If the old man is not also young, then he has only aged, he is not old. He has grown in time, in age, but he is not grown-up. He has missed. If the old man is not innocent like the child, if his eyes don’t show that crystal clarity of innocence, then he has not yet lived.If you live totally, cunningness and cleverness disappear and trust arises. These are the criteria to know whether one has lived or not. The child never dies but is only metamorphosed. The youth never dies, again there is a new mutation. And do you think the old man dies? Yes, the body disappears because it has served its purpose, but the consciousness continues the journey.If death was a reality, existence would be utterly absurd, existence would be mad. If Buddha dies, that means such beautiful music, such splendor, such grace, such beauty, such poetry, disappears from existence. Then the existence is very stupid. Then what is the point? Then how is growth possible? Then how is evolution possible?Buddha is a rare gem, it happens only once in a while. Millions of people try, and then one person becomes a buddha – and then he dies and all is finished, so what is the point?No, Buddha cannot die. He is absorbed; he is absorbed by the whole. He continues. Now the continuity is bodiless, because he has become so expanded that no body can contain him except the body of the universe itself. He has become so oceanic that it is not possible to have small manifestations. Now he can exist only in essence. He can exist only as a fragrance, not as a flower. He cannot have a form, he can only exist as a formless intelligence of existence.The world has grown more and more intelligent. Before Buddha it was not so intelligent, something was missing. Before Jesus it was not so intelligent, before Mohammed it was not so intelligent. They have all contributed. If you understand rightly, God is not something that has happened, but is happening.God is happening every day. Buddha has created something, Mahavira has created something, Patanjali has created something, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, Atisha, Tilopa – they have all contributed.God is being created. Let your hearts be thrilled that you can become a creator of God! You have been told again and again that God created the world.I would like to tell you: we are creating God every day.And you can see the changes. If you look in the Old Testament, the words that the God of the Old Testament utters look so ugly. Something seems to be very primitive. The God of the Old Testament says, “I am a very jealous God.” Can you think of God being jealous? “Those who don’t follow me should be crushed and thrown into hellfire. Those who don’t obey me, great revenge will be taken on them.”Can you think of these words being uttered by Buddha? No, the concept of God is being polished every day. The God of Moses is rudimentary; the God of Jesus is far more sophisticated, far more cultured. As man becomes cultured, his God becomes cultured. As man has more understanding, his God has more understanding, because your God represents you.The God of Moses is law, the God of Jesus is love. The God of Buddha is compassion, the God of Atisha is utter emptiness, silence.We are searching new dimensions of God, we are adding new dimensions to God, God is being created. You are not just a seeker, you are also a creator. And the future will know far better visions of God.Buddha does not die, he disappears into our concept of God. Jesus melts into the ocean of our God. And the people who are not yet awakened, they also don’t die. They have to come back again and again into some form, because the only possibility of being awakened is through forms.The world is a context for becoming awakened, an opportunity.Remember Atisha. He says, “Don’t wait for the opportunity” – because the world is the opportunity; we are already in it. The world is an opportunity to learn. It looks paradoxical; time is the opportunity to learn the eternal, the body is the opportunity to learn the bodiless, matter is the opportunity to learn consciousness, sex is the opportunity to learn samadhi. The whole existence is an opportunity. Anger is the opportunity to learn compassion, greed the opportunity to learn sharing, and death is the opportunity to go into the ego and see “whether I am or I am not. If I am, then maybe death is possible.” But if you find for yourself that “I am not,” that there is pure emptiness inside, that there is nobody – if you can feel that nobodiness inside you, where is death? What is death? Who can die?Your question is significant. You ask, “Can you say something about death?” Only one thing, that death is not.And you ask …“and the art of dying?” When there is no death, how are you going to learn the art of dying? You will have to live the art of living. If you know how to live, you will know everything about life, about death. But you will have to approach the positive.Never make the negative the object of your study, because the negative is not there. You can go on and on and you will never arrive anywhere. Try to understand what light is, not darkness. Try to understand what life is, not death. Try to understand what love is, not hate.If you go into hate you will never understand it, because hate is only the absence of love. So is darkness the absence of light. How can you understand absence? If you want to understand me, you have to understand me, not my absence. If you want to study this chair, this chair has to be studied – not that when it has been taken away, you start studying the absence. What will you study?Always be alert, never get hooked into anything negative. Many people go on studying negative things; their energies are simply wasted. There is no art of dying. Or, the art of living is the art of dying. Live!But your so-called religious people have been teaching you not to live. They are the creators of death. In a very indirect way they have created death because they have made you so afraid of living. Everything is wrong. Life is wrong, the world is wrong, the body is wrong, love is wrong, relationship is wrong, enjoying anything is wrong. They have made you so guilty about everything, so condemnatory of everything, that you cannot live. And when you cannot live, what is left? The absence, the absence of life – and that is death. And then you are trembling, trembling before something which is not, which is your own creation. And because you start trembling in great fear of death, the priest becomes very powerful. He says, “Don’t be worried, I am here to help you. Follow me. I will save you from hell and I will take you to heaven. And those who are within my fold will be saved, and nobody else will be saved.”Christians go on saying the same thing to people: “Unless you are a Christian you cannot be saved. Only Jesus will save you. The day of judgment is coming closer, and on the day of judgment, those who are with Jesus…he will recognize them, he will sort them out. And the others, millions and millions, will be simply thrown into hell for eternity. Remember, there is no escape; they will be thrown into hell for eternity.”And the same is the attitude of other religions. But out of fear people start clinging to something, whatsoever is available in the close vicinity. If you are accidentally born in a Hindu home or a Jaina or a Jewish home, you become a Jew or a Jaina or a Hindu, as the case may be. Whatsoever is available close by, the child starts clinging to it.My approach is totally different. I don’t say be afraid – that is the strategy of the priest, that is his trade secret. I say there is nothing to fear, because godliness is in you. There is nothing to fear. Live life fearlessly, live each moment as intensely as possible. Intensity has to be remembered. And if you don’t live any moment intensely, then what happens? Your mind hankers for repetition.You love a woman, your mind hankers for repetition. Why hanker for the same experience again and again? You eat certain food, you enjoy it, now you hanker for the same food again and again. Why? The reason is that whatsoever you do, you never do it totally. Hence something remains discontented in you. If you do it totally, there will be no hankering for repetition and you will be searching for the new, exploring the unknown. You will not move in a vicious circle, your life will become a growth. Ordinarily people only go on moving in circles. They appear to move, but they only appear to.Growth means you are not moving in a circle, that something new is happening every day, every moment really. And when does that become possible? Whenever you start living intensely.I would like to teach you how to eat intensely and totally, how to love intensely and totally, how to do small things with such utter ecstasy that nothing is left behind. If you laugh, let the laughter shake your very foundations. If you cry, become tears; let your heart be poured out through tears. If you hug somebody, then become the hug. If you kiss somebody, then be just the lips, then be just the kiss. And you will be surprised how much you have been missing, how much you have missed, how you have lived up to now in a lukewarm way.I can teach you the art of living; that implies the art of dying – you need not learn it separately. The man who knows how to live, knows how to die. The man who knows how to fall in love, knows when the moment has come to fall out of it. He falls out of it gracefully, with a good-bye, with gratitude – but only the man who knows how to love.People don’t know how to love, then they don’t know how to say good-bye when the time has come to say it. If you love you will know that everything begins and everything ends, and there is a time for beginning and there is a time for ending, and there is no wound in it. One is not wounded, one simply knows the season is over. One is not in despair, one simply understands, and one thanks the other, “You gave me so many beautiful gifts. You gave me new visions of life, you opened a few windows I may never have opened on my own. Now the time has come that we separate, that our ways part.” Not in anger, not in rage, not with a grudge, not with any complaint, but with tremendous gratitude, with great love, with thankfulness in the heart.If you know how to love, you will know how to separate. Your separation will also have a beauty and a grace. And the same is the case with life; if you know how to live, you will know how to die. Your death will be tremendously beautiful.The death of Socrates is tremendously beautiful, the death of Buddha is tremendously beautiful. The day Buddha died, in the morning he gathered all his disciples, all his sannyasins, and told them, “The last day has come now, my boat has arrived and I have to leave. And this has been a beautiful journey, a beautiful togetherness. If you have any questions to ask, you can ask, because I will not be available to you physically anymore.”A great silence fell on the disciples, a great sadness. And Buddha laughed and said, “Don’t be sad, because that’s what I have been teaching you again and again – everything that begins, ends. Now let me teach you by my death too. As I have been teaching you through my life, let me teach you through my death too.”Nobody could gather the courage to ask a question. Their whole life they had asked thousands and thousands of questions, and this was not a moment to ask anything; they were not in the mood, they were crying and weeping.So Buddha said, “Good-bye. If you don’t have any questions then I will depart.” He sat under the tree with closed eyes and he disappeared from the body. In the Buddhist tradition, this is called the first meditation – to disappear from the body. It means to disidentify yourself from the body, to know totally and absolutely, “I am not the body.”A question is bound to arise in your mind: had Buddha not known it before? He had known it before, but a person like Buddha then has to create some device so that just a little bit of him remains connected with the body. Otherwise he would have died long before –he would have died forty-two years before. The day his enlightenment happened, he would have died. Out of compassion he created a desire, the desire to help people. It is a desire, and it keeps you attached to the body.He created a desire to help people. “Whatsoever I have known, I have to share.” If you want to share, you will have to use the mind and the body. That small part remained attached.Now he cuts even that small root in the body; he becomes unidentified with the body. The first meditation complete, the body is left. Then the second meditation: the mind is dropped. He had dropped the mind long before; as a master it was dropped, but as a servant it was still used. Now it is not even needed as a servant, it is utterly dropped, totally dropped.And the third meditation: he dropped his heart. It had been needed up to now, he had been functioning through his heart; otherwise compassion would not have been possible. He had been the heart; now he disconnects from the heart.When these three meditations are completed, the fourth happens. He is no more a person, no more a form, no more a wave. He disappears into the ocean. He becomes that which he had always been, he becomes that which he had known forty-two years before but somehow had been managing to delay, in order to help people.His death is a tremendous experiment in meditation. And it is said that many who were present, just seeing him moving, slowly, slowly… First they saw the body was no longer the same; something had happened, the aliveness had disappeared from the body. The body was there, but like a statue. Those who were more perceptive, more meditative, they immediately saw that now the mind had been dropped and there was no mind inside. Those who were even more perceptive could see that the heart was finished. And those who were really on the verge of buddhahood, seeing Buddha disappear, they also disappeared.Many disciples became enlightened the day Buddha died, many – just seeing him dying. They had watched him living, they had seen his life, but now came the crescendo, the climax. They saw him dying such a beautiful death, such grace, such meditativeness – seeing it, many were awakened.To be with a buddha, to live with a buddha, to be showered by his love, is a blessing. But the greatest blessing is to be present when a buddha dies. You can simply ride on that energy, you can simply take a quantum leap with that energy – because Buddha is disappearing, and if your love is great and your connection is deep, it is bound to happen.It is going to happen to many of my sannyasins. The day I disappear, many of you are going to disappear with me.Vivek again and again says to me, “I don’t want to live a single moment when you are gone.” And I say to her, “Don’t be worried. Even if you want to live, you will not be able to.” Just the other day, Deeksha was saying to Vivek, “Once Osho is gone, I am gone.” That is true. But this is not only true about Vivek and Deeksha, this is true of many of you. And this is not something that you have to do, it will simply happen of its own accord. It will be a happening. But it is possible only if you allow total trust to happen.While I am alive, if you allow total trust to happen, then you can move with me in my death too. But if there is a little doubt, you will think, “But I have not done many things and I have to live my life. I know that it is sad that the master is leaving, and I know it would have been far better if he was alive, but I have many things to do, I have to live my life”…and a thousand and one desires. If there is a little doubt, it will create a thousand and one desires. But if there is no doubt, then the death of the master is the most liberating experience that has ever happened on this earth.Buddha was very fortunate to have great disciples. Jesus was not so fortunate, his disciples were cowards. While he was dying they all escaped. While he was on the cross they escaped miles away, in fear that they might be caught. After three days, when the stone was removed from in front of the tomb where his body was kept, there was not a single one of the apostles; only Mary Magdalene the prostitute, and another Mary – two women – had gathered courage.The disciples were afraid that if they went to see what had happened to the master’s body or to take the master’s body down, they might be caught. Only two women had enough love. When Jesus’ body was taken down from the cross, then too, three women took the body down. All those great apostles were not there.Jesus was not very fortunate. And the reason is clear: he was starting something new. In the East, buddhas have existed for millions of years. The Western concept of time is not right, the Western concept of time is very small, and it is because of Christianity that it is very small. Christian theologians have even calculated when the world was created – the twenty-third of March. I was wondering, why not the twenty-first? God missed by only two days! On the twenty-third of March, four thousand and four years before Christ, the world was created. A very small idea of time.The world has existed for millions of years. Now science is coming closer and closer to the Eastern concept of time. In the East, buddhas have existed for thousands and thousands of years, so we know how to be with a buddha – how to live with him, how to trust him, and how to be with him when he is dying, and how to die with him.Much of it has been forgotten, by courtesy of Christianity and Western education. The modern Indian is not Indian at all. It is very difficult to find Indians in India, almost impossible. Only once in a while do I come across an Indian. Sometimes it happens that people who are coming from faraway countries are far more Indian than the so-called Indians. Three hundred years of Western domination and Western education have made the Indian mind completely disoriented.The Western mind is coming closer and closer toward understanding buddhas more than the Eastern mind itself does. And the reason is that the West is getting fed up with technology and science, is becoming more and more hopeless, and has seen that what science has promised, it has not been able to fulfill. In fact it has seen that all the revolutions have failed. And now there is only one revolution left – the inner, the revolution of the individual, the revolution that is brought by inner transformation.Indians are still hoping that a little better technology, a little better government, a little more money, a little more production, and things will all be perfectly okay. The Indian mind is hoping, it is very materialistic. The modern Indian is more materialistic than the people of any other country. The materialist countries are fed up with materialism. It has failed; they are disappointed, disillusioned.So let me tell you, my sannyasins are more Indian. They may be Germans, they may be Norwegians, they may be Dutch, they may be Italians, French, English, Americans, Russians, Czechs, Japanese, Chinese, but they are far more Indian.Journalists again and again come and ask, “Why don’t we see more Indians here?” And I say, “They are all Indians! There are just a few foreigners – just those few whom you think are Indians, just those few foreigners; otherwise they are all Indians.”To be an Indian has nothing to do with geography, it has something to do with an inner approach toward reality. Modern India has forgotten the ways of the Buddha, has forgotten how to live with buddhas.I am trying to reveal that treasure to you again. Let it sink deep in your heart. The first principle is the art of living. Be life-affirmative. Life is synonymous with God. You can drop the word God – life is God. Live with reverence, with great respect and gratitude. You have not earned this life, it has been a sheer gift from the beyond. Feel thankful and prayerful, and take as many bites of it as possible and chew it well and digest it well.Make your life an aesthetic experience. And not much is needed to make it an aesthetic experience; just an aesthetic consciousness is needed, a sensitive soul. Become more sensitive, more sensuous, and you will become more spiritual.Priests have almost poisoned your body into a state of death. You are carrying paralyzed bodies and paralyzed minds and paralyzed souls – you are moving on crutches. Throw away all those crutches! Even if you have to fall and crawl on the ground, that is better than clinging to crutches.And experience life in all possible ways – good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light, summer-winter. Experience all the dualities. Don’t be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become. Search all possible alternatives, move in all directions, be a wanderer, a vagabond of the world of life and existence. And don’t miss any opportunity to live.Don’t look back. Only fools think of the past – fools who do not have the intelligence to live in the present. And only fools imagine about the future, because they don’t have the courage to live in the present. Forget the past, forget the future, this moment is all. This moment has to become your prayer, your love, your life, your death, your everything. This is it.And live courageously, don’t be cowards. Don’t think of consequences; only cowards think of consequences. Don’t be too result-oriented; people who are result-oriented miss life. Don’t think of goals, because goals are always in the future and far away, and life is herenow, close by.And don’t be too purposive. Let me repeat it: don’t be too purposive. Don’t always bring in the idea, “What is the purpose of it?” because that is a strategy created by your enemies, by the enemies of humanity, to poison your very source of life. Ask the question, “What is the purpose of it?” and everything becomes meaningless.It is early morning, the sun is rising and the east is red with the sun, and the birds are singing and the trees are waking up, and it is all joy. It is a rejoicing, a new day has again happened. And you are standing there asking the question, “What is the purpose of it?” You miss, you miss it totally. You are simply disconnected.A roseflower is dancing in the wind, so delicate and yet so strong, so soft yet fighting with the strong wind, so momentary yet so confident. Look at the roseflower. Have you ever seen any roseflower nervous? So confident, so utterly confident, as if it is going to be here forever. Just a moment’s existence, and such trust in eternity. Dancing in the wind, whispering with the wind, sending out its fragrance – and you are standing there asking the question, “What is the purpose of it?”You fall in love with a woman and ask the question, “What is the purpose of it?” You are holding the hand of your beloved or your friend, and asking the question, “What is the purpose of it?” And you are still holding hands, but now life has disappeared, your hand is dead.Raise the question, “What is the purpose?” and everything is destroyed. Let me tell you, there is no purpose in life. Life is its own purpose; it is not a means to some end, it is an end unto itself. The bird on the wing, the rose in the wind, the sun rising in the morning, the stars in the night, a man falling in love with a woman, a child playing on the street – there is no purpose. Life is simply enjoying itself, delighting in itself. Energy is overflowing, dancing, for no purpose at all. It is not a performance, it is not a business. Life is a love affair, it is poetry, it is music. Don’t ask ugly questions like, “What is the purpose?” because the moment you ask it, you disconnect yourself from life. Life cannot be bridged by philosophical questions. Philosophy has to be put aside.Be poets of life, singers, musicians, dancers, lovers, and you will know the real philosophy of life: Philosophia Perennis.And if you know how to live…and it is a simple art. The trees are living and nobody is there to teach them. In fact they must be laughing; seeing that you have asked such a question, they must be giggling – you may not be able to hear their giggle.The whole existence is non-philosophical. If you are philosophical, then a gap arises between you and existence. Existence simply is, for no purpose. And the person who really wants to live has to get rid of this idea of purpose. If you start living without any purpose, with intensity, totality, love and trust, when death comes, you will know how to die – because death is not the end of life, but only an episode in life.If you have known other things, if you have lived other things, you will be able to live death too. The real man of understanding lives his death as much as he lives his life, with the same intensity, with the same thrill.Socrates was so thrilled when he was going to be given poison. The poison was being prepared outside his room. His disciples had gathered; he was lying on the bed ready, because the time was coming closer. At six o’clock, exactly as the sun sets, he would be given the poison. People were not even breathing, the clock was coming closer and closer to six o’clock, and this beautiful man would be gone forever. And he had not committed any sin. His only sin was that he used to tell the truth to people, that he was a teacher of truth, that he would not compromise, that he would not bow down to the stupid politicians. That was his only crime; he had not done any harm to anybody. And Athens would remain poorer forever.In fact, with the death of Socrates, Athens died. Then it never had the same glory again, never. It was such a crime, killing Socrates, that Athens committed suicide. Greek culture never reached any such height again. A few days it continued, just echoes of Socrates – because Plato was his disciple, just an echo. And Aristotle was Plato’s disciple, an echo of an echo. Slowly, slowly, as the echoes of Socrates disappeared, Greek culture disappeared from the world. It had seen days of glory, but it committed suicide by murdering Socrates.His disciples were very much disturbed, but Socrates was so thrilled, just as a small child when you take him to the exhibition is so thrilled by everything, each and everything is so incredible. He would get up again and again and go to the window and ask the man who was preparing the poison, “Why are you delaying? Now it is six o’clock!”And the man said, “Are you mad or something, Socrates,? I am delaying just so that a beautiful man like you can stay a little longer. I cannot delay forever, but this much I can do. A little bit more, linger a little bit more! Why are you in such a hurry to die?”Socrates said, “I have known life, I have lived life, I know the taste of life. Now I am so curious about death! That’s why I am in such a hurry. I am pulsating with great joy – the very idea that now I am going to die, and I will be able to see what death is. I want to taste death. I have tasted everything else, only one thing has remained unknown. I have lived life and known all that life can give. This is the last gift of life, and I am really intrigued.”The man who has lived, really lived, will know how to die.There is no art of death. The art of life is the art of death, because death is not something separate from life. Death is the highest peak of life, the Everest, the virgin-snow-covered sunlit Everest. It is the most beautiful thing in existence.But you can know the beauty of death only if you know the beauty of life. Life prepares you for death. But people are not living at all; they are hampered in every possible way from living. So they don’t know what life is, and consequently they will not know what death is.Death is a lie. You don’t end with it, you only take a turn. You move on another road; you disappear from this road, you appear on another road. If you are not yet awakened, enlightened, then here you die, there you are born. You disappear from one body and you appear immediately in some womb, because millions of foolish people are copulating all over the world – they are just waiting for you! And there are really so many that it is good that you die unconscious and you choose the new womb unconsciously. If it was a conscious choice, you would go crazy. How to choose? Whom to choose?Unconsciously you die, unconsciously you are born into the closest possible womb that fits with you. One body is gone, and another is immediately formed.But if you are enlightened… And what do I mean by “enlightened”? I mean if you have lived your life with awareness, and you have reached to the point of awareness where no dark spot of unconsciousness exists in you, then there is no longer any womb for you. Then you enter into the womb of existence – existence itself. That is liberation, moksha, nirvana.The last question:Osho,Morarji Desai once said that if he did set up a commission to investigate us, we would not like the results. If the government does set up a commission, is there any hope at all of its being really open, really impartial?Politics can never be impartial, politics is partiality. Politics can never be unprejudiced, it is rooted in prejudice. So don’t hope for much. It will be fun, that’s all; we will enjoy the people who come with the commission. Enjoy them! If he appoints any commission and the people come here, enjoy it. Give them a feeling of your life that is happening here. Who knows, somebody may be turned on!But don’t trust politicians. The game with politicians is a dangerous game. Friendship is dangerous with them, enmity is dangerous with them. But it cannot be avoided. And what is happening here is so huge that politicians cannot remain out of it for long.Just the other day, in the Indian parliament they discussed us again – a long discussion. A phone call came from Delhi saying, “Send Krishna Prem, Madhura and the other press people, because now this is the only hot thing that people are talking about.”We are not interested in politicians, in politics – not at all. But we cannot avoid them either. Politics is like the weather: whether you like it or not, it is going to affect you anyway.It is known now why Nasser suddenly died of a heart attack. He received a telephone call from Golda Meir, who told him, “Let us make love not war.”Now, whether you make love or you make war, with politicians it is going to be difficult going, tough going.So, there is no need to hope for anything. In the first place, I don’t think he is going to appoint a commission, for many reasons. One reason is, the other day in parliament somebody raised the question, “Why a commission only for Osho?” And a great shiver went through the whole parliament.It is reported in the newspapers that the man suggested they appoint a commission to investigate Satya Sai Baba, Guru Maharaji, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Muktananda, and other Etcetera Etceteranandas. They were very happy to have a commission investigate my place, my commune, but now there is fear. And that looks logical – if you want to investigate one commune, then why not all? That is the first problem they will have to face.Secondly, he would like to avoid, to escape from appointing the commission – because who knows what will happen if the commission comes? The people who come and go back to him, may report that all that appears in the newspapers is false, it is not the true picture. So many people have visited this place, and so many members of parliament have come, and whosoever has come has reported to him, “You are unnecessarily prejudiced. Something beautiful is happening, a meeting of East and West is happening.”So he is also afraid deep down. Who knows, the commission may report favorably – then what is he going to do? And once the commission reports favorably, it will become a great problem for him. So he has found a very legal way to escape from appointing the commission. He asks that I should write a personal letter to him saying that a commission be appointed to investigate me and my work. He knows perfectly well that for five years I have stopped writing personal letters.And why should I write a personal letter? If the government wants to know what is happening, it is their work to find that out. If they have decided without investigating, they are being undemocratic. If they say to the world, “We will not allow any television companies from Holland, from England, from Japan or from Australia to cover the work and the commune, because it will not represent the true Indian spirit and the true Indian image”; if they have decided it without investigating at all, then it is their duty to appoint a commission. Why should I ask them to appoint a commission? But this is a legal trick. He knows I don’t write personal letters. For five years I have not done, and I am not going to do it now.And then he is worried also about something he said in parliament the other day. He said that he has not received any personal letter from me and it is always Yoga Laxmi, the managing trustee, who writes. And she writes, “Osho is only a guest in the commune, so how can we investigate a guest?”But Laxmi is right, I am simply your guest. And I don’t do anything, so what are they going to investigate? They can come and sit with me for twenty-four hours in my room; I don’t do anything, there is nothing to investigate! The question is of the commune, the work that goes on in the commune: that has to be investigated.But he is not interested in the commune. His interest basically is somehow to create a trap in which he can catch me – because he knows if I am caught or if I am imprisoned, then the whole work will be destroyed easily. The other day in parliament he said it – unconsciously it must have come out of him – “Osho is the place, Osho is the commune. So we cannot investigate the commune unless he writes.” And I am not going to write. I don’t think politicians are of any worth, and I don’t think they are worthy to investigate a religious commune.In fact some day we should think of appointing a commission to investigate the politicians.Three prime ministers of three great countries are sitting at a dinner party when all of a sudden a loud fart is heard coming from the seat where the lady host is dining. She is barely able to hold herself together when immediately from across the table the French prime minister stands up and in a loud firm voice exclaims, “Excuse me, messieurs-dames, but I must unexpectedly leave. I am not feeling well.”Grateful and relieved, the lady manages to regain her composure, when ten minutes later she lets another fart escape. Dismayed and blushing up to her ears, she watches how the English prime minister stands up and declares, “I am sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but I must retire early tonight. I am not feeling well.”The scene happens once more, and this time the Indian prime minister proudly stands up and says loudly, “Well now, ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor and my duty to go home.”Get it?I don’t have any respect for these politicians and political leaders. I have respect for them as human beings, but not as politicians. Politics is the most ugly phenomenon on the earth, and politicians, the ugliest human beings. I have tremendous respect for human beings, but I can’t have any respect for the ugly politics that goes on.There is no need to have any hope. First, they will not appoint any commission, afraid that it may turn against them. And it is not going to be easy either; if they appoint a commission we are first going to give tough tests for the commission too, to find out whether they are really capable of investigating a commune. What do they know about it? What do they know about the therapies that are going on here? First they will be examined. A group of fifty therapists will examine them in every possible way. Unless we are satisfied that they are worthy to investigate, we won’t allow them inside the gate.First, they are not going to appoint a commission. He is afraid – whom to appoint? Where are they going to find people who understand primal therapy, bioenergetics, encounter, psychodrama, psychosynthesis, psychoanalysis? And he is afraid that if he appoints somebody who understands these things, he will be in support of us. He can appoint a retired senile judge – but he will not know anything about it, and that will be really hilarious.I don’t think he is going to, but if he appoints a commission, enjoy it. Let them come, and have real fun with the whole thing. At least let them carry some joy, some laughter, from here. What they report is irrelevant, because what happens almost always is this: before they come here, the report will already be ready. That’s what happens. The report will be prepared by somebody else. But we are not interested in their reports.I had only said to appoint a commission so that the government can have at least a show of democracy. It is utterly undemocratic to prevent media people reaching Pune. It is so undemocratic what they tell people …now we have letters in our possession. To one sannyasin, the ambassador in America wrote, “If you want to go to Osho, forget all about it; we are not going to give you any entry visa. But if you want to go to any other ashram, write, and we are ready to give it to you.”Just see the foolishness of the man – writing it!Now in Mumbai, on the passports of sannyasins they are writing “This visa is not valid for Pune.” So it seems Pune is no longer part of India. A tourist is entitled to tour the whole of India, except Pune! But why prevent people from coming to Pune? Just Koregaon Park would have been enough!In every possible way, they are doing whatsoever they can do to hassle and hinder us. They have tried one thing that they are very clever at doing – to find some flaw in our finances. They have not been able to do it. Sadly, the finance minister had to declare yesterday in parliament, “Their finances are absolutely okay and we could not find any flaw in them.” So now they are at a loss what to do.In fact there is nothing that they can find which is being done against the law. But just their prejudices, their old rotten minds, their traditional minds… They cannot believe that a phenomenon like me is even possible in India. But it is happening, and it is going to grow. It is growing. And the more they hinder, the more it will grow. That is an inner logic of things: the more hindrances, the more challenges, the more it is going to grow.If Jesus had not been crucified, there would have been no Christianity. If one day the politicians decide to crucify me, I will be the happiest person in the world.Enough for today.

https://oshoworld.com/osho-audio-discourse-english-b/

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-book-of-wisdom-vol-1-15/

The first question:Osho,You must have told us so many times already, but I still don't get it. What is the seed of desire? Is it only in the existence of mind? And how is the desire of the body for sex related to the mind?The energy called desire has been condemned for centuries. Almost all the so-called saints have been against it, because desire is life and they were all life-negative. Desire is the very source of all that you see, and they were against all that which is visible. They wanted to sacrifice the visible at the feet of the invisible; they wanted to cut the roots of desire so there would no longer be any possibility of life. A tremendously great urge to commit total suicide has dominated humanity down the ages.I have a totally different concept of desire. Firstly, desire itself is existence. Desire without any object, desire without being goal-oriented, unmotivated desire, pure desire, is existence. The energy called desire is the same energy as existence.Desire has not to be destroyed, it has to be purified. Desire has not to be dropped, it has to be transformed. Your very being is desire; to be against it is to be against yourself and to be against all. To be against it is to be against the flowers and the birds and the sun and the moon. To be against it is against all creativity. Desire is creativity.The Eastern scriptures are perfectly right when they say that God created the world because a great desire arose in him – a desire to create, a desire to manifest, a desire to be many from one, a desire to expand. But these are only metaphors; God is not separate from desire. Desire means a longing, a great longing, to expand, to become huge, to be enormous – as huge as the sky.Just watch people, watch desires, and you will understand what I mean. Even in your ordinary desires, this basic thing is present. In fact what the man who wants to have more and more money really wants is not money but expansion, because money can help you expand. You can have a bigger house, you can have a bigger garden, you can have this, you can have that – your territory will be bigger, your freedom will be bigger. With more money you will have more alternatives to choose from.The man who is after money may not know why he is after the money. He may himself think and believe that he loves money, but that is only on the surface of his consciousness. Go deeper into his unconscious, help him to meditate, and you will be surprised and he will be surprised to find that the desire for money is not really desire for money, it is the desire to expand.And the same is the case with all other desires. Men want more power, more fame, longer life, better health, but what are they desiring in these different things? The same, exactly the same: they want to be more. They don’t want to remain confined, they don’t want to be limited. It hurts to feel that you are definable, because if you are definable then you are just an object, a thing, a commodity. It hurts that you have limitations, because to have limitations means to be imprisoned.But all these objects of desire, sooner or later, disappoint. Money becomes possible one day, and yet expansion has not happened; yes, you have a little more freedom of choice, but that does not satisfy. The desire was for the infinite, and money cannot purchase the infinite. Yes, you have more power, you are more well-known, but that doesn’t really matter in the long run. Millions of people have lived on this earth and were very famous, and now nobody even knows their names. Everything has disappeared into dust – dust into dust, not even traces are left. Where is Alexander the Great? What is he? Would you like to be a dead Alexander the Great or an alive beggar? Ask yourself, and your being will say it is better to be alive and be a beggar than to be dead and be Alexander.If you watch carefully, money, power, prestige – nothing satisfies. On the contrary, they make you more discontented. Why? – because when you were poor there was a hope that one day the money was going to happen and all would be settled and settled forever, and then you would relax and enjoy. Now that has happened, and there seems to be no sign of any relaxation. In fact, you are more tense than before, you are more anxiety-ridden than before.Money has brought a few blessings, but in the same measure it has brought many curses too. You can have a bigger house, but now you will have less peace. You can have a bigger bank balance, but you will also have a bigger madness, anxiety, neurosis, psychosis. Money has brought a few things which are good; in the wake of it many other things have arrived which are not good at all. And if you look at the whole thing, the whole effort has been a sheer wastage. And now you cannot even have the hope that the poor man can have.The rich man becomes hopeless. He knows now the money will go on increasing and nothing is going to happen – only death, only death. He has tasted all kinds of things; now he only feels a tastelessness. A kind of death has already happened, because he cannot conceive how to fulfill that desire for expansion.But desire in itself is not wrong. The desire for money, desire for power, desire for prestige, are wrong objects for desire – let it be very clear. By having wrong objects of desire, desire itself does not become wrong. You can have a sword and you can kill somebody – that does not make the sword something wrong. You can also save somebody with the same sword. Poison can kill and the poison can become medicine too. In the right hands, poison is nectar; in the wrong hands, nectar is poison.This is the essential wisdom of all the buddhas of all the ages. What the priests say is one thing; what the buddhas have brought to the world is totally different, it is diametrically opposite.Desire has to be purified, transformed, because it is your energy – you don’t have any other energy. How to transform desire? One way, the ordinary way, the mediocre way, is to change the object. Don’t go after money, start going after God. You are frustrated with money – become religious, go to the church, to the temple, to the mosque. Let your desire have a new object called God, which is as illusory as the object called money, even more illusory, because what do you know about God? Money at least is something visible, objective; you have known it, you have seen it. What do you know of God? You have only heard the word. God remains a word unless experienced. God remains an empty word unless you pour some content into it through your own existential experience.People, when they are frustrated with worldly desires, start changing the object: they start making otherworldly objects of desire – heaven, paradise, and all the joys of heaven. But it is the same trick, the mind is again befooling you. This is not the way of the intelligent person, this is the way of the stupid.What is intelligence? Intelligence means the insight that no object can fulfill your desire. I say no object, and I say it categorically, no object can ever fulfill your desire. Your desire is divine. Your desire is as big as the sky – even the sky is not a limit to it. No object can fill it. Then what is to be done? The intelligent person stops desiring objects. He makes his desire pure of all objects – worldly, otherworldly. He starts living his desire in its purity, moment to moment. He is full of desire, full of overflowing energy. His ordinary life becomes so intense, so passionate, that whatsoever he touches will be transformed. The baser metal will become gold, and the dead tree will come to bloom again.It is said of Buddha that wherever he moved, dead trees would start growing leaves; out of season, trees would bloom. These are beautiful poetic expressions of a certain metaphysical truth. Buddha is pure desire, just desire. Not a desire for anything; he has abandoned all objects.Let me remind you, first he abandoned the world. He was a prince, he was born to be a king. Seeing the futility of money, seeing the futility of all kinds of relationships, seeing the futility of all that the world can give – he was only twenty-nine years old – he escaped. He did well, because after thirty it becomes more difficult, more and more difficult.Hippies are right. They say, “Don’t believe a man who is over thirty.” Buddha escaped at the right time – he was exactly twenty-nine – because the more you become experienced in worldly ways, the more cowardly you become. Religion is for the courageous, religion is for the brave, religion is for the young, those who are still able to take the risk, those who are still able to gamble.Buddha escaped. Seeing the futility, he escaped in search of God, in search of truth. He replaced his desire for the world with the desire for God, truth, nirvana. For six years he worked hard. By the time he was thirty-five he was utterly spent. He had done all that was possible, humanly possible to do. He fasted for months, meditated, practiced yoga. And in those days there were different kinds of schools. He went from one teacher to another, from one school to another, he practiced all possible methods. And one day it suddenly flashed.He was crossing the river Niranjana. It is a small river – when I went to see the river I could not believe the story. The story says that he could not cross the river Niranjana, he could not swim it, because he was so weak. The river is so narrow, the river is so small, but he must have been very weak from years of fasting. It is said that he had fasted so long that you could count his bones, his ribs. He had become simply bones, he was a skeleton; his stomach had completely disappeared, his stomach and his back had become one. He must have been really weak; he could not cross the river, and was hanging onto the root of a tree, having no energy to get out of the river.In that moment, a great insight happened. Insights happen only in such moments. When the frustration is total, when the disappointment is complete, when the disillusionment is utter, when there is nothing left to hope for – in that moment he saw the pointlessness of it all. The worldly objects were meaningless; he has had all of them and they did not satisfy. And those otherworldly desires were just as foolish as the worldly desires. In that moment, in that insight, he became objectless.Let me tell you, the scriptures report it very wrongly. They say that in that moment he became desireless. But try to understand what I am trying to convey to you. He became objectless, not desireless. You cannot become desireless. Desire is your very life, your breath, your heartbeat; desire is your being. But certainly a transformation happened; he became objectless. This-worldly, the otherworldly, all desires in toto disappeared as objects, not desire as energy. There was no object; pure energy was felt, a desiring for nothing, a pure desire moving nowhere, a pure desire herenow.That very night he attained enlightenment. Having nothing to desire, he rested under the tree and fell asleep. For the first time he really slept. When there is nothing to desire, there is nothing to dream about either, because dreams are reflections of your desires. Dreams are reflections of your frustrations, dreams are reflections of your repressions, dreams reflect your day life. That night there was no dream, it was a dreamless deep sleep.Patanjali says dreamless deep sleep is closest to samadhi – just one step more, and you have come home. And that one step happened early in the morning. Rested, Buddha opened his eyes. For the first time in his life there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. For the first time in life he must have been at a loss. Now what? There was nothing to cling to, nothing to hold on to. There must have been an utter emptiness. Time must have stopped. There was no program anymore. Every day he used to get up with so many ideas to be cultivated, so many methods to be practiced, so many religious rituals to be done, and all that. Today there was nothing left! Utter emptiness.But do you think he died? No, he was born. Objects were not there. Now the desire was pure – just a throb, a pulsation, just a passion for nothing in particular. Resting under the tree with open eyes, he must have been seeing the sky in the east becoming red, and then the sunrise. And with the rising sun and with the sky turning red, and with the last star of the night disappearing, he became enlightened.What does this word enlightenment mean? It simply means desire was freed from all objects. He became pure love, compassion, pure life. And this pure life has tremendous beauty and ecstasy; and with this pure life you have attained the infinite. Desire remains small because you confine it to small objects, desire remains small because you desire small things. Seeing it, people start desiring big things – but big things are also small things; howsoever big they are, they have limitations.Just think of your God. How big is he? Egyptians used to say he is seven feet tall – nothing much. There are many Dutch sannyasins here. Whenever I see a Dutch sannyasin, I remember Egyptians, Egyptian gods. Indians say he has three faces. So what? Our politicians have one thousand and one faces, and everyone has many faces. Only three? When you talk to your wife you have one face, when you talk to your girlfriend you have another face, when you talk to your servant still another, when you talk to your boss still another. Just watch the whole day, how many faces! And God seems to be very poor – only three faces? How does he manage with only three faces?All concepts of God are bound to be limited. Concepts as such are bound to be limited. Even if you say he is infinite, what do you mean? What do you mean by infinite? Try to comprehend the meaning of the word infinite and you will be in a difficulty. Even your word infinite will be found to be finite. You can say he is unbounded, but just think, what do you mean? The boundary must be somewhere; how could it be that one just goes on and on and on? There must be a boundary – maybe it is very far away, far, far away, maybe you will never reach it, but what do you mean by unbounded? You simply mean unmeasured, nothing more.What do you mean when you say the ocean is unfathomable? Do you think there is no bottom to it? The bottom is there, we may not have fathomed it. Our ways of measurement are small, our yardsticks are small.Any word that we can use is bound to remain limited. Hence, those who have known godliness say nothing can be said about it. Buddha did not even say this much, that nothing can be said about it, because he said if you say nothing can be said about it, you have already said something. You have already defined it! “Nothing can be said about it” is a statement, and all statements define.You can move from small objects to bigger and bigger objects, but still your desire, your life, will not feel fulfilled. It cannot feel fulfilled unless it is really infinite, not in conceptions but in experience, and unless you taste the infinity of existence.Desire is beautiful, there is nothing wrong in it – only free it from objects. With freedom from objects, desire is divine.You say, “You must have told us so many times already, but I still don’t get it.” Just by my saying it, you are not going to get it. You will have to move into experience. It is not a philosophical system of thought that I am conveying to you. I am only pointing toward a path; the path has to be followed. You will not get it just by listening to me. Yes, you can get it if you sit silently by my side. You can get it in the intervals, when I am here and you are here and no word interferes, intervenes.Words don’t communicate. On the contrary, for higher things they become barriers. For lower things they are bridges; the higher you move, the less and less they are bridges, more and more they are walls.You say, “You must have told us so many times already, but I still don’t get it.” I will go on saying it again and again, but remember, you will not get it just by listening to me. You will have to be something like me. You will have to imbibe me, you will have to digest me. It is not something verbal that is happening here, it is something existential. It is a love affair.I am not a teacher, I am not teaching you anything, I am simply imparting something to you. What has happened to me, I am inviting you to partake of it. Be my guest, let me be your host. And if you can even be a guest for a single moment, that which has not been understood for so long will be immediately understood. And not only will it be understood, you will be surprised that you went on missing it. It is so simple; to have understood it would have been simple.But it is a question of an energy communication. And, slowly, slowly, I will turn the commune into an energy communication. Words can take you only so far, then it has to become a meeting of energies. You have to be electrified by me. You have to allow my pure desiring, my pure energy. It is objectless; I don’t desire a thing, I am simply desire. If you allow yourself to come in contact with this energy, there will be a transformation, a turning point, a conversion.You say, “What is the seed of desire?” There is no seed of desire. Desire is the seed of all. Desire is the ultimate seed. Existence desired to be man, existence desired to expand, existence desired to create.Desire is the seed of everything!If you ask me, I will say existence is desire – that’s why it could desire. Only desire can desire.You ask, “Is it only in the existence of mind?” No. The mind has only extreme tunnel vision. The mind is as if you are hiding behind a door and looking through the keyhole. Yes, sometimes you can see a bird on the wing, but for only a split second, and it is gone. You see somebody passing by – a beautiful woman, a beautiful man, or a dog – just for a moment, and it is gone. A moment before, it was not there; a moment afterward, it is no more there. That’s how mind creates time. It is a keyhole.You see the bird on the wing, and you see it only for just a second. Before that, it was not – do you think it was not? It was, but for you it was in the future, because it was not in front of your keyhole. And after a moment it is no more again – do you think it is no more? It still is, but for you it is past.The mind is limited, hence it creates divisions – past, present, future. The present is that which for a moment appears on the screen of the mind, and the past is that which is no longer on the screen, and the future that which is not yet. But let me tell you: all is, and always is. Nothing ever goes out of existence, and nothing ever comes into existence. Everything persists, remains.Time is a false notion created by the mind.Eternity is truth, timelessness is truth.Somebody asked Jesus, “Tell us something more about the kingdom of God. What will be special there? Something unique. Yes, we have heard that there will be pleasure, but pleasure we know – maybe it will be thousands and thousands of times greater, but we know what pleasure is. We have heard there will be celestial music – okay, we know something about music. What will be special?”And you will be surprised what Jesus said. It is not recorded in the Christian scriptures, but there are a few sayings scattered here and there in other scriptures. This is recorded by the Sufis. Jesus said: “There shall be time no longer.” A tremendously significant answer. There shall be time no longer – this will be special. You have known everything, but you have not known timelessness. “There shall be time no longer” means there shall be mind no longer. Mind and time are synonymous.In the ultimate reckoning, time is mind, mind is time. Both are aspects of the same coin, they both disappear together. Drop one, and the other is gone also.You ask me, “What is the seed of desire?” There is no seed of desire. Desire is the ultimate seed of all other seeds.And you ask, “Is it only in the existence of mind?” No. The mind has only a little glimpse of desire, just a flickering glimpse of desire. The mind knows nothing of desire; the mind only knows about desiring this and desiring that. Desiring money, desiring power, desiring prestige – the mind knows about desires for objects. When the objects are no longer there, desire is no longer part of the mind. Then desire is beyond mind; then desire is simply an overflowing energy.William Blake says desire is energy and energy is delight. I have heard a rumor that Sargama, one of our sannyasins, is a direct descendant of William Blake. We have beautiful people here. William Blake is one of the most beautiful persons who has ever walked on the earth, one of the most penetrating mystics. Sargama must have something of William Blake’s quality in him. But it may be just a rumor, because I have heard another rumor also that William Blake had no son at all. But that may be applicable only to legitimate sons; one can have illegitimate sons.William Blake’s insight is true. Desire is energy, energy is delight. Contemplate over it. Just pure desire, just overflowing energy, for no particular object, for no destination.That’s what you have to remember when you come to me for an energy darshan, for a “close-up.” Just become pure desire, just an overflowing desire, for nothing in particular. Don’t wait for any experience. Experiences will come, but don’t wait for them. If you wait, you will miss, because when you are waiting for an experience you are no more in the herenow. You have already missed the point; the mind has come in. The object has obstructed the purity of desire.When you are in an energy darshan with me, when you are partaking of something of my energy, just be pure desire – going nowhere, moving nowhere, just thrilled for no reason at all, just madly ecstatic for no reason at all. And in those few moments you will have the contact with me, because those few moments are my reality.But if you are sitting there, waiting to have some great experience of light inside, then maybe you may experience some light, but you missed. You threw the diamonds away and gathered pebbles on the shore. You may be waiting for your kundalini to rise, you may have a certain sensation rising in your spine, but what is it? It is pointless. It may give you a kick, a spiritual kick, but then it is gone.With me, just be pure desire – swaying with me, moving with me, dancing with me, allowing me to penetrate you to your deepest core, to the deepest core of your desire, to the very seed. And then something immense, something incredible, something you cannot imagine, is possible – an entry of the beyond into you, the meeting of the earth and sky.You say, “Is it only in the existence of mind?” No, the mind is a barrier. It allows desire only little outlets – and desire is an ocean. The mind has to be dropped, not desire; the mind has to be dropped so that you can have total desire.And you ask, “And how is the desire in the body for sex related to the mind?” The mind is not separate from your body, it is the inner part of the body. You are separate from the body and the mind, both. You are an entity, transcendental, you are a witness to the mind and the body, both. But your mind and your body are both one and the same energy. The body is visible mind, the mind is invisible body. The body is the exterior mind, and the mind is the interior body.Hence sex is not only physical. It is far more cerebral, it is far more psychological than physical. In fact, sex is triggered not by your physiology but by your psychology. The physiology cooperates with it, but deep down sex comes from the inner body to the outer body.You may be aware, you may not be aware, because you are not at all aware of what goes on happening to you. But watch, the first thing about sex happens in the head, in the mind. And then immediately the body is affected, because the body and the mind are not separate.There can be a physiological sex too. That’s what happens when you go to a prostitute; it is physiological, it is just a relief for the body. The body is overburdened with energy and you don’t know what to do with it. You have to throw it out somehow to unburden yourself, so that you can feel a little relaxed, because you have too much energy and you are so uncreative that you don’t know what to do with it.You can’t sing a song totally. If you can, you will be surprised; the energy has disappeared into the song and become the song. There is no need to go to the prostitute. You cannot dance, you cannot play on the guitar, you are so uncreative.Prostitutes will exist in the world unless man becomes more creative. And now in the West where the Women’s Liberation movement is demanding equality in everything, even male prostitutes have come into existence. They were bound to, because why only female prostitutes? Why not male prostitutes too? Equality is equality.Man is uncreative. Have you observed? Any time when you are creative, sex disappears. If you are painting and totally absorbed in it, you don’t have any sexual desire. Sex simply does not cross the threshold of your mind; it is simply not there.Only in deep creativity are people celibate – in no other way. Your saints, so-called saints, are not celibate – because they are so uncreative, they cannot be. It is impossible; it is just against the very science of energy. They are doing nothing, sitting in the temples and ashrams repeating Ram-Ram, Ram-Ram, or just stupidly playing with their malas – how can they be celibate? How can brahmacharya happen to them? It happens only when creativity takes all your energy, and no energy is left as a tension in you.Poets can be more celibate, painters can be more celibate, dancers can be more celibate, musicians can be more celibate. I am not saying that they are all celibates, I am saying that whenever a poet is a poet, he can be celibate – because a poet is not a poet twenty-four hours a day. It is very rare to find a poet who is twenty-four hours a day a poet. Then he becomes a seer, then he becomes a rishi, then he is no longer an ordinary poet.It is from people like these who were poets twenty-four hours that great poems like the Upanishads, the Koran and the Gita were born. It is not ordinary poetry. Ordinary poets are only once in a while poets, otherwise they are ordinary people – maybe far worse. Ordinary painters are only once in a while painters.It is said about a great Indian poet, Rabindranath, that whenever he was in the mood to create, he would close his doors and disappear into his room for days together – three days, four days. No food, no bath, he would not even come out. Only when his energy had moved into creativity and he was unburdened would he open his door and come out. And people who saw him coming out of his room after four days of fasting and remaining lost in his creativity, all observed that his face was no longer the same. He looked as if he had gone to some other world. He looked so delicate, like a roseflower; he looked so beautiful, so feminine, so graceful, so buddhalike. But only for a few hours would that fragrance surround him, and then it would disappear. And for months together, the mood might not come again.Poets are only once in a while poets. And when you read a whole poem, the whole poem is not a poem either. Only a few lines here and there are really poetry; the other lines are just managed by the poet, they did not descend on him.A great poet, Coleridge, died. He left forty thousand incomplete poems. Many times in his life he was asked, “Why don’t you complete these things? They are so tremendously beautiful, and only one line is missing. Just complete one line and the poem will be complete.”But Coleridge always refused. He said, “I will not complete it unless it comes from the beyond. I am not going to do it. These lines have come from the beyond, I have just noted them down. I am not the writer, I am not the author, I am just a steno; I have simply noted down something that has been dictated from the beyond. And that one line is missing. I cannot add it, because many times I have tried to add it, and I have always failed. It looks so ugly, it looks so different, so mundane, so mediocre. It does not have that luminosity.”When Rabindranath for the first time translated his great book Gitanjali into English, he was a little worried whether the translation had come through or not. English was not his mother tongue, in the first place. And secondly, to translate prose is one thing, it is easy; to translate poetry is very difficult, and more so to translate poetry from a language like Bengali which is so poetic. The whole language is poetic, its flavor is of poetry.He was worried: “Has the translation come true to the spirit of my original?” He showed it to one great Englishman, C. F. Andrews. Andrews went through it, and at just four points he said, “Four words have to be changed, grammatically they are wrong.” Naturally, Rabindranath changed them.Then when he read Gitanjali and his poems for the first time in a poets’ gathering in London, he was surprised, he could not believe his ears. One English poet, Yeats, stood up and said, “Everything is perfectly right, but at only four points something is very mundane, something is not poetic. The whole poetry flows beautifully, but at four points the river comes across rocks.”With a trembling in his heart, Rabindranath asked, “What are those four points?” And they were exactly the same as those which C. F. Andrews had suggested. Rabindranath told him, “These are C. F. Andrews’ words, he knows English better than me.”Yeats said, “That is right – it is better English, but not better poetry. The grammar is right, but poetry is not grammar. The language is right, but poetry is not only language. Poetry is something that hovers above language and grammar. Please go back to your old words!”Rabindranath got his Nobel Prize with this book, Gitanjali.All poets are not always poets, all poems are not poems. Hence you may not be able to understand what I am trying to convey to you, but whenever a poet is a poet, he is celibate. Sexuality simply disappears, evaporates. And whenever a poem is born in a poet he is part of existence, he is a creator. In that moment it is impossible to give any object to your desire. Sex gives an object to your desire. Sex is not pure, cannot be, because the object is always there.The moment sex becomes pure, it is samadhi.The mind and the body both are sexual. The body has come out of sex, and the mind is always hankering for objects, hence it is sexual. But both can be purified through creativity.My message, my key, my golden key to transform your energies, is creativity. Be more and more creative, and slowly, slowly you will see a transformation happening of its own accord. Your mind will disappear, your body will have a totally different feel to it, and constantly you will remain aware that you are separate, that you are a pure witness.And that pure witness is pure desire and nothing else.I am not against desire. I am all for desire, but I am not for desires with objects. Let objects disappear, and then you will have a desire like a flame without any smoke. It brings great liberation.The second question:Osho,I understand everything that you say, but still why my life remains unchanged?To understand something intellectually is one thing, but to understand something intellectually is not going to transform your life. You will remain the same. To understand something intellectually is really to deceive yourself. You have not understood, the mind has only pretended to have understood. This is a trick, because if you really understand it then change is bound to happen. And the mind does not want any change.The mind is very traditional, conventional, conformist, orthodox. The mind is never revolutionary; it is against all change. And the change I am talking about is a total change.You say, “I understand everything that you say…” You only believe that you understand. You understand the words – naturally. My words are simple, I don’t know many words. In fact, if you count, I must be using not more than four hundred words. But see the turnout! I am not a man of language. You can understand what I am saying as far as words are concerned – but do you comprehend? That is the question, that is the crux of the matter. Do you comprehend what is being imparted to you?You must have a very philosophical bent of mind. Meditate over this anecdote:A patient, a great philosopher in his thirties, eagerly responded at the beginning of therapy to each interpretation his analyst made by saying, “I hear you, I hear you.”“I’m sorry,” said the doctor. “I didn’t know you were a little deaf.”“I’m not. I hear you. It means I comprehend,” said the philosopher.“Well, what is it that you comprehend?”The philosopher paused. “Jesus,” he finally replied, “I don’t know.”Understanding is not the question, but comprehension. Understanding is of the head; comprehension is something deeper, of the heart. And if it is really total then it is even deeper: of the being.When you understand something then you have to do something about it. When you comprehend you need not do anything about it; the very comprehension is enough to change you. If you comprehend something, it has already changed you; there is no need to do anything about your comprehensions.Please don’t try to understand me intellectually. I am not an intellectual, in fact I am anti-intellectual. I am not a philosopher, I am very anti-philosophic. Try to comprehend me.And how does one try to comprehend? How does one try to understand in the first place? Understanding means listening with the head, continuously interpreting, evaluating, judging: “This is right, this is wrong. Yes, this is true, I have read about it. This must be right, because Jesus also said it the same way. It is so in the Gita and in the Vedas.”This goes on, this constant chattering inside that you call understanding. And then out of this hotchpotch you create a hypothesis, and you think this is what I have been telling you. Comprehension cannot come this way; this is the way to prevent comprehension.Listen silently with no inner chattering, with no inner talk, without evaluating. I am not saying believe what I say, I am not saying accept what I say. I am saying there is no need to be in a hurry to accept or reject. First at least listen – why be in such a hurry? When you see a roseflower, do you accept or reject it? When you see a beautiful sunset, do you accept or reject it? You simply see, and in that very seeing is a meeting.Don’t let your mind wander. Listen silently, attuned, and then something will stir in the heart. Truth has that quality, it stirs the heart. Truth has the quality of being self-evident, it needs no proofs.If what I am saying has anything of truth in it, it will be understood by your heart. But the mind has to give way. And then you will not need to change your life according to it; it will be changed of its own accord.The third question:Osho,What? What?? What???You remind me of a story:A man was troubled for many years with a sore arm. He had been to many doctors and could not find out what was causing the problem. Finally a friend urged him to see a doctor who was famous for his ability to diagnose illnesses. The doctor was very expensive and he had to wait a long time for an appointment. Finally he sat waiting in the office. The doctor walked in, handed him a jar and told him to return it the next day with his first morning’s urine. Then he promptly left the room.The man was infuriated! “He did not even look at me,” he thought. “And how can he tell what is wrong with my arm from my urine?”The next morning, the man, still angry, peed in the jar. Then he had his wife pee in it, then he had his daughter pee in it. Then as he walked out the door he saw his dog peeing on a tree and he got some of that also. He gave the urine to the doctor and sat there laughing to himself.Just then, the doctor returned to the room and exclaimed, “Please sir, this is no laughing matter! Your wife has been fooling around on you, your daughter is pregnant, your dog has worms, and if you don’t stop jerking off, your arm will never get better!”Now you ask me, “What? What?? What???”I am not this kind of doctor, you will have to go somewhere else.The fourth question:Osho,Why can't I feel any wonder in existence?You are too knowledgeable, you know too much. And all that you know is just holy cow dung – all knowledge always is. Wisdom is a totally different matter. Knowledge is all rot, junk; you gather it from here and there, it is not your own. It has no authenticity, it has not grown in your being, you have not given birth to it.But it gives you a very gratified ego: that “I know.” And the more you become settled in the idea that “I know,” the less and less will you feel wonder in life. How can a man of knowledge feel wonder? Knowledge destroys wonder. And wonder is the source of wisdom, wonder is the source of all that is beautiful, and wonder is the source for the search, the real search. Wonder takes you on the adventure to know the mysteries of life.The knowledgeable person already knows – knows nothing, but thinks that he already knows. He has come to a full stop. He has not reached anywhere, he has not known anything. He is a computer, his mind is simply programmed. Maybe he has MAs, PhDs, DLitts, maybe he has been to the biggest education centers of the world and he has accumulated much information, but that information is destroying his sensitivity to feel the mystery of the flowers, the birds, the trees, the sunlight, the moon – because he knows all the answers.How can he see any beauty in the moon? He already knows everything about the moon. And if you say to him, “My beloved’s face looks like the full moon,” he will laugh. He will say, “You are simply foolish. How can you compare the moon with your beloved’s face? There is no comparison possible!”He is mathematically right, scientifically right, but poetically wrong. And life is not only science. Just as Jesus said, “Man cannot live by bread alone,” I say to you, “Man cannot live by science alone.” A few windows are to be left open for poetic experiences, so some sun, some wind, some rain can come from real existence. You cannot be thrilled with life if you are too full of knowledge.I used to go for a long walk every evening when I was in the university. A professor used to follow me. For two or three days I tolerated it, and then I said, “Either you stop coming, or I will have to stop coming.”He said, “Why?”I said, “You are destroying my whole walk.”He said, “How?”He knew too much about everything, and he would talk: “This tree belongs to that species.” Now, who bothers? The tree is beautiful; it is dancing in the wind, the foliage so young, so fresh. The green of it, the red of it, the gold of it, all is so beautiful – and he is talking about the species. He was a very, very informed man about everything. A bird on the wind, he would immediately label it. He was a great labeler.I said, “Please, either you stop coming – you are destroying my evening walk – or I will have to stop.”You must be too burdened. You are, I know you. You are burdened with great scriptures, mountains of scriptures; nothing can ever surprise you.A man comes into a bar, obviously nervous and obviously in a hurry, walks over to the counter, picks up an empty glass and starts eating it. When he is finished he goes over to the wall, walks up the wall, walks along the ceiling, walks down the other wall and disappears out the door.The barkeeper can’t believe his eyes. “What the hell,” he says, “is going on here?”A man who has been sitting on a bar stool and seen the whole thing, says with a shrug of his shoulders, “Don’t worry, I know that guy. It’s always the same thing with him – comes and goes without even saying hello.”There are millions of people who are living like this. Miracles are happening all around but they can’t see anything, they are blind with their knowledge.Drop your knowledge. Knowledge is worthless, wonder is precious. Regain the wonder that you had when you were a child – and the kingdom of God belongs only to those who are able to become children again.The last question:Osho,I am in a jam. I love three women. This is hell, and this has been going on for three months. Now what to do?You must be something of a man! One woman is enough. You need legal protection. But if you have tolerated it patiently for three months, wait a little more. Time settles everything. And women are always more perceptive than men – if you cannot do anything, they are bound to do something.John and Mary began making love in a railway cutting. As their lovemaking progressed, they rolled down onto the railway tracks in the path of the oncoming express.The driver, seeing the two bodies ahead on the line, halted the train just in time. Now, delaying the train is a serious offense, and at the trial the judge demanded an explanation.“Now look, John,” he said, “I am a man of the world and I can understand you and your girlfriend having a little fun. But why didn’t you get out of the way of the train?”“Well, it’s like this, Your Honor,” said John. “I was coming, the train was coming and Mary was coming, and I thought that whoever could stop would stop!”Enough for today.

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The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 01-16Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Book of Wisdom Vol 1 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Yes and no!Man is a dilemma, he is both yes and no. It is not abnormal in you, it is the normal state of humankind. Man is half earth, half sky; part matter, part consciousness; part dust, part divine. Man is a tension. Friedrich Nietzsche says “a rope stretched between two infinities.”The past is that of an animal and the future is that of godliness. And between the two is man – half animal, half angel. The no comes from the past, the yes is a possibility for the future. Doubt comes from darkness, trust is the by-product of light. The higher self in you is always trusting, the lower is cunning and is always doubting. And you are both, as you are now.Man is naturally schizophrenic. Schizophrenia is not a disease; it is not pathology, it is the state of normal human beings. It starts looking like a pathology only when it goes to the extreme, when yes and no are so divided that there is not even an “and” to bridge them. When they become unbridgeable, then it becomes pathological. Otherwise every human being is always in a kind of duality, in a state of either/or. No other animal is in that state. Dogs are simply dogs, and lions are lions, and trees are trees, and rocks are rocks. They don’t have any duality, there is no division.Man is dual, double, divided. It is his misery, but it is also the possibility for his bliss. It is his agony, but out of this agony ecstasy can be born. No animal can be ecstatic except man. Have you seen any animal ecstatic – ecstasy like a Buddha, a Ramakrishna? There is no possibility of coming across an animal who is so ecstatic. Even the rosebush with so many beautiful flowers is not ecstatic in the sense Jesus is. The rosebush is simply a rosebush; there is no exuberance, there is no overflowing, there is no rejoicing. It is a matter of fact – not that something incredible is happening, not that something from the beyond has descended, not that godliness has been realized, not that light has come and penetrated to the deepest core of your being and you are full of it and you are enlightened.The bird on the wing is free, but knows nothing about freedom. Only man, even though he may be imprisoned, knows about freedom. Hence the misery; the bondage on one hand, and the vision of freedom on the other. The reality, the ugly reality, and the tremendously luminous possibility.Man can be miserable as no other animal can ever be miserable. Have you seen any animal crying his heart out, weeping, committing suicide? Have you seen an animal, any animal laughing, a belly laughter that shakes the very foundations? No, all these things are possible only for man. Hence the grandeur of man, hence his dignity, and hence his anxiety too.The anxiety is whether you are going to make it or not, whether this time it is going to happen or not. The anxiety is a natural consequence of two diametrically opposite possibilities: one can fall into hell, and one can rise into heaven.Man is just a ladder. You move on this ladder like a yo-yo: one moment you are in heaven, another moment you are in hell. One moment suddenly the sunlit peak, another moment the darkest valley that you have ever come across. One moment love, sharing; another moment anger, miserliness. One moment such an expanded heart that you can contain the whole world, and another moment you are so mean that you cannot imagine you had the possibility to be so mean. Man goes on moving between these two infinities continuously like a pendulum.Your question is significant because it is everybody’s question. It is not a question, it is more existential than that. It is a problem; no answer can help, some solution has to be searched for.Now, there are two possibilities for the solution. Either fall back and be satisfied with your animality. Be satisfied – that’s what millions are trying to do; drink, eat, sleep, and forget all about the greater challenges of life. Eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow we shall be no more. That’s what the materialist says.The materialist has accepted the lower self; he denies the higher self just in sheer self-defense. He does not deny it because he knows that it is not; no – he knows nothing about it. He denies it because if he does not deny it then that either/or opens up again. Again one is in a problem, again something has to be done, again the at-ease-ness is lost. Again the journey, the wandering, and the discomfort and the inconvenience and the insecurity of the journey.It is better to say that the higher does not exist, that there is no godliness, that there has never been any godliness, that there is no soul, that there is nothing inner, that man has no interiority, that man is just what he is from the outside, that man is his behavior: there is no soul in him.From Pavlov to B. F. Skinner, this is what is being taught to the world by the so-called scientific psychologists, the behaviorists: that man is only behavior. There is no one inside, just as there is no one inside a machine. The machine is just a functional unity; it has no organic unity in it, it has no soul. You can dismantle it, you can rearrange it again.That’s what scientists hope, that sooner or later they will be able to dismantle man and reassemble him. At least theoretically it seems possible for them. It is not possible. You cannot dismantle and reassemble man, because there is something which is nonmechanical in man. And that nonmechanical part is his glory. But it is better to deny it; it makes life easier, it makes life less anxious, it makes life less of a problem. You can go on living the shallow day-to-day life of so-called pleasures – eat, drink and be merry.Those who decide for it are renouncing the opportunity Atisha is talking about. They are renouncing the opportunity to become godly. They are settling for something very low, they are settling for something very cheap, they are missing something very essential. Yes, you can be at ease with the lower self, you can settle with the doubting self. But then there is no growth. And there will be no ecstasy, because there will never be any buddha born in you. You will never come to know anything of Christ-consciousness. You will remain in darkness – of course at ease, but what is the point of being at ease?Far more valuable is creative discontent, far more valuable is the insecurity of the unknown, far more valuable is a homeless wandering in search of the real home.Religion is for those who don’t accept the lower as the be all and end all. I am not saying deny the lower, remember, because there are foolish people who go to the other extreme. One stupid type of person denies the higher, says it does not exist, and settles with the lower. The other stupid kind denies the lower, says there is no lower, there is only the higher. One says godliness is illusion, the world is truth. The other says the world is illusion, godliness is truth.In my approach, both are being stupid, because both are doing the same thing. Both want to be at ease; both are denying the polar opposite, both are denying the possibility of any inner tension. And remember, it is the inner tension that gives you aliveness. The bigger the tension, the more alive you are.You know; you have experienced it. Everybody has experienced it, more or less: the attraction of the opposite. Men are attracted to women, and vice versa – why? The negative pole of electricity is attracted toward the positive pole, and vice versa – why? Why the attraction for the opposite? Because in that very attraction, life arises. In that tension, how can you remain dead? In that very tension you start pulsating.Those who settle and choose one against the other become stale, become dead. The materialist becomes superficial, and your so-called spiritualist also becomes phony. Your so-called materialist lives with shallow pleasures, and your so-called spiritualist lives in imagination, in fantasy. Both are missing life and its life-giving tensions. Man has to live with both, and in such a way that neither is denied and yet both become complementary to each other. Yes need not be against no; there is no necessity that the no should be against the yes. They can define each other, they can nourish each other.That’s my whole effort here. I bring you a new dispensation, that the earth and the sky have to be accepted together. Body and soul, the world and godliness, have to be accepted together. Nothing is wrong in the lower, the lower has to become the base for the higher. The lower has to function as the foundation; if you deny it you won’t have any foundation.That’s why religious countries, for example India, became poorer and poorer and poorer. They lost their foundations and became very phony. How can you be true if you deny something which is all around you so real? If you say the world is illusion, maya, how can you be true? You know it is not.Even the person who says that the world is maya does not try to pass through the wall, he goes through the door. If both are maya, illusion, what is the difference? Can you find any difference between two illusions? Is one a little less an illusion and the other a little more? Even the person who says the world is illusion does not start eating stones. What is the difference between bread and stones then? Both are illusions, both are dreams.But by denying the world you lose contact with the reality. That’s what happened in the East, particularly in India. India became uprooted from reality, it lost its roots in the earth. It became unearthly, a little ghostly. That’s my experience of India – India is a ghost, it has lost its body. And nobody else is responsible for it. It could not gather courage to accept the polar opposites. It became poor, it became ugly, it became ill.India chose it so that it could be at ease with the higher. But the higher can exist only with the lower – one thing more of great importance to be remembered. The lower can exist without the higher – although it will remain unfulfilled – but it can exist. The higher cannot even exist without the lower.You cannot have a building – a temple, a church – without the foundations. But you can have the foundations without making the temple. That is possible because the lower comes first and the higher comes later. The lower can come, and the higher may not come.The East tried the higher without the lower, the temple without the foundations. Now, such a temple can only be in your imagination, it cannot exist in reality. And it creates hypocrisy. The greatest hypocrisy possible in the world has happened in India. The hypocrisy is: we have to live in the lower because the lower is the real, and we have to deny it and we have to talk about the higher. And because the lower is denied, the higher cannot have any substance; it is dream stuff. So people are very obsessed with money, but they talk of godliness; obsessed with politics, power, and they talk of godliness. That remains just talk.In the West, the opposite has happened. The lower was accepted, for the same reason – because if there is only one, you can relax. You can drop the creative discontent if there is only one. Hence the attraction for the one; it is an attraction toward suicide.Think of a world where only men exist and no women. There will be no tension – certainly. There will be great brotherhood, everybody will be gay – literally gay! But life will lose something, something of immense importance – there will be no tension. It will be like having loose strings on a sitar; you cannot create music. You have to make them tight and tense, only then can you strike music out of them, only then can the hidden become manifest. With loose strings on a sitar how can you create music? They have to be tight, in a certain tension. Only great masters know how much tension is the right tension. And in the right tension the greatest melody is possible.I teach you the right tension between the lower and the higher, between the body and the soul, between the earth and heaven – a right tension with no antagonism. The lower has not to be denied for the higher, neither has the higher to be denied for the lower. They are together, they are two aspects of the same reality, they interpenetrate.So I don’t say drop your doubt, I don’t say drop your no. I say let your no become the tension for your yes, let your no become the background for your yes. Let your no create the context in which the yes will be more meaningful. Only in contrast does meaning arise. You write with white chalk on a blackboard – why? Because only in contrast will the white show; it will be loud and clear. Let no become the blackboard, and yes the white writing on it.Your trust should not be a blind trust, your trust should be a trust which has eyes. Your trust should not be an impotent trust, a trust which is trust because you are impotent to say no. Your trust should be alive, strong, vital. Your trust will be capable of saying no. Say yes and yet retain the capacity to say no, then you will be surprised – your yes has such sharpness, such brilliance, such intelligence! Then it is not blind, it has eyes to see.Use no as a foundation for yes, use doubt as manure for the rosebush. Use everything that existence has given to you. Nothing, nothing at all, has to be denied; all has to be absorbed, because nothing is unessential, unimportant. Even though sometimes it looks unessential, unimportant, even though sometimes it looks positively harmful and poisonous, it has not to be denied. It has not to be thrown out, because later on, on the way, as you become wiser you will repent if you threw something away, because you will need it in some situation. There are moments when poison is needed as medicine. There are moments of wisdom when just the touch of the wise man, and the poison becomes nectar.I want you to become alchemists. This is an alchemical school, a university for inner alchemy. We are trying to change the baser metal into gold. So remember, I accept your no too, I love your no too. I accept all that you are. I accept all that you are not – even that too. You are accepted whatsoever you are, and you are accepted whatsoever you are not. You are accepted in totality.From my side there is no question of denying anything, but of transforming it.The second question:Osho,What is the ego? Remaining unenlightened, are we always functioning through the ego or are there moments when we are free of it?Man has no center separate from the center of the whole. There is only one center in existence; the ancients used to call it Tao, dhamma, God. Those words have become old now; you can call it truth. There is only one center of existence. There are not many centers, otherwise the universe would not be really a universe, it would become a “multiverse.” It is a unity, hence it is called the universe; it has only one center.But this is to be meditated upon a little. That one center is my center, your center, everybody’s center. That one center does not mean that you are center-less, that one center simply means that you don’t have a separate center. Let us say it in different words. You can make many concentric circles on one center, many circles. You can throw a pebble in a silent lake. One center arises from the fall of the pebble and then many concentric circles arise and they go on spreading to the farthest shore – millions of concentric circles, but they all have one center.Each can claim this center as his own. And in a way it is his center, but it is not only his. The ego arises with the claim, “The center is mine, separate. It is not your center, it is my center; it is me.” The idea of a separate center is the root of the ego.When a child is born he comes without a center of his own. For nine months in the mother’s womb he functions with the mother’s center as his center; he is not separate. Then he is born. Then it is utilitarian to think of oneself as having a separate center; otherwise life will become very difficult, almost impossible. To survive, and to struggle for survival in the fight of life, everybody needs a certain idea: “Who am I.” And nobody has any idea. In fact nobody can ever have any idea, because at the deepest core you are a mystery. You can’t have any idea of it. At the deepest core you are not individual, you are universal.That’s why if you ask the Buddha, “Who are you?” he remains silent, he does not answer it. He cannot, because now he is no more separate. He is the whole. But in ordinary life even Buddha has to use the word I. If he feels thirsty he has to say, “I am thirsty. Ananda, bring me a little water, I am thirsty.”To be exactly true, he should say, “Ananda, bring some water. The universal center is a little thirsty.” But that will look a little odd. And to say it again and again – sometimes the universal center is hungry, and sometimes the universal center is feeling a little cold, and sometimes the universal center is tired – it will be unnecessary, absolutely unnecessary. So he continues to use the old meaningful word I. It is very meaningful; although a fiction, it is still meaningful. But many fictions are meaningful.For example, you have a name. That is a fiction. You came without a name, you did not bring a name with you; the name was given to you. Then by constant repetition you start becoming identified with it. You know your name is Rama or Rahim or Krishna. It goes so deep that if all you three thousand sannyasins fall asleep here and somebody comes and calls, “Rama, where are you?” nobody will hear except Rama. Rama will say, “Who has come to disturb my sleep?” Even in sleep he knows his name; it has reached to the unconscious, it has seeped through and through. But it is a fiction.But when I say it is a fiction I don’t mean it is unnecessary. It is a necessary fiction, it is useful; otherwise how are you going to address people? If you want to write a letter to somebody, to whom are you going to write?A small child once wrote a letter to God. His mother was ill, his father had died and they had no money, so he asked God for fifty rupees.When the letter reached the post office they were at a loss – what to do with it? Where to send it? It was simply addressed to God. So they opened it. They felt very sorry for the little boy and they decided to collect some money and send it to the boy. They collected some money; he had asked for fifty rupees but they could collect only forty.The next letter came, again addressed to God, and the boy had written, “Dear Sir, please next time when you send the money, send it directly to me, don’t send it through the post office. They have taken their commission – ten rupees!”It will be difficult if nobody has a name. Although nobody has a name in reality, still it is a beautiful fiction, helpful. And nobody knows it more than I do, because I don’t think anybody in the whole history of humanity has given as many names as I have given. You can count on me!Names are needed for others to call you, “I” is needed for you to call yourself, but it is just a fiction. If you go deep into yourself you will find the name has disappeared, the idea of “I” has disappeared; there is left only a pure am-ness, isness, existence, being.And that being is not separate, it is not yours and mine; that being is the being of all. Rocks, rivers, mountains, trees, all are included. It is all-inclusive, it excludes nothing. The whole past, the whole future, this immense universe, everything is included in it. The deeper you go into yourself, the more and more you will find that persons don’t exist, that individuals don’t exist. Then what exists is a pure universality. On the circumference we have names, egos, identities. When we jump from the circumference toward the center, all those identities disappear.The ego is just a useful fiction. Use it, but don’t be deceived by it.You also ask, “Remaining unenlightened, are we always functioning through the ego or are there moments when we are free of it?” Because it is a fiction, there are moments when you are free of it. Because it is a fiction, it can remain there only if you go on maintaining it. A fiction needs great maintenance. Truth needs no maintenance, that is the beauty of truth. But a fiction? You have constantly to paint it, give it a prop here and there – and it is constantly collapsing. By the time you have managed to prop up one side, the other side starts collapsing.And that’s what people go on doing their whole life, trying to manage the fiction as if it is the truth. Have more money, then you can have a bigger ego, a little more solid than the ego of the poor man. The poor man’s ego is thin; he can’t afford a thicker ego. Become the prime minister or president of a country, and your ego is puffed up to extremes. Then you don’t walk on the earth.Our whole life, the search for money, power, prestige, this and that, is nothing but a search for new props, a search for new supports, to somehow keep the fiction going. And all the time you know death is coming. And whatsoever you make, death is going to destroy it. But still one goes on hoping against hope – maybe everybody else dies, but not you.And in a way it is true. You have always seen other people dying, you have never seen yourself dying, so it seems true also, logical also. This person dies, that person dies, and you never die. And you are always there to feel sorry for them, you always go with them to the cemetery to say good-bye, and then you are back home again.Don’t be deceived by it, because all those people were doing the same thing. And nobody is an exception. Death comes and destroys the whole fiction of your name, your fame. Death comes and simply effaces all; not even footprints are left. Whatsoever we go on making out of our life is nothing but writing on water – not even on sand, but on water. You have not even written it, and it is gone. You cannot even read it; before you could have read it, it is gone.But we go on trying to make these castles in the air. Because it is a fiction, it needs constant maintenance, constant effort, day and night. And nobody can be so careful for twenty-four hours. So sometimes, in spite of you, there are moments when you have a glimpse of reality without the ego functioning as a barrier. Without the screen of the ego, there are moments – in spite of you, remember. Everybody once in a while has those moments.For example, every night when you fall deeply into sleep, and the sleep is so deep that you cannot even dream, then the ego is no longer found; all the fictions are gone. Deep dreamless sleep is a kind of small death. In dreams there is a possibility that you may manage: people go on managing to maintain their ego even in their dreams.That’s why psychoanalysis tries to go deep into your dreams, because there is less possibility of you maintaining your identity; more loopholes can be found there. In the daytime you are very alert and on guard continuously, with a shield to protect your ego. In dreams sometimes you forget. But the people who have been studying dreams say that even in dreams the protection remains; it becomes a little subtle.For example, you see in a dream that you have killed your uncle. If you go deep into it you will be surprised: you wanted to kill your father, but you killed your uncle. You deceived yourself, the ego played a game. You are such a good guy, how can you kill your own father? And the uncle looks like your father, although nobody really wants to kill one’s uncle. Uncles are always nice people – who wants to kill one’s uncle? And who does not want to kill one’s own father?There is bound to be great antagonism between the father and the son. The father has to discipline the son, he has to curb and cut his freedom and order and force him to obey. And nobody wants to obey and be disciplined and given shoulds and should-nots. And the father is so powerful that the son feels jealous. And the greatest jealousy is that the son wants the mother to be completely his own, and this father always comes in between completely, he is always there. And not only does the son feel jealous of the father, the father also feels jealous of the son because he is always there between his wife and him.Mulla Nasruddin’s son got married. Mulla Nasrudin came home with his wife and with his friends and relatives; the whole house was full. He went out for something and when he came back he was very much taken aback – his father was hugging his wife and kissing her. This was too much! This is not allowed. He was very angry and said, “What are you doing?”The father said, “And what have you been doing your whole life? You have been kissing and hugging my wife – and I never said anything to you.”He may not have said, but he must have felt like it. There is an antagonism between the father and the son, between the daughter and the mother – a natural antagonism, a natural jealousy. The daughter wants to possess the father but the mother is there; she looks like the enemy.Uncles are very beautiful people, but in a dream you will not kill your own father. Your moral conscience, part of your ego, will prevent you doing such a thing. You will find a substitute; this is a strategy.If you minutely observe your dreams you will find many strategies the ego is still trying to play. The ego cannot accept the fact: “I am killing my own father? I am such an obedient son, respectful toward the father, so loving– and trying to kill my father?” The ego won’t accept the idea; the ego shifts the idea a little bit to the side. The uncle looks almost like the father; kill the uncle, that seems easier. The uncle is only a substitute. This is what goes on even in dreams.But in dreamless sleep the ego completely disappears, because when there is no thinking, no dreaming, how can you carry a fiction? But dreamless sleep is very short. In eight hours of healthy sleep it is not more than two hours. But only those two hours are revitalizing. If you have two hours of deep dreamless sleep, in the morning you are new, fresh, alive. Life again has a thrill to it, the day seems to be a gift. Everything seems to be new, because you are new. And everything seems to be beautiful, because you are in a beautiful space.What happened in these two hours when you fell into deep sleep – what Patanjali calls sushupti, dreamless sleep? The ego disappeared. And the disappearance of the ego has revitalized you, rejuvenated you. With the disappearance of the ego, even though in deep unconsciousness, you had a taste of godliness.Patanjali says there is not much difference between sushupti, dreamless sleep, and samadhi, the ultimate state of buddhahood – not much difference, although there is a difference. The difference is that of consciousness. In dreamless sleep you are unconscious, in samadhi you are conscious, but the state is the same. You move into existence, you move into the universal center. You disappear from the circumference and you go to the center. Just that contact with the center so rejuvenates you.The people who cannot sleep are really miserable people, very miserable people. They have lost a natural source of being in contact with existence. They have lost a natural passage into the universal; a door has closed.This century is the first century which is suffering from sleeplessness. We have closed all the other doors; now we are closing the last door, the door of sleep. That seems to be the last disconnection from the universal energy – the greatest danger. And now there are foolish people in the world who are writing books, and with very logical acumen: that sleep is not needed at all, it is a wastage of time. They are right, it is a wastage of time. People who think in terms of money, work, the people who are workaholics, for them it is a wastage of time.Just as there is now Alcoholics Anonymous, soon we will need Workaholics Anonymous. I propose Morarji Desai’s name for the president of Workaholics Anonymous.People who are obsessed with work, they have to be constantly on the go. They cannot rest, they cannot relax. Even when they are dying, they will be doing something or other.These people are now suggesting that sleep is unnecessary. They are suggesting that sleep is really an unnecessary hangover from the past. They say that in the past, when there was no electricity and no fire, out of necessity people had to sleep. Now there is no need. It is just an old habit imbibed in millions of years; it has to be dropped. Their idea is that in the future sleep will disappear.And the same is happening behind the iron curtain in Russia too. They are creating new devices so that people can be taught things while they are asleep – a new kind of education, so time is not wasted. It is the last torture that we are going to invent for children. We invented the school; we are not satisfied with that. Small children, imprisoned in schools…In India, schools and prisons used to be painted the same way, the same color. They were the same type of building – ugly, with no aesthetic sense, with no trees and birds and animals around them, so that children were not distracted. Otherwise, who will listen to the foolish mathematics teacher when a cuckoo suddenly starts calling by the window? Or a deer comes into the class, and the teacher is teaching you geography or history… The children will be distracted, so they have to be taken away from nature, away from society. They have to be forced to sit on hard benches for five hours, six hours, seven hours.This goes on for years together. Almost one third of life is spent in schools. You have made slaves. Also, in their remaining life they will remain workaholics; they will not be able to have a real holiday.Now they are thinking, why waste the night time? So children can be put into night education. They will be asleep in bed but their ears will be connected to a central school, and in a very, very subtle subliminal way, messages will be put into their heads. They will be programmed.And it has been found that they can learn more easily in this way than they learn while they are awake. Naturally, because when you are awake, howsoever you are protected, a thousand and one things distract your mind. And children are so full of energy, everything attracts them; they are continuously distracted. That is just energy, nothing else; there is no sin in it. They are not dead, that’s why they are distracted.A dog starts barking, somebody starts fighting outside, somebody plays a trick on the teacher or somebody tells a joke – and there are a thousand and one things that go on distracting them. But when a child is asleep – and deeply asleep, when dreams are not there – there is no distraction at all. Now that dreamless sleep can be used as part of pedagogy.It seems we are in every way ready to disconnect ourselves from the universal source of being. Now, these children will be the ugliest possible, because even when there was a possibility of being lost completely beyond the ego, that has also been taken away. The last possibility of ego disappearance is then no longer available. When they could have been in contact with existence, they will be taught some rubbish history. The dates when Genghis Khan was born – who bothers, who cares? In fact if Genghis Khan had never been born, that would have been far better. That’s what I had written in my paper, and my teacher was very angry. I had to stand for twenty-four hours outside the class, because I had written, “It is unfortunate that he was born. It would have been very, very fortunate if he had not been born at all.”But kings and emperors, they go on and on being born just to torture small children; they have to remember the dates and the names for no reason at all. A better kind of education will drop all this crap. Ninety percent is crap, and the remaining ten percent can be very much improved. And then life can have more joy, more rest, more relaxation.Because the ego is a fiction, it disappears sometimes. The greatest time is dreamless sleep. So make it a point that sleep is very valuable; don’t miss it for any reason. Slowly, slowly, make sleep a regular thing. Because the body is a mechanism, if you follow a regular pattern of sleep the body will find it easier and the mind will find it easier to disappear.Go to bed at exactly the same time. Don’t take it literally – if one day you are late you will not be sent to hell or anything! I have to be cautious, because there are a few people here who are health freaks. Their only disease is that they are continuously thinking of health. If they stop thinking of health they will be perfectly well. But if you can make your sleep a regular thing, going to bed at almost the same time and getting up at almost the same time…the body is a mechanism, the mind too, and it simply slips into dreamless sleep at a certain moment.The second greatest source of egoless experiences is sex, love. That too has been destroyed by the priests; they have condemned it, so it is no longer such a great experience. Such a condemnation for so long, it has conditioned the mind of people. Even while they are making love, they know deep down that they are doing something wrong. Some guilt is lurking somewhere. And this is so even for the most modern, the most contemporary, even the younger generation.On the surface you may have revolted against the society, on the surface you may no longer be a conformist. But things have gone very deep; it is not a question of revolting on the surface. You can grow long hair, that won’t help much. You can become a hippie and stop taking baths, that won’t help much. You can become a dropout in every possible way that you can imagine and think of, but that won’t help really, because things have gone too deep and all these are superficial measures.For thousands of years we have been told that sex is the greatest sin. It has become part of our blood, bone, marrow. So even if you know consciously that there is nothing wrong in it, the unconscious keeps you a little detached, afraid, guilt-ridden, and you cannot move into it totally.If you can move into lovemaking totally, ego disappears, because at the highest peak, at the highest climax of lovemaking, you are pure energy. The mind cannot function. With such joy, with such outburst of energy, the mind simply stops. It is such an upsurge of energy that the mind is at a loss, it does not know what to do now. It is perfectly capable of remaining in function in normal situations, but when anything very new and very vital happens it stops. And sex is the most vital thing.If you can go deeply into lovemaking, ego disappears. That is the beauty of lovemaking, that it is another source of a glimpse of godliness – just like deep sleep but far more valuable than deep sleep, because in deep sleep you will be unconscious. In lovemaking you will be conscious – conscious yet without the mind.Hence the great science of Tantra became possible. Patanjali and Yoga worked on the lines of deep sleep; they chose that path to transform deep sleep into a conscious state so you know who you are, so you know what you are at the center.Tantra chose lovemaking as a window toward existence. The path of Yoga is very long, because to transform unconscious sleep into consciousness is very arduous; it may take many lives. And who knows, you may or may not be able to persist for so long, persevere for so long, be patient for so long. So the fate that has fallen on Yoga is this, that the so-called yogis go on only doing body postures. They never go deeper than that; that takes their whole life. Of course they get better health, longer life – but that is not the point! You can have better health by jogging, running, swimming; you can have longer life through medical care. That is not the point.The point was how to become conscious in deep sleep. And your so-called yogis go on teaching you how to stand on your head and how to distort and contort your body. Yoga has become a kind of circus – meaningless. It has lost its real dimension.In the new commune, I have the vision of reviving Yoga again in its true flavor, in its true dimension. And the goal is: how to become conscious while you are deeply asleep. That is the essential thing in Yoga, and if any yogi is teaching anything else it is all useless.But Tantra has chosen a far shorter way, the shortest, and far more pleasant too! Lovemaking can open the window. All that is needed is to uproot the conditionings that the priests have put into you. The priests put those conditionings into you so that they could become mediators and agents between you and existence, so that your direct contact was cut. Naturally you would need somebody else to connect you, and the priest would become powerful. And the priest has been powerful down the ages.Whosoever can put you in contact with power, real power, will become powerful. Existence is real power, the source of all power. The priest remained down the ages so powerful – more powerful than kings. Now the scientist has taken the place of the priest, because now he knows how to unlock the doors of the power hidden in nature. The priest knew how to connect you with existence, the scientist knows how to connect you with nature. But the priest has to disconnect you first, so no individual private line remains between you and existence. He has spoiled your inner sources, poisoned them. He became very powerful but the whole humanity became lustless, loveless, full of guilt.My people have to drop that guilt completely. While making love, think of prayerfulness, meditation, godliness. While making love, burn incense, chant, sing, dance. Your bedroom should be a temple, a sacred place. And lovemaking should not be a hurried thing. Go deeper into it; savor it as slowly, as gracefully as possible. And you will be surprised. You have the key.Existence has not sent you into the world without keys. But those keys have to be used, you have to put them into the lock and turn them.Love is another phenomenon, one of the most potential, where the ego disappears and you are conscious, fully conscious, pulsating, vibrating. You are no longer an individual, you are lost into the energy of the whole.Then, slowly, slowly, let this become your very way of life. What happens at the peak of love has to become your discipline – not just an experience but a discipline. Then whatsoever you are doing and wherever you are walking: early in the morning with the sun rising, have the same feeling, the same merger with existence. Lying down on the ground, the sky full of stars, have the same merger again. Lying down on the earth, feel one with the earth.Slowly, slowly, lovemaking should give you the clue how to be in love with existence itself. And then the ego is known as a fiction, is used as a fiction. And to use it as a fiction, there is no danger.There are a few other moments when the ego slips of its own accord. In moments of great danger: you are driving, and suddenly you see an accident is going to happen. You have lost control of the car and there seems to be no possibility of saving yourself. You are going to crash into the tree or into the oncoming truck, or you are going to fall into the river, it is so absolutely certain. In those moments suddenly the ego will disappear.That’s why there is a great attraction to move into dangerous situations. People climb Everest. It is a deep meditation; they may or may not understand this. Mountaineering is of great importance. Climbing mountains is dangerous – the more dangerous it is, the more beautiful. You will have glimpses, great glimpses of egolessness. Whenever the danger is very close, the mind stops. The mind can think only when you are not in danger; it has nothing to say in danger. Danger makes you spontaneous, and in that spontaneity you suddenly know that you are not the ego.Or – these will be for different people, because people are different – if you have an aesthetic heart, then beauty will open the doors. Just seeing a beautiful woman or a man passing by, just for a single moment a flash of beauty, and suddenly the ego disappears. You are overwhelmed.Or seeing a lotus in the pond, or seeing the sunset or a bird on the wing – anything that triggers your inner sensitivity, anything that possesses you for the moment so deeply that you forget yourself, that you are and yet you are not, that you abandon yourself – then too the ego slips. It is a fiction; you have to carry it. If you forget it for a moment, it slips.And it is good that there are a few moments when it slips and you have a glimpse of the true and the real. It is because of these glimpses that religion has not died. It is not because of the priests – they have done everything to kill it. It is not because of the so-called religious, those who go to the church and the mosque and the temple. They are not religious at all, they are pretenders.Religion has not died, because of these few moments which happen more or less to almost everybody. Take more note of them, imbibe the spirit of those moments more, allow those moments more, create spaces for those moments to happen more. This is the true way to seek godliness. Not to be in the ego is to be godly.The third question:Osho,Why do you emphasize the importance of herenow so much?Because there is nothing else. Here is the only space, now is the only time. Beyond the herenow, there is nothing. Two thousand years ago, a great Jewish master, Hillel, wrote a little poem in Aramaic. The poem is this:“If I’m not for myself,Then who can be for me?And if I’m only for myself,Then what am I?And if not now,When?”It is a beautiful statement: if not now, then when? Tomorrow? But the tomorrow never comes.Hence I emphasize the herenow. Don’t let this moment slip by unused, unlived, unpenetrated; squeeze all that you can out of it. Live it passionately and with intensity, so you need not repent later on that you missed your life.It was after the Second World War; the war had ended. Joe Dink was still in Japan waiting to be discharged. His wife, Irma Dink, was wild with anxiety and jealousy because she read about the goings on between the American soldiers and the Japanese girls.Finally she could stand it no longer, and she wrote her husband, “Joe, hurry up and come back. What do those girls have, anyway, that the American girls don’t?”“Not a thing,” wrote back Joe. “But what they have got, they have got here.”And that is the most important thing. The question is of here and now.And the last question:Osho,What is a miracle?It depends. To me, everything is a miracle. I never come across anything that is not a miracle; only miracles exist. Everything is such a surprise, it is so unbelievable! But if your eyes are closed, if your eyes are full of dust, if your mind is too knowledgeable, if you think you know all, then nothing is a miracle.To know “I don’t know anything” makes everything a miracle. It depends on your inner state, it depends on you. And to live a life without miracles is not to live at all. You can have a million miracles every day, you are entitled to have them. But because you don’t know how to connect yourself with the miraculous, you are being cheated by stupid people.If somebody produces a Swiss-made watch and you think this is a miracle, then you become victims of ordinary magicians. Don’t be befooled. The seed sprouting into leaves is a miracle – not somebody producing a Swiss-made watch out of nothing. That is just a trick, a very ordinary trick; street magicians are doing it all over the world. It is just that they are just simple people, they are not cunning people, otherwise you would have worshipped them.While exploring the wilds of South America, a man was captured by savages. They were dancing excitedly around before killing him when the explorer had a bright idea. He would baffle them with magic. Taking a cigarette lighter from his pocket, he shouted, “I make fire!”With a flick of the thumb, the lighter burst into flame. The savages fell back and gazed in wonder.“Magic!” cried the explorer.“It certainly is,” said the chief. “It is the only time I ever saw a lighter work on the first try.”It depends on you, what you call a miracle. As far as I am concerned, there is nothing else except miracles. And drop these stupid kinds of miracles.Mulla Nasruddin and his wife were sitting one Sunday listening to the radio, when this faith healer comes on and he says, “If you have a part of your body you want healed, place one hand on the radio and the other hand on the afflicted part.”The wife placed one hand on the radio and the other on her heart. The Mulla placed one hand on the radio and the other on his appendage.So the wife said, “Mulla, he’s trying to cure the sick, not raise the dead.”Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first words of the gospel according to John read:John 11 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.3 All things were made by him and without him was not any thing made that was made.4 In him was life; and life was the light of men.5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.7 The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.8 He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.11 He came unto his own, and his own received him not.12 But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.16 And of his fullness have all we received, and grace for grace.17 For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.I will speak on Christ, but not on Christianity. Christianity has nothing to do with Christ. In fact Christianity is anti-Christ, just as Buddhism is anti-Buddha and Jainism anti-Mahavira. Christ has something in him which cannot be organized: the very nature of it is rebellion and a rebellion cannot be organized. The moment you organize it, you kill it. Then the dead corpse remains. You can worship it, but you cannot be transformed by it. You can carry the load for centuries and centuries, but it will only burden you, it will not liberate you. That’s why from the beginning, let it be absolutely clear: I am all for Christ, but not even a small part of me is for Christianity. If you want Christ, you have to go beyond Christianity. But if you cling too much to Christianity, you will not be able to understand Christ. Christ is beyond all churches.Christ is the very principle of religion. In Christ all the aspirations of humanity are fulfilled. He is a rare synthesis. Ordinarily a human being lives in agony, anguish, anxiety, pain, and misery. If you look at Krishna, he has moved to the other polarity: he lives in ecstasy. There is no agony left, the anguish has disappeared. You can love him, you can dance with him for a while, but the bridge will be missing. You are in agony, he is in ecstasy. Where is the bridge?Buddha has gone even farther away. He is neither in agony nor in ecstasy. He is absolutely quiet and calm. He is so far away that you can look at him, but you cannot believe that he is. It looks like a myth, maybe a wish fulfillment of humanity. How can such a man walk on this earth so transcendental of all agony and ecstasy? He goes so far away.Jesus is the culmination of all aspiration. He is in agony as you are, as every human being is born: in agony on the cross. He is in the ecstasy that sometimes a Krishna achieves: he celebrates, he is a song, a dance. And he is also transcendence. There are moments, when you come closer and closer to him, when you will see that his innermost being is neither the cross nor his celebration, but transcendence. That’s the beauty of Christ: there exists a bridge. You can move toward him by and by, and he can lead you toward the unknown – and so slowly that you will not even be aware when you cross the boundary, when you enter the unknown from the known, when the world disappears and God appears. You can trust him because he is so like you, and yet so unlike. You can believe in him because he is part of your agony: you can understand his language.That’s why Jesus became a great milestone in the history of consciousness. It is not just coincidental that Jesus’ birth has become the most important date in history. It has to be so. Before Christ, another world; after Christ, a totally different world has existed: a demarcation in the consciousness of man. There are so many calendars, so many ways, but the calendar that is based on Christ is the most significant. With him something has changed in man, with him something has penetrated the consciousness of man.Buddha is beautiful, superb, but not of this world; Krishna is lovable, but still the bridge is missing. Christ is the bridge; hence I have chosen to talk on Christ. But always remember, I am not talking on Christianity. The Church is always anti-Christ. Once you try to organize a rebellion, the rebellion is subsided. You cannot organize a storm. How can you organize a rebellion? A rebellion is true and alive only when it is a chaos.With Jesus, a chaos entered human consciousness. Now the organization is not to be done on the outside, in the society; the order has to be brought into the innermost core of your being. Christ has brought a chaos. Now out of that chaos you have to be born totally new, an order coming from the innermost being – not a Church but a new man, not a new society but a new human consciousness. That is the message.These words from the gospel of St. John – you must have heard them so many times, you must have read them so many times – they have become almost useless, meaningless, insignificant, trivial. They have been repeated so many times that now no bell rings within you when you hear them. But these words are tremendously potential. You may have lost the significance of them, but if you become a little alert, aware, the meaning of these words can be reclaimed. It is going to be a struggle to reclaim the meaning, just as you reclaim land from the ocean.Christianity has covered these beautiful words with so many interpretations that the original freshness is lost – lost through the mouths of the priests who are simply repeating like parrots without knowing what they are saying, without knowing, without hesitating, without trembling before the sacredness of these words. They are simply repeating words like mechanical robots. Their gestures are false because everything has been trained.Once I was invited to a Christian theological college. I was surprised when they took me around the college. It is one of the greatest theological colleges in India. Every year they prepare two hundred to three hundred Christian priests and missionaries, a five-year training. Everything has to be taught: even how to stand in the pulpit, how to speak, where to give more emphasis, how to move your hands. Everything has to be taught. But then everything becomes false, then the person is just making empty gestures.These words are like fire, but through centuries of repetition, parrot-like repetition, much dust has gathered around the fire. My effort will be to uncover them again. Be very alert because we will be treading on a well-known path in a very unknown way, treading on very well-known territory with a very different, totally new attitude. The territory is going to be old. My effort will be to give you a new consciousness to see it. I would like to lend you my eyes so that you can see the old things in a new light. And when you have new eyes, everything becomes new.Listen:In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.The Upanishads can feel poor, the Vedas can be jealous: In the beginning was the Word… What does it mean when the gospel says “in the beginning”? Christians have been interpreting it as if “in the beginning” means that there was a beginning. They have been using and interpreting these words “in the beginning” as if they show something about the beginning of time. But without time, how can there be a beginning? To begin, time will be needed in the first place. If time was not in existence, what do you mean by “in the beginning”?“In the beginning” is part of time and cannot precede time, so “in the beginning” does not mean that there was a day when God created the world. That’s absolutely foolish. “In the beginning” is just a way of speaking. “In the beginning” does not mean in the beginning at all because there has never been a beginning, and there can be no end. God is eternal, his creativity is eternal. It has always been so and it will always be so.Because of these words “in the beginning,” much controversy has continued for centuries. There have even been foolish priests and bishops who have tried to fix the exact date: four thousand four years before Christ, on a certain Monday, the world started. And what was God doing before that? Eternity must have preceded it; four thousand years is nothing. What was he doing before that? Not doing anything at all? Then why did he suddenly start the creation on a certain date?It has been a problem, but the problem arises because of a wrong interpretation. No, “in the beginning” is just a way of speaking. One has to start from somewhere, the gospel has to begin from somewhere. Life is eternity; life never starts from anywhere, but every story has to start and every scripture has to start. Arbitrarily we have to choose a certain word and you could not choose better: in the beginning. “In the beginning” simply says that we don’t know.But from the very beginning, if there was any beginning, God has been creative. Let me try to say it in a different way: God is creativity. You can even drop the word God. In fact, the gospel itself does not want to use the word God. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.In the beginning was the Word… What word are you talking about? What is this word? Somebody who has known truth knows well that to name God is futile. There is no name, no definition, and all words are small, they cannot contain the whole. “The word” is simply a way of indicating the nameless, the unknown: In the beginning was the Word…Jews preceded Jesus, Jesus was the very culmination. The Judaic spirit came to a fulfillment in Jesus. Of course they denied Jesus; that is another story. Sometimes it happens that somebody among you attains to the fulfillment of the whole race, but the fulfillment is so vast and so great and you are so low that you cannot believe it, you have to deny it.Christ rose high. Jews had been waiting for centuries for this man. Look at the irony! They had been waiting for centuries for this man to happen. All their hope was with this man who would transform their lives and who would bring the kingdom of God on earth. And then this man happened, and they themselves who had been waiting for him could not believe, could not trust. What happened? They became too addicted to waiting itself. Now if this is the man, what will they do? Then the waiting will have to stop, will have to be stopped. They had waited so long; in fact waiting itself had become their whole activity, their whole religious activity – waiting for the son of God to come. Now suddenly this man is there and says, “I am here.” But now they would rather cling to their waiting than look at this man because to look at this man will be the end; now there is nothing else to wait for. The future disappears, hope disappears, desire disappears. This man will kill all hopes, all desires, all future. That is too much! The old mind has become addicted to its own waiting, the old mind has become addicted to its own misery, frustration; now it is too much.It happens: if you have been ill a very long time, by and by you start having a certain investment in the illness. You become afraid – if you become healthy again, fear arises because you will have to go to the office again, to the marketplace. For these few years you have been resting, there has been no anxiety, you could relax. Now again the responsibility. And not only that, for these few years that you have been ill everybody has been sympathetic to you, almost everybody tried to love you. You have become the center of your family, friends, acquaintances; everybody has been kind. To move again in the harsh and cruel world, the mind recoils; it doesn’t seem worth it.If a race has been waiting for so long… And Jews have always been waiting; they are still waiting, and the man has happened and gone. But they have invested too much in waiting. Their waiting has become their prayer, their synagogues are nothing but waiting rooms for the messiah to come. And he has been here! And I tell you, if he comes again – though I don’t think he will commit the same mistake again – if he comes again, Jews still will not accept him because what will happen to their waiting? They have lived too much in it; their imprisonment has become their home and they have decorated it. Now to move in the harsh, open sky – where sometimes the sun is burning so much, and sometimes it is raining, and sometimes it is cold or it is hot – is dangerous. They are sheltered.In the beginning was the Word… Jews have been insistently emphasizing that God’s name should not be asserted because it is something to keep deep down in the heart. To assert it is to make it profane, to say it is to make it part of the ordinary world and language. To say it again and again is to make it lose its meaning and significance. If you love somebody and the whole day you say, “I love you, I love you” many times – and you enjoy saying it – in the beginning the other person may be happy, but sooner or later the thing is going to be too much. “I love you, I love you”: you are making a beautiful word useless. Don’t use it too much; then it is significant, then it carries some meaning. In fact, those who are really in love may not use it at all. If the love is not shown by itself, it cannot be said; there is no need to say it. And if it is shown by itself, what is the need to say it? There should be a few key words which you use rarely, very rarely. They should be kept for rare occasions when you touch a peak.The Jews have always insisted that the name of God should not be spoken. It was the custom in the old days, before Christ, that only the high priest of the Temple of Solomon was allowed to use it – and once a year only. Nobody else was allowed. So “the word” is a code, the code for God’s name. Something has to be used to indicate it and this is a beautiful code, “the word.” They don’t use any word, they simply say “the word.” The same has been done in India also. If you ask Sikhs, the followers of Nanak, they will say Nam, the name. They don’t say any name, they simply say “the name.” It means the same as “the word.”Only the high priest was allowed, and the high priest had to purify himself. The whole year he would purify himself and fast and pray and get ready. Then one day in the year the whole community would gather. Then too the high priest would not utter the word before the crowd. He would go into the innermost shrine of the temple; the doors would be closed. Deep in silence where nobody could hear – the crowd would be waiting outside and there was no possibility for them to hear – he would assert the name in such sanctity, deep love, intimacy. He was asserting the name for the whole community.It was a blissful day when the name was asserted. Then for the whole year the name was not to be brought to the lips. You have to carry it in the heart; it has to become like a seed. If you bring the seed out of the soil again and again, it will never sprout. Keep it deep down. Water it, protect it, but keep it deep in darkness so that it sprouts, dies and is reborn.The name of God has to be kept deep in the heart. You should not even hear it. It should be so deep in your being, in your subliminal depths, that it never even reaches your own mind – that is the meaning of the high priest going into the innermost shrine. Nobody hears, the doors are closed, and he asserts the name once. The meaning is this: go into the deepest shrine of the temple of your heart, purify yourself, and once in a while, when you feel that you are pure, when you feel the fragrance of your being – when you are at the peak of your energy, when you are really alive and not an iota of sadness lingers around you; you are happy, tremendously happy, ecstatically happy and tranquil and silent, and you are in a state where you can thank, where you can feel grateful – then go into the innermost shrine. Your mind will be left outside: that is the crowd. You move deeper into the heart and there you assert so silently that even your mind will not be able to hear it. There “the word” has to be carried.In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. There is no difference between God and his name. He has no name, he himself is his name. His “is-ness” is his name, his existence is his name. A child is born. What name does he have? – no name. But he is: “is-ness” is his name. Then for utilitarian purposes we give a name to him, and by and by he will forget his “is-ness” and he will become identified with the name. If somebody insults the name he will be angry, if somebody praises the name he will be very happy – and the name never belonged to him!God is the child, always the child, always the innocence of the world. He has no name. That is the meaning of this saying: …and the Word was with God. Is-ness, existence, being: …and the Word was God. His name is his being. Don’t repeat his name, move into his being; that is the only way to attain him. In fact forget about him. Move into your own being and “is-ness,” and you will attain him.All things were made by him and without him was not any thing made that was made.God is creativity. To say “God is the creator” is already to falsify him, but to say “God is creativity” will not be understandable. Then people will think, “Then why use ‘God’? Just ‘creativity’ will do.” We say “God is the creator,” but because of this expression much nonsense arises. Then when did he create the world? Then why didn’t he create it before? Why couldn’t he create it before? Why did he create it at the time he created it? Why has he created it the way it is? Why can’t he improve it?So much misery, so much suffering in the world, and he is the creator? Then God becomes the culprit. Then we feel angry: “If he is the creator, he is responsible for all. Why can’t he change it?” Then all sorts of problems arise, and theologians go on answering these questions.In the first place, problems need not arise if you look at the thing directly. God is not the creator, he is creativity. Creativity is his being. He has always been creating; he cannot be on a holiday from his creativity. That is not possible; you cannot go on a holiday from your innermost nature – no. Whatever you can leave is not your nature; that which you cannot leave is your nature.God’s nature is creativity. He has always been creating. And there is no other way. The only way the world can exist is how it exists. It is the only way. Whatever you think or condemn or appreciate is meaningless. It is like going to a rose and asking, “Why do you only have so many petals? If a few more were there, what is wrong?” But if a few more were there, the same question would have again been relevant.Whatever the world, the mind will always create questions. So those who know drop the mind and accept the world. There are two ways: either accept the mind and be against the world, or accept the world and drop the mind. This is the only way things are and can be. There is nobody you can complain to, and there is nobody who can listen to your complaints and improve things. God is creativity, not a creator.All things were made by him – all things really are made of him, not by him – and without him was not any thing made that was made. And not only in the past: even now, whenever a thing is created he is the creator, you are only the instrument.You paint a picture or you write a song. What do you think – you are the creator? In a moment of deep creativity you disappear, God again starts functioning. So it is not a question of the past; wherever and whenever creativity happens, it is always through him. Ask all the great poets. They will say that whenever great poems have descended on them they were, at the most, passive receivers. It happened; they were not the creators.The idea that you can create is simply your illusion. All creativity belongs to him. Even through you, whatever is created, he is the creator. To understand this is a great illumination. To understand this the ego disappears; to understand this is to allow him to take total possession of you. You become an instrument: in small things, great things become possible. Then he moves through you. If you dance, he dances. You are at the most the field where he dances. When you sing, he sings. You are at the most the flute, an empty flute, which just becomes a passage to it. At the most you can allow; it is always he who is doing things.This is what I mean when I say float, when I say flow with the river. Allow his creativity to flow through you. Don’t impose any pattern on him, don’t impose your will. If you can allow yourself to be totally possessed, there is no misery and you are no longer a human being. The Jesus within you has become Christ the very moment you allow total possession. Then the Jesus disappears and the Christ appears.Christ is the principle, Jesus is the son of the carpenter Joseph. Jesus disappeared at a certain moment and Christ entered. “Christ” simply means that now the man is no longer man, the man is God-possessed. Just as when somebody goes mad and you say, “The man is maddened,” you can say, “The man is goddened.” Now the man is no longer there.In him was life; and life was the light of men.God is the only existence, the only being: the only life there is, the only dance there is, the only movement, the only energy there is. In the ocean and in the waves, in the illusory world and in the truth, in the dreams and the dreamer, the only energy there is, is God. All is he, he is all. In him was life; and life was the light of men. And whenever you come to understand this – this, that he is the only life – your life becomes enlightened. Then you are full of light. God is life. If you understand this your whole life becomes full of light, his life becomes light in your understanding. When his life is reflected within you, it becomes light.And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.And the light is shining all around you. Life is all around you: in the bird, in the tree, in the river. Life is all around you, there is nothing else. You are living in the ocean of life: out and in, within and without, only life is bubbling – a great stream of life, and you are just like a fish in it.And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. But you don’t comprehend it. You are still identified with darkness, your eyes are still closed. You are blind.This is a beautiful thing to understand:There was a man sent from God…This should be so. These are parables, but I say they should be so, because how will a man who has lived in darkness be able to come to light by himself, alone? A master will be needed.If you are fast asleep, how will you awaken yourself? It seems impossible. Somebody who is already awake will be needed to shake you out of your sleep, to give you a jerk so your needle of unconsciousness jumps out of the groove and takes a new route. For a single moment you open your eyes and you look.There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.Unless God himself is going to do it, it seems almost impossible that you will be able to realize what is what. So all the religions of the world… Hindus say avatar. They say, “Man himself is so helpless that God has to descend.” Avatar means descendence of God. He has to come himself to awaken you.This simply shows how deeply you are in sleep, nothing else – not that you have to make it a fanatic belief that God comes down. It simply shows that you are so fast asleep that unless God comes down, there seems to be no possibility for you. And if sometimes you awaken, it simply shows that God must have come down to awaken you.There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.I am here. If you can look into me, you will come to trust in things that you have not been able to realize yourself. Through me you can have a little glimpse of that which is still unseen – and God is the unseen. Somebody is needed who can be a witness, who can bear witness, who can say, “Yes, I know him,” who can resound in your depths, who can give you a taste by his touch: “Yes, God exists.” God can never be just a belief because a belief will be impotent. It will be intellectual, heady, but it won’t transform you. You can carry the belief for your whole life; it will be a part of your junkyard, it won’t change you.Trust, faith, is different. Belief is intellectual, trust is existential. But how can you come to trust unless you come close to a man who can bear witness, who can say from his very depths of being: “Yes, God is”? If you allow yourself to become vulnerable to him and his being stirs something within you, then a trust is born.The same came for a witness – John became a witness – to bear witness of the Light… He has known the light, he is coming from the light. And remember, whoever knows the light also knows that he is coming from the light because there is no other way of being here.You may not know it, but you also come from the light. That is the very source, the seed and the source of all life. You may be unaware, you may have forgotten, you may have become completely oblivious of the fact of where you come from. The source is so far away that you don’t remember at all, but whoever within you will become aware of the light will immediately become aware: “I am coming from him.” In fact he will immediately become aware: “I am him, I am he, my father and I are one.” As above, so below. He will claim, just as the seers of the Upanishads have claimed: “Aham brahmasmi, I am that.” Or he will say, like Mansoor: “Ana’l haq, I am the truth.” Or like Jesus: “I and my father are one.” Jesus says, “If you trust me, you have trusted him who has sent me; if you love me, you have loved the one that you know not.”The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. John is a door, a window, from whom you can have a glimpse of the faraway Himalayan peaks.He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.This has to be understood, this is one of the really significant things. Whenever a man like Jesus comes, he is always preceded by someone who prepares the ground. It has to be so because a ready ground is needed. Life is a deep continuity; everything is related, it is one whole. John came to prepare the ground because there were many weeds. Grass was growing, a thousand and one types of trees trespassed the whole land. They had to be cut, weeds removed, the soil changed. Only then could the gardener come and sow the new seeds.Whenever there lives a man like Jesus, he is always preceded. So the gospel says: He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light – he had come to prepare the ground.He came unto his own, and his own received him not.He has come to help; he has come to fulfill the aspiration of ages. He has come unto his own, but: …his own received him not. This is something very ironical, but it has always happened. John was born a Jew: Jews would not accept him. Buddha was born a Hindu: Hindus would not accept him. This is how it has always been. Why? – because whenever a man like Jesus or Buddha is born, he is such a rebellion that all that is established is shaken.An ordinary man lives in the past; for the ordinary man, the past is more important because the past is already established, grounded. He has much at stake in the past, much investment in the past. For example, if I suddenly come to you and tell you that the way you have been praying is wrong, and you have prayed that way for fifty years, now there is much at stake. To believe me will be to believe that your fifty years have been useless. To believe me will be to disbelieve fifty years of your own life. To believe me will be to believe that you have been a fool for fifty years. This is too much; you will fight, you will defend.And when it is a question of a race… Thousands of years the race has been doing certain things, and then a Jesus comes and he throws things upside down. Everything is again a chaos. He melts all that is established, uproots all that was thought to be very significant, creates confusion. He has to because he has now brought you the right thing. But you have been believing that something else was right for so many centuries. What to choose: Jesus or your own long past? What to choose: Jesus or the tradition?Do you know where the word tradition comes from? It comes from the same root as the word trade. It also comes from the same root as the word traitor. Tradition is a trade, it is a business – and tradition is also a betrayal. Tradition believes in certain things that are not true, tradition is a traitor to truth, so whenever truth comes there is conflict. You can see this here: I am born a Jaina, but Jainas won’t accept me. Here you can find Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, Hindus, Buddhists, but very few Jainas – impossible for them to accept me. He came unto his own, and his own received him not.Jainas are very much against me. Hindus are not so against me, but still they are also, a little. But Christians – no. Jews – not at all. The further away you go, the less is the antagonism. I am born a Jaina; Jainas are a small community surrounded by Hindus everywhere. Jainas are almost Hindus. So Jainas will be very antagonistic, Hindus a little less, and Mohammedans, Christians and Jews not so much. The further away you go, the less will be the antagonism. Hence you can understand why so many people from so many countries are here, and not so many Indians. With Indians there is a problem: their tradition is at stake. If they believe me, they will have to lose their tradition.That’s why you will see more young people near me and fewer old people; young people do not have much investment in their past. In fact a young man is looking for the future, an old man looking to the past. A young man has a future, an old man has only a past. The future means death; his whole life is past. So whenever a man of seventy comes to me it is very difficult to change him because seventy years will be fighting me. When a small boy of seven comes, a little Siddhartha, there is nothing to fight. He can surrender absolutely, there is nothing: he has no past, just the future. He can be adventurous, he can take the risk; he has nothing to lose. But an old man: he has much to lose. That’s why if a pundit comes – one who knows too much without knowing it – he will have great fight, he will have all sorts of arguments, he will defend himself. He has much to lose. But when an innocent man comes – who says, “I don’t know much” – he is easy, he is ready to let go.He came unto his own, and his own received him not.But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.And the Word was made flesh…Very few people came to him. John lived near the River Jordan in the wilderness, outside the cities and towns. People who really wanted to be transformed would seek him and come to him. Very few came, but those who came: …to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name. Those who could trust were transformed. He prepared the ground. These were the first prepared people to whom Jesus was to appear.And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.And the Word was made flesh – one of the most beautiful sentences in the gospel – and dwelt among us. Jesus is as if “the word” has become flesh; God has become man. The secret has become open, the hidden has become unhidden, the mystery has become an open truth. All the doors of the temple are open. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us… John created the situation because “the word” can become flesh only when the listener is ready.If you are ready, I can tell you what I carry within my heart. If you are not ready, it is impossible to utter it; it will be absolutely useless. In fact, it cannot be brought out unless you are ready. When your heart is ready, that very readiness will bring the truth that I carry within my heart. Then the heart can talk to the heart, depth can respond to depth.John created a group, a small group of chosen people who would be able to trust, who would be able to see with the eyes of trust. Only then is Jesus possible. Remember this: if the listener is ready, only then can the truth be uttered.I was traveling in this country for many years, all year round, just to find people who would be able to transform themselves so that whatever I carry within me can become flesh, it can be uttered. Now people ask me why I don’t go anywhere. That work is done. Now those who are ready will come to me. Now this is the only way.That’s why I don’t want masses and crowds to come here. If they come, I will not be able to utter that which I carry, and I would like to share it before I leave. If you are ready, then and only then can something of the beyond descend on you.And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father)… This is really something to be understood because Christians have been misinterpreting it continuously. They go on saying Christ is the only begotten son of God. Yes it is true in a way, but not true in the way Christians say it.Buddha is also the only begotten son of God, and Krishna is also the only begotten son of God. Remember, I emphasize: the only begotten son of God. And I am also the only begotten son of God, and you are also the only begotten son of God. Then why say “only begotten”? If all are his sons, why say it?It has some significance, some meaning; it has to be said. It is just like this: you fall in love with a woman and you say, “You are the only woman, the only beautiful woman in the world.” Not that this is true, but still in a certain moment of love it is true. It is not an ordinary fact; it is a truth. When you say to a woman, “You are the only beautiful woman in the world who has ever existed or will ever exist,” that doesn’t mean that you know all the women who have existed in the world before or that you know that all the women who are going to exist will not be more beautiful than this. How can you know, how can you compare? This is not a logical fact; this is a poetic realization.In that moment of love it is not a question of statistics. Some logician can raise the argument, “Wait! Do you know all the women that exist right now in the world? Have you looked, searched, and have you found that this is the most beautiful woman in the world? What are you saying? You are using comparative language.” But you will say, “I’m not worried about other women, and this is not comparative. I am not comparing; I am simply asserting a truth about my feeling. It is not a fact of the outside world; it is a truth of my inner feeling. This is how I feel. This is the most beautiful woman in the world. I am not saying anything about the woman. I am saying something about my heart. I don’t know all the women, there is no need.” It is not comparison. It is a simple feeling. You are so possessed by the feeling that not to say this will be wrong.When you love Jesus, he is the only begotten son of God. So this sentence is good, it says: …the glory as of the only begotten of the Father. “As” – as if he is the only begotten son of God. Those who fall in love with Jesus, for them he is the only begotten son of God. They are not saying anything about Buddha or against Buddha. They are not comparing.That’s what I mean when I say Buddha is also the only begotten son, you are also. Everybody in this world is unique. Once you attain your inner realization, you are the only begotten son of God – as if the whole existence exists for you and only for you. The trees flower for you and the birds sing for you and the rivers flow for you and clouds gather together for you. You become the sole center of existence when you attain.If you fall in love with a Buddha, a Jesus, or anybody, these assertions of lovers should not be taken as statements of fact. They are poetic realizations. You cannot argue with them; they are not arguments at all. They assert something of the heart.And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…full of grace and truth. Wherever truth is, there is grace; and wherever there is grace, there is truth. Try to understand this. You can be graceful only when you are true. If you have a certain lie within you, that lie will disturb your grace, that lie will be poisonous to your heart because that lie has to be hidden, suppressed. Nobody is to be allowed to know it. You cannot be open; you will be shut by the lie.If you deceive, you cannot be free and flowing. You will be stuck with your deception. So I don’t say that lies are bad because they are harmful to others – no. They are bad because you will miss your own grace. Deceptions are not bad because you deceive others. Deceptions are bad because they will disturb your flow and you will not be flowing. You will start freezing, in many places you will be stuck, dead. You will have blocks in your being.Look at a child; every child has grace. Then where does it disappear to? When every child brings grace into the world, where does it disappear? By and by it is lost, and then everybody becomes graceless, ugly. It is rare that somebody is capable of being as graceful as he was when he was a child. What happens? Why is a child graceful?Have you seen a child who you can say is ugly? No, that never exists. A child, and ugly, is impossible. All children are beautiful, unconditionally beautiful. They are flowing and they are true. When they want to cry, they cry; when they want to laugh, they laugh. When they are angry, they are angry and when they are loving, they are loving. They are true to the moment, they are never deceiving. But soon they learn politics. Soon they will learn: “Mother likes it if I smile. It is easier to persuade her, it is easier to manipulate her if I smile.” A small child is becoming a politician. He waits; he may be angry inside, but when the mother comes he smiles because that is the only way to get the ice cream. Now the smile is false, and a false smile is ugly because the whole being is not in it, it is something painted from without. Then more and more things will be painted, more and more personalities will gather around and the essence will be lost. Then you become ugly. Truth and grace are always together. Truth is grace, and grace is truth.The gospel catches the exact point of Jesus’ being: truth and grace. He was true, profoundly true to the very core – utmost, utterly true. That’s how he got into trouble. To live with a society which is absolutely untrue, to live with it with utter truthfulness, is to get into trouble.And the grace – he was not a politician and he was not a priest. He simply loved life and lived it. He was not here to preach anything, he had no dogma to inculcate, he had no ideas to force on people. In fact he lived a pure, graceful, flowing life, and he was infectious. With whomever he moved, whoever came into contact with him was magnetized, hypnotized. This man was a child, an innocent child. People were attracted. People left their houses, their jobs – they simply started following him.He was not a preacher, and he was not giving any political revolution to the world, and he was not giving any reformation to the world. He was just giving you a way to live flowingly, and that was the trouble because Jews are one of the most suppressed races in the world. Very suppressive, moralistic, puritans. That became the troublesome thing. They live by principles. They live by the law, and the law has to be followed. Of course they are very successful people in the world. If you live by the law, you will be very successful. If you live by love, you are bound to be a failure. It is miserable, unfortunate, but it is so. In the world, law succeeds, love fails. In God, love succeeds, law fails – but who bothers about God?Jews are very lawful, very good citizens, and wherever they move they are always successful because they always move by the law. They live by arithmetic. That is why they get most of the Nobel Prizes in the world. Nobody can compete with them – very talented. In business, they are successful. In politics, whatever they do, they do exactly the right thing. But they are very formalistic puritans, in a deep bondage with the mind. A deep hangover in the mind continues.And Jesus started talking about law. The gospel says:And of his fullness have all we received, and grace for grace.For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.…The law was given by Moses. Moses is the foundation of Judaism. Of course it was needed because unless law is established, love will not be possible. Law is a must, it is a necessity, but it is not enough.Moses gave the law to the world. The people were primitive, uncultured; they had no sense of society. Moses created a society, and one of the most enduring societies: the Jews. In fact Moses must have been a great genius because he provided the law, and Jews have survived all sorts of catastrophes. He must have given them a very permanent base. But he was a lawgiver, just as Manu was the lawgiver to Hindus. Moses is the Manu of Jews; he gave the law.Let me tell you a small story. It happened…Moses was passing by and he came across a man who was praying. But he was doing such an absurd prayer, not only absurd, but insulting to God, that Moses stopped. It was absolutely unlawful. It is better not to pray than to pray in such a way because the man was saying things which are impossible to believe. The man was saying, “Let me come close to you my God, my Lord, and I promise that I will clean your body when it is dirty. Even if lice are there, I will take them away. I am a good shoemaker, I will make you perfect shoes. You are walking in such ancient shoes, tatty, gone completely dirty. Nobody looks after you, my Lord. I will look after you. When you are ill, I will serve and give you medicine. And I am a good cook also!”He was doing this type of prayer. So Moses said, “Stop! Stop your nonsense! What are you saying? To whom are you talking, to God? He has lice on his body? And his clothes are dirty and you will clean them? Nobody is there to look after him, and you will be his cook? Who have you learned this prayer from?”The man said, “I have not learned it from anywhere. I am a very poor and uneducated man and I don’t know how to pray. I have made it up myself and these are the things that I know. Lice trouble me very much, so he must be in trouble. And sometimes the food is not good; my wife is not a good cook, and my stomach aches. He must also be suffering. This is just my own experience that has become my prayer. But if you know the right prayer, teach me.”So Moses taught him the right prayer. The man bowed down to Moses, thanked him, tears of deep gratitude flowing, and he went away. Moses was very happy. He thought that he had done a good deed. He looked at the sky to see what God thought about it and God was very angry!He said, “I have sent you there to bring people closer to me, but you have thrown away one of my greatest lovers. Now he will be doing the right prayer, but it won’t be a prayer at all because prayer has nothing to do with the law. It is love. Love is a law unto itself; it needs no other law.”Moses is the lawgiver. He founded the society, he brought the Ten Commandments. Those Ten Commandments have remained the foundation of the whole Western world: Judaic, Christian, Mohammedan – all three religions depend on the law of Moses.So the whole world has known only two lawgivers: the East knows Manu and the West knows Moses. Hindus, Jainas, Buddhists have been supplied the law by Manu, the law has been given by Manu; and Moses has given to Mohammedans, Christians, Jews. These two lawgivers have created the whole world. And there must be something: both are M: Manu and Moses. Then comes Marx who is the third M. China, Russia, he has given the law to them. These are the three great M’s – lawgivers.For the law was given by Moses… Law is for the society, love is for the individual. Law is how you behave with others, love is how you behave with yourself. Love is an inner flowering, law is an outward performance. Because you live with people, you have to be lawful; but that is not enough – good, but not enough. If a person is simply lawful, he will be dead. He will be a good citizen, but he will be dead. Law can be the foundation of the society, but it cannot be the very building. You can live on the law, but you cannot live in it. It has no space for that. For that, love is needed.Jesus was the fulfillment of Moses. What Moses started, Jesus was completing, but Jews denied him. What Manu started, Buddha was completing, but Hindus denied him. Marx still needs a Buddha or a Jesus in the world. Someday he will come, but communists will deny him.Because people have become law-oriented, love looks against law. In fact, law is needed only so that love can become possible. Law is needed so that people can live peacefully and love. Law is not, in itself, the end; it is the means. Love is the end. But when people become too law-abiding, love itself seems to be unlawful. They become afraid of love because who knows? – you are moving on a dangerous path.Love is mad, law is calculation. Law is dependable, the society can decide on it. But love is not reliable. Who will decide? Love knows no rules. It is not arithmetic, it is poetry. It is dangerous; love is always wild, and law is social.Remember this: be lawful, but don’t end there, otherwise you lived in vain. In fact you lived not. Be lawful because if you are not lawful you will be in trouble. You have to be in the society, you have to follow certain rules, but they are only rules. There is nothing ultimate about them, there is nothing from God about them.Let me tell you this: the Ten Commandments were created by Moses, they were not from God. They cannot be; those Ten Commandments are human rules of the game. Don’t steal because property is individual. But if the game changes and property becomes social property, “Don’t steal” will not be much of a law. Or if someday the world becomes really affluent, there will be so much that nobody steals – stealing is possible only if poverty is there. People are hungry and poor; they steal. But if the society is affluent, as it is going to be someday, and there are too many things – whatever you need, more is available – who would be a thief? Then the commandment will disappear; there will be no need for it. The Ten Commandments are social.Moses brings the law, Jesus brings truth, grace, love. Love is from God, law is from the mind. Love is of God, law is of man. And with love, grace happens, and with love, truth. Remember this because to understand Jesus is to understand the phenomenon of love. To understand Jesus is to understand the intricacies of grace. To understand Jesus is to understand truth. Remember, if you can understand truth, truth liberates. There is no other liberation.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Who prepared the way for you?Nobody has prepared the way for me, and neither am I preparing the way for anybody. This has to be understood.There are four possibilities. One, the oldest and the most used, is what happened in Jesus’ case. John the Baptist prepared the way: the disciple preceded the master. It has its own benefits, but it has its own limitations and defects also. It is bound to be so. When the disciple precedes the master he will create limitations which belong to him, and the master will have to function within those limitations. It has its benefits because when the master comes he will not be worried about preparing the ground. The ground will be ready; he can immediately start sowing the seeds. But the ground will be ready according to the disciple. It cannot be according to the master, so he will have to function under limitations. That’s what created the whole trouble in Jesus’ story.John the Baptist is a different type of man from Jesus, a very fiery man, almost in flames – and always in flames. He uses language which fits him, but which can never fit Jesus. Jesus is very silent, very peaceful. John the Baptist is not that type of man. He is a prophet, Jesus is a messiah, and the difference between a prophet and a messiah is great. A prophet is a religious man, deeply religious, but functioning like a politician: using the language of revolution, using very violent language – arousing the hearts and beings of men, stirring them. A prophet is like an earthquake. A messiah is very soothing, silent like a Himalayan valley: lazy, sleepy. You can rest in a messiah. With a prophet, you will always be on the go.Because of this, John the Baptist used the terminology of politics: revolution, the kingdom of God. And even “kingdom” has to be taken by force. It has to be, in fact, attacked. He was misunderstood because whenever you use the language of the outside world for the inner world, you are bound to be misunderstood. The politicians became afraid: “What kingdom is this man talking about? About what revolution? What does he mean by saying that the kingdom has to be taken by force?” John the Baptist was very impatient. He wanted immediate change, he could not wait. He created the atmosphere in which Jesus had to function. John the Baptist died in imprisonment; he was beheaded by the rulers. He was absolutely misunderstood, but nobody was at fault; he himself was.Because of him – and Jesus was to follow him – Jesus was a disciple of his own disciple. He was initiated by John the Baptist because John the Baptist preceded him. He became linked and then he had to use the same terminology. It was almost certain that he would be misunderstood. John the Baptist died in prison – beheaded. Jesus died on the cross – killed, murdered. He was also talking about the “kingdom” of God. Of course he was not so aggressive, but the very terminology appeared political. He was a very innocent man, nothing to do with politics.But John the Baptist helped in a way. Jesus could work because all the disciples of John the Baptist were ready to receive him; he was not a stranger. John the Baptist had created a small opening, a small clearance in the wilderness of humanity. When Jesus came he was received, there was a home ready for him, a few people receptive to him. That would not have been possible if he had come alone without a predecessor. But the home was made by John the Baptist, and the disciples whom Jesus attracted were attracted by him. That created the trouble.This is the oldest format: the master is preceded by a disciple who functions as a predecessor and prepares the ground. Because of its defects and limitations, there has been another, the opposite.Ramakrishna was succeeded by Vivekananda. He was not preceded by anybody. The master comes first, then follows the disciple. This has its own benefits because the master creates the whole climate, the master creates the whole possibility of growth, how the thing is to go. He gives language, pattern, direction, dimension.But there are defects because the master is infinite, and when the disciple comes he is very finite. Then the disciple has to choose because he cannot move in all directions. The master may be showing all the directions, he may be leading you toward infinity, but when the disciple comes he has to choose, he has to select, and then he forces his pattern.Ramakrishna was succeeded by Vivekananda. Ramakrishna was one of the greatest flowerings that had ever happened; Vivekananda was the prophet. Ramakrishna was the messiah, but Vivekananda set the whole trend. Vivekananda’s own inclinations were extrovert, not introvert. His own inclinations were more toward social reformation, political change. He was more interested in bringing riches to the people, destroying poverty and hunger and starvation. He turned the whole trend around.The Ramakrishna Mission is not true to Ramakrishna; it is true to Vivekananda. Now the Ramakrishna Mission functions as a social service. Whenever there is famine, they are there to serve people. Whenever there is an earthquake, they are there to serve people. Whenever there is a flood, and there is no lack of these things in India, they are there. They are good servants, but Ramakrishna’s inward revolution has completely disappeared into the desert land of Vivekananda.Ramakrishna functioned more freely than Jesus because there was no pattern for him. He lived more spontaneously than Jesus. There was no confinement anywhere; all the directions were open to him. He could fly just like a bird in the sky, no limitations existed. But then comes the disciple. He organizes it. He organizes, of course, in his own way.Both ways have their benefits, both have their defects. Then there is a third possibility which has never been used before. Krishnamurti is the first in the world to have used a third possibility. The third possibility is to deny both: the predecessors and the successors both. It is negative.Krishnamurti’s method is via negativa. So first he denied those who prepared the ground for him. That was the only way to get out of the limitations. He denied the whole Theosophical movement – Annie Besant, Leadbetter. They were the people who prepared the whole ground and worked hard for Krishnamurti. They were the John the Baptists for him. They created a vast opportunity in the whole world for him. But then he looked when he was ready and he saw the defects and the limitations, that the same would be the case as happened with Jesus. He simply denied. He denied that they created a ground or that there was any need to create the ground.While denying them he was aware that he had to deny his messiahship also because if he said that he is the messiah then he could deny the predecessors, but the successors would follow. Then the same trouble would be there as had been with Ramakrishna. So he denied: “There is nobody who has preceded me and there is nobody who is going to succeed me.” He denied Leadbetter, Annie Besant and the Theosophical movement, and for his whole life he has been denying that anybody is going to become his heir or successor.This has its own beauty, but its problems also. You may be free, very free, absolutely free because there is no limitation on either side, before or after – but your freedom is in negativity. You don’t create. Your freedom comes to no fulfillment; it is futile. You don’t help: it is as if somebody is so conscious about not falling ill – he continuously works and remains aware not to fall ill – that he forgets that sometimes he has to also enjoy health. He may not fall ill, but the very awareness “One should not fall ill and should remain aware” becomes an illness of a sort.Krishnamurti is so alert about it – that no bondage should be created anywhere, no fetters should be created anywhere – that he worked hard, but couldn’t help anybody. It is beautiful for himself, but it has not been beneficial for humanity. He is a free man, but his freedom is his alone. That freedom could not become a taste in thousands and thousands of throats; it could not create an urge. He has remained a pinnacle of freedom, but no bridge exists. You can look at him: he is like a beautiful painting or beautiful poetry – but nothing can be done about it, it doesn’t change you. He has broken all the bridges. This is the third possibility, never tried before. He is the first to try it.I have tried the fourth. That also has never been tried. The fourth is that half of my life I have worked as John the Baptist myself, and now half of my life I will function as a Christ. That is the fourth possibility: to prepare the ground and to sow it also, to sow the seeds.There are problems about it also; it is impossible to find a way which has no problems. It has its own benefits, it has its own defects. The benefit is that I am both, so I am, in a way, totally free. Whatever I have done in my first step, I have done knowing perfectly well what the second step is going to be. John the Baptist in me was perfectly aware of the Christ who was going to follow, they were in a deep harmony. They are one person; there is no problem about it. So the John the Baptist in me could not create any limitations for the Jesus to follow: a total freedom.No Vivekananda is going to follow me. I am my own Vivekananda and I am my own John the Baptist, so nobody can put a limitation on me when I am gone. And I am positive: if Krishnamurti is via negativa, I am via positiva. I have accepted both the roles and I have a certain freedom even Krishnamurti cannot have. He has to always deny, and denial in itself becomes a worry, a deep anxiety. I have nothing to deny, I just have to say yes to the total. But there are problems, and the greatest problem is that I will always be contradictory. Whatever John the Baptist has said, the Christ in me has to contradict it. I will always be contradictory.For many years I was moving around, reaching every person who had any capacity to grow. Nobody ever thought that someday the wanderer in me would simply sit in his closed room and would not even come out of the room – contradictory. For years I was talking in terms of revolution. Of course, the John the Baptist has to talk that way. Then suddenly I stopped talking about revolution, the society, the welfare of humanity; I forgot all about it. Now only the individual exists – contradictory. If you look you can find two currents parallel, and the first current has been continually contradicted by the other current. For those many years the Acharya, the John the Baptist, was doing one thing. Now the Osho is doing totally something else, a very contradictory thing.It will be impossible later on to decide whether this man was one or two. And I suspect that somebody is going to someday suspect that this man was two because the contradictions are so naked and there is no way to resolve them. This is the trouble with me, but somebody had to try the fourth and I am happy that I tried it. On this earth everything has its own problem, so you cannot escape from the problem. From somewhere or other the problem will enter, so it is only a question of choice, whatever fits you.This fits me perfectly. To be free to contradict is a great phenomenon because then I am not worried at all about what I say. I don’t keep any accounts, I need not be worried about what I said yesterday; I can contradict. This is a great freedom.If you love me, I know that you will find somewhere deep within me where the contradictions are already resolved. But that will happen only to those who trust, that will happen only to those who come closer and closer to me. All the contradictions are on the surface; deep down within me they are already resolved because I am one.I have functioned as John the Baptist; now I will function as Christ. So nobody has preceded me, nobody is going to succeed me. I am a perfect circle.The second question:Osho,Why do I feel hesitation in enjoying anything?Joy is not allowed, you are preconditioned against joy. From the very childhood you have been taught that if you are happy then something is wrong – unhappy, everything is good. If you are miserable nobody is worried about it, but if you are too happy everybody is worried about you. You must have done something wrong.Whenever a child is happy the parents start looking for the cause: he must have done some mischief or something. Why is he so happy? The parents are not happy. They have a deep jealousy toward the child because he is happy. They may not be aware of it, but they are jealous. It is easy to tolerate somebody else’s misery, but it is almost impossible to tolerate somebody else’s happiness.I was reading an anecdote…A very religious father was bringing up his son as perfectly as possible. One day when they were going to church he gave the boy two coins: one, a one rupee coin; another, a one paisa coin. He also gave him the choice that whatever he thought was right he could put in the donation plate in the church. He could choose the rupee or the paisa.Of course the father believed and hoped that the son would put the rupee in the church plate. He had been brought up in such a way; he could be expected to, relied upon.The father waited. After church he was very curious to know what happened. He asked the boy, “What did you do?”The boy admitted that he had donated the one paisa coin and kept the rupee for himself.The father couldn’t believe it. He said, “Why did you do this? We have always been inculcating great principles in you.”The boy said, “You ask why: I will tell you the reason. The priest in church spoke rightly. In his sermon he said, ‘God loveth a cheerful donator.’ I could donate the one paisa coin cheerfully – not the one rupee!”God loved the cheerful giver. I am absolutely in agreement with the boy. What you do is not the question; you are religious if you can do it cheerfully. It may be a one paisa coin, it doesn’t matter. It is immaterial because the real coin that you are giving is your cheerfulness.From the very beginning every child is taught not to be so cheerful. To be cheerful is to be childish. To be cheerful is to be natural, but not civilized; to be cheerful is somehow primitive, not cultured. So you have been brought up not to be cheerful, and whatever you have ever enjoyed was condemned again and again. If you enjoyed just running and shouting around the house, somebody was bound to be there saying, “Stop that nonsense! I am reading the newspaper.” As if the newspaper is something very valuable.A child shouting and running is a more beautiful sight than any newspaper. And the child cannot understand: “Why? Why do I have to stop? Why can’t you stop your newspaper reading?” The child cannot understand: “What is wrong in my being happy and running?”“Stop!” The whole cheerfulness is suppressed, the child becomes serious. Now he sits in a corner unhappy. The energy needs movement, and a child is energy, he delights in energy. He wants to move and dance and jump and scream and shout. He is so full of energy he wants to overflow, but whatever he does is wrong. Either the mother is saying, “Keep quiet,” or the father or the servant or the brothers or the neighbors. Everybody seems to be against his flowing energy.One day it happened…Mulla Nasruddin’s wife was very angry. Her small boy was making too much of a nuisance, creating too much nuisance. Finally she was exhausted and she ran after him. She wanted to give him a good thrashing, but he escaped, escaped upstairs, and hid himself under a bed. She tried hard, but she couldn’t get him out. She was a very fat woman, she couldn’t get underneath, so she said, “Wait, let your father come.”When Mulla Nasruddin came, she told the whole story. He said, “Don’t be worried, leave it to me. I will go and put him right.”So he went upstairs, walked very quietly, looked under the bed and was surprised – surprised by the way the boy greeted him. The boy said, “Hello, Dad. Is she after you also?!”Everybody is after him. The overflowing energy is looked at as a nuisance, and it is delight for the child. He doesn’t ask much; he simply asks a little freedom to be happy and to be himself. But that is not allowed.“It is time to go to sleep.” When he doesn’t feel like going to sleep, it is time. He has to force himself. And how can you force sleep? Have you ever thought about it? Sleep is nothing voluntary, how can you force it? He turns in his bed unhappy, miserable, and cannot think how to bring on sleep. But it is time; it has to be brought or it is against the rules.Then in the morning when he wants to sleep a little longer, he has to get up. When he wants to eat something, it is not allowed; when he does not want to eat something, it is forced. This goes on and on. By and by the child comes to understand one thing: whatever is cheerful for him has something wrong about it. Whatever makes him happy is wrong, and whatever makes him sad and serious is right and good and accepted. That’s the problem. You ask, “Why do I feel hesitation in enjoying anything?” Because your parents, your society, are still after you.If you are really with me, drop all that nonsense that has been forced on you. There is only one religion in the world and that religion is to be happy. Everything else is immaterial and irrelevant. If you are happy you are right, if you are unhappy you are wrong.It happens every day: people come to me – the wife comes or the husband comes – and the wife says she is very unhappy because the husband is doing something wrong. I always tell such people, “If the husband is doing something wrong, let him be unhappy. Why are you unhappy? The wrong itself will lead him toward unhappiness. Why are you worried?”The wife says, “But he is not unhappy. He goes to the pub and he enjoys. He is not unhappy at all.”Then I say, “Something is wrong with you, not with him. Unhappiness is the indicator. Change yourself; forget about him. If he is happy, he is right.”I tell you, if you can go happily to a pub, that is better than going unhappily to a temple because finally one comes to discover that happiness is the temple. So what you do is not the question. It is: “What quality do you bring to it while doing it?” Be happy and you are virtuous; be unhappy and you are committing what religious people have called sin. You must have heard them say that the sinner will suffer some day in the future, in some future life, and the saint will be happy somewhere in the future, in a future life. I say that is absolutely wrong. The saint is happy here and now, and the sinner is unhappy. Life does not wait for so long; it is immediate.So if you feel yourself unhappy, you must have been doing something wrong with yourself. If you cannot enjoy – if some hesitation comes in, if you feel afraid, guilty – it means somewhere by the corner the shadows of your parents are still lurking. You may be enjoying, or trying to enjoy ice cream, but deep in the unconscious the shadow of the mother or the father is lurking. “This is wrong. Don’t eat too much, this is going to harm you.” So you are eating, but the hesitation is there. The hesitation means the contradiction is there.Try to understand your hesitation and drop it. And this is one of the most unbelievable phenomena: if you drop the hesitation it may come to pass that you stop eating too much ice cream automatically because that eating too much may be part of it. Because they have denied it, they have created a certain attraction in it. Every denial brings attraction. They have said, “Don’t eat it,” and that has created a hypnotic, a magnetic, attraction to eat it.If you stop having any hesitations, you drop all the parental voices, all the upbringing that you have been forced to go through. You may suddenly see the ice cream as just an ordinary thing. Sometimes one can enjoy it, but it is not a food. It has no nutritious value, it may even be harmful. But then you understand. If it is harmful you understand it, you don’t eat it. And you can always eat it sometimes. Sometimes, even harmful things are not so harmful. Once in a while you can enjoy it, but there is no obsession to eat it too much. That obsession is part of the repression.Drop hesitations. People come to me and they say they want to love, but they hesitate; they want to meditate, but they hesitate; they would like to dance, but they hesitate. If this hesitation is there and you go on feeding it, you will miss your whole life. It is time; drop it, and nothing else is to be done. Just become alert that this is just the way you have been brought up, that’s all.Consciously, it can be dropped. It is not your being; it is just in your brain. It’s just an idea which has been forced upon you. It has become a long habit, and a very dangerous habit because if you can’t enjoy, what is this life for?These people who cannot enjoy anything: love, life, food, a beautiful scene, a sunset, a morning, beautiful clothes, a good bath – small things, ordinary things – if they cannot enjoy these things, and there are people who cannot enjoy anything, they become interested in God. They are the most impossible people. They can never reach God. God enjoys these trees. Otherwise why does he go on creating them? He is not fed up at all, not at all. For millennia he has been working on trees and flowers and birds. And he goes on listening and he goes on replacing: new beings, new earths, new planets. He is really very, very colorful. Look at life, watch it, and you will see the heart of God, how it is.People who are very uptight, unable to enjoy anything, unable to relax, incapable even of enjoying a good sleep, they are the very people who become interested in God. And they become interested for wrong reasons. They think that because life is useless, futile; they have to seek and search God. Their “God” is something against life, remember.Gurdjieff used to say: “I have searched every religion, every church, mosque and temple, and I have found that the ‘God’ of the religious people is against life.” And how can God be against life? If he is against, there is no reason why life should exist or should be allowed to exist. So if your God is against life, in fact deep down you are against the real God. You are following a Godot, not a God.God is the very fulfillment of life, God is the very fragrance of life, God is the total organic unity of life. God is not something that exists like a dead rock, God is not static. God is a dynamic phenomenon. God does not exist – it happens; when you are ready it happens. Don’t think that God exists somewhere and you will find a way to reach him. No, there is no way and there is no God existing somewhere waiting for you. Godliness is something that happens to you when you are ready. When you are ready – when the sadness has disappeared and you can dance, when the heaviness has disappeared and you can sing, when the heavy weight of conditioning is no longer on your heart and you can flow – godliness happens. God is not a thing that exists; it is something that happens. It is a dynamic, organic unity.When godliness happens everything happens: the trees, the stars, the rivers. And to me, to be capable of enjoying is the door. Serious people have never been known to reach him. Seriousness is the barrier, the wrong attitude. Anything that makes you serious is irreligious. Don’t go to a church that makes you serious.It happened once…A woman purchased a parrot, but by the time she reached home she was very puzzled, worried. She had paid a good price for it; the parrot was beautiful. Everything was good, only one thing was very dangerous: once in a while the parrot would say loudly, “I am a very wicked woman.” This was something!The woman lived alone. And she was a very religious woman – otherwise why live alone? She was a very serious woman, and this parrot would say again and again – and even passers-by would hear and listen – and the parrot would say, “I am a very, very wicked woman.”She went to the vicar because he was the only source of her wisdom and knowledge and information. She said, “This is very bad, and I am puzzled about what to do. The parrot is beautiful and everything is good – only this.”The vicar said, “Don’t be worried. I have two very religious parrots. Look.” One was in his cage tolling a bell and another was praying in his cage. Very religious people. “Bring your parrot. Good company always helps. Leave your parrot for a few days here with these religious people, and later on you can take your parrot back.”The woman liked the idea. She agreed, brought the parrot, and the vicar introduced the parrot to his parrots. But before he could say anything, the parrot said, “I am a very, very wicked woman.”The vicar was also nonplussed. What to do? In that moment the parrot who was praying stopped praying and said to the other parrot, “You fool! Stop tolling the bell, our prayers are fulfilled.”They were praying for a woman: “Stop tolling the bell; the prayer is answered!” In fact whenever you see somebody praying, suspect something has gone wrong. They are praying for a woman, praying for money, praying for something, praying for happiness. A really happy person does not pray. Happiness is his prayer. And there cannot be a higher or a greater prayer than just to be happy.A happy person does not know anything about God, does not know anything about prayer. His happiness is his God, his happiness is his prayer, he is fulfilled. Be happy and you will be religious; happiness is the goal.I am a hedonist, and as far as I see it, all those who have known have always been hedonists, whatever they say. A Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna – all hedonists. God is the ultimate in hedonism. That is the peakest peak of being happy.Drop all the conditioning that you carry with you. And don’t try to condemn your parents because that won’t help. You are a victim of their conditioning, but what could they have done? They were victims of the conditionings of their parents so it is a long succession. Nobody is responsible so don’t feel angry that your parents destroyed you. They couldn’t help it. If you understand, you will feel pity for them. They were destroyed by their parents, and their parents were destroyed by somebody else, and it has always been going on. It is a succession, a chain. Simply get out of it.There is no point in condemning anybody and there is no point in being angry, an angry young man and this and that. There is no point. That is again foolishness. Once you were sad, then you become angry. That is as bad as sadness. Just look at the whole thing and get out of it. Simply slip out of it without making any noise. That’s what I call rebellion.The revolutionary gets angry. He says the education has to be changed, he says the society has to be changed, he says a new type of parent is needed in the world. Only then will everybody be happy. But who will do this? The doers are always in the same mess, so who will be the help? “Create a new education.” But who will create it? The teachers have to be taught first. And the revolutionaries are just as much a part of this nonsense as the reactionaries, so who will bring the revolution? The hope is futile.There is only one hope: you can bring light to your being. And it is available immediately, there is nothing to it. Have you ever seen a snake slipping out of his old skin? It is just like that. You simply slip out of it, forgive and forget. Don’t be angry against your parents, they themselves were victims. Feel pity for them. Don’t be angry against the society, it could not have been otherwise. But one thing is possible: you can slip out right now. Start being happy from this very moment. Everything is available; what’s needed is only a deep attitudinal change that from now on you will look at happiness as the good and misery as the sin.The third question:Osho,Will I be able to take all that I feel here with you when I leave, or will all that has happened just be a memory?When you leave, if you don’t leave yourself here, if you take your “I” with you, whatever has happened will become a memory. Then whatever has happened will be left behind. If you want to carry it with you, you cannot carry yourself within. The choice is open: either leave yourself here, then whatever has happened will be carried within you; or take yourself back home, then whatever has happened will be left here. The choice is yours.If you can drop the ego, whatever is happening is real. But if you cannot drop the ego then it is going to become a memory, and it will create more trouble for you because the memory will become a haunting. You have had a glimpse and now it is lost. You will be more miserable than ever. You know that it exists, but now you have lost the track. You know it is somewhere; now you cannot simply say that it doesn’t exist. That argument won’t help. Now you cannot easily become an atheist and say there is no God and there is no meditation and there is no inner core to human beings – you cannot say that. You have tasted it. Now the taste will surround you, haunt you, will call you.The choice is yours. You can drop your “I” with me, and the vision that has happened will become part of your reality. It will be integrated in your organic unity, it will be crystallized. But you cannot have both, you can have only one, so before you leave please make certain that you are leaving your “I” with me. Make certain that your surrender is real and total, make certain that you are really surrendered. Then wherever you are, you are close to me.It is because of your surrender that you are close to me, it is not a question of physical space. Surrendered – you may be on another planet – you are close to me. Not surrendered – you may be just sitting close to me – you are far away.The fourth question:Osho.Yesterday you mentioned that law is anti-love, but yet without it love cannot exist and grow. Please explain in which way law is needed for love to grow.For every growth the opposite is needed because the opposite creates the tension. Without the opposite, things relax into death. This is one of the most fundamental things in life.Love cannot exist without the law; the law is the opposite. The law is the nonspontaneous, the mechanical; love is the spontaneous, the nonmechanical. Love is uncaused, law is within cause and effect. Love is individual, law is social. Can you exist without the society? Without the society you will not be born. You need a mother, a father, you need a family to grow in, you need a society to thrive in. Without a society you cannot exist.Remember, if you just become a part of society, you have already moved into nonexistence again. Without the society you cannot exist and you cannot exist just as a member of the society either. Jesus says, “Man cannot live by bread alone.” Do you think it means you can live without bread? Man cannot live by bread alone – absolutely true – but can man live without bread? No, that too is not possible. Man needs bread. It is necessary, but not enough. It simply gives you a base, but it doesn’t give you a jump, a flight. It is a jumping board. Don’t get stuck at that.Jesus says, “The Sabbath is created for man, not man for the Sabbath.” The law is needed because the society is needed. The law is the bread. But if there is only law – if you exist as a member of the society, a law-abiding member of the society, and nothing else exists in you which is beyond law – then you exist in vain, then you exist “just by bread alone.” Then you eat well, you sleep well, and nothing else happens. It is good to eat well, but not enough; something of the unknown is needed. Something from the invisible is needed to penetrate you; the romance of the unknown is needed. Without it you will be a syllogism of logic, but you will not be a poetry. Without it you may be quite right, but just “quite right”: no romance, no poetry, no dance.Love is the mysterious, the law is the nonmysterious. The law helps you to be in the world, love gives you the reason to be. The law gives you the cause to be and love gives you the reason to be. The law gives you the base; love becomes the home, the house. And remember one thing: the base can exist without the house, but the house cannot exist without the base. The lower can exist without the higher, the higher cannot exist without the lower. A man can exist with just bread; he will not have anything worth having, he will not have any reason to exist, but he can exist – he can just vegetate. But even a great lover cannot exist without bread. Even Jesus or Buddha cannot exist without bread. They have found the celestial home of love, but they cannot exist without bread.The lower is, in a way, independent of the higher. The higher is dependent, in a way, on the lower. But this is so. And it seems simple, it is easy. You make a temple; what we call in India the kalash, the golden cap of the temple, cannot exist without the whole temple there. If you remove the temple, the kalash, the golden cap, will fall down. It cannot exist without the temple. Of course the temple can exist without the cap; there is no problem about it.Just think: a man is hungry. Can he dance? Dance is impossible. The man is starving, he cannot even think. He cannot imagine what dance means. He may have known it in the past, but he will not even be able to believe that he has known it. It seems impossible, it seems almost nonexistential. It cannot exist in a starved body. How can you think of a dance descending? But think of another man who is well fed and without any dance. There is no trouble, you can vegetate. The higher is not a must, it is a freedom. If you want, you grow into it; if you don’t want, there is nobody forcing you to grow into it. The lower is a need, it is not your choice. It has to be fulfilled.Law is anti-love. If you are too lawful, you will not be able to love anybody because the very quality of love is spontaneity. It comes from the blue, it can disappear into the blue. It has no reason, no cause here. It happens like a miracle; it is magical. Why it happens, how it happens, nobody knows. It cannot be manipulated: it is anti-law, it is anti-gravitation, it is anti-science, it is anti-logic. It is against all logic and against all law.Love cannot be proved in any lab and love cannot be proved by any logic. If you try to prove it by logic, you will come to know that there is nothing like love, that love is impossible, it cannot exist. But it exists. Even great scientists fall in love. They cannot prove it in their labs, they cannot argue for it, but they also fall in love. Even an Einstein falls in love.Love makes everybody humble. Even Einstein – so proud of his logic, argument, science – suddenly falls in love one day. An ordinary woman, Frau Einstein – and suddenly his whole science disappears and he starts believing in the impossible. Even in his later life he used to shrug his shoulders, “It happens, but if you ask me as a scientist I cannot vouch for it. But it happens if you ask me as a man.” In his last days he said, “If love exists, then God must also exist because if one impossible is possible, then why not the other?” He died as a deeply humble and religious man.Somebody asked him, “If you are born again, what would you like to be?”He said, “Not a scientist again. I would rather be a plumber.”What is he saying? He is saying that he has seen the falsity of all logic and he has seen the futility of all scientific argument. What he is saying is that he has seen through and through that cause and effect may be the base, but they are not the pinnacles. The real temple, the real mystery of life, moves through love, prayer, happiness – all impossibles. If you think of them you cannot believe, but if you allow them to happen, then a great trust and a great grace arises in you.Moses is the law. The society cannot exist without Moses, he is a must. The society cannot afford to lose him. The society would be a chaos without a Moses. He is absolutely needed, he is the very foundation. But Jesus is love. Moses is needed, is necessary, but not enough. If Moses alone rules the world, the world will not be worth living.Jesus: a breeze from the unknown, nobody knows from where it comes, nobody knows where it goes – a penetration of eternity into time, the entry of the mysterious into the known.Jesus cannot come without Moses, remember. Moses will be needed. He is the bread, Jesus is the wine. You can live by bread, but the bread has nothing of romance in it. The wine – that is the romance, the poetry, the dance, the celebration, the joy, the ecstasy. Yes, Moses can exist without Jesus, Jesus cannot exist without Moses. That’s why Jesus says again and again, “I have come to fulfill, not to destroy.” Moses was just a foundation; Jesus raises the temple of God on it.Moses is the “absolutely right” citizen, the good man. Jesus is not so good. Sometimes one wonders whether he is good or bad. He confuses: he moves with drunkards, he stays with a prostitute. No, never; you cannot conceive of Moses doing that. Moses is an absolutely right man, but that’s where he misses something: the beauty, the freedom. He always moves on the right track, he is a railway line. Jesus is like a river, he changes: sometimes left, sometimes right, sometimes he changes the path completely.Moses is absolutely believable, Jesus not so. Sometimes one suspects whether this man is right or wrong. That was the problem for the Jews. They had lived on the bread of Moses, they had followed Moses and his Ten Commandments, and now this man comes and says, “I am the fulfillment of all that has preceded me,” and “I have come not to destroy, but to fulfill.” But what type of fulfillment is this? He does not look like Moses at all. He has no condemnation of the bad. He says, “Judge ye not!” Moses is a great judge, and Jesus says, “Judge ye not, so that ye may not be judged.” Moses says, “Don’t do evil,” and Jesus says, “Resist not the evil.” Very confusing: he must have created great chaos. Wherever he went he must have brought confusion and conflict to people’s minds, he must have created anxiety. That’s why they took revenge and killed him; it is absolutely logical.Buddha was not killed in India, Mahavira was not killed – sometimes a few stones were thrown or things like that, but they were not killed, crucified. They never confused the mind as much as Jesus. They had something of the Moses in them, and Jesus has nothing of the Moses in him. Mahavira has much of the Moses in him; he has something of the law and something of love, both.Jesus is pure love. That’s why he was crucified. He had to be crucified: such pure love cannot be tolerated, such pure grace is impossible to bear. The very presence is intolerable because it hurts. The very presence of Jesus throws you into confusion, and the only way to protect yourself and defend yourself is to kill this man, destroy this man. By destroying Jesus, the people tried to live with Moses and law alone, and not be bothered by love. The day Jesus was crucified, it was nothing but an indication that the ordinary mind would like to live without love. Love was crucified, not Jesus. He is just symbolic.There are many complications. Jews have always been puzzled about why this man Jesus influenced the whole world so much and he could not influence the Jews at all. Jews are great scholars, their rabbis are great pundits, and they have been trying to prove that Jesus did not say a single new word, that all that he said was written in Jewish scriptures. Then why has this man become the very axis of humanity? What happened? It seems unbelievable.They are right in a way: Jesus has not said a single word that cannot be found in the sayings of old rabbis. No, he has not said a single new word. But that is not where he is unique. He is unique in the way he has said it: not the word, but the way he has asserted it. In the Old Testament you come again and again across the expression “The lord hath said…” But that is not characteristic of Jesus. Whenever he says this, he says, “I say unto you…” not “The lord…” He is the lord. The Old Testament says, “The lord says this.” Jesus says, “I say unto you.” The old rabbis stammer, Jesus speaks; the old rabbis have a borrowed glory, Jesus has his own. The old rabbis speak from authority; Jesus, with authority – and that is a great difference.It is said that once the enemies of Jesus had sent a man to catch hold of him and bring him to the temple. He was teaching near the temple and a crowd had gathered. The man went there to catch hold of him, to imprison him, but the crowd was big and he had to enter the crowd to reach Jesus, it took time. While he was penetrating the crowd, he had to hear what this man was saying. Then he stopped, he forgot why he had come. Then it became impossible to imprison this man. He came back.The enemies asked, “Why have you come back? Why have you not caught hold of him?”He said, “I was going to, but his words fell in my ear. And I tell you, no man has ever spoken like this man! The very quality, the authority, the power that he speaks with overpowered me. I was hypnotized. It became impossible to catch hold of this man.”Jesus is love. Love has authority of its own, it is not borrowed. The old rabbis and the Old Testament people are like the moon: borrowed light. Jesus is the sun, he has his own light. Love has its own authority; law never has its own authority. The authority is from Moses, Manu, Marx; the authority is from the scripture, the tradition, the convention. The authority is always of the old, it is never fresh and new.Love is anti-law. But if you have love you can be lawful also, there is no problem in it. Then you are more than the law; you have something of love within you.You live in the society, you have to follow the rules. They are just like keep to the left, or keep to the right – nothing ultimate about them, just rules to keep the traffic in control. Otherwise it will be almost impossible to move. Good as far as it goes, but don’t think that because you always keep to the left, you have attained something. Of course it is good as far as it goes, but nothing much. What have you attained? The traffic will be convenient, that’s all. But what have you attained?All morality, all law, is good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. Love is needed. Love is a sort of madness, illogical, irrational.The fifth question:Osho,Witnessing, awareness, meditation, suddenly seem distant and sterile adult ideas in the face of the flood of wild and childish adoration which fills me while I am listening to you talk about Jesus. My adult self says, “Beware; don't indulge in sloppy, sleepy sentimentality – this is just the mind, childhood Christian conditioning.” But the impulsive, yearning seven-year-old feels like sticking out her tongue at the twenty-eight-year-old seriously spiritual seeker. Which is the real me?Neither – but the one who is watching both, the one who has asked the question. You are neither a seven-year-old nor a seventy-year-old. Oldness is irrelevant to you, age does not belong to you. You are eternal – neither the child, nor the young man, nor the old man. Always fall back to the witness, go deeper and deeper into witnessing. Never allow any other identification to settle: of the child or the adult – no. All identifications are bondages.Total freedom is not of identification; total freedom is non-identification with each and every thing. Someday, when all identifications are broken and they fall down like clothes drop and you are absolutely nude in your freedom, then you will know who you are.You are gods in exile. Only by witnessing will you remember who you are. Then all misery disappears, all poverty disappears. You are the very kingdom of God.The last question:Osho,Why do you give sannyas to so many creeps?It is from Anand Bodhisattva. If not, then Bodhisattva, how could you be a sannyasin?I love creeps. They are good people. Everybody is accepted. I make no conditions because I don’t look at how you look. I am not bothered by your appearance. I look at you, and you are gods in exile, maybe sometimes with dirty clothes, sometimes with an unwashed face, but still a god.Sometimes you look like a creep, but you are not. Because I can see you deep within your reality, I accept you totally. Whatever you pretend to be, you cannot deceive me. These are all pretensions. You may be deceived by your own pretension; I am not deceived. I look direct and immediate; I look into you. And I always find the fresh, the eternal, the beautiful: truth and grace – divinity. You are sovereigns.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 31 In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea,2 And saying, “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”11 “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.”13 Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him.14 But John forbade him, saying, ”I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?“15 And Jesus answering said unto him, “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he suffered him.16 And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.17 And lo, a voice from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”I have heard a story. It happened in the days of knights and castles.A young Englishman was searching for his fortune, wandering all over the land. Tired, he paused under a tree near a castle to rest. The duke of the castle was passing by. He stopped and inquired why the young man was waiting there, what he was looking for. The young man said, “I am an architect and I am in search of employment.”The duke was very pleased because he needed an architect. He said, “Come with me. Be my architect and whatever your needs are, they will be fulfilled from my castle and from the land. You can live like a really rich man. But be faithful and remember one thing: if you leave, you will have to leave as empty-handed as you are coming in.”The young man agreed. Weeks passed and then months and he worked faithfully, and the duke was very pleased with him. All his needs were fulfilled, he was looked after. He really lived like a rich man in the castle. But by and by he started feeling uneasy. In the beginning it was not clear what the cause of it was, because in fact there was no cause to be uneasy, every need was taken care of. It was like a cloud surrounding him, a heaviness, the feeling of something being missed. Not knowing exactly what it was, he was confused. Then one day it flashed like lightning before him: he understood the cause. He went to the duke and said that he was leaving.The duke could not believe it. He said, “Why are you leaving? If there is any difficulty, simply tell me and it will be done. I have been very pleased with your work and I would like you to be here for your whole life.”The young man said, “No, I am leaving. Please allow me to leave.”The duke asked, “But why?”The young man said, “Because nothing belongs to me here. Empty-handed I have come, empty-handed I will have to leave. This is a dream: nothing belongs to me here.”This is the point where a person starts becoming religious. If something belongs to you in this world, you are not yet ready to be religious. Empty-handed you come, empty-handed you go. Once you realize this, like a flash of lightning everything becomes clear. This world cannot be your home – at the most an overnight stay, and in the morning we go.Once you have the feeling that you are here only momentarily, you cannot possess anything. You cannot have anything here – it becomes a dream, what Hindus call maya; it becomes illusory. That is the definition of maya: something which appears to be yours and is not, something which appears to be real and is not, something which seems to be eternal and is only momentary, something which is made of the stuff dreams are made of.Unless one understands it, one goes on doing things which are eventually found to be meaningless. The day death comes, your whole life proves to be meaningless. Confronting death, you will see that your hands are empty. And you worked hard: you were in so much anguish and anxiety for things which cannot be possessed.It is not in the nature of things that they can be possessed. Possession is impossible because you are here only for a few moments. Things were here before you, things will be here after you. You come and go, the world remains.Be a guest, and don’t start feeling and believing that you are the owner here. Then your life changes immediately; then your life takes on a new hue, a new color, a new dimension. That dimension is religion.Once you understand it, you need initiation – initiation into the other world. That is available just by the corner. Once this world is understood to be just a dream, the other becomes available. This was the whole message of John the Baptist.“Repent ye: for the kingdom of heavenis at hand.”It has been tremendously, terribly misunderstood by Christians. From the very beginning the message was misunderstood. People thought that the world was going to end and John the Baptist was forecasting, was predicting, the end of the world. “…for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.” People thought that this world was going to end, this was the misunderstanding. So they waited. John the Baptist died, and there was no sign of the kingdom coming. This kingdom continued and that kingdom never came. Then Jesus was again saying the same thing: “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Then they waited, then he was crucified, and the kingdom never came. And Christians have been waiting for twenty centuries since then.Now much doubt has arisen in the mind. Even the priest in the pulpit goes on repeating these words, but they are no longer meaningful. He knows himself they are not meaningful. He goes on saying, “Repent ye: for the kingdom of God is at hand,” but he knows that for twenty centuries it has not happened and the world has continued.This is not the meaning at all. The world is not going to end; you are going to end. When John the Baptist said: “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” he never meant that this world is going to end. He simply meant that you are going to end, and before you die, make contact with the other world. Repent for all that you have done to possess this world, repent the way you have lived in this dream as if it was reality, repent for all that you have been and have been doing and thinking, because all of that is baseless.Unless you repent, you will not be able to see that the kingdom of God is just by the corner. Your eyes will remain filled with this world; you will not be able to see the other. Before the other can be seen your eyes have to be completely cleaned of this world – the world of things, the world of matter, the world of lust, possession, the world of greed and anger, the world of jealousy, envy, the world of hatred – the world of the ego. Your eyes have to be completely cleaned, washed, before you can see the kingdom of God. In fact the moment your eyes attain clarity, this world disappears just as in the morning when you become awake the world of dreams disappears. Another world opens its door. The kingdom of God is the reality and this world is only a projection of your mind.John the Baptist, and later on Christ, were saying you are going to end; but that is difficult for the mind to understand. The mind always thinks, can think and believe, that everything else is going to end, but “Not me.” The mind goes on saving itself, defending itself.Somebody dies. You see the dead body, but it never occurs to you that you are going to die. You sympathize with the family of the dead man. You say, “Poor man. He could have lived a little longer. He was not yet old enough. His family was so dependent on him. Now what will happen?”The wife is crying and weeping, and the children are going mad. What will happen? You think about the dead man, you think about the dead man’s family, you think about the future of the orphaned children. You think of the widowed wife. But you never think that this death is your death also. You always hide yourself, you always go on defending yourself. And deep down everybody thinks that he is not going to die. Death always happens to others.The mind interprets in such ways that it misses the whole point. The world is to continue: it has always been there and will always be there. Only you will not be there; death will take you away. As empty-handed as you had entered, you will have to leave. If that understanding penetrates your being, repentance becomes possible. And repentance is nothing but attaining the clarity of vision. This word repentance is very, very significant. There is no other word more significant in Jesus’ terminology because repentance will open the door of the divine.What is this repentance? You have been angry and you repent. You feel sorry: you have behaved badly with someone and you repent and you ask to be pardoned. Is Jesus’ and John the Baptist’s repentance the same? Then it cannot go very far because you have repented many times and you have not changed. How many times have you repented? How many times have you been angry, greedy, violent, aggressive, and you have repented? But your repentance has not transformed you, it has not brought you near the kingdom of God. It has not opened any new doors, new dimensions; you remain the same. Your repentance and Jesus’ repentance are not the same. In fact they are almost diametrically opposite.So whatever you have been understanding about repentance is absolutely false. Try to understand. When you repent, in fact you don’t repent. When you repent, in fact you try to repair the image. It is not repentance, it is repairing the broken image that you had of yourself.For example, you were angry and you said things. Later on when the rage is gone, the madness gone, you cool down and you look back. Now there is trouble. The trouble is that you have always been thinking that you are a very peaceful, peace-loving man; you have always been imagining that you never become angry. Now that image is broken, your ego is shattered. Now you know that whatever you have been believing has proved wrong. You have been angry, you have been very angry, and you have said and done things which are against your ego. You have shattered your own self-image. Now you have to repair it.The only way to repair it is to repent. You go and repent, you say good things. You say, “It happened in spite of me. I never wanted it to be so. I was mad, I was not in my senses. The anger possessed me so much that I was almost unconscious, so whatever I have said, forgive me, I never meant it. I may have uttered it, but I never meant it.”What are you doing? Repenting? You are simply repairing. The other man relaxes because when somebody asks to be forgiven, he has to repair his image also. If he cannot forgive, then he is not a good man. He was also angry about your anger, and he was planning to take revenge. But now you have come to be forgiven. If he does not forgive, then he will not be able to forgive himself, then his image will be broken.And that is the trick you are playing. Now if he does not forgive you, you are the good guy and he is the bad guy. Now the whole thing has been thrown upon him. This is a trick, a very cunning trick. If he does not forgive you, he is a bad man. Now you are at ease, your image repaired. You have thrown the whole guilt on him. Now he will feel guilty that he cannot forgive, and a good man has to forgive. If he forgives, it is good; if he does not forgive, then it is good for you. Now it is a question for him to decide.This is not repentance. When John the Baptist and Jesus say, “Repent!” they mean totally, absolutely, a different thing. What do they mean? They mean: try to see, try to understand what you have been doing. Look through and through. Go to the very roots of your existence, being, behavior, and see what you have been doing, what you have been being. It is not a question of any particular act that you have to repent for, it is your whole quality of being – not any anger, not any greed, not any hatred – no. Not any enmity – nothing. It is nothing about any particular act. It is something about your very being: the way, the style, of your existence. It has no concern with any particular fragmentary act.When you repent, you repent about a certain act. Your repentance is always in reference to certain acts. But Jesus’ repentance is not about certain acts; it is about your being. The way you have been has been absolutely wrong.You may not have been angry, still you have been wrong. You may not have been full of hatred, still you have been wrong. You may not have possessed much wealth, still you have been wrong. It is not a question of what you have done, it is a question of how you have been. You have been asleep, you have been unconscious; you have not lived with an inner light, you have lived in darkness.When they say, “Repent!” they mean repent for the whole way you have lived up to now, the way you are. It is not a question of asking forgiveness from somebody – no, not at all. It is just a returning. The word repent originally meant return. In Aramaic, which Jesus and John used as their language, repent means return: return to your source, come back to your original being.What Zen masters say: “Search for your original face,” is the meaning of “Repent ye.” Drop all the masks; it is not a question between you and others, it is a question between you and your God. “Repent ye” means drop all the masks and stand before God in your original face, the way he has made you. Let that be your only face, the way he wanted you to be. Let that be your only being. Return to the original source, come back to your deepest core of being. Repentance is returning back; it is one of the greatest spiritual turnings.This is what Jesus means by conversion. A Hindu can become a Mohammedan, a Mohammedan can become a Christian, a Christian can become a Hindu. That is not conversion, that is again changing masks. When a Christian becomes religious, a Hindu becomes religious, when a Mohammedan becomes religious, then it is conversion. It is not moving between one religion and another because there are not two religions in the world. They cannot be two: religion is one.Religiousness is a quality; it has nothing to do with sects and doctrines and dogmas, churches and temples and mosques. If you are in a mosque and you become religious, you will no longer be a Mohammedan; you will simply become a pure being who has no adjective attached to him. If you are praying in a temple and the temple disappears, you are no longer a Hindu; you have become religious. This is conversion.I was reading the life of a very famous bishop…He went to St. Mary’s Church in Cambridge to deliver a university sermon. Thirty, forty years before, when he was a young man, he had been an undergraduate there. And he was full of reminiscences, memories of his young age. He looked around. Could he recognize anybody who was there when he was an undergraduate? He recognized an old verger. After the sermon he went to him and said, “Do you recognize me? I was a student here forty years before. Everybody else has gone, I can only recognize your face. Thank God you have good health. You served him well.”The verger said, “Yes, I thank God, I thank him very much because after listening – and I have been listening to each and every sermon that has been delivered in this church for fifty years – thank God after listening to all sorts of nonsense for fifty years, I am still a Christian.”It is difficult to be a Christian if you listen to all sorts of nonsense that has been preached in the name of Christianity. It is difficult to be a Hindu if you know all the nonsense that has been written in the name of Hinduism. It is difficult to be a Mohammedan if you know what it means to be a Mohammedan. Because you don’t know, it is easy. You remain a Hindu because you don’t know what it means. You don’t know the hatred implied in it, you don’t know the politics intrinsic to it.It is easy to be a Christian not knowing what Christianity has done in the past. It has been murderous. Christianity has killed more people than communism. But it is easy if you don’t know. The more you know, the more difficult it will become to be a Christian, to be a Mohammedan, to be a Hindu. In fact you will understand that these are the ways of not being religious, these are the ways which prevent you from being religious, these are the ways which are the barriers. They deceive you that you are religious, they give you a false coin; they are fakers, counterfeits. To be religious is not to be a Mohammedan, not to be a Christian, not to be a Hindu. To be religious is just to be religious; nothing else is needed. That is conversion. If you repent, conversion happens. Conversion is the by-product of repentance. One does not have to repent for his acts because that is not real repentance. One has to repent for his whole being. Only then is transformation possible.Now, listen to these words of the gospel:In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea…John’s name has become “John the Baptist.” Nobody else’s name in the whole history of the world has become so connected with baptism. He initiated hundreds of seekers, and his way of initiation was something unique. He initiated them in the River Jordan. First they would meditate with him for a few days, a few months, or sometimes for a few years. When they were ready, he would take them to the river. They would stand in the river and he would pour water on their heads and something would transpire, something would happen in their hidden-most being. They would no longer be the same people they were before. It was a secret rite, a secret ceremony. Something was being transferred from the master to the disciple. The water was used as a medium.There have been two types of initiation in the world. In one type of initiation water has always been used, and in the other type of initiation fire has been used. In India, fire has been used as a medium of initiation for centuries. Zarathustra used fire as a medium of initiation. John the Baptist used water. Both can be used, and both have to be understood.Water and fire have different qualities and yet they are very deeply joined together. They are opposites, but complementary. If you put water on a fire, the water will disappear, evaporate. If you pour water on a fire, the fire will disappear. They are opposite, but in a deep unity. Water flows downward, fire flows upward. Naturally water will never go upward; naturally fire will never go downward. They move in different dimensions, different directions. If something has to go downward in you, water has to be used as a medium, as a vehicle. If something has to go upward in you, fire has to be used as a medium and vehicle.John the Baptist would pour water, and with the falling water – after a long preparation and meditation – your whole being would concentrate on the falling water and the coolness of it which would cool you within also. And through the water the magnetism of this man, John the Baptist, would flow into you. Water is a very, very vulnerable vehicle. If a man who has healing power in his hands just touches the water, the water becomes a healing medicine. Water is deeply related to your body: sixty percent or even more of your body is nothing but water. Just watch it: sixty percent of your body is water.Have you watched what your breathing is doing to you? The breathing brings fire, it is oxidation. Your body is water, your breathing is fire; with these two, you exist. When the breathing stops, the fire disappears; then the body loses warmth, then it is dead. If water is gone from the body, the body becomes too hot, feverish, and you will die soon. A deep communion between water and fire, a deep balance, is continuously needed.You eat food: through food, fire from the sun reaches your body. You breathe: through breathing, oxygen reaches the body. You drink water: water is continuously being replaced in the body. Between fire and water, you exist.John the Baptist used water to bring something from the above within you. That is one way of initiation. There is a higher way: to bring something within you upward. Then it becomes initiation by fire.In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea,And saying, “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”Every moment the kingdom of heaven is at hand. This very moment the kingdom of heaven is at hand; it is absolutely urgent to repent. That was his meaning. Don’t waste a single moment because if you waste it, it can never be recaptured, regained. All time gone is gone. It could have been a deep celebration in God, you wasted it – for nothings, for dreams. “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”“I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.”John the Baptist prepared people so that God could descend into them, then Jesus prepared people so that they could ascend into God. Both are the possibilities: either you ascend into God or God descends into you. Descendence is easier because you simply wait, receptive like a womb.You must have observed: Lao Tzu never talks about fire, he always talks about water. His method of initiation was just like John the Baptist’s. That’s why he talks about the feminine mind: one has to become feminine to receive. Just as water descends from the clouds, God descends.“Jesus,” John the Baptist says, “will baptize you with fire. He will take you to God, he will help you to go upward.” That is difficult, an uphill task, and before anybody can go uphill, he has to learn how to go downhill. Before one is ready to be baptized by fire, one has to be ready and baptized by water because if you cannot go downward, you cannot go upward. To go downward is very easy, to just wait and receive is easy. But if even that is difficult, what to say about going uphill? It is going to be very difficult.So first let God descend into you. The moment God descends into you, you will become very powerful because you will no longer be yourself. Then going uphill becomes very easy; then you can fly, then you can become fire.John the Baptist prepared people, prepared the ground for the seed to descend. Look: when you throw a seed in the soil, it descends into the soil. When it breaks, it starts rising upward. The first act is baptism by water: you throw the seed into the soil, it descends deep and rests there. The seed has nothing to do, it just has to rest and everything happens. Then an upward energy: the seed starts moving, sprouts; becomes a big tree, goes to the sky.The tree needs to be watered every day so that the roots can go deeper and deeper into the earth, and the tree also needs sun, the fire, so that the branches can go higher and higher. In the deep forests of Africa, trees go very high because the forests are so dense that if they don’t go high they will not reach the fire. They have to rise higher and higher so that they can open their being to the sun and the fire can be received. If you give only water to the tree, the tree will die; if you give only fire to the tree, the tree will die. The tree cannot exist with water only, it cannot exist in a desert with fire only. It needs a deep combination.So a baptism of water is needed in the beginning, that is the first initiation. Then a baptism of fire is needed, that is the second initiation. And between the two, when the balance is achieved, is transcendence. Between the two, when the balance is totally achieved and neither is too much and neither is too little – just the right proportion – suddenly the transcendence. In balance is transcendence: “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.”“Holy ghost” is just symbolic of balance. In Christianity the concept of three exists as the Trinity. God the father, Christ the son – but these are two poles, father and son. Something has to balance these two and that is the holy ghost. It is just pure spirit, neither son nor father, which is just in between the two, the balance. Between fire and water, the holy ghost happens.These are symbolic terms: the holy ghost is not a being somewhere. The holy ghost is the music, the harmony between duality. The holy ghost is the river between two banks. The holy ghost is where, if you go on looking for him somewhere, you will not find him. The holy ghost is there where any duality ceases within you. Love–hate ceases within you: a sudden balance. You cannot say whether it is love, you cannot say whether it is hate. It is neither. It is something absolutely unknown, you have never known it before: the holy ghost has happened.Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him.This must have been one of the rarest moments in the history of human consciousness: the master was to be initiated by the disciple.But John forbade him, saying, “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?”A few things before we can understand it. Up to now Jesus had lived a very ordinary life. He was just the son of the carpenter Joseph – helping his father in the workshop, doing ordinary things which were needed. Nobody knew anything about him, not even his family was aware of what he was. A shroud surrounded him, a cloud which had to be broken.He was waiting for the right moment. When John’s work was ready, the ground prepared, he could go to him. Then he would break down the shroud and the cloud would disappear. He needed to be related to John because that was the only way to be related to John’s disciples; otherwise there would be no link.John recognized him immediately: “This is the man for whom I have been waiting, this is the man for whom I have been working. He has come.” John forbade him, saying, “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?” And you have come to be baptized by me? That seems absurd.Jesus is on a higher plane, the plane of fire; John is on a lower plane, the plane of water. John is not yet an absolutely realized soul. He has attained his first satori, otherwise he would not have been able to work for Jesus; he has attained the first glimpse, otherwise he would not have been able to recognize Jesus. But he has not attained absolute buddhahood, he is not yet a christ.“I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?” No, he forbade it: “Don’t ask for this.”And Jesus answering said unto him, “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he suffered him.Jesus said, “Let it be so, because it is written in the scriptures that it will be so.” Jesus lived a Jew and died a Jew. He was never a Christian, and he tried hard to become part of the Jewish milieu. These were the ways he tried.It was written in the old scriptures that the messiah who was to come would be baptized by a man named John who will be baptizing people near the River Jordan. It was a long-standing prophecy. Jesus said, “Let it be so, as it is written in the scriptures.” He tried in every way to become part of the tradition so that the innermost revolution that he was trying to bring did not become lost in the desert of politics. But still it happened, still it became lost in the desert of politics, because to bring that inner revolution is to ask almost the impossible from the human mind.The human mind clings to the old. That’s why Jesus is saying, “Let it be so. Please baptize me so I don’t look like an intruder and a stranger, so I become part of the tradition and from within I can work outwardly, from within I can create a great revolution. I would like to work from within.”But that was not going to be so. Jesus tried, it was impossible; Buddha tried, it was impossible. Buddha remained a Hindu all his life. He just wanted to create a revolution in the Hindu mind from within, but the moment he started saying his things, the old mind became alert.I have heard a story…There was a very old church – very ancient, very beautiful, hallowed by tradition – but it was almost in ruins and there was danger that it might fall any day. The worshippers had stopped coming; any moment it might fall. Even the trustees of the church wouldn’t have a meeting in the church; they would meet somewhere else to decide things about the church. But they were reluctant to destroy it.They asked great architects, but they all suggested reluctantly that the building was too dangerous, it was beyond repair. It had to be destroyed and a new church had to be built. They never wanted it to be destroyed; it was very ancient, it had a long tradition, it had become part of their being. To destroy it looked as if they were going to destroy themselves. Reluctantly they called a meeting of the trustees and they passed three resolutions. They are beautiful.The first resolution – the church, the old church, had to be destroyed and a new church had to be built – passed unanimously. The second resolution – until the new church was ready they would continue to worship in the old church – passed unanimously. And the third resolution – the new church had to be built on exactly the same spot where the old church stood, and with the stones of the old church – passed unanimously!This is how the traditional mind goes. It goes on clinging and clinging; even if it becomes contradictory, it goes on clinging. It avoids seeing the contradiction, it avoids seeing the death that has already entered. It avoids seeing that the body is no longer alive: a corpse, stinking, deteriorating.Jesus tried to relate himself to the old mind. He says to John: “Baptize me. Let it be so.” “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he suffered him.John understood his point: otherwise Jesus would have been a foreigner from the very beginning and things would become almost impossible.Still things were impossible. But nobody can say that Jesus had not tried, nobody can say that Buddha had not tried. On their part they did everything that could be done to become a continuous flow with the ancient, with the old, with the traditional. They wanted revolution not against tradition, but in it. But it never happened; the old mind is really very, very obstinate, stubborn.And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.The initiation by water, the baptism by water. Jesus saw God descending:…and lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.And lo, a voice from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”Immediately after the baptism by John, Jesus came out of the river and on the riverbank this vision happened. This vision was not a dream because John was also a witness to it – and not only John, a few other disciples who were present on the bank. It was an objective reality. Everybody saw something descending like a dove, very peaceful, pure: a white bird of heaven descending and lighting on Jesus as if heaven had opened. It happens that way. When you become open to heaven, heaven becomes open to you. In fact heaven has always been open to you, only you were not open.Up to now Jesus had lived a closed life. It was good, he needed it otherwise he would have been in danger from the very beginning. Christians have no story about what happened in Jesus’ youth. He must have lived absolutely unknown. Nobody knew about him; he was just an ordinary young man like any other. His ministry lasted for only three years. When John baptized him he was thirty and when he was crucified he was thirty-three. The ancient, the old, the traditional mind could not tolerate him for more than three years: within three years he was crucified. That’s the reason he lived absolutely unknown: an ordinary man among other ordinary mortals, not revealing his identity.Immediately as he was baptized, he revealed who he was for the first time. John was a witness, a few other disciples on the bank were witnesses. But the quality of John’s being and of Jesus’ being was very different. John was a fiery prophet and Jesus was a messenger of peace. Soon afterward John was arrested and thrown into jail and Jesus started preaching.News started coming to John which he could not believe because Jesus was saying something else, something he had never meant to say. By and by the differences became so great that even John, who had initiated Jesus and who had seen with his own eyes the opening of heaven and the descending of the dove, even he became suspicious.In the last days of his life, before he was beheaded, he sent a note to Jesus, just a small note asking, “Are you really the one for whom we were waiting?” He became suspicious because this man was saying something else, absolutely something else. “Be humble,” this man was saying, “Blessed are the humble because they shall inherit the earth.” John was not a humble man, he was really very proud: a very strong man, believing that he could bring revolution to the whole world, almost mad with his strength. And Jesus was saying, “Blessed are the poor.” John must have thought, “What nonsense this man is talking.”Jesus was saying, “If somebody slaps you on one side of the face, give him the other side also” – absolutely unlike John. And Jesus was saying, “If somebody snatches your coat, give him your shirt also.” How is this man going to bring revolution? These are not revolutionary teachings.These are the only revolutionary teachings. But John could not understand them; he had his own idea of a revolution. He could have understood Lenin, he could have understood Trotsky, he could have understood Marx, but he could not understand Jesus, his own disciple. The problem was of a totally different kind of revolution. One revolution – which is brought by violence, aggression – is social, in a way forced. Another revolution – which is not brought by force, not even by discipline; which comes by spontaneity, by understanding – is of the heart.Jesus was bringing a totally new kind of revolution to the world. Nobody had talked about that revolution before. That’s why I say Jesus is the turning point in the history of human consciousness – even more than Buddha, because there had been many others like Buddha, talking on the same lines; he was not new. He may have been the end of a long procession of buddhas, but he was not the first.Jesus brought something totally new to the earth; he was the beginning of a new line, of a new search, of a new inquiry. John could not understand. Lao Tzu, if he had been there, would have understood, but not John. John was a totally different type of man. In his last days he was very worried that something had gone wrong: “Has this disciple betrayed me or what?” He sent a note: “Are you the one we were waiting for or has something gone wrong?” When you have a certain idea of a certain thing, that becomes a barrier to understanding. What to say of others? Even John could not understand Jesus perfectly.I have heard a story…There was a very great rich merchant who used to go all around the world to collect silk, spices, perfume. He was one of the most perfect merchants in these three things: he knew where to get them at a low price, from what markets of the world, and where to sell them and profit much. And he had profited much. That was his only interest, to find out more and more about perfumes and spices.One day, passing through a town, somebody told him, “Here lives a very wise man. Whatever your inquiry, he is always helpful.”The merchant thought, “Maybe he knows something about silk, spices, perfume. Maybe he can be helpful in showing me some market where I can get even more low-priced commodities.”He went to the wise man. Before he had even asked, the wise man said, “Yes, I know. Go to the north, in the Himalayas,” and he gave him a particular peak to go to. “Go to that peak and sit on that peak for three days. In those three days you will see something which you have never seen before. Then come back.”The man rushed. He had the fastest horse in the country. He rushed to the mountains, he found the peak. Fasting, praying, he sat there for three days looking around and dreaming about silk, perfume, spices. He waited there. Some unknown door was going to open and he would become the master of all the silk that is in the world, all the spices, all the perfumes.The key was going to be handed to him within these three days. He waited and waited, and he fantasized and he dreamed. He could not even see the beautiful valley that was around or the beautiful, silent river that passed by not making even a slight noise. He could not hear the birds singing in the morning, he could not see the beautiful sunset. He could see nothing because he was so full of dreams and he was so tense, waiting for something.Three days passed and nothing happened. He was very annoyed and angry. He rushed back to the wise man and he said, “Nothing happened. I could not see anything that I had not seen before. What went wrong?”The wise man laughed and said, “Your idea of riches.” Then he said, “Now don’t go to that valley again, you will never find it, but all around on the bank of the river there were diamonds. Those were not stones, they were diamonds. But you missed.”Then the man remembered, as if through his dream he had seen something – dim, vague, cloudy – but he had seen something. Yes, in the morning with the sun rays many times he had a glimpse of many stones that were shining. But he had his own idea of riches, and that was too much.Even John had his own idea of revolution, of what religion is. He became suspicious. But that day when Jesus was baptized he was a witness. He had seen the opening of heaven. And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.The dove is one of the oldest symbols of silence, of peace, of purity, of harmony. Have you seen a dove descending? Watch a dove descending: in the very coming down you will feel a silence surrounding the dove. That’s why it has become a symbol. And Jesus is peace, silence. He is not war, he is not revolution in the ordinary sense of the word, he is not violence. He is the humblest man and the purest who has ever lived on the earth.Baptism by water always brings descendence of the purest spirit, which is surrounding you always. Just the moment you are ready it descends in you. It is raining all the time, only your pot is upside down. You cannot gather it because your pot is upside down. Once your pot is right-side up, immediately you are fulfilled. In deep initiation the master tries to put your pot right-side up.In the West the science of initiation is completely lost. In the East it is also almost lost. In the West it is lost because it never existed there in its totality, only fragments from the East traveled and reached the West. In the East it is lost because it has almost become a dead thing: everybody knows about it, and nobody knows about it. It has become a businesslike thing: you go and you can be initiated by anybody.Initiation is not so easy. You can be initiated only by one who has attained at least the first satori, the first samadhi. There are three satoris. The first satori means that you have had a glimpse from far away: you have seen the Himalayas away, far away, shining in the sun. That is the first satori. The second satori is one when you have reached the peak. You have arrived. And the third satori is one when you and the peak have become one. That is the last, the ultimate samadhi.One who initiates you must have attained at least the first. If he has not attained the first, initiation is just bogus. This is on the part of the master: he should have attained the first satori.Much is needed on the part of the disciple because unless the disciple is ready – through deep meditation and purification, through deep catharsis and cleansing – even if the master is there, you will not allow him to put your pot right-side up. You will resist, you will not surrender, you will not be in a let-go. The disciple needs to be in deep trust, only then can the master do something in the innermost being of the disciple. It is a great turning, a conversion, so much is needed on the part of the disciple. Only then is initiation possible.I was just reading a story about a seeker who went to see Bayazid, a great master. The seeker asked, “Please allow me to be a part of your family.”Bayazid said, “But there are requirements to be fulfilled. If you really want to be a disciple, there are many duties you will have to do.”The seeker asked, “What are the duties?”The master said, “First, the winter is coming. You will have to go to the forest and chop wood for the winter and collect wood. Then start working in the kitchen and after that, I will show you what to do.”The seeker said, “But I am in search of truth. How is it going to help to work in the forest and chop wood? What connection is there between chopping wood and attaining truth? And working in the kitchen? What do you mean? I am a seeker.”The master said, “Then seek somewhere else because you will have to listen to me. And however absurd the demand, you will have to fulfill it. That’s how you will become ready for let-go. I know chopping wood has nothing to do with truth, but to be ready to chop it because the master has said it has something to do with truth. I know working in the kitchen has nothing to do with truth. So many people are working, every housewife is working; if that was the way to attain, everybody would attain. It has nothing to do with truth, but when I say that you have to do it, you have to do it in deep love and trust. That will prepare you, that has something to do with truth. But I cannot reveal that to you right now; you will have to wait.”Reluctantly the seeker said, “Okay, but I would also like to know what are the duties of a master?”The master said, “The duty of the master is to sit around and order.”The disciple said, “Then please help me to become a master, train me to become a master. I am ready.”The ego is always seeking its own enhancement. And the ego is the barrier; because of the ego, your pot is upside down. The rain goes on falling and you remain empty.On the part of the disciple, initiation means allowing the master to do whatever – unconditionally. And on the part of the master, it is possible only when he has attained at least the first satori. Otherwise you can be initiated by a thousand and one masters and you will not attain anything. When these two requirements are fulfilled, a communion happens between the master and the disciple.This communion happened that day. Jesus was “opened,” as they say in Subud. Jesus was opened by John the Baptist, and the spirit of God descended on him like a dove: And lo, a voice from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”This always happens. Whenever someone opens to heaven, it is always heard deep down in the heart, it resounds: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” This has been taken wrongly in Christianity. They think Jesus is the only son of God – foolish. The whole existence comes from God, the whole existence is related to God as son to father.A few things to be understood: it would have been better if we had thought of God as mother because the son is more deeply related to the mother. He lives in the womb, he is part of the mother – blood and bones and flesh and everything. But there is also a very significant meaning in thinking of God as father. It is not baseless.Father is indirect, mother is direct. You know who your mother is; you simply believe who your father is. A mother knows exactly that you are her son, but the father believes. Father is indirect, mother is very direct. And God is not so direct, God is very indirect. He fathered you, that means you are related to him, but the relationship is of a trust, a belief, a deep faith. You will come to know your father only when you trust.Your mother is more of a scientific fact, empirical; your father is more a poetical fact, not so empirical. Your mother is very close, in fact too close; the father is very far away, somewhere up in the sky. To feel for the mother is instinctive; to feel for the father, one has to learn it. Your mother is already there; God has to be discovered. So the symbol of the father is also very meaningful, it carries some hidden meanings in it.Whenever it happens to anybody that the heart opens up and the dove descends, this is always heard: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Why is God well-pleased? You have come back home. You went astray, you did all sorts of things irrelevant to your being. You have repented, you have come back home.The whole existence is pleased, the whole existence is pleased whenever somebody becomes a christ or a buddha. The whole existence celebrates because even if one person becomes a buddha or a christ, the whole existence becomes, in a way, more aware and alert.Certainly the world was different after Jesus. The trees are more alert after Jesus and the rocks are more alive after Jesus because his consciousness, the attainment of his consciousness, has spread all over existence. It has to be so. Flowers flower more. They may not be aware, but the very quality of the whole has changed. Even if one drop of consciousness attains godliness, the whole ocean cannot be the same. That one drop has raised the being of the whole, the quality is different.You cannot conceive of yourself if there was no Buddha and no Christ, no Krishna. Just remove twelve names from history and the whole of history will disappear. Then humanity will not be there. In fact, the existence that you know around you will not be there. You will be far more asleep and unconscious, you will have gone far more astray. You will be far more violent, aggressive: the glimmer of love that beats in your heart will not be there, the grace that sometimes appears in your eyes will not be there. Your eyes will be more like an animal’s: ferocious, violent.But when a Jesus has happened, his eyes become part of your eyes – a very minute part, but still sometimes it happens that that part spreads all over your eyes and you look at existence in a totally different way. The world remains the same but your eyes change, and with your eyes the whole changes. In your heart a very minute part has become Buddha with Buddha, Christ with Christ, Krishna with Krishna. I know it is a very minute part, but the possibility to grow exists with it.Look deep down within yourself to the part that has been contributed by Christ or Buddha. Protect it, help it to grow, sacrifice all that you have for it to grow, and you will be on the right track. Let that part win, let that part be victorious, let the Galilean within you win, and immediately – whenever that part is victorious – you are also going to hear: And lo a voice from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,A single session of your Dynamic Meditation has left within me a greater bliss and sense of being than twenty years of having had to listen to the stories of The New Testament and to pray to an almighty and distant God who stayed an unexperienceable Godot to me. Is it possible that the teachings of Jesus just might not be helpful to all seekers – yes, might even be poisonous to them, or to some?Christianity and Christ should never be confused. Christ is totally different from Christianity so whenever you want to understand Christ, go directly and immediately – not via Rome. There you will never understand Christ. Christ or Krishna or Buddha cannot be organized: they are so vast that no organization can do justice to them. Only small things can be organized. Politics can be organized – not religion. Nazism can be organized, communism can be organized – not Christ, not Krishna. The sheer vastness is such that the moment you try to force them into a pattern, they are already dead. It is as if you are trying to grasp the sky in your small hands, with closed fists. With an open hand the sky may touch, may be a little bit on your hand, but with a closed fist it has already escaped out of it.Whatever you have been hearing about Jesus is not about Jesus the real man; it is about the Jesus that Christians have invented, decorated to be sold in the market. The Christian Jesus is a commodity to be sold; Christ himself is a revolution. You will have to be transformed through him; he is the baptism of fire. You can be a Christian conveniently. You can never be a real Christian conveniently.If you are really following Jesus, there is bound to be trouble. He himself ended on the cross; you cannot end on the throne. But if you follow Christianity there is no trouble, it is a very convenient way to adjust Christ to yourself rather than adjusting yourself to Christ. If you adjust yourself to Christ, there will be a transformation; if you adjust Christ to yourself there can be none. Then Christ himself becomes part of the decoration of your imprisonment, part of your furniture, your car, your house – a convenience at the most. But you are not related to him. That’s why twenty years look like they have been wasted.The same will happen with me. You are fortunate that you are doing meditation with me. Once I am gone, the meditation is going to be organized. It is impossible to prevent it, it is the way things move. Then you will do it for twenty years – or two hundred years – and nothing will happen. It does not happen through the technique; technique is just dead. It happens through the love that you feel for me, that I have for you. The technique is just an excuse, it is not the most important thing. The most important thing is your love, your trust. In that trust the technique works and functions, becomes alive, gets roots into your heart.Sooner or later everything becomes organized: prayer, meditation, everything. Then the glory is lost. Then you can go on doing it. You may become absolutely perfect, skilled – it may also give some sort of consolation – but the mutation will be missing. You will remain the same, a continuity. It will not be a baptism: you will not die in it and you will not be reborn. That’s why my insistence is on searching for an alive master.Scriptures are there. At one time those rivers were flowing, but now they are frozen, they are lost in the desert land of churches, temples and organizations. The poetry no longer throbs in them, they are dead dogmas, arguments; the love has disappeared. Remember this always: if you can find a living master, forget all about scriptures. The living master is the only scripture that is alive. Read his heart and allow your heart to be read by him. Be in a communion; that is the only way.Jesus worked the same way as you feel with me, but twenty centuries have passed. The first disciples who came around him staked their lives, they left all that they had, they moved with this man, they risked everything. It was worth it. This man was a treasure of the world, unknown. Nothing was too much. Whatever was asked they did. They had the opportunity to walk with a god on this earth, to be in close affinity with divinity. Others were saying, “This man is wrong,” but those who were close to him knew that only this man was right. And if this man was not right, then nothing could be right – then “right” cannot exist. They crucified this man, but those who were close knew that you cannot crucify him. This man had already entered immortality, this man had already become part of their immortal souls. You can kill the body, but not the spirit.They had lived, walked, breathed in the being of this man; they were transformed. It is not a question of technique. They prayed with this man, but the real thing was not prayer, the real thing was just to be in the presence of this man. This man had a presence.Have you observed? Very few people have what you call presence. Rarely do you come across a person who has a presence: something indefinable around him, something that you suddenly feel but cannot indicate, something that fills you but is ineffable, something very mysterious and unknown. You cannot deny it, you cannot prove it. It is not the body because everybody has a body; it is not the mind because everybody has a mind. Sometimes a very beautiful body may be there, tremendously beautiful, but the presence is not there. Sometimes a genius mind is there, but the presence is not there; and sometimes you pass a beggar and you are filled, touched, stirred – a presence.Those who were in the presence of Jesus, those who were in his satsang – those who lived close, those who lived in his milieu – breathed him. If you allow me to say it, those who drank him and ate him, who allowed him to enter their innermost shrine – that transformed, not the prayer; prayer was just an excuse to be with him. Even without prayer it would have happened, but without prayer they might not have found an excuse to be with him.You are here with me. I go on inventing meditations for you. They are just excuses so that you can be here a little longer, a little while more, so that you can linger around me because nobody knows when my presence will touch you. Nothing can be said about it; it cannot be manipulated. It happens when it happens; nothing can be done directly for it. Just be here. Even without meditations the thing will happen, but without meditations you won’t have any excuse to be here.I go on talking to you. Even without talk it can happen, it will happen, but if I don’t talk, by and by you will disappear because you won’t have an excuse. What are you doing here? I have to give you something to do so that you can be. I have to engage you and occupy you so that you don’t feel restless. The thing is going to happen from some other dimension, but when you are occupied that dimension remains open. If you are not occupied, you become too restless. All meditations and all prayers and all methods are toys invented for children to play with, but that is useful, very significant. Once you are occupied your innermost shrine is open to me: you are not restless, you are doing meditation. And then I can do my work – it is not good to say that I do my work – then it starts happening.You are right, twenty years of Christian teaching, listening to The New Testament stories, may have been futile. Not because those stories are futile – they are superb as far as stories go. The poetry of The New Testament, the poetry of the whole Bible, is something not of this world. There are great poets – Shakespeare and Milton and Dante – but nobody can surpass the Bible. The poetry is tremendously simple, but it has some quality which ordinary poetry cannot have. It has awe; that is the religious quality.Have you watched sometimes? You see a beautiful flower. You may appreciate it, it has an aesthetic quality. You appreciate it and you move ahead. You may see a beautiful face, even the face of a Cleopatra – the lines, the proportion, the marble-like body – but that too is aesthetic. And sometimes you come across a few things or a few beings that inspire not only aesthetic appreciation, but awe. What is awe?Facing some thing or some being, thinking stops. Your mind cannot cope with it. You can cope with a Cleopatra, you can even cope with an Einstein: however abstruse, abstract, difficult, you can cope with it; just a little more training of the mind may be needed. But when you come across a Jesus or a Buddha the mind falls flat, it bogs down. Something is too much for it. You cannot think about anything, you are as if in a deep shock, and yet the shock is blissful. That is awe.The Bible has awe in it, the quality of putting your mind completely at a stop. But that you will have to reach directly. The missionary, the priest, the bishop destroy it because they start interpreting. They put their minds in it and their minds are mediocre. It is as if you are looking at a tremendously beautiful thing from the mind of a very stupid man. Or you are looking at a mirror that is broken, completely broken – it has gathered rust, nothing can be mirrored perfectly – and you look in the mirror and see the moon, distorted. That’s how it has been happening.The Bible is one of the greatest events in the world: very pure, purer than the Bhagavadgita because the Bhagavadgita is very refined. The people who created it were very cultured and educated, and of course whenever a thing becomes very refined it becomes ethereal, unearthly. The Bible is rooted in the earth. All the prophets of the Bible are people of the earth. Even Jesus moves on the earth: he is the son of a carpenter, uneducated, not knowing anything about aesthetics, poetics – nothing. If he speaks poetry, it is because he is, not knowing it at all, a poet. His poetry is raw and wild. Jesus has something of the peasant in him: wisdom but not knowledge. He is not a man of knowledge; no university would be willing to confer an honorary degree on him, no. He wouldn’t fit at Oxford or Cambridge; he would look very foolish in the gowns and clown-like caps. He would look very foolish, he wouldn’t fit. He belongs to the earth, to the village, to ordinary plain people.Just the other night I was reading a small story, an Arabian story…A man died. He had seventeen camels and three sons and he left a will in which, when it was opened and read, it was said that one-half of the camels should go to the first son, one-third to the second and one-ninth to the third.The sons were nonplussed. What to do? Seventeen camels: one-half is to go to the first son. Is one to cut one camel in two? And that too won’t solve much because then one-third has to go to the second. That too won’t solve much: one-ninth has to go to the third. Almost all the camels would be killed.Of course they went to the man of the town who was most knowledgeable: the Mulla: the pundit, the scholar, the mathematician. He thought hard, he tried hard, but he couldn’t find any solution because mathematics is mathematics. He said, “I have never divided camels in my life, this whole thing seems to be foolish. But you will have to cut them. If the will is to be followed exactly then the camels have to be cut, they have to be divided.” The sons were not ready to cut the camels. So what to do? Then somebody suggested, “It is better that you go to someone who knows something about camels, not about mathematics.”So they went to the sheikh of the town who was an old man, uneducated, but wise through experience. They told him their problem. The old man laughed. He said, “Don’t be worried. It is simple.” He loaned one of his own camels to them – now there were eighteen camels – and then he divided. Nine camels were given to the first and he was satisfied, perfectly satisfied. Six camels were given to the second: one-third; he was also perfectly satisfied. And two camels were given to the third: one-ninth; he was also satisfied. One camel was left. That was loaned. He took his camel back and said, “You can go.”Wisdom is practical, knowledge impractical. Knowledge is abstract, wisdom is earthly; knowledge is just words, wisdom is experience.The Bible is very simple. Don’t be deceived by its simplicity. In its simplicity it has the wisdom of the ages. It is very poetic; I have never come across anything more poetic than the Bible. One can simply go on relishing it, one can go on repeating the words of Jesus. They come from the heart and they go to the heart. But don’t go through a mediator. Those mediators are mediocres, they destroy the whole thing. I have looked through many commentaries on the Bible, but I have never come across a single intelligent commentary. They all destroy. I have never seen any single commentary from any theologian who has added anything to the Bible, who has in any way made its glory more manifest. They dim it. And that is bound to be so. Only a man of the quality of Jesus can reveal the truth of it, only a man of the quality of Jesus can enhance its beauty. People who live in the dark valleys and people who live on the sunny peaks of the Himalayas don’t understand each other’s language. When the man from the peak speaks and the man from the valley interprets, everything goes wrong.Yes, it is right; your twenty years may have been wasted. But it will be a total misunderstanding if you think that Jesus is not for you. Jesus is for all, that is not the question. Go direct: become more meditative, become more prayerful, and go direct. And forget all that has been told to you about the Bible; the Bible is enough.In a sense if you want to understand the Upanishads, it may be difficult to understand them directly because they are very refined. The people who were talking in the Upanishads were great philosophers; they need commentaries. But Jesus is plain, his truth is plain. He is a very ordinary villager; no commentary is needed. He is his own light. And if you cannot understand Jesus, who will you be able to understand? Throw all the foolish commentaries away. Go direct. Jesus is so simple you can have a direct contact.I am not commenting on Jesus, I am simply responding. I am not a commentator. To be a commentator is to do a very ugly job. Why should I comment on Jesus? He is plain, he is absolutely simple. Just like two plus two make four; he is that simple. Just like in the morning the sun rises and everybody knows it is morning. He is so simple. I am not commenting on him, I am responding. I read his words: something echoes in me. That is not a commentary. My heart throbs with him, something parallel echoes in me, and I tell you what it is.So don’t take my words as commentaries. I am not trying to explain Jesus to you, there is no need. I am simply mirroring; I am telling you my heart. I am telling you what happens to me when I am listening to Jesus.The second question:Osho,Often during the lecture I find a part of me waiting for your glance. When you finally look at me, something in me runs away. The feeling is like being in a desert, waiting for ages for some water to come, and when it finally rains, the mouth snaps shut. Why is this?No need to think there is some great secret in it: just the woman, just the woman within you. That is the way of the woman. She waits for something, she attracts something, she asks, invites something, and when it comes she becomes afraid and escapes. It is the way of all women. And unless you understand it and drop it, your whole life will become miserable.First you attract, and when the thing that you have invited comes to you, you become afraid and you escape. This hide-and-seek goes on. This has been my observation: the feminine mind asks for something, but when it rains, it is never there to receive it. So the feminine mind becomes a long endless waiting. Every moment the fulfillment was possible, but whenever it comes close, the woman becomes afraid. The woman asks for love and is afraid of love because when love comes, it brings death with it. Love has to bring death because only then can you be reborn. There is no other way.I will read the question again: “Often during the lecture I find a part of me waiting for your glance. When you finally look at me, something in me runs away.” You wait for my glance. A deep love arises in you, a waiting. But when my glance comes to you, it brings death. Then you become afraid, you escape because you were waiting for love and the glance brings death also. It brings love also, but love and death are two aspects of the same glance. If I really love you, I have to be a death to you. There is no other way, the love cannot happen in any other way. And when the glance penetrates you, something shrinks, escapes; something runs away, becomes afraid. Then my glance moves. Then you are again at ease waiting for me.There is no other secret in it: just the woman. And when I say “the woman” you should not misunderstand me. Many men behave just like a woman. In love everybody behaves like a woman. You would like to take a jump into the unknown and you don’t want to renounce the known. You want to move on two boats together and they are moving in different dimensions, diametrically opposite. You want to be yourself, and you would like to have a new life also.You ask the impossible. You want to cling to whatever you have and you would like to grow also – and that very clinging is preventing you from growth. No, both are not possible together.When you wait for my glance you wait as you are, but when I come and knock at your door I have come to destroy you as you are, because I know that only then will the hidden within you be released. Then you become afraid.People like freedom, but they are fearful also. When the freedom is not there they think about it, they dream about it, they fantasize, but when freedom comes they become afraid because freedom brings with it many more things than they ever thought about. Freedom brings insecurity. Freedom brings adventure, but insecurity also. Freedom brings a bigger sky, it gives you wings, but then the bigger sky can be dangerous also. Freedom is very dangerous. To live in freedom is to live dangerously. You come to me, you seek freedom, but deep down I see you are also saying, “Don’t make us free, please don’t push us into freedom. Let us cling to you, let us depend on you.” And you go on asking and praying, “Give us freedom.” With one hand you ask, with another hand you deny; one part of you says yes, another part of you goes on saying no.Have you watched your mind? You say yes–no together. Maybe one is a little louder and the other is not so loud, maybe you are very cunning and you don’t listen to the other when you say the one, but just be a little watchful. Whenever you say yes, just by the side lingers the no. Then you are in a constant conflict. You would like for me to come to your door. But then you will close the door because I will come as I am, not as you expect me. I will come as I am, not according to your dreams.Always remember to find the small causes for the things that happen in you and around you. Sometimes you start asking for very deep and great reasons which are not there – and particularly in the West, about everything, because of the two hundred years of psychology, and the training in psychology and psychiatry. The knowledge of psychology has become common knowledge, everybody knows about it. People go on digging deep into small things which have nothing much in them, simple facts, and they go on bringing things up which are not at all connected.Just this morning I was reading an anecdote…A psychoanalyst and a friend were standing looking at the sky through the window and discussing something. The psychoanalyst said, “Remarkable! Look!” Some work was going on. A building was to be demolished and a few laborers were working with barrows. He said, “Look, twelve people are working with barrows: eleven are pushing them in front of them and one is pulling it. Eleven pushing, one pulling: there must be an explanation for it. There must be some deep-rooted inhibition in that man. Or something happened in childhood with his parents, something to do with a primal. There must be some deep-rooted problem involved. We must go and ask.” So they went down.They stopped the laborer who was pulling the barrow behind him and the psychoanalyst said, “Please, just help us to discover something very deep-rooted in you. Eleven people are pushing their barrows in front of themselves; only you are pulling your barrow. There must be some explanation for it. Something tremendously traumatic must have happened in your childhood, a deep repression, obsession, compulsion – some complex. Please tell us something about it. What do you feel?”The laborer looked at them and said, “Blimey, guv’nor, I just hates the sight of the thing, that’s all. That’s why I’m carrying it behind.” Just hates the sight of the thing!There is nothing to it, you are just a woman. Go beyond it. Man has to go beyond his manhood and woman has to go beyond her womanhood. And when you are neither man nor woman you will be able to allow my glance to reach the deepest core of your being. Then you will be able to open your doors. Then my knock will not go unanswered.The third question:Osho,Surely that which happens in the instant of death by drowning is the true explanation of Jesus' baptism at the hands of John. Was not the skill and strength of the baptist that of taking a man to that point, and the preparation you talk of beforehand employed so that a man be transformed by the experience rather than terrified by it?Yes, exactly so. Baptism is possible only when you are ready to die. That is the symbolic meaning: John the Baptist used to take his disciples to the river when they were ready to die, when they were ready to let go, when they were ready to flow with the river. When the resistance was broken, when they were no longer fighting, when the whole struggle to survive had disappeared, only then would he take them to the river. They were ready to be drowned by him, to be murdered by him.There is a story I would like to tell you about a Sufi mystic, Sheik Farid…Farid was going to the river one day to take his morning bath. A seeker followed him and asked, “Please, just wait for one minute. You look so filled with the divine, but I don’t even feel a desire for it. You look so mad and just watching you I have come to feel that there must be something in it. You are so happy and blissful and I am so miserable, but even the desire to seek the divine is not there. So what to do? How to create the desire?”Farid looked at the man and said, “Come with me. I am going to take my morning bath. You also take a bath with me in the river, and maybe right while you are taking a bath the answer can be given. Otherwise we will see after the bath. Come with me.”The man became a little puzzled. This Sheik Farid looked a little mad. How was he going to answer while taking a bath? But nobody knows the ways of the mystics, so the man followed. They both went in the river and when the man was taking a dip, Farid jumped on him and pressed him down in the river. The man started feeling restless. What type of answer was this? At first he thought Farid was joking, but then it became dangerous, he was not going to leave him! He struggled hard.Farid was a very heavy, strong man and the seeker was very thin, as seekers are. But when your life is at stake, even that thin-looking man threw Farid off, jumped on him and said, “Are you a murderer? What are you doing? I am a poor man. I have just come to ask you how the desire can arise in one’s heart to seek the divine, and you were going to kill me!”Farid said, “Wait. A few questions first. When I was pressing you down in the river and you were suffocating, how many thoughts were in your mind?”The man said, “How many? Only one thought: how to get back to the air to take a breath.”Farid asked, “How long did that one thought stay?”The man said, “That too did not stay long because my life was at stake. You can afford thinking when nothing is at stake. My life was in danger – even that thought disappeared. Then to come out of the river was not a thought, it was my whole being.”Farid said, “You have understood. This is the answer. If you are feeling suffocated in this world, pressed from all sides, and if you feel nothing is going to happen in this world except death, then the desire to seek truth or God or whatever you name it will arise. And that too will not last long. By and by that desire is no longer a desire, it becomes your being. The very thirst becomes your being. I have shown you the path,” said Farid. “Now you can go.”Just try to understand the whole situation in the world: if it is already destroying you, jump out of it. The real question is not how to seek God; the real question is how to understand that where you are thinking life is, there is no life but only death.John the Baptist, or anybody who has ever baptized anybody else, who has ever initiated anybody else, who has ever brought anybody out of the world of dreams to the world of truth, has to prepare you for death. Yes, that is the meaning. By baptism he was saying, “Your old self has gone down the river, you are no longer the same. A new identity has arisen; now you have a new nucleus. Function through it and don’t function through the past.”The same has been done through initiation by fire. In India initiation by fire, not by water, has traditionally been used. There have been a few side currents that have been using water baptism also, but the main current in India has been using fire. So in every master’s house – what they used to call a gurukul, the family of the master – there was a fire constantly burning in the middle of the house, a constantly burning fire, twenty-four hours a day. All the teachings were delivered near the fire. By and by, the fire symbol became deep-rooted in the disciples.There is a beautiful story in the old Upanishads about when a disciple, a very famous disciple, Svetketu, was with his master…The master waited for twelve years and wouldn’t initiate him into the mysteries. The disciple served and served, tending the fire in the house – the fire had to be kept lit for twenty-four hours. It is said that the fire itself became very worried about this Svetketu. For twelve years he had been serving the fire, tending it, bringing wood from the forest. The story is beautiful. It says that the fire became worried. Even the fire started feeling that the master was a little too hard, a little unjust. The fire started feeling compassion for Svetketu.The fire talked to the master’s wife when the master was out and said, “This is going too far. This Svetketu has been serving so silently for twelve years. He has earned it already; the secret has to be revealed to him. Persuade your husband.”“But,” the wife said, “he won’t listen. If I say anything, he may even become harder. He is not a man who can be persuaded. One has to wait. He knows how to work and how not to work, what to do and what not to do, and I cannot say anything.”It is said that the fire became so concerned that the fire itself revealed the secret to Svetketu. And when the secret was revealed, the master danced. He said, “Svetketu, I was waiting because when the fire reveals itself, that’s something. I was forcing the fire itself to reveal the secret because compassion will arise, existence is compassionate. I could have given you the secret any day, but that would not have been so vital; it would have been from me. But now the doors of existence have been opened for you by existence itself. Now you are in communion with fire itself, you have been initiated by fire.”What secret can the fire give to you? – the secret of death. In India we have been burning dead bodies to make it deeply associated with death, so that fire becomes associated with death. Even those who are not seekers also know that fire is the symbol of death: one dies in it. But those who know and seek on the path also know that one is resurrected through it: dies and is reborn. But in both cases, whether through water or fire, death is the point. One has to die to attain life abundant, one has to carry one’s cross. Nobody else can initiate you, only death. Death is the master. Or, the master is death.If you are ready to die, nobody can prevent you from being reborn. But this death should not be suicidal. Many people commit suicide. They are not resurrected. A suicidal death is not a death through understanding; a suicidal death is a death through misunderstanding. You die confused, in agony. You die obsessed with the world, you die attached to the world. You die as a complaint.Watch people who think of committing suicide. They are not against life. In fact on the contrary, they are so attached to life that life cannot fulfill them. They take revenge, they complain. They kill themselves just to lodge a complaint against the whole existence – that it was not a fulfillment. They are grumbling; they are saying, “Life is not worth it.” But why is life not worth living? They expected too much; that’s why it is not worth it. They asked too much; they never earned it. They asked too much and it was not delivered. They are frustrated.One who is ready to die without frustration – seeing the truth of life, seeing the truth that life is just a dream, it cannot fulfill anything – knows it cannot frustrate also. Both fulfillment and frustration are part of the illusion that life is real. One who sees that life is unreal, just like a dream, becomes detached. A renunciation comes.In the Upanishads there is one very vital saying: “Ten tykten bhunjithah: those who have indulged in life have always renounced.” It is very revolutionary; the implication is tremendous. It says: those who have indulged in life are bound to renounce because they have seen the truth – that life is false. They have looked into it and found nothing. Not that they are frustrated, because if you are frustrated that only shows that you were still expecting something. Frustration shows deep expectation. One who has become aware that life can only promise but can never deliver – it is a dream – is neither frustrated nor fulfilled in life. Then comes renunciation. Renunciation is not leaving life; renunciation is seeing life as it is. Then one is ready to die because there is nothing in life.That readiness for death is the point John the Baptist was driving people toward. When they were ready, he would bring them to the River Jordan and do the ritual, the final touch. With the water flowing over the head and down the river, the ego, the old personality, is gone. Pure essence – bathed in a new sense of being, with a new mystery of being alive, with a new sense of existence – is born.Of course, death can either be a very terrifying experience or tremendously beautiful. It depends on the attitude. If you feel terrified in death then you will die, but you will not be resurrected. If death becomes a beautiful experience, then you are dying and at the same time resurrecting. Ordinarily death is terror; that’s why you are so afraid to die. In life nothing beautiful happens until you die, but you are terrified. A master has to persuade you, by and by, about the beauty of death. He has to sing the glories of death. He has, by and by, to convince you and create a trust in death so that you can let go. Once you let go nothing dies, only the ego. You remain for ever and ever.You are eternity, you cannot die, the fear is absolutely futile and unbased. But the ego has to die. The ego is a created phenomenon: it was not there when you were born. Society created it, society has given you the ego, and that ego can be taken by the society, and that ego is absolutely going to be taken by death. You will go as you had come: empty-handed you come, empty-handed you go. The ego is just an illusion in between. That ego is afraid of death. Once you understand that you are not going to die – only the ego, only the disease – you are ready. You are ready for baptism.The fourth question:Osho,You say that seriousness is a disease. Whenever I remember myself, I feel serious. So what should I do?Don’t get serious about it. Let it be so, and laugh. If you can laugh at yourself, everything is okay. People laugh at others, but never laugh at themselves. It has to be learned. If you can laugh at yourself, seriousness is already gone. It cannot make its abode within you if you are capable of laughing at yourself.In Zen monasteries every monk has to laugh. The first thing to do in the morning is to laugh, the very first thing. The moment the monk becomes aware that he is no longer asleep, he has to jump out of bed, stand in a posture like a buffoon, like a circus clown, and start laughing – laughing at himself. There cannot be any better beginning of the day. Laughing at oneself kills the ego, and you are more transparent, lighter when you move in the world. And if you have laughed at yourself, others’ laughter toward you won’t disturb you. In fact they are simply cooperating, they are doing the same thing that you were doing. You will feel happy.To laugh at others is egoistic; to laugh at oneself is very humble. Learn to laugh at yourself – about your seriousness and things like that. But you can get serious about seriousness; then instead of one, you have created two diseases. Then you can get serious about that also, and you can go on and on. There is no end to it; it can go on ad nauseam. So take hold of it from the very beginning. The moment you feel you are serious, laugh about it and look for where the seriousness is. Laugh, give a good laugh, close the eyes and look for where it is. You will not find it. It exists only in a being who cannot laugh.A more unfortunate situation cannot be conceived, a poorer being cannot be conceived of than the man who cannot laugh at himself. So start the morning by laughing at yourself, and whenever you can find a moment in the day when you have nothing to do, have a good laugh for no particular reason – just because the whole world is so absurd, just because the way you are is so absurd. There is no need to find any particular reason. The whole thing is such that one has to laugh.Let the laughter be a belly laughter, not a heady thing. One can laugh from the head – then it is dead. From the head everything is dead; the head is absolutely mechanical. You can laugh from the head, then your head will create the laughter, but it will not go deep in the belly to the hara. It will not go to your toes, it will not go to your whole body. Real laughter has to be just like a small child laughs. Watch his belly shaking, his whole body throbbing with it. He wants to roll on the floor because it is a question of totality. He laughs so much that he starts crying; he laughs so deeply that the laughter becomes tears, tears come out of him. Laughter should be deep and total. This is the medicine that I prescribe for seriousness.You would like me to give you some serious medicine. That won’t help. You have to be a little foolish. In fact the highest pinnacle of wisdom always carries foolishness in it, the greatest wise men of the world were also the greatest fools. It will be hard to understand. You cannot think of how they can be fools because your mind always divides: a wise man can never be a fool, and a fool can never be a wise man. Both attitudes are wrong. There have been great fools who were very wise.In the old days, in every king’s court there was a great fool – the court fool. He was a balancing force because too much wisdom can be foolish, too much of anything can be foolish. Somebody was needed who could bring things back to earth. A fool was needed in the kings’ courts who would help them laugh, otherwise wise people tend to become serious, and seriousness is an illness. Out of seriousness you lose proportion, you lose perspective. So every king’s court had a fool, a great fool, who would say things and do things and bring things back to the earth.I have heard…An emperor had a fool. One day the emperor was looking in the mirror. The fool came, jumped, and hit him with his feet in the back. The emperor fell against the mirror. He was, of course, very angry and he said, “Unless you can give some reason for your foolish act which is more foolish than the act itself, you will be sentenced to death.”The fool said, “My Lord, I never thought that you were here. I thought the queen was standing here.”He had to be pardoned because he had given a reason that was even more foolish. But to find such a reason, the fool must have been very wise.Every great wise man – Lao Tzu, Jesus – has a certain quality of sublime foolishness. This has to be so because otherwise a wise man will be a man without salt, he will taste awful. He has to be a little foolish also. Then things are balanced. Look at Jesus riding on a donkey and saying to people, “I am the son of God.” Look at it; he must have been both. People must have laughed, “What are you saying? Saying such things and behaving in such a way.”I know that’s how perfect wisdom appears. Lao Tzu says, “Everybody is wise, except me. I seem to be foolish. Everybody’s mind is clear; only my mind seems to be murky and muddled. Everybody knows what to do and what not to do; only I am confused.” What does he mean? He is saying: “In me, wisdom and foolishness meet together.” And when wisdom and foolishness meet together there is a transcendence.So don’t be serious about seriousness. Laugh about it, be a little foolish. Don’t condemn foolishness; it has its own beauties. If you can be both, you will have a quality of transcendence within you.The world has become more and more serious. Hence so much cancer, so much heart disease, so much high blood pressure, so much madness. The world has been moved, forced, too much toward one extreme. Be a little foolish also. Laugh a little, be like a child. Enjoy a little, don’t carry a serious face everywhere, and suddenly you will find a deeper health arising in you. Deeper sources of your health become available.Have you ever heard about any fool who went mad? It has never happened. I have always been searching for a report of any foolish man who went mad. I have not come across one. Of course a fool cannot go mad – because to be mad you need to be very serious.I have also been searching to see if fools are in any way prone to be healthier than the so-called wise. And it is so: fools are healthier than the so-called wise. They live in the moment and they know that they are fools, so they are not worried about what others think about them. That worry becomes a cancerous phenomenon in the mind and body. They live long and they have the last laugh.Remember that life should be a deep balancing, a very deep balancing. Then, just in the middle, you escape. The energy surges high, you start moving upward. And this should be so about all opposites. Don’t be a man and don’t be a woman: be both so that you can be neither. Don’t be wise, don’t be a fool: be both so you can go beyond.The fifth question:Osho,Please explain why we don't feel the divine which is here–now, within–without, which is you–me, and all.This is from Swami Yoga Chinmaya. It is because you are too much, and too heavy on yourself. Because you cannot laugh, the divine is hidden, and because you are too tense, you are closed. And these things that you think – that the divine is here–now, within–without, you–me – are only head things, they are not your feelings. They are thoughts, not realizations. If you go on thinking on these lines they will never become experiences. You can convince yourself by a thousand and one arguments that this is so, but they will never become your experience. You will go on missing. It is not a question of argument, philosophy, thinking, contemplation – no. It is a question of drowning yourself deep in the feeling of the phenomenon. One has to feel it, not to think about it. And to feel it, one has to disappear.You are trying an absolutely impossible thing: by thinking, you are trying to realize God. It will remain a philosophy, it will never become your experience, and unless it is an experience it is not liberating. It will become a bondage; you will die in that bondage of words.You are too much – Yoga Chinmaya’s head has to be cut off, beheaded, completely – too much in the head, and too much of yourself. God is not more important, you are more important. You want to know God: God is not the emphasis, you are the emphasis. You want to achieve God: not that God is important, you are important – and how can you live without achieving God? God has to be possessed, but the emphasis is on you. That’s why you go on missing.Drop the “you.” Then there is no need to worry about God; he comes by himself. Once you are not, he comes. Once you are absent, his presence is felt. Once you are empty, he is rushing toward you. Drop all the philosophies and all that you have learned, and all that you have borrowed, and all that has become heavy on the head.Drop it, be clean of it; it is all rot. Once you are clean, in that cleanliness you start feeling something arising. In that innocence is virginity. God is always available.The last question:Osho,How is it possible that the mind can go on producing thoughts constantly, and how can we stop that which we have not started?You cannot stop that which you have not started. Don’t try it, otherwise you will simply be wasting time, energy, life. You cannot stop the mind because you have not started it. You can simply watch, and in watching it stops. Not that you stop it; in watching it stops. The stopping is a function of watching, it is a consequence of watching – not that you stop it. There is no way to stop the mind. If you try to stop it, it will go faster; if you try to stop it, it will fight with you and create a thousand and one troubles for you. Never try to stop it. This is exactly the truth: you have not started it, so who are you to stop it? It has come through your unawareness; it will go through your awareness. You have nothing to do to stop it. Become more and more alert.Even the idea that one has to stop it will be the barrier because you can say, “Okay, now I will try to be aware so that I can stop it.” Then you miss the point. Then even your awareness won’t be of much help because again the same idea is there: how to stop it. Then after a few days of futile effort – futile because it will not happen because the idea is there – you will come to me and you will say, “I have been trying to be aware, but the mind doesn’t stop.”It cannot be stopped; no method exists to stop it. But it stops – not that you stop it, it stops by itself. Simply watch; in watching, you withdraw the energy that helps it to run. In watching, the energy becomes the watcher and the thinking automatically becomes feebler and feebler and feebler. Thoughts are there, but they become impotent because the energy is not available. They will move around you, half dead, but by and by more energy will be coming to the awareness. One day suddenly the energy is no longer moving into thoughts. They have disappeared. They cannot exist without your energy. So please forget about stopping them. That is none of your business.And the second thing, you ask: “How is it possible that the mind can go on producing thoughts constantly?” It is just a natural process. Just like your heart goes on beating constantly, your mind goes on thinking constantly; just like your body goes on breathing constantly, your mind goes on thinking constantly; just like your blood goes on circulating constantly and your stomach goes on digesting continuously, the mind goes on thinking constantly. There is no problem in it, it is simple. But you are not identified with the blood circulation, you don’t think that you are circulating. In fact you are not even conscious that the blood circulates; it goes on circulating, you have nothing to do with it. The heart goes on beating; you don’t think that you are beating. With the mind, the problem has arisen because you think that you are thinking; the mind has become a focus of identity. The identity just has to be broken. It is not that when the mind has stopped, it will not think forever, no. It will think only when it is needed; it will not think when it is not needed. Thinking will be there, but now it will be natural: a response, a spontaneous activity, not an obsession.For example, you eat when you are hungry. But you can get obsessed and can go on eating the whole day. Then you will go mad; then you will commit suicide. You walk when you want to walk. When you want to go somewhere, you move your legs. If you go on moving your legs when you are sitting on the chair, people will think you are mad and that something has to be done to stop you. If you ask how to stop these legs which are moving and if somebody says, “Stop them by holding them with your hands, force them,” you will be in even more trouble because the legs are moving and now the hands are also engaged, and your whole effort is how to stop them. Now your energy is fighting with yourself. You have become identified with the mind, that’s all. That too is natural because the mind is so close to you and you have to use the mind so much.One is constantly sitting there. It is as if a driver has been driving a car for years and has never been out of the car. He has forgotten that he can go out, that he is a driver. He has forgotten completely; he thinks that he himself is the car. He cannot go out because who is there to go out? He has forgotten how to open the door, or the door is completely stuck by not having been used for years, it has gathered rust, it cannot open easily. The driver has been in the car so much that he has become the car, that’s all. A misunderstanding has arisen. Now he cannot stop the car, because how is he to stop it? Who is going to stop it?In the mind you are just the driver. It is a mechanism around you, your consciousness goes on using it. But you have never been out of your head. That’s why I insist: drop a little out of the head, go to the heart. From the heart you will have a better perspective that the car is separate from you. Or try to go out of the body. That too is possible. Out of the body you will be absolutely out of the car. You will be able to see that neither the body nor the heart nor the mind is you; you are separate.Right now, continue to remember only one thing, that you are separate. From everything that surrounds you, you are separate. The knower is not the known. Go on feeling it more and more so that it becomes a substantial crystallization in you that the knower is not the known. You know the thought, you see the thought – how can you be the thought? You know the mind – how can you be the mind? Just drop away; a little distance is needed. One day when you are really distant, thinking stops. When the driver is out, the car stops because there is nobody to drive it now. Then you will have a good laugh, seeing that it has just been a misunderstanding. Now, whenever you need it, think.You ask a question to me: I respond. The mind functions. I have to talk to you through the mind; there is no other way to talk. But when I am alone, the mind doesn’t function. The mind has not lost the capacity to function. In fact it has gained more capacity to function and to function rightly; because it is not constantly functioning, it gathers energy, it becomes clearer. So “when the mind stops” does not mean that you will not be able to think again. In fact, only after that will you be able to think for the first time. Just to be engaged in relevant, irrelevant, thoughts is not thinking. It is a mad sort of thing. To be clear, clean, innocent, is to be on the right path for thinking. Then when a problem arises you are not confused; you don’t look at the problem through prejudices. You look directly at it, and in that direct look the problem starts melting. If the problem is a problem, it will melt and disappear. If the problem is not a problem but a mystery, it will melt and deepen. And then you will be able to see what a problem is. A problem is that which can be solved by the mind.A mystery is that which cannot be solved by the mind. A mystery has to be lived; a problem has to be solved. When you are in the thoughts too much, you cannot know what is a mystery and what is a problem. Sometimes you take a mystery as a problem. Then your whole life you struggle and it is never solved. And sometimes you think of a problem as a mystery and you foolishly wait. It could have been solved.A clarity, a perspective, is needed. When thinking – this constant inner chattering and inner talk – stops, and you have become alert and aware, you are capable of seeing things as they are, you are capable of finding solutions and you are also capable of knowing what a mystery is. And when you come to feel a mystery, you feel reverence, you feel awe. That is the religious quality of being. To feel reverence is to be religious; to feel awe is to be religious. To be so deeply in wonder that you have again become a child is to enter the kingdom of God.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 417 From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”18 And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.19 And he saith unto them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”20 And they straightway left their nets, and followed him.23 And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.24 And his fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.25 And there followed him great multitudes of people from Galilee, and from Decapolis, and from Jerusalem, and from Judaea, and from beyond Jordan.Once a rabbi was asked to tell the whole Bible message in brief. He replied that the whole Bible message is very simple and short. It is God shouting to man: “Enthrone me!”This is what happened that morning in the River Jordan: Jesus disappeared, God was enthroned. Jesus vacated the house, God entered. Either you can be, or God can be; both cannot exist together. If you insist on existing, drop the search for God; it is not going to be fulfilled. Then it is impossible, absolutely impossible. If you are there, God cannot be. Your very being, your very presence, is the hindrance. You disappear, and God is. He has always been there.Man can live as a part, separated from the whole. Man can create around himself ideas, dreams, ego, personality, and think of himself as an island unconnected with the whole, unrelated with the whole. Have you ever seen any relationship between you and the trees? Have you seen any relationship between you and the rocks? Have you seen any relationship between you and the sea? If you don’t see the relationship, you can never come to know what God is. God is nothing but the whole, the total, the one. If you exist as a separate part, you unnecessarily exist as a beggar. You could have been the whole. And even while you think that you are separate, you are not separate; that is just a thought in the mind. The thought is not befooling existence, it is only befooling you. The thought is just a barrier for your eyes to open.That morning in the River Jordan when John the Baptist initiated Jesus, he killed Jesus utterly. Jesus disappeared. And in that moment of nothingness was a buddha – what Buddha calls shunyata, emptiness. The heavens opened and the spirit of God like a dove descended on Jesus, lighted on him.This is just symbolic: Jesus died, God was enthroned. This is what in Zen they call a special transmission, outside the scriptures. No knowledge was given by John the Baptist to Jesus, no scripture was conveyed. Not even a single word was uttered, no dependence on words or letters – just a direct pointing to the soul of man. Seeing one’s nature, an attainment of buddhahood: this is what happened that day.Christians have missed the point: it was not knowledge that was transferred from John the Baptist to Jesus, it was a vision. It was not verbal, it was existential. It was more like knowing than knowledge. Eyes were transferred: a new way of seeing the world and being in the world was transferred, a special transmission outside the scriptures. That’s why Jesus immediately felt one with God, but cut off from the Jews. Jews are “the people of the book.” The Bible doesn’t mean anything else; it simply means “the book.” Jews are the people of the book – the people who have believed in the scriptures tremendously, who have loved and relied on the scriptures for centuries.Jesus became one with God, but immediately was cut off from his own tradition. Then he tried in a thousand and one ways to remain part of the community, but it was impossible. He could not be part of the scriptures, could not be part of the tradition. Something of the beyond entered him and when God enters, all scriptures become useless. When you yourself have come to know, all knowledge is rubbish.That was the struggle between Jesus and the rabbis. They had knowledge, Jesus had knowing – and they never meet. The man of knowing is rebellious, the man of knowing has his own eyes; he says whatever he sees. The man of knowledge is blind: he carries the scripture, he never looks around; he just goes on repeating the scripture. The man of knowledge is mechanical, he has no personal contact with reality.Just a few days ago I was reading about a very high-powered New York psychiatrist. He was talking to one of his new patients and he told him, “I am very busy, in fact too busy. It will be good if you can help me. The first interview is always one-sided: you will be telling me all that you want to tell me. If I can get it down and look at it, and study it later on at my own convenience, it will be a great help. So here is a tape recorder. I will leave the tape recorder. Turn the machine on and talk to the tape recorder. Whatever you have to say, say all that you would like to say to me and then later on I will listen to it.” The psychiatrist asked, “Are you willing?”The man said, “Of course. It is perfectly alright.”The tape recorder was turned on and the psychiatrist left, but after just two minutes he saw the man leaving the office. He ran after him, stopped him and said, “So soon? You could not have said much to the tape recorder.”The man said, “Listen, I am also a very busy man. In fact busier than you. And you are not the first psychiatrist I have consulted. Go back to the consulting room and you will see sitting just by the side of your tape recorder my small recorder talking to the tape recorder.”Knowledge is just like this. Nobody is present: tape recorders talking to tape recorders. Your mind is just a tape recorder and scriptures are old tape recorders – an old medium, but still the same. Somebody has said something, it is recorded there. Then you read it and it becomes recorded in your own tape recorder – but there is no personal touch.Knowing is personal, knowledge mechanical. Through a mechanical approach you can never come to discover the reality, the truth. It is going to be a dead affair. You will attain a lot of information, but you will never attain transformation. You may come to know many things, but you will never know the thing which needs to be known: the being that you are and the being that surrounds you. And that which surrounds you is the same as that which is within you. A deep personal contact is needed. That morning in the River Jordan, Jesus came in personal contact with the divine. John the Baptist initiated him to be a nothing.When you come to me, you are not coming to a man who knows much, you are coming to a man who has a lot of nothingness in him. I can share that nothingness with you. The day you are ready to share my nothingness, you are initiated.You can be here in two ways. You can be a student; then you will be related to me in a mechanical way, you will collect information from me – which was never meant to be done. You will start knowing many more things from me. That is an addiction. The ego may feel stronger, but the soul will become more and more impoverished. Or you can be a disciple here and not a student; then you share in my nothingness. Then by and by you disappear completely. Then there is nobody inside you who knows – and that nobodyness is the only way to know. In that nothingness your heart is open, in that nothingness the island disappears and you become the continent. In that nothingness the separation disappears: you become the whole. Then the whole exists through you.The rabbi was right who said, “God shouting to man: ‘Enthrone me!’” Jesus, Krishna, Christ, Mohammed, Lao Tzu, all are shouts of God to man: “Enthrone me!”Immediately, Jesus started to preach:From that time Jesus began to preach…Immediately: knowledge needs time, knowing is immediate. If I want to share my knowledge with you it will take time, but if I want to share my nothingness with you, time is not needed. Immediately, right here now, it is possible. Only your readiness is needed. Time is not a requirement at all, it can happen in a split second.Whenever I read this gospel, the thing that strikes me immediately is: the moment Jesus was baptized and the heavens opened and the spirit of God descended like a dove, he came out of the river, went to the bank. A crowd was gathering and he started to preach. Before that he had never uttered a single word, before that he had not taught anything to anybody.That’s how it should be. A teacher can go on teaching without knowing, but not a master. Teachers are many, masters few. A master is one who teaches through his knowing and a teacher is one who teaches through his knowledge. A teacher prepares himself for years, then he can teach. But a master in a single moment of courage, in a single moment of daring, in a single moment of death, in a single moment of jumping into the unknown, becomes capable of teaching. Once you know, that very knowing wants to be shared; once you are blissful, that very blissfulness starts flowing, it starts seeking the heart. Once you are, you are already on the way to be shared by many.Jesus moved out of the river:From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”John the Baptist was saying the same thing. Jesus could have said the same thing just by hearing John the Baptist – he was a well-known preacher, great multitudes used to visit him, great crowds used to wait and listen to him. Everybody knew that his message was this: “Repent ye for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Jesus must have known about it, but he had never uttered those words before.To utter such great words without knowing is sacrilegious, it is a betrayal. Never utter such great words unless you know yourself, because you can destroy others’ minds. You can fill their minds with your rot. If you don’t know and you go on saying things to people, as it has happened all over the world…Go and look at the priests in the churches and the temples and the mosques: they go on teaching and they go on preaching, not knowing anything, whatever they are saying. They are not aware of what they are doing at all – tape recorders! They have learned, but they have not known. They have studied, but they don’t have their own eyes; their own hearts are as dead as those to whom they are preaching. Their minds may be more cultivated, but their hearts are as ill as anybody else’s.Jesus had never uttered these words before. Nobody had known about this man Jesus before this. He remained in his father’s workshop; he worked, he helped his father. Suddenly a new quality of man, a new man altogether fresh, was born. Baptism is a birth.From that very moment he: …began to preach, and to say, “Repent…” because now he can utter those words with authority. Now they are no longer John the Baptist’s words he is repeating, now they are his own. He has repented and he has come to know what they mean. Now they are not futile, parrot-like words; they are pregnant, alive. He has touched the reality of those words, he has come to see the mystery of them.The actual word in Hebrew is teshuvah: repent. Teshuvah means return and teshuvah also means answer. Both meanings are beautiful. To return to God is an answer to him. This is one of the most beautiful things in Judaism, one of the greatest contributions of Judaism to the world. It has to be understood because without it, you will never be able to understand Jesus.Judaism is the only religion in the world which says that not only is man seeking God, but God is also seeking man. Nobody else in the world believes that. There are Hindus, Mohammedans and other religions, they all believe man is seeking God. Judaism believes God is also seeking man. And this should be so if he is a father. This should be so. He is the whole, and if a part has gone astray, the whole – out of his compassion – must seek the part.Judaism has a beauty of its own. Man seeking God is just like stumbling in darkness. Unless God is also seeking you, there seems to be no possibility of any meeting. How will you seek him who is unknown? Where will you seek him? You don’t know the address. Where will you address your prayers? Where will you move, where will you go, what will you do? You can only stumble, cry and weep; tears can be your only prayer. A deep desire, but how to fulfill it? You can burn with it, but how to arrive? Judaism says man can seek, but man cannot find unless God wills it.God is within reach, but not within grasp. You can spread your hands – he is within reach, but not within grasp. He comes within grasp because he is also seeking you. He can seek you immediately and directly, he knows exactly where you are. But he cannot seek you unless you are on the search. He can seek you only when you are searching, when you are doing everything that can be done, when you are not withholding anything, when your search is total. When your search is total, immediately heaven opens and the spirit of God descends in you. He is waiting, waiting with a deep urge to meet you.This should be so, because existence is a love affair. It is a hide-and-seek play, it is a game. The mother is playing with the child and hiding. The mother is waiting, and if the child does not come the mother will start seeking him. But God gives you total freedom. If you don’t want to seek, he will not interfere, he will not be an intruder. If you want to seek, only then does he knock at your door. If you have invited, only then does the guest come. The guest may be just waiting to knock on the door. Only your invitation is needed, otherwise he can wait for eternity, there is no hurry. God is not in any haste.“Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” It would have been absolutely different if the word was not translated as repent, if it was left to the original return. That is what Patanjali says in his Yoga Sutras: pratyahar is returning to oneself. That is what Mahavira means when he says to move withinward: pratikraman, to go in.The word teshuvah has a totally different meaning from repent. The moment you say “repent” it seems that man is a sinner: a deep condemnation comes in. But if you say “return,” there is no question of sin, no condemnation enters. It simply says that you have gone far away, you have played too long – please come back. The child has been playing outside and the evening is descending. The sun is setting and the mother calls, “Please return.” A totally different quality, a totally different connotation. There is no condemnation in it, just a deep love call: “Return!”Just listen to the sentence if I say: “Return ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” All condemnation, all sin, and the whole nonsense that has created guilt in man disappears just by a single word translated rightly. A single word can be significant, but the whole of Christianity will disappear if you translate repent as return. All churches, the Vatican, everything will disappear because they depend on repentance.If it is a question of return – and you are not condemned and you have not committed any sin – then guilt disappears. And without guilt there cannot be churches, without guilt the priest cannot live. He exploits the guilt, he makes you feel guilty – that is his trade secret. Once you are made to feel guilty, you have to seek his help because he will ask for forgiveness for you, he will pray for you. He knows the way to pray, he is in a deeper relationship with God. He will defend you, he will persuade God for you and he will show you the way not to be a sinner again, how to be virtuous. He will give you the commandments: do this and don’t do that.All the churches of the world are founded on the word repentance. If it is only a question of return, the priest is not needed; you can return home. It is not a question of condemnation, nobody is needed to purify you; you have never been wrong. You had gone a little farther away, but nothing is wrong in it. In fact, it could not have been so if God were not willing for you to go so far. There must be something in it: going far must be a way of coming back. Because when you have gone too far and then you come back home, for the first time you realize what home is.It is said that travelers in foreign countries realize for the first time – as you must be realizing in Pune – how beautiful home is. It is difficult to realize when you are at home, everything is taken for granted. But when you go away, now everything is difficult. It is no longer a home, you cannot take anything for granted. There are a thousand and one inconveniences, discomforts – and nobody is there to look after you, you have to look after yourself. Nobody cares; you move in an alien world, a stranger.In contrast, suddenly for the first time the home, the meaning of the home, arises. First it was just a house to live in, now it is a home. Now you know that houses are different from homes. A house is just a house; a home is not just a house; it is something plus – plus love. Maybe it is needed that man should go a little astray – off the track, into the wilderness – so that, in contrast, coming back to home becomes significant, meaningful.I say “return,” I don’t say “repent.” Jesus never said “repent.” He would laugh at the word because the whole thing is corrupted by the word. Now churches know well that the word is a wrong translation, but they still insist on it because it has become their foundation. To return is so simple: it depends on you and your God; no mediator is needed, no agent is needed.From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, “Return: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Another meaning of the Hebrew word teshuvah is answer. Your return is your answer. Answer to what? Answer to the shout, “Enthrone me!” The answer to the question God has been asking you: “Come back home.”This is again a very beautiful contribution of Judaism. Every religion has contributed something original. Judaism says: “God asks the question, man answers.” Ordinarily other religions say that man asks the question and God answers. Judaism says, “No, God asks the question, man answers.”The moment you answer, that is the return. The moment the child says, “Yes, I am coming,” he is already on the way. Have you heard the question? If you have not heard it yet, how will you be able to answer? People come to me and they ask, “Where is God?” I say, “Forget about God. Have you heard the question? They say, “What question?” “The question that God asks.”If you have not heard the question, you cannot know where God is. The moment you hear the question the direction is clear – the moment you hear the question that arises deepest in your being, at the deepest core, and becomes a constant haunting in the heart: Who are you? Why are you here? Why do you go on existing? For what?If the question has arisen in the heart, you will know God is – because who is asking this question? You cannot ask it. You are unconsciousness, a deep sleep; you cannot ask. Somewhere deeper within you God is asking the question, “Who are you?” If you have heard the question, you know the direction. And the answer can only be: “Return back. Follow that direction, move back.”Your questions are false. You have not heard them; somebody else has taught them to you. Your questions are false and then your answer becomes false. You learn the question from others, you learn the answer from others, and you remain phony.The word phony comes from telephone. Have you ever observed? Listening to a man directly – listening to your wife or husband or friend directly, face-to-face – is a reality because a personal contact is there. But listening to him on the phone everything becomes phony. One never knows who is there: whether the person really is there or a tape recorder. Nobody knows. And the sound seems to be coming not from the heart, but from the mechanism. Have you sometimes watched people? I have watched a few people, I know a few people who will put their specs on whenever they phone. I was worried: What is the matter? The person is not there, so who are you trying to see? Just a deep urge to see the person. A deep urge – otherwise the thing seems to be phony. But this is how the mind has become corrupted.I went with a friend once to visit the Taj Mahal. He is a good photographer. He had no time to see the Taj Mahal; he was seeing it through the camera lens. I told him, “We have come here to see the Taj Mahal.”He said, “Forget about it. It is so beautiful that I will take pictures and see them at home!”Those pictures are available everywhere. What is the need to come to the Taj Mahal? The direct vision is lost.Mulla Nasruddin’s first child was born. I went to see him. The Mulla was sitting with the boy, a small boy – beautiful. I said, “How beautiful!”He said, “This is nothing. You must see the photographs!”Phony; everything becomes more and more indirect. Then it loses the touch of reality, the concreteness, the clarity. Then it goes far away, far away.The answer can be true only if the question has been really heard. Every day I come across somebody or other who says, “I want to meditate, I want to search, but nothing happens.” He is complaining as if existence has not been just to him: “Nothing happens.” But I look into his eyes: his desire is phony. In the first place he never wanted to meditate, he has come as part of a crowd. Somebody else was coming, a friend was coming, and he followed. Or he had a holiday and he thought, “Let us go and see.” Nothing is happening. Nothing can happen because meditation and prayer and God are not questions of technique. You can learn the technique, but nothing will happen unless the question has been heard first, unless it has become a deep desire in you for which you can stake your life, unless it has become a question of life and death, unless it penetrates the very center of your being – unless it becomes a thorn in the heart, unless it becomes a deep anguish and pain. If the question is heard – then the answer.We can translate this sentence in two ways: From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Either we can translate it, “Return: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Or “Answer: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”And the kingdom of heaven is always at hand, it is its nature. It has nothing to do with Jesus’ time: right now it is true, exactly as it was then. It was true before Jesus and it will always be true. The kingdom of God is always at hand – just grope. His hand has always been seeking you, but your hand is not groping. Answer, return, and he is available. All that you need is available, only you are not ready to move toward it. You are afraid to lose something which you don’t have, and because of that fear you cannot attain that which has always been yours to take.And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.And he saith unto them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”And they straightway left their nets, and followed him.This will come many times in Jesus’ life. You will be surprised at the quality of people in whom and with whom he was moving: simple people – farmers, villagers, fishermen, carpenters – but real people, not phony. People who live with nature are real because with nature you have to be real otherwise nature won’t yield to you. With nature you have to be alive, otherwise you will not be able to cope with it. The more surrounded you are with unnatural things, the more unnatural you become. If you live just surrounded by mechanisms, you will become a mechanism yourself.It is said that a man is known by his company. I say to you: a man is made by his company. If you live surrounded by mechanical gadgets, as modern man is living, by and by you become unreal. If you live with nature – with trees and rocks and the sea and the stars and the clouds and the sun – you cannot be unreal, you cannot be phony. You have to be real because when you are encountering nature, nature creates something in you which is natural. Responding to nature continuously, you become natural.A man who lives with nature is always trusting. A farmer who goes on sowing seeds has to trust. If he doubts, he will never sow the seeds because there are a thousand and one doubts possible: whether this year the earth is going to do the same as it did last year or not. And who knows, the earth may have changed its mind. Who knows if the rains are going to rain or not? Who knows about the sun, whether it will rise tomorrow morning or not? Sitting in your easy chair surrounded by your books you can doubt, there is nothing at stake. But if a farmer working in the field with the earth doubts, he is lost; if a fisherman doubts, he is lost.Living with nature, trust arises. Trust is natural to man just like health is natural; doubt is unnatural just like disease is unnatural. A child is born trusting. I’m not talking about the modern child – maybe a modern child is not born trusting because he is born in a climate of skepticism.I was reading a story one day…A mother was telling a story to her daughter. The daughter was restless, it was getting late, and the mother was telling her a bedtime story to put her to sleep. The mother said. “There was a princess – very charming, beautiful, and very wise, very loving. The whole court of the king loved and respected her. She was very kind, particularly to animals.“One day she came across a frog in the courtyard. She became afraid that somebody might tread on him, so she brought the frog into her bedroom. In the morning she was surprised: the frog had turned into a beautiful prince! And the prince asked her hand in marriage.”At this point the mother looked at her daughter and felt that she was completely skeptical. Her eyes, her manner, her face – everything was saying, “No, I cannot believe it.” Complete incredulity was on her face. So the mother said, “What? Don’t you believe this?”The girl said, “No, and I’ll bet the princess’ mother didn’t either!”Today’s climate is one of skepticism. Even a child is doubtful – doubting, skeptical. In the old days, even old men were trusting; the whole climate was one of trust, faith. They were healthy people. Watch yourself – whenever you doubt, something shrinks in you; you become small and tiny. You become hard, you become dead and you are no longer flowing – frozen. Whenever trust arises, you are again flowing. The blocks are melting and you expand, you become vast. Whenever you trust you reach a peak of being alive, whenever you doubt you fall into death.Because modern man is lacking in trust, drugs have started to have so much appeal for him. There seems to be no other way to have the feeling of an expanded being and consciousness. Drugs are chemical methods to feel, for a few moments or a few hours, an expansion of consciousness. Trust gives it to you easily and freely. Trust gives it to you not for a few moments; it becomes an eternal quality in you. And trust has no side effects.If you ask me, I will tell you trust is the only reliable drug if you want expansion of consciousness. Those who have never known what expansion of consciousness is have not lived yet. Consciousness can expand and can go on expanding, waves of bliss going to the very corners of existence, expanding with the infinity of existence. When you expand you become part of the whole; when you shrink you become an island.Those people were really simple, trusting: And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Nothing is strange about his saying this. The strange thing is: And they straightway left their nets, and followed him.Such deep trust. Not for even a single moment did they doubt, not for even a single moment did they say, “What do you mean ‘fishers of men’?” Not for a single moment did they ask, “Who are you? By what authority do you speak?” No, it was not needed because they were simple fishermen. They must have looked at Jesus: his very presence was the authority.If you have eyes of trust, nobody can deceive you. You are deceived because of your doubt and then you think that you need more doubt, otherwise people are going to deceive you more. Then you are deceived more and a vicious circle is created. You doubt so that you will not be deceived, but you are deceived because of your doubt. If you trust, nobody can deceive you. What do I mean when I say, “If you trust, nobody can deceive you?” Is your trust going to prevent somebody from deceiving you? No, but when you trust, you have eyes to see; the deceiver will be revealed immediately – naked.I would like you to remember this as a criterion: a man who trusts cannot be deceived. If he is deceived, he must have some doubts within himself because only when the eyes are full of clouds of doubt are you not able to see. When you are capable of seeing and your vision is clear, the very presence of the person says whether he is a deceiver or not.They must have looked. The sun must have been rising on the sea, they were ready to throw their net into the sea. They must have looked back at this man: “What manner of man is this Jesus?” In that silent morning, they must have felt the presence of this man Jesus. The presence was conviction, the presence was the proof. They threw away their nets, they straightway followed this man. In a single moment their whole life was turned completely upside down. In a single moment of vision, they were converted.Jesus says, “Come follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. How long will you go on throwing your nets into the sea? How long are you going to just catch fish? I will make you fishers of men.” And he did make them.It was almost unbelievable in those days – it is almost unbelievable even now – how Jesus transformed ordinary people into extraordinary beings. Buddha transformed Mahakashyapa, Sariputta, Mandgalyan, Ananda, but the credit goes more to Mahakashyapa, Sariputta, Ananda and Mandgalyan and less to Buddha because they were rare beings. If Mahavira transformed Gautam, Sudharma, the credit goes more to the disciples because they were rare beings.But Jesus was tremendously powerful. Peter, a fisherman, uneducated, or Andrew or Matthew or Thomas or John – all poor, uneducated people who would have been lost in any crowd and you would not have been able to find them – they were just stones, ordinary pebbles on the way, and Jesus transformed them into Kohinoors.Mahakashyapa was a rare being in his own right; there is every possibility that even without Buddha he would have become a buddha. It would have taken a little longer, maybe he would have taken a little more time, but it seems almost certain that he would have become a buddha even without Buddha. But think of Simon called Peter, or his brother Andrew. Nobody can conceive that without Jesus they could have become anything whatever.He not only promised, he did the miracle. “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” And certainly more men have been caught in the net Jesus has thrown into the sea of humanity than in any other net. Half of the world is caught in the net. All the apostles, all twelve of the apostles, were very ordinary, uneducated, common people, and upon them he built the whole structure.Peter, Simon called Peter, Jesus made him the very rock on which the whole of Christianity stands. The word Peter means rock. On Peter’s rock the whole of Christianity stands and is supported by him. Yes, Jesus did make them fishers of men – and not only fishers of men. He delivered more than he promised: he made them fishers of God. And they straightway left their nets, and followed him.When Mahakashyapa came to Buddha, he argued. When Mahakashyapa came to Buddha he had five thousand of his own disciples, he was a great teacher in his own name. When Sariputta came he had thousands of disciples of his own, he was a great scholar. For years he waited and argued. They were not men of trust, they were men of doubt and skepticism: very cultured minds, cultivated minds, geniuses in a way.Jesus worked with ordinary mud and transformed it into gold. You cannot find a greater alchemist than Jesus. And they straightway left their nets, and followed him. This is the miracle.People went to Mahavira and argued, people went to Buddha and argued because the whole Indian continent has been arguing for millennia. People have become trained here; they are born with philosophies. People come to me, very ordinary people, but they never come down below the level of brahman, the ultimate. They talk about brahman; it has become part of their blood.Jesus worked with very simple people. His very presence was the proof. In religion, presence is first, proof is second. In philosophy, proof is first, presence is second. Sariputta would open his eyes to Buddha only when Buddha had proved himself, argued for himself, when he had defeated Sariputta and his mind totally. Then he would open his eyes. Proof was first, presence was second.But with Jesus and the people he worked with – they were not theologians, they were not philosophers, not argumentative, no; they were simple people, ordinary people of nature, just like trees and rocks and rivers – for them presence is first, proof is later. In fact presence is the proof. They fell in love – that’s the only way to express it rightly. They looked at Jesus, they fell in love. When you fall in love, you follow. Then there is no question, then you simply follow because your heart knows better than your mind can prove. Your heart has felt something, something of the mysterium, something of God. Your heart has felt the presence, something which is not of this earth. That is enough. You have tasted something; you simply follow.And they straightway left their nets, and followed him.And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.This has to be understood in a totally new light – not the way Christians have been trying, but in a totally new light – the new light that modern science has thrown on the phenomenon of disease.A disease, any disease, first arises deep in the mind and then moves toward the body. It may take a long time to come to the body: it is a long distance. You are not aware of it when it is in the mind, you become aware of it only when it strikes hard at the roots of the body. You always feel the disease in the body, but it always originates in the mind. You are not aware of it then, so you cannot do anything about it. But when it comes to the body, then of course you start seeking a physician, some help. The physician, seeing it in the body, starts treating it in the body. It can be treated in the body, but then some other disease will arise because the treatment has not gone to the very source. You have been changing the effect and not the cause.If it can be changed in the mind, the disease will disappear from the body immediately. That’s how modern research on hypnosis proves that every disease – at least in principle – can be transformed, changed, can be dropped, if the mind is changed. And the vice versa is also true: if the mind is convinced by hypnosis, then disease can be created also.Just two or three days before, somebody sent me an article of deep significance. A man – a physician, a doctor in California – has treated many patients with cancer just through the imagination. This is the first clue which opens the door – and not one patient, many. What he does is, he simply tells them to imagine. If they have cancer of the throat, he tells them to relax and imagine that the whole energy of their body is moving toward the throat and the tumor is being attacked by their energy, just like arrows from everywhere, all over, moving toward the throat and attacking the disease. Within three, four, or six weeks the tumor simply disappears without leaving a trace behind – and cancer is thought to be incurable.Cancer is a modern disease; it has come because of the stress, tension and anxiety of life. There has in fact been no cure for it up to now through the body. But if cancer can be treated through the mind, everything can be treated through the mind.Jesus’ miracles happened because the people were very trusting. Once it happened…He was walking and a woman came – a very poor woman, afraid and apprehensive about whether Jesus would treat her or not because he was always crowded by so many people. The woman thought to herself, “Just touch Jesus’ garment from behind…”She was cured. Jesus looked back and the woman started thanking him. She fell at his feet and was very grateful. He said, “Don’t be grateful to me, be grateful to God. Your faith has healed you, not I.”The world was deep in trust, people were rooted in faith. Then, just the idea: “If Jesus touches my eyes they will be cured.” The very idea became the root cause of the cure. It is not that Jesus cures; if you are skeptical then Jesus can’t help, then he will not be able to cure you.I was reading a story…One day Jesus was running out of a town. A farmer working in his fields saw him running, so he inquired, “What is the matter? Where are you going?” But he was in such a hurry that he would not answer.So the farmer followed him, stopped him after a while, and said, “Please tell me, I have become too curious. If you don’t tell me, this will haunt me again and again. Why were you running? Where are you going? From whom are you escaping?”Jesus said, “From a fool.”The farmer started laughing. He said, “What are you saying? I know well that you have cured blind people, you have cured people who were almost dying. I have heard that you have cured people who were dead already! Can’t you cure a fool?”Jesus said, “No. I tried, but I can’t because he is a fool and he won’t believe. I have cured all sorts of illnesses and I have never failed, but with this fool I have failed. He is following me and he says, ‘Cure me,’ but I have tried every way that I know and everything fails. That’s why I am escaping from the town.”A fool cannot be cured, and a fool cannot be hypnotized. Ordinarily among the common masses, the idea is prevalent that very intelligent people cannot be hypnotized. That is absolutely wrong. Only fools cannot be hypnotized, idiots cannot be hypnotized, mad people cannot be hypnotized. The greater the intelligence, the more possibility there is of your going deep into hypnosis because in hypnosis your trust is needed, the first requirement is your trust. The first requirement is your cooperation, and an idiot, a madman, cannot cooperate and cannot trust.Jesus could do miracles. Those miracles were simple: they happened because people were trusting. If you can trust, the mind starts functioning from within, spreads to the body and changes everything. But if you can’t trust, nothing can help. Even ordinary medicine helps you because you trust it. There has been an observation that whenever a new medicine is invented, it works very well for six months to two years; people are affected by it. But after six months, eight months, ten months, it doesn’t work so well. Physicians have been worried. What happens?Whenever a new medicine is invented, you believe in it more than in an old medicine. Now you know the panacea is there “…and I will be helped by it.” And you are helped. The trust in a new medicine, a new discovery, helps. They talk about it on TV, on the radio, in the newspapers, and there is a climate of trust and hope. But after a few months when many people have taken it – and a few fools have also taken it, which cannot be helped – then a suspicion arises because that man had taken the medicine and nothing happened. These fools then create an anti-climate, and after a while the medicine loses its effect.Even more than medicine, the physician helps if you trust him. Have you watched? Whenever you are ill and the doctor comes, if you trust the doctor then you feel relief just by his coming. He has not given any medicine up to now, he has just been checking your body – blood pressure, this and that – and already you feel that fifty percent of the disease is gone. A man you can trust has come. Now there is no need to carry the burden on yourself, you can leave it to him and he will see to it. If you don’t trust the physician, he cannot do anything.In medicine they call a certain false medicine a placebo. It is just water or something which has nothing to do with the illness, but if it is given to you by a physician you trust, it helps as much as the real medicine; there is no difference. Mind is more powerful than matter; mind is more powerful than the body.And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.And his fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.And there followed him great multitudes of people from Galilee, and from Decapolis, and from Jerusalem, and from Judaea, and from beyond Jordan.Jesus was less a teacher and more a healer. A healer not only of the body, not only of the mind, but of the soul also. He was a physician, a physician of the soul. That’s how every master has to be.You are divided within yourself, you are fragmentary, you are not whole. If you become whole, you will be healed. If the tensions for the future and the accumulated tensions of the past disappear from within you, you will be healed, your wounds will disappear. If you can be in the present you will be whole, fully alive, utterly alive, and a deep delight will happen to you.Jesus is not a philosopher teaching some dogma to people. He is a physician, not a philosopher. He is trying to teach trust, and if trust happens everything becomes possible. He goes on saying, “If you have faith, faith can move mountains.” It may not be the mountains that exist outside, but the mountains of ignorance, the mountains of ugliness, the mountains of unconsciousness that exist within. He does not have a creed, a dogma. He is, rather, releasing a healing force through himself. His whole effort is to help you to return to God. That’s why he says, “Don’t be thankful toward me. Thank God.”Then too he says, “Your faith has healed you.” Not even God can heal you – your faith. His insistence is on faith. And remember the distinction between belief and faith: belief is in an idea, faith is in total reality, faith is a reverence for the whole. Belief is of the mind, faith is of your totality.When you believe in God, you believe in a God of philosophers. When you believe in God, God is an idea, a doctrine. It can be proved or disproved and it will not transform you. But if you have faith, it has already transformed you. I will not say that it will transform you. If you have faith, it has already transformed you. Faith knows no future, it is immediately effective. But faith is not of the head. When you have faith, you have faith in your blood, in your bones, in your marrow, in your heart. In your whole being, you have faith. A man of faith is a man of God.Jesus’ whole effort is how to bring you back home. Yes, God is shouting through him: “Enthrone me!” If you have faith you will become available and God will be enthroned in you. That is the only way of being blissful. Unless God is enthroned in you, you will remain a beggar, you will remain poor, you will remain ill. You will never be whole and healthy, and you will never know the ecstasy of existence. You will never be able to dance and laugh and sing and just be unless God is enthroned in you – that means unless you are dethroned and God is enthroned.So there is this choice, the greatest choice that man ever encounters: either to continue on the throne yourself, or dethrone yourself and let God come in.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is the need for secrecy in master–disciple relationships and also in ordinary human relationships?The being has two sides, the without and the within. The without can be public, but the within cannot be. If you make the within public you will lose your soul, you will lose your original face. Then you will live as if you have no inner being. Life will become drab, futile. It happens to people who live a public life: politicians, film actors. They become public, they lose their inner being completely, they don’t know who they are except what the public says about them. They depend on others’ opinions, they don’t have a sense of their being.One of the most famous actresses, Marilyn Monroe, committed suicide, and psychoanalysts have been brooding on the reason why. She was one of the most beautiful women ever, one of the most successful. Even the President of America, Kennedy, was in love with her, and she had thousands of lovers. One cannot think of what more you can have. She had everything. But she was public and she knew it. Even in her love chamber when President Kennedy would be there she used to address him as Mr. President – as if one was making love not to a man, but to an institution. She was an institution. By and by she became aware that she had nothing private. Once somebody asked her – she had just posed for a nude calendar and somebody asked, “Did you have anything on while you posed for the nude calendar?”She said, “Yes, I had something on. The radio.”Exposed, nude, no private self – my feeling is that she committed suicide because that was the only thing left she could have done privately. Everything was public, that was the only thing left she could do on her own, alone – something absolutely intimate and secret. Public figures are always tempted toward suicide because only through suicide can they have a glimpse of who they are.All that is beautiful is inner, and the inner means privacy. Have you watched women making love? They always close their eyes. They know something. A man goes on making love with open eyes, he remains a watcher also. He is not completely in the act, he is not totally in it. He remains a voyeur, as if somebody else is making love and he is watching, as if the lovemaking is going on on a TV screen or in a movie. But a woman knows better because she is more delicately tuned to the inner. She always closes her eyes. Then love has a totally different fragrance.One day, run the bath and then switch the light on and off. When there is darkness you will hear the water falling more clearly, the sound will be sharp. When the light is on, the sound will be not so sharp. What happens in darkness? In darkness, everything else disappears because you cannot see. Only the sound and you are there. That’s why, in all good restaurants, light is avoided; sharp light is avoided. They are candlelit. Whenever a restaurant is candlelit, taste is deeper, you eat well and you taste more. The fragrance surrounds you. If there is very bright light the taste is no longer there. The eyes make everything public.In the very first sentence of his Metaphysics, Aristotle says that sight is the highest sense of man. It is not. In fact sight has become too domineering. It has monopolized the whole self and it has destroyed all the other senses. His master – Aristotle’s master, Plato – says that there is a hierarchy in the senses: sight at the top, touch at the bottom. He is absolutely wrong. There is no hierarchy.All senses are on the same level and there should not be any hierarchy. You live through the eyes: eighty percent of your life is eye-oriented. This should not be so; a balance has to be restored. You should touch also because touch has something which eyes cannot give. But try: try to touch the woman you love or the man you love in bright light and then touch in darkness. In darkness the body reveals itself, in bright light it hides.Have you seen Renoir’s paintings of feminine bodies? They have something miraculous in them. Many painters have painted the feminine body, but there is no comparison with Renoir. What is the difference? All other painters have painted the feminine body as it looks to the eyes. Renoir has painted it as it feels to the hands, so the painting has a warmth and a closeness, an aliveness.When you touch, something happens very close. When you see, something is far away. In darkness, in secrecy, in privacy, something is revealed which cannot be revealed in openness, in the marketplace. Others are looking and observing; something deep within you shrinks, it cannot flower. It is just as if you put seeds down on the open ground for everybody to look at. They will never sprout. They need to be thrown deep into the womb of the earth, in deep darkness where nobody can see them. There they start sprouting and a great tree is born. Just like seeds need darkness and privacy in the earth, all relationships which are deep and intimate remain of the inner. They need privacy, they need a place where only two exist. There comes a moment when even the two dissolve and only one exists. Two lovers deeply in tune with each other dissolve. Only one exists. They breathe together, they are together; a togetherness exists. This would not be possible if there were observers. They would never be able to let go if others were watching. The very eyes of others would become the barrier. So all that is beautiful, all that is deep, happens in darkness.In ordinary human relationships, privacy is needed. And when you ask about the relationship of a master and disciple, even more privacy is needed because it is a transmission of the highest energy possible to man. It is the highest peak of love, where one man pours himself into another and the other becomes a receptive womb. Even a slight disturbance, somebody watching, will be enough of a barrier.Secrecy has its own reason to be there. Remember that, and always remember that you will behave very foolishly in life if you become completely public. It will be as if somebody has turned his pockets inside-out. That will be your shape: pockets turned inside-out. Nothing is wrong in being outside, but remember, that is only part of life. It should not become the whole.I am not saying to move in darkness forever. Light has its own beauty and its own reason. If the seed remains in the dark for ever and ever, and never comes up to receive the sun in the morning, it will be dead. It has to go into darkness to sprout, to gather strength, to become vital, to be reborn, and then it has to come out and face the world and the light and the storm and the rains. It has to accept the challenge of the outside. But that challenge can only be accepted if you are deeply rooted within.I am not saying to become escapists, I am not saying to close your eyes, move within and never come out. I am simply saying, go in so that you can come out with energy, with love, with compassion. Go in so that when you come out you are not a beggar, but a king. Go in so that when you come out you have something to share – the flowers, the leaves. Go in so that your coming out becomes richer and is not impoverished. And always remember that whenever you feel exhausted, the source of energy is within. Close your eyes and go in.Make outer relationships; make inner relationships also. Of course there are bound to be outer relationships: you move in the world, there will be business relationships, but they should not be all. They have their part to play, but there must be something absolutely secret and private, something that you can call your own. That is what Marilyn Monroe lacked. She was a public woman: successful, yet failed completely. While she was at the top of her success and fame, she committed suicide. Why she committed suicide has remained an enigma. She had everything to live for; you cannot conceive of more fame, more success, more charisma, more beauty, more health. Everything was there, nothing could be improved upon, and still something was lacking. The inside, the within, was empty. Then, suicide is the only way.You may not be daring enough to commit suicide like Marilyn Monroe. You may be very cowardly and you may commit suicide very slowly, you may take seventy years to commit it, but still it will be a suicide. Unless you have something inside you which is not dependent on anything outside, which is just your own – a world, a space of your own where you can close your eyes and move, and you can forget that anything else exists – you will be committing suicide.Life arises from that inner source and spreads into the sky outside. There has to be a balance, I am always for balance. So I will not say, like Mahatma Gandhi, that your life should be an open book – no. A few chapters open, okay, and a few chapters completely closed, completely a mystery. If you are just an open book you will be a prostitute, you will just be standing in the marketplace naked, with just the radio on. No, that won’t do.If the whole book is open, you will just be the day and no night, just the summer and no winter. Then where will you rest and where will you center yourself and where will you take refuge? Where will you move when the world is too much with you? Where will you go to pray and meditate? No, half and half is perfect. Let half of your book be open – open to everybody, available to everybody. Let the other half of your book be so secret that only rare guests are allowed there. Only rarely is somebody allowed to move within your temple. It should be so. If the crowd is coming in and going out, the temple is no longer a temple. It may be a waiting room in an airport, but it cannot be a temple. Only rarely, very rarely, do you allow somebody to enter your self. That is what love is.The second question:Osho,Sometimes I wonder what I am doing here, sitting before you. And then suddenly you are too much for me, too much light and love. Yet I want to leave you. Can you explain this to me?Yes. The question is bound to happen to everybody some day or other. What are you doing here? The question arises because my emphasis is not on doing; I am teaching you non-doing. The question is relevant. If I was teaching you something to do, the question wouldn’t arise because you would be occupied. If you go to somebody else – there are a thousand and one ashrams in the world – they will teach you to do something. They will not leave you unoccupied at all because they think that an unoccupied mind is the Devil’s workshop. My understanding is totally, diametrically opposite. When you are absolutely empty, God fills you; when you are unoccupied, only then you are. While you are doing something, it is just on the periphery. All acts are on the periphery – good and bad, all. Be a sinner, you are on the periphery; be a saint, you are on the periphery. To do bad you have to come out of yourself; to do good you also have to come out of yourself.Doing is outside, non-doing is inside. Non-doing is your private self, doing is your public self. I am not teaching you to become saints, otherwise it would have been very easy: don’t do this, do that, just change the periphery, change your acts. I am trying a totally different thing, a mutation – not a change from one part of the periphery to another part of the periphery, but a transmutation from the periphery to the center. The center is empty, it is absolutely void. There, you are. There, being is, not doing.It is bound to happen to you sometimes: sitting before me you will wonder what you are doing here. Nothing – you are not doing anything here. You are learning how to just be, not to do – how not to do anything: no action, no movement, as if everything stops, time stops. In that nonmoving moment you are in tune with the present, you are in tune with existence.Actions become part of the past. Actions can be in the future, they can be in the past. God is always in the present. God has no past and no future. And God has not done a thing. When you think that he has created the world, you are creating his image according to yourself. You cannot remain without doing anything. You become too restless, it makes you too uneasy – so you have conceived of God also as a creator. Not only as a creator, Christians say that for six days he created and on the seventh day, Sunday, he rested – a holiday. The Bible says God created man in his own image. Just the reverse seems to be the case: man has created God in his own image. Because you cannot remain unoccupied, you think, “What will God do if he is not creating the world?” And because you get tired by doing, you think, “God must also have gotten tired after six days, so on the seventh day he rested.” This is just anthropomorphic. You are thinking about God just as you would think about yourself. No, God has not created the world; the world comes out of his non-activity, the world comes out of his non-doing. The world is a flowering of God, just like a tree.Do you think a tree is creating the flowers – making great effort, doing exercises, planning, asking the experts? The tree is not doing anything at all. The tree is just there, absolutely unoccupied. In that unoccupied state, the flower flowers by itself. And remember, if some day trees become foolish – as foolish as man is – and they start trying to bring the flowers, then flowers will stop coming. They will not come because they always come effortlessly. Just watch a flower. Can you see anything of effort in it? The very being of a flower is so effortless, it simply opens. But we cannot conceive of it. The birds singing in the morning, do you think they go to Ravi Shankar to learn? Do you think they are doing something in the morning when they start singing? No, nothing of that sort. The sun rises, and out of their emptiness arises the song. The greatest miracle in the world is that God has created without doing a thing. It is out of nothingness.I was reading about the life of Wagner, a German composer and great musician. Somebody asked him, “Can you say anything about the secret of why you have created such beautiful music – and how?”Wagner said, “Because I was unhappy. If I had been happy, I would not have written down a single note. People who are unhappy have to fill their lives with imagination because their reality is lacking something.” And he is right in many ways. People who have never loved write poetry about love. That is a substitute. If love has really happened in life, who bothers to write poetry about it? One would have been poetry himself; there would be no need to write it.Wagner said, “Poets write about love because they have missed love.” Then he made a statement which is tremendously meaningful. He said, “And I think God created the world because he was unhappy.” A great insight – but the insight is relevant to man, not to God. If you ask me, God created the world – in the first place, he is not “a creator” but “a creativity” – but to use the old expression, God created the world not because he was unhappy, but because he was so happy that he overflowed. He had so much.The tree is flowering there in the garden not because it is unhappy. The flower comes only when the tree has too much to share and does not know what to do with it. The flower is an overflowing. When the tree is not well fed, not well watered, has not received the right quota of sunlight and care and love, it doesn’t flower – because flowering is a luxury. It happens only when you have too much, more than you need. Whenever you have too much, what will you do? It will become a heaviness, it will be a burden; it has to be released. The tree bursts and blooms, it has come to its luxurious moment.The world is the luxury of God, a flowering. He has so much, what to do with it? He shares, he throws it out, he starts expanding, he starts creating. But remember always, he is not a creator like a painter who paints. The painter is separate from the painting. If the painter dies, the painting will still live. God is a creator like a dancer: the dance and the dancer are one. If the dancer stops, the dance stops.You cannot separate the dance from the dancer, you cannot say to the dancer, “Give your dance to me, I will take it home. I am ready to purchase it.” The dance cannot be purchased. It is one of the most spiritual things in the world because it cannot be purchased. You cannot carry it away, you cannot make a commodity out of it. When the dancer is dancing, it is there; when the dancer has stopped, it has disappeared as if it never existed.God is creativity. It is not that he created sometime in the past and then stopped and rested – and since then what has he been doing? No, he is continuously creating. God is not an event, he is a process. It is not that once he created and then stopped. Then the world would be dead. He is continuously creating, just like birds are singing and trees are flowering and the clouds are moving in the sky. He is creating, and he need not take any rest because creativity is not an act; you cannot be tired. It is out of his nothingness.This is the meaning in the East when we say that God is emptiness. Only nothingness can be infinite; “somethingness” is bound to be finite. Only out of nothingness is an infinite expanse of life, existence, possible – not out of somethingness. God is not somebody, he is nobody or more correctly, “nobodiness.” God is not something, he is nothing or, even more correctly, “nothingness.” He is a creative void, what Buddha has called shunya. He is a creative void. What am I teaching to you? I am teaching you the same: to become creative voids, non-doers, delighters in just being.That is why the question is bound to come to everybody’s mind sometime or other. You ask: “Sometimes I wonder what I am doing here.” You wonder rightly: you are doing nothing here. Your mind may supply answers, but don’t listen to them. Listen to my answer. You are not doing anything here; I am not teaching you to do something. Your mind may say that you are learning meditation: you are doing meditation, yoga, this, that or you are trying to achieve enlightenment, satori, samadhi – all nonsense.This is your mind supplying because the mind is an achiever, the mind cannot remain without activity. The mind goes on creating some activity or other. Earn money; if you are finished with that, then earn meditation – but earn. Achieve something, do something.You become afraid when you are not doing anything because then suddenly you are face-to-face with the creative void. That is the face of God: you are in a chaos and you are falling in an infinite abyss and you cannot see the bottom – there is none.Sitting before me, what are you doing? Just sitting. That is the meaning of zazen. In Zen they call meditation “zazen.” Zazen means just sitting, doing nothing. If you can just sit near me that is enough, more than enough; nothing else is needed. If you can just sit without doing anything – not even doing a thought, not even thinking or dreaming – if you can just sit near me, that will do everything. “…suddenly you are too much for me…” you say. Yes, if you just sit I will be too much because if you just sit, suddenly I will be flowing within you. If you just sit, you will immediately become aware of light and love. And then you say, “…I want to leave you” because you are afraid of love and light.You have become a denizen of darkness. You have lived in darkness so long that your eyes are afraid. No matter what you say – that you would like to live in the light – your deep-rooted habits shrink you and say, “Where are you going?” You have a great investment in darkness. All your knowledge is related to darkness. In light you will be absolutely ignorant. All your wisdom and experience is out of darkness; in light you will be naked, nude. All that you know belongs to darkness; in the light you will find yourself just like an innocent babe, a small child, not knowing anything.You have lived in bondage and now you are afraid to be free. You go on talking about freedom and moksha – absolute freedom – but if you watch yourself you will know that whenever freedom comes your way, you escape. You become afraid. Maybe you talk about freedom just to deceive yourself; maybe it is a substitute, the substitute Wagner is talking about. You are in bondage; you have never known freedom. You talk about freedom; you sing songs of freedom and through those songs you have a vicarious satisfaction, as if you have become free. It is an “as if” freedom. But with me it is not going to be “as if”; it is going to be a reality. You become afraid of the reality.You go on asking for love, but when it comes you escape because love is dangerous. One of the greatest dangers in life is love. The mind can become settled with marriage, but not with love. The mind always wants law, not love. The mind always loves order, not the chaos that love is. The mind wants to remain in security, and love is the greatest insecurity you can come across. Whenever love comes you become afraid to the very roots, you shake and tremble because that love, if allowed to enter you, will destroy your mind. The mind says: “Escape! Escape immediately!” The mind is trying to save itself.You have lived too deeply in contact with the mind and you have become too attached. You think that whatever the mind says is right; you think that whatever is security for the mind is security for you. There is the whole misunderstanding. The death of the mind will be life for you, and the life of the mind is nothing but death for you. The identity has to be broken. You have to become aware that you are not the mind. Only then can you be near me, only then will the effort to leave and escape dissolve. Otherwise you can find reasons to leave, but those reasons will all be phony. The real reason will be this: you were not able to let light come in, you were not able to let love come in and destroy your mind and destroy your ego and give you a rebirth.The third question:Osho,Your teaching seems to be: be absolutely oneself. This is beyond me. How can one be oneself if one is not oneself?Let me ask you another question: How can you not be yourself? You can believe it, but you cannot be anything other than yourself. You can think that you are somebody else, you can imagine that you are somebody else, but all the time you are just yourself, nothing else. Whether you believe you are yourself or not is irrelevant. You remain, all the time, yourself. You can go on running and chasing shadows, but one day or the other you will have to realize that you have just been doing an absurd thing.How can you be other than yourself? How? You ask me how one can be oneself. I ask you, how one can be other than oneself? – and in my questioning is the answer. Nobody has even been other than himself; nobody can ever be other than himself. To be oneself is the only way to be, nothing can be done about it.You can believe: it is just like you sleep at night in Pune and you dream that you are in Philadelphia. That doesn’t make any change in reality. You remain in Pune – here, somewhere, in Mobo’s. You remain in Pune; Philadelphia remains just a dream. In the morning you will not wake up in Philadelphia, remember. You will wake up in Mobo’s, in Pune. However miserable, but it is the case! Nothing can be done about it; at the most you can again dream of Philadelphia.You are gods. That is your reality. You can believe, you have believed in many things. Sometimes you believed you were a tree – many trees are still believing that. Sometimes you believed you were an animal: a tiger, a lion. There are a few people who belong to Lion Clubs – Lion Bhabhutmal Sanghvi. They are not satisfied in being men – lions! Sometimes you believed that you were a lion, and then you were a lion: a dream. Sometimes you believed that you were a rock and you were a rock: a dream. You have been changing your dreams.Now the time has arrived. Wake up! I’m not giving you another dream, remember. You hanker for it, you would like me to give you another dream, but I am not going to give you another dream. That’s why to be with me is difficult and arduous because I am insisting that you wake up. Enough is enough. You have dreamed a lot; you have been dreaming for eternity. You have just been changing dreams. When you get fed up with one dream you start changing it, you dream another dream. My whole effort is to shake you, to shock you, to wake you.It is not a question of achieving any new thing; it is already your being. Just opening the eyes, just dropping the dreams, just dropping the clouds and the vision: it is a question of clarity and understanding, that’s all. Between you and Jesus, between you and me, between you and Buddha, there is no difference of being – nothing. You are exactly the same. The difference, at the most, is that you are asleep and Jesus is not asleep, that’s all.So don’t ask me how to be oneself; you cannot be otherwise. Just ask me how to be awake. You are yourself all the time. Just become a little more alert, just bring a new quality of waking consciousness, just watch. Don’t try to be anything because that will again be a dream. Just watch; whoever you are, wherever you are, just watch and be – and allow it. Then the happening, the sudden happening, can come any moment. The heavens can open and the spirit of God, like a dove, can enter you.In fact, this is just a way of saying something that cannot be said. It can be said in just the opposite terms also. Let me say it: when John the Baptist initiated, baptized Jesus, Jesus opened and the spirit of God, like a dove, was released from him and flew into the infinite sky. That is also exactly the same truth. It is just a way of saying it from two polarities.You are gods and you have never been anything else. That’s why I am not worried if you want to sleep a little longer. Nothing is wrong; the choice is up to you. You can have a little more sleep: turn over and have a little more sleep, snore a little longer. Nothing is wrong. But don’t try to improve, don’t try to achieve anything. Don’t try to become anything because you are already that which you can become. The being is your only becoming, you carry your destiny within yourself. Relax, and be.The fourth question:Osho,Are you still learning too?Yes, because if learning stops, you are dead. Learning is life. You can ask me, “Are you still alive?” That will be the same question.The ego is a perfectionist and the ego thinks that when you have attained, when you have become enlightened, there is no learning, you know all. But if you know all, “all” will be finite. Just by being known, it has become finite. You cannot know the infinite. The infinite simply means that you can go on learning and learning and learning and the end never comes, it is an eternal journey. It begins, but it never ends. Then the ego thinks: “What is the difference when we are also learning?” The difference is that you are learning while fast asleep, unconscious, and a man who is enlightened learns consciously. Your learning is not knowing; your learning is knowledge, dead information. A man who is awakened, his learning is not like knowledge; his learning is simply knowing.He is like a mirror. The mirror goes on mirroring. A bird flies before a mirror and the mirror mirrors it. Is there a point where you can say, “Now the mirror is perfect. It mirrors nothing”? When the mirror is perfect it will mirror perfectly, that’s all.When you are awakened, you learn perfectly. Not that you stop learning, not that you have become perfect and now there is nothing more to know. Just the contrary: the more you know, the more there is to know; the more you open your eyes, the more the infinite surrounds you. It is an infinite journey. I am still learning, and I am happy. I would not like it to be otherwise. I would not like to come to a point where I could say, “I have known all” because that would be death. Then what? Then the river is frozen, then it no longer flows. No, a perfect river goes on flowing, it is never frozen. I will go on learning, Buddha and Jesus are still learning. It has to be so.Mahavira is still learning, notwithstanding what Jainas say. They say that he has known all, he has become all-knowing, because their ego is involved. Their master – how can he still be learning? Doesn’t that mean he is still not perfect? So Jainas say Mahavira has known all, he has become a sarvagya – all-knowing, omniscient. This is their ego, not Mahavira.If you say to Christians that Jesus is still learning, they will be very angry. The son of God, the only begotten son of God – how can he be still learning? He knows all. But I tell you he is still learning because he is still alive, alive with the infinity – learning infinitely, but of course learning perfectly.This is very difficult to understand because your ego always seeks goals, and if learning continues for ever and ever then there is no goal. But I tell you, that’s how life is. Life has no goal; it is an ever-flowing river, always reaching, but never reaching – always arriving, but every arrival becomes a new departure. Go to the Himalayas. You trek, you move, you go high to the peak. All the time you were trekking upward, there was no peak beyond it. Then you reach the peak and many more peaks are revealed. You go on and on and on: it is an ongoing process.God is the process. Even God is learning; it has to be so, otherwise he will be stupid. He is not stupid, he is learning. He is evolving, and that’s beautiful. Nothing is static, everything is dynamic. That’s what I mean when I say don’t say that God is, always say God is happening. Don’t use a static term, don’t use a noun for him – use a verb. Say he is happening, say he is learning, say he is evolving, say he is a process, he is a river – and you will have struck truth.Yes, I am continuously learning. Every moment life is so tremendously beautiful and so tremendously vast, so tremendously infinite and so tremendously mysterious. To say that one has known all will be sacrilegious.The fifth question:Osho,Why did Jesus constantly talk in obscure parables which baffled even his disciples most of the time? Was this a deliberate technique? Why couldn't he be more straightforward like you?Whoever told you that I am straightforward? While listening to me you may get that impression. Think and meditate on it later on: you will find me more baffling than Jesus. At least he is consistent.Never ask such questions because these questions show that you are sitting as a judge. Why did Jesus do this or that? If you cannot leave even Jesus out of your judgment, how will you be able to leave out anybody else? Why can’t you accept things as they are? “Why is this flower white and not red?” Is it not a foolish question? “This flower is red, that flower is white. Why?”A small child was walking with D. H. Lawrence in a garden and the child asked, “Why are the trees green?” D. H. Lawrence looked at the child and said, “They are green because they are green!”Jesus is Jesus, I am me. Jesus is not there to follow me, nor am I there to follow him. And it is good that everybody is unique, otherwise life would be a boredom, a monotony. But people are foolish. They go on coming to me and asking me, “Why did Buddha say this? Why did Mahavira never say this?” Mahavira is Mahavira, Buddha is Buddha. The Ganges flows toward the east and the Narmada goes on flowing toward the west. What to do? If all the rivers were flowing toward the east do you think the world would be better? Just think of a world with four thousand million Buddhas. Can you think of anything more boring? They would start committing suicide: wherever you went you would meet your replica, wherever you looked it would be as if you were always looking in the mirror – only people exactly alike.No, it is good that everybody is unique. Why do you hanker after such things? Jesus is beautiful in his parables; without parables he would not be beautiful, without parables something would be missing. He is one of the most beautiful storytellers.Of course the beauty of a parable is that it baffles the reason. But you are childish; you think a story is perfect when the story gives you the conclusion, the motto. You are just like schoolchildren who can’t be satisfied unless the story comes to a conclusion and gives an exact mathematical conclusion to it. Then they are satisfied, but then the story is dead. A perfectly concluded story is dead.A parable tries to show something, not to say it. It indicates very indirectly; the conclusion has to be supplied by you. It leaves a gap, it gives you some space to find out the conclusion. A parable is creative. When a story is totally complete – like two plus two equals four – it gives no scope for your imagination, no scope for your meditation. Then it is simply mathematical. It is no longer poetic, it is dead.You would like somebody to say absolutely, exactly, what he means; but then that which is the ultimate meaning cannot be shown to you. The ultimate meaning is always going to be indirect, indicated – said, and yet not said. You feel a vague something, but it is never concrete. If it becomes concrete, it is of this world. If it remains vague and you follow it and you try to find out the clue, in the very effort to find the clue you rise above it. You have already entered another world.A parable is not an ordinary story; it is symbolic, it is creative. If you listen to it, if you try to understand it, your understanding will become higher than it was before you heard it. An ordinary story remains below your understanding; you can understand it perfectly because it has nothing beyond it. Parables are of the beyond: one step within your mind, one step without, another step beyond. It is a persuasion.Jesus constantly talks in parables. He really wants to baffle you because he is talking about something which is ineffable, elusive – mysterium. He is talking about the mysterious. Gaps have to be left for you to fill. Parables should be like puzzles which challenge you, and through the challenge you grow.And never compare: Why is Jesus like this? The trees are green because they are green. Jesus is just Jesus-like, and he is not like anybody else. That is what I have been insisting continually for you to be also: just be yourself, never be anybody else. Never be a Christian, never be a Hindu, never be a Jaina because then you are following a pattern and you will miss your soul. The soul is yours: individual, unique – and the pattern is public, collective, social. Never try to be somebody else. Just try to find out who you are and allow it, accept it, welcome it, delight in it, relish it so that it is nourished, so that it grows. Through you, God is trying to become somebody he has never tried before.God is not repetitive; his creativity is infinite. He never tries the same model again – he is not a Henry Ford. He is absolutely inventive; every day he goes on trying the new, the fresh. He never bothers to repeat a model again, he always goes on improving. He is a great innovator. That’s what creativity is. So don’t try to become a Jesus because then God won’t receive you.A Hasid was dying. His name was Josiah. Somebody asked him, “Have you prayed to God, have you made your peace with God? Are you certain that Moses will be a witness to you?”Josiah looked at the questioner and said, “I am not worried about Moses because when I am facing God I know perfectly well that he will not ask me, ‘Josiah, why were you not a Moses?’ He will ask me, ‘Josiah, why were you not a Josiah?’ So I am worried about myself. Stop talking nonsense. Moses? What am I to do with Moses? My whole life has been wasted in it. Now I am dying and I am facing the real question that he will ask me: ‘Were you a Josiah or not? I had made you to be somebody special, somebody unique. Did you achieve that peak or not, or have you missed the opportunity?’”God will certainly ask you, “Were you able to become yourself?” No other question can be asked.Don’t ask such questions: “Why did Jesus constantly talk in obscure parables?” He loves it that way! And a parable has to be obscure, dim, candlelit. Too bright a light kills a parable, too much analysis kills it. It is poetry.“Was this a deliberate technique?” You can never go beyond the technique, you are too obsessed with the technique. Everything becomes a technique to you. This is the way Jesus is, it is not a question of technique. He is not following a certain technique, he is not a follower of Dale Carnegie. He has never read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. He is not following a technique. He was not an American.In America everything has become a technique. Even if you want to make love, you go and learn the technique. Can you imagine a more unfortunate day for humanity? Even animals don’t ask. They know perfectly well how to make love; they don’t go to a school to learn the technique. But in America everything has become a technique. How to be friendly – even that has to be learned. Is man so completely lost that even friendship has to be learned?People come to me and I go on saying to them, “Laugh!” They ask me how to laugh. How to laugh? – learn from Swami Sardar Gurudayal Singh, he is a perfect master! But I have come across the rumor that people don’t allow him to laugh. They say, “Our meditation is disturbed.” Your meditation is disturbed by laughter? Then it is not worth anything.You have to learn everything. I think sooner or later you will have to learn how to breathe. It is possible because you follow many other things in the same way. You have to ask how to sleep, how to relax. They were natural once, just like breathing.Go and ask a primitive. He will simply laugh if you ask, “How do you go so deeply into sleep?” He will say, “What a foolish question! I simply put my head down and go. There is no how to it.” You will say, “Still, there must be a trick because I try hard and nothing happens. You must know a secret which you are hiding.”He is not hiding anything; that’s how it happens. He simply puts his head down and goes to sleep. There is no gap between these two states.One day or another, man is going to ask how to breathe and then if you say, “You just breathe; there is no how to it,” he will not believe you. How to love, how to live, how to laugh, how to be happy – these are all simple things, no how is needed. These are natural things, they are not techniques.This is how Jesus is. He loves. The way he says his parables, he loves. He knows he has an intrinsic knack of how to tell a parable.A parable is not arithmetic. It should not be too clear, otherwise the point is lost. It should be a persuasion, it should not be an advertisement. It should not argue because then the point is lost. Then why not argue? Why say a parable?It should not give proofs, it should only supply hints, and that too, not completely. Just a few hints so that your being is challenged, you become alert.I have heard about Chuang Tzu…He was talking to his disciples, and as disciples are, many of them were fast asleep. It must have been late in the night and they were tired, and Chuang Tzu was saying difficult things that were beyond them. When something is beyond you, it seems better to rest and sleep than to bother with it. Suddenly Chuang Tzu became aware that many of them were fast asleep and it was useless. They were even snoring and disturbing him. So he told a parable.He said, “Once it happened that a man had a donkey, and he was traveling on a pilgrimage toward some holy place. But he was very poor, and it came to pass that he was hungry. No money was left, so he sold the donkey on which he was riding to another traveler who was rich. But the next afternoon, when the sun was very hot, the first owner rested in the shadow by the side of the donkey.“The second owner said, ‘This is not good. You have sold the donkey.’“The first owner said, ‘I have sold the donkey, but not the shadow.’”Everybody became alert; nobody was asleep, nobody was snoring. When you talk about donkeys, donkeys hear it immediately! Chuang Tzu said, “I am finished with the story. Now I come to my point.”They all said, “Wait! Please finish the story.”Chuang Tzu said, “It was a parable, not a story. You are more interested in donkeys than you are in me.”Now everybody was throbbing with excitement: “What happened? Then what happened?” But Chuang Tzu left it there, he never completed it.It was not meant to be completed, it was just an indication that the human mind is more interested in stupidities than in higher values and higher things, more interested in foolish things. But I loved it, it was beautiful of him. He brought all the stupid minds to a certain point – to an indication, to a hint.Jesus talks in parables for many reasons, but those reasons are not techniques. You can think about them, but they are not techniques. It simply happened naturally to him, he was a good storyteller. But you can think about the reasons he talked in parables. The first: great things can be said if you create a drama around them. If you say them without the drama they fall flat.That’s why stories have a tendency to live, to live forever and ever. The Vedas may disappear, but Ramayana, the story of Rama, will not disappear. It is a story; it will be preserved. The Upanishads may disappear, but the parables of Jesus will remain. They hang around you, they become a climate.You never forget a beautiful story. It is just as if you sing a beautiful song, you will remember it better than if it were prose. If it is poetry, it is remembered well. Somehow it fits with the deepest quality of your mind. If it is a parable, if there is a drama in it, it has a tendency to cling to you. It will come again and again and again; it will become an inner climate.Bare principles are soon forgotten. And in the days of Jesus, books were not written. All that Jesus was saying was recorded many, many years afterward. For those many, many years it was just in the memory of the people who had heard him.A parable can be remembered well. You will forget what I say, but you will never forget the parables, the anecdotes, the jokes. You may forget Mahavira and Moses, but you will not forget Mulla Nasruddin. Mahavira is too far away; Mulla is your neighbor. Mahavira may be somewhere in moksha, Mulla is just within you. He is you, you can recognize yourself in him.So there may be reasons, but don’t be bothered about them. It is Jesus’ way, and it is good that he never tried anybody else’s way. In Judaism there were prophets, great prophets: Jeremiah, Ezekiel – they had their own way. Even John the Baptist never used any parable.This has to be understood. Prophets are something special to Judaism. They don’t exist anywhere else. Mystics are everywhere: Buddha is a mystic, not a prophet; Mahavira is a mystic, not a prophet. A mystic is one who has attained God; a prophet is one to whom God has come. It exists only in Judaism – the concept of prophets – because only in Judaism does God seek man. In all other religions, man seeks God.When man seeks God and finds him, he is a mystic. When God seeks man and finds him, he is a prophet. When man comes to God, he is a mystic; when God comes to man, he is a prophet. When the drop drops into the ocean, he is a mystic. When the ocean drops into the drop, he is a prophet.A prophet is a very mad and fiery man. Of course he has to be: the ocean has come to him. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, John the Baptist – they are prophets, mad people, mad people of God. They speak fire, they don’t talk in parables. Their sentences are acidic: they will burn you. They cannot soothe you.Buddha is very soothing, Krishna is just like a lullaby that surrounds you, soothes you, consoles you, heals you. A prophet simply burns you with an unknown desire, makes you mad. Jesus is both a prophet and a mystic, one who has come to God and one to whom God has also come. Sometimes he talks like John the Baptist and sometimes he talks like Krishna. Sometimes he soothes and sometimes he wounds. He is a very deep balancing phenomenon, both a prophet and a mystic. That’s why you will find in him a synthesis. You will find in him all that is in Judaism – all that is beautiful and great – and you will find in him all that is beautiful in Krishna, Buddha, Mahavira; Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism.Jesus is a culmination point, as if all the religions of the world meet in him and reach a crescendo. He talks sometimes as a prophet: he invokes, provokes, he calls you. But that is not his only quality. He soothes: he says parables, he consoles, he gives you a lullaby. He wakes you, and he helps you to sleep also. That is the way he is. All explanations are explanations after the fact, remember. The basic thing is that this is the way he is, and no other way is possible for him.Socrates was poisoned. The court decided that he should be murdered, but the people loved him very much – even in the court almost half of them were in favor of him. So they gave him an opportunity. They told him, “If you stop talking about the truth, if you keep quiet, you can be pardoned and your death can be avoided.”Socrates said, “That will be impossible. That will be more deathly than death because to talk about truth is the only way I know to be. It will be worse than death. So please kill me because if you leave me and you say I have to keep quiet, it will be impossible.“That’s not the way I am. To talk about truth is the only business I know – the only business I know. It is the only way I am. I cannot promise that I will stop talking truth because even if I stop, even in my silence only truth will be spoken. So I cannot promise that. You had better kill me.”And he was killed.This is very meaningful. A Socrates is a Socrates. A Socrates is a Socrates, and there is no other way. All explanations are explanations after, but don’t be bothered about them. Love if you can. And if you cannot love Jesus, forget about him and find somebody else you can love. Don’t be bothered about explanations and reasonings and proofs.Only love will help you to understand, nothing else. When you love a person – whoever he is: Jesus or Krishna – when you love a person, you immediately understand him. That’s the way he is; then you don’t want him to be otherwise. Love never wants to change anybody. Love accepts, understands.The last question:Osho,Is there any mystery behind your answer when you also say the name of the questioner? Please explain it – but please don't say my name because sometimes it is too heavy.This is from a sannyasin. I will not tell you the name because deep down she wants her name to be said. This is not the first time she has asked the question; I have been avoiding this question many times.Deep down she wants her name to be said so that it becomes a part of history, part of the record. This is her last effort now. She is trying to play a trick by saying, “Please don’t say my name,” so that I can be provoked.But you cannot provoke me.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 99 And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him, “Follow me.” And he arose, and followed him.10 And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples.11 And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, “Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?”12 But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.”13 “But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”Luke 923 And he said to them all, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.”24 “For whoever will save his life shall lose it: but whoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.”25 “For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?”Religion is basically, essentially, a rebellion. It is not conformity, it is not belonging to any organization, society, church because all belonging comes out of fear, and religion is freedom. There is fear in being alone. One likes to belong to a nation, to a church, to a society because when you belong to the crowd, you forget your loneliness. It does not disappear, but you become oblivious to it. You deceive yourself, you create a dream around you – as if you are not alone. You remain alone all the same. This is just an intoxicant.Religion is not an intoxicant, it does not give you unconsciousness. It gives you awareness, and awareness is rebellious. When you become aware, you cannot belong to any society, to any nation, to any church because when you become aware, you become aware of the austere beauty of aloneness. You become aware of the music that is continuously happening within your soul. But you have never allowed yourself to be alone to hear it, to be in rapport with it, to be one with it.Religion is not conformity because all conformity is mechanical. You do certain things because you are expected to do them. You do them because you have to live with people and you have to follow their rules. You do them because you have been conditioned to do them: you go to church, you go to the temple, you pray, you follow rituals. But everything is empty; unless your heart is in it, everything is dead and mechanical. You may do everything exactly as it is prescribed, with no error, it may be perfect – but then too it is dead.I have heard that President Kennedy had to sign so many letters, autographs and personalized pictures that a small mechanism was invented for him. The machine used to sign for him, and the signature was so perfect that no expert was able to say which was mechanical and which was true – not even President Kennedy himself was able to say which was false and which was true. Malcolm Muggeridge reports that when Kennedy was killed they forgot to turn the machine off, so it continued. The President continued to sign personalized letters even when he was dead. A mechanism is a mechanism.You become a Christian. Then you become a mechanism: you go on behaving as if you really loved Christ, but “as if” has to be remembered. You become a Buddhist. You go on behaving as if you follow Buddha, but “as if” has not to be forgotten. Your signature may be perfect, but it is coming out of a dead mechanism.Religion is not conformity. Conformity is between the individual and the past, and religion is something between the individual and the present. Poetry is something between the individual and the future. Conformity means to conform with those people who are no longer there, the dead – to conform with Moses, with Mahavira. Now to conform with Jesus is a dead thing; you are conforming with the past. If you relate to the present, it is totally different. It revolutionizes you, it gives you a rebirth.Conformity is between the individual and the society. Religion is something between the individual and existence itself. Society is our creation. God created Adam, not humanity; God created Eve, not humanity. God creates individuals; humanity is our fiction. But the fiction can take possession of you and you can forget the real and you can cling to the fiction. I know people who want to love humanity and they cannot love a human being. Where is humanity and how are you going to love humanity? You can only make empty gestures in the air. Humanity is nowhere. Wherever you come across it, you will come across real, concrete human beings. Humanity is an abstraction, a mere word. It has no reality in it: a soap bubble, nothing more. You can only come across real human beings. To love a real human being is very difficult, but to love humanity is very easy. It is almost as if you love nobody. To love humanity is equal to loving nobody. Then there is no problem, no difficulty.Religion is something that happens between you and the concrete existence. It is not about fictions. Also, religion is not about tradition. Tradition belongs to time; religion belongs to eternity. To move into religion, you have to move in the eternal now. Religion has no history. There the West has to learn something from the East.In the East we have never bothered about history. The reason? The reason is simple. All history is about time, that which happens in time is recorded in history. History is a dead book. We have never bothered about history because religion belongs to eternity: you cannot record it as an event; it is an eternal process. You can only record the essential fact of it, the essential truth of it, not the ripples that are made in the river of time. That’s why if you go to a Jaina temple and see the twenty-four tirthankaras, you will be confused about who is who. They all look alike, you will not be able to make any sense out of it. Why do these twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas all look alike? They cannot be alike; they existed in different ages, they were different individuals. But we have not bothered about events in time.A body is an event in time. The difference in bodies is past history. But the innermost being, which is in eternity, is the same within me, within you, within everybody. The form differs, but the innermost center is the same. Those twenty-four tirthankaras in the Jaina temples say something about the innermost being. That’s why they have been sculpted to be similar. Look at Buddha; he also looks like Mahavira, there is no difference. They are not facts, they are truths. Religion is not concerned about facts, it is concerned about truth.Facts can be learned from books – truth, never. If you become too involved with facts, your eyes will be clouded and confused and you will not be able to know the truth. Beware of facts, they can lead you astray. Sort out the truth, always try to find the truth; don’t be bothered too much about facts. Facts are irrelevant. That which changes is the fact and that which remains always the same is the truth. Your body is a fact: one day you were a child, now you are a young man or an old man; one day you were born, one day you will die. The body changes, but the “you” who abides in the body, who has made it a temporary abode, that “you” is eternal. That is the truth: it is formless, it has no qualities. It is immortal, it is eternity.Religion is not a tradition, so you cannot borrow religion. You will have to risk yourself, you will have to earn it. You will have to stake your life for it. That is the only way there is. You cannot get it cheap; if you want to get it cheap, you will get a counterfeit.Religion is not consolation. It is, on the contrary, a challenge: God challenges man, God haunts man, God goes on crying, “Return! Enthrone me.” He will not leave you at rest. He will go on knocking at your doors, he will go on creating storms in your being, in your spirit. He will go on stirring you. He will not allow you to settle for less. Unless you attain the ultimate, you will not be allowed to rest. Religion is a challenge, it is a great storm. It is like death; it is not a consolation.The so-called religions, the organized religions, are consolations. They console you, they hide your wounds. They don’t stir you, they don’t call and invoke you. They don’t ask you to be adventurous, they don’t ask you to be daring, they don’t attract you to move in a dangerous life. They are like lubricants.In a society with so many people, you need lubricants around you so that there is not so much conflict. You can move easily, movement is not very difficult, and you don’t rub against the neighbor. No conflict arises; the lubricant goes on flowing around you. You go to church as a lubricant. It helps, it helps in a social way. It is a formality: filled full, you become respectable. It is just like becoming a member of the Rotary Club, it is respectable, it helps. You become a member of a church, that too helps. You become a member of a religion, that too helps. People think you are religious, and when people believe you are, you can deceive them more easily. When you have a garb around you that you are religious, you have a potential weapon with you. Your religion is a consolation to yourself and a respectability. In fact it is politics, diplomacy – part of your struggle to survive, part of your ambition, part of the whole politics of the ego. It is power politics.These things have to be remembered when you try to understand Jesus. And religion is also not morality. Morality, again, is just the rules of the game. Those who want to play the game of the society have to follow the rules of it, just like when you play cards you have to follow certain rules. Not that those rules have any ultimacy about them, not that they come from God. You create the game, you create the rules, you follow the rules. But if you want to play, you have to follow the rules.Morality has nothing ultimate in it. That’s why every society has its own morality, every culture has its own morality. One thing can be moral in India and can be immoral in America; another thing can be moral in America and may be immoral in India. If morality is really real, then it cannot differ.In India, to divorce a woman or a man is immoral. It is not thought to be good. Once you are married you have to live with your partner. But in America, if you live with a woman you don’t love, it will be thought immoral. If you don’t love, then it is immoral to sleep with that woman. Only love, only a deep love allows you to be with the woman. Otherwise leave her. Don’t deceive her, don’t waste her life.Morality is a game; it changes. From society to society, age to age, period to period, it goes on changing. It depends, it has nothing ultimate about it. But religion is ultimate. It has nothing to do with America or India. It has something to do with a new consciousness within the individual. It is a sunrise in the individual, it is a new being arising and expanding in the individual. You have a new look, you have new eyes through it. You can see the old problems, but they disappear. Not that they are solved; they simply disappear, they dissolve. With a new eye, they cannot be there. You have a new vision, a new dimension. These things have to be remembered because when a Jesus, a man like Jesus comes, these things become the problem.I have heard an Arabian proverb. It says: “Show a man too many camels’ bones or show them to him too often, and he will not be able to recognize a camel when he comes across a live one.”“Show a man camels’ bones too many times, or too often,” and the Arabian saying says, “that man will not be able to recognize a camel when he comes across a live one.” This happens when a Jesus comes to the world. You have seen so many phony priests, you have seen so many hocus-pocus preachers, you have seen so many scholars not knowing anything but creating much fuss about it, that when a Jesus comes you cannot recognize him. Whenever a Jesus or a Buddha comes, it becomes almost impossible to recognize him. For the majority, it is almost impossible. Only a few rare beings who have some potentiality, or who are a little alert, only they can have a few glimpses.To recognize a Jesus is a great achievement because that means you have a certain consciousness which can relate to Jesus. You have a certain quality which can relate to Jesus: you are already on the way to becoming a Jesus yourself. You can only recognize that which you already have within you opening, flowering. It may be just a bud, but you can recognize a little bit, your eyes are not completely closed.There are priests who are pretenders. To them, religion is a trade. It is a livelihood, not their life. To Jesus, religion is life; to the rabbis, to the priests, it is a livelihood. Then there are scholars who go on talking about nothing – and they can talk so much, they are so articulate, that you will never be able to recognize the fact that deep within they are empty.I have heard about an international competition…A competition was arranged, essays were invited from many countries. The subject of the competition was “The Elephant.” The Englishman immediately went to South Africa with cameras and a group of followers, and he investigated the whole thing. He came back after six months and wrote a book: well printed and illustrated. The title of the book was Hunting the Elephant in South Africa.The Frenchman never went anywhere. Every day he simply went to visit the elephant house in the zoo in Paris. After two, three weeks he started to write a book – a very carelessly printed book, not even hardcover, just a paperback. The title of the book was The Love Life of the Elephant.The Indian, who had been appointed by the Indian Government, was a man who had never seen an elephant because he had always remained in the Himalayas. He was a great yogi and poet and Sanskrit scholar. He never even went to the zoo. He wrote a big book, a great treatise. The title was The Divine Elephant. It was written in the form of poetry and he quoted great Sanskrit books from the Vedas up to Sri Aurobindo. Anybody who read the book had the impression that this man had never seen an elephant. He was a poet, he may have seen one in his dreams. He talked about the elephant which was seen by Buddha’s mother before he was conceived: mythology, a white elephant.And last of all, the Germans. They appointed six professors of philosophy to write the book. They went to all the museums and libraries all over the world to study everything that was written about the elephant. They never went to see any elephant or any zoo – just museums and libraries. They searched all over, they took almost six years, and they wrote a book – twelve volumes, almost an Encyclopedia Britannica. The title of the book was A Short Introduction to the Study of the Elephant. Professors of philosophy – what do they have to do with elephants? And that too, a short introduction: a prolegomenon. It was not even about the elephant! It was just an introduction to the study of the elephant.When a Jesus comes, you are already too much in the know. You have read the books, you have listened to the scholars, you have listened to the priests, you are too full of ideas, and when Jesus or a man like Jesus comes, you simply cannot recognize him. The live animal is there, and you have become too addicted to the dead bones. To recognize Jesus means you will have to put aside all that you know already.Jesus was not murdered by bad men, he was not murdered by criminals; he was murdered by very respectable rabbis. In fact religious people killed him. Religion is never in danger from irreligious people because they don’t bother about it. Religion is always a danger to the so-called religious because their whole life is at stake. If Jesus is right, then all the rabbis are wrong. If Jesus is right, then the whole tradition is wrong. If Jesus is right, then7 the whole Church is wrong.Everybody stands against Jesus. Jesus is always alone, very alone. You cannot understand his aloneness. Whatever you know about aloneness is a physical aloneness. Sometimes no one is in the house, the house is dark and you are alone. The electricity has also gone so you cannot turn on the light, you cannot turn on the radio or the TV. You are suddenly thrown into aloneness. But this is a physical sense of aloneness. You don’t know what Jesus feels.He is spiritually alone, amidst strangers where it is so difficult to find a friend who will recognize you. He goes on looking into each and everybody he meets on the path, penetrating, gazing deep into the eyes. Nobody recognizes him, nobody understands him. Rather, people misunderstand him. They are ready to jump into misunderstanding, but nobody is ready in any way to understand him.Whenever there is a religious being, the so-called religious are all against him. They would like to kill him immediately so the danger is avoided and their security again becomes certain.Remember, he was killed by very good people. It is still the same. Go around Pune and ask the so-called good people. You will always find them against me; they have to be, their whole way of life is in danger. They are afraid to even listen to me because, who knows? A truth may strike home. They won’t come near me, they won’t read my books; they cannot take that much risk. They always have opinions of their own.One day, it happened that I witnessed a beautiful scene…A man was talking to Mulla Nasruddin. The man said, “Why are you so miserly and so stingy toward your wife?”Mulla said, “You must have heard something wrong about me because as far as I know, I am generally a very generous man.”The man became angry because whenever you challenge somebody’s opinion, he becomes angry. He became angry and he said, “Stop defending yourself. Everybody in the whole town knows that you are too hard on your wife. Even for day-to-day expenses she has to beg you like a beggar. And stop defending yourself. Everybody knows it!”Nasruddin said, “Okay, if you are so angry, I will not defend myself. But can I say one thing, just one thing?”The man said loudly, “What?”Nasruddin said, “That I am not married.”Since that day that man has been against Nasruddin. Once I met him and I told him that since Mulla Nasruddin is not married, the whole thing is baseless. “Your whole argument is baseless. Why are you angry?”He said, “It makes no difference, it is only a question of time. Wait, sooner or later he will be married and then I will be right! I am still telling the truth. It is only a question of time. Wait, my opinion cannot be wrong.”People cling to their opinions – baseless, but still they cling. The more baseless the opinion, the more people cling to it. If it is based on right grounds there is no need to cling; it is true in itself. When it is baseless, your clinging is needed because only your clinging can become the base. Remember always if you know something is true, you never get angry if somebody contradicts it. You get angry in the same proportion as you know it is not true. Anger shows that you have just a mere opinion, no knowledge.People were very much against Jesus because he was ruining all their edifices. They were thinking their houses were built on rocks, and just his presence showed them that their houses were built on sand, they were already falling. They jumped on him, they killed him. He was not killed by the political powers, he was killed by the pseudo-religious powers, by the priests.This is my understanding: if religion has disappeared in the world today, it is not because of science – no; it is not because of atheists – no; it is not because of rationalists – no. It is because of pseudo religion. There is too much pseudo religion and it is so bogus, phony, that only people who are phony can be interested in religion. People who have even an iota of reality will go against it, they will rebel.Real people have always been rebellious because reality wants to assert its being, to express its freedom. Real people are not slaves. Remember this, then we will enter the sentences.And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him, “Follow me.” And he arose, and followed him.The whole thing seems to be a little unreal. The world has changed so much it looks more like drama than real life. Jesus comes and says to a man who is sitting in the customs, working there – maybe a clerk or somebody – he simply looks at him and says: “Follow me.” And he arose, and followed him. It looks like a drama, not reality because the reality that we know today is absolutely different. The world has changed, the human mind has changed.For these past three centuries the human mind has been trained to doubt. Before Jesus, for centuries continuously, the human mind lived on trust, lived on the simplicity of the heart. People’s eyes were clear. This Matthew, an ordinary man, must have looked into Jesus’ eyes – the way he walked, the presence that he brought with himself, the penetrating look that stirred the heart – he touched something deep.It rarely happens today. I come across so many people, but rarely do I see a person so open that whatever I say simply reaches the heart and becomes a seed immediately, with no time wasted. Otherwise, people are protecting. They come to me and they say they would like to surrender, they would like to follow me, but I see a great armor around them: very subtle, but they are protecting from everywhere. They won’t allow any space for me to enter them. If I try too hard, then they become too protective. They go on saying that they would like to relax and let go; their mouths say something, their bodies show something else. Their thoughts are something, but their reality is just contradictory.People were simple in Jesus’ time. They must have just looked, and when Jesus said: “Follow me” they simply followed. It was natural. When these gospels were written, those who were writing the gospels were not aware that someday these things would look fictitious. It was so natural in those days that the gospel writers could not imagine that someday the thing would look false, would not sound real. It is happening now all over the world.Move with Buddha: a different quality of humanity surrounds him…Prasanjita, a king, came to see Buddha. He was Buddha’s father’s friend – both were kings – and when he heard that his friend’s son had renounced the world, he was very worried. When Buddha came to his capital town, Prasanjita went to see him and to persuade him.He said to Buddha, “What have you done? If you are not happy with your father, come and live in my palace. Get married to my daughter, I have only one daughter, and this kingdom will be yours. But don’t move around like a beggar. It hurts: you are the only son of your father. What are you doing? Both these kingdoms will be yours. Come to my home.”Buddha looked into Prasanjita’s eyes and said, “Just one question. Have you attained any happiness through your kingdom? Just say yes or no. If you say yes, I follow you. If you say no, then you have to follow me.”Prasanjita fell to Buddha’s feet and said, “No. I renounce. Initiate me. I leave all this.” A very different quality of immediacy.The same thing happened to me, the same:One of my father’s friends was a lawyer, a very cunning lawyer. When I came home from the university, of course my parents were worried. They wanted me to get married and settle, but they didn’t want to say it directly to me. They knew that to say it directly would be like interfering in my life, and they are very nonaggressive, silent, simple. So they thought about their friend and they asked the friend to come.He came with all his arguments ready; he was a lawyer. He said, “If I convince you that marriage is a must, will you get married?”I said, “Of course. But if you cannot, then are you ready to leave your wife and children?”The man had not thought of that; he said, “Then I will have to think.”He never came back. The quality of the mind had changed; otherwise there was an opportunity for him, an opening of the sky. I waited and waited, but he never came. He became afraid because everybody knows that life as you have lived it has not given you anything. But one needs courage to say that because just in saying that, a deep renunciation happens. You have already moved on another path once you realize the fact that life as you have lived it has been futile, fruitless, irrelevant.Saith Jesus unto him: “Follow me.” And he arose, and followed him. What a beautiful world, what a beautiful consciousness. You can have that consciousness, and through it everything becomes possible, even the impossible becomes possible.Try. Drop the doubts because whenever you doubt you are destructive. Doubt is destructive; trust is creative. Doubt kills, doubt is poison. Trust gives you life, life abundant, infinite life, because when you trust you relax.In trust there is no fear, in trust there is no need to defend, in trust there is no struggle. You let go, you flow with the river. You don’t even swim, the river takes you to the ocean. It is already going to the ocean. You fight unnecessarily, and through fight you destroy your energy. Through fight you get frustrated, and through fight the whole opportunity is lost in which you could have danced, in which you could have celebrated. The same energy becomes a struggle; the same energy can become surrender.And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples.This has to be understood. It is a very delicate point that whenever a man like Jesus is on the earth, sinners recognize him before your so-called righteous people because sinners have nothing to lose except their sins. Sinners don’t have opinionated minds; they don’t have theologies and scriptures. Sinners have a sense that their lives have been futile, sinners have an urgency to repent and return. But the so-called respectable people – trustees of temples and churches, mayors, politicians, leaders, pundits, scholars – have much to lose and no urgency of being, no intensity to transform themselves, no desire in fact. They are dull and dead. Sinners are more alive than your so-called saints, and sinners are more courageous than your so-called saints. To come near, to come close to Jesus needs courage.Have you watched that your so-called saints are not really religious, but simply people who are afraid? Afraid of hell, afraid of God’s punishment – or greedy, greedy and ambitious to achieve heaven: the award and blessings of God. But they are not truly religious. When you are truly religious you don’t bother about hell and heaven, you don’t bother about anything. This very moment you are so deeply in heaven, who bothers about the heaven which comes after death?Sinners are more courageous, they risk. And: …behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples.And when the Pharisees saw it…– the respectable people, the righteous –…they said unto his disciples, “Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?”Their minds are always concerned with such foolish things: with whom you are eating, with whom you are sitting. They don’t look directly into Jesus; they are more interested in with whom he is sitting. He is sitting with sinners – now that is their problem. Jesus does not create any ripple in their being, but the sinners create anxiety. How can they come and sit with this master?Sinners are there. The condemned people for whom they have invented hell are sitting there. Your so-called saints won’t allow those sinners to be so close – never. They would not like to be in their company at all. Why? Why are your saints so afraid of sinners? They are afraid of their own inner fear, afraid that if they are with sinners it is more possible that the sinners will convert them than the possibility of the sinners being converted by the saints. They are afraid. They are afraid of their own sinner inside them. That’s why there is the fear of the sinner outside. Always remember that whatever you say ultimately refers to you, not to anything else. If you are afraid to go to a place where drunkards gather together, it shows simply that you have a certain tendency toward alcohol, intoxicants, and you are afraid. Otherwise why fear? You can be at ease there. Nobody can corrupt you except yourself.…they said unto his disciples… This too has to be remembered: they didn’t say it to him. I know those Pharisees who are around. They will say it to you, they will not come to say it to me. They say it to the disciples because to come to Jesus to say it is dangerous. The man may hypnotize you, it is risky – just talk to the disciples. Such impotent people have become so important; they hold all the key posts in the world, they hold all the power, and they are absolutely impotent. They are not even ready to come and face Jesus.“Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?” – as if sinners are not human beings. And as if these people themselves are not sinners. Who is there who can say, “I am not a sinner”? To be here in this world is to be somehow or other involved in sin. Nobody can claim otherwise.When the whole humanity is involved in sin, how can you be out of it? You are part. If sin is happening somewhere, I am part of it because I am part of humanity. I create the climate – maybe a very tiny part of it, but I also create the climate. A Vietnam happens: I am part of it; I am the sinner. How can I think of myself as out of it? Whatever any human being is doing anywhere, he is part of me and I am part of him. We are members of each other.A real saint always feels humble because he knows that he is also a sinner. Only a false saint feels proud and thinks that he is above. Nobody is above. If there is any God, he must be part of your sin also. And he knows it because he is involved in you. He beats in your heart, he breathes in you, and if you commit sin, he is a part of it. Only so-called saints – dummies, not real – can think otherwise and be proud.But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.”He simply said, “Those who are sick need the physician. I am the physician, so the sick people have come to me.” It should be the criterion: around a saint, sinners will gather together. This should be the criterion. If you see a saint and only respectable people are around him, he is no saint at all. The physician is false because whenever a great physician comes into the world, people who are ill are bound to rush to him. They are bound to crowd the man because their need is there. They want to be whole and healed, and the physician has come.“They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.” But the reverse is not true, remember. A sinner needs a saint, but if you think that you don’t need a saint, it does not mean that you are not a sinner. A sick man seeks a physician and there is no need for a healthy man to seek a physician, but just by not seeking a physician, don’t deceive yourself that you are healthy. Remember that the reverse is not true. That’s why in the next sentence Jesus says:“But go ye and learn what that meaneth…”He said, “This is the truth: sinners are bound to seek me and sick people are bound to come to me. I am a physician of their soul. Those who are healthy, I am not for them; they need not come. “But go ye and learn what that meaneth…” It is not simple. Go and meditate over it. You may be ill yourself and you need me, but you have just been thinking that you are not ill.”The greatest illness that can happen to a man is that when he is ill, he thinks that he is not ill. Then nobody can cure him, then no medicine will help him. Then the physician may be next door, but the man will die uncured. This is the greatest misfortune that can befall a man: to be sick and think himself healthy.“But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice…”This is one of the most significant sayings that Jesus has ever uttered. This is his whole secret: “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice…” Mahavira is not so merciful, Mohammed not so merciful, even the compassionate Buddha is not so merciful as Jesus, because they all say that you will have to sacrifice, you will have to change your ways and you will have to account for your past karmas.In India we have talked about compassion long enough, but we have continuously been talking about karma. One has to keep all accounts, and whatever bad deeds you have done you will have to cancel them by good deeds. You will have to come to a balance, only then can the accounts be closed. This is what Jesus means by sacrifice.He says: “I will have mercy…” This is his key secret. What does he mean when he says: “I will have mercy…”? He means that it is almost impossible for you to cancel all the bad karmas that you have committed because the whole thing is tremendous, vast. Millions of lives you have been doing things and all that you have done has been wrong, has to be wrong, because you have been unconscious. How can you do anything good while unconscious? You have done millions of things, but all are wrong.While one is asleep one cannot do anything that is good. Virtue is impossible in unconsciousness, only sin is possible. Unconsciousness is the source of sin. You have done so many sins that it seems almost impossible. How will you get out of this? The very effort doesn’t seem probable, the very effort seems hopeless. Jesus says, “Mercy will do it.” “Just surrender to me,” Jesus says, “and I will have mercy.” What does he mean? He simply means: “If you can trust me and trust that you have been forgiven, you are forgiven,” because all those karmas have been committed in an unconscious sleep. You are not responsible for them.This is the key message of Jesus: man is not responsible unless he is alert. It is as if a child has committed a sin. No court will punish the child because they will say the child doesn’t know, he has done it unaware. He had no intention of doing it, it has simply happened, he is not responsible. Or a madman has committed a crime, murdered somebody. The court, once it is proved that the man is mad, has to forgive because a madman cannot be responsible. Or a drunkard has done something and it is proved that he was drunk, absolutely drunk. You can, at the most, punish him for his drinking. You cannot punish him for the act.Jesus says, “I have come. I will have mercy…” It does not mean that it is up to Jesus to forgive you, remember. That has been a mistake. Christians have been thinking that since Jesus is the only begotten son of God, and he is merciful, there is no need to do anything. Just pray to him, confess your sin. He is merciful, he will forgive you.In fact Jesus is just an excuse. He is saying this: if you become alert and become aware that you were unconscious in whatever you have been doing up to now, hitherto, the very awareness that you were unconscious, the very realization, forgives, becomes the forgiveness. Not that Jesus is doing anything.It is just like when I promise you that if you surrender to me, I will transform you. There is no promise and I am not going to do anything. You surrender, that’s all, and the transformation happens. But it will be difficult for you to surrender if there is nobody to surrender to. Then you will say, “To whom do I surrender?” It will be almost impossible, absurd. Just surrendering, without anybody there to surrender to? You will feel yourself absurd. What are you doing? Somebody is needed to surrender to. That is just an excuse.When I say, “I promise I will transform you,” I am not going to do anything because nobody can transform you. But if you surrender, in the very effort when you surrender, the ego is surrendered and transformation happens because the ego is the only barrier. It is because of the ego that you are not changing, it is because of the ego that your heart is burdened by a rock and you are not throbbing well. Once the rock is put away…You have become so addicted to the rock that you say, “Unless I find some golden lotus feet I am not going to surrender this rock.” So I say, “Okay, let my feet be the excuse.” You have become so addicted to the rock that you think that unless you find lotus feet, golden feet, unless you find a god, you are not going to surrender because the rock is very valuable. It is because of your foolishness that I have to play god. So I say, “Okay, let me be the god. But please surrender your rock so your heart starts throbbing well, so you start feeling, loving, being.”When Jesus says, “I will have mercy…,” he is saying the same thing. He is saying, “I am here to forgive you. Just surrender. Come follow me,” and:“…I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”This is tremendously beautiful. Every time a Buddha, a Jesus or a Krishna happens, this is what they come for.“…I am not come to call the righteous…” In the first place, they never listen to the call. The righteous are dead people; they are deaf, they are too full of their own noise. They are so certain about their virtues: they don’t have any earth to stand on but in their beliefs, in their imagination, they think that they are standing on a well-founded ground. They have no foundation; their edifice is just as if a child has made a house of playing cards. A little breeze and the house will be gone, but they believe in it. The house exists only in their imagination.In the first place, they will not listen to the call. In the second place, if you insist too much they will get angry. In the third place, if you are stubborn as Jesus was, they will kill you. And in the fourth place, when you are dead they will worship you. This is how things go.“…for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” In fact, to realize that you are a sinner is already a transformation. The moment you recognize that you are a sinner, you have repented. There is no other repentance.Look at it in this way. In the night you are fast asleep and dreaming. If you realize that you are dreaming, what does it mean? It means that now you are no longer asleep. Once you become aware that you are dreaming, you are awake. Once you become aware that you are asleep, you are no longer asleep – finished. The sleep has already left you.To remain a sinner one needs to continuously think to himself that he is not a sinner, he is a virtuous man. To hide the sin, one needs the confidence that one is righteous, not a sinner. Sometimes the people who call themselves righteous think that even if they sin sometimes it is just to protect their virtue, to protect their righteousness.It happened…India and Pakistan were at war and everybody was in a war mood. Even Jaina saints were in a war mood. At least they shouldn’t have been: they have been preaching nonviolence for centuries. But I came across the news that Acharya Tulsi, one of the greatest Jaina munis, had given his blessings to the war. What did he say?He said it was “to protect the country of nonviolence. Even if violence has to be done, it has to be done – to protect the country of Buddha, Mahavira, Gandhi.”Do you see the trick? Nonviolence has to be protected by violence. One has to go to war so that peace reigns. I have to kill you because I love you; I am doing it for your sake.A man who thinks he is a sinner has already surrendered. He realizes the fact: “I am a sinner and I have done nothing else except sin and sin. It is not that sometimes I have committed a sin. Rather on the contrary, I am a sinner. It is not a question of actions; it is a continuity of unconsciousness. I am a sinner and whether I have done something wrong or not is irrelevant. Sometimes I don’t do anything wrong, but still I am a sinner.”“The sinner” is a quality of unconsciousness. It has nothing to do with actions. You may not have done anything wrong for twenty-four hours – you may have remained in the house, fasting, sitting silently, meditating; you have not done anything wrong – but still you remain a sinner. If you are unconscious, you are a sinner.Your being a sinner is not the result of the sins you have committed. Your being a sinner is simply a state of unconsciousness. You are not a sinner because you do sins. You do sins because you are a sinner. It is a continuity of unconsciousness – a continuum, without any gap. Once you realize this, the very realization is an awakening. The morning has come, it has knocked on the door of your home; you are aware. Yet awareness is fragile, very delicate: you can fall asleep again – yes, that is a possibility – but still you are aware. You can use this moment and come out of the bed.“…for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”And he said to them all, “If any man will come after me – if any man will come after me – let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.”“If any man will come after me… If you have decided to come after me, then this is what you have to do.” This is the discipline, the only discipline Jesus ever gave: “…let him deny himself…” When you come to a man like Jesus, you have to drop your own ideas and the ego. You have to completely drop your own decisions because only if you drop your ideas, decisions, ego, can Jesus penetrate you. Soon you will not need Jesus. Once you have dropped your ego, things will start happening to you on your own. But as a first step: “…let him deny himself…”Look. You can come to me and surrender. But it is possible that the surrender may be your idea. Then it is no longer a surrender. The surrender is surrender when it is my idea, not yours. If it is your idea, then it is not surrender; you are following your idea.It happens every day. Somebody comes here and I ask him, “Would you like to move into sannyas?” He says, “Wait, I have to think about it.” I say to him, “If you think about it, then it will be your sannyas, not mine.”Then you think and you come to a conclusion, but it is your ego thinking and coming to a conclusion. Then you take sannyas, but you have missed the opportunity. The opportunity was there when I had asked you to take a jump. Had you taken it without any consideration on your part, that would have been a repentance, a turning, a conversion. If you think, it’s okay – but it is simply okay, nothing more. You have come in, it is your idea you are following. There is no surrender in it. Deny yourself.And the second thing: “…and take up his cross daily…” A life with Jesus is a life moment to moment. It is not planning for the future. It has no plan; it is spontaneous. One has to live moment to moment “…and take up his cross daily…”Why a cross? – because surrender is death. Why a cross? – because surrender is pain. Why a cross? – because surrender is suffering. Your whole ego will suffer and burn. Your ideas, your past, your personality, will be on fire continuously. Hence the cross. The cross is a symbol of death. And until you die, nothing is possible; until you die, the resurrection is not possible.“…Let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily…” This has to be done daily, every morning. You cannot think: “Yes, I have surrendered once. It is finished.” It is not so easy. You will have to surrender a million times. You will have to surrender every moment because the mind is very cunning. It will try to reclaim you. If you think that you have surrendered once and it is finished, the mind will recapture you. It has to be done every moment until you are completely dead and a new entity has arisen, until a new man is born within you, until you are no longer continuous with the past: a breakthrough has happened.You will know it because you will not recognize yourself. Who are you? You will not be able to see how you were connected with the past. You will recognize only one thing – that there has been a sudden gap. The line broke, the past disappeared, and something new entered you which has nothing to do with the past, which is not at all connected with it. The religious man is not a modified man, the religious man is not a decorated man. The religious man has nothing to do with the past. He is absolutely new.“For whoever will save his life shall lose it…”Don’t cling to the ego…“For whoever will save his life shall lose it: but whoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.”Lose it and you will have it, cling to it and you will lose it. Looks paradoxical, but it is a simple truth. The seed dies in the soil and becomes a great tree. But the seed can cling to its own self, go on protecting itself and defending itself because for the seed it looks like death. The seed will never be able to see the plant, so it is death.You will never be able to see the man I am talking about, so it is a perfect death. You cannot imagine that man because if you can imagine that man, it will be your continuity. You cannot hope about that man because if it is your hope, then your hope will be the bridge. No, you are completely in the dark about that new man. That’s why trust is needed.I cannot prove it to you, I cannot argue about it because the more I argue about it and prove it to you, the more it will become impossible for you. If you become convinced, then the barrier is perfect because your conviction will be your conviction. And the new will come only when you have gone totally. All your convictions, ideologies, arguments, proofs: you are gone, wholesale – and only absence is left. In that absence, the heavens open and the spirit of God descends like a dove, lights on you.“…but whoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.” Why does Jesus insist: …for my sake…? Look at the problem: if you are going to die completely, and a new man is going to come only when you are no more, then who will be the bridge between you and the new? Who will be the bridge? You cannot be the bridge otherwise the new will not be new; it will be just a modified old.There the master becomes the bridge. He says, “Die silently. I am there to look after you. Move into death; I will take care of the new coming into you. Don’t be worried, relax: …for my sake…”That’s why religion will never become a philosophy, will never become a theology. It will never be based on arguments; it cannot be, the very nature of it forbids it. It will remain a trust. If you trust me, you can die easily without fear. You know I am there, you love me and you know that I love you, so why fear?It happened…A young man recently married was going on his honeymoon. He was a samurai, a Japanese warrior. They were going on a boat to an island when suddenly a storm came. The boat was small and the storm was tremendously terrible, and there was every possibility that they would be drowned. The wife became very afraid, started trembling. But she looked at the samurai, her husband. He was sitting silently as if nothing was happening, and they were in the throes of death! And any moment the boat would be gone under the sea.The woman said, “What are you doing? Why are you sitting like a statue?”The samurai pulled his sword out of its sheath. The wife could not believe it, what was he doing? And he put his naked sword just near the throat of the wife. She started laughing, and he said, “Why are you laughing? The sword is so near your throat – just a little move and your head will go.”The wife said, “But it is in your hands, so there is no problem. The sword is dangerous, but it is in your hands.”The samurai put his sword back and said, “The storm is in my God’s hands. The storm is dangerous, but it is in the hands of somebody whom I love and who loves me. That’s why I am unafraid.”When the sword is in your master’s hand and he is going to kill you, if you trust him, only then will you die peacefully, lovingly, gracefully. And out of that grace – and out of that peace, and out of that love – you will create the possibility where the new arrives. If you die afraid, the new will not arrive. You will simply die. That’s why Jesus says: “…for my sake… let me be the bridge.”“For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?”Remember, you can gain the whole world and lose yourself as people have been doing all over the world throughout time: gaining the world and losing themselves. Then one day they suddenly find that all they have gained is not theirs. Empty-handed they come; empty-handed they go. Nothing belongs to them. Then anguish takes over.“For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?” The only way to be really intelligent in the world is first to gain yourself. Even if the whole world is to be lost, it is worth it. If you gain your own being, your own soul, your own innermost core, and the whole world is lost, it is worth it. To gain that innermost core you will not only have to lose the world, you will have to lose the idea of yourself because that is the innermost barrier, the ego. The ego is a false identity. Not knowing who you are, you go on thinking that you are somebody. That somebody, the false identity, is the ego. And unless the false goes, the true cannot enter.Let the false go and the true is ready. Repent, return, answer; the kingdom of God is at hand.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/come-follow-yourself-vol-01-08/

The first question:Osho,How can one who has been trained all his life to analyze and question and doubt be brought to bridge the gap between doubt and trust?Doubt is beautiful in itself. The problem arises when you are stuck in it; then doubt becomes death. Analysis is perfect if you remain separate and aloof from it. If you become identified then the problem arises, then analysis becomes a paralysis. If you feel that you have been trained to analyze, question, and doubt – don’t get miserable. Doubt, analyze, question, but remain separate. You are not the doubt; use it as a methodology, a method. If analysis is a method, then synthesis is also a method. And analysis in itself is half; unless it is complemented by synthesis, it will never be the whole. You are neither analysis nor synthesis. You are just a transcendental awareness.To question is good, but a question is obviously half. The answer will be the other half. Doubt is good, but one part; trust is another part. But remain aloof. When I say “remain aloof,” I say remain aloof not only from doubt but from trust also. That too is a method. One has to use it, one should not allow oneself to be used by it – then a tyranny arises and the tyranny can be either of doubt or of trust.The tyranny of doubt will cripple you. You will never be able to move a single step because doubt will be everywhere. How can you do anything while there is doubt? That will cripple you. And if trust becomes a tyranny – and it can become, it has become for millions: the churches, the temples, the mosques are full of those people for whom trust has become a tyranny – then it doesn’t give you eyes, it blinds you. Then religion becomes a superstition.If trust is not a method and you are identified with it, then religion becomes superstition and science becomes technology. Then the purity of science is lost and the purity of religion is also lost. Remember this: doubt and trust are like two wings. Use both of them, but you are neither.A man of discretion, a man who is wise, will use doubt if his search is toward matter. If his inquiry is about the outside, the other, he will use doubt as the method. If his search is toward the inner, toward himself, then he will use trust. Science and religion are two wings.In India we have tried one foolishness. Now the West is committing another. In India we have tried to live only by trust; hence the poverty, the starvation, the misery. The whole country is like a wound, continuously suffering. And the suffering has been so long that people have even become accustomed to it, they have accepted it so deeply that they have become insensitive to it. They are almost dead: they drift, they are not alive. This happened because of the tyranny of trust. How can a bird fly with one wing?Now in the West another tyranny is happening, the tyranny of doubt. It works perfectly well as far as objective inquiry is concerned. You think about matter, doubt is needed; it is a scientific method. But when you start moving inward it simply doesn’t work, it doesn’t fit. There trust is needed.The perfect man will be a man who has a deep harmony of doubt and trust. A perfect man will look inconsistent to you, but he is not inconsistent; he is simply harmonious. Contradictions dissolve in him. He uses everything.If you have doubt, use it for scientific inquiry. And watch great scientists: by the time they reach their age of understanding and wisdom, by the time their youthful enthusiasm is gone and wisdom settles, they are always very deep in trust. Eddington, Einstein, Lodge – I’m not talking about mediocre scientists who are not scientists at all – but all the great pinnacles in science are very religious. They trust because they have known doubt, they have used doubt, and they have come to understand that doubt has its limitations.It is just like my eyes can see and my ears can hear; if I try to hear from my eyes then it is going to be impossible, and if I try to see by my ears then it is going to be impossible. The eye has its own limitation, the ear has its own limitation. They are experts, and every expert has a limitation. The eye can see, and it is good that it can only see because if the eye could do many things, then it would not be so efficient in seeing. In the eye the whole energy becomes sight, and the whole energy in the ear becomes hearing.Doubt is an expert. It works if you are inquiring about the world. But when you start inquiring about God through the same method, then you are using a wrong method. The method was perfectly suited to the world, to the world of law, but it is not suited to the world of love. For the world of love, trust is needed.Nothing is wrong in doubt, don’t be worried about it. Use it well, use it in the right direction. If you use it in the right direction and use it well, you will come to an understanding: you will come to a doubt of doubt itself. You will see that you become doubtful of doubt. You will see where it works and where it doesn’t work. When one comes to that understanding, one opens the door of trust.If you are trained for analysis – good. But don’t be caught in it, don’t allow it to become a bondage. Remain free to synthesize also because if you go on analyzing and analyzing and you never synthesize, you will come to the minutest part, but you will never come to the whole.God is the ultimate synthesis; the atom, the ultimate analysis. Science reaches to the atom: it goes on analyzing, dividing until finally it comes to the minutest part which cannot be divided anymore. And religion comes to God: it goes on adding, synthesizing. God is the ultimate synthesis; more cannot be added to it. It is already the whole. Nothing exists beyond it. Science is atomic; religion is “wholly.” Use both.I am always in favor of using everything that you have. Even if you have some poison I will say, “Preserve it, don’t throw it.” In some need it can become medicinal; it depends on you. You can commit suicide by a poison, and by the same poison you can be saved from dying. The poison is the same; the difference is right use. Everything depends on right use. So when you go to the lab use doubt, when you come to the temple use trust. Be loose and free so that when you go from the lab to the temple you don’t carry the lab around with you. Then you can enter the temple totally free of the lab, to pray, dance, sing. And when you move toward the lab, again leave the temple behind because dancing in the lab will be very absurd, you may destroy things.Bringing the serious face that you use in the lab to the temple won’t be appropriate. A temple is a celebration, a lab is a search. Search has to be serious, celebration is a play. You delight in it, you become children again. A temple is a place to become children again and again so you never lose touch with the original source. In the lab you are an adult, in the temple you are a child. And Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is for those who are like children.”Remember always not to throw away anything that existence has given to you, not even doubt. It must be existence that has given it to you, and there must be a reason behind it because nothing is given without reason. There must be a use for it.Don’t discard any stone, because many times it has happened that the stone that was discarded by the builders became the very cornerstone of the building in the end.The second question:Osho,The Bible uses the word repent. Sometimes you translate it as return, sometimes as answer and sometimes you leave it as repent. Do you change the meaning as you need it?I am not talking about the Bible at all. I am talking about me. I am not confined by the Bible; I am not a slave to any scripture. I am totally free and I behave as a free man.I love the Bible, the poetry of it, but I am not a Christian. Neither am I a Hindu, nor am I a Jaina. I am simply me. I love the poetry, but I sing it in my own way. Where I should emphasize what, is finally decided by me, not by the Bible. I love the spirit of it, not the letter. And the word that I translate sometimes as repent, sometimes as return, and sometimes as answer means all three things. That is the beauty of old languages. Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic: all the old languages are poetic. When you use a poetic language it means many things. It says more than the words contain and it can be interpreted in different ways. It has many levels of meaning.Sometimes the word means repent. When I am talking about sin and I use the word repent, it means repent. When I am talking about God calling you, then the word repent means answer, it means responsibility: God has asked, you answer. And when I say that the kingdom is at hand, the word means return. All three meanings are there. The word is not one-dimensional, it is three-dimensional. All the old languages are three-dimensional. Modern languages are one-dimensional because our insistence is not on poetry, but on prose. Our insistence is not on multi-meaningfulness, but exactness. The word should be exact, it should only mean one thing so that there is no confusion. Yes, that’s right. If you are writing about science the language has to be exact, otherwise confusion is possible.It happened in the Second World War: an American general wrote a letter to the emperor of Japan, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The letter was in English and it was translated into Japanese, which is more poetic, more flowery, and one word means many things.A certain word was translated in a certain way. It could have been translated in some other way also; it depended on the translator. Now they have been inquiring about it, and they have come to the conclusion that if it had been translated in the other way that was also possible, there would have been no Hiroshima and no Nagasaki.The American general meant something else, but the way it was translated it was felt to be an insult. The Japanese emperor simply declined to answer it, it was too insulting. And Nagasaki and Hiroshima happened, the atom bomb had to be dropped. If the emperor had replied to it, there would have been no need for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just a word translated in a different way and one lakh people died within minutes, within seconds. Very costly – just a single word. Words can be dangerous.In politics, in science, in economics, in history, words should be linear, one-dimensional. But if the whole language becomes one-dimensional, then religion will suffer very much, poetry will suffer very much, romance will suffer very much because for poetry a word should be multi-dimensional. It should mean many things so that the poetry has a depth and you can go on and on and on.That’s the beauty of old books. You can go on reading the Gita every day, you can go on reading the gospels every day, and every day you can come upon a new and fresh meaning. You may have read the same passage a thousand times and it never occurred to you that this can be the meaning. But this morning it occurred; you were in a different mood, you were happy, flowing: a new meaning arises. Some day you are not so happy, not so flowing, the meaning changes. The meaning changes according to you, according to your mood and climate.You carry an inner climate that goes on changing just like the outer climate. Have you watched it? Sometimes you are sad and you look at the moon and the moon looks sad, very sad. You are sad and a fragrance comes from the garden and it seems very sad. You look at the flowers: rather than making you happy, they make you heavy. Then in another moment you are happy, alive, flowing, smiling. The same fragrance comes and surrounds you, dances around you, and makes you tremendously happy. The same flower, and when you see it opening, something opens within you also. The same moon, and you cannot believe how much silence and how much beauty descends on you. There is a deep participation: you become partners in some deep mystery. But it depends on you. The moon is the same, the flower is the same; it depends on you.Old languages are very flowing. In Sanskrit there are words: one word can have twelve meanings. You can go on playing with it and it will reveal many things to you. It will change with you, it will always adjust to you. That’s why great works of classical literature are eternal. They are never exhausted.Today’s newspaper will be worthless tomorrow because it has no vitality of meaning. It simply says what it means, it has nothing more in it. Tomorrow you will look foolish reading it. It is ordinary prose; it gives you information but it has no depth, it is flat.Two thousand years have passed since Jesus spoke, and his words are still as alive and fresh as ever. They are never going to be old. They don’t age, they remain fresh and young. What is their secret? The secret is that they mean so many things that you can always find a new door in them. It is not a one-room apartment. Jesus says, “My God’s house has many mansions.” You can enter from many doors, and there are always new treasures to be revealed, to be discovered. You never come on the old landscape again. It has a certain infinity. That’s why I go on changing. Yes, whenever I feel, I change the meaning. But that is the way Jesus himself has done it.In translating the Hebrew Bible into English, much has been lost. In translating the Gita into modern languages, much has been lost. In translating the Koran, the whole beauty is gone because the Koran is poetry. It is something to be sung, it is something you should dance with. It is not prose. Prose is not the way of religion; poetry is the way.Remember this always and don’t get confined. Jesus is vast and the English Bible is very small. I can understand the resistance of old people that their books should not be translated. It has a deep significance. You can translate prose, there is no trouble. If you want to translate a book on the theory of relativity into any language, it may be difficult but the difficulty is not the same as it is with the Bible, the Gita, or the Koran. It can be translated, nothing will be lost; it has no poetry in it. But when you translate poetry, much will be lost because each language has its own rhythm and each language has its own ways of expression. Each language has its own meter and music; it cannot be translated into another language. That music will be missed, that rhythm will be missed. You will have to replace it with some other rhythm and some other music. So it is possible: ordinary poetry may be translated. But when the poetry is really superb, of the other world – the deeper and greater it is – the more difficult, almost impossible, it is.I treat Jesus as a poet, and he is. Van Gogh said about him that he is the greatest artist that has ever been on this earth. He is. He talks in parables and poetry, and he means many more things than his words can convey. Allow me to give you the feeling of that infinity of meanings.Poetry is not so clear, cannot be. It is a mystery. It is just early in the morning: all over you see a mist, fresh…just born, but clouds… You cannot see far away, but there is no need; poetry is not for the far away. It gives you an insight looking at the near and the close and the intimate.Science goes on searching for the far away; poetry goes on revealing to you in new ways the intimate, the close: that which you had always known, that which is familiar. Poetry reveals the same path that you have been treading all your life, but with a new hue, a new color, a new light. Suddenly you are transported to a new plane.I treat Jesus as a poet. He is a poet. And this has been much misunderstood. People go on treating him as a scientist. You are fools if you treat him as a scientist; then he will look absurd, then the whole thing will look miraculous. Then if you want to believe in him, you have to be very superstitious. Or you have to throw him out completely, the baby with the bath water. Because either he’s so absurd – you can believe, but then you have to believe very blindly and that belief cannot be natural, spontaneous; you have to force it, you have to believe for the sake of belief and you have to force it on yourself – or you throw him out completely. Both are wrong. Jesus should be loved, not believed. There is no need to think of him for or against.Have you ever watched? – you never think for or against Shakespeare. Why? You never think for or against Kalidas. Why? You never think for and against Rabindranath. Why? – because you know they are poets. You enjoy them, you don’t think for and against.With Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, you think for and against because you think they are arguing. Let me tell you: they are not arguing. They have no thesis to prove, they have no dogma. They are great poets – greater than Rabindranath, greater than Shakespeare, greater than Kalidas because what has happened to Rabindranath, Kalidas and Shakespeare is just a glimpse. What has happened to Jesus, Krishna and Buddha is a realization. The same that is a glimpse to a poet is reality to a mystic. They have seen. Not only seen, they have touched. Not only touched, they have lived. It is a live experience.Always look at them as great artists. A painter simply paints a picture; a poet simply writes a poem. A Jesus creates a human being. A painter changes a canvas. It was plain, ordinary; it becomes precious by his touch. But can’t you see that Jesus touches very ordinary people – a fisherman, Simon called Peter – he touches, and by his very touch this man is transformed into a great apostle, a great human being. A height arises, a depth is opened. This man is no longer ordinary. He was just a fisherman throwing his net into the sea, and he would have done that his whole life, or even for many lives – and would never even have thought, imagined, dreamed what Jesus transformed into a reality.In India we have a mythology about a stone called paras. The stone paras is alchemical. You touch iron with the paras and it is transformed into gold. Jesus is a paras. He touches ordinary metal and immediately the metal is transformed, it becomes gold. He transforms ordinary human beings into deities, and you don’t see the art in it. Greater art is not possible.To me, the gospels are poetic. If I speak again on the same gospel, I will not speak the same, remember. I don’t know in what mood, in what climate, I will be then. I don’t know from which door I will enter then. And my house of God has many mansions. It is not finite.The third question:Osho,Yesterday after the lecture I approached small Siddhartha by the drinking water. Having read what you said about him being one of the ancient ones, I crouched down, looked into his eyes and said, “Osho told me who you are.” He smiled, looked deeply at me, and twice threw water on my head. He then softly hit me on the head and said quietly, “Shut up.” There was silence. It was very beautiful.It must have been. He baptized you by water. It was a baptism. And he is very innocent, more than John the Baptist. His innocence is very spontaneous.You should crouch more often before him, and you should allow him to throw water and hit you more. And when he says, “Shut up,” then shut up and remain in silence.He is a tremendously beautiful child.The fourth question:Osho,When I reflect on Christ's persecution two thousand years ago, I feel that in the meantime nothing much has changed in people's attitudes toward a living messiah in their midst. Suspicion, cynicism and mistrust seem to be all around just as before. Could it be that you, too, one day will be persecuted by the establishment? Looking around the auditorium, I fancy that I can spot the Doubting Thomas, the John, the Simon Peter, Mary Magdalena, even Judas and the rest of the gang. Could this all be a live-action replay?It is. They are all here. They have to be, because the gang leader is here and nothing ever changes, all changes are superficial. Deep down, humanity remains the same. It is natural. I’m not condemning it, I’m not saying that anything is wrong in it. It has to be so, that’s the way it is.When Jesus comes, the Doubting Thomases are bound to be there. When people who trust come, people who can’t trust also come. They create a contrast. And it is good, otherwise your trust will not be of much value. It becomes precious because of the Doubting Thomases around. You can compare, you can feel. You can see what doubt is, what trust is. The weeds will also come when you plant a garden. The weeds are also part. When a Jesus comes, a Judas is bound to be there because the whole thing is so tremendously significant that somebody is bound to betray it. It has such a great height that somebody is bound to feel very hurt by it – the ego.Judas was hurt very much. And he was not a bad man, remember. In fact he was the only one among all of Jesus’ disciples who was well-educated, cultured, belonged to a sophisticated society and family. He was of course the most egoistic. The others were just fishermen, farmers, carpenters – people like that, ordinary people from the ordinary rung of society. Judas was special, and whenever somebody feels special there is trouble. He even wanted to guide Jesus. Many times he tried. And if you listen to him, there is a possibility that you will be more convinced by Judas than by Jesus.It happened…Jesus came to visit the home of Mary Magdalena. Mary was deeply in love. She poured precious, very precious perfume on his feet – the whole bottle. It was rare, it could have been sold. Judas immediately objected. He said, “You should prohibit people from doing such nonsense. The whole thing is wasted, and in town there are people who are poor and who don’t have anything to eat. We could have distributed the money to poor people.”He looks like a socialist: a forerunner of Marx. Mao, Lenin, Trotsky; all would agree with him.What did Jesus say? He said, “Don’t worry about it. The poor and the hungry will always be here, but I will be gone. You can serve them always and always, there is no hurry, but I will be gone. Look at the love, not at the precious perfume. Look at Mary’s love, her heart.”With whom will you agree? Jesus seems to be very bourgeois and Judas seems to be perfectly economical. Judas is talking about the poor and Jesus simply says, “It is okay. I will be gone soon, so let her welcome me as she would like. Let her heart do whatever she wants and don’t bring your philosophy in. Poor people will always be there; I will not be here always. I am only here for a tiny while.”Ordinarily your mind will agree with Judas. He seems to be perfectly right. He was a very cultured, polished man of manners: sophisticated, a thinker.And he betrayed. Only he could betray because on each step his ego was hurt. He always felt himself superior to all of Jesus’ disciples. He would always keep himself aloof, he would not move in the crowd. He always thought of himself as not part of the crowd. At the most he was second only to Jesus – and that too, reluctantly. Deep down he must have been thinking himself first. He could not say it, but it was in his heart.He was madly hurt. Jesus was continuously hurting their egos. A master has to because if a master goes on pampering your egos, he will not be of any help, he will be poisonous. Then you can commit suicide through him, but you cannot resurrect. Of course Judas was the most egoistic, he was hurt more. And Jesus had to hurt him more. Judas took revenge. And he was a good man, there is no doubt about it. That is the problem with good men.He sold Jesus for thirty rupees. He was so concerned with the perfume and its cost – look at the mind! – and he sold Jesus for thirty rupees, thirty silver pieces. Jesus was not even very costly. But then when Jesus was murdered, crucified, he started feeling guilty. That’s how a good man functions. He started feeling very guilty, his conscience started pricking him. He committed suicide. He was a good man, he had a conscience, but he had no consciousness.This distinction has to be felt deeply. Conscience is borrowed, given by the society; consciousness is your attainment. The society teaches you what is right and what is wrong: do this and don’t do that. It gives you the law, the morality, the code, the rules of the game. That is your conscience. Outside, the constable; inside, the conscience. That is the way that the society controls you.If you go to steal, the constable is outside to prevent you. But you can deceive the constable, you can find ways. So the society has placed a deep electrode within you: the conscience. Your hand starts trembling, your whole inner being; you feel that your inner being is saying, “Don’t do this; this is wrong.” This is society speaking through you, this is just society implanted within you.Judas had a conscience, but Jesus had consciousness. That was the rift. The man of conscience can never understand the man of consciousness because the man of consciousness lives moment to moment, he has no rules to follow.Jesus was more concerned with the love of the woman Mary. It was such a deep thing that to prevent her would be wounding her love, she would shrink within herself. Pouring the perfume on his feet was just a gesture. Behind it, Mary Magdalena was saying. “I would like to pour the whole of the world on your feet. This is all that I have, the most precious thing. To pour water won’t be enough; it is too cheap. This is the most precious thing that I have, but even this is nothing. I would like to pour my heart, I would like to pour my whole being.”But Judas was blind toward it. He was a man of conscience: he looked at the perfume and he said, “It is costly.” He was completely blind to the woman and her heart, and the expansion of consciousness and the gesture. Perfume looked too precious and love – love was completely unknown to him. Love was there. The immaterial was there and the material was there. The material is the perfume, the immaterial is the love. But the Judas could not see immaterial. For that, you need eyes of consciousness.A man of conscience will always be in conflict with a man of consciousness because the man of consciousness sees things which the man of conscience cannot see. And the man of consciousness follows his consciousness: he has no rules to follow.If you have rules, you are always consistent because rules are dead. You are also dead with them: you are predictable. But if you have consciousness, you are unpredictable. One never knows; you remain a total freedom. You respond, you don’t have any readymade answers to give. When the question arises, you respond and the answer is born. Not only is the listener surprised by your answer, you are also surprised.When I answer you, it is not only that you are listening to it, I am also a listener. It is not only that you hear it for the first time; I also hear it for the first time. I don’t know what the next word or sentence is going to be. It can move in any direction, it can move in any dimension.That’s what I mean when I say that I remain a learner. Not only are you learning with me, I am also learning with you. I am never in a state of knowledge because a state of knowledge is dead. You have known something, it is readymade. Now if somebody asks, you can give it to him, it is already material.I am never in a state of knowledge; I am always in the process of knowing. To be in the process of knowing is what I mean when I say I am learning. Knowledge is already past; knowing is present. Life is not a noun, it is a verb. God is also not a noun, God is a verb. Whatever the grammarians say, I am not concerned. God is a verb, life is a verb.Knowing, learning, means that you always remain in a vacuum. You never gather anything. You always remain empty like a mirror, not like a photographic plate. A photographic plate immediately comes to a state of knowledge. Once exposed, it is already dead. Now it will never mirror anybody else; it has mirrored once, forever. But a mirror goes on mirroring. When you come before it, it mirrors you. When you are gone, it is again empty.This is what I mean: a man of learning always remains empty. You raise a question, it is mirrored in my emptiness. An answer comes and flows to you. The question gone, the answer disappears, and the mirror is again in a state of not knowing: empty, again ready to reflect. It is not hindered by its past. It is always in the present and always ready – not readymade, but always ready to reflect, to respond.When Jesus comes – a man of consciousness; a man of learning, not of knowledge – Judas is bound to be there. He’s the scholar, the man of knowledge. He must have felt many times that he knew more than Jesus, and maybe he is right. He may know more, but he does not know the state of knowing. He knows only knowledge, dead information. He is a collector of dead information. He will betray Jesus. And of course when Jesus is there, there will be women who will love him deeply: a Mary Magdalena, a Martha. They are bound to be there because whenever a man of the quality of Jesus arises, that quality has to be understood first by women and then by men. Trust is the door to it, and women are more trusting, more innocently trusting.That’s why it is so difficult to find a woman scientist. Sometimes a Madame Curie happens. That must be a freak of nature, or the woman may not have been much of a woman.Deep down, a woman is a poet – not that she writes poetry, she lives it. And she knows how to trust; it comes easy to her, it comes spontaneously to her. In fact, for a woman to doubt is a difficult training. She will have to learn it from a man, just like she will have to learn science from a man. She is illogical, irrational. Those are not good qualities as far as the world is concerned. They are disqualifications in the world, but as far as the inner kingdom of God is concerned, they are the qualifications.Of course man cannot have both worlds. At the most he can have one where he’s topmost: he can have the outer world. But then he will have to lose the other; there he cannot be the top, he will have to follow women.Have you seen Jesus being crucified? No male disciple was near him – only women because the male disciples started doubting. This man cured illnesses, this man revived dead people, and now he cannot save himself? So what is the point of believing and trusting in him? They were waiting for a miracle. They were hiding in the crowd and waiting for a miracle: something miraculous was going to happen. Then they would have believed because they needed proof. And the proof never happened; Jesus simply died like an ordinary man.The women were not waiting for any proof. Jesus was enough proof, there was no need for any miracle. He was the miracle. They could see the miracle that happened that moment – that Jesus died with such deep love and compassion. Even for his murderers he had a prayer in his heart. His last words were, “God, forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing.”The miracle had happened, but for the male eye it never happened. The women around there understood immediately. They trusted this man, and this man’s innermost heart was open to them. They understood that the miracle had happened. The man had been crucified and he was dying with love, which is the most impossible thing in the world: to die on the cross with a prayer for those who are killing you. But this was love. Only the feminine mind can understand it. They were close to him.When Jesus revived, resurrected after the third day, he tried to approach his male disciples. They could not see him because they had settled the fact that he was dead, and you see only things which you expect to see. If you don’t expect, you don’t see.Your eyes are very choosy. If you are waiting for a friend, you can see him even in a crowd. But if you are not waiting for him, if you have completely forgotten about him, then when he comes and knocks on the door, for a moment you are puzzled: “Who is he?”They had settled the fact that Jesus was dead, so when Jesus came across their path they could not recognize him, they could not see him. It is even said that he walked for miles with two disciples while they talked about Jesus’ death. They were very miserable because of it – and Jesus was walking with them; they were talking to him, but they could not recognize him. Only love can recognize even after death, because love recognized when you were alive. For love, death and life are irrelevant.Jesus was recognized first by Mary Magdalena, a prostitute. She came running to the male disciples who were holding a great conference: “What should we do? How can we spread the word to the whole world? How can we create the church?”While they were planning for the future, she came running and said, “What are you doing? Jesus is alive!”They laughed. They said, “Mad woman, you must have imagined it!” Man’s mind always thinks that such things are imagination. They started talking to each other: “That poor woman, Mary Magdalena. She has gone mad. Jesus’ crucifixion has been such a shock to her.” They felt pity for her.She insisted, “Don’t feel pity for me. Jesus is resurrected!”They laughed and they said, “We understand. You need rest, you are too shocked by the fact that he is dead. It is your imagination.”Around Buddha, around Krishna, around Jesus, Mahavira, there have always been a great number of women. They were the first-comers, they were the first disciples. It is natural. So don’t be surprised.For two thousand, or two million years, the human mind will remain the same. Humanity as a whole remains the same. The revolution is individual. You can be transformed as an individual, then you go beyond the crowd. But don’t be worried about such things.This question is from Chaitanya Sagar. He’s always worried about such things. I never answer him, but he’s always worried: worried about others, worried about the world, he is worried about the organization, worried about the ashram, worried about my disciples, worried about me – never worried about himself. All these worries won’t help. Time is short, life is very short. Use it.Just the other night I was reading a play by Samuel Beckett: a small book, the smallest possible in the world – a short play. The name of the play is Breath. The length of the whole play is only thirty seconds – thirty seconds! There is no actor in it, no dialogue. Just a stage.The curtain opens. Many things are lying around. Rubbish – just as if somebody has left the house in a hurry. All sorts of things are jumbled, with no order, just disorder – rubbish. And from the background, the sigh of a small child is heard, just born. Then, after thirty seconds, there is the gasp of an old man who has died. This is all – but this is all life is. Thirty seconds: a sigh and a gasp. The first effort to inhale and the last effort to cling to the breathing – and everything is gone.Life is short, not even thirty seconds. Use it; use it as an opportunity to grow, use it as an opportunity to be, and don’t be worried about other things. That is all rubbish. Only this is true: the sigh and the gasp, and all else is just rubbish. Forget about it. What do you have to do about it?You should not be concerned with whether the world has changed or not. The world is the same, it has to be the same. Only you can be different; the world will never be different. When you become aware, conscious, you transcend the world.The fifth question:Osho,What does Christ really mean when he says, “Come follow me”?Exactly what he says: “Come follow me.”The sixth question:Osho,To follow Jesus a deep trust, surrender and love is needed, but today a deep skepticism is prevalent all over the world. What is the way?This is from Swami Yoga Chinmaya. Think about yourself. Is deep skepticism within you? That is the question to be asked. “…a deep skepticism is prevalent all over the world.” Who are you to be worried about the whole world? This is a way to escape the real problem. Skepticism is deep within, the worm of doubt is there in your heart, but you project it; you see it on the whole world’s screen.“The world is skeptical… What is the way out?” Now you are transferring the problem. Look within yourself. If there is doubt, find it out. Then something can be done. The world won’t listen to you, and there is no need because if they are happy in their skepticism, they have the right to be happy in their skepticism. Who are you?Never try to think in terms of missionaries. They are the most dangerous people. They are always saving the world, and if the world doesn’t want to be saved, then still they are trying. They say, “Even if you don’t like it, we will save you.” But why the bother? If somebody is happy eating, drinking, enjoying life, and is not in any way concerned with God, what is the point of forcing him? Who are you? Let him come to his own understanding. One day he will come. But people are very worried about how to save others. Save yourself if you can, save yourself because that too is a very difficult, almost impossible job.This is a trick of the mind. The problem is inside; it projects it on the outside. Then you are not worried about it, then you are not worried about your own anguish. Then you become concerned with the whole world, and in this way you can postpone your own transformation.I insist again and again that you should be concerned with yourself. I am not here to make missionaries. Missionaries are the most mischievous people. Never be a missionary; that is a very dirty job. Don’t try to change anybody. Just change yourself.It happens: when you change, many come to share you in your light. Share, but don’t try to save. Many will be saved that way. If you try to save, you may drown them before they were going to be drowned by themselves.Don’t try to force God on anybody. If they are doubting, it is perfectly okay. If God allows them to doubt, there must be some reason in it. They need it, that is their training; that is from where everybody has to pass.The world has always been skeptical. How many people gathered around Buddha? Not the whole world. How many people gathered around Jesus? Not the whole world, just a very small minority; they can be counted on your fingers. The whole world has never been worried about these things.Nobody has the authority to force something on anybody else – not even on your own child, not even on your own wife. Keep whatever you feel is the goal of your life to yourself. Never force it on anybody else. That is violence, sheer violence.If you want to meditate, meditate. But this is a problem: if the husband wants to meditate, he tries to force the wife also. If the wife does not want to meditate, she forces the husband also not to meditate. Can’t you allow people their own souls? Can’t you allow them to have their own way?This I call a religious attitude: to allow freedom. A religious man will always allow freedom to everybody. Even if you want to be an atheist, a theist is going to allow you. That is your way, perfectly good for you. You move through it because everyone who has come to God has come through atheism. The desert of atheism has to be crossed; it is part of growth.The world will always remain skeptical, in doubt. Only a few attain trust. Make haste so that you can attain.The seventh question:Osho,Why do you always tell us to be happy if, before enlightenment, one has to reach a peak of pain and anguish?If I don’t tell you to be happy, you will never reach the peak of pain and anguish. I go on telling you to be happy and the more I say, “Be happy,” the more you become aware of your unhappiness.The more you listen to me, the more you will find anguish arising. The only way to make you unhappy is to go on constantly forcing on you: be happy! You cannot be, so you feel the unhappiness all around you. Even what you used to think was happiness, even those points disappear and you feel absolutely hopeless. Even momentary happinesses disappear and the desert becomes complete. All hopes and all oases disappear.That’s where the jump happens. When you are really unhappy, totally unhappy – not even a ray of hope – suddenly you drop all unhappiness. Why? Why does it happen? It happens because unhappiness is not clinging to you; you are clinging to unhappiness. Once you feel the total anguish of it, you drop it. There is nobody to carry it for you.But you have never felt it so intensely; you have always been lukewarm. You feel a little unhappiness, but always there is a hope for the future. Tomorrow there is going to be happiness – a little desert, but the oasis is coming closer. Through the hope, you go on. Through the hope, the unhappiness remains.My whole effort is to kill the hope, to leave you in such total darkness that you cannot allow any dream any longer. Once this intensity reaches to the hundredth degree, you evaporate. Then you cannot carry it anymore. Suddenly whatever you call it – unhappiness, the ego, ignorance, unawareness, or what have you, anything that you want to call it – it drops.I will tell you a story. It happened…A farmer had a pedigree ram. It was a beautiful animal, but sometimes it got mad and the shepherd who looked after the ram was very worried. He always wanted to get rid of it, but the farmer loved it.One day it became too much, so the shepherd came and said, “Now you choose: either me or the ram. I resign; take my notice or this ram goes. This is a mad animal and continuously creating trouble. He gets so angry and so dangerous that sometimes one feels that he will kill.”The farmer now had to decide, so he asked his friends what to do. He never wanted the ram to be sold. They suggested an animal psychologist.The psychologist was called. The farmer was skeptical, but he wanted to do anything so that the ram could be saved. The psychologist remained for four days: watched, observed, took notes, analyzed. Then he said, “There will be no trouble. Just go to the market, purchase a gramophone and bring Beethoven records, Mozart, Wagner – classical music. Whenever the ram gets mad, in a rage, just put on a classical record. Play it and it will soothe him, and he will be perfectly calmed down.”The farmer couldn’t believe it, that this was going to be so. But it had to be tried, so he tried it. It worked! Immediately the ram would become silent and cool down.For one year there was no trouble. Then one day the shepherd came running and said, “Something has gone wrong, I don’t know what. The ram has killed himself! As usual, seeing that he was getting in a rage again, I put a record on. But he worsened. Then he became more and more mad and he simply charged into the wall. His neck is broken. He is dead.”The farmer went there. The ram was lying dead near the wall. Then he looked at the gramophone to see what record was there. There had been a terrible mistake: it was not classical music, but Frank Sinatra’s record singing: “There Shall Never Be Another Like You.”That created the trouble. “There Shall Never Be Another Like You.” The ego is the cause of all madness, unhappiness, misery. That is going to be the cause of your death, that is going to break your neck.You can cope with it, if it is lukewarm. My whole effort is to bring it to a peak where you cannot cope with it. Either you have to drop it, or you will drop. And whenever such a choice arises – that you have to drop the misery or you have to drop yourself – you will drop the misery. With the misery, the ego, the ignorance, the unawareness – they all disappear. They are names of the same phenomenon.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Luke 957 And it came to pass, that, as they went in the way, a certain man said unto him, “Lord, I will follow thee whitherever thou goest.”58 And Jesus said unto him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”59 And he said unto another, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father”.60 And Jesus said unto him, “Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.”61 And another also said, “Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at my house.”62 And Jesus said unto him, “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”Once a man owned a very big pond. A small lily plant was growing in it. The man was very happy. He had always loved the white flowers of lilies, but he became concerned because the plant was doubling itself every day: sooner or later it would cover the whole pond. He had trout in the pond and he loved to eat those trout. Once the pond was covered by the lilies all the life from the pond would disappear, including the trout.He didn’t want to cut the plants, he didn’t want his trout to disappear; he was in a dilemma. He went to an expert. The expert calculated and said, “Don’t be worried. It will take one thousand days for the lily to cover the whole pond. The plant is very small and the pond is very big, so there is no need to worry.” Then the expert suggested a solution which appeared almost absolutely right. He said, “Wait, and when half the pond is covered with lilies, cut the plant. Always keep it only half-covered so that you will enjoy the white flowers and your trout will not be in danger. Fifty-fifty – half the pond for the lilies, half for the trout.”The solution looked perfectly right, and one thousand days – there was enough time, so there was no need to worry. The man relaxed. He said, “When the pond is half covered, I will cut the lilies.”The pond was half-covered – but it was half covered on the nine hundred ninety-ninth day. Ordinarily you would think that it would be half covered after five hundred days – no. The plant used to double itself, so half the pond would be covered on the nine hundred ninety-ninth day and only one day would be left. But that would not be sufficient time to cut the plant or to keep it to the half.And it happened. On the nine hundred ninety-ninth day the pond was half covered and the man said – he was not feeling very well, a little sick – he said, “There is no hurry. I have waited nine hundred ninety-nine days and there was no trouble. Now it is just a question of one more day. After one day I will do it.”The next morning the whole pond was covered and all the trout were dead.This is the puzzle of life. It is a dilemma, one has to choose. If you go on accumulating things and possessions, the plant is doubling on the pond. Every day your things go on growing and your life is suffocated. Life looks long – seventy years, eighty years. There is no hurry. People think, “When we reach the midpoint we will change.”People always wait to get old for religion; people go on saying that religion is for old people. Go to the churches, to the temples, and you will find old people – just on the verge of death. One foot is already in the grave, the nine hundred ninety-ninth day. The next morning, life is going to be suffocated. Then they start praying, then they start meditating, then they start thinking about what life is – what the meaning of existence is. But then it is too late.Religion needs a deep urgency. If you postpone it you will never be able to become religious. It has to be done right now. As it is you are already late, as it is you have already wasted much time – and wasted it in futile things, wasted it in things that are going to be taken away from you.For all those things, you have to pay with life. Whatever you possess, you lose life for it. It is not cheap; it is very costly. One day you have many possessions, but you are no longer there. Things are there – the owner dead. Great piles of things, but the one who wanted to live through them is no more.People go on preparing for life, and they die before their preparation is complete. People prepare and never live. To be religious is to live life, not to prepare for it. You are doing a very absurd thing: your rehearsal goes on and on and the real drama never starts.I have heard about a small drama company. They were rehearsing. The real drama was getting postponed every day because the rehearsal was never complete. One day the heroine was not there, another day some other actor was not there, one day something else happened – the electricity failed or something – and it went on being postponed. But the manager was happy for at least one thing: the hero of the drama had always been present, he had never been absent.The last rehearsal day he thanked the hero. He said, “You are the only person who can be relied upon. All these other people are unreliable. You are the only one who has never been absent. Summer or winter, cold or hot, you have always been here.”The hero said, “There is something I would like to say. I am going to get married on the day the real drama is going to be played, so I thought that I should at least attend the rehearsals. I will not be here on that day. That’s why I have never been absent.”Know well that exactly on the day when the real drama is to start, you will not be here. It is just a rehearsal: preparation and preparation.Possessing things is simply preparing to live, arranging so that you will be able to live. But to live, no arrangement is needed, everything is already ready. Everything is absolutely ready; only you are needed to participate. Nothing is lacking.This is what I call the religious attitude: this urgency that you have to live now and there is no other way to live. Now is the only way to live and to be, and here is the only home. There and then are deceptions, mirages – beware of them!Now try to understand these very significant sutras in the gospel:And it came to pass, that, as they went in the way, a certain man said unto him, “Lord, I will follow thee whitherever thou goest.”When you come across a man like Jesus or Buddha, something suddenly strikes. They have a magnetism, a presence which attracts you, which surrounds you, invokes you, invites you, becomes a deep call in the heart of the hearts. You simply forget yourself, you forget your way of life. In the presence of a Jesus, you are almost absent. His presence is so much that for a moment you are dazzled, for a moment you don’t know what you are saying, for a moment you utter things you never meant to utter, as if you are hypnotized.It is a hypnosis. Not that Jesus is hypnotizing you – his very presence becomes a concentration of your being. It becomes such a deep attraction that the whole world is forgotten. You must have been going somewhere to do something: you have forgotten it. You must have been coming from somewhere: you have forgotten about it. Suddenly in his presence, the past and future disappear. Suddenly you are here and now, and a different world opens: a new dimension is revealed.And it came to pass, that, as they went in the way, a certain man said unto him, “Lord, I will follow thee whitherever thou goest.” This man doesn’t know himself what he is saying. It is an urge of the moment. After a moment he will repent for it, after a moment he will start looking backward, after a moment he will start thinking about what he has done.When you come to me, sometimes you say things which I know you don’t mean, which I know you can’t mean because they are so irrelevant, they don’t fit – as if you are raised to a higher level of being, as if you are in a new state of consciousness and you utter strange things. Later on when you fall back to your ordinary state, either you will forget what you said or you will shrug your shoulders; you will not be able to believe that you said it.You come to me: you bring a thousand and one questions, but when you are near me, suddenly you forget. You start mumbling. I ask you for what you have come and you say, “I have forgotten.” You think that I am doing something to you. Nothing – I am not doing anything to you. The questions and problems belong to a lower state of mind. When your state is changed, those questions and problems disappear, they are not there. Back home when you settle down, they are there waiting for you again. Again you will come and you will forget.This is something deep within you. When you are near me, you start looking at things through me. You are no longer in the dark, you are in my light, and the problems that were relevant in your darkness are no longer relevant. To ask them looks foolish, silly. You cannot articulate your problems because they are no longer there, but when we depart – you on your way, I on mine – again the suddenness of darkness. And now the darkness is even more than before, and those problems are multiplied.This man – the gospel doesn’t mention his name, knowingly. It simply says “a certain man” because it is not a question of a particular man. It is not a question of a particular man: a certain man. Every man is implied in it.Many people will meet Jesus on the way and it is always on the way. That too has to be understood. Jesus is always moving. That is the meaning: he is always on the way. Not that he was continuously moving and never resting, but the meaning of “on the way” is that Jesus is a river.You know or you know it not, but the river is flowing. A river is in its flowing. To conceive of a river as nonflowing is not possible because then it will no longer be a river. A Jesus is a flow, a tremendous flood: it is always on the way, it is always moving.You had come to me yesterday, but I am no longer there. That land is already lost in the past, those banks are no longer anywhere. You may carry them in your memory, but the river has moved. And if you carry the past in your memory, you will not be able to see the river: exactly where it is now, at this point of time.And it came to pass, that, as they went in the way… Jesus is a wanderer because once your consciousness is freed, once your consciousness has entered the eternal, it is going to remain an eternal wandering. Then the whole is the home, then the home is nowhere.Then you will be continuously flowing. There will never come a moment of knowledge; you will only be knowing and knowing and knowing. It will never be completed because once knowing is completed, it is dead. You will be learning, but you will never become a man of knowledge. You will always remain empty.That’s why a man like Jesus is so humble. He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” What does he mean by “poor in spirit”? He means exactly what I am saying: people who don’t attain knowledge, because knowledge is “the riches of the spirit.” You accumulate things outside, around the body; and you accumulate knowledge inside, around the soul.A man may be poor as far as things are concerned and he may be rich as far as knowledge is concerned. Jesus says that just to be poor in body won’t help; that is nothing much, that is not authentic poverty. The authentic poverty is when you don’t accumulate things inside, when you don’t come to the point where you declare: “I know.” You are always knowing; you remain a process, always on the way.Many times we will come across the expression “Jesus on the way.” He is a wanderer, but this wandering is an indication of the innermost flow. He is dynamic, he is not static. He is not like a stone, he is like a flower – always flowering, a movement, not an event.…A certain man… that certain man can be you, can be anybody. He has no name. It is good that the gospel has not mentioned a name. It has been done knowingly because if you mention a name, people think that it must be about this certain man. No, it simply says that it is about the human mind – any man will be quite representative: …a certain man said unto him, “Lord…”When you come across, when you encounter Jesus, suddenly you feel something of the divine. When you have lost contact with Jesus you may start thinking about whether this man was a god or not, but in his presence he’s so much, he’s so powerful in his inner poverty, his humbleness has such a glory. His poverty is a kingdom: he’s enthroned. He’s in the highest of consciousnesses. He suddenly surrounds you, is your environs, wraps you from everywhere like a cloud. You forget yourself in it.“Lord” – that’s the only expression that can be used for Jesus – “Lord, I will follow thee whitherever thou goest.” And in that moment of awakening, in that moment of exhilaration, in that moment of intensity, you utter something which you may not be aware of.That certain man said: “Lord, I will follow thee…” He doesn’t know what he is saying. To follow Jesus is very arduous because to follow Jesus only means to become a Jesus. There is no other following. It is to risk your all and all – for nothing. It is to risk all for nothing; it is to risk your life for a death. The resurrection may be or it may not be – who knows? You can never be certain about it and no guarantee can be given. It is just a hope.To sacrifice all that you have for just a hope? The man is not in his senses. What is he saying? He is intoxicated by Jesus, he has drunk too much of his presence. He is no longer in his mind, in his commonsense mind. Back home he will think, “What happened? Why did I say this? Is this man a sorcerer, is this man a hypnotist, a mesmerizer? This man must have played a trick upon me; I was almost deceived. What have I said?”No, Jesus is not a sorcerer and he is not a magnetizer. He is not a mesmerizer, he is not a hypnotist. But his presence – and you become poetic. In his presence something rises to a peak in you and you assert something from your innermost core of being. Even your surface, your peripheral self, is surprised.“Lord…” This man may not have said “Lord” to anybody else before. But suddenly, when a Jesus comes you have to call him “Lord.” When you encounter Buddha you have to call him “Bhagwan.” It has to be so, because you cannot find any other expression. All other words seem to be insignificant – only “Lord,” “God”: “Lord, I will follow thee…” And when you say to somebody “Lord,” it immediately follows: “I have fallen in your love.”“…I will follow thee whitherever thou goest.” What a commitment! – made in a moment of ecstasy. You may repent for it forever, but this happens.Jesus knows it well:And Jesus said unto him,“Foxes have holes…”Jesus is saying, “Poor man, think again. What are you saying? Don’t commit yourself so deeply, don’t get involved with me. Watch, wait, think, ponder – and then come back to me.”“…foxes have holes,and birds of the air have nests;but the Son of man hath notwhere to lay his head.”Whom are you going to follow? Even foxes have holes – if you follow a fox, at least you will have a hole in which to lay your head. Even birds of the air have nests: “…but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” The greatest, the highest, the sublimest are homeless. This has to be understood. This is one of the very penetrating sayings. It has tremendous meaning.Watch trees, animals, birds: all have deep roots in nature. Only man is without roots. Birds don’t need families, they can survive without families; nature itself protects. The trees are not in need of anybody. If there was nobody, then too trees would be there, and flowering. Nature itself protects; they have a home.Think of a small child, a human child. If the family was not there to look after the child, can you conceive that he would survive? He would be dead. Without the society, without the family, without the artificial home he would not be able to survive. On this earth only man is homeless, only man is the outsider. Everybody else is an insider.Hence religion – religion is nothing but the search for a home. This earth doesn’t seem to be a home. If you think about it, you will feel yourself a stranger here. Sooner or later you will be thrown out. This life is momentary, you don’t feel that you are welcome. You have to force yourself upon it.The trees are welcome; it seems the earth is happy through them. The earth goes on giving, sharing. The birds are singing as if the earth sings through them. Look at the animals, so alive and vital. Only man seems to be an intruder, as if he has come from somewhere else.This earth may be a sojourn, but it is not a home. Maybe we are staying here for the time being – a caravanserai, but not a home: in the morning, we have to go.Jesus’ saying has many meanings and I would like you to enter them all. One, man is not rooted. Because he is not rooted, he is always in search. Where to find a home? God is nothing but the search for a home where we can feel at ease and relaxed, and where we can feel that there is no need to struggle. We are accepted – not only accepted, welcomed. There is no need to fight your way. You can be whatever you are and relax, and you know the love will continue flowing, life will continue flowing. There is no fear of punishment and no greed for any reward. You are at home. You are not a stranger in a foreign land.This is the search of religion. That’s why animals don’t have religion. Birds don’t have religion; they make nests, but they don’t make temples. Otherwise a temple is not very difficult: they can make a big nest and gather together and sing together and pray. But they don’t pray; they don’t need to. Man is the only animal that makes temples, churches, mosques. Prayer is a very strange phenomenon.Just think if somebody comes from some other planet and watches humanity. If you are making love to a woman, the watcher will be able to understand. Something like it must be happening on the other planet also. He may not be able to understand what you are saying, but he will know what you must be saying. He may not understand the language, but he will understand what lovers say to each other. When you kiss and embrace each other, he will understand the gesture.When you are doing business he will understand; when you are reading a book he will understand; when you are doing some exercise he will understand. But when you are praying, if something like religion does not exist on his planet, he will not be able to understand at all. What are you doing? Just sitting alone? Looking at the sky, talking? To whom? What are you saying?If he comes on a certain day, like the religious day of Mohammedans, Christians or Hindus – all over the earth, millions of Mohammedans praying, not talking to each other, talking to the sky – he will simply feel that something has gone wrong: “Humanity has gone mad. What is happening? What are these people gesturing about, why are they gesticulating? To whom are they talking, who are they calling ‘Allah’? To whom are they bowing their heads? Nobody seems to be there.”God is not visible. God is somewhere in the mind of man. Prayer is a monologue, it is not a dialogue. A man from another planet would think that something had gone wrong in the nervous system of humanity. He would think that it is a failure of the nerves: millions of people gesticulating to nobody, talking to the sky, looking at the sky, crying “Allah! Allah!” Something is wrong: the whole of humanity has gone mad, it seems.Prayer will not be understood because prayer is absolutely human. That is the only thing that only man does; all other things animals are doing also. Love – yes, they also make love. Search for food – they also do that. Singing they do, dancing they do, talking they do – there is communication: they are sad, they are happy. But prayer? That is nonexistential.Jesus says: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” Man is a stranger. That’s why we go on creating the fiction that we are at home and not a stranger. The home is a fiction. We create a togetherness with people. We create communities, nations, and families so that we are not alone and we can feel the other is there, somebody who is familiar, somebody who is known – your mother, your father, your brother, your sister, your wife, your husband, your children – somebody who is known, familiar. But have you ever thought about it? Is your wife really known to you? Is there really a way to know the wife or the husband or the child?A child is born to you. Do you know him, who he is? But you never ask such uncomfortable questions. You immediately give him a name so that you know who he is. Without the name he will create trouble: without the name the child will move in the house and whenever you will encounter him, the unknown will be looking at you.To forget that some stranger has come, you label him; you call him some name. Then you start managing his character, what he should do, what he should not do – so that you know and you can predict him. This is a way to create false familiarity. The child remains unknown: whatever you do will be on the surface; deep inside he is a stranger.There are moments, some rare moments, in which you suddenly become aware of this. Sitting by the side of your beloved, suddenly you become aware that you are far apart. Suddenly you look at the face of your beloved and you cannot recognize who she is or who he is. But you forget such moments immediately. You start talking: and you say something, you start planning, you start thinking. That’s why people don’t sit in silence – because silence creates a restlessness. In silence, the fiction of familiarity is broken.That’s why if a guest comes to your house and you don’t say anything, you simply sit silently, he will be very angry, he will be in a rage. If you go on sitting, just looking at him, he will get mad. He will say, “What are you doing? Has something gone wrong with you? Say something! Have you gone dumb? Why are you keeping silent? Speak!”Speaking is a way of avoiding, avoiding the fact that we are unfamiliar. When somebody starts speaking, everything is good. That’s why with foreigners you feel a little uneasy because you cannot speak the same language. If you have to stay in the same room with a foreigner and you cannot understand each other, it is going to be very difficult. Continuously he will remind you: “We are strangers.” And when the feeling comes that somebody is a stranger, you immediately feel danger. Who knows what he will do? Who knows if he will not jump on you suddenly in the night and cut your throat? He’s a stranger!That’s why foreigners are always suspected. There is nothing in fact to suspect; everybody is a foreigner everywhere. Even in your own land you are a foreigner, but there the fiction is settled: you speak the same language, you believe in the same religion, you go to the same church, you believe in the same party, you believe in the same flag – familiarity. Then you just think you know about each other. These are tricks.Jesus says, “The son of man is homeless.” Jesus uses two words again and again for himself: sometimes he uses “son of God” and sometimes he uses “son of man.” “Son of God” he rarely uses, “son of man” more often. It has been a problem for Christian theology. If he is the son of God, why does he go on saying “son of man”?Those who are against Christ say, “If he is a son of man, why does he insist that he is the son of God also? You cannot be both. If you are the son of man, everybody is the son of man. But if you are the son of God, why use the other expression?”Jesus insists on both because he is both. And I tell you, everybody is both: from one side son of man, from another side son of God. You are born to man, but you are not born only to be man. You are born to man, but you are born to be a god. Humanity is your form, divinity is your being. Humanity is your clothing, divinity is your soul. Jesus goes on using both expressions. Whenever he says “son of man,” he says: “I am joined with you. I am just as you are – plus. I am just as you are, and more.” To indicate that more, sometimes he says “son of God.” But rarely does he use that – rarely, because very few people will be able to understand it.When he says “son of man,” he is not saying something only about himself. Just look at this sentence; he is saying something about every man, that the essential man is homeless. If you think you are rooted, if you think you have a home, you are below humanity. You may belong to the animals: “Foxes have holes, birds…have nests…the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”If you think that you are rooted and you are at home in this world, you must be living below humanity because anyone who is really human immediately becomes aware that this cannot be the life. It may be a passage, a journey, but this cannot be the goal. And once you feel homeless in this world, the search starts. That certain man had said: “Lord, I will follow thee whitherever thou goest.” He may be thinking that Jesus is going to the east, or the west or the south or the north. “I will follow him,” but he does not know the direction where Jesus is going.Jesus is going godward, and that is not north, that is not east, that is not west, that is not south; that is neither up nor down – it is none of these. To go godward is to go within. In fact that is not a direction at all. It is to lose all directions: north, east, south, west, up, down – to lose all directions. To go withinward means to move in the dimensionless, directionless.He does not know what he is saying: “Lord, I will follow thee whitherever thou goest.” In his “whitherever,” the godwardness is not implied. He does not know what he is saying. Jesus is not going anywhere. He is going within himself – which is not a point in space.To go within is to go beyond space. That’s why the soul can never be found in any experiment. An experiment can find anything which belongs to space. You can kill a man, cut and dissect him, and bones will be found, blood will be found, everything else will be found; only the soul, only the essential man, will not be found. It does not exist in space. It touches space, but it doesn’t exist in it. It is only touching it, and if you destroy the body and cut the body, the touch is lost. That fragrance flies into the unknown.That is where Jesus is moving. He knows that this man is committing too much and he will not be able to forgive himself for it. And when you commit too much, you will take revenge. This happens.I come across many people who – in a moment, like lightning – say to me, “We would like to surrender. Now, whatever you will say, we will do.” I know that if I accept them, they will take revenge because they will not be able to fulfill what they are saying. They don’t know what they are saying and they don’t know in what dimension I am moving. They will not be able to keep pace with me, and then there are only two possibilities: either they will become angry against themselves, which is not the usual way of the mind, or they will become angry with me.That’s simply the normal course: whenever you are in trouble, somebody else is responsible. Whenever they feel that trouble has arisen – and it is going to arise; from the very first step it is going to be arduous, it is going to be a razor’s edge – then they will take revenge. Then they will be against me because that will be their only way to protect themselves. That will be the only way: if they can prove that I am wrong they can take their commitment back.Jesus knows. He says, “I am homeless. With me you will never find rest; with me you will always be on the way. I am a wanderer, a vagabond. With me you will always be on the road. And my journey is such that it starts, but never ends. You don’t know where I am going. I am going toward God. I am moving away from things and the world of things. I am moving toward consciousness. I am leaving the visible, moving toward the invisible.”You can’t understand what the invisible is because at the most you can think about it negatively – you can think it is that which is not visible. No, the invisible is also visible, but you need different eyes to see it.It happened…Mulla Nasruddin had opened a small school and he invited me. I looked around the school; he had gathered many students. I asked him, “Nasruddin, what are you going to teach these students?”He said, “Two things, basically: to fear God, and to wash the back of the neck.”I couldn’t see the relationship: to fear God and to wash the back of the neck? I said, “It is okay as far as teaching them to fear God goes, but I cannot see the relevance of why to wash the back of the neck!”He said, “If they can do that, they can cope with the invisible!”The back of the neck is the invisible because you cannot see it. “If they can do that, they can cope with the invisible.” Your “invisible” can be just like the back of your neck: it is also part of the world. Your God is also part of the world; that’s why your temples become part of your market and your scriptures become commodities. Your doctrines are just like things you purchase and sell.The God of Jesus or Buddha is not your God. Your God is not Jesus’ God. His God is a withinness, a beyondness; his God is a transformation of your being, a mutation, a birth of a new being with a new consciousness. Your God is something to be worshipped; Jesus’ God is something to be lived. Your God is in your hands; Jesus’ God is one to whom you leave yourself, in whose hands you surrender. Your God is just in your hands; you can do whatever you want with your God. Jesus’ God is one to whom you surrender – and surrender totally.That man did not know what he was saying. Jesus prohibited him by saying this.And he said unto another, “Follow me.”To the one who was ready to follow, he said, “Wait, please. You don’t know what you are doing, you don’t know what commitment you are making, what you are getting involved in.”The first man acted in a moment of inspiration, in a moment of enthusiasm, in a moment of intoxication. He’s not reliable, he’s influenced – and if you do something under influence, it’s just as if you are drunk and you say something and the next day you have forgotten it.And he said unto another, “Follow me.” To one who has not said anything he says: “Follow me.”But he said, “Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.”To the other man Jesus said: “Follow me.” And the man had not asked. But the man was more ready, the man was more prepared, the man was more mature.Just a few days before, a Dutch woman came to me – a very simple and good-hearted woman, in fact too good-hearted. Even good-heartedness can become a disease if it is too much. She comes to me again and again, and she writes notes and letters that she cannot tolerate poverty. When she goes to her hotel she meets beggars on the road and she cries and weeps, she feels guilty and she suffers much. She cannot meditate – even in meditation those beggars’ faces come. She thinks that it is selfishness to meditate while there is so much poverty. A very good-hearted woman, but not mature: simple, good – but childish.I told her, “Do either of two things. Go and first remove the poverty from the world and then come if time is left and I am here. First remove the poverty and then come and meditate so you don’t feel guilty. Or if you think that is impossible, then drop the idea. Meditate, and out of your meditation, whatever help you can give to people, give.”Then she became worried about sannyas. She wanted to take it and yet was afraid – the Christian upbringing. Then she came again and she said, “There is a problem. My father has been very good to me. He has taught me how to be. Now if I take sannyas I will be betraying my father, his teachings. But if I don’t take sannyas it is a constant haunting around me that I should move into it so I can be transformed.”I said, “You decide either way.”That too she couldn’t decide. Then one day she came and she was very worried so I told her, “One thing is certain now. Even if you ask for sannyas, I am not going to give it to you. So be at rest now. I’m not going to give you sannyas.”Since then I have seen her. She has not come to see me, but she is here. Now she seems to be worried – I can see her face – that if she comes to me for sannyas, I will not give sannyas to her.Good, but immature. Commitment can only be out of maturity. A certain ripeness is needed. And Jesus said unto another, “Follow me.” But that man’s father had died. He could not contain himself; that’s why he may have come to see Jesus on the road. He was passing by the village, his father was lying dead, and he said: “Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.”This is a very symbolic situation: the father is dead, one who has given birth to the body, and another father is present who can give birth to the soul. The question is between the soul and the body, the question is between life and death. From a worldly father you don’t attain life. In fact you are born to die, you are born to death.The father is dead. The man said: “Suffer me, Lord, to go and bury my father – a formality, but let me do it.”Jesus said unto him – one of the most poignant, penetrating utterances of Jesus – “Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.” It looks a little harsh, it does not show compassion. The father is lying dead and the son is expected to bury him. It is a formality, a social mannerism and a duty. But Jesus said: “Let the dead bury their dead.” Jesus said, “In the village there are many dead people. They will do that. Don’t be worried about it. There is no need for you to go.”The symbolic meaning is that one who moves into religion need not bother about duties, morality, formalities, because morality is a lower religion. Duty is a lower religion, formality is of the personality. When you attain a higher religion, you can drop all morality because now you will be fulfilling something deeper and higher. Now there is no need to carry mannerisms, no need to carry social etiquettes: “There are enough dead people in the town who will do it, and who will do it happily. Don’t be worried about it. Let the dead bury their dead; go and preach the kingdom of God.”What manner of man is this Jesus? Some man’s father is lying dead and he wants to make him a preacher of the kingdom of God? Is this the moment to go and become a preacher of God?It is symbolic. He’s saying, “Don’t be worried about death, be worried about God. And don’t be worried about the father who gave birth to your body; think about the father, go and preach about the father who has given your soul to you.”“…but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.” In a way, if you watch the death of anybody who has been intimate to you – a father, a mother, a wife, a husband, a friend who has been very intimate to you and is dead – only in that moment is conversion toward God possible. If you miss that moment, you will again be in the mess of the world.Death gives you a shock. Nothing can give you a shock like that: death is the greatest shock. If that shock does not make you awake, you are incurable, impossible. Jesus used that moment. He is one of the greatest artists who has ever walked on the earth, the greatest alchemist.The situation is death. The father is lying dead in the home, the family must be crying and weeping. This is no time to go and preach the kingdom of God. It looks absurd, looks harsh. Jesus looks too hard. He is not; it is because of his compassion that he says this. He knows that if this moment of death is missed in burying the dead body, there will be no possibility to awaken. Maybe that’s why he turned to this man and said: “Follow me.” He must have seen death in his eyes, he must have felt death around him. Of course it was bound to be so: the father was dead. But still the man could not contain himself. He had to come to see this man, Jesus. Maybe because of death Jesus became significant, maybe because of death he became aware that everybody is going to die. Maybe because of that he had come to Jesus in search of life.The first man is just an onlooker; the second man is ready. Death prepares you. If you can use death, if you can use pain and anguish, if you can use suffering, misery, that can become a step toward the divine.Shocked, this man must have been standing there almost as if he himself was dead. Thinking must have stopped. In such a shock you cannot afford thinking. If the shock is really total, even tears cannot flow. For tears to flow, the shock has to be not total. If the shock is total, one is simply shocked. Nothing moves: time stops, the world disappears, thoughts drop. One is dazed, one just looks with empty eyes, hollow. One simply looks, not looking at anything. Have you seen that type of look sometimes in madmen’s eyes, or sometimes immediately after somebody has died who was very intimate?Jesus must have seen: this man was ready. Let me tell you, unless you have experienced death, you are not ready. Life is very superficial; it is just on the periphery, just on the surface. Death is deep, it is as deep as God – so only from death is the conversion possible. Only in the moment of death do you change: your outlook changes, your attitudes change, the old world becomes irrelevant. Buddha was transformed by seeing a dead man. Jesus must have looked: And he said unto another, “Follow me.” Only one who has known death can follow Jesus.If you have known death, only then can you follow me. If you have known suffering and the cleansing that comes out of suffering, if you have known pain and the shock that is a by-product of pain, then and only then can you be with me. Otherwise sooner or later you disperse because life goes on calling you back; there are a thousand and one things yet to be fulfilled. You will continually be going backward.Only when death cuts the bridge, breaks all the ties with life, is there a possibility that you will turn – turn your back to the world and face God. That’s why in one sentence Jesus says two things which on the surface look very irrelevant: “Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.”This man is not even a disciple. He is a stranger standing by the side of the road, and Jesus says: “…go and preach the kingdom of God.” This is my observation also. The best way to learn a thing is to teach it.The best way to learn a thing is to teach it, I repeat it, because when you start teaching, you are learning. When you are simply learning you are too self-centered and that very self-centering becomes a barrier.When you start teaching you are not self-centered: you look at the other, you look at the need of the other. You watch and observe his problem. You are completely aloof, detached, a witness. And whenever you can become a witness, godliness starts flowing from you. There is only one way to learn great things and that is to teach them. That’s why I go on saying to you that if you have shared my being in any way, go and spread, go and teach, go and help other people to meditate, and you will suddenly be surprised one day: the greatest meditation will happen to you when you are helping somebody to go into meditation.While meditating, things will happen. While you yourself are meditating many things will happen, but the greatest will happen only when you are able to teach meditation to somebody else. In that moment you become completely detached; in that detachment, you are completely silent. You are so filled with compassion – that’s why you are helping the other – that something immediately happens to you. Jesus said: “…but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.”And another also said, “Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home, at my house.”And another said, “I would also like to be with you. I’m ready to follow you, but I would have to go back, at least just to say good-bye to my family, friends, to those who are at home.”And Jesus said unto him, “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”No man who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. Why? Because no man who looks in the past can be capable of being in the present.A Zen seeker came to Rinzai, the great master. He wanted to meditate and he wanted to become enlightened, but Rinzai said, “Wait, a few other things first. First things first. From where are you coming?”The man said, “I always break the bridges which I have passed over.”Rinzai said, “Okay, from wherever you are coming is not the point. But what is the price of rice there these days?”The disciple laughed and he said, “Don’t provoke me, otherwise I will slap you.”Rinzai, bowing down to the seeker, said, “You are accepted.”If a man still remembers the price of rice from where he is coming, he is not worthy. Whatever you carry from the past is a burden, a barrier; it will not allow you to open to the present.Jesus said: “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. If you want to follow me, follow me. There is no way of going back, there is no need. What is the point of saying good-bye? What is it going to serve? If you want to follow me,” Jesus says again and again in the gospel, “you will have to deny your father, your mother; you will have to deny your family.”Sometimes he looks almost cruel. One day he was standing in the village market and a crowd was surrounding him. Somebody said, “Lord, your mother is waiting outside the crowd.” Jesus said, “Who is my mother, who is my brother, who is my father? Those who follow me, those who are with me – they are my brother, they are my father, they are my mother.”It looks really cruel – but he was not. He’s not saying anything to his mother; he’s talking to those people. If you’re clinging too much to the family, the inner revolution will not be possible because the family is the first imprisonment. Then the religion you belong to is the second imprisonment, then the nation that you belong to is the third imprisonment. One has to break them all, one has to go beyond them all. Only then can one find the source – the source which is freedom, the source which is godliness.“No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” One has to renounce all that is futile to gain that which is meaningful.Once it happened that a group of friends were sitting and talking about what the most essential thing is that cannot be renounced. Somebody said, “I cannot renounce my mother. She has given birth to me; I owe my life to her. I can renounce everything, but not my mother.”Somebody else said, “I cannot renounce my wife because mother and father were given to me – they were never my choice – but my wife I have chosen. I have a responsibility toward her, I cannot renounce her. But I can renounce everybody else.”This way they went on. Somebody said he could not renounce his house, somebody else said something else. Mulla Nasruddin said, “I can do without everything except my navel.”Everybody was puzzled – just a navel? So they pressed him to explain it. He said, “Whenever there is a holiday and I am at ease, I have leisure time, I lie down on my bed and eat celery.”They said, “But how is that concerned with the navel? You can eat celery…”He said, “You don’t understand. Without the navel I have nowhere to put the salt.” He puts the salt in his navel when he eats celery!All your attachments are just that absurd. Except for your innermost consciousness, everything can be renounced. Not that I say, “Renounce it,” but deep down one should live in renouncement – be in the world, but one should remain in renouncement.You can live in the family not being part of it; you can live in the society and yet out of it. It is a question of inner attitude. It is not a question of changing places, it is a question of changing the mind.The things that you are too attached to are not bad in themselves, remember. Father, mother, family, wife, children, money, house – they are not bad in themselves. The attachment is not bad because these things are bad, or these people and these relationships are bad. Attachment is bad; it can make you very stupid.Mulla Nasruddin suddenly became rich. He inherited a great treasure. And of course, what happens with newly rich people happened with him also: he wanted to show it, exhibit it. He called the greatest painter in the country to make a portrait of his wife.The painter started working. Nasruddin said that there was only one condition. “Remember, don’t forget it: the pearls must be in the painting.” His wife was wearing many pearls and diamonds: they must be there. He’s not worried about the woman – what she looks like in the painting is not the question – but the pearls and the diamonds should be there.After a while when the painting was ready, the painter brought the painting. Mulla Nasruddin said, “Quite good, quite good. Only one thing: can’t you make the breasts a little smaller and the pearls a little bigger?”The mind of an exhibitionist, the mind of showing that you have something precious, valuable – the mind of the ego. The question is not of living in a palace. Live in a palace, that’s not the point; or live in a hut or live just by the side of the road, that is not the point. The question is of the ego.You can be an exhibitionist in a palace; you can be an exhibitionist on the road. If your mind is wanting somebody to know that you possess something, or have renounced something, you are in a deep darkness that has to be broken.Jesus says that one should not be attached and one should not look backward. Looking back is an old habit with the human mind. You go on looking back. Either you look back or you look in the future, and this is how you miss the present.The present is divine, the past is dead memory, the future is just hope, fiction. Reality is only in the present. That reality is God, that reality is the kingdom of God.Jesus said: “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” Just this is to be understood; nothing else has to be done. Just listen to me: you know well that the past is past; it is no longer there, nothing can be done about it. Don’t go on ruminating about it, wasting time and energy. That rumination about the past creates a screen around you and you cannot see that which is already here.You have been missing it, and it has become a habit. Whenever you are sitting, you are thinking about the past. Become aware. I’m not saying to try to stop it because if you try to stop it, you will still be engaged with it. I am saying be disengaged with it.So what will you do? Whatever you do will be an engagement with it. You just have to be aware. When the past starts coming in the mind just relax, quiet yourself, still yourself. Just remain alert, not even verbalization is needed. Just know that the past is gone; there is no use chewing over it again and again.People use the past as chewing gum, they go on chewing it. Nothing comes out of gum – it is not nutritious, it is just futile – but just through the exercise of the mouth one feels good. Just the exercise of the mind and one feels as if one is doing something worthwhile.Just remain alert, and if you can be alert about the past you will become aware, by and by, that the future has disappeared automatically. The future is nothing but the projection of the past. The future is the desire to have the past that was beautiful again and again, in more beautiful ways – and to not have the past which was painful, to never have it again.This is what the future is. You are choosing a part of the past, glorifying it, decorating it, and imagining that in the future you will again and again have those moments of happiness – of course more magnified, more inflated – and you will never have the pain that you had to pass through in the past. This is what future is.Once the past disappears, it does not disappear alone. It also takes the future with it. Suddenly you are here, now: time stops. This moment which is not of time I call meditation, this moment which is not of time Jesus calls “the kingdom of God.”Just remember it more and more. Nothing is to be done, only remembrance – a deep remembrance which follows you like breathing whatever you are doing – which remains somewhere in the heart. Just a deep remembrance that the past has to be dropped – and the future goes with it.Herenow is the door; from herenow you pass from the world into God, you pass from the without to the within. Suddenly, in the marketplace the temple descends: the heavens open and the spirit of God descends like a dove. It can happen anywhere. Every place is holy and sacred; only your ripeness, your maturity, your awareness, is needed.The word awareness is the master key. We will come across many situations in the gospel where Jesus goes on saying: “Awake! Be alert! Be conscious! Remember!” Buddha goes on saying to his disciples: “Right mindfulness is needed.” Krishnamurti goes on saying: “Awareness.” Gurdjieff’s whole teaching is based on one word: self-remembering.This is the whole of the gospel: self-remembering.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 01 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Do you ever cry?Yes, whenever I look at you. You may not see my tears, you may not hear my cry – but always when I look at you, crying is there. Because of that, I go on working on you. It is not only to help you to come out of your misery, it is to help myself also. If you come out of your misery, I will come out of my misery. That is created by your misery.It is said that when Buddha reached to the Ultimate’s door, he stopped there, he wouldn’t enter. The door was open; the devas, the gods, were ready to welcome him in but he wouldn’t enter. The devas asked him, “Why are you standing there? Come in. We have been waiting for you for ages. You are welcome. You have returned home.”Buddha said, “I will stay here, I will have to stay here. Until the last human being passes by me and enters, I cannot enter.”This is a beautiful parable. Don’t take it literally, but it is true. Once you become aware, once you become a being – once you are – infinite compassion arises in you. Buddha has made compassion the criterion of enlightenment. Once you have attained, you don’t suffer for yourself, but you suffer for others: seeing the misery all around, seeing the whole absurdity of it – seeing the possibility that you can come out of it immediately, right now, and still you go on clinging.With one hand you push it away, with another hand you pull it close. You go on creating your own prisons and still you would like to be freed. Your whole effort is contradictory. You want to come to the east and you go toward the west.Seeing you, yes, I always cry.The second question:Osho,For ten years I have identified myself as a poet. But since I took sannyas ten days ago it has become unimportant to me whether or not I ever write another verse, even though I have often heard you praise the poet. What has happened?The first thing: you cannot be identified as being a poet because poetry is something that happens only when you are not there. If you are there, it will just be rubbish. It happens only when you are absent. That’s why it is so beautiful. It comes into your emptiness: it fills you – your vacuum. You become pregnant with the unknown, with the strange.The poet is just a mother. The mother is not going to produce the child. The child has been conceived: at the most the mother is tending it, caring for it deep within her heart, trying to give it a body – not the soul. Poetry comes to you just like a child is conceived: in deep love. In deep receptivity you become a womb and the poetry is conceived. It is a pregnancy. And one has to be very careful because a miscarriage is always possible, you can abort; you can be too much in a hurry and you can destroy it.Allow it to settle within your being. It will take its own time, it will grow by and by. It will grow in your unconscious. Your conscious is not needed; your conscious will be an interference. Forget about it, let it grow.You will feel heavy, your whole being will be as if carrying a burden – nice, pleasant, but still a burden. And then one day the child is born. In that moment not only the child is born, the mother is also born. When the poetry is born, the poet is born. It is not the poet who writes the poetry. In fact, it is the birth of poetry which creates the poet. You were not a poet before it – only by its birth.A woman becomes a mother. A mother is a totally different category from an ordinary woman. A woman is a woman; a mother is totally different. She has conceived something of the beyond; she has carried the beyond into her womb and she has given it a body.The poet is born when the poetry is born. It is a shadow of the poetry, a consequence of the poetry. It succeeds poetry, it does not precede it. There was no poet before, there was no mother before. There was a man, there was a woman – but there was no poet, there was no mother. The mother comes into existence after the poetry has happened.Ordinarily, whatever you call poetry is not poetry. It is just a mind thing. You think it; you write it. Whatever you write is prose and whatever existence writes through you is poetry. It may have the form of prose, it doesn’t matter. Whatever Buddha says or Jesus says is poetry. The form is prose, that is not the point. It is poetry because existence writes it: the whole writes through the part; the ocean tries to give you a message through the drop. Whenever you write, it is prose, ordinary prose. Whenever existence writes through you, it is poetry. It may be prose – it is still poetry.You cannot be identified with being a poet. That will be a disturbance, that will destroy the whole music and the whole harmony. It is good, good that the identification has dropped, good that you have forgotten about poetry, good that it doesn’t seem to affect you in any way now whether you write or not. This is the right situation. Now for the first time there is a possibility that poetry may happen.I cannot say “It will happen,” because poetry cannot be predicted. If you predict it, again the mind will start functioning and waiting and trying and doing something about it. No, completely forget about it. It may take months, it may take years, it may take your whole life, but some day, if you have really completely forgotten your identification, you will become the medium. Something will flow through you. It will come through you, but it will be of the beyond. Then you will be a watcher, a witness to it. You won’t be a poet, you will be a witness. And when it is born, a different quality of being will come in its wake. That’s what a poet is. All great poets are humble, they don’t claim.The Upanishads are not even signed. Nobody knows who wrote them – the greatest of poetry, and the poets have not even tried to sign it. They have not left their signatures; that would have been profane. They have left it, they have not claimed it. They were just vehicles.A real poet is a vehicle, a medium. That’s why I praise poetry so much. It is very close to meditation, very close to religion – the closest neighbor. The politician works with the practical, the scientist with the possible, the poet with the probable, and the mystic with the impossible. The probable is the closest neighbor of the impossible. That’s why I praise poetry. But when I praise poetry, I am not praising your poets. Ninety-nine percent of them are just writing junk. They are doing a mind thing, an ego trip. They manage, that’s all – but poetry doesn’t come through them.You can write poetry. Technically it may even be correct, but it may be dead. Sometimes it happens that a poem is technically not correct, but it is alive. Who bothers about whether a thing is technically correct or not? The real thing is whether it is alive or not.If you are going to become a mother, would you like a child who is technically correct, but dead – a plastic child: technically, absolutely right, you cannot find a fault? In fact if you want technically correct human beings, then only plastic beings are possible; only they can be absolutely correct. A real, alive child has so many defects – bound to be so, because life exists in danger and death. Only a dead thing is out of danger. Life is always a hazard: there are a thousand and one difficulties to be crossed, riddles to be solved. The very phenomenon that life exists is a miracle, with so many imperfections.Life is imperfect because life is a growing phenomenon. Anything that is growing will be imperfect, otherwise how will it grow? Anything that is perfect is already dead. It is good for the grave; you cannot do anything else with it.Ninety-nine percent of your poets are just writing junk; they give birth to dead children. Sometimes – and only sometimes, rarely – a poet is there. And whenever such a phenomenon as the poet exists – which is a miracle on this earth – just next to him is the mystic. One step more and he will become a mystic. If the poet tries to be on his wings a little more, he will become a mystic. And if the mystic, in his compassion, descends a step toward you, he will become a poet.Poetry is a communication of the mystery of life. Unless you have felt it, how can you communicate? Poetry is a relationship between you and the whole. Something transpires between the drop and the ocean, between the leaf and the tree. Something transpires between the whole and the part, and the part starts dancing. The part is so overflowing with joy that it sings, so delighted that its movements become poetic. It no longer walks on the earth; it flies.Prose is just walking on the earth, poetry is a flight into the sky. Prose is just walking, poetry is dancing. The movements are the same, but the quality is tremendously different.Good. You are blessed if the identification is gone. That’s what I’m trying to do through sannyas, so that when your old identification is gone, you are left in a vacuum. Only in the vacuum can the hands of God descend in you and create something out of the mud that you are, create something beautiful. It will not be yours, it will come through you. Rejoice that the identification is gone; don’t try to bring it back. Forget all about it, forget all about everything that you know in relation to poetry, poetics. Forget everything; just rejoice in being yourself.One day, suddenly you will fall in line with the whole – a turning in, a tuning in – and a song will descend like a dove. Then you will be for the first time a poet. You will not claim it, but you will be it. Those who are, don’t claim. Those who are not, only they claim.The third question:Osho,I feel like an actor in a play and I don't always like my role in it. Just when I feel it is dropping, you push me back in it – defining it, defining me. It appears you give me a form, while my being is bursting at the seams. I want to explode and spread. Why do you mold me so?The first thing: if you really feel that you are an actor in a play, there is no question of your like or dislike. Then you cannot say, “Sometimes I don’t like my role in it,” because like and dislike come only when you think of yourself not as an actor but as a doer.To the actor, all roles are the same. What difference does it make whether you become Jesus or Judas in a drama? If you really know that this is a drama, and Judases and Jesuses are all the same behind the curtain, behind the stage – it is just an act. Then what is wrong in being a Judas? How can you dislike it? And what is good in being Jesus? How can you like it?Like and dislike exist only when you think you are the doer. Then good and bad come in – then judgment, evaluation, then condemnation, appreciation. Then the duality enters. Only with the doer, the duality enters. If you are an actor it is all the same whether you are a Judas or a Jesus. Once you understand the point that life is just a great drama, you are finished with likes and dislikes. Then whatever the whole wills, you do it. You are not the doer; you fulfill the desire of the whole.That is one of the greatest teachings of all religions: to become an actor in life. Then like–dislike disappears. When like–dislike disappears, choice disappears; and when you are choiceless you are free. Moksha, nirvana, is attained.Become an actor. Play the role, play it beautifully because when one has to play it, why not play it beautifully? You are a Judas – perfectly okay. Be a Judas, enjoy the role and let the audience also enjoy the role. Behind the stage, Judas and Jesus are meeting and having tea. They are friends there, they have to be.In fact without Judas, Jesus cannot be. Something in the story will be missing, something very essential will be missing. Just think of Jesus without Judas. Christianity will not be possible. There might not have been any record of Jesus without Judas. Because he betrayed, Jesus was crucified; and because Jesus was crucified, the event stuck hard in the heart of humanity.Christianity was born not because of Christ, but because of the cross. So I would prefer that Christianity be called “Crossianity.” It should not be connected with Christ, but with the cross.If you go and look at the church, you will see the cross raised higher than Jesus, and the bishops and the popes wearing the cross. Christianity is born out of the cross. But if you think that, then who is the author of this crucifixion? – Judas, not Jesus.At the last moment on the cross, just before he died, Jesus hesitated. The part hesitated to dissolve into the whole, the river hesitated to fall into the ocean. It’s natural, it is human: Jesus is son of man and son of God.Every river must be tremendously apprehensive and afraid when it comes to the ocean. It was coming all the way – it may have journeyed thousands of miles to meet the ocean – but whenever the river falls into the ocean, a deep turmoil is bound to be there in the heart. She is going to disappear. The ocean is so vast, where will she be? She will be lost, her identity gone: the name, the form, the dreams, the desires – all gone. The ocean is so vast she will simply disappear. Falling into the ocean is death; there is the cross. When a river falls into the ocean, there is a cross.Jesus at the last moment looked at the sky and said, “God, have you forsaken me? Why is this happening to me?” – a deep cry of anguish. “Why have you forsaken me?” shows the humanity of Jesus. That is where Jesus is tremendously beautiful, incomparably beautiful.Buddha is more inhuman. You may call it superhuman, but he is inhuman. If he was going to die on the cross, he would not have cried toward the sky, “Why have you forsaken me?” He knows that there is nobody to cry to, he knows no God exists, that it is all human foolishness. He knows all that is born is going to die; he has understood it totally. He will not cry, he will simply dissolve. The river of Buddha will not hesitate, it will not hesitate for a single moment. There will not be a cross.Buddha is inhuman, very far away from the human heart. Mahavira is still even more inhuman. They are not of this world at all; they are very abstract, as if they are not concrete human beings. They look more like disembodied ideas. They look fictitious, they look mythological – but not real.Jesus is very real. He’s as real as you are. And this cry… Buddha would have laughed. If he had been there he would have laughed at how foolish this man was: “What are you crying about? To whom are you crying?”In Lewis Carroll’s beautiful book, Alice in Wonderland, there is a small dialogue:Tweedledum says to Alice. “Why are you crying? You are unreal, just a dream of the king.”Alice looks at him and says, “But I am real.”Tweedledum laughs and says, “You are foolish. If he, the king, stops dreaming, where will you be?”Alice says, “I will be here of course.”Tweedledum laughs again and says, “You fool! If he stops dreaming, you will simply disappear. You are a figment of his dream. Don’t cry. How can you cry? You are unreal.”Alice goes on crying. She says, “If I am unreal, then who is crying? If I am unreal, then what about these tears?”Tweedledum says, “You fool, do you think these tears are real or your crying is real?”Buddha would have laughed, Shankara would have laughed: “What are you doing? This whole world is maya: the dream of the king. You are just part, a figment of it; you are not real, you are unreal. Just disappear. Why are you saying, ‘You have forsaken me?’ Who is there to forsake you?”But not Jesus. He cries – tears may have flowed through his eyes. He is human, as human as you are, rooted in the earth as you are. He is very earthly – but not just earthly, not merely earthly. He is more.He cried. For a moment he even became angry and annoyed. He said, “What are you doing to me? Have you forsaken me?” And then he understood. The river hesitated, then understood and moved into the ocean.Then he said, “I understand. Thy will should be done, not mine.” The part was ready to fall into the whole.He is earthly and he is heavenly, both. He is a great bridge. At the last moment he understood the whole thing as just a role to be played. “Thy will should be done, not mine.” Then it becomes acting; if it is your will it becomes doing. This is the difference.You say to me, “I feel like an actor in a play…” You must be just thinking of yourself as an actor in a play because the next part of the sentence denies it: “…and I don’t always like my role in it.” If it is just a play, why bother? Be a Judas or be a Jesus – it is all the same. From where does the evaluation of like and dislike come? The ego exists in your likes and dislikes. In your choice exists the ego; when you don’t choose, the ego disappears. That is what I’m doing to you: “Just when I feel it is dropping, you push me back into it…”Yes, I will go on pushing you until the choice disappears completely. Don’t resist me because if you resist, you will not be able to understand for long. Don’t get annoyed and don’t say, “What are you doing to me?”“It appears you give me a form, while my being is bursting at the seams. I want to explode and spread.” “I want” is the barrier to exploding and spreading. The “I” cannot explode and cannot spread. It can only think, it can dream.My whole effort is so that you can drop the “I” and just be. Then you will spread, then there will be no barrier for you, then you can become infinite. You are infinite; the ego won’t allow you to see it, the ego won’t allow you to see the truth.“Why do you mold me so?” I will go on molding you from one form to another, and again from one form to another, so that you can understand that you are formless. Only the formless can be molded into form. If you have a form, you cannot be molded into another form; you are already fixed.If you want to mold steel it will be difficult, but you can mold mud easily. Why? Why not steel? Steel has a more fixed form. You can say it in this way: steel believes in a more fixed form, steel is deceived by a more fixed form. Mud is not so deceived.Then there is water: formless, fluid. You put it in a jar; it takes that form. You move it into another jar, never for a single moment does it resist. It takes another form, it is fluid.Allow me to mold you in many forms because only in changing from one form to another, somewhere in between, will you become aware of the formless. There is no other way to become aware of the formless. Moving from one form to another – just in the middle somewhere, when the old form has gone and the new has not arisen – in that interval, some day you will become aware.That’s what God himself is doing – goes on changing your forms. Sometimes you were a plant, then you were a bird, then you became an animal… Then you became a man: sometimes a woman, sometimes a man; sometimes black, sometimes white; sometimes stupid, sometimes intelligent. He goes on changing your form because that is the only opportunity. By changing the form, somewhere in the middle, one day you will become aware.The whole thing is an acting; then you will be able to say: “Thy will should be done, not mine.” That moment you are freed. When you can say with your whole heart, “Thy will should be done, not mine,” you have disappeared. The river has fallen.The fourth question:Osho,I feel that I have been dishonest and insincere in all my relations throughout my life. I have not done justice to my parents, my wife, nor my children, nor my friends and neighbors, and so on. And now I feel I am not just and sincere to my master and my sannyas also. This is the cause of great agony to me, to my mind. What should I do?If you start thinking in terms of doing, you will again be insincere because in whatever you have done, you have been insincere. Your doing has become corrupted.So the first thing is: resist doing. Just remain alert, alert to your insincerity. Don’t be in a haste to do anything because that will be done again by you; your whole past will be involved in your doing. Resist; just remain with this feeling that you have been insincere, that’s enough. It is purifying, it has a tremendous capacity to purify and cleanse you. Just remain with the feeling: “I have been insincere, I am insincere,” and don’t try to do anything about it. That is again trying to make a good image of yourself, that you are not insincere, that you are a sincere man. Your ego is hurting because you have been insincere.Try to be aware of the fact; don’t try to do anything about it. Anything that you do will be immature and too early. Just remain with the idea, live with it. Live with the idea that you are insincere. If you can live with it, the very idea, the very awareness will kill your ego completely. The ego cannot remain alive if you think you are insincere. The ego needs a good image, that you are a sincere man, very honest. That’s what the ego is saying to you: “Do something so you can repaint the image, renovate the image.”You have been insincere. This has been revealed through meditation. Now the ego is in danger of death. The ego says, “Do something.” Through doing, it will try to again reclaim the fallen image, resettle with the old so you can feel again: “I am good, I am beautiful. I am sincere, I am moral, I am this and that.”The first thing – very difficult, arduous, but this has to be done: just remain alert to the insincerity, live with the idea and don’t be bothered about changing it.It will change of its own accord because once you understand that you are insincere, you cannot remain insincere. It is impossible, it has never happened. It cannot happen, the very thing is impossible. If you know that you are insincere, it will drop. If you want to save it, do something to create the feeling that you are sincere.If you know that you are a liar, the lying will stop of its own accord. If you feel you are immoral, don’t try to do anything: don’t repent, don’t feel guilty. Those are tricks. Remain with the idea, the naked fact of who you are. Don’t move, don’t get occupied in doing something. Remain naked with the naked idea, the naked reality, and you will see a change is happening that is not by your doing. When a change comes to you not by your doing, it comes from God. Only God can make you moral, sincere; only God can make you religious; only God can make you pure. It is prasad, it is his gift; you cannot do it. All your doing will be an undoing. Please, remind yourself again and again that you are not to do anything.You say, “This is the cause of great agony to my mind.” Yes, it is a great cause of agony to your mind, and to the ego which is the same – mind or ego – because the ego feels hurt. You – and so insincere? You had always believed that you were a very sincere man, you had always believed that you were a pinnacle of a man, a crescendo of humanity, the purest gold. You had always believed that.Now meditation has broken a window into the falseness. You have been able to look into yourself, the reality. You have come across a mirror. Now don’t try to escape from it. Remain with the fact: whoever you are, that is your reality. Remain with the fact. If you can remain with the fact, you will change. But that change will not be your doing, it will happen.When a transformation comes to you, it has a totally different grace. Whatever you do will always be tiny, mediocre, and finally useless. Whatever God does to you is infinite. Only that can be infinite which comes from the infinite. Don’t try to do anything. Accept the fact, remain with it, relax, and suddenly there will come a transformation.I teach sudden transformation, and I teach transformation by God, not by you. You are just to allow him. That is all that you have to do on your part. Open the door, wait. Just open the door; that much you have to do. Allow, so that when he knocks at the door you can welcome him, when he comes you can recognize him, when he comes you can call him in. Just don’t sit with closed doors, that’s all. Meditation is nothing but that: opening the door.Meditation will not give you enlightenment, remember. No technique can ever give you enlightenment; enlightenment is not technical. Meditation can only prepare the ground, meditation can only open the door. Meditation can only do something negatively; the positive will come. Once you are ready, it always comes.Please don’t try to do anything. Just be.The fifth question:Osho,You said that the family is the first thing to renounce. I don't understand why we were served prasad on the day of your father's initiation.The family has to be renounced, that’s true. I have renounced my family, but my family is rare: they haven’t renounced me. And it is rare, I say, because it has not happened before.Jesus’ father never came to Jesus to be initiated. John the Baptist initiated many, but his own father never came to be initiated. Krishna’s father was not a disciple of his.My father is rare – not because he is my father: he is simply rare. There was every possibility, as human nature goes, there is every possibility that a father cannot come and bow down to his own son. It is almost humanly impossible. He has done that. You will not find a parallel in the whole history of man. And it may not happen again.But you are blind and you cannot see the fact, so even the prasad became a problem to you. Just think of bowing down to your own son, coming to the feet of your own son, being initiated. A tremendous humbleness, a tremendous innocence is needed.That is one of the most difficult things in human relationships. It is not accidental that Jesus’ father never came to him. It is simple: to believe in the son to whom you have given birth, whom you have seen from the very first day, from his first cry – how can you believe that he has become enlightened? Your own son? Impossible. Your own blood and bone? Impossible. How can you think that he has become something, someone from whom you have to learn?A son remains a son, and to a father he remains a child always because the distance is always the same. If my father was twenty when I was born, that twenty years’ distance has remained the same; it will always remain the same. If I am forty-five, he will be sixty-five. I cannot come closer to him in age. He will always be twenty years more experienced than me.And to come back to me and to surrender – you cannot realize the significance of it. That is why you ask such foolish questions. It is one of the rarest moments.I again repeat: my father is rare not because he is my father. He’s simply rare.The sixth question:Osho,Did Jesus become the Christ on the cross, or when he came out of the River Jordan? Are there stages of christhood also?There are no stages. Enlightenment – or christhood or buddhahood – happens in a single split second, there are not gradual stages. But when Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, the journey started – not christhood. The seed started moving toward being a tree. The seed was broken in the soil, now the tree and its coming is only a question of time. You cannot say that when the seed has broken in the soil the tree is there: you cannot say it because the tree is not there.You cannot say that the tree is. You cannot say it because where can you see the tree? You cannot rest under the tree, you cannot pluck the fruits, you cannot have the fragrance of the flowers. The tree is nonexistential. Yes, in one way you cannot say the tree is. But in another way the tree is, because the seed is broken. The tree is on the way, it is coming; now it is only a question of time. It has come, in a way, because it has started.The day John the Baptist initiated Jesus the seed was broken. The heavens opened and the spirit of God, like a dove, descended. This was the beginning – not of christhood, the beginning toward christhood; the seed moving toward the tree.Jesus became Christ on the cross when he said, “Thy will be done. not mine.” That day he became a tree; he became a big, vast tree. Thousands could take shelter under him now. It bloomed, it filled the whole earth with fragrance.So in a way you can say that in the River Jordan, when he was initiated, the first glimpse was achieved; on the cross, the last. It depends how you want to express it. But I think I have conveyed the meaning to you: he started on the journey toward being a Christ on that day.You can also call him Christ on that day; it is just a question of how to express it. But my emphasis is that he moved toward christhood. He became Christ on the cross.Christhood or buddhahood, nirvana, moksha, enlightenment – they happen in a split second, they have no gradualness about them. They are sudden transformations.The seventh question:Osho,The return is entirely a personal affair. Even a very near one cannot understand. It is actually easily possible only for those who have suffered. But you are calling all. Is it possible for them to hear your call of love?That is not the point. Whether they hear it or not is not the point: I should go on calling. They may be deaf, but I am not dumb. If they don’t listen I will have to call more loudly, that’s all.When you call a thousand, only a hundred will listen. One can never know who the hundred will be. You call a thousand, a hundred will listen. The very nature of the call is such that only those who are just near awakening can listen to it. Only those whose sleep is almost complete, who are nearing the morning and are getting ready to wake – only they can listen. But you cannot see who those will be. Call a thousand: a hundred will listen and only ten will start moving. Ninety will listen and still will not move; they will listen but they will not understand, or they will understand something else, or they will misunderstand. Ten will start moving. And when ten move, only one reaches; nine will be lost on the way. Call a thousand and you have called only one. But this is how things are, so one has to go on calling.So I don’t bother a bit whether you listen or not; I go on calling. One is bound to come and that’s enough. If you call a thousand, and one comes, if you call ten thousand and ten come, that’s enough. One should not ask for more, that is already too much.This is right that only those who have suffered will be able to understand me – because pain purifies, suffering gives understanding. Suffering gives a certain crystallization. Unless you suffer you don’t know what life is. Unless you suffer you don’t know how difficult it is to get out of life.I was reading the life of a great Japanese poet, Issa. He suffered, he must have been a very, very sensitive man: he was a great poet. He’s one of the greatest haiku poets.When he was only thirty he had already lost his five children; five children had died by the time he was thirty – almost every year a child died. Then his wife died and he was almost completely mad – in anguish, in suffering.He went to a Zen master. The Zen master asked, “What is the problem?” The Zen master must have been almost like a buddha – not like Jesus – one who has attained, but one who has completely forgotten human misery.Issa said, “My five children are dead and now my wife is dead. Why is there so much suffering? I can’t see the reason for it. What is the explanation? I have not done anything wrong to anybody, I have lived as innocently as possible. In fact I have lived very much aloof. I’m not very related to people. I’m a poet, I live in my own world. I have not done anything wrong to anybody. I have lived a very poor life, but I was happy. Now suddenly my five children are gone, my wife is also gone. Why is there so much suffering, and for no reason? There must be an explanation.”The Zen master said, “Life is just like a dewdrop in the morning. It is the nature of life that death happens. There is no explanation; it is the nature of life. There is no need for any special reason to be given. Life’s nature is like a dewdrop. It hangs for a while on a leaf of grass; a small breeze and it is gone, the sun rises and it evaporates. That is the nature of life. Remember that.”Issa was a man of deep intelligence. He understood it. He came back and he wrote a haiku. The haiku means: Life, a dewdrop? Yes, I understand. Life is a dewdrop. Yet… and yet…In “Yet…and yet…” he’s saying something superbly human. “Life is a dewdrop; I understand. And yet…” The wife is gone, the children are gone and the eyes are full of tears: Yet…and yet…“Yes, life is a dewdrop, but…” And “but” is great. Only those who have suffered can understand that life is a dewdrop, and even then “Yet…and yet…” remains. Even then, even when you understand, understanding is difficult.Those who have not suffered, what to say of them? They live a superficial life. Happiness is always superficial, it has no depth in it. Only sadness has depth. Life is superficial, only death has depth. Life is very ordinary: eating, earning, loving – very ordinary. Suffering has a depth; it awakens you, it shocks you out of your sleep.Yes, only those who have suffered will understand what I’m saying: Yet…and yet… Even they may not understand. But this is so, this is how life is. If one becomes despondent because of this and thinks not to call, not to say anything…It happened…When Buddha became enlightened, for seven days he remained silent. He thought, “Who will listen?” He thought, “What am I going to say? Who will understand?” He thought, “The things that have happened to me, if somebody had told them to me when they had not happened to me, even I would not have understood. So who will understand? Why bother?”For seven days he sat and sat and sat under the bodhi tree. Tradition says that the devas in heaven became very disturbed. “Why is he keeping quiet? Only after thousands of years does one become enlightened. Why is he not calling people?”They came – a beautiful story – they bowed down to Buddha and said, “You should say something. You have attained; you should give the call. The word should spread to people. Why are you keeping quiet? We waited and waited. Seven days looked like seven centuries. What are you doing? Don’t waste time. You will only be for a little while more and then you will disappear for ever and ever. Before you disappear, give a call.”Buddha said, “Who will listen? Who will understand?”But those devas were very cunning, and it is good that they were cunning. They argued, they persuaded. They said, “Yes, you are right. Rare – rare is the possibility of someone’s listening, and rarest is the possibility of someone understanding. But it is there.Call a thousand: a hundred will listen, ninety will not understand; ten will walk, nine will be lost on the way. Somewhere or other they will think that they have achieved; they will sit by the side and they will think they have come home. Only one will arrive – but one is more than enough.”Buddha understood and he started preaching.I know it is a very hopeless effort. Knowing well that you will not understand, I go on talking to you. It is as if one is talking to walls.When Bodhidharma became enlightened he was sitting near a wall, his back to the wall. Immediately he turned and faced the wall. For nine years he would not sit in any other way. Whenever he would sit, he would face the wall. If somebody was there – an inquirer, a seeker – he would have to ask his questions from the back.People asked, “What foolish posture have you chosen? There have been many buddhas in the world, but nobody has sat facing a wall. Why are you sitting this way? Why are you so crazy?”Bodhidharma said, “As far as I know, all the buddhas have been facing walls.” Wherever you look, there is a wall. That’s not the point.Bodhidharma would say, “They all have faced walls, but they were a little more polite.” He would say, “I’m not so polite, that’s all. I don’t bother a bit what you think of me. I will turn my face toward you only when I see that someone is there who can understand me.”For nine years he faced the wall. Then a man came. The man said, “Turn toward me otherwise I will kill myself.” He had a sword in his hand. Still Bodhidharma would not turn. He cut off his hand and said, “Look, the hand is gone. The second thing will be the head.”Then Bodhidharma turned. He said, “Wait! So you have come,” because only those who are ready to behead themselves can understand.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 914 Then came to him the disciples of John, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not?”15 Jesus said unto them, “Can the children of the bride chamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.”16 “No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse.”17 “Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.”Religion can be healthy, as healthy as a newborn babe – as healthy as the songs of the birds in the morning, as healthy as a newly-opening lotus. Or religion can be ill, diseased, dying, just like an old man: shrinking, sad, moving into death.When religion is young it has a fragrance, the fragrance of life. It has a song, it has a mystery around it. It has the quality of dance, joy, delight. It is a celebration. When religion is young, alive, fresh, religion is always a celebration. It is a feast; it is life-enhancing, life-affirmative. When religion is old, dying or already dead – just a stinking corpse – then it is renunciation, then it is not celebration. Then it is anti-life, then it is life-negative. Then it leaves the world, it leaves all that is alive, it starts being suicidal. It shrinks.Life expands, death is a shrinkage. When you are young, you are flowing in all directions. When you are old, you are frozen. You no longer flow, you only grumble. You become hard; the flexibility is lost.When religion is young, alive, it is ordinary. It has nothing to fulfill the ego: it is very ordinary. In fact, in its very ordinariness it is extraordinary. It is superb in being just ordinary. Life is enough when religion is young; no other God is needed. Then life is God, life is divine.When religion becomes old and ill, as everything becomes old and ill… Whatever is born has to die; even a religion is born one day, lives for a while, and then dies. But followers go on clinging to the dead body. Then the dead body kills those followers too: it becomes a source of illness, neurosis. It becomes an abnormality, a cancerous growth. When religion becomes ill or dead, it kills you, it is poisonous. This has to be understood from many directions.First, people are more willing to be in a dead religion than to be in an alive one because you have been taught to be afraid of life, of love, of happiness. Every child is brought up in the world with a conditioning, with a feeling that there is something wrong in being happy. A very vague feeling, but it is there and it influences your whole life: there is something wrong in being happy. So whenever you feel happy, you feel guilty – as if you have been committing a wrong, as if you have been sinning.Only sinners seem to be happy. Saints seem to be very sad. So whenever you are sad, everything is okay. You never feel guilty if you are sad – have you observed it? But if you are very happy, suddenly you try to hide it. Nobody should know.Why has this happened to the human mind? – because every child is taught to be serious, somber, to have a long face. Every child is taught not to jump, not to run, not to shriek, not to be too delighted, not to laugh loudly. “Sit quietly!” – as if something is wrong in energy expressing itself. Whenever the child is happy, the family, the people around, all start teaching him – as if something has gone wrong. When the child is not happy, when he is unhappy, everybody sympathizes with him.When the child is ill, everybody takes care of him. When he is healthy, everybody goes on stopping him: “Don’t do this!” “Don’t do that!” When the child is ill, lying in bed, the father comes, the mother comes, the relatives come. They are all very careful around him. By and by, he starts learning there is something basically wrong in energy, in happiness, in joy, in dancing, running around, shrieking with delight. There is something basically wrong – he gets the hint – and there is something basically good in being sad, ill. Whenever he is sad, he is appreciated, sympathized with.Whenever he is healthy, everybody seems to be against him; the whole world is against him. This creates guilt, a deep guilt in the child. That guilt follows you your whole life.If you go to see a saint and you see him laughing loudly, you will be shocked. A saint, and laughing so loudly? A saint should be sad. You have a particular idea about the saint. Yes, it is okay to laugh in the pub, to laugh in a restaurant – gamblers can do that – but to laugh in a church? No, it is not allowed. One has to become serious when one goes to church; one has to become almost corpselike because of this training. The training has a vicious circle about it: you were trained by your parents, your parents were trained by their parents. Somewhere in the past, deeply hidden in unknown history, something went wrong.Maybe one who is happy cannot be forced to work, because happiness is a play. Only sad people can be forced to work. That’s why when you work you become sad, when you are on duty you become sad. A holiday has a different quality to it. You can laugh, you can enjoy.Life was difficult in the past. Man was in a constant struggle with nature. To survive was his only aim, and everybody had to work hard. If you are happy, you like to dance, not work; if you are happy, you like to sing, play the flute – and not go hunting. If you are happy, who bothers about duty and about the office? If you are happy, you like to rest and relax. That was dangerous.That’s why happiness was condemned, laziness was condemned, rest was condemned. It has been taught, it is deep in your blood, that work is the goal of life. A good man is always working; a bad man always seems to be on holiday.Mulla Nasruddin has not worked for a long time, for years. One day he was sitting by my side. The day was very sunny and he said, “If I had been working somewhere, I would have taken a holiday today.” He had not been working for many days – for years!He was missing work because he could not take a holiday. How can he take a holiday? He only remembered work when it comes to taking a holiday.The whole human mind has been trained to be a worker. That’s why duty has been praised and playfulness condemned, business praised and gambling condemned – because a gambler is playful and a businessman is serious. The businessman is respected; a gambler is simply condemned. He is thought to be just below humanity.Religion is a totally different dimension. There is every possibility a gambler may enter religion, but a businessman is debarred. A drunkard may enter religion: I am not saying you should become drunkards, I am just emphasizing the quality of playfulness, the quality that can enjoy and be, and is not worried about results. But a very serious man is debarred by his own seriousness.Jesus created trouble for himself. He was a religious man: healthy, young, vibrant with life. Life was his god. Many times in the gospels you come across scenes that depict him sitting at the dining table – eating, drinking. How could the Jews and the people, his people, believe he was religious? Fasting should be done, and he is always feasting, he is always creating a feast around himself. Wherever he moves he creates happiness. What type of religious man is he?His own relatives thought he was a little beside himself; his own relatives thought he was a little mad. The society in which he lived thought he was a glutton, a drunkard: “He could be a sinner, but he cannot be a saint.”That’s why he was crucified outside the town. The Jews had a law. They used to crucify in two ways: either inside the town or outside the town. When a person belonged to the society and had done something wrong, he was crucified in the town. At that time if somebody who had done wrong was an outsider, to symbolize the fact that he didn’t belong to the society, that he was an outcast, he was crucified outside the town.Jesus was crucified outside the town. Not only that: to emphasize the fact, two very dangerous criminals were crucified with him – one dangerous criminal on either side. He was crucified between these two just to emphasize the fact – to hit it hard into people’s minds – that he is just a criminal, a dangerous man, not at all respectable, an outcast. He had to be crushed like a worm, not like a man. What had he done? What sin had he committed? – the sin of being happy.That’s how I am condemned. People would have liked me if I had been a sad man. They would have liked me if I had been fasting and killing my body. They would have liked me if I had been teaching you a type of masochism: how to be cruel to yourself. They would have liked me, they would have praised me like anything; they would have called me an avatar.But I teach you to be alive, I teach you to be happy. I give you only one gospel: the gospel of joy and love. That is a crime. That is creating a dangerous situation. That is corrupting people.Jesus committed the crime of being happy. That was his only crime – nothing else.Christians have been trying to change his face. They say he never laughed. Can you think of a man who is always seen at dining tables, eating well, drinking – and not laughing? Impossible! But Christians had to create a respectable Christ, a Jesus who is not a criminal. They have painted his face. You can’t find any picture of Jesus depicted by Christians, any statue of Jesus created by Christians, that is real or true. It is absolutely unreal. The man has been betrayed.Just the other night I was reading a poem. I liked it. I would like you to listen to it. It is a poem by Adrian Mitchell.The Liberal Christ Gives an InterviewI would have walked on the waterBut I wasn’t fully insured.And the BMA sent a writ my wayWith the very first leper I cured.I would’ve preached a golden sermonBut I didn’t like the look of the mount.I would’ve fed fifty thousandBut the press wasn’t there to count.And the businessmen in the templeHad a team of coppers on the door.And if I’d spent a year in the desertI’d have lost my pension for sure.I would've turned the water into wineBut they weren’t giving licenses.And I would have died and been crucifiedBut like – you know how it is.I am going to shave off my beardAnd cut my hair,Buy myself some bullet-proofUnderwearI am the Liberal ChristAnd I’ve got no blood to spare.Christians have made him totally different. He was not like that. He was a rebellious man, a revolutionary, extraordinary. He lived it, he lived his rebellion. He was not a theoretician: he lived it, he died for it. He loved life so much that he was ready to die for it. But he was not ready to be anti-life. That was his crime.Even with John the Baptist and his disciples there was trouble. John the Baptist was an old, traditional prophet. His disciples were ascetics: fasting, praying. They were anti-life. There was conflict between Jesus and the disciples of John the Baptist. These sutras are about that conflict.Then came to him the disciples of John the Baptist, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not?”Why has fasting become so important? Why has brahmacharya, celibacy, become so important?There are two things on which life depends: food and sex. If you are anti-life, you will be against both food and sex because they are the very basis of life. Through food, you live. Through sex, the coming generations will live. If you fast, you will die. If you become a celibate, you cut the passage for the future generations to come. If celibacy and fasting become absolute, life will disappear from the earth. Those who are against life have praised fasting as a method, celibacy as a goal.The question is relevant: “Why do we, the disciples of the Baptist, often fast, and the rabbis and the Pharisees do the same, but why your disciples fast not?”People come to me too and they say, “Why don’t you teach people to fast?” I am always surprised. Why are people so concerned with food? If you study Gandhi’s life, his whole life he is concerned with food: food and the stomach. Eating and enema: these are continuously the two basic problems. Why is he so afraid of food?With food, a fear arises. The fear is of sex. If you eat well, sex energy will be created. If you don’t know how this energy can move upward in your being, it will start moving downward. If you don’t know how this energy can move like fire, it will move like water. So with food, the fear of sex arises.Go and see. In India there are many saints, particularly Jainas. Jainas have a great number of saints who are continuously fasting. The fear is of sex because if they eat well, energy is created. If energy is there, what will you do with it? You cannot laugh, you cannot dance, you cannot love. What will you do with this energy? This energy will become a heavy load on you. It is better not to create it.Fasting is trying not to create energy. You live at starvation level so a minimum of energy is created – and that is used by your day-to-day work. You never have any to spare. Even for a good laugh you will need energy, for dancing you will need energy. So live at the minimum because if energy is at the maximum, then joy will burst forth.If you don’t give sufficient water to a tree, if you don’t give sufficient manure, food, to a tree, the tree may remain there, but flowers will not come because flowers only come when the tree has energy to spare. Flowers are a luxury. When the tree has enough, more than enough, and it wants to share, then flowers come and the fragrance is released. That is the tree enjoying energy – too much of it. It would like to share it with the world. But when you don’t have enough, how can you share? The tree may live, but it will not be really green. It will be almost dying, always on the verge of death.People have learned the trick: if you fast, you can live life at the minimum. Then there is less danger. Anger will not be possible because anger needs energy. Love will not be possible; love needs energy. Joy will not be possible; joy needs energy. Life is a play of energy. Everything needs energy. So if you live at the minimum you are just alive enough, and death is always at hand.Remember: the Kingdom of God is at hand only when you live maximally, when you live an optimal life, when you live at the peak. Then the Kingdom of God is at hand. Those who are living at the minimum are suicidal people. They are not courageous enough – otherwise they would commit suicide in a second. They are cowards, committing suicide slowly, poisoning themselves very slowly. They will live, and they will not live at all.John the Baptist and his disciples were ascetics. They lived at the minimum. Jesus was thought by his brother-disciples, because he was also a disciple of John the Baptist, to be a traitor: “He has betrayed the master” because he started moving in a totally different dimension. He became the source of an alive religion. He started celebrating.That real Jesus is completely lost in the desert of Christian theology. He is completely lost. In the rubbish that Christian theology goes on producing in great quantity, the real gospel is completely lost and forgotten. The message of the man was to delight, because only that can be a prayer and gratefulness to God. Life should be a feast and not a fast.Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not?Jesus said unto them, “Can the children of the bride-chamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.”It is a very pregnant sutra. He is saying, “When the bridegroom is there, can the children of the bride-chamber mourn?” That will look absolutely foolish, absurd, neurotic. When the bridegroom is in the house, there is no question of mourning and fasting and being sad. The children of the bride-chamber will dance, feast and enjoy. The bridegroom is with them.“But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast.” Those days have come. Those days have been on the earth now for a long time, almost two thousand years. Churches are mourning: the bridegroom is no longer there. Popes are sad, bishops are not able to laugh. Their faces are almost dead: life frozen and stuck, flexibility gone. They simply go on repeating mechanically what Jesus has said.Jesus is saying that while religion is alive, there is no question of fasting. It is the time to feast and be grateful, and be thankful the bridegroom is with you. It is the time to dance and sing and go mad in sheer delight! Yes, the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken away, when Jesus will no longer be there. Then you can mourn and fast at your ease. Jesus is saying: “Because I am here, how can they be sad? When I am here, why should they fast? This is the time to rejoice!”Jesus says again and again “Rejoice!” He never says “renounce.” He says “rejoice.” The world is yours if you rejoice; the whole is yours if you are happy.The saying that says: “Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone” is true. In deep laughter, suddenly trees and birds and animals, and the sky and the earth, join together with you. It is an invitation, an opening. When you cry and moan, you are closed. Then you are not available to the sea and the sands, and the sea and the sands are not available to you. You have become a monad: windowless, doorless, everything closed in.A sad man is closed, completely closed to himself. His being is not expanding, his being is not like a river flowing toward the sea. He is a dead tank. He goes nowhere. The movement and the process of life has stopped.Jesus said unto them, “Can the children of the bride-chamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them?”While the religion is alive and young, don’t miss the chance because when the bridegroom is not with you, the days will be long. Then you can mourn and fast and do whatever you like.But this is the trouble. When Jesus is there, people kill him and when he is gone, they worship him. When Buddha is there, people throw stones at him; when he is gone, he is worshipped. This has always been so. Human stupidity is tremendous.When Jesus is gone, a totally different type of religion is created at his death – diametrically opposite to his being because those who create the religion when Jesus is gone are the sad people, people of the head, hung up in the head. They create, they gather together, they call conferences, they decide what Jesus was. They paint, repaint; the original face is completely lost. They take charge. When Jesus was there, these same people would never come close to him because he was not respectable enough.What misfortune: when Jesus is alive he is not respectable enough for these pundits, Pharisees, rabbis, to come and listen to him. They will not come; he is below them. They already know too much. But when the fragrance is gone, they immediately come to fill the vacuum, to fill the place that Jesus has left, because now they can discuss Jesus – what he meant and what he never meant. Now they can decide the whole character of Jesus. That character is going to be a caricature, it is going to be absolutely false, because these are the people who cannot understand him: the men of knowledge.The man of knowledge cannot understand Jesus. He can understand only scriptures, the dead word. Jesus is the word become flesh. It is alive, throbbing, living. The man of knowledge is expert only in postmortems. He can dissect the dead body, and then he creates something that is absolutely, diametrically opposite to the real man who was there. These people create Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism. Buddha is not the originator of Buddhism, and Christ is not the originator of Christianity.Christianity is created by the same type of people who crucified Jesus – the same type. They may not be exactly the same people, but they are the same type. Those who crucified him were the priests, and those who created Christianity were also the priests.It makes no difference whether the priest is a Jew or a Christian. These are only labels. It makes no difference. The priest is always against the alive, religious man. He is always for the dead because the dead can be manipulated by him. The alive Jesus won’t listen to a rabbi. The rabbi is afraid of the alive Jesus. He will never cross his path, he will try to avoid him. But when Jesus is dead, then those rabbis will gather together. They will create a church on his corpse.That’s what Jesus says: “Can the children of the bride-chamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast.” “When I am dead,” Jesus says, “when the freshness of religion is gone,” Jesus says, “then people will fast, they will mourn. But right now, fasting is irrelevant.”So remember this: when a religion is feasting, it is alive. Join it! When a religion is fasting, escape from it as fast as you can because it is not only dead, it will make you dead if you allow yourself to be close to it.“No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse.”Jesus says, “The traditional religion, the old religion, cannot celebrate.” Celebration is new, every moment new. It is never old. “No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment…”The new, fresh, young religion never fits with the tradition. It will fit someday – when the newness of it has gone and it has become a tradition itself, a dead past. Religion, alive, is a presence. It is in the present. A tradition is just a memory. Can you distinctly feel the difference? It has to be felt.You love a woman. The woman is there, you are there; love is flowing between you two. It is a presence. Something indefinable surrounds you: something you cannot catch hold of, something immaterial, something spiritual. Something of the other world has descended around you: you live in a totally different type of world. That moment is no longer a part of this world. You are transcended, transferred to an unknown dimension.But then the woman has gone, the love has gone, years have passed. Now it is just a memory. Sometimes you can ruminate about it, you can close your eyes and again see that moment of bliss. But now it is dusty; much dust has gathered upon it. Now it is no longer alive. You can feel, but that feeling is only feeling through the mind. It is not immediate.When the love was there, it was immediate. It was something you could have touched, something was there surrounding you. It was more alive than your own body and it was more vital than your own mind. But now it is just a memory.A flower: alive in the morning, welcoming the sun, dancing in the breeze – and by the evening the petals have withered, the fragrance is gone. A memory of something past. You cannot live it, you can only think about it. And that thinking can create a clinging to the past. That’s how tradition is born.Buddha lived two thousand five hundred years ago; Jesus, two thousand years ago; Krishna, maybe five thousand years ago. Something happened in the moment Jesus was here on the earth. Now it is only a memory: the flower has gone, the fragrance gone. Only the emptiness is left. And you go on worshipping that emptiness. You create temples around it, churches around it. You worship that emptiness. It is just a memory.What type of foolishness has settled in the human heart? When the flower is there, you avoid it, and when only the emptiness is left, then you worship. You are afraid of real religion. That’s why you become a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian. This is a trick of the mind, a deception. This is the way to avoid religion – because religion will transform you, religion will destroy you as you are, and religion will give you a new birth. Something unknown will come into existence through religion and you are afraid of that – of dying, of being reborn. So you belong to old traditions.Jesus says: “No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment…” The traditions are old, like old garments. Celebration is always new; it is never old. It is herenow. So religions that are dead go on fasting. They are ascetic. Religions that are new are celebrating. They have a type of spiritual hedonism around them.Have you read Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek? Read it! Jesus must have had something of the quality of Zorba the Greek: a tremendous capacity to enjoy life, an infinite trust in life, a deep attunement with the present. Kazantzakis’ novel, Zorba the Greek, has some quality of Jesus in it.Of course, the pope in the Vatican will be very offended if he comes to know I say Jesus has the quality of Zorba the Greek, but I say it. He has – I can’t help it – a spiritual hedonism.Allow me to coin the term “spiritual hedonism” because ordinarily you think of hedonism as very earthy. “Eat, drink, be merry” – that is earthy hedonism. That is there in spiritual hedonism, and more too. “Eat, drink, be merry” is there, plus God. “Eat, drink and be merry in the name of the holy, in the name of your God, your Father who is in heaven.”“Eat, drink, be merry” – make them your prayer. Let your eating and drinking and being merry be a sort of ritual, a sort of prayer, a gesture of happiness: “I am okay and I am happy you have given birth to me. I am happy that I am, and my whole thankfulness goes to you.”A spiritual hedonism is always there when religion is alive. When a religion becomes dead, hedonism disappears completely and the religion becomes antagonistic to everything that man can enjoy. Then religion goes on seeking ways and means of how to be sad, how to be more and more sorrowful, how to kill all avenues of delight and joy. Then it becomes ascetic.“Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.”Only a new religion – just born, fresh, original – can celebrate. Then celebration fits with it: can love, can trust, can enjoy.“Neither do men put new wine into old bottles…” a very enigmatic answer. They had asked, “Why don’t your disciples fast?” and Jesus answered in a very indirect way because there are things that can only be said in an indirect way. You cannot indicate them directly.I was staying with a friend…He had a beautiful child, a young boy, just eight or nine years old. He was playing outside in the garden and I was watching him. He was running after butterflies, collecting flowers, rolling on the grass and enjoying the wetness of the grass and the dewdrops. And the gardener was cutting the hedge, and the freshly cut hedge was giving a beautiful fragrance to the whole garden. The boy was jumping and dancing and running around in sheer delight.Then he went inside. The mother asked, “Where have you been?”He said, “Out.”“What have you been doing?”He said, “Nothing.”Then I called him and I said, “That’s not right. You have been doing so many things and you say you have been doing nothing.”He said, “That’s why I say ‘nothing.’ Those things cannot be said. The fragrance…”Yes, I understood his point. The fragrance that was filling his nostrils – how can you say it? And when he was rolling on the grass, the touch of the grass, and the dewdrops clinging to his body and a subtle coldness and the freshness… How can you say it? And running after butterflies… What happens in the mind of a child when he runs after butterflies? How can it be said? And the sun, and the showering of light… How can you say it, what happens in the heart?Yes, I understood his point. He avoided. He said, “Out.” When his mother insisted, “What were you doing?” he said, “Nothing.” But he was doing so many things that there was no other way to say it. Only “nothing” can cover it, and only “out” – a blanket word that covers many things. “Out.” The whole world is included. “Out” – the sun, the trees, the butterflies, the grass, the dewdrops. And these are the outer things. What was happening inside the child? The sheer delight, for no visible reason. Just happiness. How to say it?When Jesus was asked, “Why do your disciples fast not?” – how to say it? He asks: “Can the children of the bride-chamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them?” He answers with another question.“But the days will come, when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and then shall they fast. No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse. Neither do men put new wine into old bottles else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.” Very indirect, but it gives you the right clue. There are things that cannot be said directly. They are so vital that you have to go around them. They are like live wires; you cannot touch them directly – that will be dangerous. Hence, Jesus goes on talking in parables.Once Adolf Hitler said, “I cannot see why man should not be as cruel as nature.” Why should man not be as cruel as nature? And in a way, man has been as cruel as nature, or even more. Sometimes you are cruel with others; sometimes you are cruel with yourself. These are the ordinary categories into which the whole of humanity can be divided. Rarely does a man come who is neither cruel to others nor to himself. That is the man I call the man of God, the godman.It is very easy to change from one extreme to another. Ordinarily, people are cruel to others: violent, aggressive. Then that violence toward others, that cruelty toward others, has to be paid for deeply because when you are violent to others, they will be violent to you. You cannot go on being aggressive to others; the violence will return. It is dangerous, it is costly. Even an Adolf Hitler or a Napoleon has to pay for it. They die the death of sheer violence that is returning to them, falling upon them.Spit in the sky and it falls on you; dig a ditch for the other and someday you fall into it yourself. So the cunning and calculating minds understood the fact that to be violent with others is very costly and dangerous – but they want to be violent and they want to be cruel. Cruelty is deep down in their bones, in their animality – so what to do?The best and the most diplomatic way is to be violent with yourself. Then there will be no revenge taken. So the ordinary man is violent toward others, and your so-called saints are violent toward themselves. They are simply more calculating, and cowards, escapists. But they are violent toward themselves.Do you know there was a sect of Christians – they still exist; they are not so prominent now, but they still exist – who used to flog themselves every day in the morning, beat their own bodies? Blood started flowing. That was their prayer – as if God was hungry for their blood, as if God was thirsty for their blood. What type of God did they have in mind? Some murderer, some murderous power?No, they were sacrificing themselves. They were trying to show God: “Look, we are not happy. We are very unhappy. Have mercy on us.” That was their prayer: “We are so sad. Look, blood is flowing. And we are in such deep misery. Have mercy on us.” But I tell you, God’s mercy is available only to those who are happy.Jesus says one of the most enigmatic sentences: “If you have, more will be given to you. And if you don’t have, even that should be taken away from you.” Nobody has said it in that way. Jesus is simply incomparable: “If you don’t have anything, even that should be taken away from you. And if you really have something, more will be given to you.”It looks very anti-communist, but it is tremendously true, absolutely true, because when you are happy, more happiness becomes available; when you are unhappy, more unhappiness becomes available. When you are happy, you get more. Doors open, God’s mercy is on you. He loves those who dance, those who come singing. Those who come with complaints – with sad faces, blood flowing – they cannot be loved. They have not even been able to love themselves. How can God love them? They have missed. They could not love themselves. How can God love them?Remember this: if you cannot love yourself, nobody can love you. Forget about God – even ordinary human beings will not love you. First you should love yourself. Only then will others love you. And you should love yourself so infinitely, so totally, that not even a little bit of hatred about yourself, toward yourself, is left. Only then do God’s love and mercy become available.He loves those who love themselves tremendously. He is a lover of lovers, and his grace descends on you when you are dancing and not standing in the posture of a martyr. That is one of the ugliest postures one can take. Never try to become a martyr. Jesus is something else.Christians have been martyrs, flogging themselves. In Russia, there was a Christian community – a big community before the revolution – who used to cut off their genital organs as a sacrifice to God. What type of sacrifice is this? What are they saying? They are saying, “God, look! We cut off our genital organs as a symbolic act, to show we are no longer interested in life, in love, in happiness. We are no longer interested in any ecstasy.” And they will fast, they will pray.God loves life. He creates life every moment. God is not against life; he is the innermost core of life. Love life. You have an expression in English: “Live your lives out.” I would like to change it a little. I would like to say: “Love your lives out.” Don’t just live your lives out – that is very poor. Love your lives out. Be a flame, and burn from both ends. If you can burn from both ends – even for a single moment – and flow in love in all directions, immediately you will enter the divine. This I call spiritual hedonism. Jesus is a spiritual hedonist.Always watch your attitudes because there is every possibility the ascetic may be hidden within you. And always watch your attitudes because from those attitudes and your awareness of them, clues will come to you that will open many doors.For example, if somebody is sad, in pain, suffering, sympathy is very easy. You are full of sympathy. But if somebody is happy, in great pleasure, what happens? You cannot sympathize with someone who is happy. You feel jealous. Maybe it is the same person: he has won the lottery, and you feel very jealous. And then his wife dies, and he is robbed, the lottery is gone – and you are so full of sympathy. What is happening? Why are you so sympathetic toward sadness?You must get a certain hidden pleasure from it. You are violent. You are never sympathetic with somebody’s happiness, and you are always sympathetic with somebody’s unhappiness. You must have some hidden pleasure.When somebody is unhappy, deep down you feel very good that it has happened to him, “not to me,” and you have the upper hand. You can be sympathetic, it costs nothing. But can you dance with somebody who is happy? Can you be really happy in somebody’s happiness? Many times you have been sad in people’s sadness, but can you be really happy when people are happy? Yes, you pretend – but you know. You smile and you say, “Good. God has been merciful to you,” but deep down you are jealous.You can be in sympathy with happiness only if you yourself know how to be happy. You don’t know; you are miserable, a miserable lot. So whenever somebody is in more misery than you, you feel a little happy – comparatively. He is in even darker depths. You feel better. At least you are a little happier than that man.But whenever somebody is happy, you feel in the depths. He is at the peak: you feel jealous. Jealousy will never go unless you become really happy. And your sympathy is false, your sympathy is immoral, because it has a deep down pleasure in it, in somebody else’s misery.Remember these things: a religious person is one who is so happy that he will never be able to feel jealous. He is so happy that he lacks nothing: “I cannot see how I can be jealous of anybody. Impossible! I am so happy. More is not possible.” If more is not possible then how can you be jealous?People try not to be jealous. That is not possible. Be happy and you will be non-jealous. Be happy and you will be non-ambitious. Be happy and the ego will disappear. The ego can exist only in deep unhappiness and misery. It is a dweller in hell, it abides only in hell.Go and watch your own life. When you say “God,” what do you mean? Do you know any other God than the green trees and the red flowers, and the clouds floating in the sky, and the sunlight, and the moon in the night and the silent stars? Do you know any other God? And the heart within, and the hearts without – do you know any other God? The whole is God, the only God. But the religious people, the so-called religious, have created a God against life. They say, “Renounce life! Only then can you attain God.” Jesus says, “Live life as a prayer. Love life as God’s own.”Love life; move into life, deeper and deeper, and at the deepest core, suddenly one day you will find God is. He is beating in every heart, and he is flowering in every flower, and he is hidden in every stone. But the religions have done a horrible thing, made a horrible mess. They have put everything upside down.When Ho Chi Minh was alive, he used to say to every American visitor, “Tell me. Is the Statue of Liberty still standing in America? And don’t be shy,” he used to say, “please tell me, because I have suspicions. Even if it is standing, it must be standing on its head.”All the churches are standing on their heads, and all the so-called religions are upside down. God is not important. If God is against life, then God is just a concept, just an abstraction, an empty word. It has no flesh in it, it has no blood in it, it has no warmth in it. It is just a cold, abstract concept.Pascal, one of the greatest thinkers of the West, once had a dream. In the dream he received a message. He woke up: the dream was so deeply stirring. He got up immediately, and he wrote the message he had received in his notebook.When he read the message in the morning, it was of tremendous import. He sewed it into his coat. For his whole life it was sewed in his coat. Many times, when he was walking on the road or talking to somebody, he would just look, then close his coat again. It was a very simple sentence. It was: “I don’t want the God of philosophers. I want the God of David, Abraham, and Jacob”: the God of life, not of philosophy; the God of the ordinary man, not of the extraordinary egoists.The God of Jacob, Abraham, and David – the God of those who love life and live life – is the real God. The God who is against life is a counterfeit. Any temple that is against life is a counterfeit. Beware of it! The temple that enshrines life itself as God is the only true temple.Jesus replied rightly. And if you can see life as God, then you are always in the bride-chamber. Then the bridegroom is always, and always, and always there. If you can see life as God, then the bridegroom will never leave you. That God expressed himself through Jesus; that God expressed himself through Krishna. He danced through Krishna, he played on the flute through Krishna. That God sometimes penetrates and comes to the marketplace, but you don’t recognize him because you have a counterfeit god.I have heard…Once it happened a man took his grandmother to a great art exhibition. There, she saw for the first time a real painting, an authentic painting, by Vincent van Gogh. She looked at the painting and laughed.The man asked, “Why are you laughing? Do you like this painting?”She said, “This is a copy. I have had a calendar hanging on my wall for almost twenty years, and this is just a copy of it.”The calendar was a copy of the painting. It was the true, authentic painting, but she laughed and said, “Why are these ordinary things being shown here? This painting has been hanging in my room for twenty years.”If you are too influenced by the counterfeit, you will miss the real. If your eyes become too filled with the counterfeit, when the real encounters you, you may not even be able to recognize it. God is life and there is no other God. God is you, me, and all – and there is no other God. Celebrate, rejoice that God is there in everything: every pebble and every leaf, full of God; every drop of water, full of God. When you are thirsty, God is thirsty within you. And when you drink cold water, it is God flowing within your being, it is God who will quench your thirst. The thirst is God, the quenching is God, the water that quenches is God. All is God.What is there to renounce? For what reason should you fast? Celebrate and dance! A real religion is celebration. A false religion is renunciation.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Roses are redViolets are bluish,If it wasn't for JesusWe'd all be Jewish.Please comment.We still are. Jesus could not succeed. To be Jewish has nothing to do with any race; it is an attitude. To be Jewish means to be calculating, to be under the world of law and not love. To be Jewish means not to be poetic, but to be arithmetical. To be Jewish means not to be in awe of the wonder that surrounds you.It is not just accidental this whole century has been dominated by three Jews: Marx, Freud, and Einstein – because the world is materialistic. It has never been as materialistic as it is now. One Jew, Marx, invented the idea that life is nothing but economics. That’s what I mean by calculation. Even religion is economics, even poetry is economics. Marx says even consciousness depends on economic situations, it is a by-product: consciousness is a by-product of economic situations, the structure of the society. Marx is the perfect Jew: you cannot find a better specimen!Then Freud tried to invent the idea that the whole of life moves according to unconscious laws, instincts: there is no conscious event in human life; everything is dominated by the unconscious. He was a fatalist.Fatalism is also an idea that the world is run by dead rules. To Marx, it is economics that rules everything. To Freud, it is unconscious instinct that rules everything. Then Einstein tried to invent the idea the whole of life is nothing but a combination of atoms. All three are calculators.To be a Jew has nothing to do with the Jewish race. There are Jews who are Hindus, there are Jews who are Jainas, there are Jews who are Buddhists. The Jew is an attitude.Christ has not succeeded: Christians are Jews! Christ can succeed only when law is defeated by love, when matter is defeated by spirit, when language is defeated by silence, when prose is defeated by poetry, when life is not ruled by economic, instinctive, historical laws, but life is ruled by grace. Then Jesus succeeds.So don’t think you are not Jews. Out of a hundred people, ninety-nine percent are Jews. Only sometimes one person is not Jewish. That person lives a life of love. He has nothing to force his life into, no pattern. He lives moment to moment; he flows from one moment to another moment – with no idea of where he is going, with no goal.Then freedom happens. And only in freedom is there consciousness, and only in freedom is there godliness. Godliness is total freedom. If you live moment to moment – not knowing where you are going, not knowing from where you are coming – if the past is irrelevant and the future also, and only the present has any relevance, any reality, you go beyond being Jewish.Everybody is born a Jew. Rarely, very rarely, somebody dies and dies not as a Jew. That is a rare blessing. Just by calling yourselves Christians nothing is changed. Only labels change. The container changes but the content remains the same.Jesus has failed, but not because his revolution was not worthy of success. Jesus has failed because his revolution was too much for you. It was beyond you. Just to look that far away, that high, is impossible. Your eyes are fixed on the earth; you have completely forgotten the sky. And because you have forgotten the sky, you have forgotten you have wings. Looking down, groping in the darkness of the earth, you have become creepers, like a snake. You are no longer birds, birds of heaven.Jesus failed because you are so deep in unconsciousness. And Jesus will go on failing. His very effort is such that success is almost impossible. As far as society is concerned, he may never succeed. Only with individuals is success possible.Hence, all those who have known… Ask the awakened: Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, Zarathustra. You will always find their insistence is on the individual. They know well that at the most you can expect a few individuals to rise high. The greater part of humanity will do everything it can to save its bondage, to remain secure in its imprisonment, to remain comfortable and live somehow – dragging life as a burden – and die somehow. The greater mass will not listen, will not understand, will not try to transform themselves. Religion is individual.And religion has no names. Whenever somebody becomes religious, immediately he is no longer a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian. He is simply religious. It is an understanding: it is a different kind of knowing, a different way of seeing. And when you see differently, you see a different reality. The reality depends on your eyes. If your eyes change, the reality changes.If you are calculating, you will never be able to know more than matter because calculation has its limitations. If you are too arithmetical, you will never be able to know that which is beauty, that which is good, that which is true. You will never be able to know because calculation cannot lead to that.How can you know a beautiful flower by being arithmetical? You can count the petals, but you will miss the beauty. You can count the parts, but you will miss the whole. And you are certain to miss the beauty that surrounds the flower, that exists like a climate around the flower – but cannot be caught hold of by counting the petals. You have to forget counting, you have to forget the mind that counts.The mind is Jewish. Once you go beyond mind you enter a different world: the world that cannot be accounted for, that cannot be explained, that is a mystery and remains a mystery. The deeper you go into it, the greater the mystery. The more you know, the less you know. And there comes a moment… When you really know it, you know only one thing – that you don’t know.The second question:Osho,Today I wanted to dance as you were speaking. And you even mentioned Kazantzakis, whom I love. But I feel inhibited to dance, even though I was sitting in the back. This place feels conservative to me, but probably I didn't dance because of my own conservatism. Is this a question?Not at all – it is a confession.This place is not conservative. But you are all conservative, and you make this place. It is not mine, it is yours. If it were mine, it wouldn’t be conservative. But I am alone and I cannot make it. I am a stranger here. It consists of you, and you are conservative. This place becomes conservative: it cannot go beyond you because you are the constituent parts. It is the total of your conservatisms.But who bothers? If you are really in a state of dance, who bothers? Then you can dance, even on the road. Maybe the police will come and take you to prison, but that’s okay. What can you do? If you can stop the dance, then it is not worth doing. It must have been a mind game; it must have been just an idea, an idea in the mind that you would like to dance – but not really.When dance happens, it is not an idea in the mind, not at all. It is a tremendous energy in the body. It has its own force. You are possessed, you cannot do anything. You forget this place, you forget the society, you forget the world. You are helpless, you are possessed by dance. Then something from the beyond enters.It must have been just an idea in the mind. That’s why you stopped it. Ideas can be stopped, but when you are possessed, you cannot do anything about it. It happens; it is not done. And then it is divine when it happens. When you do it, it is human and ordinary.It is not a question. It is a confession.And you say you love Kazantzakis. That too may be just an idea in the mind because people love things that they lack in their life. Reading Zorba the Greek you may love Zorba, but if you met Zorba, you might not like him because he will be such a totally different, altogether different, being than you. Even Kazantzakis was never at ease with Zorba. They were friends. Zorba was a real person: he is not just in a novel. Even Kazantzakis was very uneasy with him because he was a totally different type of man – absolutely hedonistic, absolutely in the moment. Nothing else mattered except happiness.Of course it looks very selfish. Only sad people look unselfish. Happy people always look selfish, and happy people are always condemned because the whole society is unhappy. “How do you dare to be happy? When everybody is so unhappy, you must be very selfish to be happy. Don’t smile when everybody is weeping and crying, and don’t laugh. Life is very miserable, and it looks unmannerly.”A man like Zorba will never be accepted in any home. You will not allow him to stay with you because his very presence will be a disturbance. He does not believe in any morality. He knows only one morality: happiness.And I say to you, that is the only morality there is. All else is rubbish because only a happy person can be moral, only a happy person is not interested in making others unhappy, only a happy person creates an atmosphere around him where others can also be happy. But those others will not like the idea of your being happy when they are miserable.You may have loved Zorba, but you won’t allow Zorba to become a guest in your home. He is unreliable. Such happy people are dangerous. You can rely on sad, dead people: they will not escape with your wife! Zorba can. He lives in the moment. He has no future, no past, no heaven, no hell. He is very true to the real moment.But you may have loved him. This happens, this has to be understood. You always love the opposite. The opposite attracts you – but only in fantasy. In reality it will be troublesome. People who have never loved go on reading poetry about love. Sometimes they even try to write poetry about love. This has been my observation. I have come across many poets; they have missed love in life so they go on writing poetry about it. That’s a substitute: very pale, useless, but still a little satisfying. At least something is here. Plastic flowers, but they look like flowers. Love is dangerous. To write poetry about love has no danger in it.Watch: if somebody is reciting a poem on love you may welcome him, but if the man really moves into love then the society will condemn him. Read the story of Laila and Majnu, or Shiri and Farhad, and you will love it. But the people who were alive in the days of Majnu hated the man – because who loves a lover? Try to be a lover and you will be condemned by the society. Write poetry about it and maybe the president will give you an award; you may get the Nobel Prize. No lover ever gets a Nobel Prize. People who write poetry about love get Nobel Prizes.Man has become afraid of the real; but about the phony, there is no danger in it. Have you watched this? Sometimes you are sitting in your room or in your house and reading or doing something, and somebody knocks at the door. You feel very bad. Now somebody has come to disturb you. You don’t even like to answer; you would like to avoid it. You don’t go yourself: you send the servant to the door, or your child, to tell the person: “Daddy is not at home.” But if somebody gives you a call on the phone, then you are not disturbed. Then you immediately take the phone in your hand because the reality is so far away.Sometimes it has happened that a thief has entered somebody’s house and has been caught, and caught because of an old habit. The phone was ringing and he could not resist it. He had to answer: a phone has to be answered! So he took the phone in his hand and he was caught. And when he was asked, “Why did you bother?” he said, “I completely forgot I was a thief in the house. When the phone rings, one has to answer.”A man was doing some research work on this phenomenon. He called twenty public phones and somebody or the other answered. Then he inquired of a man: “Why did you answer? It was not for you.”He said, “I was just passing.”“Then why did you answer?”He said, “But the phone was ringing!”It has a certain power. When the phone rings you have to answer. It is a certain quality, something like hypnosis. It is not your concern, and it is certain it is not ringing for you. It is a public phone: you are passing by the way, you are going to your office. It is certainly not ringing for you – so why?When the reality is far away, it is very easy to answer. When the reality comes nearer, it becomes more and more difficult. The greatest difficulties of life are concerned with the people who are very real to you and very near to you: your wife, your children, your husband – very close. They are real. There is the trouble.You may have liked Zorba. Even Kazantzakis liked the man – when he was not with him! But when they lived together, it was really difficult because sometimes he will come drunk and will start dancing and will dance the whole night. And he was a powerful man, very strong. When you live with such a man, it will be difficult unless you yourself are such a man.Don’t create substitutes. That’s a trick of the mind to deceive you. Love the real, don’t love the phony. It is better to love than to write poetry on love because love will transform you, love will give you insight. Love will give you insight into the human heart: into your own and the other’s. Through love there will be many unhappy moments, anguish, but there will be peaks of joy also. And that’s how one grows: through the night of anguish, then through the day of joy. One moves through the duality. It is a dialectical process.Just reading poetry about love is so convenient, but don’t think that you really love. It is very easy because nothing is at stake.Leo Tolstoy has written in one of his memoirs that when he was a small child his mother used to go to the theater. They were very rich people: they belonged to the royal family. In Moscow the snow would be falling – a winter’s night – and the mother and her child would be in the theater. And Tolstoy remembers that whenever there was a tragedy his mother would weep and cry and sob, and tears would flow down.Tolstoy used to think, “What deep compassion she has!” But later on, by and by, he became aware she had no compassion at all. This was a substitute.Then they came out of the theater, and the driver sitting on the buggy and waiting for them was dead, frozen in the ice. He could not leave the buggy. He had to be there: any moment they might come. He was dead, frozen in ice, and Tolstoy’s mother wouldn’t pay even a single bit of attention to him. The man would be thrown out, thrown away, another man would be called and they would move. And she would not weep or cry.Tolstoy says, “Then I became aware her compassion was phony. It was a trick.”It is very easy to cry in the theater because nothing is involved. It is very easy to cry while looking at a movie: everybody cries at the movies. But to cry in life is difficult because then something is involved.If you cry for this man who is dead, your driver, then next time you will have to change your lifestyle. Then, if it is snowing too much, you will not go to the theater. Or you will make arrangements for the driver to sit somewhere, or you will make arrangements for better clothing. But that will affect your style of life.Who bothers about the real man? People cry when they read novels, when they see a movie, when they go to the theater. But in real life their eyes are simply vacant, empty. No tears come.Remember this: if you really love Zorba, you will become a Zorba; if you love Jesus, you will become Jesus. This is one of the fundamental laws of life. If you love somebody, if you love something, by and by the object of your love transforms you and you become alike.Have you observed it? Sometimes you come across a couple, a wife and husband, who look alike. They talk in the same way, they walk in the same way, they smile in the same way – a deep affinity. What has happened? They are not brother and sister, so why are they so alike? They love each other and they love deeply. When you love somebody you are vulnerable. Then the other changes you and you go on changing the other. If wives and husbands really love each other, by the time life comes to an end they will be almost alike. It has to be so. Love transforms.The theater and movies and novels and poetry will not transform you much. In fact, they are ways of avoiding the transformation. They are ways of how not to look at life and live in fantasy.This is not a question. This is a confession. If you had really wanted to dance, who can prevent you? And when that type of dance happens, who would like to prevent you? When you are possessed and it is not a mind thing…Next time you are possessed, don’t be worried about this place. Let them do whatever they want to do. It is not your business to be worried about it. Dance, but remember, this should not be a mind thing – otherwise you will simply create a disturbance.Be possessed. When you are possessed, the dance is holy.The third question:Osho,You said, “If there were no reformers, the world would be a more natural and beautiful place.” Then why is this place so full of reformers?To reform the reformers!The world is full of reformers – what to do? They have to be reformed. I am training people who can reform the reformers.The question is not signed. The person who has asked this must be afraid. You should not be afraid. You should sign your question so I know exactly in whose mind this question is arising, because I don’t answer the question, I answer the questioner. The question is useless if you are afraid even to sign it. If you don’t want to reveal your identity, your whole heart is not in the question.Why do you try to deceive? Even if the question is foolish, you have to show your identity because you are not here to hide yourself. You are here to expose yourself, to expose yourself to me so I can change you. If you go on hiding, then how can I change you? If you are foolish, it’s okay. Be foolish, but let it be exposed. If you are dark, don’t be afraid. Open the doors – otherwise from where will the light enter?Here, there is not going to be any argument or discussion. I am not interested in any discussion or any argument. If I say something to you, I say it not as an argument, not for any argument’s sake. I am not trying to defend any dogma, any religion, any scripture. I have none – no dogma, no scripture, no religion – to defend. I am trying to create a communion between you and me. But if you are hiding, you will miss.Always reveal your identity. And don’t try to polish the question because that, too, I feel. You make the question, you polish it; you try to make it in such a way so it looks very sophisticated, very cultured. The more you polish it, the further away from your reality it is. Let it be raw so it is close to your heart.If your question itself has gone very far away from your heart, then how is my answer going to be close to you? My answer will hit the question and you will be very far away from it. Let it be raw like a wound so I can hit it directly. It will hurt. That is why you try to push it away from you. But if you are so afraid of being hurt, then the surgery I am trying to do will not be possible.It is a surgery. You have a very ill mind, a cancerous growth in the mind. It has to be operated upon. It will hurt, it will certainly hurt, but that hurt is beneficial because once it hurts and the growth is removed, you will be healthy and whole. So don’t try to hide. Be true.Remember: you can move to the other extreme. You can try to look very raw. That won’t help. Just be yourself.The fourth question:Osho,While in one place Christ asks his disciples to carry their crosses every day, in another he bids them to celebrate his presence as that of a bridegroom. Why this contradiction?There is none. It only appears to be a contradiction.Every moment one has to remember death because any moment it is possible. That is the meaning of “to carry the cross every day.” You should not forget death. Once you forget death you relapse into unconsciousness. If you remember death you remain alert, awake.But when we say “remember death,” we don’t mean you should become oppressed by the idea, obsessed by the idea. We don’t mean you should create a deep fear about death and tremble continuously. That will be morbid, that will be a perversion.There are two types of perverted people in relationship with death. One: those who have completely forgotten, or try to forget, that death is. They try to avoid it. They do not even like to talk about death. If you start talking with them about death, they will think you are uncivilized, unmannerly. They will avoid the very topic. They will not go to the cemetery. That’s why cemeteries are built outside a town, so nobody comes across them accidentally. Only when one has to go, only then: otherwise you can avoid it.Death is a taboo subject, more taboo than sex. Nobody talks about it – and everybody knows it is coming. Humanity lives in a great deception. This is one morbidity.Then there is another morbidity. You can move to the other extreme and you can become obsessed with death. You can constantly tremble and not sleep in the night, because who knows? You may not get up in the morning. And you cannot eat well, because how can you eat well? Death is coming. You cannot love, because how can you love anybody when everybody is going to die? That too is morbid; that too is a perversion.Jesus says, “Carry your cross every day.” He says to remember death and still let every moment be a celebration of life. Death is coming. That is an even deeper reason to celebrate, because who knows? This may be the last moment.This moment of life should not to be destroyed by the fear of death. But against death, in contrast to death, this moment has to be celebrated even more deeply, because who knows? – the next moment we may not be here. And while the bridegroom is here, celebrate it.The parable of the bridegroom can become a very inner thing. Within you, the body is the body of death and your consciousness is life – the source of life. You are both. Your body is going to die. It belongs to the earth: “dust unto dust.” It will have to go, it will return to its source. You belong to the sky, you belong to God. Your consciousness is separate from your body. This is the meaning of Jesus on the cross. Everybody is on the cross because consciousness lives in the body and the body is death.If you understand, everybody is on the cross, but death should not become a pessimism. On the contrary, death should be all the more a cause for celebration. The bridegroom is within you and the body is the chamber of the bridegroom. Celebrate it!Jesus is not contradictory. Jesus is simply plain. The contradiction is in life itself: life exists through death and death exists through life. Life itself is the paradox – but that is also the beauty. All beauty exists in contrast, and life exists as a tension between opposites. It is a bridge built on two banks: death and life.Celebrate every moment because this may be the last moment. But while celebrating, don't forget that death is coming, that death comes. Remember!Remembrance should not become an obsession. Remembrance should become a celebration. Carry the cross, but carry it dancing. Carry the cross, but carry it singing. Carry the cross, but carry it with a deep celebration within. Then you live both: you live life, you live death, and you live both deeply and intensely. And when you can live both intensely, they become one. Then you know that life and death are two aspects of the same thing, of the same energy. Life is expression, manifestation. Death is a returning.The fifth question:Osho,Would you define and discuss the nature of consciousness? How does consciousness relate to ego? Is consciousness the creative principle? That is, could you say, “In the beginning was consciousness” as equally as “In the beginning was the word or the logos”? How does consciousness relate to God?In the beginning was the word, or the logos. The same cannot be said about consciousness because in the beginning unconsciousness was also there. Consciousness is just a part of your reality, the reality of the inner. Unconsciousness is also there. So there was not just consciousness in the beginning. Unconsciousness was also there, as much as consciousness. Or you can say that in the beginning something was there in which both consciousness and unconsciousness are involved.That is the meaning of God. God is not only consciousness: God is consciousness plus unconsciousness. God is both the dark night and the bright day; both summer and winter; both life and death. God is both the beginning and the end. God is beyond duality. And the duality is intrinsic in him: he is both matter and mind, the manifest and the unmanifest.Consciousness is just a part of the great oceanic unconsciousness. Consciousness is just on the surface. Deeply hidden are layers and layers of unconsciousness. One has to transcend both to know that which was in the beginning, which is God.“Would you define and discuss the nature of consciousness? How does consciousness relate to ego?” One part of you is conscious: one tenth. Nine tenths of you is unconscious. If the conscious part thinks itself to be the whole, it becomes the ego. Then it forgets about the unconscious; then the part imagines itself to be the whole. Then it is the ego.The conscious becoming aware of the unconscious – that is the whole effort of religion, that is the whole effort of meditation. If the conscious turns back, looks back, and also becomes aware of the unconscious – the dark night within – then the conscious knows, “I am conscious. I am also unconscious, and my consciousness is just a wave on the ocean. The unconscious is vast.” Then the ego disappears. The ego is the part thinking itself to be the whole. Non-ego is the part becoming aware of the whole. Then the ego disappears.How to define the nature of consciousness? It has never been defined, it will never be defined, because who will define it? To define it you have to be away from it. To define anything, you have to stand outside it, you need a distance. The perspective will not be possible if the distance is not there.You are consciousness, you are unconsciousness. There is nobody who can stand outside and define it. You can know it but you cannot define it. That’s why all religion is mysterious, mystical, vague, cloudy – because no term that is very basic to religion can be defined.The subject cannot be made an object. I cannot put myself in front of myself, so I cannot define. Neither has Buddha defined, nor Jesus. Definition as such is debarred by the very nature of the phenomenon. Everything else can be defined because consciousness is the definer. Everything else is before consciousness. The consciousness can know, go around, watch, observe, experiment, define, dissect – but who will define consciousness? You cannot get further away from it. You are it. You can know it, but you cannot define it. Knowledge is not possible, only knowing.I can help you to create a meditative state where you can know what it is, I can give you the method, but I cannot give you the definition. That’s why religion always looks a little suspicious. “Why don’t you define your terms? Just do as science does: define! If you cannot define your terms, that simply shows you don’t know what you are talking about.”A great linguist and positivist philosopher, A. J. Ayer, says that if we take two terms, “God” and “dog” the second is true and the first is false because nobody can define God. The word is meaningless. God cannot be defined. Dog can be defined. Dog is more meaningful than God.If you insist on definitions, then only things can be defined; persons cannot be defined. Laws can be defined; love cannot be defined. Gravitation can be defined, but grace – grace cannot be defined. That which is without is definable; that which is within is elusive. One has to understand it and move into meditations.Buddha says that buddhas can only show you the way: you have to move. One day you come upon the goal. Nobody can give you the goal beforehand. Not even a definition is possible. And it is good a definition is not possible, otherwise you will settle with the definition, you will settle with the information and you will never travel, you will never journey to the goal. Sometimes it happens the very map you were thinking to use for the journey becomes the barrier. You become satisfied with the map itself.I was reading a very rare autobiography of a man who belonged to a very primitive race in the Amazon. He was the son of the chief and his father was a great lover of the Amazon River and had moved to the very source of the river.Then this boy, the son of the chief, went to America. Some missionaries helped him to go. He studied there, became a graduate, and came back home.Thinking, “My father loves the Amazon so much, he would be very happy if I brought him a map, a detailed map, of the Amazon,” he purchased the best map available and brought it to his father.He thought his father would be very happy, but he looked at the map and he was very sad and he threw the map away. The son was very hurt. “I have brought a gift, a present, and my father has thrown it away. Why?”He asked his father. The father said, “This is absolutely bogus, because I don’t see the Amazon anywhere. How can the Amazon exist on paper? You are a fool and you are deceiving me. I have moved with the Amazon and I know what it is. “Don’t be deceived by this map. There are only lines there.”Definitions of God are maps, lines on paper. Definitions of consciousness are maps – and sometimes people get too obsessed with maps. The best way to be lost is to have a map. You cannot fail. If you have a really detailed map, you will be lost in it and the mind will think, “Now I know everything.” The living Amazon is beautiful, dangerous, terrible. At any moment life is at stake. With the map – conveniently sitting in your easy chair – you can study it and you can “know” all about the Amazon!In the world outside you, maps have a little relevance, but in the inside world they are absolutely irrelevant. If you have any maps, throw them away. All the religions have given you maps: throw them away! Enough of maps – now let there be a real journey.When you attain your consciousness, you will laugh at the stupidity of the mapmakers. Then you will know they have never been to the innermost source of life: they have been copying other mapmakers. For centuries they have been copying, and they go on adding their own fantasy and their own ideas. They go on changing and decorating.All maps are false because the innermost remains indefinable. There is no need to define. Consciousness is there within you. Return, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Why be bothered by the definition? When the thing, the real thing, is so close, why not taste it?When the river is flowing, you ask me about the definition of water. And I know you are thirsty, and I know the definition cannot quench the thirst. But you say, “Unless water is defined, how can I drink the water?” I can’t see the point. If people had just waited for the definition, and only then had their thirst been quenched, humanity would have disappeared long ago because water is still indefinable. Don’t be befooled by what scientists say. They may say water is H20 – two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen – but when the scientist is thirsty, give him oxygen and hydrogen to drink. Then he will know, and he will say, “What are you doing? Have you gone mad? Water quenches thirst, not two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen.”Mulla Nasruddin’s son came back from the university. He was studying logic there and he had become a great philosopher, as everybody is prone to become in youth. Youth is foolish, and to become a philosopher is easy. He was very interested in showing his knowledge. Fresh from the university, everybody is.They were sitting at the dining table and his mother brought in two apples. Seeing an opportunity, Mulla Nasruddin’s son said, “Mummy, I will show you something I have learned. What do you see on this plate?”The mother said, “Two apples.”He said, “No! Logic says something else. There are three apples, not two.”The poor mother looked again, but there were two apples. She said, “What do you mean?”He said, “Look. Watch. This apple is one. This apple is two. How many are one plus two?”The mother said, “Of course, one plus two is three.”The son was very happy. Mulla Nasruddin was watching. He said, “Good, very good. I will eat one and your mother will eat two. You eat the third!”But you cannot eat logic, you cannot eat science, you cannot eat philosophy. And religion is concerned with quenching your thirst. Religion is concerned with your hunger – not with definitions, maps.The sixth question:Osho,You said, “We are not doing anything here,” but we who live and work here are continuously occupied with doing. In fact, the more we do, the more we are praised; and anyone who does not, or does less, is scolded. Please explain.When I said, “We are not doing anything here,” I meant I am not doing anything here – because I love you. When you love, the doing is not a doing at all.If you love me, then you will also not think that you are doing very much. In fact, you will not think that you are doing anything. Love is not a duty. In love, work becomes worship – and you work in the ashram. The whole quality of work, and the attitude, will be different if you love me.If you don’t love me, of course it is work. Then your mind will hanker for praise. Then in many ways you will try to avoid the work – as many of you are doing! You go on finding ways and means: how to avoid it, how not to do it.I never avoid, because I love you. The more I can do, the better I feel. But you avoid as if work is something that you are dragging, a burden. Work only looks like work if it is a burden.If work is out of love, it becomes worship and then there is no need for any other meditation. It is enough. The work itself becomes the meditation. You are so deeply in it that the mind stops.Energy needs work; otherwise the energy will become restlessness. Energy needs expression and energy needs to be creative, otherwise the same energy, coiled up within you, will become disease and illness. You have energy. That energy has to be creative. And there is no happiness except in creativity.Creativity is work with love. A painter paints. He is not working; he is loving. He is completely absorbed in it – the doer is not there. A singer sings or a dancer dances. If the dancer is just a professional, then it is work, then he will be tired. But if a dancer really loves dancing, then the more he moves into it, the more energy he gets to go further.It is said even scientists were surprised about Nijinsky, one of the greatest dancers that has ever walked on the earth. They couldn’t believe his jumping. When he danced he would take such big jumps that they were against gravitation. They were not possible: you cannot jump that much. And the way he would jump – so gracefully! And when he was coming down, he would come like a dove, so slowly, as if gravitation was not functioning.Many times Nijinsky was asked, “What is the secret?”He said, “I don’t know – except that I love dancing.” Once he said, “When you love dancing, then you don’t function under the law of gravitation. You function under the law of grace.”That is the difference between Moses and Jesus. Moses brings the law of gravitation into the world. All those Ten Commandments are laws, just like gravitation. Jesus brings the law of grace, which is not a law at all.You function in a totally different dimension when you love deeply – this question would not have arisen, you would not have thought of it as work.Watch a mother, how much she does for the child. But if you ask her she will say, “I have not been doing anything. In fact, many more things were needed to be done and I have not done them. I always feel my child has not received as much care as was needed.”Then go to the secretary of a club or institute and ask him. He will give you a long list of what he has been doing there. He will even include things he has not done on the list! He is a doer; a mother is a lover.I was reading the biography of a Hindu sannyasin who lived in South Africa. He came to the Himalayas on a pilgrimage. He was going uphill and it was hot. He was perspiring and gasping for breath. The journey was hard.Just in front of him was a girl, not more than ten years of age, carrying a very heavy, fat child on her shoulders. She was perspiring. The sannyasin spoke to the girl and said, “My daughter, the child seems to be very heavy.”The girl looked at the sannyasin and said, “Swamiji, he is not a burden. He is my brother. He is not a burden at all. He has no weight – he is my brother.”When you love, weight disappears; when you love, you function in a different world.The last question:Osho,Is this it? Am I experiencing you? Has the final journey begun?This is from Dharmateerth Bodhisattva. Yes.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Luke 101 After these things the Lord appointed other seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face into every city and place, whither he himself would come.2 Therefore said he unto them, “The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth laborers into his harvest.”3 “Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs amongst the wolves.”4 “Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes: and salute no man by the way.”5 “And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house.’”6 “And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it: if not, it shall turn to you again.”16 “He that heareth you heareth me; and he that despiseth you despiseth me; and he that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me.”17 And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, “Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name.”18 And he said unto them…20 “Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.”21 In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight.”22 “All things are delivered to me of my father: and no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the son will reveal him.”Once upon a time…Two explorers came to a clearing in the jungle. It was a beautiful place: thousands and thousands of flowers were blossoming. One of the explorers said, “There must be a gardener tending these flowers, looking after this plot.” He was a believer.The other disagreed and said, “I don’t see any gardener here. I don’t even see anybody’s footprints. And there seems to be no point in making such a beautiful garden in such a dense and deep forest. Who will come to look? Who will enjoy these flowers? Nobody ever passes by. No, there is no gardener. The whole garden is just an accident.”They argued. The second was an unbeliever, a skeptic. But there was no way to decide who was right, so they pitched their tent and waited for seven days.No gardener ever appeared. The skeptic was very happy and he said, “Look! There is no gardener. Now it has been proved.” But the believer said, “The gardener is invisible. He comes, but we cannot see him. He comes, but we cannot hear his footsteps – because this garden is not possible without a gardener.”So they set up a barbed wire fence around the garden. They electrified the wires, they brought in bloodhounds and they patrolled day and night. But nobody ever entered. No shriek was ever heard from the shock of the electricity flowing in the wires. The bloodhounds never gave a cry.After seven days the skeptic said. “Finished! Now it is proved beyond doubt that there is no gardener, visible or invisible.”But the believer was not convinced. He said, “The gardener is not only invisible, he is intangible, and he has no scent and he is eternally elusive. You cannot catch him with electrified wires, and you cannot catch him with bloodhounds, and our eyes cannot see him. But he is, certainly he is.”Now the skeptical friend, in great despair, said, “What happened to your original statement? Now, what is the difference between an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive god or gardener, and one who is just imaginary or that does not exist at all? What is the difference between the two?”I was reading this parable. I liked it because this is how the argument has been going on, on this earth. Believers go on talking about an invisible God. Skeptical minds go on disproving any possibility of it. And they both seem to be right, or they are both wrong, because the argument never comes to a conclusion.From the very beginning, the whole line of inquiry has taken a wrong route. Once you separate the gardener from the garden – God from creation – the problem arises, and then it can never be settled.The garden is enough proof of the gardener. But the gardener is not separate. He does not come to tend the garden: he is in the garden; he is the garden. He does not look after the flowers: he is in the flowers; he is the flowers. Not that he is invisible – he is visible, but visible as flowers.If you have an idea of God, you will never find him. The very idea will become the barrier. Only those who have no idea of God come upon him or allow God to come upon themselves. If you have a certain idea, the very idea is going to be the wall, the brick wall, between you and the truth.The believer was not wrong, but he took a wrong line of argument. He divided the gardener from the garden. This gardener cannot be proved because this gardener doesn’t exist. A gardener separate from the garden is nonexistent.That’s why the skeptical friend could argue. And his argument is valid: valid not against God or the gardener, but valid against the believer because the believer has taken a wrong route.To me, God is herenow. All that you see is God. God is not something beyond; God is something within. Or if you like paradoxes, you can call God “the within beyond” or “the beyond within.” But God is intrinsic, is the innermost core of existence.Unless you start in the right direction, you will go on missing. Never believe in a God who is separate from the creatures and the creation. He is not, he cannot be. He is one with it. He is in it, he is it. Once this is understood, you start flowing. Your whole life becomes a prayer.That is the basic message of Jesus. That’s why he goes on saying that God is his father. It is a way of saying what I am saying to you. Between the father and the son, or between the mother and the child, there is a continuity. The father goes on living in the son; the mother continues in the child. The son is nothing but the extension of the existence of the father, an extended hand, as if the old body has become incapable of existing and is going to disappear and the father has created a new body to live within.When Jesus says, “God is my father,” he simply means, “I am continuous with him. There has never been a separation. He is flowing in me. He is flowing in my every cell. Nowhere has there been a discontinuity.” That is the whole meaning of it. But he uses the word father because he is talking to very simple, unsophisticated people. He is talking to real people, not to plastic people. He is not talking in a university. He is talking to real people, people who are alive.He uses the word father. And it is beautiful in a way because unless religion becomes personal, it remains a philosophy. When religion becomes personal, it becomes life. Religion is something live, not something to brood about. It is something that should become a milieu around you. It is something that should become a continuous breathing, a continuous beating of the heart.Religion is a way of life, a way of being. It has nothing to do with thinking. When Jesus says, “God is my father,” he means this existence is not alien, this existence is a home. You can rest in it, you can rely on it, you need not be afraid.This is one of the most significant things to be understood, because modern man is so afraid. Never has this been so. Never in the history of humankind has man been as afraid as he is now. Every day I go on talking to people about their problems and almost always, deeply hidden somewhere, is fear. Whenever they come deeper to their being, finally other problems disappear. Only one problem remains: fear.Why is modern man so afraid? It has never been so. Something has happened, something like a catastrophe. Once God is not there in your consciousness, you will be afraid – because without God, existence becomes alien. Then you are not at home; then it is as if everybody is against you. If God is not there, then existence becomes inimical – not that it really becomes so, but it looks so to you, it appears to you that it is inimical. Life looks just like a competition, a struggle to survive. A great jealousy surrounds you. Love disappears with God, at-homeness disappears with God.God is just a symbolic word. It simply denotes an attitude, an attitude that you are at home. If God is the father, then the whole of existence is home and you can be at ease. There is nothing to fear: everything is in the hands of your father.Religion is personal, and the whole effort is to look at life as if it is a family. The tree, however far away, is related to you. It is a relative – and the rock also, and the oceans also, and the moon and the stars also. Everything is related to everything else. You exist in a related family.You are a part of it – as if existence is trying to reach somewhere through you to a higher peak of consciousness. Through you, God is trying to reach a new existence, to a new peak of ecstasy, to a new peak of awareness, to a new way – as if God is trying to achieve a breakthrough through you. Suddenly you are accepted. Not only accepted, God is trying to do something through you. History is being created through you, existence is being created through you. You are significant; you have a tremendous significance. Without you, God will lack something.Just think: without the son, the father will no longer be a father. Without the son, it is not only that the father will lack something, he will no longer be the father. He will be barren, a desert. The son is a fulfillment.You are the fulfillment. But once you forget God, or you drop the idea of God as modern man has done, suddenly you are alienated. Suddenly you are never at ease. Wherever you move, you move like a stranger – among enemies, not among friends.A friend of mine was staying with me. He was a vice-chancellor in a university, a very atheistic man. I always like trees, and I always like trees to be so close to the house that they almost touch it and cover it. People don’t like that because there is a danger: the tree may destroy the wall, may destroy the foundations. But to me it is worth it. Even if the building disappears, it is beautiful.He looked around in the morning and he said, “What have you done? You are creating a jungle. Don’t you know that trees are enemies of man?”He is right in a way because trees have been constantly fighting with man, and man has been constantly fighting with trees. All the cities you know were once forests. Man has destroyed the trees, cleaned the ground, claimed it. Now, if you don’t do anything with trees for even twenty years, they will overrun and take over, take back the land. They will destroy the buildings and the roads and everything.So he said, “What are you doing? Trees are enemies.”For the first time, I heard the idea. It is historically true, existentially false; scientifically true, religiously false.Scientifically, all of life is a struggle. Everybody else is fighting you, and you are fighting everybody else: “the survival of the fittest.” It is a murderous competition, a cutthroat competition. Nobody is friendly. Even those who you think are friends are not friends. They cannot be, scientifically.A new child is born. Now he is a new competitor in the world. One more enemy will be there. He will breathe, and he will destroy much oxygen you could have used. Now he will be using it. He will need space, he will need food, he will need water – this and that. Now there is one more enemy.Whenever a man dies, one enemy is dead. You can celebrate the fact! Now that much oxygen is free, that much food will be available – one competitor is gone. It is scientifically true. Ask Malthus.Yes, it is true – but religiously? Religiously, the world is a unity. Existence is a family; we exist together. Life is togetherness, and that togetherness is God. If you cannot feel that togetherness, you will feel alienated and you will always be afraid. To a religious man, fearlessness happens spontaneously. To a nonreligious man, fear is the only way to be. “God the Father” can be translated. Then it means: “Existence is one. It is a togetherness, it is a harmony – not a conflict.”We are members of each other. Whenever somebody dies, something in me also dies. Whenever a new child is born, something is born in me also. Whenever a new child is there, life becomes more alive through him, life smiles. Whenever somebody dies, there are tears. It has to be so because I come out of life, I go back into life. Life was trying to do something through me.Everybody is a messenger, everybody is a messiah, everybody has a destiny to fulfill – and until you fulfill that destiny, you will never feel fulfilled. You can have a lot of money, but fulfillment will not come through it. You can have a lot of sex, but fulfillment will not come through it. You can have a lot of power, but fulfillment will not come through it.Fulfillment comes only when you have fulfilled a certain destiny that you were carrying, that was coded within you, that was deep in your blueprint. Unless you have become that for which you were made, unless you have attained being, you will never be fulfilled.Fulfillment is peace, fulfillment is bliss, fulfillment is contentment. And only a fulfilled heart can pray because only a fulfilled heart can be grateful and can feel the grace descending – the spirit of God, like a dove.Now the sutras:After these things the Lord appointed other seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face into every city and place, whither he himself would come.The gospels are telegraphic because they were meant to be remembered, memorized. Not a even single superfluous word is used. They are very economical. So whatever is said has to be understood with deep trust and reverence because that is the only way to understand things like this. A deep reverence is a basic climate and a basic requirement. Only in that deep reverence can something enter you that hits the heart, stirs your soul.If you just listen like a skeptical mind – closed, doubting – you will miss because these are not principles, these are poetries. They indicate, and the indication is very subtle. They intimate, but only in deep intimacy can those things be understood.After these things the Lord appointed other seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face into every city and place, whither he himself would come. Why two and two? Why not three? Why not one? Why two and two? Jesus shows a deep understanding of the human mind. More than two is a crowd, and a crowd is never one. It falls apart. There is every possibility they will start arguing within themselves; there is every possibility there will be a conflict of leadership.More than two is a crowd; less than two – one is lonely, and in loneliness doubts arise. In loneliness one loses confidence, in loneliness one becomes afraid, suspicious. Jesus says: …two and two… It should not be a crowd, and one should not be alone. “Go two together.”Two people who are intimate, close to each other, bring to each other whatever is great. That’s why love is so meaningful – because only in love do you touch the optimum. Alone, you exist on the minimum. In love, you touch the maximum.Have you watched it? Have you seen a single person when he falls in love? Have you observed the change that comes to him? Suddenly he walks in a different way. He walks less and dances more. His movement suddenly takes a new grace. His eyes sparkle, his face becomes more beautiful. Something deep inside relaxes and rejoices. He is more vibrant, radiant. You can see that the energy is flowing. Just a few days before, he was low, shrunken. Now, in love, he has opened, bloomed, is overflowing. What has happened?The other has given a deep call. That call has touched his soul. It has awakened him. His energies that were lying dormant have become dynamic. Now he has a meaning in life, a purpose. Now life is no longer like a desert. It starts blooming. It gains tremendously. And the beauty is this: the other is not losing, the other is also gaining the same. Two people in love both gain tremendously and nobody loses. Both come to their peaks because each stirs the depth of the other and each calls the most beautiful in the other. Each provokes the divine in the other.Lovers become gods to each other. And when somebody believes that you are a god, you have to fulfill it. What can you do? When somebody believes that you are a god, unknowingly you start fulfilling it. Unknowingly you attain your destiny: you become a god.If nobody has ever believed in you, you will miss much. If nobody has ever loved you, you will remain barren. If nobody has loved you so deeply that for him at least you have become divine, then the divine in you will go on lying dormant. It will not become dynamic.When Jesus says …two and two…, he is saying not to go alone because alone you will be at your minimum, and not to be more than two because then conflict will arise, but two – in deep friendship, in deep love, in deep trust – so you can help each other and provoke each other to the very height it is possible to attain. Potentially, whatever the other can attain he will attain through you. “Go two and two.”Therefore said he unto them, “The harvest truly is great…”He speaks in the language of the farmers, the fishers, the carpenters.“The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth laborers into his harvest.”It has always been so. When a Buddha is there it is so, when a Zarathustra is there it is so, when a Mahavira is there it is so. The harvest is truly great, but there are not enough laborers. The treasure is vast, but there are not enough to share it. A tremendous energy is released, but nobody is open to receive it. The flower has opened, but nobody passes by to be filled by its scent. The fragrance is wasted. It could have been used and people would have attained their highest peak, but the fragrance goes on spreading into emptiness of the sky. Yes: “The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few: pray ye therefore…” Jesus says to his disciples: …pray to the lord of the harvest that he will send forth laborers into his harvest.The crop is ready to be cut, and if it is not cut in time it will be wasted. There is a time to sow and there is a time to reap the crop. Jesus is ready, the crop is ready, but there is nobody to share it. Why does it happen? Why are people so blind? Why do people want to remain in their unhappiness? And when the door opens to happiness, why don’t they look at it?They have certain investments in their unhappiness; they have become attuned to their unhappiness. This is my feeling also. You come to me and you say to me that you would like to be happy. But at that very moment I see within you that somewhere a part, a greater part of you, is against it. That part does not want to be happy because that part has invested much in being unhappy. Now the whole investment will be gone.You want to be happy, but you don’t want to lose the investment you have made in unhappiness. In many, many lives you have tried to use unhappiness for certain ends. Watch – for example, people talk too much about their miseries. They exaggerate. Why do they exaggerate about their miseries? And what is the point in talking? Why go on telling everybody about your miseries?A certain happiness is attained through this. Whenever you talk about your misery, people show sympathy. This is a way to gain sympathy. Of course you must have missed love – otherwise who bothers about sympathy? Sympathy is a poor substitute for love; it is counterfeit. If you have ever been loved by somebody, and if you have ever loved somebody, you will not ask for sympathy. No, because sympathy is an insult. Love is totally different. But sympathy looks like love. It is a counterfeit. It appears like love; it is not.When somebody loves you, you are the end; when somebody sympathizes with you, you are not the end. When somebody loves you, you are the emperor; when somebody sympathizes with you, you are the beggar. Sympathy is given to you because you are in such misery; love is given to you because you are so happy. When you are happy, people love you. When you are unhappy, people sympathize with you.But sympathy gives a false appearance of love, and you have invested in sympathy. Now how can you drop your unhappiness? You cannot. And whenever somebody like Jesus comes and opens the doors of paradise, you don’t listen to him. You say, “There must be some deception. Paradise? It is not possible, and we are not fools. We have also been struggling. Paradise is not possible. Only unhappiness is possible.”In the last years of his life, Sigmund Freud became very pessimistic. He had been working on the human mind for fifty years. Nobody has worked so hard, so persistently, so scientifically – and he had watched thousands and thousands of human minds: their functioning, their mechanism. In the last years he started feeling that man, as he is, cannot be happy. “There seems to be no possibility that man can be happy. Something seems to be basically wrong.”Nothing is basically wrong. It is only because man has invested too much. A child is born. Whenever the child is happy, nobody cares about him. But when he is ill, everybody sympathizes, cares, loves. The child learns the trick. If you want sympathy, if you want attention, be ill. Don’t be happy because when you are happy, you create jealousy in others. Jealousy means enmity. When you are unhappy, you create compassion in others. Compassion means friendship.That’s why you cannot respect Jesus. He is so happy; he is a bridegroom. He is always at a feast, never fasting.You go to the saints who are fasting, unhappy, because they don’t create jealousy in you. They are so unhappy that they create sympathy in you. And when you sympathize with them, you make their unhappiness even more valuable than it was before.This is a vicious circle. In India it is happening all over. Go and see your saints: the more unhappy they are, the more they fast, the more they commit suicide, the more they poison their being and body, the more pale and dying they are, the more unhealthy they look – the more they are respected, the more a crowd gathers. People say they are great ascetics. Their unhappiness creates sympathy.How can Jesus get that sympathy? Impossible! When you go and see him, he is sitting at the dining table with his friends. He enjoys eating and drinking, and he must have enjoyed singing and dancing because I cannot conceive otherwise – a man who enjoys eating and makes eating a sacrament, and says that it is holy, and says that this is a form of prayer because it is God who is hungry within you, and when God is satisfied, you have prayed.Not only that, he even drinks and allows his disciples to drink, because he says, “Life should be lived in its abundance.” Not only needs should be fulfilled because if only needs are fulfilled, life is only okay, it is not ecstatic. That wine is simply a symbol for ecstasy: life should not only be lived with our needs fulfilled, it should be overflowing, it should be a dance. Wine is not a need; nobody needs it. It is a celebration. Bread is a need; everybody needs it. Wine is not a need, it is a celebration.Jesus, if you see him, will not create sympathy in you. Rather, he will create jealousy. That’s why he was crucified. He created so much jealousy around him; everybody became somehow inimical to him: “This is not the way to be a saint!”You always like pessimists, dead people, people who are almost in the grave. Why? And then it is no wonder that, by and by, you also become like them – because you will become like whomever you respect.Respect people who are happy. Don’t respect people who live in misery and create their misery. That is ill, morbid. Don’t bow down to anybody who is in any way masochistic, creating his own suffering. In that way you will be helping him also.Just think: if nobody goes to your masochistic saints, do you think they will remain there? They will escape from those temples, they will come to the marketplace, they will say, “What is the point? We go on fasting and nobody comes, no procession is arranged, nobody respects us. What is the point? We go on fasting, dying, and nobody respects us.” Then the whole point is lost.That will be a great help to them also. That will be real compassion toward them. If you don’t go to them, they will come back to life. But you go on respecting them, you go on fulfilling their egos. Now unhappiness becomes a great investment. And that’s also how you are working in your own life. People cling to their miseries because that is all they have. That’s why it happens: “The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few…”Only people who are really understanding, and who are really aware that life exists to be celebrated, will be able to enter from the door Jesus has opened for them. The others will not come. Not only will they not come, they will deny the door exists. Because if they accept the door exists, then it will be a constant uneasiness in their hearts, a restlessness, that the door exists and they have not gone there. No, they will simply deny the door exists. Not only that, they will say, “This Jesus is a deceiver. He is not a true prophet. True prophets are always miserable, they live in unhappiness.” And you can understand their language because you also live in unhappiness.The language of happiness is absolutely foreign to you. You cannot understand it. You can understand pain and suffering. Ecstasy? “The man must have gone mad!” Ecstasy looks mad. You can understand pain. Pleasure? That you cannot understand.This is the trouble. I also say to you: “The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth laborers into his harvest.”“Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among the wolves.”It is very dangerous to send ecstatic people among miserable people – very dangerous. If you dance on the street, sooner or later you will find yourself in the police station. If you are miserable and crying and weeping, even the constable will sympathize with you; but if you are laughing and dancing, something has gone wrong. It doesn’t happen. Ecstasy? “The man is mad!” You cannot be allowed to move in the world. You are dangerous.Look at the absurdity: a happy person seems dangerous; an unhappy person seems to be okay. The unhappy fits with you, the happy does not fit.“Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among the wolves.” Jesus knows he is sending his disciples into a dangerous world. First, people will not understand what they say. People will misunderstand. But even in their misunderstanding, there will be a doubt lurking in the minds of the people that these people may be right.That creates more danger. Whenever you feel that something may be right, an uneasiness arises. Either you have to cope with it or destroy it – so the proof is destroyed.Jesus was crucified just so the proof was destroyed that a man can be so happy and so ecstatic. A man can really be a son of God – the proof has to be destroyed. Then you go on asking about proof: “What proof is there of God?” And whenever there is proof, you destroy it.Jesus was the proof. If you could have understood him, you could have understood that God exists. There is no other way to know about God. You can know the tree only by the fruits. Jesus is the fruit, the crop, the harvest. He was a living proof. But he had to be destroyed because if God exists, how can you go on living in your miserable holes? You will have to come out into the light.It is better to deny God than to come out of your darkness because you have lived in that darkness so long that you are attuned to it. Yes, it is miserable, but it is your own misery. Yes, it is miserable, but you have lived so long with it that a sort of attachment has arisen. You are attached to it.Doctors fear that whenever somebody has lived with an illness for long, he clings to it and deep down does not wish to be well again. Then no medicine can help because he is struggling against the medicine. He wants the illness to continue.I know a person and I have watched him. He has been in bed for almost seven years. He was a politician, then he fell ill.I have been watching him all these years. He fell ill because he was defeated in an election. That illness was psychological: he could not accept the fact that he could be defeated. His ego was shattered; he fell ill. The body was simply reflecting something deep that had happened in the ego.And so he continued. One illness would disappear; another would come. Another would go, then something else would happen. After a year, everybody in the family became aware that it seemed he was not going to be well again because for the first time, lying down on his bed, he had become relaxed. You can understand the whole misery of a politician’s life: the conflict, the tension, the anxiety. For one year he rested.Now, somewhere in the unconscious, a deep desire has arisen: “This is better!” And now he knows that if he gets up again he will again be in the same world because that is the only way he knows how to be in the world. He cannot do anything else than be a politician. That is his profession: the only business he knows. Now he is afraid.Seven years have passed and things are going well. When he was working and was in the world, his son was not at all worried about the family affairs. Now the son is doing well. His wife has taken many things into her own hands. Even his old father has started going to the shop again. Everything is going well, perfectly well – better than ever. So why bother to get up? Now illness is an excuse.I went to see him and I talked to him. I told him the truth. He became very angry. He said, “What do you mean? Do you mean that I am prolonging my illness? I had hoped at least you would understand. You don’t understand me. Why should I be lying down here?”But at the very same time I knew he had understood. I said, “Be truthful. There is nobody here. And I will keep this, I will not tell anybody.”He relaxed and he said, “Maybe. I will think about it.”The next day I went again and he confessed. He said, “You are right. I thought about it again and again. The whole night I couldn’t sleep. It seems to be the case.“But I don’t want to get well. Life has never been so good! And now, to go back into politics after seven years will be almost impossible” – because once you are out of politics even for seven days, you have gone. Seven years – people have completely forgotten about him. Just seven days is enough.A politician has to be constantly in the public eye. He has to go on doing something or other, some mischief or other, some strike or hunger strike – or anything, whatever it is – but he has to be in the public eye, in the newspapers. If he is not in the newspapers for even seven days, he has gone.The public’s memory is very short. Who bothers? People will not even recognize him – that once he was the great leader. Now there are other great leaders who have replaced him. They won’t allow him to enter.So he said, “It is going to be very difficult. It was difficult in the very beginning. Now it is going to be almost impossible. And everything is going well.”This is the situation. Then even unhappiness becomes an attachment, even illness becomes an attachment. Illness can become an excuse for many things. Remember this, otherwise you will never be able to be happy. Don’t play games with yourself.Jesus says, “…I send you forth as lambs among the wolves.” Why? Why lambs among the wolves? – because he knows that truth is going to be attacked. He knows love is going to be attacked. He knows that ecstasy is going to be attacked.“Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes: and salute no man by the way.”Why does Jesus say this? “Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes: and salute no man by the way.” He is saying that you are so happy and ecstatic, you are so blissful now that you have tasted something of the divine, that it is enough to create trouble for you. “Now don’t carry a purse. Go like beggars so at least they can sympathize with you. You are emperors, but go like beggars – without even shoes, so you look like beggars. Go barefoot without shoes, like the poorest beggar who has not even shoes, so at least they can sympathize.”That seems to be the reason why Buddha called his sannyasins bhikkus, beggars, why Mahavira insisted that you move like beggars. “…because you have the quality of an emperor. That is enough to create trouble for you. Now if your appearance is also like an emperor, then you will be immediately attacked. At least let your appearance be that of a beggar. There is no guarantee you will be saved because you will still be like lambs among the wolves – sooner or later they are going to find out that you are an emperor. Your appearance is just a protection.” Jesus says this to protect his disciples.“Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes…” Why does he say “nor scrip”? – because he is saying, “Don’t go as knowers.”These are the two riches: the riches of the outer and the riches of the inner. “Don’t go as rich people and don’t go as people rich in knowledge. Let them think you don’t know anything, then they will sympathize. Don’t carry scriptures with you, otherwise you will be unnecessarily attacked. They will argue and you will be dragged into arguments. That, too, has to be remembered.“Don’t carry scriptures; don’t carry knowledge. Go like innocent children. That will be a protection. Talk out of your experience, but don’t bring the scriptures in, otherwise those people are very clever about scriptures. Once you bring the scriptures in, you will be defeated. They can argue better than you.”This is something to be remembered. A man of experience always hesitates because he knows that whatever he has experienced cannot be expressed. He hesitates. But a man who has not known anything except the scriptures is absolutely certain. Only fools are certain. Wise people are always hesitant.So don’t go with scriptures, otherwise you will be caught in the net of the pundits, the rabbis, and you will be unnecessarily distracted. And then the whole point will be lost.Jesus says: “I send you like lambs” – pure beings with no corruption: no corruption of knowledge, no corruption of outward things. “I send you virgin, uncorrupted. It is dangerous, but that is the only way you can carry my message,” he says.“…and salute no man by the way.” Why does he say this: …salute no man by the way? He is saying that on the way there are a thousand and one distractions: “So keep to the goal, where I am sending you. Just keep in mind the goal, where I’m sending you. Even an ordinary salute to a person, a stranger on the road, can become a distraction.”I will tell you a story. It happened in Tibet…A lama who was working in a faraway valley wrote a letter to the chief monastery, to his master: “Send one more lama. We need one here.”The chief of the monastery called all his disciples, read the letter, and then told them, “I would like to send five of you.”One lama asked, “But only one has been asked for. Why five?”The old chief said, “You will know it later. I will send five and then too, it is not certain one will reach because the way is long and the distractions a thousand and one.”They laughed. They said, “The old man has gone out of his mind. Why send five when one is needed?” But the old man was insistent, so five started the journey.The next morning when they were passing a village, a messenger came running from the chief of the village. “Our priest has died and we need a priest. The salary is good.” The village looked rich and prosperous, so one of the five said, “I would like to stay because this too is Buddha’s work. Why go to the valley? I am going to do the same work there too. You four will be enough. Only one is needed so I will stay here.” One dropped.The next day they were passing by the outskirts of a town. The king of the town passed them on his horse. He looked at them. One young monk was very beautiful and healthy and radiant, and the king said, “Wait! I am looking for a young man because my daughter is ready to be married. I have been watching and looking, but you seem to be exactly right. Are you ready? I have only one daughter. My whole kingdom will be yours.”Of course, the young man said goodbye to his friends.All this happened: two had disappeared. Now the other three became aware the old man was not mad. The way really is long and the distractions a thousand and one!So now the three decided, “But we will not do such a thing,” – although deep down they were feeling jealous. One man has become a king, another has become a great priest – and who knows about that valley, about what is going to happen there?The third night they lost the way. Far away on a hilltop only one lamp could be seen, only one house. Somehow they reached there.There was only a young woman there, and she said, “It is good you have come. You are a godsend because my mother and my father were to come back this evening and they have not come back. I was very afraid to be alone in this house so far away from the town. It is good. You are a godsend. You are sent by Buddha himself. Please stay with me and don’t leave me until my parents come.”The next morning they had to leave. But one of them, who deep down had fallen in love with the woman, said, “I cannot go until her parents are back. That would not be compassion.” Compassion was not the thing; passion was the thing! But when there is passion, people talk about compassion.The two said, “This is not good. We have to reach there and you are dropping out. And we had decided that now we would not do that.”The man said, “I have been taught my whole life to be compassionate and the woman is alone, her parents have not returned. This won’t be good, it won’t be virtuous, and Buddha will never forgive. You can go” – in fact, he wanted them to go – “but I will be here.” The third one dropped.The next morning in a village a crowd gathered around them and they were challenged because the village was atheistic and didn’t believe in Buddha. “You have to prove that what Buddha says is true.” They had a great atheist scholar there and the scholar challenged them.One of the two accepted the challenge. The second said, “What are you doing? Who knows how long this will go on?”He said, “Even if my whole life is wasted, I am devoted to Buddha, and this man has challenged Buddha and his philosophy.” It was not a challenge to Buddha; it was a challenge to his ego! “I cannot leave this village, I will convert this village. You can go, and in fact, only one is needed.”And that’s how it happened. The man remained there to argue and only one reached!Jesus says: “…and salute no man by the way.” This is just a way of saying, “Please, remember the goal.”“And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, ‘peace be to this house.’”This is a mantra, a blessing, and it changes the whole atmosphere. Jesus says, “When you enter a house, before you enter, say: ‘peace be to this house.'“ It is not only a saying: feel it, be it. Be at peace. “Bring peace to the house because only in that peaceful milieu can my message be delivered. Create a spiritual vibration of peace; spread the feeling of peace.” And if you are really feeling it, it will spread.Try it. When somebody comes to see you or meet you, just settle within yourself. Become silent, and when the man enters, deep down just feel peace for him. Feel “peace be to this man.” Don’t just say it, feel it, and suddenly you will see a change in the man, as if something unknown has entered his being. He will be totally different.Try it. It is experimental, it is absolutely scientific. There is no need to believe in it because thought transference is continuously happening.Sometimes you destroy yourself by your own thoughts. Somebody comes and you become suspicious: “This man seems to be dangerous!” You are giving a thought to the man. Now he may be dangerous, and if he is dangerous you will say, “I was right!” and in fact you created the vibe. In fact you started it.The husband coming home starts thinking in his mind that his wife is going to be nasty, so how to answer her, how to find excuses for why he is late? He may be creating doubts in the wife’s mind – and women are very intuitive. You may not be able to transfer a thought to a man, but with a woman it is almost impossible not to transfer it. They are more intuitive. They are less in their heads and more in their hearts. Now the wife is getting ready to be angry and you are preparing her and when she becomes nasty you think, “I was right!” The next time you will be more afraid and your fear will create a circle.Try just the opposite. While coming back home, think that your wife is going to be perfectly beautiful. Feel it! Just saying it and feeling just the opposite won’t help. Feel it, and one day, suddenly, you will see that it works.We are joined together by our hearts. We exist as parts of one feeling heart. That heart is God. He beats in our hearts: the beat is his. He lives: the life is his. And if you can create a great, strong thought or feeling around you, the ripples go on and spread. You live in the world you create and you get the world you deserve.“And into whatsoever house you enter, first say, ‘peace be to this house.’”“And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it: if not, it shall turn to you again.”Whatever you give, if it is accepted, will be good because in that deep peace you will be welcomed. If it is not accepted, if the people or the person are hard, very closed, not open at all, and your message – your deep love and peace – is rejected, don’t be worried. That peace will fall upon you. You will be showered by it, and it will still be good. Nothing will be lost.“He that heareth you, heareth me; and he that despiseth you despiseth me; and he that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me.”Jesus says to his disciples, “If people love you, they love me, because I am coming to them through you. And if they love me, they love that who has sent me, because he has come through me. If they hate you, they hate me. If they hate me, they hate the source of all life.”Remember: whatever you do, finally you do it to God. Meanwhile you may be doing it to somebody else, but finally it turns out that you have done it to God. If you hate a man, ultimately you hate God. If you love, ultimately you love God because all others are just mediums. Whatever you do to them is not to them; it is finally to the source, to the very seed.And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, “Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name.”And he said unto them…“Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.”The disciples are disciples; they are not yet awakened. They have come in deep contact with an awakened man. That awakened man has become infectious to them, they are deeply impressed, the impact has gone to their roots – but they are still disciples, they are not awakened themselves.So when they came back they were very happy. In their happiness, they had completely forgotten God because wherever they went people listened to them with tremendous attention, wherever they went they were received with love. They could not believe what had happened. They came back rejoicing and saying: “Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name.”Their reach is only up as far as Jesus. They have not yet seen God through him. Jesus is not yet transparent to them; they cannot see God. At the most they see God reflected, at the most they feel something of the unknown, but it has not become a settled, centered feeling in them.So they have completely forgotten God. They say: “…even the devils are subject unto us…” Now their egos are inflated. But they remember one thing: “…through thy name.” “It is your name that has done miracles. Even the devils are in our power.”Jesus immediately says: “Notwithstanding in this rejoice not…” Don’t rejoice that the spirits are subject unto you. If you really want to rejoice, rejoice about something else that you are not aware of: “…but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.” Rather rejoice that God has heard your prayers. Don’t think about yourself and don’t think about my name. Rather feel happy that God has heard you and helped you: “…your names are written in heaven.”In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, “I thank thee, O Father…”The disciples are aware that they have done miracles. They have become very important. They remember Jesus. But: …Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, “I thank thee, O Father…” He remembers God. His name is of no use. If his name is so powerful, it is because of God. He is just a medium, a flute on which God has decided, in his mercy, to play a tune or sing a song.“…I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes…”These disciples are just babes. They are neither wise nor prudent. They don’t know the scriptures; they don’t know the tradition. They are not priests or scholars. They are just babes: simple, innocent.“…that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight.”“All things are delivered to me of my father; and no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him.”“All things are delivered to me of my father…” He simply says, “I am no more than a medium. If you pay respect to me, don’t pay respect to me. At the most you can pay the respect through me, but the respect should go to God.”“All things are delivered to me of my father, and no man knoweth who the Son is…” because once you know who the son is, you have already known the father. If you recognize Jesus, you have recognized God. If you crucify Jesus, you have crucified God because whatever you do with Jesus, you do with God.Not only Jesus was crucified on Golgotha; God was crucified that day. You could not believe in God who was expressing himself through Jesus. You could not recognize the son, you could not see from where the song was coming. You destroyed the flute. But in destroying the flute, the song also disappeared.“All things are delivered to me of my father; and no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son…” “Only he knows me,” Jesus says, “and only I know who he is” – because that revelation is possible only in deep love, that revelation is possible only when you become part of God and God becomes part of you. When you are so deeply related to the whole existence that you are no longer separate, then you know who God is.“…and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the son will reveal him.” And for ordinary humanity there is no other way than to look through the son, to accept the revelation, to see God through he who has become one with him. Once you see it, you have already become a son. Then others can see through you, and the thing can go on spreading.Every person who has recognized Jesus has immediately become a Jesus. Every person who has recognized Buddha has immediately become a buddha. In your recognition, you have attained. Then anybody who recognizes you is linked, is bridged, with God. One man can transform the whole world. It becomes a chain of openings.If you recognize me, you have become me. Then somebody recognizes you; he has become you. And this can go on and on. Just a small pebble thrown in the sea, and ripples arise and they go on spreading.Jesus is just the pebble. You can become Jesus if you recognize him. That is the meaning, the real meaning, of being a Christian: you have recognized Jesus as the son of God and you say, “My eyes are not yet able to look at the sun; the light is too much. I look at the lamp, but I recognize that the light is the same.”To look at God directly will be blinding. To look at Jesus is beautiful. He is not blinding. But through him you can recognize, and then by and by your eyes can become attuned. Once you have become attuned to Jesus, you can look directly at God because by and by, Jesus will disappear, will become transparent, and will be gone – and only God will be left there. That’s why he goes on saying again and again, “I and my father are one.”Recognition is one of the turning points in life. The search for a master is the search for a man in whom you can recognize that God is; in whom you can recognize that now there is no need for any proof; in whom you can recognize – not intellectually, but existentially – that yes, God is. That man becomes your master. He becomes the door. That’s why Jesus goes on saying, “I am the door. I am the opening through whom you can come.”Otherwise you can go on arguing. Your arguments are all futile. Whether you prove that God is, or you prove that God is not, does not matter much. They are all intellectual gymnastics. Nothing is proved. No atheist ever becomes capable of converting a theist, and no theist is ever capable of converting an atheist. For centuries the argument has continued. Nobody seems to win. The whole thing seems to be futile and meaningless. You cannot convince anybody about anything unless he opens his eyes and recognizes something of the beyond.Once it happened…Mulla Nasruddin woke up one morning and started crying and weeping. His wife was worried. She said, “What has happened? Have you had a nightmare?”He said, “No, it is not a nightmare. I have died. I am dead.”Now, how can he be convinced that he is not dead? The wife tried, the neighbors tried, but there was no way to prove it to him. He insisted that he was dead.He was taken to a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst watched him, talked to him: “A very rational man, argumentative, and he argues that he is dead! And he says, ‘Give me some proof that I am alive!’”The psychoanalyst thought it over and said, “Yes.” An idea had struck him. He said, “Come with me.”He took Mullah to the hospital, to the postmortem department, and told the doctors the situation. The dead bodies were cut and the psychoanalyst said, “Look. Is there any blood flowing?”No blood was flowing. The psychoanalyst had the idea that if Nasruddin could be convinced that dead bodies don’t bleed, something might be possible with the proof that dead bodies don’t bleed and live bodies bleed.For seven days he took Mulla to see the autopsies, and Mulla was intellectually convinced. When he was convinced, Mulla Nasruddin said, “Now there is no need to continue. I am convinced that dead bodies don’t bleed. But that makes no change in my attitude.”The psychoanalyst said, “Wait.” He took his hand, took a sharp knife and made a small cut on his finger. Blood started flowing. The psychoanalyst was thinking, “Now there is absolute proof that you are not dead.”Mulla Nasruddin looked at the blood and said, “My God! So dead men bleed after all!”No proof can be a proof. If you are convinced that God is not, all proofs will prove that he is not, and if you are convinced that he is, then all proofs will prove that he is. No conviction can be changed. So whether you believe in God or you don’t believe in God, both are bogus, both are head trips – unless you recognize it is not a question of argument, unless you open your eyes and see something that suddenly fills you, your total being, and a certainty arises in you that is not intellectual but existential.To seek a master is to seek somebody in whom you can recognize something of the divine, who becomes the proof, in whose being you can taste something of the divine, in whose eyes you can glimpse and see something of the divine; in whose love you can feel something being showered, in whose song you can feel – you can know beyond doubt – that the infinite is flowing.The master is nothing but a reed, a flute, an empty flute, an emptiness. God flows through him. If you can recognize it, already you yourself have become one with him. Then others can recognize it in you and it can spread.One man attaining God can become the total transformation of the whole humanity. It has not happened because people insist on being miserable, they insist on being blind, they insist on being themselves – whatever they are. They protect their hell, they defend their misery, they are armored against God.That is why it has not happened. Otherwise one Buddha would have been enough; one Jesus would have been enough. But there have been thousands of Buddhas and Jesuses and Mahaviras, and you go on living in your darkness. It is simply unbelievable, but it has been so.Don’t wait for the whole of humanity. Nobody can say when the whole of humanity will listen. But if you can listen, if you can recognize, you also become a door.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I recoil from the whole idea of the crucifixion. The murder of Jesus at thirty-three, even more than the murder of John the Baptist or the murder of Socrates, seems supremely unnecessary. Could not he, the prince of compassion, have managed to sympathize with the high priests, seeing the impossibility of their situation? After all, they were bishops, not the Gestapo – benighted no doubt, but not murderous. Or worse still, did he deliberately push them to the ultimate impossibility where they were bound to kill him, and set them up as the villains?One very foundational thing will have to be understood, and that is that the people you call bad are never as bad as the people you call good.The bad people are bad, but they have no excuse for being bad. They know they are bad and they have nowhere to hide themselves. But the people who are thought to be good, respectable, honored, respected, religious, are the really dangerous people because their badness can hide in their goodness. They can murder and will not feel they are murderous. They can kill and can go on feeling they are doing that killing for the good of those who are being killed.The ordinarily bad person, the criminal, is exposed. He knows he is not good, and that is his possibility of transformation. He can understand it and come out of it. But the so-called good person is hidden under a personality. He may not be able to understand what he is doing and for what reasons he is doing it. He can always manage to rationalize.That’s how it happened, and not only in the case of Jesus. It has always been happening. The priests who were murderous never thought they were doing anything bad. They thought they were saving their religion, they thought they were saving morality. They thought, “This man is dangerous. He is corrupting the youth.”The charge against Jesus was that he was corrupting people: “He is destroying the old morality, creating chaos.” That was the charge against Socrates and that is the charge against me. It has always been so.Whether they are Hindus or Greeks or Jews makes no difference, the priests are the protectors of the old. The temple is of the past: they are the protectors, the guardians of tradition. Of course Jesus looked dangerous to them. He can destroy the whole structure.Not that they were deceiving themselves. They may have thought themselves perfectly right without a single question that they weren’t: “This man is dangerous and to destroy him is to save the society.” And of course whenever there is such an alternative – that you can save the whole society by killing one man – the murder is worth it. The priests killed him because of their goodness, because of their virtue, because of their morality. They killed him in the name of God. They killed him very innocently.This situation has arisen again and again in history. There seems to be no possibility of changing it. The only possibility would be for Jesus to be so moderate that he doesn’t hurt anybody – but then he is useless. He could have managed; you ask me rightly. He could have been very moderate and liberal. He could have talked like a politician who talks much but never says anything; who says many things but is always vague; who never clearly asserts anything so you can never pinpoint what he has said.Jesus’ crime was that he was clear, certain – that whatever he was saying, he was not saying like a politician. He was opening his heart; he was not diplomatic. If he had diluted his teaching, there would have been no trouble – but then there would have been no Christ either, and that would have been a greater murder. Then Christ would have committed suicide.As I see it, as things are, this is the only way things could have been. Jesus had to be as hard as he was, he had to be as rebellious as he was. He should not have diluted his message and he should not have come down and compromised.The priests would have been happy if he had become a rabbi, a priest. Then there would have been no trouble. If he had just kept himself within the imprisonment of the tradition, if he had not tried to open new dimensions to humanity, there would have been no trouble. Then they would have worshipped him, loved him, sanctified him as a saint. They would have remembered him.But he tried to open new dimensions. Then you are moving into danger, but that danger is worth taking. That Jesus was crucified is nothing to be worried about because that is the only way. He pushed humanity to a higher level of being and consciousness.It is not that he tried to manage in some way to be murdered. There was no need. The priests are enough; you need not provoke them. They will be provoked automatically, they move in a mechanical way. There was no need to provoke them. The very being of Jesus was enough.You recoil from the whole idea of crucifixion because you cannot understand. It is not an ordinary murder. It is meaningful, it is significant, it has done much. It has created something new that never existed before. Through that crucifixion, Jesus changed almost half of humanity, forced them to move on a different path than they had ever moved on.When you think about crucifixion, you become afraid – as if you are being crucified. You don’t know that Jesus cannot be crucified. Only his body can, not him. But when you think of crucifixion, you think of yourself being completely crucified and killed. Your understanding about life and death is not there yet.That is the meaning of the story that after the third day Jesus was alive again, resurrected. It simply says that you can crucify the body of a Jesus, but you can never crucify his spirit. After three days, he will again be moving on the earth, deathless. Crucifixion became a situation in which he could assert his deathlessness.So it is perfectly okay as it is: there is nothing to be worried about. And this will continue to be so. The only possibility for a Jesus to exist and not be crucified is if people have become so indifferent to religion that they don’t bother. That is not a good possibility. That is very sad. Jesus comes and walks on the earth and nobody is hurt, no priest bothers about him – rather, people enjoy. They gather around and Jesus looks amusing; he looks like a fool or a buffoon who is talking nonsense.That’s what the modern philosophers say: to talk about God is to talk nonsense. It makes no sense, it is meaningless. You are using words that are only containers, and there is no content in them. God, moksha, nirvana – what do you mean?If Jesus comes someday and nobody is bothered, that will be the saddest possibility. Jesus hurts because people are concerned. Jesus hurts because religion is meaningful; Jesus provokes antagonism because with religion, life is at stake. That will be the most unfortunate moment in human history – when Jesus comes and nobody bothers to stone him, nobody bothers to crucify him. He will move around the earth and people will laugh, will be amused. And he will look like a buffoon.No, the crucifixion of Jesus simply says that religion is so meaningful that when a man like Jesus comes, he creates a rift in humanity between those who love him and those who hate him. The whole of humanity is divided. He is significant.Many times I think about it: this has never happened in India. Buddha was not crucified, Mahavira was not crucified, Krishna was not crucified. Why? This country is too sophisticated about religion, and when you become too sophisticated, you become indifferent.This country could tolerate Buddha, Mahavira, and Krishna. Ordinarily, people think that it is because this country is so religious. That’s not my opinion. This country is so sophisticated that people have already become indifferent. Nobody bothers about what Buddha is saying. In fact, everybody already knows what he is saying. Everybody knows all that can be known – who bothers?It is like Jesus walking into Cambridge University or Oxford, where philosophers think that God is meaningless. If Jesus comes to Oxford and stands on the crossroads and cries, “I and my father are one!” then those philosophers will gather together and they will laugh. “About whom are you talking? Which father? Where is he? What do you mean by ‘father’? Then who is your mother?” They will ask irrelevant questions and they will laugh, and Jesus will simply feel embarrassed.This is my understanding: the Jews of Jesus’ days were very simple people, not sophisticated. Religion was very meaningful, not just a philosophy. Their whole life was at stake, and this man was destroying it. This man was uprooting all they had been protecting for centuries. This man was trying to create a revolution, a chaos. And they had a deep love for the tradition, for the values they had always cherished. They were not indifferent; they could not be indifferent. Either they had to follow Jesus, or they had to kill him. There was no other alternative. India is more philosophical, too much in the head. Jews were not that much in the head.To me, the crucifixion of Jesus simply shows one thing: they took Jesus seriously. Buddha was never taken that seriously. We could tolerate him: “It’s okay. Let him do his thing. Nothing much is going to happen out of it. Why kill him unnecessarily? By killing him, there may be even more danger because the death will create a stir.”If he had been in India, Jesus would have become one of the avatars – but nothing much. Nothing much: we would have included him in the tradition. Even Buddha has been included. Buddha denied all that is basic to Hinduism, but Hindus are very sophisticated people. They said, “Yes, this too is a message from God.” He was contradicting all that is meaningful to Hindus, but they were not bothered. They said, “He is also an incarnation of God.”Hindus have written a story about when Buddha died that shows how sophisticated minds function. Of course, he was a very important man, one of the most important ever born in India, one of the most influential. He had denied Hinduism, so how to cope with him?Hindus have created a story. They say…God created the world, heaven and hell. Centuries and centuries passed. People would die and immediately they would go to heaven. Nobody would go to hell because nobody was a sinner.So the people who were managing hell – the Devil and his disciples – went to God and said, “Why have you created hell? Nobody ever comes. Our whole existence is futile. We go on sitting and sitting and waiting, and nobody knocks at the door. Either cancel it, or send people!”God said, “Wait! Soon I am going to be born as Gautam Buddha. I will destroy people’s minds, I will poison their minds, and then they will be coming to hell.”That’s why Buddha was born: an incarnation of God to spoil people’s minds. And since then, hell is overflowing.This is a sophisticated way to tackle a man like Buddha. Jews were simple. They simply could not tolerate Jesus. They killed him. That means they paid great respect to him. They realized the significance of the man, the dangerousness of the man: either he lives or their tradition lives. Both cannot live together.Try to meditate on the crucifixion of Jesus and you will not be so puzzled and confused, and you will not recoil so much from it.The second question:Osho,Although you have made me alive toward Christ, Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna, Lao Tzu and all those known as enlightened ones – and although it is really difficult for me to conceive of you as separate –when someone starts talking highly of anyone, it automatically comes out of my mouth that there has never been a greater master than you, and maybe there will never be in the future either. So is this because of my love toward you, or due to my ego, or is it reality, or am I biased? Please enlighten.The disciples of Jesus thought in the same way. The disciples of Buddha also thought in the same way. It is part of love, not of reality.It is part of love. You fall in love with a woman and you think, “Never before has there been such a woman; never again shall there be such a woman.” What do you mean? Is this the reality? In a sense it is: it is the reality for you. It is not an objective reality; it is a subjective reality. This is your feeling, and feelings are as real as stones. They exist.This is not a comparison. You are not saying there really has never been such a beautiful woman before. How can you know? Millions and millions of women have been on the earth: how can you know, how can you compare? You don’t even know all the women that are on the earth right now. Who knows? – there may be somebody who is more beautiful than your beloved.But that is irrelevant, that is not the point. You are not making a comparative statement. It is not that you have studied all the statistics. You are simply making a statement of love. It has nothing to do with any other woman; it is not comparative. In the moment of love a truth arises, a subjective truth. It is your feeling. For you, this is the woman, and all other women have become irrelevant.The same happens when you love a master. It happens even more extremely because the love is still deeper. You love a woman physically – at the most, psychologically. You love a master spiritually. You touch the deepest core. He touches the deepest core in you. In that ecstasy, a subjective truth arises.This is not new. This is nothing new to you. This has always been happening. Ask Jesus’ disciples and they will say, “He is the only begotten son of God.” They cannot conceive that Jesus can be compared in any way with anybody else. He is incomparable, unique –the only begotten son. It is impossible for them to conceive that there is another son of God. Ask the followers of Buddha and they say, “He has attained. And only he has attained the unattainable. It was never attained before.” Ask the followers of Mahavira. They say, “He is the only one, all-knowing, omniscient. There is nobody else.”What is happening? It is a simple phenomenon of subjective love. It is impossible for the lover to conceive that there can be anybody else. In a moment of love, you are in such deep ecstasy, so intoxicated. Love is an intoxicant. In that intoxication, whatever you say is poetic, it is not scientific. And there is no contradiction in it.That’s why when I speak on Jesus, I forget all about Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna. They pale down, they disappear, they fade. Then, Jesus arises out of the whole of history, the only one, because that is the only way to understand him. You have to be deeply in love.When I talk about Buddha, I forget about Jesus because even to remember Jesus will be a disturbance. When I talk about Lao Tzu, I forget about everybody else. He is enough, more than enough. He himself is such a vast sky that you can go on and on and on, and there is no end to it. They are all vast skies.But the standpoint of the disciple is the standpoint of a lover. He is making a poetic statement. It is not reality, and yet it is reality. It is not reality in the objective sense of the word. It is reality as a subjective feeling. But I would like you to get out of it. I would like you to attain a greater love that is less like an intoxicant and more like awareness.There are two stages with a master. First is falling in love with him. It is absolutely necessary; without it, you will never be in contact with him. But that is only the beginning. That should not become the end. In that state of ecstasy, you will be poetic. Be poetic! Don’t be worried. There is nothing to worry about. Declare your love! Go on the housetops and declare your love because the more you declare it, the more it grows.But that is just the beginning. That is necessary to come close to the master. But come still closer and there comes a moment when the two flames of the disciple and the master become one. There is a jump, a leap, and the two flames become one. Then you become aware. Then you will laugh at your own statements.Now you know that enlightened people are not different at all. Only names differ. Buddha is a name, Jesus is a name, Krishna is a name – but the enlightenment that has happened to them is the same. The closer you come to Buddha, the closer you will come to Christ also.It is as if you are moving from the periphery of a circle toward the center. On the periphery, one point is Buddha, another point is Jesus, another point is Ramakrishna. The closer you come to the center, those lines are no longer so separate, so different, so distant. Ramakrishna comes toward Christ, Christ comes toward Buddha, Buddha comes toward Krishna. They are coming closer. Move more and more to the center, and they are meeting and merging into each other. When you reach the exact center, suddenly they have all disappeared. Only enlightenment is, only light is. All have disappeared. Those were just the personalities.Whatever you see in me is a personality. It is not the quality of the light; it is the mode of the lamp. It is the body of the lamp, not the quality of the light.The quality of the light is the same. Lamps differ. One lamp may be just an earthen lamp, another may be a golden lamp. The difference is vast, but that difference makes no difference in the quality of light. There is the same light in an earthen lamp or in a golden lamp.It is the same. Buddha is reported to have said, “Go to the sea and taste the seawater. Anywhere you go, the seawater tastes the same.” Such is the quality of buddhas. You can taste from me, you can taste from Ramakrishna, you can taste from Krishnamurti, you can taste from Jesus: the difference is only from where you taste it. The ghat, the banks, may be different, but the ocean is the same. And wherever you taste it, it will taste the same: the same saltiness, the same flame.So there is nothing wrong in it. Don’t feel guilty in any way. When you are in love, you have to be mad. In love and reasonable? – nobody has ever heard about it. If your love is reasonable, it will not be much of a love. When you are in love, you are mad.When Majnu says something about Laila, it is not a scientific statement. But still it has a truth: the truth of Majnu’s heart. It does not say anything about Laila, it says something about Majnu’s love. But that love is also true.So don’t be in any way guilty about it because this is the only way you will proceed. But don’t cling to it: move, go on and on. A greater consciousness is waiting for you – where love becomes aware, where love becomes consciousness, where love flares up and becomes light. There you will understand that all are one and the same. And in enlightenment, the personality disappears – the personality of a Buddha or a Jesus – and only the ocean remains, with the same taste.It is your love. Good. Be happy about it, but don’t be content with it, don’t think it is enough. Good, but more is possible. Always look ahead and always try to transcend the state you are in. There comes a moment when nothing remains to be transcended. That is realization.The third question:Osho,Do all enlightened masters sound as egoistic as you do?It is bound to be so. They sound egoistic because they cannot be humble in the sense you understand humility. Try to understand; it is a delicate point. Whatever you call humbleness is a function of the ego. It is a modified ego. The enlightened person has no ego so he cannot have a modified ego, he cannot be humble. He cannot be humble in the sense you can understand.Otherwise Krishna will not be able to say to Arjuna, “Leave everything and come to my feet. I am the God who created the whole existence – sarva dharman parityajya mamekam sharanam vraj. Come to my feet” What egoism! And Jesus will not be able to say, “I am the door, I am the way, I am the truth, I and my father in heaven are one. Those who follow me will be saved. Only those who follow me will be saved.” And when Buddha attained buddhahood, he declared to the skies, to the heavens, “I have attained the unattainable!”They sound very egoistical. First, they cannot be humble in the sense you understand humbleness. Your humbleness is a modified, polished, cultured ego. But they sound egoistic because they are not humble. You know only two qualities, two ways, of being: humble or egoistic. They are not humble so they must be egoistic. You have only two categories. And egoism is easy for you to understand. It is your language.When you say “I,” you mean one thing. When I say “I,” I mean something else. But when I say “I,” you will understand it in your way, not in my way. When Krishna said to Arjuna, “Come to my feet!” what does he mean? Of course you will understand if you said to somebody, “Come to my feet!” – so Krishna’s meaning must be the same. No, that is not his meaning. He has no “I” left, he has no “my” left, but he has to use your language, and you understand it in your own way.So all enlightened masters sound egoistic because you are egoistic. You can understand their humbleness only when your ego disappears; otherwise it won’t allow you. The only way to understand those who have awakened is to become awake.I go on observing continuously: I say something, you understand something else. But that’s natural. How can you understand my meaning? When I say something, the word goes to you, but not my meaning. My meaning remains in my heart. And then the word goes within you and you color it, you give it a meaning. That meaning is yours.The words sound egoistic, but they are not – because if they are, then enlightenment has not happened yet. Enlightenment happens only when the ego has disappeared. The ego is the darkness of the soul, the ego is the imprisonment of the soul. The “I” is the barrier to the ultimate.A Buddha is an emptiness. And when he says, “I have attained the unattainable,” he is simply saying the emptiness has realized its emptiness, nothing else. But to translate it into your words? He is simply saying the emptiness has realized its emptiness, but he has to say, “I have attained the unattainable.”When Krishna says, “Come to my feet,” he is saying, “Here, look! The emptiness is standing before you. Dissolve into it!” But that won’t be direct. He has to use Arjuna’s language. He says, “Come to my feet.” If Arjuna is ready and willing to surrender – if he trusts and surrenders – when he touches Krishna’s feet, he will touch emptiness. Only then will there be a realization of what Krishna was saying: “There are no feet, there is no Krishna – just a tremendous quality of emptiness.” The temple of God is emptiness. Touching Krishna’s feet, he will bow down to emptiness, and the emptiness will pour down into him. But that will be possible only when he trusts.Yes, many times I must sound very egoistic to you, but don’t be deceived. If you cling to the idea that I am egoistic, you will never be able to let go, to surrender, and then your ego will go on. Then there is no need to be here with me because then the whole point is lost. You are wasting your time.There is only one way to be here with me: if you want to surrender. Otherwise go away. Find somebody somewhere else where you find it easy to surrender because unless you surrender, you will not come to know who you are. And without knowing yourself, you will not be able to know what has happened to a man whom we called enlightened. Only through your own experience will things become clear to you.Yes, it sounds egoistic. Now there are two ways. If you think it not only sounds egoistic, but it is, then go away from me. The sooner you go the better, because all the time that you are here will be wasted. Or if you think it simply sounds egoistic, but it is not so, then surrender, then don’t wait – because sometimes waiting too long can become habitual. You can get addicted to it, and then you can go on waiting and waiting and waiting.And I will not be waiting here for long. A little while longer and I will be gone. Then you will repent, then you will suffer, then you will be sad – but then it will be of no use.It will be easy for you to touch my feet when I am gone because then there is no surrender. You can go and touch the feet of a statue. The statue is dead; there is no surrender. When you touch the feet of an alive man – who is alive just like you, who is in the body just like you – then comes the problem. The ego resists.So either believe in your ego or believe in me. These are the only two alternatives. Up to now you have believed in your ego. What have you attained? I open another alternative for you. Try it.The fourth question:Osho,Who are you?Whoever you think, because it depends on you. If you look at me with total emptiness, I will be different. If you look at me with ideas, those ideas will color me. If you come to me with a prejudice, then I will be different.I am just a mirror. Your own face will be reflected. There is a saying that if a monkey looks into a mirror, he will not find an apostle looking at him through the mirror. Only a monkey will be looking through the mirror.So it depends on the way you look at me. I have disappeared completely so I have nothing to impose on you. Who am I? Just a nothingness, a mirror. Now you have complete freedom. If you really want to know who I am, you have to be as absolutely empty as I am. Then two mirrors will be facing each other and only emptiness will be mirrored. Infinite emptiness will be mirrored: two mirrors facing each other. But if you have some idea, then you will see your own idea in me.The fifth question:Osho,During the lectures I find my eyes fixed on your face. Every once in a while, there is a sudden shift and for a few moments your face appears satanic. I know this is a projection. What is inside of me?Is there any need for me to tell you? You have both sides within you: the divine and the Devil. Sometimes, when you are flowing through your divine side, you will see the divine in me. Then things shift. When you are flowing through the devilish side, then the Devil will be seen in me. But always remember: it is you. I am just a mirror, a situation to reveal yourself to yourself – that’s all. So whatever you see, meditate on it because that must be some quality within you.It is very easy for the mind to project and forget that it is a projection. There are people who believe I am really a devil, and there are people who believe I am really divine. Both are taking their projections as real. I am just “I am.” I am just a mirror. I show your face to you. That’s the function of a master: to show your face to you.So whatever you see, meditate upon it. If you see the Devil, then try to find your Devil within yourself and try to drop it. Don’t get the idea the Devil is in me, because then you will never be able to get rid of your Devil. Because if it is in me, then what can you do? Then you are helpless. But if it is in you, something can be done. You can drop it.The sixth question:Osho,Why are the sannyasins who live here not allowed to participate in all the meditations? Why are they told to participate in only one meditation every day?It is because of you, ladies and gentlemen. It is because of your laziness.I go on talking about non-doing, and my text becomes your pretext. Non-doing has nothing to do with laziness. In fact, a lazy person can never move into non-doing. A lazy person is almost suicidal, closed. His energy is not flowing. A non-doer is a flowing person, alive.A non-doer does not mean that he does not do anything. He does many things, many more than ordinary doers, but he is still not a doer. All he does is a happening. He is instrumental – as if the divine possesses him and functions through him. He never thinks, “I am doing it.” At the most he thinks, “I am allowing it.”A non-doer will do many things and will not be tired because there will be no tension. A non-doer will do many things and will not accumulate any ego because he is not the doer. Things are just happening. A non-doer loves his work, and the work becomes worship.People are allowed to be here only for certain work. That certain work is that they have to transform their work into worship. But they would like to be lazy. And particularly in India, sannyas is thought to be a type of laziness. People who don’t want to do anything become sannyasins.I am not a shelter for them; I am not a shelter for escapists. I am here to teach you life and more life and still more life, because only when your energy is flowing will you be able to love; only when your energy is flowing will you be able to know; only when your energy is flowing will you be able to transcend death someday. Otherwise not.But very few work as worship here. Many go on avoiding. Not that they want to meditate – because if they want to meditate then the whole thing will be totally different: they can meditate with their work. But they would like to do all the meditations just to avoid the work.A few are absolutely lazy and think they can try and rationalize it. For example, let me tell you about one day in one sannyasin’s life. From six to seven in the morning he meditates, then comes breakfast. Then eight to nine-thirty or ten is the lecture. Then of course by ten o'clock he has already done too much: meditated, listened to such a long lecture – so a little gossiping is obviously needed. Then by eleven, eleven-thirty, he is ready for lunch. By twelve, of course, he has already done too much – meditating, listening, even eating – so at twelve he goes to sleep. Up till three, rest is needed. Three to three-thirty: tea or coffee time. Three-thirty to four-thirty: Nadabrahma – individual meditation. Four-thirty to five-thirty he goes for a walk. Of course, one needs a little physical exercise. Five-thirty to six-thirty: Kundalini Meditation. Then dinner time. And, of course, then the girlfriend comes, so the day is complete. Do you need still more meditations?I talk every day for ninety minutes. That means, at the most, thirty pages. Here we have twenty people who are editing. Every day they have to edit, transcribe, proofread, thirty pages. Twenty people: that means one and a half pages per person. Still the work goes on piling up. And they are always carrying long faces – they are doing great work! It looks ridiculous: one person speaks, twenty people edit. It simply looks ridiculous. Then, too, the work is never done. It goes on piling up.They are told not to meditate too much because listening to me is meditation. Can you do a better meditation than listening to me? If you love the work, if you love me, that is meditation. Your whole life should be meditation. People who come for a few days from the outside have to learn meditation, but those who are living here – their whole life should be meditation. Their walking, their sitting, even their sleep – everything should become meditative. Meditation should be a climate here, not something you do, but something you are.Don’t put on faces that you are doing very great work. Love it! Nobody is helped by carrying a long face and a burden, and nobody is deceived by you because the whole thing seems to be ridiculous. You just have the idea of feeling burdened. That burden kills you. And if you go on thinking about it, it will become a burden. It will create ulcers, it will make your body feel ill, and you will become tense and nervous. Then you will try even more to show that you are very burdened – and now you are moving in a vicious circle.You are here to enjoy, be, delight. And the work is so little that, in fact, it can be done within minutes. Just one and a half pages of editing, transcribing, and proofreading – how long will it take? This is just an example. It is the same with other work.But there are people who take it as worship. They are flowing and growing and flowering. There are people who work, and work lovingly. That’s why some work is done; otherwise it would be impossible.These questions come from the people who are lazy. I will not use the name of the person who has asked this question again because it is the same sannyasin who wants her name to be told.The seventh question:Osho,Are fear and guilt the same thing? And surely as light shows up darkness, so Jesus must have made people aware of their guilt?Fear and guilt are not the same thing. Fear accepted becomes freedom; fear denied, rejected, condemned, becomes guilt.If you accept fear as part of the situation… It is part of the situation. Man is a part, a very small tiny part, and the whole is vast. Man is a drop, a very small drop, and the whole is the whole ocean. A trembling arises: “I may be lost in the whole. My identity may be lost.” That is the fear of death. All fear is the fear of death. And the fear of death is the fear of annihilation.It is natural that man is afraid, trembling. If you accept it, if you say, “This is how life is,” if you accept it totally, trembling stops immediately and fear – the same energy that was becoming fear – uncoils and becomes freedom. Then, you know that even if the drop disappears in the ocean, it will be there: in fact, it will become the whole ocean. Then, death becomes nirvana. Then, you are not afraid to lose yourself. Then, you understand the saying of Jesus: “If you save your life you will lose it, and if you lose it you will save it.”The only way to go beyond death is to accept death. Then it disappears. The only way to be fearless is to accept fear. Then the energy is released and becomes freedom. But if you condemn it, if you suppress it, if you hide the fact that you are afraid, if you armor yourself and protect yourself and are defensive, then guilt arises.Anything repressed creates guilt, anything not allowed creates guilt, anything against nature creates guilt. Then you feel guilty that you have been lying to others and lying to yourself. That inauthenticity is guilt.You ask, “Are fear and guilt the same thing?” No. Fear can be guilt, but it may not be. It depends what you do with fear. If you do something wrong with it, it becomes guilt. If you simply accept it and don’t do anything about it – there is nothing to do – then it becomes freedom, it becomes fearlessness.“And surely as light shows up darkness, Jesus must have made people aware of their guilt.” No, not at all. Jesus tried to help people not to feel guilty. That is his whole effort. His whole effort is to tell people to accept themselves and not feel guilty, not feel condemned: “Don’t say to yourself that you are ugly, wrong, a sinner. Don’t condemn. Whatever you are, you are. Accept the fact and the very acceptance becomes a transformation.”Jesus never created guilt in people. That was one of his crimes. He tried to cheer up guilty people – that was his crime. He tried to tell them, “Don’t be guilty, don’t feel guilty. Even if there is something wrong, you are not wrong. Maybe you have acted wrongly, but your being is not wrong because of that.” Some action may be wrong, but the being is always right.He accepted people. Sinners were at ease with him, at home with him. That became the trouble. The rabbis, the bishops, the priests, started saying, “Why? Why do you allow sinners to be with you? Why do you eat with them, why do you sleep with them? Why are so many outcasts following you?”Jesus said, “It is bound to be so. I come for those who are sick. The sick seek the physician. Those who are already healthy need not. Go and think about it.” Jesus says, “I have come for the sick, for the ill. I have to support them and I have to make them strong. I have to bring light to them and I have to bring life to them again so that energy, their energy, becomes dynamic and flowing.”No. Jesus as a light does not show darkness. In fact, when the light is there, darkness disappears. Darkness is not shown by light; it disappears with light.This is the difference. If a priest is there he will show darkness. He is not a light; he cannot destroy darkness. He will make you feel guilty, he will create sinners. He will condemn, and he will make you afraid of hell, and he will create a greed and a desire for heaven and rewards. At the most he can create more fear and more greed in you. That’s what heaven and hell are: projections of fear and greed.When a Jesus, a sage, appears, darkness is simply destroyed. When the light is there, darkness is not shown. Darkness simply is not – because darkness is nothing but the absence of light.There is darkness in the room. If I give you a lamp and tell you, “Go, and take the lamp with you because with the lamp it will be easy to see the darkness. If you go in darkness, how will you be able to see the darkness?” – it looks logical, but it is absurd. Darkness can be seen only when there is no light? If you take the light with you, you will never be able to see darkness because once the light is there, darkness is no longer there.Jesus simply destroys darkness, he destroys guilt. He creates hope, he creates confidence and trust. People who have been condemned for long have lost all hope. They have settled with their sin, they have settled with their ugly lives, and they know that nothing can be done now; they can only wait for hell. They have accepted that they are going to be thrown in hell and they have to suffer.Jesus comes and helps people to come out of their closed darkness. He says, “There is no hell.” He says, “Come out! Except for your ignorance, there is no hell. Except for your own closedness, there is no hell. Come out of it! Flow again. Unfreeze and melt, and live life again. Come into the sunlight and God is available.”That’s why he says, “Return! The Kingdom of God is at hand.” He does not say that if you are a sinner then returning will take a long time, and if you are a respectable religious man then returning will take less time. No.Just think of the whole thing as if you are dreaming a long dream that you are a sinner, and somebody else in the same room is dreaming he is a saint. Will it take a longer time for you to get out of your sleep than it will take for the one who is dreaming he is a saint? Both the saint and the sinner have been dreaming. They will take the same time to get out of their sleep.Sometimes, paradoxically, it may take a little longer time for the saint because he is having such a beautiful dream. He would not like to come out of it. The sinner is already in a nightmare: he would like to come out of it. He is crying, shrieking, that he should somehow come out of it. He is making every effort to come out. The dream is not beautiful. The dream is ugly: he is in hell. The saint may like not to be disturbed. He would like to turn over onto the other side and go still a little more into his sleep.Remember, when you feel happy, returning is difficult; when you feel unhappy, returning is easy. That’s the meaning of the saying: “There are blessings hidden in misfortunes, hidden in curses” – because when one is going along happily and everything is running smoothly, who bothers to transform oneself? When one is sad, in deep sorrow, in misery, in tears, then one would like to come out of it.Suffering is also good because it gives you an opportunity to awaken, to come out of your sleep. Nothing is wrong if you can use it rightly. Even poisons can be used as medicines and they can become life-enhancing.If you feel guilty, try to see why you are feeling guilty. Yes, man is helpless – right. And man is ignorant – that is right, too. In his ignorance he has done many things that were not as they should be – that too is right. Accept this helplessness, this ignorance, and pray and let your tears come down. Confess, repent, say to God, “I was helpless and I was ignorant, and I could not do better – and I still cannot do better, unless you help. As I am, I will again go wrong. As I am, I will again betray you. I cannot rely on myself. Help me. Only your grace can save me.”That’s what Jesus’ whole teaching is: ask for God’s grace, don’t believe in yourself – because that very belief has been your whole undoing.No, he never created guilt in anybody. He tried to free people from guilt.The last question but one:Osho,How?Now. And there is no “how” to it.And the last question:Osho,Osho! Osho! Osho!!!That is the way! If you can cry, if you can pray, if you can call from your very innermost core, the divine is always available. The divine is always close. It is just that you have not called, just that you have not knocked at his door. Jesus says, “Knock, and the door shall be opened unto you. Ask, and it shall be given…”Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 1246 While he yet talked to the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him.47 Then one said unto him, “Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee.”48 But he answered and said unto him that told him, “Who is my mother? And who are my brethren?”49 And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, “Behold my mother and my brethren!”50 “For whomsoever shall do the will of my father that is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.”Luke 1425 And there went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and said unto them,26 “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, even his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”26 “And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.”Thomas Carlyle once said about one of his friends that he was born a man and died a grocer. Everybody is born great and dies very small. Everybody is born like a god and almost always dies like a dog. What happens in between? Why is man crippled by life?One should hope that man grows to greater dimensions, grows to greater heights, grows to greater life – what Jesus calls “life abundant” – but that rarely happens. As it happens usually, man starts shrinking. The moment a man is born he starts shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. This has to be understood.When a child is born, he has no identity. He simply is. That isness is vast, it has magnitude, it has no limitation. The child has no name yet – a name cripples – the child has no identity, the child does not know who he is. That is his greatness, that is his vastness. He is one with existence, he is not yet separated. He has no boundary, no finitude.A child has no character; that is his beauty. Character kills. The more character you have, the smaller you have become. Character is an armor around you. It defines you – and every definition is a death. Let me repeat: every definition is a death. Only the undefined is alive.The child has a body but he has no form. In his consciousness, no form yet exists. Even if you put a mirror before the child, he will not recognize himself. He will look at the mirror, but he will not recognize that he is reflected there because he does not yet know who he is. That is his innocence. Then things start gathering around: the name, and it becomes an imprisonment. The form, the recognition, the identity, the religion, the society, the color, the nation – they all become confinements.Now the child is shrinking; the vastness of the sky is disappearing. Clouds are gathering and they go on suffocating your being. By the time you die, you were already dead long before.This is the meaning of these sutras: if one is to attain one’s real glory again, one has to become indefinable, one has to lose character.It will be very difficult to understand me. I say one has to lose character, because character is what gives you limitations. Character is a fixity, a frozenness. Unless the character melts and you start flowing again, and you become unknown to yourself and unpredictable… Nobody, not even you yourself, knows what is going to happen in the next moment. You start living from moment to moment. The calculation is gone, the planning disappears. You float like a white cloud in the sky, moving but without any motivation; moving but not knowing where you are going; moving but remaining in the moment – so totally herenow that past and future make no sense. Only the present is meaningful.Then who will be, what will be, your identity? Who will be you? You cannot say anything about it; it is unutterable. That is what Buddha calls the inner emptiness: anatta, no self. That’s what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God – something mysterious that you are, and not that you have to become. You are already that.It happened in the Second World War in a Japanese concentration camp – the guards of the camp had come to know the American army’s arrival was imminent. They could reach any moment and Japan would be defeated. So they became afraid for their own lives. They unlocked the doors of the concentration camp and fled to the woods.But those who were imprisoned in the camp never came to know that now the doors were not locked. They were still imprisoned. The guards had gone, the locks were unlocked, but the prisoners were still prisoners. They were already free, but they did not know it.The next day when the liberators came they had only to announce to them, “You are already free. We have to do nothing.”This is what I say to you: you are already free. The guards have never been there except in your imagination, and the locks were never locked. You have seen a dream and you are imprisoned in it. And this is the only good news Jesus brings to you, or I bring to you: you are already free, not that you have to become free.All your imprisonment is just a mental attitude. You call yourself a Hindu or a Christian or a Mohammedan. Not that you are a Christian: how can you be a Christian and how can you be a Mohammedan? How can just a mere ideology confine you, how can just words make prisons for you? To such a vital energy, to such a vital reality, how can mere words – Hinduism, Christianity – become imprisonments? Impossible.But you believe in them. Then the impossible becomes possible. You think of yourself as being this or that. That very thinking makes you this or that – but you are not. In the innermost core of your being, you remain total freedom, absolute freedom.Now try to enter these sutras. They are very delicate and there is every possibility of misunderstanding them. Jesus has been misunderstood on many points. One of the points is covered by these sutras.People have been finding fault with him because of these sutras. On the one hand, he goes on talking about love – he even says, “God is love” – and then on the other hand, he goes on saying such contradictory things. How can a man of love say these things? But he has said them. So there is every possibility they have not been understood rightly.Let us try…While he yet talked to the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him.Then one said unto him, “Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee.”But he answered and said unto him that told him, “Who is my mother? And who are my brethren?”And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said,“Behold my mother and my brethren!”“This is my mother and these are my brothers.” Up to now, whatever he has said can be understood. The next sutra is really very dangerous. He says:“For whomsoever shall do the will of my Father that is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.”And there went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and said unto them, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”“And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.”He says, “If any man come to me and hate not his father, mother, wife, children, brothers and sisters, he cannot be my disciple.” A man who has always been talking about love – why does he so suddenly talk about hate? The word hate does not fit on the lips of Jesus. The man seems to be contradictory, paradoxical – but that is only an appearance. We have to go deeply. If Jesus says “hate,” he must mean something.He means first that man is born as part of the divine, as part of the totality, the whole. The child in the mother’s womb is not in the mother’s womb: the child is in the womb of the whole. The mother is nothing but a part of the whole. The mother is the nearest part of the whole, but the child exists in the divine, in the totality.He does not know the mother; he simply exists. Then he is born, he is separated from the mother. But even while separate from the mother, he does not yet have an identity. He cannot say “I am.” Still the purity of amness continues.Then, by and by, he will start loving the mother. The moment he starts loving the mother, he will forget the wholeness of amness, the totality. Love of the mother will become oblivion of the total. Then he starts loving the father and he forgets the total completely. Then his brothers, sisters, then a family is created, a small family, and he has forgotten the great family of existence.Unless his consciousness shifts again from the mother, from the father, from the brothers and sisters, and the whole gestalt changes – unless again he looks at the whole and the whole becomes the family, again he lives with the stars and the trees and the rivers and the ocean and the sands – he will not be able to follow Jesus. And you will not be able to follow me – because what is the meaning of following Jesus? The only meaning is to shift the focus of consciousness.If you have fallen in love with a family, you have to go beyond that love; otherwise that very love, that very attachment, will not allow you to enter the greater whole.When Jesus says “hate,” he simply means “don’t love.” When he says “hate,” he uses a very strong word to emphasize it because love has made you part of a small family, so only hate can make you again a part of the whole. But by “hate,” he does not mean hatred. By “hate,” he simply means “annihilate the love, the attachment.”In India, we have been using the words asakti or rag – attachment, being colored by the attachment. Be nonattached, renounce. Renounce the small so you can find the whole. And this is the beauty: if you renounce the part, the small family, and attain the great family, suddenly you will realize the small family is there in the great – because where will it go? In the small family, the great family is not there; but in the great family, the small family is there.When the whole earth becomes your home, your own home is included in it. But when your only home is your home, the whole earth is not included in it. When the whole sky becomes yours, the small sky you used to think is yours is there.The greater includes the smaller, the smaller cannot include the greater. Your father, your mother, your children, your wife, will be there – not as your mother, as your father, as your wife, but as gods. In fact, you have not taken anything away from them. On the contrary, you have given something to them. Before, they were ordinary human beings; now they will be divine. Your renunciation has not destroyed anything. On the contrary, it has revealed much. Lose the small so you can gain the whole, and that small will be regained again in greater glory.In the beginning, it will seem as if you are moving away from love because the love of the family, the love of the country, is the only love you know. And it is a false love because unless the love includes the whole, it can never be satisfactory. Love is vast and can only be fulfilled by the vast.Unless you love existence, you will love in vain: your love will create frustrations. It will never give you contentment because love needs such a vast phenomenon to fill it that only God can do that. No father, no mother, no wife, no children, no sister, no brother, no friend, can do that. Unless God comes to you as a father, or your father appears to you to be a god – unless the wife becomes the whole, or the whole becomes the wife – you will not be fulfilled.That’s why there is so much misery because of love. You love the part and you expect the whole. That’s the misery. You love the small and you want the great. It cannot be fulfilled; hence, frustration.Whenever you fall in love with a man, you expect something divine. Every lover expects it. And when it is not delivered, you are hurt and you feel you have been cheated. Then the misery of love arises.Expectations are great and the reality is very tiny. You expect from the wrong sources: you want a small stream to become the ocean. It cannot, it is helpless. When your eyes are open to the reality, the dream disappears and the honeymoon is over. A small, tiny stream – and you were thinking of the ocean! Now you are fallen, frustrated, wounded deeply in the heart.Love wounds because you expect the whole from the part. And this is the only love you know. This love is not exactly love; it is attachment. There is a greater love that arises only when your eyes are open to the vast, to the infinite, to existence.When Jesus says “hate,” he simply says, “Whatever your love is, it is worth nothing. Move to the opposite, move to the other extreme. Drop all this nonsense you call love. It is not love. It may be fear – fear of loneliness – but it is not a sharing of being. It is a game of the ego, and love cannot be a game of the ego. Drop all this. And by dropping all this, tremendous possibilities open.”First, if you drop all so-called love – the love of the father, the mother, the brother, the sister, the family, the wife – if you really drop it, suddenly your identity will be lost. Who will be then, who will be you then? If somebody asks you right now, you say, “I am somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, somebody’s husband, somebody’s father. This is my religion. This is my country. This is the group I belong to.” You have something to say about yourself.Think. If you belong to no country, you belong to no sect, no church, no denomination, you have cut all bonds from your family – father, mother, wife – you are absolutely alone, who are you then? How will you say who you are?By cutting the attachments you have killed your ego.That is Jesus’ meaning. He says that through your attachments, your ego exists and gets nourishment. Cut all the attachments and suddenly the ego collapses. It has nowhere to stand, nothing to be supported by. Suddenly it collapses and in that collapse, for the first time, you are born. For the first time, you are you – not somebody’s son, not somebody’s husband, not somebody’s father. For the first time, you are simply there in your absolute nakedness, purity, innocence. You are undefined – all definitions gone. Suddenly you start throbbing with a new heart; you become part of the whole. The small family that was surrounding you and creating a boundary is no longer there.You became small because of the attachment of the family. You become vast once that attachment is transcended. That’s why Jesus uses a very strong word. He says “hate” because less than that won’t do.Listen: While he yet talked to the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him. Many more things have to be understood. Jesus knows well that his mother and his brothers don’t understand him. They think, really, that he has gone a little crazy. Their own brother – and he thinks he is the son of God! Just think about your brother. If he starts thinking he is the son of God and always talks about God who is in heaven, naturally you will think he has gone out of his mind. You will seek the help of a psychiatrist; you will give him electric shocks to bring him back to earth.Jesus’ relatives thought he was beside himself: “He is a little eccentric, crazy, mad.” When he would go to his village, people would simply laugh, they would ridicule him. At the most they were amused, looking at this son of the carpenter Joseph: “And now suddenly he thinks he is the son of God” – and they know well whose son he is! “Just a few years ago, he was working with his father in the workshop, carrying wood from the forest, helping his father. And now suddenly he has gone mad. Poor Jesus!”That was the idea of his family too. They felt pity for him. So when somebody said, “Your brothers and your mother are waiting without, desiring to speak with you,” he knows what they are going to speak to him about. He knows that their whole effort is somehow to bring him back home and make him normal.This is one of the problems with humanity. People you call normal are not normal at all, but they have the majority. A Buddha always looks abnormal; a Jesus looks abnormal. In a sense he is because he doesn’t behave like you, he doesn’t follow the ordinary rules, he does not fit with the society. He is a misfit. And to allow him creates a suspicion in your minds: if he is right, then you are wrong. That creates a doubt and a trembling: “He must be wrong, he must be proved wrong. He must have somehow gone wrong somewhere.” Of course, the ordinary is thought to be normal – and the normal is thought to be the norm – so the exceptional, the unique, looks abnormal.Even psychoanalysts think Jesus was neurotic. Many books have been written against Jesus, proving he was neurotic, he was not in his senses.What was he saying? Of course, if someone among you suddenly declares that he is the son of God, you will start laughing. What does he mean?Jesus knows well what his family wants to talk about. And they have not come to him, they have only come to the son of Joseph, which he is no longer. He was, but since John the Baptist initiated him into a different life – changed and converted him to a new plane of consciousness, initiated him, led him through a new door into existence – since then, he is no longer the same.When Buddha came back to his home after twelve years, his father could not believe that he had become enlightened. He said, “Drop all this nonsense! You can befool others, but you cannot befool me. I have given birth to you, I have known you from the very beginning. Drop this game and come back home. I am your father and because I love you, my doors are yet open for you – though you don’t deserve it! You are an escapist. In my old age you escaped, and you are my only hope. Come back home.”Of course, the father cannot see what has happened. He is too full of his own ideas, too full of his memories, his remembrance of this boy who was born to him. And now suddenly he has become a buddha, enlightened, has attained truth? If he had been somebody else’s son, the father might have looked again, might have watched, observed, might have been more open. But this is his own son. The eyes are full of tears, anger, attachment, memories. The eyes are clouded by the past. He cannot see the reality that is standing before him.Buddha laughed and he said, “Just look at me! I’m not the same one who left your house. Somebody else comes to you. That man is dead. I am totally new.”The father looked again and then said, “You cannot deceive me. You are the same. I know you well. I know you more than you can know yourself.”Jesus knows what they want to talk about. And they don’t want to talk to him, to the reality that he is now. They want to talk to something that exists no longer. Jesus disappeared that day in the River Jordan when John the Baptist initiated him into a different life. The man who used to be there has disappeared. The house is old, but the resident has changed. The same person doesn’t live in the same body. The body is the same, but a new consciousness has entered. A new consciousness abides there, and they have come to talk to the old who is no longer. Then one said unto him, “Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee.” But he answered and said unto him that told him, “Who is my mother? And who are my brethren?”This new consciousness – call it “Christ” – this new consciousness says: “Who is my mother? And who are my brethren?”Unless you can see two personalities – one of Jesus, who is no longer, and one of Christ, who has come like a dove and has entered his soul – you will not be able to understand these sentences. These sutras become very simple once you see that this man Jesus is no longer the Jesus who used to be.It happens many times to my sannyasins. When they want to go back to their homes they become a little apprehensive. They come to me and they say, “It is going to be difficult. My father won’t understand me, my mother will not be able to see what has happened. When I go back they will not be able to see the fact of what has happened to me.”I tell them, “Don’t be worried. Simply go and remain new. Don’t try in any way to behave like the old.” That has to be remembered because the temptation will be there. Because the mother is there, the father is there, the brothers are there – the whole milieu of the old – the temptation will be that even if you have changed, why create a disturbance for them? Just act in the old way.But if you act in the old way, that will be a deep disturbance for you. That will be a deception, it won’t be authenticity. And in that way you are not going to help your family. That way you will be untrue to them.Be true. Even if they misunderstand in the beginning, accept that misunderstanding – it is natural – but remain the one that you have become. Don’t act; remain true. Sooner or later they will understand. And once they understand, your reality will start transforming them also. Reality is a great force.This happens many times…One sannyasin from England just wrote to me: “I was afraid, notwithstanding whatever you had said. I was afraid, and as I came nearer to England, my fear was tremendous. My father is very stubborn, as fathers are, and I thought that he won’t understand, he won’t even listen. He will think I am mad and he will try and force me to go to a psychoanalyst. ‘What has happened? Why are you wearing orange?’ And he is an old Christian, orthodox. It will be almost a shock.”But the sannyasin had to go, so he went. And now he has written: “They were shocked. They couldn’t believe it. But as you had said, I tried not to be tempted to act. I remained true, and for the first time, after three or four days, they relaxed.“And for the first time something has transpired between me and my parents, something that I can call love, that has never been there before. Fear was there, but not love. And they are asking me questions about what has happened to me, and they have even tried to meditate” – which he thinks is a miracle.He thinks that I must be doing something from here. I’m not doing anything from here. Your truth, your authenticity, has a great power in it. Truth transforms not only you, but if you are true, wherever you move, with whomever you relate, you become a great force.Jesus knows that they have not come for him. They are not yet ready. And they don’t understand that a discontinuity has happened in the life of Jesus. The old is gone and the new has come, and they are not in any way related.That is the problem: when the new comes, the new is absolutely new. It is not a modified form of the old. When the old goes, it goes totally. There comes a gap, a silence, an emptiness.The old goes and the new comes – the body remains the same. Nobody will be able to see what has happened, but everybody will feel something has happened. Even you yourself will become aware, by and by, that you are no longer the old.Recognition takes time: sometimes months, sometimes years. Recognition takes time. By and by you become aware that you are no longer the same person you used to be. And when this realization surrounds you, you flower. A different grace becomes available to you.The old man lives under law, the new man lives under love. The old man lives in the society, the new man becomes a peak of absolute aloneness. The old man lives in the past, in the future; the new man lives only in the present. The new man has a presence, a different quality of being: a magnetism, a charisma.But he answered and said unto him that told him, “Who is my mother? And who are my brethren?” And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, “Behold my mother and my brethren!” He has created a new community. Buddha called his community the sangha. Buddha says to his disciples to seek three refuges. When anybody comes to surrender, he has to surrender to three things. He says: “I surrender to Buddha, I surrender to the sangha, I surrender to dhamma.”Buddha is the alive, the presence herenow, but he will not always be there. Sooner or later he will disappear. Just as a lamp disappears and then you cannot find where the flame has gone, Buddha will disappear. This body cannot contain him for long because the body is mortal and he is immortal. The vehicle is weak; the vehicle cannot persist for long. Sooner or later the body will fall and the flame will disappear. Then to whom will you surrender? So Buddha says, “I am creating a community: the sangha.”The sangha is a community of those who live with the same attitude, who live a life in common, who commune with each other. It is a community: a community of seekers on the same path, a community of those who have been in love with the same buddha, whose love joins them together.The community is a group. When the buddha is there, you can look at him: he can be helpful, he can guide you, he can take you out of your misery and darkness. But when he is gone, then there is only one possibility: you should join together to help each other. A few will be a little ahead, a few will not be so. A few may be lagging behind, a few may be marching forcibly, a few may just be fast asleep – but if it is a community, then those who are lagging behind can also be helped. The community can take care of them. The community can think about them, can love them, can help them, can guide them. When a buddha is alive there is no need, but when the buddha is gone, a community is the only refuge.Jesus was creating a community. This community is not the church, remember; this community is not a sect, remember. This community is a family of fellow seekers, not of fellow believers. When you believe, the community becomes a sect. When you seek, then it is a community. A community is an alive phenomena of those who are all seeking together and helping each other.There is a parable in India…Once it happened that a great fire broke out in a forest. Two men were helpless there in the forest, they couldn’t get out of it because one was blind and another was crippled in the legs.The crippled one couldn’t run. He could see, but he couldn’t run. The blind one could run fast, but he couldn’t see. So they made a community. They talked to each other and they said, “We can help each other.”So the blind man took the crippled man on his shoulders. They became one man. The blind man could walk, the crippled man could see. They helped each other. They came out of the fire; they were saved. Separately, they would have died. Together they found the way out.A community is a community of blind people and crippled people. When a buddha is there, there is no need because he is both. But when the buddha is gone, the master is gone and the source of life disappears. And the whole forest is on fire, and everywhere there is darkness, and somebody is crippled and somebody is blind and everybody lacks something. But everybody also has something. Then, the community can arise. That is the family of Jesus. He says: And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, “Behold my mother and my brethren!”“And then,” Buddha says, “a time comes when the community will also become dead. It will become a sect.” The family of Christ will become Christianity; the family of Buddha, the sangha of Buddha, will become Buddhists: dead, fellow believers not fellow seekers. Nobody is going anywhere, they simply believe. The community is not a community at all now. They talk, they discuss, but nobody is ready to risk anything, to search, to inquire.Then, dhamma. Then you have to take refuge, you have to surrender and take refuge, only in the pure principle of dharma. The pure principle, the basic law – what Lao Tzu calls Tao, what Buddha calls dhamma, what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God. Then you have to surrender to the unknown.It will be difficult because Buddha is visible, you can touch him. And the community is also visible – not as enlightened as Buddha, but some fragments of life, some fragments of light, are carried by the community. You can put them together; a certain light can be created. But when the community has become a sect, a dead religion, an organization not a brotherhood, remember: a brotherhood is not an organization. A brotherhood may be organized, but it is not an organization. It is fluid. A brotherhood is organized because of love. Organization is a by-product, a consequence.But an organization is simply organization. It is forced, solid: not because of love, but because of law. Then one has to look to God, whom you cannot see anywhere, whose address is not known, whose whereabouts are absolutely unknown.Jesus says: “Behold my mother and my brethren!” This is my family, my community, in which I am spreading my being, with whom I am sharing my new life, with whom I am sharing my new vision and my new eyes. “For Whomsoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.”“Whoever is ready to follow the path of God – he is my mother, he is my brother, he is my sister.” Jesus is saying, “Only those who are related to God are related to me. Now, no other relationship is possible.”Even if Jesus’ mother wants to be related to him again, she cannot be related just because of the old relationship. She will have to seek a new relationship, and that new relationship is possible only if she becomes attuned to God. Only through God, via God, can you be related to Jesus. There is no other way.If you come to me, if you are really a seeker of truth, immediately you become related to me. Otherwise there is no relationship. Only via the truth – you cannot be related to me directly. All direct relationship is impossible now. Unless you seek that which I have found, there is no possibility. There is no possibility at all.It happens… Many times people ask me – just a few days before, Vivek was asking me, “Why do we never see any of your college friends, your school friends, coming to you? Why don’t they come?”In the first place, I never had many friends because from the very beginning if somebody was a seeker, only then was there a possibility of any friendship. There was no other way to relate with me. So very few friends. But even those are lost because unless they now relate to my new reality, there is no possibility. Either I have to come down to relate to them, which is not possible, or they have to come up – which is difficult.By and by, they have disappeared. They continue to think about me as of old, but that man is no longer there; that man is dead. They would like to relate to me as of old, but that man is dead. How can you relate to a dead man?So it becomes embarrassing for them. If they come, it becomes embarrassing. They don’t know what to talk about, what to say. If they say something of the past and then they look at me, the whole thing looks absurd. It carries no meaning. At the most I can listen, but I cannot say a single word. Then they feel awkward.They used to come; by and by they dropped. But my family has not dropped me. They have tried hard to cope with me. And they have tried hard to feel my new reality. That’s a rare phenomenon. Jesus was not as fortunate as I am.“For whomsoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.” And there went great multitudes with him and he turned, and said unto them, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Unless you deny your worldly family, you cannot be part of a spiritual family. Unless you deny the ordinary ties of the body, you cannot move into the world of the spirit. You have to leave behind the world of matter, the world of the body, to move into the world of the spirit.“And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.” And until you die, you cannot follow. You have to die so that the new can be born in you. It can be born only when you are gone. It is not a question of transforming you, it is not a question of improving you, it is not a question of making something better of you. However better you are made, improved, modified, you will remain the same.Your ego can be more polished – it can even be taught to be humble. You can be taught to be simple: you can live naked, with no clothes. You can be taught to be nonpossessive: you can leave the whole world. But if you remain the same, your nonpossessiveness will not help much; your nakedness will not help much because your nakedness will become a new clothing for the ego.Now the ego will be satisfied: “I have renounced all. I don’t possess anything. I have left my family” – but the “I” will continue. And the “I” has to drop. Unless the “I” disappears, you will not be empty enough for the divine to enter. You will not have enough space for him.That is Jesus’ meaning when he says: “And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.” To be a disciple is to die in the master and to be reborn in the master. It is to drop totally dead in the master so his life flame can give you a new light and a new life.Until you die, nothing is possible and that is the great fear. You would like to be improved, you would like to become better. Then don’t come to a man like Jesus! He is not interested in bettering you, he is not interested in renovating the old house. He says, “We will demolish it and we will make a new one,” because if you renovate an old house it remains the old. It may deceive others, but it cannot deceive you. You know it is the old. The foundations remain the old, the structure remains the old. You polish it, you color it, you whitewash it – a few patches here and there – and then you think everything is new. It is not.In life, never try to renovate, because something is fundamentally wrong. The base is wrong, the whole foundation is wrong – and on that foundation, you will remain wrong.So I’m not interested in you becoming more religious, no. I’m not interested in your becoming more moral, no. I am not interested in your attaining a beautiful character – not at all. I am interested that you should die so that a newness rushes into you. Only on your death is resurrection possible. And that which will resurrect will be the divine. That will be the divine.Once you are ready to die, moral, immoral, sinner or saint are all irrelevant. Once you are ready to die, you have become capable. You open the door. You say to God, “Come in!”Remember: God comes from the same door as from where death comes in. If you are afraid of death you will remain afraid of God. God and death are two names of one phenomenon. If you are afraid, you interpret God as death. If you accept, you interpret death as God. Death itself becomes the beloved.Wait. Wait as you wait for your beloved – and death comes dancing! There is nothing like it. No longer can you conceive of anything that can transcend the beauty of it. Death becomes the beloved. Then death’s garb is no longer there. God is revealed.This has to be done every moment because every moment death knocks at your door. Every moment when you exhale, death knocks. Exhalation is death; inhalation is life. The first thing a child has to do is to inhale, and the last thing the old man, dying, will do is to exhale. With exhalation, death; with inhalation, life.This is happening every moment. Whenever you inhale, you are becoming again alive, whenever you exhale, again death. Death, life, death, life… That’s how you move. They are two wings or two legs; two aspects of you. If you really die with each exhalation – if you relax and you surrender – then with each inhalation you will revive. And you will feel such freshness that even the dew in the morning will be jealous! You will feel freshness such as the stars in the night feel.This is eternal life. One who has learned the secret of how to die moment to moment has learned the secret of how to live eternally. Now death is impossible. Death is possible only if you resist it. It is in your resistance that death exists. Resistance is ego. Death exists because of the ego. If you surrender, death disappears. Surrender is the key.Jesus says: “And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.” Not only does the father have to be denied, and the mother, and the sister and the brothers, but you have to deny your life also. Your life has to be denied so that God can live within you and through you. Both cannot live together within you.Remember: either you or God. You would like to give him a small room somewhere in your house, a small temple in a far corner of the house. You would like him to live there, but that is not his way. He wants the whole house or nothing. This trick won’t do.I was staying with a friend. In the morning, I saw him going to the garage. I asked him, “Where are you going?”He said, “We have made a temple in the garage.”They live in a palace and their god lives in the garage! Whom do you think you are befooling? And he was very happy. He thinks he is a very religious man – and the god lives in the garage. He’s not even a welcomed guest.Even with a guest you behave well, even with a poor relative you behave well. Even a poor relative will feel offended if you put him in the garage. The god lives in the garage!He was very happy and he said, “We have made a very beautiful temple there. Come and see.”I said, “God cannot be there, so I’m not coming. Go and do whatever you want to do, but this is not prayer.”God comes to you only when you completely give in, when you are completely empty and you say, “I am no more. Now you can come in.” When you have vacated the throne, only then is he enthroned.Enough for today.

https://oshoworld.com/osho-audio-discourse-english-c/

Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/come-follow-yourself-vol-02-06/

The first question:Osho,You have said, “Teaching is the best way of learning,” but you have also said, “The world is irreligious because of too many preachers.” Would you please speak on the subtle difference between helping others and trying to change others.There is a vast difference – and tremendously significant – between trying to change the other and helping him. When you help somebody, you help him to be himself. When you try to change somebody, you try to change him according to your idea. When you try to change somebody, you try to make a carbon copy of him. You are not interested in him. You have a certain ideology, a fixed idea, an ideal. You change him according to the ideal. The ideal is more important; the real man is not important at all.In fact, trying to change the other according to some ideal is very violent. It is aggression, it is an effort to destroy the other. It is not love, it is not compassion. Compassion always allows the other to be himself. Compassion has no ideology, compassion is just a climate. It does not give you direction, it only gives you energy and then you move. Then your seed has to sprout according to its own nature; there is nobody forcing anything on you.When I say “go and help others,” I mean help them to be themselves. When I say “the world is too irreligious because of too many preachers,” I mean that so many people are trying to change, convert, transform others according to their own ideology.The idea should not be more important than the person. Even the whole of humanity is not more important than a single human being because humanity is an idea. A single human being is a reality.Forget about humanity; remember the human being – the real, the concrete, the throbbing, the alive. It is very easy to sacrifice human beings for humanity. It is very easy to sacrifice human beings for Islam, Christianity, Hinduism. It is very easy to sacrifice them for the idea of Christ, Buddha, Mahavira. Help, but don’t sacrifice. Who are you to sacrifice anybody? Each individual is his own end. Don’t use him as a means.That is the meaning when Jesus says, “The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Everything is made for man. Man is the supreme value. Even God, the idea of God, is for man, and man is not for the idea of God. Sacrifice everything to man and don’t sacrifice man to anything whatever. Then you help.If you start sacrificing man, then you are not helping. You are destroying, you are crippling the other. You are violent, you are a criminal. So all your so-called mahatmas who try to change the other are criminals. One can just love, help, be ready to give unconditionally.Share your being, but let the other move toward his own destiny. The destiny is unknown; nobody knows what is going to flower. Don’t give a pattern, otherwise the flower will be crushed. And remember that each individual being is unique. There has never been such a being before and there is never going to be again. God never repeats. He is not repetitive, he goes on inventing. So if you are trying to make a man be like Jesus, you will be being destructive because Jesus can never be repeated again. And there is no need: one is beautiful, many will just be boring.Don’t try to make a man a Buddha. Let him become himself: that is his buddhahood. Neither you know, nor he knows, what he is carrying within himself. Only the future will show. Not only will you be surprised, he will be surprised when his flower opens. Everybody is carrying a flower of infinite potentiality and power, of infinite possibility.Help, give energy, love. Accept the other and give him a feeling that he is welcome. Don’t give him a feeling of guilt, don’t give him the idea that he is condemned. All those who are trying to change him give him a feeling of guilt, and guilt is poison.Whenever somebody says, “Be like Jesus,” he has denied you as you are. Whenever somebody says to be like somebody else, you are not accepted, you are not welcome, you are like an intruder: “Unless you become somebody else, you will not be loved.” What type of love is this that destroys you? And you become false, inauthentic, because you can only be authentically yourself. All else will be false, all else will be just masks, personalities, but not your essence. You can decorate yourself with the personality of Buddha, but it will never touch your heart. It will never be related to you, it will not be connected with you. It will just be on the outside: a face but never yours.So whoever is trying to make you somebody else and says, “I will love you if you become Buddha, Christ,” does not love you. He may be in love with Christ, but he hates you. And his love for Christ may also be not very deep because if he has really loved Jesus, he would have understood the concrete uniqueness of every individual.Love is a deep understanding. If you have loved one person, you have started a different quality of vision within you. Now you can see with a clarity. If you have loved Jesus, then whoever comes before you, you will see the reality of this man – of this concrete human being, of this potentiality herenow. And you will love this man, you will help this man to become whatever he can become. You will not expect anything else. All expectation is condemning, all expectation is a denial, all expectation is a rejection. You will simply give your love – for no reward, for no result. You will simply help, with no future in mind.When love flows without any future it is a tremendous energy. When love flows without motivation it helps, and nothing helps like it. Once you feel that even one single human being accepts you as you are, you feel centered. You are not unwelcome in this existence: at least one human being accepts you unconditionally. That gives you a grounding, a centering. That gives you a feeling that you are at home.And the more you are at home, the closer you will be to God because he is deepest in your heart. When you are close to yourself, you are close to him. When you are centered, you are in him. When you are far away from yourself, you are far away from God. The distance between you and yourself is the distance between you and God, and there is no other distance. So whoever says, “Become somebody else,” is throwing you away from God. You will become false, you will carry masks. You will have personalities, character, and a thousand other things, but you won’t have a soul, you won’t have the essential. You will not be an awareness; you will be a deception, a pseudo phenomenon – not authentic.So when I say help, teach, I am not giving you any idea to teach them. I am saying: just create a climate around people. Wherever you move, carry the climate of love and compassion and help the other to be himself.That is the most difficult thing in the world – to help the other to be himself – because that is against your ego. Your ego would like to make imitators of people. You would like everybody to imitate you; you would like it that you become the archetype and everybody follows you. Then your ego will be very, very fulfilled. You will think of yourself as the blueprint. Everybody is just to follow you here: you become the center and everybody becomes the false. No, the ego will not like that idea. It wants to change according to you.Who are you to change anybody? Don’t take that responsibility. That is dangerous; that is how Adolf Hitlers are born. They take the responsibility of changing the whole world according to them.There is a great difference between a Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler, but deep down no difference at all because both have ideas of changing the world according to them. One may be using violent methods, the other may be using nonviolent methods, but both are using methods to change the other according to themselves. One may be using the bayonet, another is threatening you: “I will go on a long fast if you don’t follow me.” One may be threatening to kill you, and the other may be threatening that he will kill himself “…if you don’t follow me,” but both are using force. Both are creating situations in which you can be forced to be something else that you don’t want to be, that you never wanted to be. They are both politicians. Neither Hitler loves you, nor Gandhi loves you.Gandhi talks about love, but he does not love. He cannot love because the very idea – the ideal of how you should be – creates trouble. There is only one way of loving people: love them as they are. And the beauty is, when you love them as they are, they change. Not according to you; they change according to their reality. When you love them, they are transformed: not converted, transformed. They become new, they attain newer heights of being. But that happens in their being, and it happens according to their nature.Help people to be natural, help people to be free, help people to be themselves. And never try to force anybody, to pull and push and manipulate. Those are the ways of the ego. And that is what all politics is.The second question:Osho,It is believed that Christ was the first politician of love in that he tried to save the world before he had saved himself, and that we are his children: politicians of love, seeking heaven on earth.Politician, and Christ? Politics and love are impossible to be together. Love is anti-political, politics is anti-love.I know politicians talk about love, but don’t be deceived by their talk. They talk about peace and prepare for war. Never listen to what the politician says. Always watch what he is doing because whatever he says may be just a distraction – to distract you so you cannot see what he is doing. He goes on saying things absolutely contrary to what he is doing. That saying is a camouflage. It is a cover, to hide.That’s why politicians go on talking, so that you are not in any way helped to be aware of what they are doing. They distract by their talk. They don’t communicate, they don’t say much. In fact, they want to hide so that things are not known. They talk about peace and they all prepare for war. They talk about love and they all create hatred in the world.They are tricky, very diplomatic. When they say, “Love your country,” they are saying, “Hate your neighbors.” But they hide their hatred in the love of the country because when you say, “Love your motherland,” nobody is going to raise any question about it. There is no question: everybody has to love his motherland. But deep down in the teaching of the love of the motherland, they are preparing you for war. Then you start hating the neighbors: they don’t belong to your nation, they don’t belong to your race, they don’t belong to your religion.“Love your religion” – then what will you do with people who don’t belong to your religion? Of course, it has to be understood that you will hate them. If you love your religion, you will hate other religions; if you love your country, you will hate other countries; if you love your color, you will hate people who are of a different color. If you really want to love human beings, you have to stop loving the country, you have to stop loving the religion, you have to stop loving your color. If you really want to love human beings, you have to stop all political nonsense.But they are very tricky, diplomatic. They talk about love and they sow the seeds of hatred, they talk about nonviolence and they prepare you for violence. They say they are preparing for war because without war, peace will be impossible. They have talked such nonsense for so long that you don’t even understand how contradictory they are. And the whole of humanity goes on moving in darkness.Remember one thing: Christ is not a politician – not even of love – because politics is poisonous, it will poison love itself. Christ is not a politician at all. Had he been a politician, he would not have been crucified. Just a little diplomacy would have saved him. Just a little diplomacy: there was nothing much in it. But he was not a politician. That was the trouble. He was very authentic and true, not diplomatic. He said whatever he felt.Look. Your so-called mahatmas are politicians. They try to live according to their principles, they try to be according to their ideology. Whatever they preach, they try to live it. Jesus is totally different. Whatever he lives, he preaches. There is the difference.A Mahatma Gandhi looks almost like Jesus. He is not. He tries to live whatever he preaches, but the preaching is important. He wants others also to live according to his preaching – and he himself tries to live according to his preaching.Jesus is totally different. He says and preaches whatever he lives. When you preach whatever you live, you are exposed, you are open and vulnerable, you are true to yourself. But then you start becoming a misfit with the society. Society is politics, it is diplomacy; many things are not to be said, many things have to be said that are not true.When Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” Jesus remained silent. He could have said something. He was an articulate man, he was a great poet in his utterances. He could have said something. And his whole life was depending on that. That was the last thing Pilate asked, “What is truth?” And Jesus looked into his eyes and remained silent: very nondiplomatic, very nonpolitical. He embarrassed Pilate.In that silence, Pilate felt very restless and uncomfortable. Jesus penetrated him deeply. His silence was something that he was saying from his heart.But Pilate wanted words. Pilate was not asking, “Show me the truth!” He was asking, “What is truth?” He was asking for a definition, and Jesus wouldn’t give the definition because he was truth – and he was standing in front of him.He looked into his eyes. He must have stirred his soul. Pilate became uneasy. He turned away from Jesus. He said to the priest, “Take this man away and do whatever you like. Crucify him.”I always think about it. In that moment, Pilate must have felt as if he is crucified in silence. Just think about Jesus looking at you: all your falseness, all your masks have fallen away because they cannot be there when Jesus looks at you. Naked and nude you are standing before him – empty, with nothing.Pilate was the governor general of the Roman Empire, but inside, a poor man, a beggar. All that falseness cannot deceive Jesus. He penetrates deep. All your worldly riches are useless. He looks deep down into you and the beggar is caught, the beggar starts becoming restless. This was not asked for.If Jesus had been a little diplomatic, he should have given a philosophical answer. Pilate was a student of philosophy; he would have understood. Jesus could have convinced him, argued, persuaded. Pilate may have saved Jesus his life – but rather than saying anything, Jesus created a climate, a situation, in which Pilate became very restless.Just think: Jesus looking in you. Silence becomes embarrassing. This man seems to be dangerous – as if he is pushing a dagger into your heart. Suddenly Pilate must have felt the emptiness, the poverty that he was. He turned aside. He said to the priest, “Take this man away and do whatever you like.” But he could not have slept that night, or even for months. Jesus would have haunted him.A very nondiplomatic answer. Jesus should have said the same thing that Pilate believed; that would have been diplomacy. Politicians say only the things you believe already, then you are with them. They don’t disturb, they console. Their answers are like ointments.Jesus’ answer to “What is truth?” is like a wound in the heart. For his whole life Pilate must have been haunted by the silence. “What did this man mean? Why did he remain silent, why did he look so deeply within me? Why?” In his dreams it must have become a nightmare.Jesus was not a politician, not even of love. Love cannot be politics. Love is simple, not complex. Politics is very complex and cunning. Love is intelligence; politics is stupidity. Only mediocre people get interested in politics. Love is tremendous intelligence, it is understanding. When you love, you are transformed through it.Politics is always concerned with the society, the nation: is always concerned with the collectivity. Love is always concerned with the individual because love can flow between two souls. There is no other way. Just as a river flows between two banks, love flows between two souls. Love is individual, intimate, close.It can flow between one individual and the whole existence because the whole existence has a soul. That soul is God. But it cannot flow between one individual and society. Society is just a word. It cannot flow between one individual and humanity. Humanity is just a word. There is nobody to receive it, there is nobody to respond to it.Jesus loved, but he was not a politician. Jesus never tried to change the society, remember. That was a misunderstanding on the part of the priests – that he was trying to change the society. He was not trying to change the society at all; he was trying to change the individual. And that too, not according to his ideology, but according to the individual’s potentiality. There are a thousand and one instances.Jesus never condemns, Jesus never creates any guilt, Jesus never says, “This is sin. Don’t do it.” He reveals what sin is, but he never says. He makes you understand what sin is, but he never gives you a dead dogma in the hand.In life, dead dogmas are useless. Only an alive consciousness is useful because every moment, sin and virtue change: something that was a virtue in the morning may not be virtuous in the evening. It depends on you, on others, on circumstances. It is not a dead thing that you can carry with you. It is changing every moment. Unless you have a flexibility, a sensitivity to change with life, you will not be able to know what sin is because every moment life goes on moving. Something was virtuous in a certain moment; the same thing can become a sin in another moment. So no dogma is possible.Jesus gives a sensitivity to people – an awareness, a mindfulness, a meditation, so that they can feel their way, so that they can understand every situation and respond accordingly. If you go deeply into Jesus, you will understand only one thing: to act with awareness is virtue and to act with unawareness is sin. Sin is not a quality of any act, neither is virtue. Sin and virtue belong to the presence or absence of awareness. It is not what you do that is sin or virtue, it is how you do it: aware or unaware. It doesn’t depend on the action; it depends, deep down, on the consciousness – what quality you bring to it.Jesus loved. That was one of his crimes – that he loved. A rabbi should preach, he should not love. A religious man should become an example, and induce and seduce people to follow his example. Jesus was not an example at all. In the ordinary sense, he was not creating any ideal of his own. He was simply helping people to be more prayerful, to be more mindful, to be more watchful. And he lived and loved, and he lived like a very ordinary man but with very extraordinary awareness. He lived like a Zen master. Jews could not understand him – or only later on. Hasids would have understood, but they came very late. They would have understood him; they would have understood him absolutely. He was a Hasidic master or a Zen master.But his followers also misunderstood him: they thought that he was a politician and he had come to change the society. And his enemies also misunderstood him.The same has happened again and again. I am here. I am not interested in society at all, not a bit. But the politicians go on thinking that I am planning some way or other, that I am a conspirator and I am planning something – in secret ways – to change the society or the government. It is difficult to convince them.I am not interested at all in your government or in your society. You can go on playing with these stupid toys. I am not interested. But they cannot understand because it is beyond them. They cannot see the point: somebody is not interested in government, in governing people. They think there must be some deception; something is hidden behind it. They think my talk about religion – changing the individual, loving the individual – is just a facade. Behind it there must be politics. They can understand only politics, and they will see politics everywhere.It is understood. I can understand it because they cannot go beyond their own minds. It is just like when a pickpocket comes to see a saint, but he cannot see the saint, he only looks at the pockets. He is a pickpocket.You walk on the road. Different people look at you in different ways. A shoemaker looks at your shoe and understands you according to the situation and the condition of the shoe. If the shoe is in a bad condition, he knows that your economic position is not okay. If the shoe is not polished well, he knows you may be unemployed. He need not see your face: he just looks at the shoe.If a man has been working on shoes for thirty or forty years, he becomes almost a psychologist. From the shoe he can say everything: what your financial position is, what your status in society is – even what your mind is right now. When you are happy, you walk differently. When you are unhappy, you drag. The shoe can show that you have been dragging for long – as if you are pulling the whole load, the weight.The shoe can show whether you are in love or not. Have you watched? When you are in love, you polish your shoes. Everything becomes significant. Some human being has become interested in you. Now everything is significant. When nobody loves you, you become careless. Who bothers whether the shoe is gathering dust? Let it gather. Nobody is interested in you – why should you be interested in the shoe?A policeman has a different type of shoes from a schoolmaster. You can see the shoe and you will know which is which. The policeman has to be violent; his shoes will show that he is violent. A schoolmaster is just a schoolmaster. The shoes will say the whole story.A shoemaker looks at the shoe, a pickpocket looks at the pocket, a hairdresser looks at the hair. He knows whether you are a square or a hippie. The hair will show it. And this is not new. In India one name of Krishna is Keshava. Keshava means longhaired. He was the first hippie in the world!When a politician looks at a Jesus, or at me, immediately his understanding is political. He becomes afraid, he thinks a competitor has come. But Jesus is not a politician. A man who knows love cannot be a politician. Why? – because politics is ambition. Love is non-ambitious.Politics is a way to rule over others. Love never wants to rule. The very effort to rule and possess and be powerful is violent. It is part of hatred. Love gives, and gives unconditionally. Love does not possess. Love is not a monopoly, is not a power lust.How can love be politics? Please don’t use that word with Jesus. And he’s not interested in changing the society. He is interested in changing the heart, the heart of man. Maybe society is changed through it, but that is irrelevant. It can happen as a consequence, but that is not a concern.If the heart of man changes, the society is bound to change because with a different man, a different society will arise. But that is a consequence. Jesus is not interested in that. His whole interest is in how the Kingdom of God can be felt within. That’s why he goes on insisting “the Kingdom of God is within.” It has nothing to do with the without. Politics is without; religion is within.Love gives, politics takes; love shares, politics has nothing to share. It tries to possess.The third question:Osho,I don't know who I am. I feel like I need grounding at some level. Is there no place for grounding?It is good that you don’t know who you are because all that you know will be wrong.The depth of your being is indefinable. It has no name, no form. The innermost of your being is always unknown and unknowable. Socrates said, “Know thyself.” Not that you can know. He is saying, “Try to know yourself, and one day you will know that it is impossible to know. And when you come to a point where all knowledge disappears, and you stand in deep ignorance before yourself, that is the most beautiful experience, the greatest ecstasy.”Just think: if you can know yourself, by knowing you will become limited. You will become a commodity. By knowing about yourself you won’t be happy; you will become very ordinary. Once known, you are finished with yourself. Then what will you do with it? Inquiry finished – you will be bored with yourself.Your being is a mystery. The more you know, the less you know it. The deeper you go, the more you see the infiniteness. The depth is such that you cannot touch the bottom of it – never. People who think they know themselves are very superficial. People of depth always become aware of something unknown. And it is beautiful because the unknown is always alive, and the unknown is always infinite. The unknown is eternal.Socrates said, “Know thyself.” He means try to know thyself – not that you will be able to know. And after Socrates, a Roman – Marcus Aurelius – said, “Be thyself.” He is better than Socrates. “Know thyself” is impossible, but “be thyself” is possible. There is no need to know, just be. Knowledge is irrelevant; being is enough. Just be yourself.So don’t try to find a definition of your being. It is impossible. Live it, you can; know it, you cannot. Why be bothered about knowing? Isn’t being enough?There is an urge – a deep urge, a curiosity – to open and know every mystery. But that urge is going to fail as you move within. If you move without, that urge can be fulfilled a little. Science can fulfill your urge because something can be known about matter. But that too, I say “just a little.” If you go deeper, there also the unknown comes to be encountered. The deeper you go, the more knowledge becomes shaky. The deeper you go, the more everything is blurred.One of the greatest scientists of the West, Eddington, has written in his autobiography: “When I started, the whole world looked like a mechanism. When I started working, searching, inquiring, the world looked like a great mechanism – and I had the idea that someday or other the mechanism will be known.”He thought that existence could be divided into two categories, the known and the unknown. Known: that which we have known, and unknown: that which we will know someday or other. It is only a question of time.At the end of his life he said, “Now life appears to be divided into three categories: the known, the unknown, and the unknowable.” This unknowable… Known and unknown we can understand, that is only a question of time. The unknown can become known because one day the known was unknown. But the unknowable – that which cannot be known, which is impossible to be known? With that category, religion enters.Then Eddington said, “Now as I look at the world, it doesn’t look like a mechanism. Rather, it looks like a thought: very mysterious.”Had he lived a little longer, he would have certainly said, “Now it does not even look like a thought because a thought has a structure, a logic. It looks like a poem or a song” – and a song just like birds sing in the morning: beautiful, but you cannot make anything out of it. Beautiful and meaningless, tremendously beautiful, it can be enjoyed. But the meaning? – there is none.This is my understanding: unless you can enjoy the meaningless, you will never become religious. God, to me, is the meaningless beauty that surrounds you, the meaningless song that is heard all around; the meaningless murmur of a brook, the meaningless whisper of the winds, the meaningless silence of the stars. Tremendously beautiful, but meaningless. Why do I say meaningless? – because it is unknowable.A thing remains meaningless unless it is known. Once you know, then it is meaningful. And I tell you, stars are mysterious, but they are nothing compared to your inner being. Rivers are mysterious, but they are nothing to your inner stream of consciousness. The Himalayas are mysterious, but nothing as compared to your inner peaks of ecstasy.Be, rather than know. Marcus Aurelius looks to me to be of more and deeper understanding when he says, “Be thyself” than Socrates when he says, “Know thyself” – though I know well that you cannot be yourself unless you try the Socratic dictum, “Know thyself.” Try to know. You will never be able to know, and by and by, you will drop the inquiry of knowing and you will start being. Knowing is philosophy, being is religion.One of the greatest American Christian theologians of this century, Paul Tillich, was once asked at the end of his life – somebody in Santa Barbara, somebody, a student, asked him – “Sir, do you pray?”He said, “No, I meditate.”But if you ask me, I will say, “No, I don’t even meditate. I just am.”Prayer is duality: you and God. Without God you cannot pray. The other is needed – it is a dependence. Tillich is right. He says, “No, I don’t pray.” The answer is not Christian, the answer is Buddhist. He says: “I meditate.”Meditation is a freedom – freedom from God also because even he is not needed. You cannot pray without God because to whom will you pray, to whom will you raise your head, to whom will you raise your eyes, to whom will you talk, with whom will the dialogue be? A God is needed. Maybe he is there or maybe he is not there, that is irrelevant, but prayer requires a God.It is a dependence. Without God, the man who is praying will immediately stop praying. If there is no God – or the news comes that he is dead, or has been assassinated or something like that, or just died of old age – the man who is praying will immediately stop, will throw away his rosary and will say, “Finished! Now there is no point. To whom to pray?”Prayers are a dependence. And that is how Buddhism goes higher than Christianity – because even if God dies, it will not disturb the man who is meditating. He will say, “It is okay. It matters not whether he is alive or not. To me it was never a requirement. I am enough unto myself.”The man who meditates, meditates alone. But if you ask me, “Do you meditate, sir?” I will say, “No, I don’t even meditate. I just am” – because in meditation some activity is involved. The other is not there, you are not in a dialogue, but you are doing something. The doing is there. The doing becomes the other: the doer and the doing. You are meditating.Meditation is an action; you are doing something. Sometimes you meditate and sometimes you don’t meditate. That is not of much worth because something that sometimes is, and sometimes is not, cannot be your nature. The nature is always there, it does not depend on any doing.I just am, and that is the greatest prayer, and that is the greatest meditation. That is what Zen masters say. If you ask them what they do, they say, “We chop wood, we carry water, and when we feel hungry we eat, and when we feel tired we sleep.” This is what I mean when I say, “I am.” Even the dependence of doing something is no longer there.Prayer needs the other, meditation needs action, being needs nothing. And when you are in tune with that which needs nothing, then for the first time you are in tune, and then for the first time you are grounded.You ask me, “Osho, I don’t know who I am.” There is no need. There is no need to know who you are. The only need is, don’t be anything else, just be that which you don’t know you are. Just be that. Don’t move outside it. And there is no need to know it because you are it already. Whether you know it or don’t know it makes no difference. Knowledge will not add anything to it. Not knowing will not take anything out of it, knowing will not add anything to it, so what is the point? You are.Call the rose by another name – it remains a rose. Whether you know the name of the rose or not, it remains a rose. Whether you call it “rose” or don’t call it “rose,” the rose is not bothered. It is.Emerson says somewhere in his diary: “Outside my window the rosebush is blooming. And the rosebush is not bothered with who it is, and the roses are not comparing themselves with other roses of the past, and they are not thinking of the future roses. Just in this moment they are with God. This day, they are with God.”In your being, you are God. I will not even say “with God.” In your being, just this very moment, you are God, you are divine. No knowledge is needed.Don’t be worried about it. Nobody has ever known who he is. He is! And all those who have said that they know are just repeating clichés. They must have read it in the scriptures. But those are only words. You can say: “I am brahman,” or “I am atman,” or “I am the supreme self,” but these words are clichés. They are ugly. They don’t say anything, they don’t mean anything.“I feel like I need grounding…” Yes, that’s good. You need it. But grounding has nothing to do with knowledge; grounding has something to do with being. That’s why I say Marcus Aurelius is better than Socrates when he says, “Be thyself.”“Is there no place for grounding?” Place is part of space. In being, time and place are not there. Space and time both disappear there. You will be grounded only when you come to a certain state within – where you cannot say who you are, where you cannot say where you are, where you cannot say when you are. Everything has stopped; time does not move. The clock may be moving – ticktock, ticktock. It may be moving, and you can listen. But time does not move – only the futile gesture of the clock. Something deep within you has stopped. That is the point I call “the point of no when.”And there is no space. You cannot say where you are. The “where” is irrelevant. You cannot show where you are on the map. You are no longer on the map, you don’t belong to the map. You are no longer part of the measured, you are no longer part of the charted. You are transcendence.You can look at space, but you are not in space; you can look at time, but you are not in time. Then you are grounded. This is what I call being, this is what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God, this is what Buddha calls nirvana.Yes, you need grounding, but it would be better to say, “You are already grounded. You just need awareness.” How can you be if you are not grounded? You are already in God. How can you be otherwise? There is no other way to be. That is the only way there is.But you are not aware. Become more and more alert, watchful. No need to be worried about knowledge: who you are. Just become aware, Whoever you are: X, Y, Z – that unknown X – whoever you are, just become alert and aware. Let that unknown within you, or unknowable within you, not fall into a stupor and a sleep. Awaken it. Don’t allow it to move into dreams anymore. Shake it out of sleep and suddenly you will see that you are already grounded. In fact, whatever is needed is already there – just a turning.That is what Jesus means when he says, “Return! The Kingdom of God is at hand.” He’s talking about your hands. The Kingdom of God is always at hand. Just stretch your hand a little and you will be able to touch it. That stretching of the hand is what I mean by awareness.The fourth question:Osho,Having never had the opportunity to truly fall in love, to know that surrender, is that keeping me from truly falling in love with you, being in that mad state of love? Is it enough just to feel quiet love, respect – though not necessarily that odd form of insanity?Don’t be worried – because you must be comparing yourself with others. That creates the problem. This is your odd kind of insanity.Everybody has his own way of being in love. Never compare it. Somebody may be dancing, somebody may be ecstatic and singing, and somebody may be sitting silently with closed eyes. Both are mad in their own ways. Don’t think that you are not mad and the one who is dancing is mad – because one who is dancing will think, “Are you mad? You have fallen in love and are still sitting with closed eyes? What are you doing there? Dance!”Everybody has his own way of madness also. Just as nobody has the same face as you, nobody has the same eyes as you, nobody has the same fingerprints as you – nobody has the madness that you have. Everything is unique.Everybody falls in love in his own way. And it is good; it has to be so. Never compare. With comparison arises the trouble. Then you start feeling that you are missing something. Your love is calm and quiet and respectful. Then you start thinking there must be something wrong. Why are you not so passionately in love? Why are you not like a storm? You are blowing like a small breeze, but that is your way, and God needs both. Storm and storm and storm – he also needs a little rest. A little breeze is always handy.Don’t be worried; this is how God is happening to you. Never compare. Just look within you and enjoy whatever is happening so it can happen more. Enjoy it, delight in it. It will happen more. You may become even more gentle; the breeze may even disappear and stop. It has happened that way also.There are as many ways toward God as there are seekers. Everybody has his own way and there are no superways, remember, no superhighways.Everybody walks on his own path. In fact, the path is not found readymade. You create it by walking, and it disappears when you have gone ahead. So nobody else can walk on it; it is never left behind. It is just like the birds flying in the sky. Once they have flown, they don’t leave any footprints. Nobody can follow it. There is no need.Don’t compare. Be contented with yourself. Enjoy, delight, help yourself to be yourself. This is your way.The fifth question:Osho,I was not looking for you, and yet you found me. I was not deserving. There are others I know who have tried harder to find the truth. Why have I been so lucky?Because you are so humble. It is possible that you may be trying hard, but the effort comes out of the ego. You may not be trying, you may be simply waiting, but that waiting can come out of humbleness. Effort, with ego, will fail. Even no effort, with humbleness, will succeed. If you feel, “I was not looking for you, and yet you found me,” if you feel “I was not deserving,” that’s how you have deserved it. That’s how!Feeling that you were not looking for me, I have found you. Your deep humbleness, deep humility, has created the situation. It is only in humbleness that a master is found. It is only in humbleness that the divine happens.Your effort is of no use because it is yours. The “you” is too much. That will hinder the path.The sixth question:Osho,Before you found me I had already renounced my family, race and religion. Now it has all changed. I have never felt so affected as now, since my parents and sister are sannyasins too. Something special and indescribable has happened between me and them, I feel. And in Judaism I find myself and accept myself. What is happening?This is what should happen. Jesus says, “Hate your father, hate your mother, hate your brethren and sisters.” He cannot teach hate: he must be using hate as a means toward real love. And this is what has happened. You had already renounced your family, race and religion, but that renunciation must have been out of ego. It was not a rebellion; it must have been a reaction. You must have done it without knowing what you are doing.It may have broken you away from the family, but it didn’t join you with the greater family of existence. It separated you from the family, but it simply separated you. It was just a divorce, it was not a marriage to the greater. It was impotent.Then you came to me. You became different. You meditated, you became a little more alert and then, by and by, your change became a magnetic force to your family also – whom you had renounced. Then your father, your mother, and your sister also came.It simply happens that if you are changed, you become a magnetic force. And of course, those who have been related to you very deeply are effected immediately. If one person in the family changes, the whole family is affected immediately.They may start defending. That too is a sign. They may start fighting. That too is a symbol that they are being affected now. Now they cannot remain the same; something has to be done.They came, they also changed, and you again became a part of your family – in a totally new dimension. The marriage has happened now in a totally new dimension. Now your family is just part of the greater family I’m creating, of the greater sangha, the community that I’m creating. Now, through me, you have become joined again.That’s why Christians go on signing their signatures, “Yours in Jesus.” That is very meaningful. Now there is no bridge. If you love Jesus, Jesus has become the bridge. You may have been a friend to somebody. Then Jesus came to you. Now the friendship has taken on a totally different meaning, a different poetry. Now you are no longer directly related to the person. Jesus is always somewhere in the corner, Jesus is always somewhere in between, flowing. Now the friend is no longer an ordinary friend. He has also become divine through Jesus and you say, “Yours through Jesus.”This will happen to you all by and by. You will be rejoined to the same family you renounced, through me.The seventh question:Osho,The last few days this happens: whenever I feel I need to be in tune with my center, immediately I see the image of a very calm, deep lake surrounded by mountains. All is peace and in deep harmony. I see myself sitting either at the edge of the lake or on the mountain top – just sitting and watching in calm happiness. There are always white and black birds silently flying around. The place is not from this world, and yet it is from this world. The image centers me immediately. I seem to need it, but still it feels a bit childish. And although it doesn't feel like I am doing something, I am yet doing. Please comment.This is good: healthy and wholesome. This is one of the old meditation techniques. You may not be doing it knowingly, but you may have done it in some past life. It may have simply surfaced again, but it is one of the most beautiful techniques. As far as techniques go, this technique also goes!Use it. Don’t feel it is childish, because all happiness is childish, all joy is childish, all delight is childish. Enjoy it, become a child. And when the work is done, the technique will disappear. When the work is done, the picture of the lake and the mountains and the birds will disappear by and by. The picture will disappear, but the calmness will remain. The lake will go, but the rippleless lake of your consciousness will be left behind.Enjoy it as much as you can. This has something to do with your past. You may have done it before. Now it has again surfaced. It happens: if people have been doing certain methods in their past lives and they have been left incomplete, when they meditate again, suddenly some technique erupts, surfaces, and possesses them completely. Then you are not doing it. It is happening.That is one of the most significant things to be understood. If a method happens to you without doing, that is the method for you because when you do, something becomes different; but when it happens, it is totally different. When it happens, it is nearer to the heart. When you do, it is nearer to the head.Allow it, enjoy it, let the scenic beauty of the lake completely surround you. Forget yourself; be in it totally. It will center you. And once the work is done, all pictures will disappear. When only you are left – the lake is no more, the birds are no more; nothing is there to be seen, only the seer is left – then the real meditation happens. That’s what I call “being,” just being. That is the ultimate.But this technique can be helpful. When it is happening by itself, it can be very helpful. Allow it. It is healthy and wholesome. And don’t think it is childish. All beauty, all happiness, all ecstasy is childish. God is childish!Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 1310 And the disciples came, and said unto him, “Why speakest thou unto them in parables?”11 He answered and said unto them, “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.”12 “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”18 “Hear ye therefore the parable of the sower.”19 “When anyone heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the wayside.”20 “But he that received the seed into stony places, the same is he that heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it;”21 “Yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended.”22 “He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful.”23 “But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some a hundred-fold, some sixty, some thirty.”Jesus is like a diamond. Every facet of him contributes to the brilliance of the whole. To the sorrowing he brings solace, to the seekers he brings knowledge, to the poor he brings the Kingdom of God, to the rich he brings poverty of the spirit, to the strong, humility, to the weak, strength. He is many things, and he is different to each one who comes to him. He has many faces, many aspects, and it has to be so.It is the same with Buddha, it is the same with all those who have awakened, because when they talk to you or relate to you, they talk to you and they relate to you. They respond. They cannot give more than you can take: they cannot give you that for which you have not asked; they cannot give you that for which you are not ready. They can only give you that for which you have come.Who Jesus will prove to be to you depends on you. He is a response, he reflects you. Remember this. Because of this, many complexities have arisen. Many people will give you different reports – and they all are true, and no one is totally true. They all talk only of facets, parts of Jesus that have been revealed to them; hence so many stories.Buddha died and immediately there was great turmoil in his followers. The sangha divided into many parts. The community could not remain one because there were different reports – as if Buddha was not one man but many. He was one, absolutely one, but he reflected so many people that they had known him in different ways: according to their capacity, according to their receptivity, according to their readiness. They all said different things – not only different, but quite contradictory to each other. The community had to divide.The same happened with Mahavira. The community had to divide. The same happened with Jesus. The community could not remain one. And the reason is that Jesus is different to different people. He has to be; he is just a pure mirror. You come and he reveals your face to yourself. He exists so that you can realize yourself. He has no other idea to force upon you. He has no idea at all. He is simply a helper. If you come to him in search of knowledge, he will reveal that to you. If you come to him in search of love, you will be benefited by his compassion and love. If you come to him as a sinner, he will give you salvation. But it depends on you; he echoes you.This has to be understood, then these sutras will be very simple.And the disciples came, and said unto him, “Why speakest thou unto them in parables?”The disciples were noticing that whenever he talks to the masses, he always talks in parables; whenever he talks to them in privacy, he talks differently.It has to be so. A disciple is different. A disciple is one who has committed his all. He is not just a follower. A follower is one who is impressed – and still hesitating. And the ordinary masses are neither followers nor disciples. They may be curious to know who this man is, they may be intrigued by this man, they may be amused by this man. A few of them may become followers later on, and a few of the followers may become disciples later on, but the mass is still not related to him.They have come to him as curiosity seekers, just by the way. Somebody has told them, “Here comes Jesus. A great man, the son of God!” and they have become interested. They may lose interest again, they may go on their paths and forget everything about him – or at the most, he may remain a beautiful memory – but will not be a transformation to them.So these are the three types of people to whom Jesus is relating: the masses, the followers, and the disciples. The disciples are a chosen few. The disciples are those who have come to decide that this man is their salvation, and they have staked all that they had. Now they are ready to die for him. If they live, they will live for him; if they die, they will die for him. Now there is no turning back. They have come to the point of no return. They watch this man, they love this man. Now this man has become their very life.The innermost secrets can only be revealed to these disciples. The mysteries can be revealed only to those who are so ready that even if death is needed they will not shirk, they will not hesitate. And death is needed. To know the ultimate secret, you will have to die – and until you die, that ultimate secret cannot be born within you. To receive him, you will have to disappear. So only to those few disciples can the truth be revealed in its directness, in its immediacy.To the followers: something of the truth but not direct, something of the truth but not immediate, something of the truth but garbed, something of the truth but hidden. They will have to work. Only then will they be able to know what has been said to them.To the masses: just parables. Parables are faraway echoes of truth. If somebody insists, then there is a thread in the parable. I use the word sutra. It is a Sanskrit word. It means “the thread.”It is very significant. When I say “these sutras,” I mean “these threads.” If you catch hold of them, you can reach the ultimate. They are like arrows from the ultimate that have reached to your heart. If you follow the path of the arrow backward, you will reach the ultimate. These are threads, sutras.A parable is a sutra. It simply gives you a thread, a hint, an indication. It gives you a very subtle hint and a very delicate thread. You have to be in search; then the parable, by and by, will reveal its treasure to you. It is not revealed on the surface. If you take the obvious as the actual, it will be just a beautiful story. If you are deceived by the obvious, you will lose track of the hidden. The obvious is not the actual in the parable. In the parable it has many coverings. You will have to uncover; you will have to work hard.I have heard a true story about a man who had parked his car in front of a supermarket. When he came back, his car was almost destroyed. Somebody has crashed into the car. The front was completely gone and there was no visible sign of the other car or the other man.His heart sank. Then he found a small piece of paper tucked under the windshield wiper. He felt happy: the man had left his address and name. He took out the scrap with trembling hands. He opened the paper.On the paper was written: “While I am writing this note to you, at least two hundred people are watching me. They all think that I am writing my name and address. I am not!”That was all. The obvious is not the actual. And they believed, those two hundred people, that he has written down his name and address and tucked the paper under the windshield. The man had gone, those two hundred people had gone. Nobody bothered about what he had written.If you take a parable as the obvious, you will miss the whole point of it. The obvious is not the actual. The actual is hidden, very deeply hidden – as if a diamond has been hidden inside an onion. You uncover, you uncover – and then layers and layers of onion – and then the diamond is revealed.A parable is a diamond hidden in an onion. The obvious is not the actual. The actual is totally different. A parable is a way of saying some truth of tremendous import, but in such a way that even a child can understand, can feel that he has understood. But a parable needs deep understanding to be discovered. A child can feel he has understood, but even a very mature person may feel that something goes on eluding him. A parable is both simple and very complex. It is a story on the surface; it is a secret within.Jesus talked to the masses in parables, small stories. Ordinary people could understand them. And if you work on them, even extraordinary intelligences may miss the point. Nobody has talked like Jesus. His parables are the most beautiful in the whole history of the human mind.Buddha tells stories, but they cannot be compared to Jesus’ parables. Buddha’s stories are plain. They say something, but whatever they say is obvious. They are not parables, they are stories. They are to explain something. He will say something, and to make it explicit, he will tell a story. The story is secondary. The story can be dropped because he has asserted the truth first and then he explains the truth by the story. It is not a parable. When the truth is hidden in the story and is not asserted outside the story, then it is a parable.Buddha’s stories can be dropped because whatever he has said in the stories he has also said directly. He will always say the truth first and then he will say the story to explain it. Buddha’s stories are explanatory.Jesus’ parables are not explanatory. Whatever he wants to say, he says in them. You have to dig deep, you have to move inside the story – and a parable is like a Chinese box: box within box, box within box. You go on and you find another smaller box inside. A parable has many layers, as many layers as there are types of man.Gurdjieff uses the categorization of seven types of man. The first type, number one, is body-oriented. If he listens to the parable, he will only touch the body of the parable, the surface. The obvious will be the actual for him. He will listen to the story, he will enjoy the story, he will go home and tell the story to his children. They will also enjoy, and everybody will forget about it. It is a story to be enjoyed.Number two, the man who lives in his feelings, will suspect something deeper than the body. He will suspect some poetry in it, some romantic dimension will open to him. The parable will not be only a parable, a story. It will be a poem, condensed poetry. He will enjoy it deeply. He will be thrilled: tears may come to his eyes or he may dance to it – but that is all. A good poem is just a good poem; it does not transform you. It gives a thrill, and it is gone. It is like a breeze that comes, touches you, refreshes you – and then it is gone.Man number three, the rational man, will try to understand the meaning. The parable will become philosophy to him. He will rationalize about it, around it. It will be a dry thing, but he will make a theory out of it.These are ordinary categories: man number one, man number two, man number three. They are all here: you can find these three types everywhere. This is ordinary humanity, the masses.Man number four is not confined to the body or to the feelings or to the reason. Man number four has risen above them. He has become an awareness, a watcher. He will understand the deep significance of the parable, and the significance will be life transforming. He will become a follower. He may become, later on, a disciple. He may be transformed totally.And the disciples came. And said unto him, “Why speakest thou unto them in parables?” “Why don’t you say things directly? Why do you go indirectly and indirectly? Why do you go around and around? Why not hit them directly and say things directly?”One very well-known Christian preacher, Harry Emerson Fosdick, has said that every man is an island and if you want to land on the island, you have to row around and around to find the right place for landing.Yes, he’s right. Every man is an island, and if you want to make contact, real contact, you have to row around and around to find the right place and the right time to land. If you land from the wrong place you will be rejected; if you land in the wrong moment you will not be accepted. If you land from the right place, in the right moment, you will be a welcome guest – otherwise you will be an intruder. One has to wait. A parable is a going around and around the island of man to find from where to land.But the disciples can’t understand it. Why? Why does he speak in a different way to them? Whenever there are multitudes, why does he change his ways and start talking in roundabout language?The disciples are those whose gates are open for Jesus. There is no need to go round and round. The disciples are those whose landing has been already found. They are in contact with Jesus. Jesus is always welcome, always welcome. They are waiting, intensely awaiting him; they have become just a deep waiting for him. He is the bridegroom, they have become his brides. Their hearts are open, there is no need to go around and around.But for the masses, each man is an island and the landing has to be found – and the right moment.“Why speakest thou unto them in parables?”He answered and said unto them, “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.”To whom is it given to know the mysteries of heaven? To whom is it not given? Those who seek, those who knock at the door of heaven, it is given to them. Those who are standing without knocking, or those whose back is to the gate of heaven, or those who have become completely oblivious that heaven exists – to them it is not given.Unless you are moving in the direction of God, God cannot move in your direction. If you are moving against him, how can he reach you? If you are closed to him, how can he open you? If you are denying him, how can he come and become a guest in your heart? No, then it is not given; heaven is not given to you.Jesus said: “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.” But they can turn, they can start moving in the direction of God because it takes the same energy. Whether you move against him or for him, the same effort is needed. In fact, to move against him needs more effort because then you are moving against the current. To move toward God needs no effort because then you are flowing with the stream. There is no need for any effort.People think that when somebody attains God it is a miracle. That is not right. The miracle is that which is done by you – that you have lost God. That is a miracle. That is something, a great achievement, because it is so hard to go against, it needs so much effort, it needs so much struggle – and struggle for nothing because in the end your hands are empty.To achieve God is to relax, is to start flowing toward him. And you need not do anything. If you are just in a deep let-go, the river takes you over. God possesses you if you allow him.“Repent, return, the Kingdom of God is at hand.” It has always been at hand, but you have become deaf to the message. You listen to it, and yet you don’t hear it. You hear it sometimes, but you don’t understand it. And there are a few moments when you understand also, but you never bring it to your life; it never becomes existential. It remains a fragrance in the mind and then disappears.He answered and said unto them, “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. But to them it is not given.” “That’s why I have to talk in parables to them.” They can only understand parables; only through parables will a possibility linger around them. They will remember the parable and in some moment of tranquility, calmness, collectedness, the parable may start functioning. The seed will remain with them and when the rains come, maybe it will sprout. It will wait for the right moment – and someday the right moment will be there.They may be feeling happy, or they may be feeling very calm and quiet, or they may be feeling relaxed, and suddenly they remember the parable and some new meaning arises. It was not there when they heard it because a meaning depends on your being; it depends on you what meaning you give to a certain thing.I was reading a story…Two psychiatrists lived in the same building. Every evening they would come back from their offices, and they often rode on the same elevator together.The elevator man was very intrigued by one thing that happened again and again. As he got out of the elevator, the first psychiatrist would invariably turn back and spit on the other psychiatrist. The other would smile, calmly take his handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe his face or tie or coat. Sometimes the elevator man even heard him chuckle to himself.He became more and more curious. One day he could not contain himself. As he was closing the door on the first psychiatrist he asked, “For heaven’s sake, doctor, tell me why your colleague goes on doing this to you.”The other psychiatrist laughed and said, “Oh, I don’t know. This is his problem. And how can I know? But why should I be bothered? Poor man, that is his problem.”Somebody spitting on your face: really, it is his problem, it has nothing to do with you. But you make it your problem. Then you are disturbed, then you are worried, then you start thinking of how to take revenge.Can you see the point of the story? The meaning depends on you; the interpretation is yours. Even when somebody is spitting in your face you can laugh, you can smile, you can even feel compassion for the poor man. He must be having a great problem, otherwise why?A parable is just a seed that is given to you. How to uncover it, when to uncover it, will depend on you and your moods. Sometimes it happens that you may hear something today and you may not understand it, and years will pass and then suddenly, one day, you have understood it.Years have passed. What has happened in those years? You have changed. You have become more mature; you have gained more experience. You are no longer the same. The parable is the same, but you are no longer the same. Every moment you are changing, and a changed you will find a different meaning in the same parable.Jesus talks to the masses in parables because they are not yet ready. Nobody knows when they will be ready. But something has to be given to them: a gift from Jesus, a parable. Right now they may be simply amused, simply delighted in hearing a beautiful story, but as they are delighting, the parable is entering within them.Unaware, they have opened their hearts. Then the parable will be there in their hearts. Then it will wait for its timing, its season; it will wait for the man to be ready. Then one day, after years, and sometimes even after many lives, the parable will come to a flowering and the truth that the seed carried will be revealed.To those who are ready, the truth can be said right now. They will hear it and they will understand it. But for those who are not ready, something has to be given to them also.And then Jesus says a very paradoxical thing – one of the most paradoxical that he ever uttered, but very significant. Always remember, whenever you find a paradox in Jesus, Lao Tzu, Krishna, remember – something very, very significant, tremendously significant, is being asserted because the greater the truth, the more difficult it is to assert it in ordinary language. A paradox has to be used for it because a paradox is a unity of dualism. It contains the opposites. And greater truths always contain the opposites.Jesus said:“For whosoever hath…”Listen to it well!“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”It looks very cruel, unkind, hard. We would have thought just the opposite: give to those who don’t have. If you want to take away, take away from those who already have too much, and Jesus says just the reverse. He says, “To those who have, more will be given. And those who have not, even that which they have will be taken away.” This is one of the most fundamental laws. This is so.In ordinary life, in the worldly life, just the opposite law functions. In ordinary life, this is how we think: a poor man should be given more. If you take away from the rich, nothing is wrong, but if you take away from the poor and give it to the rich – can you conceive of anything more wrong than this? You give to the healthy and take away from the sick?Out of this law, communism is born. Communism says: give to those who don’t have and take away from those who have. As far as this world goes it is okay, but in the other world – the Kingdom of God – it is totally different. More will be given only to those who have. And from those who don’t have, even that which they have will be taken away. Why?If you meditate, more meditation will be happening to you. If you don’t meditate, even those few moments of calm quiet that happen on their own will be taken away. If you are getting crystallized within yourself, the whole existence will help you to go deeper in your crystallization. Everything will help to integrate you. If you are not getting crystallized and you are becoming a bigger and bigger crowd every day, everything will help to make you become an even greater crowd.Whatever is happening to you in the inner world, existence helps it. Whatever. If you are growing inside, God helps you to grow more. If you are falling, getting split, getting fragmented, the whole helps you to become more fragmented because in that inner world you have to earn; you cannot get anything without earning it. You cannot get anything without working hard for it. You cannot get anything unless you deserve it.“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” Jesus said to his disciples: “You have something. I am giving you more, I am adding more to it” – because more can be given only when you have something. If you don’t have something already, you will not be able to absorb the more that is given to you.If you don’t have anything of the inner consciousness and I give to you, it will be lost. It will be a wastage. To absorb that which is given by Jesus or Buddha – or by any master – you need a foundation. If you don’t have the foundation already, nobody is going to give to you because that is a sheer wastage and it may even prove dangerous. Whatever you get without earning will be a danger to you because it will never become a part of you. It will be a burden. It can crush you, but it cannot help you to grow.And the more you absorb, the more will be flowing toward you. If you don’t have, nothing can be added to it.“Hear ye therefore the parable of the sower.”And Jesus told them a parable:“When anyone heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the wayside.”Jesus is saying something that is very meaningful, but he is saying it in the language that was prevalent in those days. The language has become out-of-date now, but Christians go on insisting on it. That creates a very embarrassing situation, but the meaning will never be obsolete. It is language that always becomes obsolete, no longer in fashion.Jesus says: “When anyone heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one…” – the Devil. That is the language of those days. There is no Devil, there is no personality. There is neither personality in the Devil nor in God. Both are impersonal phenomena. But this is a way of speaking – and beautiful, very poetic. And it is a parable.Jesus says, “If you hear of the Kingdom of God” – the word, the news, the good news – “and you don’t understand it, immediately the Devil enters your heart and takes it away.” This is just a way of speaking, but try to understand it.Science, today’s science, has come to know many mysteries of life without understanding them. They have come to know, but they have not understood. The secret of atomic energy was known: immediately the Devil entered. It could not help humanity. Such a great secret: it could not help. On the contrary, it became destructive – Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And there is every fear that it may destroy the whole humanity because a secret is known but not understood.So whenever you know something, you attain some power because knowledge gives power, knowledge is power. What will you do with the power if you don’t understand? If you understand it, the power will be absorbed by you, and the power will give you light, and the power will become silence, and the power will become a deep calm, and the power will become humility, humbleness. It will kill your ego.But if you don’t understand, then the power will become the ego. And then that power will become destructive to others. Then you will try to possess others; then the power will become political. That is the Devil.Let me say it in new language. Whenever you don’t understand a new secret, it becomes political: the Devil enters. When you understand, it becomes religious. Then God enters. All that is known without understanding will always go into the hands of the politicians. They are the evilest forces in the world; they are always in search of more power. Scientists are serving politicians, not knowing what they are doing.Unless you are deeply prayerful and meditative, any power that you attain is going to serve wrong purposes. That is the meaning of Jesus: “When anyone heareth the word of the kingdom…” The word of the kingdom is the greatest secret. To penetrate to the innermost core of existence is the word of the kingdom: “…and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart.” And he will be poorer because of it, even poorer than he was before. At least the wicked one had not entered him before.Sometimes people come to me for the wrong reasons. I can understand. Because people are wrong, how can they come for the right reasons? I have to persuade them, by and by, to be here with me for the right reasons. Otherwise they can be here for the wrong reasons. They come to me to attain more power. I have to persuade them that power is not good. “Rather, work for silence.”Silence doesn’t seem to be as attractive as power. Power is foolish but looks very attractive to the ego. They ask me, “If we meditate, will we become more powerful? If we meditate, will siddhis come to us, will powers come to us? Will we be able to do miracles?”This is coming to me for wrong reasons. This is all foolish because even if you can do miracles, what is going to happen? You may attract a crowd, you may be worshipped, but you will remain in the ego. Crowds may come around you, but God will be far away.Those who have been working deeply in the world of consciousness – Patanjali or others – have always warned disciples that sometimes, even without seeking it, power comes on your path. Then beware! Don’t start using it, because if you start using it, you are distracted by it. Now you are no longer moving toward God. Now your path has changed; now you have taken a different track, and there you will be lost.“This is he which receiveth seed by the wayside.” If you throw seeds and they fall by the side of the road, they will not be able to sprout. People will always be walking; they will be destroyed.“But he that received the seed into stony places, the same is he that heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it;“Yet he that hath not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended.”Then there is a second type who receives the word with joy – but in a stony place. Your head is that stony place. You can listen to truth and receive it in the head. And the head is very rocky, stony; it has no soil to help the seed to grow. You may rejoice that you have understood, but that understanding is not going to last very long. Sooner or later that understanding will disappear.Don’t be intellectuals when you are near a man like Jesus or Buddha. They are not teaching philosophy and they are not teaching any doctrine. They are teaching life, and life can be received only in the heart, not in the head.The first, who Jesus calls “This is he which receiveth seed by the way side,” has not even received in the head. He simply listens. He listens from one ear and it goes out through the other. He never receives anywhere; he’s the worst.The second is a little better. He receives, but receives in a stony place: in the head. The word enters the head and becomes his reasoning, becomes an argument, a doctrine, a belief, a philosophy. Then, too, he may rejoice in it; he may be happy that he has understood. There are many here around me who think they have understood, but the seed has fallen in the stony place.“Yet hath he not root in himself” – in the head there is no soil and the seed cannot find roots – “but dureth for a while” – the seed will remain there for a while – “for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended.”Sooner or later, if the word has been understood, your life will start changing. You will become rebellious, you will start falling off the society track. You will not be so much with the society as out of it. You will become a stranger in your own land, and then there is going to be trouble, persecution, tribulation. And then, then you will betray the word because reason is not enough. Reason can carry the word if it is comfortable and convenient. When trouble arises, reason will drop it and betray it.Only the heart can carry the word. Even when there is trouble, hardship, even when death faces, then too the heart will carry it. And only then can the seed have roots.“He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful.”Then there is one more type who heareth the word and who understands it in reason – or even allows a little of it to drop in the heart – but he: “…received seed among the thorns…” His heart is not pure, and his heart is not solely and wholly devoted to the Kingdom of God. He has a thousand and one desires; there are many weeds growing in the heart and the seed is lost in those thorny bushes.Unless God becomes your only goal, the only goal, unless God alone – and only God alone – challenges you and all desires drop and he becomes the only desire… Unless he is your only love and there is no competitor to it – you will lose the seed. You will not be able to grow and become a vast tree of the divine. It will not be possible.You have many desires. Maybe God is also one desire among them. You have many loves. Maybe God is also one of them. But God cannot be one among many. Either he can be the only one, or he will not be. You cannot divide your heart.Sometimes people come to me and they say they have some other master. I tell them, “It is good. Go to your master, don’t come to me. Or if you come to me, then come to me. Then, forget your old master. If you are happy with your old master, if things are growing, go back with my blessings. If things are not growing – and there is every possibility of this, otherwise why should you have come to me? – then be courageous and drop out of the old relationship completely because to be with a master, one needs to be wholly with him.”Unless your heart is available to me completely and totally, the seed will fall in a thorny bush where many other plants are growing, and the seed may not have a chance to grow. The whole soil of your heart has to be cleared and cleaned before the seed can be sown.“He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful.But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundred-fold, some sixty, some thirty.”Then there is the right person, who receives the word in the heart – where no thorns and thorny bushes are growing, where only the one plant of the divine is received, where only one love exists and only one ambition and only one desire. Then your heart has become the temple.These four possibilities – and Jesus says, “These are the people who come to me, and I have to talk in parables so everybody receives according to his understanding.” Somebody may be just enjoying the parable. Good, but it does not go very far. Some will receive it in their reason, in their heads. Good, as far as it goes – but it will not last long. Soon, whenever there is trouble, they will betray him.The last night, when Jesus took leave from his disciples, one disciple followed him. Jesus had been caught, had been made a prisoner. The enemy is taking him to the prison. One disciple follows. He says, “Lord, I will come with you wherever you go.”Jesus says, “You don’t know that. Before the morning, before the sun rises, you will have denied me three times.”But the disciple says, “Never! I will never deny you. How can I deny you? I will never betray you. Even if I am killed, I am ready.”Then he follows Jesus in the crowd. Somebody, seeing him, seeing that there is a stranger, asks, “Who are you?”The disciple says, “I come from another town.”He says, “Are you a follower of Jesus?”The disciple says, “No, I don’t know who Jesus is.”And Jesus looks back and he says, “The sun has not yet risen.” Nobody understood, but the disciple understood.Then again, when they are reaching nearer the prison, again somebody looks at the disciple and says, “Why are you following us? Who are you?” They thought he was a spy or somebody.The disciple says, “I am a stranger, and just out of curiosity about what is happening, I am following you.”“So you don’t belong to Jesus?”He says, “Who is this Jesus? I have never even heard…”Jesus looks back and says, “The morning is yet far away.”And again at the prison gate somebody asks him and the disciple again denies – three times before the sun has risen.The disciple must have understood the word in the stony place, in the head. The head cannot sacrifice. Only the heart can sacrifice. And unless you are ready to sacrifice your all, God cannot become a truth to you. He demands all, not a small bit less. He demands you totally. That is the challenge.Only the heart is mad enough to do that. The head is too clever. It can give a little, but it always holds back much. It can come out a little, but the major part remains inside – watching. seeing, calculating whether it is worth it. And it is always ready to withdraw if things go too far.People were with Jesus when he was hailed as the son of God. The multitudes were there. But when he was being crucified, all those masses had disappeared. Nobody was there. Only a few disciples were there, and even those disciples were hiding in the crowd of the enemies. When Jesus was crucified, only three women came near him. That is symbolic that only the heart can come near in such moments.If Jesus had been going to be enthroned, then all the disciples would have been near him. In fact, there would have been a great competition. They had even been asking Jesus before he died: “Lord, when you reach heaven and you are sitting on the right side of God, please tell us what our positions will be. Who will be sitting by your side, and who will be the next?” Ambitious heads, ambitious minds, ambitious egos.If Jesus had been going to be enthroned, then they would have been in great competition to be near him. But he was crucified. They were watching, hiding in the crowd. If some miracle should happen then they will rush and they will declare: “We are the closest, the most intimate with him.”But nothing happened. He simply died like an ordinary man, just an ordinary man. And he was so capable of curing others. He has raised dead people from their graves, and he could not save himself. He has cured incurable diseases, he has done all sorts of miracles. And the disciples were waiting: if some miracle happens and Jesus attains glory and God, and God comes down and saves his son – the only begotten son – and the crucifixion becomes an enthronement, and he is declared the king of the world, they would have rushed. But nothing happened suddenly – no miracle. Jesus died like an ordinary man.This was the miracle: that he accepted. Whatever the will of God is, is going to be his will. He accepted it in totality. “If he wants me to be killed on the cross – perfect. Then that is what is to be the case. Then that has to happen.”He dropped his ego and will completely. In that moment, the greatest miracle happened – but it was so deep, so inner, that the disciples could not see it.Only three women reached Jesus, to take his body from the cross. This is symbolic. The heart came close even when he was dead, crucified, nothing to give. The heart is always with. In glory, in success, in failure – the heart is always with. The head is with you when you succeed. When you fail, the head fails you. It escapes. It is cunning: it knows when to be with somebody and when not to be. It withdraws, it simply denies. “Who is this Jesus? I have not even heard the name.”Three poor women – one of them a prostitute, Mary Magdalene – came to take possession of the body. They brought the body of Jesus down from the cross. Whether crucified or enthroned makes no difference for the heart. The heart is not a calculator; the heart is not a Jew. The heart can stake all and all. And that’s why the heart becomes the door to the divine.That is the fourth possibility. And then the seed reaches the right soil “…and bringeth forth, some an hundred-fold, some sixty, some thirty.”Much harvest comes out of a single seed. Remember, when Jesus gives you something, he is just giving you a seed. If you give it a chance to grow in your heart, it will become a hundredfold, even a thousandfold.Whatever Jesus is giving you, you cannot understand what it is until it grows in you. A seed looks just like a pebble, an ordinary pebble. It does not look like a diamond. Sometimes the pebble may look even more colorful, more precious. But the pebble remains the pebble. It has no potentiality, it is dead.Even a diamond has no potentiality. But a seed – that is the difference. The pebble is dead, the diamond is dead, but the seed is alive. It can grow, it can become more and more and more. A hundredfold, a thousandfold – and then millions of seeds will come and they can again grow a hundredfold, a thousandfold.It is said that one single seed can fill the whole earth with greenery: just a little time is needed. And if you give more time, a single seed can fill the whole universe with greenery, with flowers. Such is the potentiality of a seed.When Jesus talks to you, he is not giving you flowers; he is giving you seeds. You may have liked to get flowers because their value is obvious – but he gives you seeds because he knows a flower is just on its deathbed, a flower is at its last stage. A seed has not yet even begun. A seed is infinite potentiality; the flower is exhausted.That is the difference between an awakened one and the so-called pundits, rabbis. They give you flowers – exhausted. You can enjoy a little, decorate your room for a while, but the flower is exhausted. A Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna: they give seeds. That’s why a rabbi can be very famous in his time, but then he is forgotten. A pundit may be very famous when he is alive, but when he is gone, he is gone. Jesus lives and lives and lives; Buddha goes on living. They give seeds. Millions of flowers come out of them, and millions of seeds. And they continue; there is a continuum of life.A parable is a seed. It depends on you how it will unfold. You can lose it like a dead thing if you hear it and don’t understand. Or you can lose it if you hear it and understand only with the intellect: then it falls on stony ground. Or you can lose it by understanding, even giving it a place in the heart, but among so many bushes. No, Jesus wants your whole heart. Nothing less will do. It is a total commitment.When you come to me to be initiated, it is a total commitment. It is a risk. You are taking a jump into the unknown. So only courageous, very courageous people can move onto the path: only those who dare. It is risky and dangerous. You have never known it before. You will be moving for the first time, so you don’t know.I was reading a story…It happened in a desert. A man was feeling very thirsty and he came to a place where there was a hand pump by the side of the road. He went near, very hopefully, and there was a small note hanging with the hand pump.On the note was written: “Please. The road traffic is almost nil. Years pass before some traveler comes by. The pump is in order, but for years nobody has used it so first you will have to put water in it. I have hidden a big bottle full of water under the white rock.“Please don’t drink it first. Even if you drink a part of the water, then it will not be enough for the pump to start. And trust me. If you put the whole of the water in the pump it will function, and there will be enough water coming for you.“And remember, before you leave, fill the bottle again and put it under the rock.” And it was signed, and the date was from twenty years back. For twenty years…The man ran to the white rock. The bottle was there. Many people had passed by, but everybody had trusted the man. There was every possibility that they may have thought, “Who knows if this man is mad or crazy, or is just a practical joker?” – playing a joke on you. You put in the water, who knows? The water may be lost and the pump may not start. Then… And you are thirsty, in the middle of a desert. For miles there is no town. It is dangerous and risky to trust, and somebody unknown, you don’t know who this man is. He has signed it, but who is he?But everybody had followed the instructions. This is trust. And the man also followed them.It is moving into the unknown: he was dying of thirst, every temptation was there to drink the water first – who knows? And this water can save him! That is absolutely clear: this water can save him. To pour the water into the pump… Maybe it will be lost and the pump will never work. It is a desert land – who knows? The pump may have been working when the last man came; it may not be working now.This is taking a risk. Life is at stake. But he poured the water, with trembling hands, with fear, with death close by.When you come to me, when I say something of the unknown, you have to trust me. There is no other way. And it is dangerous, and who knows? – this man may be just a practical joker. He may be just playing a joke, or may be mad, crazy. It is a risk.To walk with Jesus is a risk. To go with him is a risk, because wherever he is leading you have never been there. The path is unknown, the goal is unknown.Only the heart can take that much risk because the heart is innocent, innocent like a child. “But he that received seed into the good ground…” That heart is the good ground, and the good news can be received only in the good ground. And Jesus says: “That’s why I talk in parables.”The parable can be understood according to the man. He can understand it according to himself. If he has something within him, then the parable will hit that source and will give much. If he has nothing in him, the parable will be lost.If you don’t have the base, the parable will not reveal the source of power to you because then the wicked one enters, and then you are possessed by the Devil. Then the ego becomes stronger, and rather than helping, you have been harmed.A parable is beautiful: it gives you only as much as you can take. It never gives you more. But if you are ready, or someday when you will be ready, then it starts giving you more and more and more.I have heard that when President Abraham Lincoln was choosing people for his cabinet, one of his advisors suggested the name of a certain man.Abraham Lincoln declined. The advisor asked why.Lincoln said, “I don’t like his face.”This can’t be a reason! The advisor said, “But he’s not responsible for his face. At least that should not be a reason. What can he do about it? He is helpless.”Lincoln said, “No. After the age of forty, every man is responsible for his face.”I agree with him – absolutely true. After the age of forty, you are responsible for your face. It is the way you have lived, loved, worried. It is the way that you have behaved, related. It is how miserable you have allowed yourself to be, or how ecstatic. It is your autobiography – but after the age of forty.You are responsible for your face. But I would like to tell you something more. You are responsible for your soul also, not only for your face, because you are whatever you have chosen to be. It you are miserable, this is your choice; if you are in deep darkness, that too is your choice. Unless you choose and return, God will not be available. Not that he is not available, he is always available, but he is helpless.Face him, turn back, look at the source, and suddenly he showers on you. Yes, remember this fundamental law: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Will I know when I am ready to face you?You will face me; knowledge will come later on. Not otherwise – not that knowledge will come first and then you will face me. Knowledge will not precede, reality will precede. Knowledge is a shadow: it follows. Once you start thinking knowledge precedes, you are in a mess.I will tell you a story…One evening a monk knocked at the doors of a Zen monastery. He wanted to stay over for the night. He was tired, hungry. The host opened the door, but rather than greeting him with a hello or good evening, he encountered him with a very famous Zen koan. He said: “What is your original face, the face that you had before your father and mother were born?”The monk took his sandal off from his foot and hit the face of the host hard. The host stepped back, bowed down and said, “Welcome, you are welcome. Your understanding is tremendous.”Then they had dinner. In the cold night they were sitting by the fireplace chitchatting and the guest asked, “Do you have the answer yourself or not? The koan that you asked me – do you have the answer to it yourself or not?”The host said, “I am not that fortunate. No, I don’t have the answer. But I recognized it when you gave me the answer because I have read so much about Zen, and heard so much about Zen, I could recognize the immediacy of your answer. You didn’t hesitate for a single moment. You didn’t think it. It came out of your totality. It was not from the head – that much I could recognize.”The guest didn’t answer. He continued sipping his tea. But then the host became a little suspicious. He looked again at the face of the guest and he found there was something he didn’t like. So he asked again, “Please, tell me: do you really know the answer? Do you have the answer?”The guest started laughing, and then he starting rolling on the mat in deep mirth. And he said, “No, sir. I have also read so much about Zen and heard so much about Zen.”If knowledge becomes too much, that becomes the barrier. You can know without knowing. That is the danger of knowledge. You can know, not knowing at all. Deep inside you remain ignorant, but on the surface you know everything that can be known.You can deceive others, but the greater danger is that someday you may be deceived by yourself, you may deceive yourself. Then all possibility for growth stops.Never be bothered about knowledge. The whole quest should be for reality, for that which is. You should not be worried about it. That is the difference between theology and religion: theology goes on talking about God; religion talks God, not about. The “about” is the realm of theology. The priests, the preachers go on talking about and about. Religion is not talking about reality. Religion talks reality.You ask me, “Will I know when I am ready to face you?” You will face me first; then you will know. Knowledge always follows. It is a recognition when the real thing has happened. You will not know God before knowing him. You will know him first and then, as a shadow, knowledge will follow. You will recognize later on what has happened. The happening is first, recognition is later.Sometimes it may take much time to recognize because the mind is stupid. Sometimes it takes a long time to recognize. It may happen many times in your life: you may have attained a few moments of tremendous reality, authenticity, but you couldn’t recognize them. They are lost in the desert. Before you could recognize them they were gone – and then there were other things, the mind became engaged. You missed.This is my observation: you cannot find a single human being on the whole of the earth who has not had some moments of reality. In spite of yourself, sometimes the glimpse comes to you because it is not only you who is seeking reality, reality is also seeking you. It is not only that you need God: God is in tremendous need of man. You cannot be without him; he cannot be without you.You can forget him, but he cannot forget you. You may be standing with your back toward him, but he goes on trying to reach you. Your hands may be very small; his hands are not small. He can reach you wherever you are, even in the seventh hell. And he goes on groping for you, remember this.That’s why many times – not because of you, in spite of you – a glimpse happens. But you cannot recognize it. Many people have religious experiences, but they cannot recognize them as religious. Sometimes they think they are aesthetic experiences. No true aesthetic experience can be other than religious.When you see the beautiful face of a man or a woman a child, if you are really struck by the beauty, the experience is not only aesthetic, it is religious because in that moment of beauty, God has looked at you through that face. God has revealed himself to you through that face. Through those eyes, the depth of existence has tried to communicate with the depth of your being. The depth has talked to depth. There has been a dialogue. It is not only aesthetic.Suddenly, one morning you are light and graceful and you are fresh and unburdened. The past is no longer haunting you and the future has not yet started. You look at the sky, a vast emptiness, and everything stops within you. You also become a vast emptiness. It is not just an aesthetic experience, it is religious. Beauty is truth – and truth is beautiful.Sometimes you hear music and the mind stops, and the music surrounds you, you are drowned in it and you are no longer there. Just a transparent presence, and the music goes through and through. In that moment, it is not only music that is happening, it is religion. But you don’t recognize it.Do you think religion happens only in the church, where dead priests go on beating around the bush? In fact, that is the last thing – for religion to happen in the church. It is a graveyard; God is not alive there. A church is full of dead Gods. They were alive sometime, somewhere in the past. They are just histories now.When Jesus walked on the earth, religious experiences were happening around him. But now Jesus is a dead myth. He is worshipped in a church, preached about, but he is not there.The church, the temple, is the last place for religion to happen, for God to penetrate you. He comes to you in more alive ways. He comes through the wife, through the child, through the husband, through the friend – sometimes, even through the enemy. Flowers and ocean and sand, and the mountains and the stars and the birds – he comes in a thousand and one ways, but always alive.He is life. You can forget the name “God.” The word has become very dirty – drop it! Just call him life, that will do; call him existence or being, that will do. If truth seems too harsh, call him love, that will do. If truth has been too monopolized by philosophers, drop it. Love is perfectly beautiful.Wherever you had any poetic experience, wherever your heart became a small poem – something throbbed within you, something unknown – there is religion. Recognition may take time. Sometimes you may not be able to recognize for lives. And when you do recognize, then you will simply laugh, you will go mad with laughter because then in that recognition many other things that were left unrecognized will be also recognized.I have heard about a Zen monk – the story is simply unbelievable! He worked hard. His master has given him a koan, a Zen puzzle to work out. The koan was: If one hand claps, what will the sound be? Not two hands clapping with each other – just one hand clapping in emptiness. “What will the sound be? Try to hear it.”He tried and tried, but he couldn’t hear it. Years passed. He would go to the master, he would always bring something that he had heard, and the master would reject it immediately. Even before he had said anything, the master would say, “No! Don’t bring any stupidity here. Go back! Work hard!”It is said that twelve years passed and the master never even gave him an appreciative look. He was harsh and the disciple lost heart, he lost his nerve. He escaped from the monastery.Where could he go? He had no home. The people from his home would not accept him because once you become a monk and you live in a monastery for twelve years, coming back home would be falling down, would not be respectable. The whole town would laugh at him, that he has failed, and his family would feel bad. Better not to go to them.Then where could he go? He was just standing in a town, an unknown city, not knowing where to go, what to do. A woman looked from the window. The monk was standing there. He was a beautiful man. The woman called him. Not knowing who she was, and even if he had known, now there was no problem.She was a prostitute. She called him and he went to her. The prostitute fell in love with him. She danced and she played music. And she was a great singer, and a great musician, and a great dancer, and he forgot everything that he has learned for twelve years with his master – the Zen koan and everything. He completely forgot – as if everything had been erased, as if he had never been to the monastery.He was making love that night to the woman – I have never come across a beautiful story like this – and when he came to the climax, suddenly he heard one hand clapping because in deep love, there comes a moment where two become one, when the two energies meet – yin and yang, man and woman – and the man disappears, and the woman disappears. There is no yin and no yang: a circle, a non-duality.Suddenly, the koan was solved. He heard the sound of one hand clapping. It is said he jumped out of bed, jumped out of the window.The woman could not believe it. “What are you doing? Have you gone mad?”He said, “Let me go to my master first. It has happened!”He went to the master and, wonder of wonders, the master was waiting outside the temple for the disciple. He said, “So it has happened? This is no time to come and see me. Two o’clock – in the middle of the night!”The master was waiting for him. Before it happens to the disciple, the master knows. If you are tuned with the master, if you have really surrendered to the master, it will also happen to your master exactly when it happens to you. The master lives many times, many satoris, through his disciples. His own satori is complete: he has arrived, but many times through his disciples, whenever a disciple arrives, he arrives again through him. Again, the same dance.Life is God, love is God. Remember this much, and don’t be worried about knowledge.“Will I know when I am ready to face you?” You will face me. You will jump out of bed, you will jump out of the window and you will rush. And you will not know what is happening because that happening is greater than you – how can you know it? It is vaster than you, how can you comprehend it? You are just a drop in it; it is oceanic. But later on, when everything is settled again and you are at home with this ecstasy, with this satori, samadhi, then the mind comes back, starts recognizing, starts thinking.Recognition is of the mind; the realization is not of the mind. In the deep moment of realization, the mind stops. The phenomenon is such, and so unknown, that the mind cannot function, cannot cope with it. When it has gone, then the mind comes back. Then it starts looking and watching and thinking and brooding and then suddenly a recognition arises: “So it has happened?”“So it has happened?” The mind cannot believe in it because the mind is a doubter. But it has to believe it. Believe it or not, it has happened.Recognition will follow realization. You will know when it has happened, but you will not know beforehand, and there is no need. And if you know beforehand, your knowledge will become the barrier. So please don’t be concerned about it.The second question:Osho,How can I serve you?Just be yourself. There is no other service to me. Just be yourself; that’s how you can serve me. That is how you have already served me – if you are yourself. My whole effort is to help you to be yourself.If you are centered, rooted, grounded; if you have come to a point where you are not worried about becoming somebody else, where the ambition to become somebody else has dropped – when there is no desire to move into the future, when the present is enough unto itself, when you are deeply contented as you are, when you can thank God, when you can be grateful and there arises no complaint; when your whole heart is simply full with gratitude – you have served me. There is no other way.Of course it would have been easier if I had given you some other ways to serve me, because those things you can do. You can come and massage my feet. That won’t help; that is of not much use. That is not going to lead you anywhere. You may feel happy, but that happiness is not bliss.My whole effort is: fall back on yourself. Don’t move and don’t be motivated by the future. If this moment becomes your total reality, you have come close to me, the closest that one can come to another. By being yourself, you will be near me; by trying to be something else, you will go far away.Don’t be imitators. The mind is an imitator because it is very easy to play the game of imitation rather than to become authentically true. And many ideas have been given to you: become like Buddha, become like Jesus, become like Krishna – as if you have to become everybody else except yourself, as if God is only against you. He’s for Krishna, for Christ, for Mahavira, for Buddha – only against you. Then why does he create you? Then he seems simply foolish. Why does he go on creating you? If he is interested in Buddha, he can create Buddhas. Why you?It would be simpler. He could go on creating Buddhas like Ford cars. They could go on coming through the assembly line: one car after another, one buddha after another! That would be good. But God is not interested in it. He never creates a Buddha again – have you observed? He never creates, he never bothers to create, a Jesus again. Why?There is no need to repeat. All repetition is dead. He goes on creating the new, the novel. He creates you! He’s more interested in you than in creating more Buddhas or more Christs. And remember, he will not repeat you either, so while you are here, be true and authentic. Be yourself.I have heard a story…An American made a beautiful teacup and then he wanted to mass-produce it. But to mass-produce it in the States would have been very expensive, so he sent it to Japan to be mass-produced.In transit, the cup handle was broken, and the Japanese, as you know, are perfect imitators. They mass-produced it exactly as it was: with the handle broken. They repeated it exactly as it was.This has been going on. God goes on creating the new, God goes on creating the novel, God goes on creating you, and the imitators in the churches and the temples go on saying, “Be like Jesus, be like Buddha, be like this” – and in transit, everybody’s handle is broken. The transit: two thousand years. Even if Jesus comes back, he will not be able to recognize the Jesus that is worshipped in the churches. Impossible. Jesus was a totally different man – alive. Churches go on worshipping somebody who was never there. It is their invention.Why do I go on speaking on Jesus, Buddha or Krishna, or Zarathustra or Lao Tzu? This is the reason: I would like to bring you Jesus as he was before the transit, before the priests entered – unbroken, complete.In one of my friends’ house, there is a very valuable painting, a seventeenth-century painting by a great master – very precious – and he loves it so much that he’s always afraid even to clean it. Something may be destroyed and it is old and very fragile.Much dust had gathered on it and an expert had to be called, and when the expert started cleaning it, a new problem arose. The paint started peeling off. The expert was very worried, and he said, “Should I stop?”I was staying with the friend. I said, “Don’t stop. Go ahead.” The friend was not there, otherwise he would have stopped him.But the expert said, “It may be destroyed.”I said, “Don’t be worried. Just go ahead because I can see something else behind the painting.”And it was so. When the paint was peeled off, it was discovered that the real painting was hidden behind it and some other painter had just tried to improve on the master. There were two paintings, and the real came out only when the imposed painting and the paint were peeled off.Then everybody was happy. But the risk was there.When I talk on Jesus, I am trying to peel off the paint with which Christianity has tried to improve upon the original face of the master. But it is natural that things change in transit.Be true to yourself. Never try to be anybody else. That is the only sin I call sin. Accept yourself. Whatever you are, you are beautiful. God accepts you; accept yourself also. He created you in his own image. He trusts, he has committed himself in your being. Don’t betray him, don’t become imitators.That is the only way you can serve me – by being yourself. Be thyself, and suddenly you will be close to me, the closest that is possible. By being imitators, by trying to be somebody else, you falsify your being, you become a traitor. All ideals are treacherous and all ideals are betrayals. I don’t teach you any ideal, and I don’t want you to become anything that is not intrinsic to you.You don’t know who you are; that is the difficulty in being oneself. One has to remain content with the unknown.I have heard…When the apostle Paul reached Athens, he told the people of Athens, “You are good, you are great in your thinking, and you have given the greatest philosophies to the world. But one thing I have observed: I have seen a temple in your city that is devoted to the unknown God. Inside there is no statue – just written on marble is: ‘This temple is devoted to the unknown God.’”Paul said, “This is not enough: an unknown God. This is not sufficient. Your foundation is incomplete. I give you the known God because only with the known God is a foundation possible. Your culture, your civilization, lacks foundation.”But I tell you, only the unknown God is God. Once you are devoted to a known God you have already started falsifying because the known will be knowledge, the known will be part of your mind. Buddha is known, easy to imitate. Jesus is known, easy to imitate. You are unknown. I teach you to remain true to the unknown God.The known is easy. You can tackle it; you can cope with it. To move into the unknown needs much courage, needs daring. And religion is the greatest adventure. It is not a consolation, it is not a convenience, it is not respectability. It is to move into the unknown, the uncharted, and to risk life.What Paul said to the Greeks is dangerous. This man Paul talks sense, but is very dangerous. You will also feel that a known God is better than an unknown God because with the known, we can relate easily, with a map we can move easily. But I tell you again and again, there is no better way to be lost than to have a map.In the world of truth, all maps are false because the truth is undefined and remains indefinable. Defined, it becomes untrue. That’s what Lao Tzu means when he says, “The truth cannot be said. Once said, it is no longer truth.”God is unknown. Or even better would be to say, the unknown is God. And that unknown resides in you, abides in you. If you want to serve me and to be close to me, be close to your unknown God that is within you. Serve the unknown God that is within you, help that unknown God to be, to expand, to become, to flow, to flower.The third question:Osho,The strangest thing has happened: I feel happy! My problems seem transparent, and I feel more and more alive. You talk about the need to die. How can my happiness lead me through “the dark night of the soul”?This is from Sambuddha. Now, Sambuddha, please don’t try to create new problems!This is how the mind functions. Even if you are happy, you feel unease. You, and happy? Impossible! Something must have gone wrong; it doesn’t fit with the idea that you have of yourself. You, and happy? You must have gone mad, or you must be imagining, or this man Osho has hypnotized you. You, and happy? Impossible.Now, Sambuddha, don’t try to create new problems. Forget all that I say about dying – because in the happiest moment, one dies. The death I am talking about is not the death of misery. The death I am talking about is not the death of suffering, is not the death of agony. The death I am talking about is the death of ecstasy, the death of pure bliss, the death when you are so happy that you explode and simply disappear.But don’t be worried about it. It will come by itself; it is already on the way. If you become worried and you become concerned: “Why I am so happy…”“The strangest thing has happened: I feel happy!” If you become worried about it, soon the happiness will disappear and you will fall back to your old state of mind. Enjoy it. Move deeply into it. Dare! The mind has become so miserly and so miserable that when happiness happens, then too it clings to its old past. It is afraid to move. How to be happy? How to laugh? Even if it laughs, it laughs halfheartedly. Even if it moves, it moves ready to withdraw any moment if something goes wrong. And happiness wants you to be totally in it. It claims you totally.Enjoy it, move into it, be possessed by it – and in that possession will be death. Totally possessed by happiness, the ego dies.I don’t teach suffering, I don’t teach sacrifice, I don’t teach renunciation. I teach the death that comes out of bliss, the death that comes at the peakest peak of happiness; the death that comes when you are dancing, singing, loving; the death that comes when you are possessed by the whole and the ocean drops into the drop.Of course, the drop dies. Such a tremendous phenomenon: the ocean dropping in the drop – how can the drop live now? But what is the point of living? If the drop tries to live, that will be real death, and if the drop disappears in the ocean, this is what Jesus calls “Life, and more abundant life.”Allow it. It is very difficult: people go on seeking happiness, but when it comes, they close their doors. People go on seeking love, but when it knocks at the door, they hide somewhere in the closet. People go on seeking friendship, and when somebody comes near, close, they become panicky, they become afraid.What is the fear of happiness? – the fear of death. What is the fear in love? – the fear of death. What is the fear of freedom? – the fear of death. The ego is afraid. The ego can remain in misery, it can remain even in the seventh hell, but even a slight breeze of happiness and the house of the ego starts falling, collapsing.Nothing kills like happiness, nothing kills like ecstasy, but that risk is worth taking because only after that death does real life arise. You disappear. Then God lives in you.The fourth question:Osho,Why is religion a dirty word for me, and why does it threaten me far more here in Pune than it ever did before?Religion has become a dirty word. It has been used too much and abused too much. It has passed through thousands and thousands of hands. It is just like an old coin or an old currency note that has passed through many hands and has become dirty. Everything that is used too much becomes dirty – not only religion.All beautiful words have become dirty. God, love, ecstasy – all have become dirty. The reason is natural, obvious. The words are so beautiful that humanity tends to use them too much. Just look at the advertisements, and you will find all the beautiful words being used for cigarettes, soaps, cars, furniture: all the beautiful words. Even a cigarette – the advertisement can say that the cigarette is ecstatic. Now, a beautiful word is being dirtied.Every film, every movie, is thought to be “marvelous,” “fabulous.” If everything is fabulous, and every movie is fabulous, then nothing is fabulous. The word does not mean much now. If you say something is fabulous, it doesn’t mean anything. It simply means that you have been listening to TV too much. All beautiful words become dirty because the mind tends to use them more and more, for everything and anything.Religion has become dirty. It is the oldest thing in the world. There is a controversy about which profession is the oldest, and prostitutes and priests are the two competitors. I have also been thinking about it and I cannot conceive of how prostitutes can come before priests. Impossible! Unless the priest is there, how is prostitution imaginable? Impossible. The priest must have come first. He must have condemned sex, and then prostitutes followed. He must have condemned it so much that the whole thing became very attractive.Religion has become a dirty word, but remember well: when a word is dirty, that does not mean that the thing that is denoted by the word is dirty. Religion, the word, may have become dirty, but religion, the thing, is still fresh and will always remain fresh.You can use another word for it. Any word will do; that is not a problem. Remember: just because a word has become dirty, don’t throw away the thing itself. That will be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The bathwater has become dirty – true, throw it away – but at least save the baby. If you can save the baby, there is no trouble.Churches have made it dirty. They have made a profession out of it, they have corrupted it, and they have made it so low because they have to bring it to the masses. They have made it very cheap – as if there is no need on your part to do anything. They come and give you the Bible free; they come and go on throwing religion on you, they go on imposing. They don’t even ask your permission. They are intruders, pretenders. They have corrupted it. But they have not corrupted religion as such; they have corrupted only the word. Forget the word, but don’t forget the reality that is indicated by it.And that may be the cause: “…and why does it threaten me more here in Pune…?” – because here, near me, I am not concerned about the word; I am concerned about religion itself. It threatens more. If you go into a church, you will come back intact. As you have gone in, so you will come out – the same. But if you come to me, you cannot go back the same.If you really come close to me, in that very coming you will be transformed and changed. You may escape, you may become afraid, scared, but you will never be the same again. I will go on haunting you wherever you are. I will come in your dreams, I will follow you like a shadow.The fear is real, the threat is real. When you go to a church, the priest is a false threat. He may thunder, but the threat is false. He may shout at you the name of God, but the threat is false.I have heard…It happened in a Zen temple. One morning there was a great earthquake, as happens in Japan. Half the temple collapsed.The priest, who had been pretending that he was a real Zen man, immediately gathered his disciples and said, “Look! Now you must have observed what the real quality of a real Zen man is. The earthquake was there, but there was not even an iota of fear in me. Have you observed it? I remained as if nothing had happened. Not only that, you must have seen that after the earthquake stopped, I went to the kitchen because I was thirsty and I drank a big glass of water. Didn’t you observe that my hand was not trembling at all while I was holding the glass?”One disciple smiled. The priest felt annoyed. He said, “What is funny about it? Why are you smiling?”The disciple said, “Reverend sir, it was not a glass of water. It was a big glass of soy sauce that you were drinking!”When you want to show off, from somewhere or other, the reality is bound to leak in.Go to a priest. His words are okay – never more than okay, just okay – but if you look into the reality of the man, you will have no fear. He is just like you. He may pretend, and you may even pretend that whatever he is pretending is true. That’s how it goes on, because pretensions need mutual cooperation. He pretends that he is a great master, you pretend that you are a great disciple. He accepts your pretension, you accept his pretension. That’s how both are mutually satisfied and things remain the same.When you are here, you are really near a danger point. I am a dangerous man. You should be alert about it. Come close to me with full awareness. There is danger. I am not a priest. I am not teaching religion here, I’m ready to give it to you. It is not a teaching, it is a transmission.In churches, you have learned the words religion, God. They have all become dirty. Then you come to me and you start realizing that those words may have become dirty, but something is hidden behind them that is ever-fresh, ever-green, ever-alive – and capable of changing you totally. Then the fear arises.Just the other day, Atmada wrote me a letter, a beautiful letter, saying, “Why are you so worried about this Jesus being crucified? It is good that this idiot was crucified! Why are you worried about it?”In fact, this is all that the priests have done. Trying to force Jesus on you, trying to be aggressive intruders on your being, somehow trying to convert you to Jesus, they have dirtied the very name of this beautiful man. And trying to prove that he is the greatest wise man in the world, they have only been able to magnify his defects and nothing else. That’s why Atmada writes to me that he was an idiot.I know he was, but that is how a wise man always is. This point has to be understood. A really wise man is a synthesis of whatever you call wisdom and idiocy. He is as simple as an idiot and as complex as any wise man can be.You can look at him from both sides. If you look at him from one side, he will look like an idiot. And you can find in Jesus all the things you can find in idiots. Read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s book, The Idiot. It is about an idiot, but in that idiot you will find all the beautiful qualities Jesus has: the innocence, the quality of no-mind, the quality of trust. A doubt never arises. These are all idiotic qualities. You call a man an idiot if he trusts everybody and anybody; and you call a man an idiot if you go on deceiving him and still he goes on trusting you. You go on deceiving him and he goes on trusting you. You cannot create doubt in him because he has no mind.A man like Jesus is also like an idiot – not because he has the same state of idiocy, but he has come to the same state from a very different dimension. The circle is complete: he has again become a child.The idiot is below the mind, Jesus is above the mind. Both are no-minds. The idiot has no mind. Jesus and Buddha also have no minds, but there is a difference. They had, and they found out that to have a mind is foolish. They dropped it. They have become idiots voluntarily. They are not stupid. They are idiots because they are wise.Yes, I know – Jesus, Lao Tzu, Buddha, they look like idiots. In India we have a word for idiot that comes from Buddha. It is buddhu. The word is derived from Buddha himself. Buddha, buddhu. Buddhu means “idiot” and buddha means “the awakened man.” How can both these words be together?When Buddha died, his impact was tremendous. Thousands and thousands of people became followers. Thousands and thousands of people were sitting under bodhi trees with closed eyes, meditating. And people called to them: “Buddhus, go home! What are you doing? Don’t be a buddhu! Do something, go home. Your wife is suffering, or your children are hungry. Don’t be an idiot! Don’t be a buddhu!”I know. Jesus is so innocent he looks foolish, but that foolishness is tremendously precious.I am also idiotic, Atmada. And whatever I am teaching is teaching you to be so simple and trusting that you also become idiots in a sense. But that idiocy is the supreme awareness, that idiocy is supreme wisdom. Polarities meet, dualities disappear.In a Jesus, you will always find a paradox: he’s both together. You will find in him qualities that are feminine, you will find in him qualities that are absolutely male. They meet and mingle, and they have become one. In him, the feminine and the male have become one; the wise and the fool have become one. The polarities have disappeared.The contradiction is no longer a contradiction, it is a synthesis – but difficult for the mind to understand. The mind is a doubter, the mind is skeptical. And the mind thinks it is very intelligent.The mind is stupid, the mind is mediocre. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence is a totally different flowering of your being; it has nothing to do with the mind. The mind is just a mechanism. It is a computer, a biocomputer – very complex, but still a mechanism. It has nothing to do with intelligence.Intelligence comes within you only when you have become so unidentified with the mind that you can see that the mind is separate and you are separate. In that state, intelligence happens. That intelligence will be both wise and a fool.That is the mystery of a Jesus. That is the paradox, the poetry.The fifth question:Osho,The peaks are getting pretty wonderful, but the valleys are deeper and darker than ever. Finding a balance seems impossible. What to do?There is no need to do anything. You do not have to find a balance; the balance will find you. Simply move. When the valley comes, go into the valley. When darkness surrounds, enjoy it, feel blissful in the velvety touch of it. Move into it, into the infinite magnificence of it. Darkness has a soothing quality no light can have. And the valley is a rest – like the night, like death.There is no need to try to find a balance. The balance will find you. Simply move into the valley. When the valley comes, accept it – not only accept it, welcome it, enjoy it, delight in it. Darkness is beautiful. And when the valley goes and you move toward the peak, that too is perfectly beautiful. It is beautiful – the light, the morning, the sun.Don’t cling to anything. Clinging creates trouble. Through clinging, anguish comes. If you cling to the peak and you say, “I would not like to go to the valley again,” then you will be in trouble. Then, at the very peak you have created the valley. Then, already the suffering has started. You are afraid. Fear has entered, the agony is already there. You are no longer happy; you have destroyed the peak.When you are in the valley, you will suffer because “now the valley has come.” You will suffer the valley and you will not be able to enjoy the peak. This is the ordinary situation.When you are happy, you become afraid. Is this happiness going to stay or will it be gone? Now this fear eats happiness like a worm, poisons it. You are happy, and yet you are not happy. Something is already dead: you have become apprehensive about the future. And when you are unhappy, of course, you are unhappy. When you are happy you cannot be happy – how can you be happy when you are unhappy? So the whole of life becomes a vicious circle of unhappiness.Now, listen! When you are at the peak, dance. I know, and you know, that the peak is not going to last forever. There is no need. If it lasts forever, it will be such a tension that you will not be able to tolerate it. It will be such an excitement that you will not find any rest in it. It will be dangerous, it will kill you. There is no need for it to last forever. But while it lasts, dance, enjoy, and sing it – knowing well it is going to be lost again. But knowing it, one has to enjoy it more before it is lost.Remember, this is the miracle: when you enjoy it more, it lasts longer. When you are happy in it and dancing, it forgets to go away from you, it lingers with you. When you don’t cling to it, it clings to you. This is the whole secret.And when it is gone, then too it is not gone. It has given you such a deep blissfulness that now you can go into the valley and you can rest in darkness. Then the valley becomes relaxation and the peak becomes enjoyment. Then the peak becomes the day and the valley becomes the night: then the peak becomes activity and the valley becomes passivity.One has to enjoy the night also. That is the only way to enjoy the day. And if you enjoy the day, a great night comes with great rest. It refreshes you, rejuvenates you.Always remember: the greater the peak, the greater the valley will be. Otherwise how can the peak be greater? If you go to the Himalayas, then you will find the greater the peak the greater the valley. If you are afraid of the valley, then don’t ask for the peaks. Then move on plain ground. There will be no peak and no valley.That is the most miserable life – where there is no peak, no valley. One simply vegetates. It is not a life. One simply drags. It is a monotony. It is not a dialogue; it is a monologue. A dialogue needs duality, a dialogue needs contradiction, a dialogue needs polarity, a dialogue needs paradox. And within the paradox, you move from one pole to another.Don’t be worried about balance. Balance will seek you; I will see that balance seeks you. Simply do this much: while on the peak, dance. While in the valley, rest. Accept the valley; accept the peak. Both are parts of the one whole and you cannot deny one part. They are two aspects of the same coin.Remember, one who enjoys more is bound to suffer more because he becomes very sensitive. But suffering is not bad. If you understand it rightly, suffering cleanses. If you understand it rightly, sadness has a depth to it no happiness can ever have. A person who is simply happy is always superficial. A person who has not known sorrow and has not known sadness, has not known the depths. He has not touched the bottom of his being; he has remained just on the periphery. One has to move within these two banks. Within these two banks flows the river.And I tell you, balance will seek you if you accept both and you live both. Whatever happens, welcome it. Suddenly, one day you will see that balance has come, and when balance comes to you, then it is something totally different from that balance you can force upon yourself.If you force the balance, it will be a sort of control, and a control is always artificial, and a control is always ugly, and a control has a violence in it. It is forced, artificial. When balance comes to you, it is a happening. Suddenly it descends on you. Heavens open and the spirit of God, like a dove, descends in you.All that is great always comes. All that you make is always small, petty. It is never great. All that you do is going to be lesser than you. All that is great, you have to allow. Balance will find you. God will find you. Just be ready.And this is readiness: to accept whatever comes, to accept it with gratefulness. Even sorrow, even sadness, even the dark valley.The last question:Osho,The other day you lovingly told me to be more concerned about myself and less about others. Thank you Osho. I got the point. And yet I must ask one more question not to do with me, but to do with you. What exactly is happening with you? Every month your body is becoming more sensitive in every way, and the phenomenon, even to my state of unawareness, is awesome. Can you say something about your changes?This is from Chaitanya Sagar. It is good he says this is the last question that he is asking not about himself!I can understand your worry, your concern. The fact is simple. After the age of thirty-five, life starts declining. Thirty-five is the peak: if you are going to live for seventy years, thirty-five is the peak. After thirty-five, you start declining. Now it is downhill.If somebody becomes enlightened after thirty-five – as Buddha became at forty, Mahavira became at forty – then he can live a little longer, because he was already going downhill and enlightenment will not disturb the body more than it was already disturbed.If you become enlightened before the age of thirty-five, then there is danger. Shankara became enlightened before the age of thirty-five. He died at thirty-three. When you are going uphill and life is moving strongly and you become enlightened, the connection between you and the body is disrupted. It has almost always happened that people who have become enlightened before thirty-five have not survived up to thirty-five. It is difficult because the body and you become so separate, and the uphill task becomes very difficult.It is just as if you were going uphill and suddenly you see there is no more petrol in the tank of the car. The uphill task becomes almost impossible. Now you will have to get out and push the car uphill – very difficult! If you become aware when the car is going downhill that there is no more petrol there, there is no trouble. In fact, there is no need for petrol: the car can go without it.Shankara died at thirty-three. Buddha lived up to eighty; Mahavira also lived up to eighty. This has to be understood. I should have died before thirty-five, in fact. Somehow, I have been pulling. That “somehow” can be understood.By and by, I have dropped out of life; I have dropped all activity. Whatever energy my body has, I am using for you. That’s all. Otherwise I have dropped all activity: I have stopped moving, stopped traveling – I have almost stopped everything. I come out just to see you in the morning and in the evening. Otherwise I have become completely inactive, absolutely passive. Whatever small energy is there, I am using as economically as possible.So every day my body is going to become more and more fragile, more and more sensitive. My ship is ready – any moment I can depart. I am lingering on the bank a little while longer for you. That’s why I am in a hurry. You have time to ask useless questions. I don’t have time to answer them.You have time to waste. My time is finished. So if you really want to use this opportunity, don’t miss a single moment. Don’t hesitate, and don’t put your half-heart into the effort because when I am gone, then you will repent and then you will be very sorry – but then nothing can be done. While I am still here, use every opportunity I am giving to you, and don’t waste a single moment. I have what you are seeking: I can pour it into you – but your cup is not ready.The thing is like this: you come to me and I have a full kettle of tea. You are thirsty, and I would like to give it to you, but I cannot pour it in your hands. It will burn you. I have to wait because you will have to produce your cup. And that cup can be produced only from your innermost core of being.Only your innermost being can become the cup. Only then can I pour whatever I have. I am waiting for you so you can produce the cup. You are thirsty I know, and I have that which can quench your thirst, but the cup is not ready.So don’t ask such questions. Rather, look at me and try to understand.Just the other night a sannyasin was saying, “How can you help us when you yourself are not well in the body?” True. If I am not well in the body, how can I help you? It looks absolutely logical. But do you know if Buddha was well in the body?No enlightened person has ever been well in the body, cannot be, because the bridge is broken, the being with the body is disrupted. The body goes on moving on its own, and the being goes on residing in it, but the energy that was given by the identification is not given. You live as one with your body. I live as two. My body is just like my clothes – absolutely separate. It is a miracle it is functioning.Buddha had to keep a physician continuously with him because every moment was a danger. And the physician was not for him because his work was done, he had achieved. The physician was for those who were still thirsty, and he had something that could quench their thirst. The physician was for them.If the doctor comes to see me, it is not for me. It is for you. If I see that there is no point and I cannot help you, I can disappear this very moment.But many of you are working hard. I have the largest number of sannyasins that is possible in this twentieth-century world, almost fifteen thousand all around the world. They are all working hard. If they can succeed, we will release one of the greatest energies, spiritual energy, in the world.I have to wait, and I have to linger on – whatever the body says. The body says, “It is time, and the ship is ready. You can go.” The house is ready to collapse, but I am holding it.Don’t waste my time in anything. Use it if you can. And this is the trouble: you may not understand now, but later when you understand, I will not be there and then that understanding will not be of much help. It will give you simply deep anguish and sorrow and agony.While I am here, if you understand me, it can become your ecstasy. When I am gone, it will be just an agony.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 1334 All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them:36 Then Jesus sent the multitude away, and went into the house: and his disciples came unto him, saying, “Declare unto us the parable of the tares of the field.”37 He answered and said unto them, “He that soweth the good seed is the son of man;”38 “The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one;”39 “The enemy that sowed them is the Devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.”40 “As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world.”41 “The son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and which do iniquity.”42 “And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”43 “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their father. Who have ears to hear, let him hear.”44 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.”The other day I was reading a few lines of Stephen Crane’s. I would like to read them to you:A man said to the universe, “Sir, I exist.”“However,” replied the universe, “the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”Man can exist in two ways. One, that the whole celebrates him. One, that the whole welcomes him. One, that the whole feels blessed because of him. And the other, that the whole feels cursed.Man can live a life of good, truth, and beauty – and man can live a life of untruth, evil, and ugliness. And man is free to live and to choose. Man is a tremendous freedom: that is his innermost nature. Nothing is forced. Hence the beauty of the adventure, and hence the danger also. You have to choose.Your choice will determine your being, your choice will become your destiny. On each step, every moment, you have to decide who you are.People come to me and they ask who they are. It is not a question of inquiry because the being is not a static thing waiting for you to be discovered. The being has to be created moment to moment. That is the only way to discover it.You create yourself moment to moment. You are born not as a fixed entity, but only as an infinite potentiality. You are born as a seed, not as a tree. You are born open, not closed, and that opening is tremendous. You will have to choose every moment who you are going to be. Your decision is your destiny. And unless you live a life so that the whole feels blessed, you are not religious.A religious life is a life of spontaneity. A religious life is a life of flow, of dynamism. A religious life is a life of prayer. Prayer is the supreme good.Let me explain to you what prayer is. It is not something you do; it has nothing to do with doing. It is something you become, by and by. It is something you live, it is something that surrounds you like a climate, it is something like a deep gratitude. Looking at the trees, or looking at the sea, or looking at the grass, a tremendous urge arises in you to say, “Thank you.” That is prayer.Not that you say it. It is not in the saying, but in the very urge, in the very mood that you would like to say, unconditionally, “Thank you” – not knowing to whom your thank-you is addressed, not knowing who is the creator of the morning and the evening and the stars and the moon and the sun, not knowing whose hands are hidden behind every grass leaf and who is smiling in every dewdrop. Not knowing at all.Knowledge is ugly; not knowing is beautiful. Remember, not knowing is not ignorance. Not knowing is ultimate knowledge. It transcends even what you call knowledge. Not knowing is innocence. In deep innocence a thank-you arises, unaddressed, not knowing whom you are addressing. But that is not the point. Deep within your being, in your depths, you feel gratitude.Prayer is the feeling of the unknown presence. That feeling of the unknown presence becomes reverence. Prayer has to be just like breathing. It is not that you do it and you are finished with it. It is something that goes on and on and on like breathing. Awake or asleep, it surrounds you, it throbs within your heart. It almost becomes you. No separation exists. And a life of prayer is what I call a good life. A life of gratitude is what I call a religious life.This life of spontaneity, of flow, does not know what sin is. Sin comes from knowledge. That is the meaning of the biblical story. When Adam ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, he sinned. Then he was thrown out of the Garden of Eden. This story has no parallel; this story is simply unique: “…because he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”No other religion has emphasized in such a crystal clear way that knowledge is sin and that unless you become like children again, you will not become good. Unless you drop all knowledge and you become innocent again, uncorrupted by knowledge, you will not be accepted back. The source will go on rejecting you.Not that the source wants to reject you. But the way you behave, through knowledge, creates the situation for your own rejection. God had to expel Adam and Eve. Not that he wanted to – he must have wept because they were his children – but he was helpless.Whenever you create the feeling in the whole of helplessness, you commit sin. And whenever you force the whole to reject you, you commit sin. Whenever you force the whole to throw you out of the garden, you commit sin.Sin is behaving in a cunning way, behaving as if you know. Sin is being self-complacent, sin is thinking you are enough unto yourself. A child is not enough unto himself; a child is helpless. A child does not know anything; he acts out of innocence. Then it is good. The moment you start acting out of knowledge, it is sin.Try to understand the import of what I am saying. I am saying that if you live a virtuous life out of knowledge, it is not virtuous. You can have character out of knowledge, you can have a quality of morality out of knowledge, but then it is no longer moral. Then you are still eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge.Your so-called saints are, deep down, sinners because they still go on getting their nourishment from the tree of knowledge. The real sage is innocent. He acts – not because of the commandments, because all commandments are sin. He acts out of his totality. He responds in this moment.He does not act out of the mind. To act out of the mind is to sin, and to act out of the mind is to be thrown out of the garden, out of the Kingdom of God. Once you accept the mind as your source of activity, you have denied God, and in your denial of God, you are denied.Whenever you act out of the mind, your act is going to be fragmented because the mind is a split phenomenon. The mind is not one. It is many, it is a multitude, its names are legion. Whenever you act out of the mind, only a part acts – against the whole. Whenever you act out of no-mind…Sometimes you act: you know there are moments when you act out of no-mind. You are walking. You have gone for a long morning or evening walk and suddenly a snake crosses the path. You don’t have time to think. The mind needs time; the mind is a time process. You don’t have time to think. If you think, you will be gone! The snake is there and the snake is not going to wait for you to think. The snake acts out of no-mind; you will be in danger if you believe in the mind. But you will act out of no-mind. You will simply jump.And remember, and watch: you will jump first, and then you will think about what has happened. That jump comes out of your totality; it is not of the mind. That jump is a spontaneous total. It is here and now. It has nothing to do with past, nothing to do with future. It has no past, no future. It is absolutely here, now.The quality of good is the quality of an act that comes out of your totality. You fall in love: you see a man or a woman and suddenly, in spite of you, something happens. Your total being responds in a new way. Even you are surprised! You throb, you sing, you have a dance within you – as if clouds have separated and you have seen the source of light. In a single moment – in fact, that moment is not a part of time. In fact, it is a “no moment,” as if time has stopped. Something took possession of you. This is out of no-mind.Whatever is like love is good. That’s why Jesus says, “God is love.” He’s not saying God is loving. He is simply showing a quality: God has the same quality as love. “Good” is love, good has the same quality as love.All that comes from the mind is from the Devil. “The Devil” is just a way of saying it – because it separates. Let me define “Devil” as one who separates, and God as one who unites. God and Devil are both ways of speaking. They are not entities; they are symbols.Just a few days before, I read a beautiful story of DuBois’. I would like you to listen to it and try to understand it.It was one o’clock and I was hungry. I walked into a restaurant, seated myself, and reached for the bill of fare. My table companion rose. “Sir,” said he, “do you wish to force your company on those who don’t want you?”“No,” I said. “I wish to eat.”“Are you aware, sir, that this is social equality?”“Nothing of the sort, sir. It is hunger,” I said, and I ate.The days’ work done, I sought the theater. As I sank into my seat, the lady next to me shrank and squirmed. “I beg pardon,” I said.“Do you enjoy where you are not wanted?” she asked coldly.“Oh, no,” I said.“Well, you are not wanted here.”I was surprised. “I fear you are mistaken,” I said. “I certainly want the music, and I like to think the music wants me to listen to it.”“Oh sir,” said the lady, “this is social equality.”“No, madam,” said the usher. “It is the second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”After the theater, I sought the hotel where I had sent my baggage. The clerk scowled. “What do you want?”“Rest,” I said.“This is a white hotel,” he said.I looked around. “Such a color scheme requires a great deal of cleaning,” I said. “But I don’t know that I object.”“We object!” said he.“Then why…” I began, but he interrupted.“We don’t keep niggers,” he said. “We don’t want social equality.”“Neither do I,” I replied gently. “I want a bed.”I walked thoughtfully to the train. “I will take a sleeper through Texas. I’m a little bit dissatisfied with this town.”“Can’t sell you one.”“I only want to hire it,” said I, “for a couple of nights.”“Can’t sell you a sleeper in Texas,” he maintained. “They consider that social equality.”“I consider it barbarism,” I said, “and I think I will walk.”Walking, I met another wayfarer who immediately walked to the other side of the road where it was very muddy. I asked his reason.“Niggers is dirty,” he said.“So is mud,” said I. “Moreover, I am not as dirty as you, yet.”“But you are a nigger, aren’t you?” he asked.“My grandfather was so called.”“Well then?” he answered triumphantly.“Do you live in the south?” I persisted pleasantly.“Sure,” he growled. “And starve there.”“I should think that you and the Negroes should get together and vote out starvation.”“We don’t let them vote! We?”“Why not?” I said in surprise.“Niggers is too ignorant to vote.”“But,” I said, ‘I am not so ignorant as you.”“But you are a nigger?”“Yes, I am certainly what you mean by that.”“Well then?” he returned with that curiously inconsequential note of triumph. “Moreover,” he said, “I don’t want my sister to marry a nigger.”I had not seen his sister, so I merely murmured, “Let her say no.”“By God, you shall not marry her even if she said yes!”“But I don’t want to marry her,” I answered, a little perturbed at the personal turn.“Why not?” he yelled, angrier than ever.“Because I am already married. And I rather like my wife.”“Is she a nigger?” he asked suspiciously.“Well,” I said again, “her grandmother was called that.”“Well then?” he shouted in that oddly illogical way.I gave up. “Go on,” I said, “either you are crazy or I am.”“We both are,” he said as he trotted along in the mud.The mind is crazy; the mind is mad. The mind creates divisions, fragments. The mind creates nations, races: white and black, poor and rich. The mind is the Devil. When you can feel that you are one with all, you have gone beyond the mind. To feel one with all, to feel unison, is to be good. And to act out of that oneness is to be religious.A religious man has no character. A religious man has a spontaneity. A religious man has a moment-to-moment contact with the whole. That contact is never lost. He lives prayerfully.A nonreligious man may be apparently good, moral, he may have a character, but he is frozen, dead. He acts out of that character: out of the mind, out of knowledge, out of the rules. He is never in contact with the whole; he is always out of step. That’s what I call the Devil, that’s what I call bad.That’s what Jesus means by this parable. He has not been understood; he has been very misunderstood. But if you can carry this feeling of what good is and what bad is, you will be able to go deep into this parable.All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them:Then Jesus sent the multitude away, and went into the house: and his disciples came unto him, saying, “Declare unto us the parable of the tares of the field.”Jesus always talked in parables. The parable is a poetic way of saying things that cannot be said in prose. It is a very feeling way of saying things from the heart, things that cannot be expressed by the head. A parable is a way to talk in pictures and not in words.Have you ever observed that children always understand pictures? That’s why, in children’s books, you have to have many colored pictures: not much text, many pictures. First they understand the pictures, and then they understand the text.In your dreams, you are again living in parables. You have pictures and pictures and pictures. The text is not much: your unconscious understands only pictures. Your conscious has become trained for language, words, but your unconscious is still that of a child.When Jesus, a man like Jesus, is talking, he is trying to bridge something between himself and your unconscious. He is not a preacher. When a preacher talks to you, he talks in concepts. He is trying to communicate from one head to another head. When people like Jesus, Buddha, or Zarathustra talk, they are trying to communicate something from their innermost depth to your innermost depth. They always use parables.A parable becomes a picture. Logic is not needed to understand it. If you can love sympathetically, that will do. If you can listen sympathetically, that will do. If you can listen in deep trust, that is enough. No logic is needed. The parable will manifest itself, will surround you, will become part of your being. You may forget the message but you will never forget the parable. It will be deeply imprinted, it will remain within you for ever and ever. Stories have a way to penetrate to the innermost core.All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them: Then Jesus sent this multitude away, and went into the house: and his disciples came unto him, saying “Declare unto us the parable of the tares of the field.” He must have used that parable with the multitude, with the crowd. The disciples wanted to know what he means. The disciples wanted to know the exact significance of the parable.He answered and said unto them, “He that soweth the good seed is the son of man;”“The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one;”“The enemy that sowed them is the Devil: the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.”“As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world.”“The son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity;”“And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”“Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.”A simple parable, but very significant. Move step-by-step into it: “He that soweth the good seed is the son of man…” “The son of man” has a very particular meaning in Jewish literature. It is used only for the prophets because ordinarily, whomever you call human beings are not yet human beings. They have the potentiality to be, but they have not actualized it. They are just like seeds. They have not yet sprouted, they have not yet bloomed. Their fragrance is just a possibility; it is not yet actual.Jews call a man “son of man” who has become perfectly actualized, the perfect man: one who is no longer just potential, one who has bloomed, flowered. “The son of man” is a very, very respectful expression. It is next only to “the son of God.” And unless you become the son of man, you will not be able to become the son of God. First become actualized human beings: real, authentic, true. Then, the next step becomes possible. Then you can transcend humanity and you can become the son of God.Jesus uses “son of man” for himself again and again – more than he ever uses “son of God.” Rarely does he use “son of God.” Often he uses the expression “son of man” because for those who have not become even human beings, the son of God is a myth. They cannot understand it. You can understand only that which has become, in some way, actual within you. You can understand only that which has become part of you.You are part human being. When Jesus says “son of man,” at least a part within you can respond that yes, it is true. A part within you can trust him. But when he says “son of God,” he is moving in some direction about which you are completely oblivious. You have not known it, you have not even heard about it. It makes no sense to you.So he uses the expression “son of God” only very rarely, only with very close disciples who are by and by growing into divinity; whose hands are touching the divine, who have been groping and now they have come to the door, who have attained a small glimpse of the ultimate. Only then he uses “son of God.” Otherwise he says “son of man.”He answered and said unto them, “He that soweth the good seed is the son of man…” One who has become actualized, one who has become really human, how will you know him? This crystallization will be his innermost phenomenon, you will not be able to see it. You will not be able to look within him, you will not be able to understand what has happened within him. That will remain a mystery to you; it will remain hidden. But one thing you can watch, one thing you can see and understand, and that is: “He that soweth the good seed is the son of man…”You will see through his acts, through his words, even through his gestures, that he is sowing the seed of good. Whatever he does, however he moves – even walking, sitting, sleeping – he is continuously sowing seeds of good. His whole life is nothing but a showering of good seeds all around. Wherever he moves, he goes on sowing good seeds.Not that he thinks about it deliberately, not that he plans it, not that he makes any effort about it, not that he has become very skilled in a certain discipline. No, spontaneously: he cannot help it. That’s how he is. That’s how it happens to him; that’s how his whole being functions now.Goodness, good deeds, good is the functioning of one who has become actualized. Remember: you have been taught just the opposite. You have been taught, “Become good in your acts so you can realize yourself.” That is wrong. That is looking at the thing from the wrong end. The real teachers have not said that. They have said just the opposite. They have said, “Become actualized, and you will find that your acts have become good.”Character is not to be cultivated. A cultivated character is immoral, however moral it appears to be. A cultivated character is a bondage, it is an imprisonment. And whomever you call men of character are all frozen, dead people – blocked. They need to be melted so they can flow again.They may be good, but they stink. They may be good, but it is very difficult to live with them. They may be good, but they are very paralyzing to others – crippling. If you live with them, they will become a heavy weight on your chest. They will crush you and destroy you. They are destructive.When you are really in contact with a good man – a good man whose goodness is not forced and cultivated, but one who has realized his potentiality and now the goodness flows – it is just like a fragrance of a flower that has opened. When the flower opens, the fragrance spreads: not otherwise. Otherwise you can have a plastic flower and you can spray it with perfume. A character that has to be maintained, controlled, is sprayed perfume. The flower is not real.Jesus says: “He that soweth the good seed is the son of man.” Recognize that he is the son of man. You will be able to know from his acts. But he does not act through morality, through discipline. He acts out of his heart. You cannot see his heart without seeing his acts: that is your blindness.Never try to follow the acts of good people. That’s how the whole world has become almost dead, a great graveyard. I was just reading a few days ago that Paul, St. Paul, said to his people, “I imitate Christ. You imitate me. And that is the way.”This is dangerous teaching. This man Paul has completely misunderstood. He says, “I imitate Christ. You imitate me.” He says, “Do whatever I do. That’s the way.” These are the people who have destroyed the message of Christ completely.If you imitate, you will remain false. You may become Christlike, but you will not be a Christ. You may become Buddhalike, but you will not be a Buddha. You will be just a pseudo Buddha, a false thing, an untrue thing. And that is not going to make you blissful, and that is not going to create a sense of obligation in existence.“He answered and said unto them, he that soweth the good seed is the son of man.” This is the way you will recognize him, that’s all. “The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one.” How to translate this “wicked one” – the Devil, Beelzebub, Satan – into today’s twentieth-century language? I call it the mind.Buddha is more modern, more contemporary, than Jesus. Buddha will never say this. He will say the mind corrupts, not the Devil. “The Devil” is a symbolic way of saying the same thing – but dangerous because then in Christianity, the Devil became very, very important. And in the Christian mind, the Devil became a reality and God also became a personalized reality. They are not persons; they are both interpretations of a certain inner phenomenon.The inner phenomenon is that your being can function in two ways: either through the mind, or through no-mind. If you work through the mind, that is what Jesus calls “the wicked one.” If you work through the no-mind, then you function through your nature. That’s what Buddha calls nirvana, selflessness, anatta, enlightenment.You are separate from the mind. Once you know how to function without the mind – how to bypass it, how to put the mind aside – then you are functioning in the totality, with the totality. Then you are in tune with it. Then you are not like an island; you have surrendered and you have become part of the mainland, the continent. Then you are not separate from existence. It is not that you exist; then God exists in you. Then the ego has disappeared like a dewdrop in the morning sun.“The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; The enemy that sowed them is the Devil…” The Devil is not outside you. It is very tempting to think of him as outside because then you can throw all the responsibility on him and you can become completely free of the responsibility.People have been always using scapegoats to throw their responsibilities on. Whatever is wrong with you, you will always find some cause for it in somebody else. Somebody says something and you feel angry. Now you think he has insulted you. In fact, you have become angered – not that he has insulted you. If you were a little more aware, there would have been no anger, and then there would have been no insult also. You throw responsibility. One feels good just putting the responsibility on others’ shoulders.This is one of the oldest ways the human mind has been defending itself. Once you can say and argue that somebody else is responsible, you can relax and you can be yourself, whatever you are. No need to transform.If you see that the Devil is within and that there is no point in throwing out the responsibility onto somebody else – that you are the problem – then to live with that problem becomes difficult, to live with that problem becomes almost impossible. A moment comes when you have to drop it. It is too much and it is foolish and stupid to carry it. You are not benefited by it; you are simply crushed under the weight.Never throw the responsibility on some Devil outside. The Devil is within, as much within as God is within. If you function through the mind, this is the Devil. If you function without the mind, if you function through meditation, no-mind, it is God. God is a function of you. The Devil is also a function of you.If you function unaware, unalert, not remembering yourself, you have allowed the Devil to enter you. And remember, I am not being anthropomorphic at all. There is nobody outside who enters within you. These are only ways of talking.“The enemy that sowed them is the Devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. The son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Jesus is saying that the good survives and the bad dies. Jesus is saying the good is eternal and the bad temporary. Jesus is saying the good remains and the bad is momentary. This has to be understood.Forget his words, they have become out of date. And Christians go on talking about these words and explaining them. The words are dead. What he says is very significant, and will always remain significant, but the language has to be changed.Listen to how different it sounds if I say: “Good is that which is going to survive – maybe temporarily it is defeated, but eventually, finally, it wins.” In India we say satya meva jayate: truth wins, eventually. Maybe in the moment the lie appears to win, but finally that cannot be so because a lie is a lie and will be exposed someday or other. It cannot become an eternity.Just think, how can a lie become eternity? It has no roots in existence, it has no being of its own. Even if it exists for the moment, it has to borrow its being from some truth.That’s why whenever you assert a lie, you defend it, you argue for it, you try to prove it, and you like to say, “This is truth.” You are trying to borrow being and life from truth for the lie. But a borrowed life is a borrowed life. For a moment it may deceive, but it cannot deceive eternally; it cannot deceive for ever and ever. Someday or other it is bound to be exposed.A lie is a lie, and cannot become true. And a truth is a truth: maybe hidden for the moment, misunderstood, not heard, heard wrongly, interpreted wrongly – but a truth is a truth. A diamond is a diamond: maybe lost in the mud, but it is not the mud and it cannot become the mud. Finally, it has to be discovered.Truth is eternal. Or, it will be better if we say it just the other way around: that which is eternal is true. Don’t cling to anything that is not eternal, otherwise you are living with a lie. And all the time you lived with it is simply wasted because the lie will be exposed and you will find your hands empty.Jesus is saying that in the end, good survives and all that is bad dies in the fire, is destroyed. So look at, watch your life. What are you sowing? The world is a field, life is an opportunity. What are you sowing?Are you sowing love or are you sowing only lust? If you are sowing only lust, in the end you will come to know and you will have to repent much because that lust was just a momentary fantasy: ungrounded, without any roots. It was just in the mind. Love? Then you can rely upon it. Then you are building your house on a rock, not on the sands.What are you accumulating in the world – possessions, things, wealth? Then you are deceived by the Devil, by the mind, by ambition, desire. Or are you trying to realize who you are? – the real wealth.The only thing that can be possessed is your being, because you already possess it. Nothing else can be possessed. If you are searching for one thing that you can possess and can be yours, and can be yours for ever and ever – even death cannot take it away from you – then you are sowing the seeds that Jesus calls “the children of the kingdom.”And if you are a little alert… And I hope that you are, otherwise you cannot be near me, you cannot be here. A part of you has become alert; hence you are here. A part has become awake. Just watch from the corner that has become lighted. Just watch your past. Do you find anything that can be eternal, that can be existential for ever and ever? If not, then your life has been wasted. Don’t go on repeating it. Jump out of the vicious circle, stop that wheel. If you think that yes, there is something that can be eternal, then water it, protect it; help it to grow.That is how one finds one’s religion. It is not found in the Bible, it is not found in the Gita or Koran. It is found in one’s own experience. Watch, observe, and go on separating the good seeds from the bad. Before God rejects them, please reject them. Don’t carry anything with you that is to be thrown in the fire. Don’t carry anything with you that is going to die.It is going to be hard, arduous, to separate yourself from false things because you have attached so much significance to false things; you go on wasting your life for things of no import, childish.A man goes on accumulating wealth and just goes on thinking that someday in the future he is going to live. Right now, he is preparing. But that preparation is never fulfilled. One day, suddenly, he dies. And the wealth is accumulated there and somebody else will become the possessor. This man wasted his whole life. He could have lived, he could have lived beautifully, because in fact if you want to live, all that is needed is already given to you.Let me repeat it: if you want to live, all that is needed is already given to you. There is no need to prepare. All preparation is postponement, and all preparation is a trick of the Devil – the mind. The mind says, “How can you live now? How can you dance? First you need a marble floor, then you can dance.”So first have a marble floor, then you can dance! Do you see the fallacy in it? If you want to dance, the beach is enough, the earth is enough. If you want to dance, you can dance anywhere, anytime. Every moment is as good as any other. Nothing else is needed. Only life is needed in you, and that is there. You need a flowing life, that’s all. To dance, that’s all that is needed. Not even training is needed for dancing. Life itself is the dance. Just allow it to happen.Do you want to sing? Then what are you waiting for? Do you want to love? Then what are you postponing for? This is the only moment there is, and this is the only life there is. Forget about the future and start being alive here and now. Remember, if you are alive this moment, the next moment you will find yourself more alive because the next moment is born out of this moment.If you miss this moment, a great punishment is there. It is not that somebody who is sitting there on a golden throne in heaven goes on punishing you. If you miss this moment and you don’t dance, you lose the capacity to dance by and by. That is the punishment. That is the only punishment. There is nobody who is punishing you.If you pray this moment, you are rewarded because the next moment a greater prayer is waiting. If you don’t pray this moment, you lose the capacity to pray. By and by, you become absolutely incapable of praying, and then you go and ask people how to pray, how to meditate, how to love.Just look at the absurdity of the questions: “How to love?” “How to pray?” “How to meditate?” “How to live?” Absurd questions, but they show the poverty, the inner poverty of man. He has been postponing everything, and by and by he has forgotten. Every child knows how to pray, and every child knows how to love, and every child knows how to dance, and every child knows how to live. Every child comes complete, with everything ready. One has just to start living.Have you seen? If you are crying and a small child is watching, he will come near you. He cannot say much, he cannot argue you out of your crying, but he puts his hand on your hand. Have you felt the touch? Never again will anybody touch you like that, like a child can touch. He knows how to touch. Later on, people are simply cold, hard. They touch, but nothing flows from their hands. When a child touches you – the tenderness of it, the softness of it, the message – he pours his whole being into it.Everybody is born complete to live. And the more you live, the more capable you become of life. That is the reward. The less you live, the less capable you are. That is the punishment.The religion you have to seek is within you. You have to watch your life moment to moment and drop all that seems to be momentary. It may be very exciting – but futile in the end. Drop it! And look deeply into those moments that may not be so exciting. The eternal cannot be very exciting because that which has to be for ever and ever has to be very silent, peaceful. Blissful, of course, but not exciting; deeply blissful, but with no noise around it. More like a silence than like sound.You will have to grow awareness so you can sort it out. Otherwise, in the end, you will find you have lived a futile life. That’s what Jesus calls: “…the tares of the field.”“Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.”“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.”Yes, that is how it is. Once you come to know the eternal, the essential, the infinite, once you have come to feel it, then you are ready to go and sell all that you have been possessing, that you have been accumulating. Then you are ready to sell everything just to have this treasure of eternity.I will repeat it again: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.” This is what my sannyas is all about. Seek the eternal. Whatever the cost, stake all for it and you will not be a loser.Try to save that which you have accumulated and you will be lost. Jesus says, “Those who save their lives, lose: and those who are ready to lose them, attain, to life – to life abundant.”Enough for today.